On Black Lives Matter, Migrant Labour Crisis, and Elephant Killing

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/asia/india-elephant-death-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
https://www.ndtv.com/entertainment/abhay-deol-is-twitters-new-hero-for-calling-out-woke-indian-celebs-2240094

Please do speak up against the violent death of the elephant, but question yourself, why do we move so swiftly from compassion for the elephant to blaming an entire state and people for supposedly ingrained violent tendencies? No act of violence can define a people at large; is there any other state entirely clean of violence? And while you're at it, cultivate the healthy skepticism that you may not know the full story yet, that the elephant's death might have been an accident, an unintended consequence of saving crops from boars*?

*But then again, question yourself, why it is OK to kill boars intentionally, not elephants unintentionally, with the explosive pineapples? Looking for a reason more convincing than "they damage crops", we are talking about internal explosions here, after all! Are different levels of sensitivity warranted for different species of animals? Is that an extension of how different levels of sensitivity are the norm for different races** of humans?

**Or genders or nationalities or religions or orientations or classes or castes - pick the discrimination that moves you most; and again question yourself, why do I only feel moved to speak up by that particular style of discrimination***, even though they all are in principle the same, that is, discrimination against someone for something that was determined for them at birth, with no input of their own?

***But then again question yourself, what's so wrong with speaking up for only a few of all the injustices? Should one not speak up for any injustice, if he does not speak up for all? If one doesn't speak up for injustice against migrant labour in India, does he have no right to speak up for injustice against the black people in the US? If he remained silent about one injustice, is it better if he keeps shut about all injustices? Would the world be a better place with that approach?

Tree

There is a tree outside the window from where I sit while working at home amidst the coronavirus lock-down. I do not know what tree it is, I am no botanist. I don't feel the urge to know, either.

A month ago it was all barren. It evoked the beauty of a radiant sage: simple, sufficient, timeless.

Then it bore its leaves lightly, until about a week ago. When the spring winds blew, the leaves trembled delicately, like vulnerable pets who must be handled with great care.

Now it is dense, and reflects the light shone on it by the sun in short-lived glitters. They remind me of afternoons spent playing outside as a kid, observing these patterns of here-now-gone-now light with the wonder and attention of someone who notices something for the first time.

The tree was beautiful each time. In a few months it will be its most good-looking, waving about almost proudly in its colorful autumn glory.

And then be barren again, beautiful, once again.

The enemies of emptiness

The smell of old books

The walking of geese

The dilapidated bicycle

Homework copies marked Very Good

The gossip about other planets

The water fountain in the park

The stains of ink from the fountain pen

The trembling of plants

The bell tolls to end school days

The ineffectiveness of hot summers

The sound of ball on bat

The novelty of all information

The taste of calcium carbonate

The stickiness of Boroline

The ironed handkerchief

The change from the grocery store

The shiny Kiwi shoe polish

The hissing of insects at night

The mother's embrace

Commotion

On Friday evenings after work,

while walking to the Subway station,

brushing aside pangs of anxiousness,

I stand outside the Rockefeller,

and look at the people

looking at the famous X-Mas tree.

It’s a swarm of selfie sticks.

At every step,

I hesitate.

I wouldn’t want to ruin

anyone’s holiday picture;

“Who’s that in the background?”

It would be a minor shame.

I am not exactly a festive scene.

Good day

I had the most satisfying day at work today. Since this blog is also a bit of a diary, I have to note this down. Made breakthroughs in a couple of different statistical research projects I was working on, and in addition had a great day, exposition wise, on a third macroeconomic stress model I had worked on last week. Days like this are so rare, and I'm pretty thrilled with how everything went today, especially as all three were the more creative and thoughtful of my projects. I also work on several other, more regular and tedious ones, and success on them does not quite make my day in quite the same way. Hooray!

Enough self-congratulations for now, I suppose. Must start reviewing Khan Academy Linear Algebra lessons in a few minutes now.

A room of one's own

In this very week, 17 years ago, I moved to a new place. It was a huge change. I moved from New Delhi to, well, New Delhi, but in my own little life it was a development of colossal proportions. The new place was, well, a mile from the old one, but it was still quite honestly a huge change. I don't live at the said new place anymore. Haven't for a very long time in fact, but it was quite something, the giddy euphoria I used to feel back in those days at the prospect of having my own private place, a den, as it were, a room of my own. I was eleven years old, and wasn't doing any of the things that people most require a room of their own for. But, anyway, those were the days.

