Growing Old

Two weeks ago, I had a conversation with good old darling Joe, who's in Flagstaff. Joe turned *41 this year, and he looks like he's 21.

A bit from the phone conversation:

Joe: Oh, Shilps. I'm growing old. I've been trying to get back into running, and my tooth hurts.

Me: Knees, Joe. You mean your knee hurts.

Joe: No, no Shilps. My tooth.

Me: Your shin? Yes? Your shin hurts?

Joe: My tooth, Shilps.

Pause.

Me: Ankles?....

Joe: The Tooth, Shilps.

Pause.

Me: What do you mean, Joe? You're not running on your teeth instead of running on your feet, are you?

Joe: No, but the tooth hurts when I breathe in the cold air while running. Remember the tooth?

(Pealing bouts of laughter on both sides)

Me: Oh, yes. The bad tooth. You couldn't laugh at any jokes during winter when we'd all be walking back at night...and you'd grimace instead and look like a snarling and rather hungry wolf.

Joe: Yes. (mini-giggle). That's the one. (very sober and sombre now).

Me: But that tooth of yours has been bothering you for fifteen years. What's growing old got to do with it?

Joe: I'm growing old. My tooth hurts. I have to keep my hand over my mouth while running.

Me: Why don't you keep your mouth closed? You don't need your mouth open while running.

Pause.

Joe: Oh...! But it's difficult, Shilps. I'm growing old. I can't breathe through my nose anymore. I'm growing old.

Me: You can't breathe through your nose because you're growing old? Well use a scarf over your mouth and breathe through your mouth then.

Joe: Yes. Ana gave me one. I have a ski mask too....

Me: Well there you go. Then you can keep your mouth open and keep breathing, laughing and running, but you won't have a painful tooth.

Joe: The tooth hurts Shilps. I'm growing old....

*Beth tells me that Joe has put up a note saying that he's turned 42 this year. So I guess I'm the one who's growing old....

Priceless Prayer

I read the below just yesterday on a British website, loved it on multiple counts, and have to share it.

A local minister was walking past his church when the intoning of a prayer made him stop and then leap out of his skin.

What had happened...

The minister's 5 year-old son (John?) and his friends while playing around chanced upon a dead robin, and wished to give the poor dead bird a proper and decent burial. John hunted around and found an old shoe box for the robin's final resting place. The lads dug up a small hole and John, since he was the minister's son after all, was chosen to administer the last rites and say the prayer for the deceased robin. In an impressive, solemn and sonorous voice, John intoned his version of what he thought his father always said, "Glory be unto the Faaather, and unto the Sonn, and into the hole he gooooes..."

Reminds me of the time when I was about the same age as John, and said for four straight years, "Guard India 'n watch over us".....

Spotty

I've done away with the original post because there was something that came up in a conversation some days ago. Subconsciously I rather liked the idea of wearing the halo, sprouting golden wings, and feeling righteous....but seriously - I was being a sham. I doubt that I would go out of my way to do anything for poor Spotty. I have never gone out of my way to help whole human beings I claim to care for nor have I ever done anything to make real human beings feel happy - so I dare say I should be a little more careful when it comes to publicly commenting on other people's unkind and offensive behaviour while making myself look like a docile angel with batting eyelids. I've tried to do 'no harm' - but alas, going by my record in terms of thoughts alone leave alone direct action - even there I haven't made much headway.

Who's there?

Some days ago, while going through a Readers Digest, I came across an interesting experiment carried out in 1997 by Daniel Levin and Daniel Simons from Cornell University. This experiment now joins the mini-list of clever, crisp, and elegant social psychological experiments that I would like to remember.

The experiment involved a 'stranger' who stops a pedestrian on a university campus to ask for directions. All fine and good. The pedestrian starts giving directions and the stranger is listening and nodding for good measure. All going well. Some seconds later, two men carrying a door (yes, a door) cut across the pedestrian and the 'stranger'. All is well still inspite of the rather rude intrusion. Or is it? The talking 'stranger' quickly sneaks into the spot of one of the 'door-men', while one of the 'door-men' stays back to talk with the pedestrian. Out of the 15 people they tried this little 'prank of an experiment', 7 of them noticed the change. The 'door-man' does look similar to the 'stranger' - even though in this set of experiments the two were wearing different clothes. Not huge numbers here - but rather amusing nonetheless. I'd found a neat video of the experiment but now I can't find the link any more. It's either been removed within the last couple of days or maybe I'm typing in the wrong string of words.

In a second set of experiments, Levin and Simons made the 'stranger' and the 'door-man' wear construction clothes and construction hats. Here, only 4 out of 12 people (college students) noticed the 'new-stranger/door-man' was now a different person.

While this experiment comes across as being funny and neat and even odd for many people interested in psychological and social-psychological experiments, it seems that some (crabby people?) don't like this experiment at all. They think it was too frivolous or something quite obvious, and that it's silly to think of this experiment as being of any use.....

P.S: One thing I've never quite understood: for experiments involving small numbers, such as forty people (which is probably a fairly average number when doing experiments) or 65 people - why do studies and reviews of these studies report percentages? Just reporting the raw numbers would make much better sense, I'd think.