Also, these. These are also THE days. But let's come to that later.

Since I believe the blog should betray continuity of some sort, let me fill the large absences on my blog with a quick recap of my whereabouts since I seem to have shifted base frequently in the last couple of years. After completing my education in Pittsburgh at the end of last year, I spent more than two months at my brother's place in Cleveland, traveled to Florida for a bit and have since been working and living in Princeton. Now that the ambiguity regarding my whereabouts has been resolved, the point of the post is that my parents flew in here from New Delhi a few days ago! I just can't remember the last time I had felt this happy. When I graduated? I have to say that was the culmination of 17 months of the hardest I ever worked, but, no. When I found a job? That was a massive relief, because it immediately freed me from worrying about paying off a gargantuan debt, but, hell no. What are some other candidates? When I first fell in love, that was close, but no, not really quite there.

Until a few days ago, I used to doze off on most weekdays at around 9. It was a major departure from my grad school days when I was wide awake at school at 3 AM everyday but for some reason, it felt as if after an eleven hour workday starting at 7 AM, and watching a nominal amount of TV, it was the a natural and even necessary thing. It doesn't help that I know, in a non-professional way, a sum total of zero people in the city I live in. Besides, you've got to get up on time, right? Wrong, apparently. The thirst for sleep vanished as if by magic, and cheesy as it sounds, I feel so effusively happy reliving my teenage days of watching news on TV every night with dad that it is even somewhat embarrassing to admit. So effusively happy, secretly. Also, again, as if by magic, I who could not bear to stay awake until last week can't possibly go to sleep now, and feel like I have all the energy in the world to cook my parents dishes I've learned to cook over the last 2 years, drive them everywhere and be the the world's best bad tour guide.

I must have been foolish when I was 11. Or I must be foolish now, that the thing I least want, almost dread, is a place of my own, even though I can no longer say that I amn't doing any of the things that people most require a place of their own for. Yes, yes, I admit I had begun watching Bigg Boss. But they're off season anyway.

Nonlinear jump diffusion

In wintry dims of after-rains

like filigree my fingers shiver

as does my mind, 

jumping back and forth in time,

one moment I remember

lying in my balcony in 1999

reading with teenage fascination

about Mohenjodaro at 2 in the night

and thinking "wow, how cool"

living vicariously in BC 2000,

as I now live in AD 1999,

and sometimes, farther back in time,

my dad, who lost to me in 100m sprints

to make me feel victorious and vain,

until he met with an accident,

in September, 1994.

After which I won no more.

And then I sit and wonder what

it must have been to have continued

watching "Johnny Gaddaar" that day in '09.

After all, it had been a wish of mine.

Growing up

In school I always wanted to be a good boy. If only a teacher ever came to me and told me she's naming her newborn after me, because 'you're such a good boy', it would have been the most delightful thing to have happened to me. But now being good is not that important. Being perceived good is to an extent still fairly important. And that's not entirely a bad thing, because to be perceived as good, invariably the most straightforward way is to actually be good. So while not much of a difference if you think about it this way, there is a major difference, if you are the kind that likes truth and wants to see truth. And the difference is what is popularly called 'the loss of innocence'. It's a big difference, and sooner or hopefully later, you'll realize why it is a 'big' difference.

Writing me down

A month ago I started keeping a diary. At first it was merely one of the many diversions I had been trying. Except that this was one that began to take a life all its own, other than solely its diversion aspect, its reason of being. The first day I wrote a diary, there were only bad things to write. Actually, to be honest, that wasn’t just the first day. As noble as this month-old tradition now seems, its beginnings were rather rheumy. I distinctly remember the third day. Each new letter on that day’s entry seemed to me at that time an unwelcome, almost officious, replacement for a fullstop. I still call it a fullstop and not a period, as is the norm in polite society; I guess I’m somewhere still a stickler for dramatic effect. But when I look back today at that day’s page, it does not seem all that bad anymore. It does make me sad to read it, but then I notice that even at the tenterhooks of that sepulchral, sodden stillness I managed to make the cursives look delicately done and had made sure that the commas and semicolons were given their just due in the world. And then it’s better, in the worldy way.