For instance, if 24 out of 40 people while strolling around a waiting room leap up into the air upon finding a person on T.V casually talking back to them while in the middle of reading the evening news - what's the point in saying:

60% displayed 'leaping behaviour'.

15% exited the premises displaying 'fleeing behaviour'.

12.5 % displayed 'yelping behaviour' .

5% displayed 'peering behaviour' (i.e peering into the monitor, peering into the back of the monitor, and peering all around).

5% displayed 'sideways glancing behaviour'.

and 2.5 % displayed 'perfectly normal behaviour' (given the circumstances) but was still carried off by the men in the white coats....?

Why not say -

Out of the 40 subjects 'tested' -

24 leapt.

6 fled.

5 yelped.

2 peered.

2 leered.

And 1 person was carried off by the men in white coats (after he started chatting pleasantly with the 'newscaster' as if talking with people in T.V sets were something quite normal and something that he did everyday.... The 'newscaster' had to end the conversation before walking off the sets, and refuses to participate in any future psychological experiments...)

The Readers Digest did not use percentages, thankfully enough. They simply reported the numbers for the Levin and Simons study.

'Mamma Mia' and some memories

Today evening was fun. Guha and I went for the Mamma Mia musical. We'd both been pulling long faces about this earlier. Both of us had started watching the movie in December, and I had gagged before the movie got to the middle and then fallen asleep....so when we heard that the musical was coming to Purdue - we pooh-poohed it.

For some reason though last week when I saw the posters, all the all-too familiar ABBA songs and some vague memories of memories came back to me, and I told Guha on a whimsy that we should go for the show. That musicals are always better watched as musicals than as movies and in any case it would be fun hearing all those ABBA songs after so many years.

And so Guha got the tickets today. And so we went. And so it was. Great fun.

They were all accomplished singers and performers but the young woman who played the role of Donna was the one who had an astounding voice.

As I heard the songs there were some memories that came floating by:

1. How as a 6 year old I'd heard the song Super-trouper and I was quite convinced that the lyrics started off with "super-duper" right until I was 12 or so....

2. How when I was in class VII, I was given some of my pocket-money to buy my first cassette and an ABBA cassette it was indeed. They sang almost all my favourites from that cassette today....and I can't remember ever hearing all of the ABBA songs in one go apart from the time I was in school. And today's performance didn't disappoint me. There was my secret favourite and quite frankly risqué : Does your mother know. Voulez-Vous, which was definitely a dance number as well... Gimme, gimme, gimme! and Take a Chance on Me followed. 'Course I've never minded dancing on my own by myself, and today I was grinning in my seat and doing my "thumbs-twirl dance", which embarrassed Guha to no end - even though nobody was watching. He did join me though a little later for some very short minutes on some air drums...The performance was absolutely delightful. I'm talking about the performance-on-stage, that is.

3. There were the other quiet favourites: Chiquitita, The Name of the Game and The winner takes it all, Thank you for the Music (rather ironic that last one) and I remember listening to these as a school-going kid when I wasn't particularly cheery but was feeling not too terribly miserable either. The ABBA songs (and these in particular along with Fernando came to haunt me when I was in classes XI and XII. After I was a year into my undergrad in Calcutta I don't remember listening to ABBA much.

4. And then they performed the song I have a dream today that sent my memory bells pealing quite noisily. When we were in Class X, Sumki and I took it upon ourselves to direct the Class V play for Teachers' Day. We decided on Cinderella - which was fine. Sumki wrote the whole play on her own, which was better than fine. I was supposed to write one Act but never got around to doing that (and in any case she was the better writer). But the story doesn't end there.

We took it upon ourselves to make the play into a musical.

Why two mortally tone deaf people who couldn't sing for nuts would do that is beyond my powers of understanding. But we did. I don't exactly remember how we managed to teach the songs to the kids. Who was teaching them? Surely we couldn't have tried teaching them on our own by ourselves. The kids were exceptionally gifted. The girl who played the part of Cinderella (Moutushi) could sing like an angel, and the girl who played the part of the Prince (Debiparna) - even though she didn't have the intimations of musical greatness, she did have oodles of charisma and a brilliant clipped accent, and I think she pulled off the couple of songs that she had to sing (one being The Carpenters - I'm on Top of the World) pretty well. It was Cinderella/Moutushi however who had to sing I have a dream, and she was perfect....I couldn't help but be amazed today - and after all these years, as to how Sumki and I with such utter gall went on to direct a musical of all things!

5. The other memory comes from not a pleasant patch of a year - but the memory by itself is - oh well. Here goes.

It was my second year here. During the end of the Fall semester we had a stack of end-of-term papers to write up. Beth and I would meet up in the department on some late evenings to work, and sometimes there was more of snickering and exchanging of notes on random topics than paper writing. And on some evenings there was too much to type and there were too many papers (with some methodology and theory bits) that were thrown at my head (by Beth) so that I could fit them into my inching-along paper for any horsing around to happen.

One evening, Lorrell and Alyson - two other batch-mates/friends joined us in the department. We met relatively early on in the evening. The computer lab was otherwise deserted, and after 17 minutes or so of focused work, Lorrell started entertaining us with some songs from ABBA.

She was listening to them on her comp but was singing along as well -

Friday night and the lights are low

Looking out for the place to go
Where they play the right music,.......the swing
You come in to look for a king....

And then she really got into the lyrics and with a lot of head-shaking and air-guitar playing, she belted out -

You can dance, you can jive...having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene.....dancing queen...

At which point I had to join in with my voice and my dance.

Beth gave us big stares, which translated meant, "What on earth is that?"

"ABBA, Beth. ABBA. The Swedish band...."

"Muriel's Wedding. Seen Muriel's Wedding?" Piped in Lorrell before going back to her head-shaking and singing.

Beth shook her head and said, "nu-oh."

"Take a chance on me...." Crooned Lorrell some minutes later....by which time I had had to reluctantly return to my paper, which was glaring back at me from the screen. "Get on with the self-esteem bit you iijit. You've written enough about creativity...."

In the middle of the night all of us felt terribly hungry and the cheapest and the closest choice was what else but McDonalds. We all had some nasty burgers (apart from Alyson who had some equally horrific looking chicken nuggets) and washed them down with some Coke, and trudged back to campus to finish our papers. Beth kept wanting to break an arm or a leg so that she wouldn't have to turn in her paper. I kept reasoning with her that that wouldn't get her out of handing in her paper. She'd have to do it at some point so she might as well finish it that night. So much of brilliant sense coming from myself startles me at times.

So there we were. I don't remember how much of my paper I had done but all of a sudden I heard the noise of squeaky wheels over the whatever-song I was listening to on the net while working. I looked around at Beth who was looking back at me with her eyebrows lost in her hairline somewhere. Through the corner of my eye I saw a chair (with someone on it) swinging and making its way out of the computer lab. I took off my headphones and heard Lorrell telling herself, "Coke. There has to be some coke in the fridge....coke. Gotta get some coke." I left the computer lab to see that Lorrell was sitting on the chair and rolling along on it all the way down the length of the corridor to the kitchenette, which houses the rather ample-sized fridge.

What happened after that is ridiculously silly. Lorrell came back on her chair and then (the exact details escape me) she and I decided to have a wheel-race on speeding chairs down the corridor. Alyson, quite excited at the prospect of a race came out to be the judge and as soon as she said, "Get, set go!" both Lorrell and I were off whizzing down the corridor like wheely-bullets. We were in splits of course but we took the race very seriously as well. I got ahead of her quite soon and just as I was nearing the end of the corridor - quite the clear and easy winner, Lorrell lunged forward and tried grabbing me. She was trying to cheat! Well I was having none of that. I gave one mighty swing forward while fending her off...and I don't know whether I was partly responsible for what happened next - but she went crashing into a recycling bin (which according to Beth is still the only recycling bin in the department to have a massive dent). There was a mighty ruckus in that building as Lorrell banged into that bin with her chair. We waited and stopped in our tracks to see whether we could hear any sirens but that was that. Lorrell was unhurt, and the recycling bin while it wasn't that lucky, and had suffered some damages still stood straight - sort of squashed up against the wall. Laughing hysterically we rolled back down into the computer lab. Alyson and Beth, if I'm not too badly mistaken were also in fits. As far as I remember I didn't get off the chair but wheeled back down the corridor as speedily as I had come. At some point Lorrell and I noticed a couple of fairly largish cameras (or what looked like cameras) near the ceilings and we hoped that nobody had recorded our antics.

These were only some of the memories that came back on being there at the musical today.

For the encore the cast performed three of the songs Mama mia, Waterloo, and Dancing Queen before the curtains went down for the evening. Oh it was marvelous fun and I'm glad Guha and I managed to kick our lazy habits for the evening.

The show was pretty packed but for the entire evening there were three empty seats on my right, and I kept looking to see whether they were going to be taken all of a sudden.

Now, that would have been something.....

*Note: I've provided the links for all the ABBA songs just in case anyone wants to hear them*

Saturday late-noon II

The weather too is absolutely outstanding (better than the grapes...).

Cold, crisp, and sunny.

The photo does not do justice to what's outside.

It's a lazy Saturday late-noon. One of those late-noons, which seem almost perfect.

As usual I've taken my lazy shot - a shot of the trees opposite to my apartment.

Some of the leaves have started changing colour.

I shall go out for a walk in a bit.......

Saturday late-noon

Got the goodies on the side from the Farmer's Market today. The local farmers sell their goodies some five blocks away - fruits, vegetables, breads, cakes, cheese, eggs, meat....every saturday (morning-ish), from late May till the last week of October. The coming weekend I might actually take a photo of the farmer's market - and put some comments by way of explanation.

The grapes were outstanding. There were more than double the number of grapes in the basket. I finished the ones that do not appear in the photo. I'd forgotten that grapes could taste so real, sweet and slightly sour at the same time, so flavourful, and so abominably good. Fuzzy, pearly purple on the outside and a translucent white on the inside. Two apples have been eaten as well (not by me) - two remain. The cake on the right, which does not look like much - I'll admit (it looks like some lumpy unsightly mass of half-baked dough) - is so pleasant and wholesome that it needs to be tasted to believed (I had err...more than half a cake last week - so I know). It's moist, soft and crunchy - all at the same time and it's not too terribly sweet. The uneven, ungainly '8' shaped hole in the front right-hand corner is there because I dug out a piece just to make sure that the cake could be consumed by the other human inmate of the house. The bread rolls in the back taste very good (either as grilled sandwiches or with some jam) but this particular batch has not been sampled as yet. They are challah rolls made I believe with some bit of honey.