Sometimes I write in the middle of a crowded subway ride, and it does occur to me when I do that that somebody might imagine me lunatic, but if reading tomes in the subway is kosher, I think that writing a page down shouldn’t be too conspicuous. Sometimes I write my diary sprawled prostrate in the Central Park. That is, now that I think of it, my favourite place to write the diary. With its vast green expanse all around you, and from beyond it peeking at you the colossal skyline of centuries of human enterprise, and all of it umbrellaed under the same blue sky that I gazed at as a four year old in Ranchi – the place has an aura of grandeur and intimacy all at once, and for a moment it feels like writing down the little details of my comparatively featureless life is the most natural thing to do, as if under this vast umbrella the trivialities of my day will assume a vastness themselves, an importance, a place.

The first time I went and lay down in the Central Park after work, I felt like sleeping there under the sun. And so I slept, in the crisp formals that interns at investment firms invariably wear. When I woke up a couple of hours later in the crumpled bleached white shirt and the crumbling green grass specks all over it, I felt the best I had felt in days. A feeling washed over me: that I was still a good person, despite whatever. Unreasonable, yes, that sleeping in the grass should in any way have that self-fulfilling consequence, but why would I complain.

When I woke up, people were hanging out all over the park. Couples mostly, all of them happy and uninhibited. There was also the occasional gang of girls. And then there were the solitary reapers, the people photographing everything and everybody. And of course kids. Kids and moms, actually. I realize that the women that I am most attracted to without personally knowing them at all, are increasingly women with their little kids. Sometimes pushing their little ones in a baby-walker while they shop at a mall, but more often playing with them at a park’s swings and inclines. It’s a dangerous predisposition, I know. “I don’t act upon it” as they like to say.

I didn’t write anything about work. I am not sure what to write here about it. You are never sure about these things – what would be appropriate, what would be deemed crossing the line, and all those auxiliary doubts. But I will mention that I had a conversation over lunch with someone who was some time ago the chief economist to the Treasury Secretary. I even had a theory about why the historical positive correlation between sovereign bond yields and risk assets is not holding up anymore, and he seemed happy with the reasoning. Somewhat cool, I guess.

Don’t know what else to write. Will come back, hopefully.

On being back in India after an year in US for the first time

Relatives like to ask you rhetrorically "wahan pe hain aise majey?" You have to stop yourself from saying "haan hain, isse zyada hain." even though if you said this you'd just be replying truthfully. But then hamaare kuch sanskaar hain.

You picked up a habit abroad: you say thank you to everyone - barbers, tailors, vendors, gatekeepers, doctors. No one responds. Most look back at you in bewilderment. But this is still OK, really. Then there are times you say thank you to friends or cousins too, when then they curve a contemptuous lip and go "Saale bhai ko thanks bolega!"

You notice how the following of queues is a philosophical abstraction, not a reality. And you suffer for it. Time and time again.

Girls once again start giving you the "come a step closer and I'll call the police" look when you weren't even thinking about her until she gave you this look. And there it starts feeling like home once again.

It feels very, very, very hot for the first day or two. But it takes a really short time to get used to it again if you've spent your whole life here.

Something quite the opposite of what happened when you first went to US happens. When you first go to US, you look at the simplest sandwich - this is at a grocery, mind you, not some fancy eatery - and see 6.99 and quickly convert it to something close to 400 and go "screw you" in your head, "I don't need this shit. No way." Now you come back to India and you want to have one samosa and your first impulse is to convert it into dollars, but no dollars dude, this is just 25 cents. Goodness gracious me, I'll eat four!

You appreciate how judiciously all resources are utilized in India. The West appears once again what it appeared to be when you first arrived there - a place where people waste things a lot.

Statistically Significant Inference

The lesser I write, the more fake I become.

Cute

adj. 1. The good thing left about you, when you're neither beautiful nor intelligent. 