Oh, and yes - some jam was bought too today and a cabbage roll. A jar of apricot jam, which is inside the fridge. The cabbage roll, filled with vegetables and minced pork (somewhat like a momo is how I'd describe it) is inside my tum'.

Oh dear!

I must say that I was very surprised and my brain fairly boggled when I saw the * BBC frontpage today. (*this isn't a link to the frontpage - since the frontpage changes everyday - it's a link to the main bit. The video is rather erratic in a funny way. The only thing that would play yesterday is the 32 second clip on 'Ardi' from the Discovery channel). I thought it was some sort of a prank but I've never known the frontpage of the BBC to be pulling pranks of any sort (unlike the Calcutta edition of The Statesman, which many years ago had pulled a hilarious prank, which wasn't a personal prank, and that was on April Fools Day. The BBC radio once did pull a prank in the 70s I think it was, on April Fools Day...but about that some days later!).

This instance (not a prank) comes very close to the instance when another gentleman was given the award for making a documentary. A documentary!

In the current instance I actually feel rather bad (and sorry for him actually) on a couple of counts at least. 1) It must be embarrassing (since he knows...) 2) His detractors are going to be laughing their pants off and will not stop jibing him for a while now.

But on another note: who knows what The Committee may yet do in the coming years? Award a to-be-writer who is very articulate and has a good imagination in the anticipation that she may write the grandest book ever?
Boy, oh boy.

A Quote and a Picture

Photo from Suvro da's collection. Taken at the National Gandhi Museum, New Delhi.

"One cannot follow Truth or Love so long as one is subject to fear. As there is at present a reign of fear in the country, meditation on and cultivation of fearlessness have a particular importance. Hence its separate mention as an observance. A seeker after truth must give up the fear of caste, government, robbers etc and he must not be frightened by poverty or death."

------ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Three experiments

There are three experiments in social psychology that have horrified and intrigued me ever since I first read about them. These are - The Stanley Milgram Experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and The Solomon Asch Experiment.

(*There are plenty of other websites other than the one that I've highlighted, which deal with these three experiments.)

The first experiment looked into the problem of 'obedience', and how far people would go to obey orders coming from someone (a 'scientist') working in a respectable university.

The second looked into roles and their 'power' over individuals - even when the roles adopted were essentially 'fake'.

The third of the lot seems on the surface to be rather staid in comparison to the other two, since it wasn't ostensibly looking into the underlying aspects of cruelty and abuse but was simply investigating the aspect of conformity and how far people would conform to what a group (of people) was saying even though the individual had all the reason to believe that the group as a whole was dotty, blind or had at the very least severe visual deficiencies. There's one very short video clip available on youtube here, and there is something grimly humorous about it.

Each of the experiments raised many contentions and later on ethical concerns as well, and of course some people may say that the 'samples' were not large enough. There may be some seven hundred and seventy-seven other problems with all three of the studies. That's all fine.

Yet there is enough in the world to show us that the experiments were not completely off the mark. Yet while the aspects of obedience, roles, and conformity do provide clues as to how and why humans act the way they do - what still remains a mystery to me is why/how some people choose not to engage in barbaric, cruel, and inhumane behaviour no matter what. What accounts for this difference? It's all very well for sociologists and social psychologists to be looking into environmental factors in order to explain why people act in horrible ways, and to say that good people can be bad because of external factors. But that's precisely it. Good people - really good people do not go and torture human beings. That's what being good means. Not being a goody-goody two-shoes but being really good. And being really good takes an enormous amount of courage. Standing apart from the crowd takes some doing.

I could keep writing but I'll end this post for now. The next couple of posts (at least) will break off from this path.

Evil...?

To go along with the fruitless series:

1. If there is evil that exists in the world - in the form of human evil - what can we do about it? Should evil human beings be allowed to roam around free? Should they be subject to capital punishment? Should they, if they are caught, be kept locked up in a place where they are unable to harm other human beings?

....we don't on the whole seem to care much though one way or the other as long as we are safe and if we ourselves are evil, we are able to rationalise (and if 'we' don't - I do).

Sometimes I wonder....!

2. How would one deal with brutal people? Are brutal people just 'born' brutal and evil? There are some kids who like hurting animals and kids smaller than they are, and there's no point or sense in saying that little kids who are victims themselves victimize others. It might be the case for some but there are kids who are victimised and yet they grow up to be kind and sensitive.

3. I've been reading Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness again - there's little point in saying that I don't agree with everything that Fromm has written but there are parts there that have made me travel through the corridors of evil and abuse. Add to that Scott M. Peck's People of the Lie - and Peck isn't given to being dramatic or over-the-edge just for the sake of being thus. He seems to be a calm and quiet person but doesn't seem shy of saying things that are seen as being politically incorrect in many circles, such as - 'evil people' exist. The other books that I've been reading and some essays too and their rather perceptive authors are goading me along. Haven't read an Agatha Christie in the last one month - but then I don't need to read her to remember her. I can hear her in my head alongwith Poirot and Miss Marple, thank you. I can't but feel that people who think or try to think the best of human beings regardless of how they behave are a little gullible if not downright foolish.

4. I guess all of the above would require me to define evil....or at least describe what I mean by the word. For all that - some other day.

6. I say the above is fruitless because I don't think I can really know for sure whether evil exists. I had been utterly convinced at some points that the idea of pure evil is something that I must have constructed to scare myself even though I've seen some evil myself in this world. I've seen more of hypocrites and liars and just plain vacuous people who are pompous more often than I'd like to and these sorts are no better really - but evil....I've seen it more in specific actions of people - which seem to be motivated by nothing other than evil. It really couldn't be anything else no matter how hard these people may rationalise.

7. Sometimes I am quite sure that I sense evil within me, which has nothing to do with anything on the outside....

So much for now.

Wandering and wondering

The following is related to a series of rather improper thoughts I have been having lately (or not so lately). ‘Improper’ on a number of counts I guess but here improper just because it’s seemingly such a non-social way of viewing people and their behaviours because I’m wondering whether people are just ‘made’ in a particular way – fixed and unchanging and if they change – it’s almost as though they were ‘meant’ to change like some almost non-conscious creature.

….

Every now and again I wonder: so I like wandering around in the forests, and I really love nothing half as much as wandering around a forest (there are some things that I may have liked even better in connection to walking around forests, like living in one up on the hills, but that’s not the point) but then I always end up asking myself, ‘but who wouldn’t?!’ Reluctantly and with disbelief of course I have to admit that there are people/morons who would probably choose walking around in a mall over walking around in a forest. I like to think that people who don’t like walking around in a forest don’t deserve any further thought.

But then I wonder about something else. It’s nothing new, and I myself have had similar versions of the same thought erupt in my head on different occasions: but maybe they can’t help themselves. Maybe that’s just the way they are made. They love mall-hopping and they love shopping but they hate walking around in a forest or they hate splashing up and down a creek. I know too that there may be some who love walking and trekking even more than I do and who also love shopping with a vengeance. But maybe, they too are just the way they are. They are somehow given to liking this odd combination of things. They just can’t help being the way they are.

What would make people love shopping or walking around in a mall? I do of course love book browsing (and it’s sometimes even better than book buying) but one doesn't ever go to the mall to do that and browsing through/for specific music (something I haven’t done in a long time unless it’s on youtube). But maybe this too is just the way I’m made. I remember that at as a kid I had this horrible fixation for shoes (of all things). It sounds terrible – but I did although I don’t know why considering that the Cinderella fairytale did not appeal to me one whit as a kid (this may have something to do with reading the original Grimm's version, which is quite a nightmare and nothing of a fairytale). I don’t have a shoe obsession anymore although I have the quirky (if not downright silly) habit of looking at the shoes that people wear, and these days even grocery shopping sounds better, much better than any sort of shopping that requires a trip to the mall. But I know of people who love visiting or roaming around in the mall. Why would anyone want to go there?

Yet how on earth can people be asked or forced or made to like the forests? I know of kids who never learnt swimming no matter how many times they were taken to the pool. I know of kids who read books because their friends were reading...and for many years they read and even bought books but stopped reading for fun and pleasure as soon as they 'grew up' and weren't living near those friends any longer. Some people like music, some people are tone-deaf, and some think or like to think that they like music. Some people love climbing mountains and will do anything to climb the next peak and others are afraid of heights and yet others are scared of heights and will keep climbing mountains so as to conquer their fear....

Yet maybe human beings are ‘made’ in these different ways. Someone likes going to the mall. Someone else doesn’t. Maybe it’s got something to do with internal states of being or with something like reflexive knee jerk reactions? Maybe it’s like a purely physical pleasure? Some people like ice-cream and others like chocolate bars. So some idiots like malls and some people like forests and maybe there are some messed up ones who like both. But maybe that’s just the way people are somewhere inside and there’s nothing much one can do about it?

I don’t know whether this is a depressive thought or whether it’s ridiculously insane or whether it's just plain hogwash. ….I can’t help but wonder and wander along this rather fruitless series of 'improper' thoughts.

P.S: I don't know what happened to the birdies at the water fountain. It hasn't gotten that cold but all the birdies seem to have disappeared...

Birds, boys, girls, and a water fountain

I was sitting in front of a water fountain on campus the other day. This is one of the quaint water fountains (I'll put up a picture if I ever get around to taking one) and it looks older somehow. It has a deep enough base and the water goes high enough through a pillar in the centre and then trickles and splashes down into the base, which forms a mid-sized pool.

I was rather distracted that day, and as I went over the class material in my head, organizing my thoughts, wondering how to make sense of what seems to be increasingly senseless, and how to present 'the social construction of reality' in class without sounding pompous or inane or just vague. I sighed, drank my coffee and smoked, and then finally started looking. The pillar of the water fountain had a main base which formed a pool of indeterminate depth but half-way down there was a mini-base where there was some water that collected and the sprinkles made mini showers all over and into the main pool. As I looked I saw these fat little birds that were all happily sitting on that semi-base getting drenched in the showers from the fountain. They kept fluffing their wings every now and again and then just settled right back in again, looking very happy, content and cheery. I couldn't help but smile as I saw some nine of those fat little, ridiculously content, and very wet birds. I was wondering whether the water was cold or warm or cool and was wondering how it would be to sit on the edge and dip my feet into the pool. I even wondered how it would be if I let out a war whoop and leapt into the pool with a running sprint....