Years

I'm going to be 26 in a month. I really don't feel 26 in my head. I feel, well, umm, 21? Physically, yes, I think I'm not 21 anymore, and it would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise. But in my head (I hope you can know what I mean), in my head, in the way I think, I mean that hasn't changed much since I was 21. Infact I'd say that except for a greater readiness for failures in life, nothing has changed. I remember going to take the Mensa test 5 years ago, Rohit was there, Pyush, Adyansh. Two months later results of the test came from somewhere in Pune. I got 147 in the test and a letter reached me a day later that stated, well let me understate, that I was quite smart. I hate to admit it, but I was really full of hot air for a day. Sentences like Jason Bourne's "I'm always listening" and Sherlock Holmes' "Elementary, dear Watson" got recited in front of the mirror, I confess. I did a lot of googling and found much to my dismay that at 148, they called you a genius. But it was still good, my mom was so happy to see that thing that she showed it to all my relatives who came home the next one month. S*****t show that certificate! Other than that I can't quite recall how everything was back then. I also recall the 4th semester exams, Electronics in particular, but not much else. Harpreet was staying in the hostel for that exam. We studied till really late, Harpreet and I, while Khanka was off to sleep at 1 AM. Khanka's roomie was never there, so we also slept in his room. Just an hour or so in the morning. Oh, yeah, now I recall other things. Then Rohit and I joined an NGO. One day we roamed about the most godforsaken parts of Delhi to see how street kids live and if possible offer them a way to start getting educated through this NGO. It sounds fun, but at 48 degree celsius in May 2007, it wasn't. Neither of us had quite started driving yet, so it was 5-6 buses and an enormous amount of walking. At a different nonprofit event, one of the girls, a particularly pretty one, not knowing my name referred to me as the fat guy while talking with Rohit. By the time I got to know this, I knew she'd never see me again. But I felt so insulted, I really ran and ran the next two months. I think I must have still been a teenager at 21. In just fifteen days, I was running 7-8 kms at a stretch every morning plus cycling an equal distance every evening. In just over a month, I was running close to 10 kms every morning and I'd lost 9-10 kgs without any gym-advisor or dietician crap, and felt my healthiest best. This was both good and bad, I think. Bad because ever since then, I never panic about my weight because somewhere inside I tend to be overly overconfident (redundancy intended) that I can do it in 20 days whenever I really decide, so what's the hurry.

Everything was so straight and good. Anyway, I completed 1 year at Mumbai today. Not much to say on that as of now. Perhaps when I'm 31.

Some more things

It was sometime last month that I wrote I'll leave it. Yesterday, I thought I'd better do blogging rather than indulging in things that were doing me no good, and made me feel somewhat bad about myself too. So, like always, I have no clue what I'm going to write in the post. But, visitors kindly bear.

Sometimes one wishes all sorts of things, probably out of a ingenuous childishness in all of us. When these wishes fall flat, it hurts. But if you can stand up when it hurts, you can at least be content with yourself, though not necessarily accomplish your wishes. Anyway, enough of the philosophizing.

I learnt a few lessons over the last one month or so. Not from the textbooks though, I still have to learn those. So I think I shall be making some modifications in my mindset and the way I perceive things, if I am able to. To start with, I feel I need to shoot my expectations with myself on the professional front to something may be just short of dead high. Equally importantly, I need to keep the expectations on the personal front to something may be just a notch more than zero. And if instincts are to be believed I think I am already well on my way in this process. Though this agenda sounds a bit like making a robot out of oneself, but you'll agree that robotic is any day better than moronic.

The other day I was having a discussion with a classmate about what separates truly successful people from potentially successful ones. No prizes for guessing where I fit myself in these two things. After about an hour of talking I finally arrived to the conclusion that what we lack is that we want acknowledgement for whatever good we are before proceeding to enhance ourselves towards greater excellence and betterment. While the truly successful people, I assume, never aspired any recognition or acknowledgement midway. And may be that is what kept them going to follow their dreams through to their conclusions. In this respect a key area, I feel, that needs working on , on our part, is developing a sort of comfort with solitude or rather a love affair with solitude. None of it might appeal to the readers, but I'll just let you know this is one thing I'll be trying to work on.

Finally, some minute updates. Got selected in Mensa. Bhai left for his MBA and is doing very nicely, I hope he continues to make the most of his strengths and that God bestows upon him all the health and wisdom he'll need.

Anyways, I hope to keep coming back once in a while.