Not five seconds later some four boys and three girls came truddling along. They must have been high-school kids or maybe fresh undergrads who didn't have a class at 4 on Monday afternoon. They had just finished running around in the big water fountain (about that some other day) from the looks of it. They were all drenched and soaking to the bone but looked very happy. They walked over to the fountain where I was sitting and were contemplating on the merits of jumping into the pool. One girl stuck her toe in and said, "brrr....freezing."

One of the boys with an impish look on his face looked towards me and said, "You're going in after us, right?"

With a grin I said, "Sure. And you can go and teach my class."

A couple of them giggled. Another girl stuck her foot in and said, "wow - it's deep." The boy looked at me and said, "Don't know whether we should go in..."

I said, "Go for it. You're drenched anyway."

Even before the words were out of my mouth I saw one of the girls and two of the boys leap into the pool and swim two laps and then with mighty whoops they came out. "Cold. Cold. Cold." Two of them grinned hugely at me and said, "Have a nice day." And with that the noisy little bunch was gone.

The fat little birds had flown away some minutes ago.

I trudged off too for my class while wondering about 'the social construction of reality' again with a last look at the fountain.

Von's: books in the basement

There is a lovely local book-shop near campus called Von's, which I used to visit an awful lot in my first year. These last some years I've gone there less often and I have some reasons for that. Every now and again when I do drop in - I spend a considerable amount of time there. I go and settle myself in a comfy couch in the children's book-section with a pile of books to browse through. I'm never bothered and no one chases me away. I do feel wistful every now and again when I'm there inside the book-shop.

For a while now I have known that Von's has a used book section down in the basement. Somehow I've never prodded myself to go down there. I know that most likely sounds odd. Why ever not, one may ask....I am not really sure whether I want to share the reasons (batty as they are). Today I did go over to Von's. And I did go down into the book-filled human-empty basement. I ended up buying four books. And as I went in and out of the aisles looking and fingering and leafing through the old books (some older than others) - I wondered (among very many other things) how people can find reading books on a kindle half as satisfying. Some comparisons come to mind - but let me desist. I did feel wistful all the while down in the basement and some book titles made me gulp loudly.

On my way in and on my way out I saw one occupant - an elderly gentleman at the far end of one of the aisles who was quite comfortably sprawled out on the floor with his head resting in one of his palms reading a book, completely oblivious to the world. He could have been reading at home - he looked so comfy. I didn't travel up and down that aisle because I would have felt like an intruder.

Middle of the Week

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

I'm tempted to write nothing but put up the above quote but of course I'll go on (with what will become I am sure a gloomy rant. It may be otherwise but I rather doubt it).

Some weeks ago, was it, or days - never mind - I came across that liner again "life is one damned thing after another." I don't know whether the original quote actually starts off with 'life' or with 'history' (I’ll check once I finish writing the post) - but even that matters not much for the purposes of the current bit. I wonder more whether life is the same damned thing over and over again. I will try as I sometimes do, not to ramble. But after weeks of not writing here, all the thoughts start banging against each other demanding to be heard and it becomes very difficult to stay on track. So I apolgise to the few readers who do visit this blog and read my posts.

Yet another semester has begun. The first week is always my favourite. Almost nothing goes wrong even in a class of 90 students packed in, in a-not-too-large of a space. I am focused (don’t ask me why or how), I don’t ramble, I make jokes (but in context – at least not out of context), and I form some coherent sentences of my own but I keep asking leading questions so that the students themselves come up with the answers, which I then write on the board. The students seem happy and engaged on the whole. I am happy and almost prancing around the whole length and breadth of the classroom. Something of course starts going wrong somewhere after that magical first week, and I’m not really sure even now what all the factors are. Part of it I know is my tendency to ramble, my unpreparedness for a sudden question or a sudden strand (which I don’t know whether to ignore or whether to somehow incorporate into the discussion), my mind blanking on me and a whole lot has to do with the way I start approaching the class after that one magical week or so. But all that can wait too for another day.

I can’t help but be reminded of my own first encounters with sociology when I was in college. I can’t say that the whole discipline fascinated me equally (it still doesn’t). I never got a hang of stats (sadly enough) and I never really could for the life of me remember dates and many related strings of information that would have helped immensely, and these days more than most of the research papers I read leave me unimpressed and untouched. However, I still remember one of the topics that fascinated me when I had started on the discipline and the topic holds my interest even now. I don’t however know whether that interest has become any deeper or whether it has matured some over the last decade and some years. That topic was “freedom and determinism”.
Many years ago I read some liners which had made me chortle. A black woman was told, “But you have to stop smoking…” and she had replied, “On this earth – I am born and I have to die. The first one’s happened. I’ll have to do the second. Ain’t a thing more that I have to do. I choose to do the rest.” Hmm.

During my years in college and a year or two prior to them I remember watching a lot of programs on the Discovery channel which talked about the brain, the mind, and behaviour, and those programs brought in hundreds of other questions and musings – most of which got carefully written down in my diaries. At that point of course I fancied that I would take up something like clinical psychology in later years somehow…The question of freedom and determinism would haunt me in very many more ways (and some bizarre ways) over the next many years but I didn’t know that back then. I was also madly, blindly and absolutely feverishly reading anything and everything that Ayn Rand had written, writing about most of it in my diaries, arguing with myself and disagreeing and agreeing. The real thinking over would happen some years later. Not then. I read some other books too (I think) but I was nothing in my college years if I wasn’t an Ayn Rand fanatic. I was a Richard Bach fanatic too during the same time.

My professor in college – one of the finest teachers, in fact I’d have to say the finest teacher that I have come across in a formal setting – is the one who introduced the topic of ‘determinism and freedom’ in class and got me interested in a focused way, and for months and two years I pondered more on this question than anything and everything else combined. I had discussions and debates with my professor in the class, and he would answer and sometimes throw back a question at me. Not once did he ask me to shut up nor did he tell me that I was holding up the class. I have no idea why or how he had the patience to answer my questions (some of which must have sounded quite silly and uninformed) and I don’t have any idea how he never got distracted with my endless questioning and sometimes vehement and mutinous badgering. Nor do I know how he finished the syllabus. The same professor was forced to send me out of the class once. But only because I had stopped asking questions and stopped paying attention in his class. Come to think of it, I don’t know whether I would have stuck to sociology if we hadn’t had this one professor when I was in college.

Many years later (sometimes it feels like a lifetime although it couldn’t have been more than five years or so) I came across a human being who was even more patient, even more interested in what I had to say and ask, even more painstaking and for a whole year, through letters though it was (and humongous letters at that), he managed to nudge me into taking a closer and more refined look at things. Of course if anyone had to tell me that back then I would have snorted. I didn’t like to think that this one human being had managed to nudge me into taking a tempered view regarding many issues – social and non-social ones. I don’t know why. Maybe it was my colossal ego for I know I had one – a much larger one some seven years ago. I even happen to remember how in one snap he stopped me from being the rather indifferent agnostic that I had been. No sermons. No flashing divine insight. No. But the message was contained in a couple of innocuous liners and a nudging reminder of Meerabai for some reason made me remember that I did believe in God.

How free are human beings? What is freedom? Are we determined? By what/whom? At how many levels does freedom exist? What about determinism? At how many levels are we controlled and determined? What forms of determinism exist? Political, economic, cultural, and social too (and if one wants to set up a neat little barriers one may add blind habit, custom, and tradition maybe to the list)? Maybe genetics? Who knows? Why leave out fear? What other elements control us then? Where does it end then this control? What does it mean to be free in an enlightened way? Can human beings really be free? What would that order of living be? And no matter how ‘unacademic’ it sounds – what about karma? And what about love? Doesn’t love both control us and make us free ? And what’s the point in freedom really or any state of exalted grace – no matter how glorious or however absolute – if there is no love that is fulfilling and absolute contained in that state of being?
....Limited vision and grand questioning probably never were meant to go together.

I had told a friend in college that if I ever taught sociology – I would talk about two things in the first couple of classes and more: one would be to talk about and elaborate upon the words and the meanings of the words “social” and “society”. The other was to talk about determinism and freedom. And as a graduate instructor I have done so. These classes are still my favourite ones after so many years – even now when I am the one who is still asking all the questions.

And I really still am doing just that. Asking questions still and going around in circles and coming out of the same damn door that ‘in I went’. And it’s rather cruelly disappointing in a way. Things could be far worse I know. I know nothing if I don’t know that. But I don’t know what it is that I’m missing while going through the days and nights that have all started looking alike. All I know is that there is something that I’m missing. And since this is not a mystery story - what do I mean by missing? Not looking or seeing carefully enough and therefore overlooking something vital as well as the yawning feeling that something is absent.

Every now and again I have felt as though I were suspended somewhere in-between waiting….the wait comes. Time hangs. For some moments it feels as though there is no movement at all almost as if the utter timelessness within my own senses will be followed by something incomparably magnificent and absolute. But I am a wise fool and I know all that follows is the unbearable sadness and the just about bearable and the quotidian. They come in and swing. The glory is most likely for those who have already paid their dues.
For now I am determined by the dues I must pay and I shall and will.

Tomorrow or the day after there will be some other post - maybe even a funny one...

Last day of Class

Last day of my summer teaching as a graduate instructor was the day before. At the beginning of class, while I was just about to go upstairs to get some coffee for myself, a couple of my students running down the stairs handed me a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin. They walked towards me with the bag and cup in their hands and thrust both out towards me with me looking no doubt a little blank. "Yes. We got it for you. A little going-away gift. Thanks..." I was so touched that all I could say about five times and more was "Thank you so much. That was awfully nice of you..." They seemed equally gleeful and one of the boys informed me "...and we were worrying whether you'd beat us to the cafe." "Yes, so we ran upstairs as fast as we could..." said the other.

And on the same day right at the end of that last class on that last day, I'd barely said a proper good bye to all the students...there were a couple of girls who came up and wanted an A instead of a B for the course. One of them plaintively inquired why she hadn't done well in the last quiz even though both of them had studied together till 3 O'clock the night before the quiz. There were more comments. They wanted me to increase the number of points for their class presentation. They accused me of not having enough assignments (which is why they hadn't done well). And then one of the girls made the mistake of saying, "I didn't know that I'd get a B if I missed 11 points." That was it. I told her that the information was in the syllabus and that I hadn't kept it a secret, and if she had wanted to get an A so badly then maybe she would have done well not to have waited until the very last day of class.

That was that more or less.

Yesterday

Yesterday was July 4th - Independence Day for the United States. I don't very clearly remember what I've done the other years that I've been here but it's interesting to note some of the things that happened yesterday.

For one, the sky was grey and overcast and it was drizzling all day long. Everything was covered in a grey mist. Once again our street looked like it was perched up on the mountains as it always does during and after rainfalls. However yesterday this was a bit of a problem because fireworks are a very big part of the Independence Day celebrations. While some people were not thwarted by the time nightfall came and went ahead with the sparklers and sprinklers - the big fireworks dispaly most likely did not go through. I've been wondering for the whole day today what they are going to do with all the fireworks.

The second thing is that I was rather grouchy and restive from the morning. I'm not so sure why but I know that I was missing home for some reason. And if I weren't really missing anything - I was indeed "seeing" these incessant images billowing through my head. I kept seeing the Oxford and the Landmark bookstores and the roads in front of them where I'd spent inordinate amounts of time during my last couple of years in Calcutta University. I could see the the times that I'd spent at these places on drizzling afternoons and early evenings when for some hours I'd forget everything else. I was reminded of my solitary outings to Nandan for movie watchings. I kept seeing the tea shop, "Dolly's" in Dakshinapan in my head. Dolly's, which had been my cubby hole for a decade and where I'd met more than a couple of people (Ria, Saron, Putul, Ratna di, Mili di, Anita di, Lily di) - some of whom went on to become very good friends, and then of course there was the image of the indomitable and formidable (in the "Poirotan" sense) Dolly di herself. I missed some other places and some people but my self-admonishing did no good. The thing is a part of me knew that the other part of me was not being reasonable in missing most of the things that it was missing. To which the part that seemed to be missing certain things replied, "I'm not missing anything. I'm not missing anything. I'm just reminded of these different things..." "And you shouldn't be missing anything. All the while that you were wandering around those bookshops you kept thinking about the day that you could be walking around a library and picking out books without anyone following you around!"

I never miss home and I certainly never miss Calcutta, and I never miss the days long gone by. The best thing that I can say about olden days is that they are old, dead, and buried. There are very few memories that I like to glance over and fewer still that I really cherish. So I always scold myself when I feel any sort of home-related pangs, even minor ones. I love the place where I currently live, and I don't intend to ever leave this country for good unless I have to (which may well happen in a year's time but I'll not go quietly), and so personally, I think it's rather stupid to get all teary-eyed or homesick when it comes to anything related to India. I am quite non-sentimental about my country and what I feel about it at the micro level and at the macro level would most likely not please anyone.

I know of some people who do get all prettily nostalgic about home. They sigh and lament as though they were being held in the United States, forced to live here like prison inmates, much against their will. They talk about missing the vibrant life and the earthy living, which is so characteristic of India. Some complain that the United States is sterile and antiseptic. They sigh and gush and wish they could just go back home where everything is so much better. Such emotions and more of the same remind me of those icky and bad stories by Jhumpa Lahiri in her Maladies of an Interpreter (that's what I call the book) and some other ickier stories written by some other Indian immigrants (Chitra Banerji Devakaruni and Anita Desai's daughter come to mind) who miss India with unbearable longing and desire. My point is if you miss being in India that much and that badly - then by all means please go back. Don't prattle, preen and prance about it, and write sob stories about that apparently non-negotiable desire and the fragmented identity. Gah, is all I can say. Although these novels and short stories collections based on themes of dislocation and longing have all made it big and are all mega hits.

The opposite is no better. Bengalis will have their Bongo-samitis. I have heard that that these samitis happen in a bigger way in large cities but this University town also boasts of its own Amra Bangali club. Now the first year I was here I actually went to one of the gatherings (I swear I went only for the food). And what do you see? Pompous, fat bengali men and women who think they are the cat's whiskers because they have immigrated to the United States and brought with them all their incorrigible cultural habits while developing no commendable ones. I vaguely remember why I was terribly amused and annoyed with the people who had organized this Amra Bangali meet and I left before any of the goodies were served. There was some name dropping - that I do remember. And I also remember that it felt as though I were at the para pujo with nosy kakimas and jethimas and pompous jethus, and I didn't see any reason to stay for another second. Now some people may like to be reminded of (and may even get tearily nostalgic for) those long-gone days with the neighbourhood aunts and uncles breathing down their necks even when living ten blocks away - for me it was a little short of a nightmare, although I must say that it was rather amusing if even a slightly demented form of amusement for the first 7 minutes or so.

For the first two years or so that I was here, I adamantly refused to interact with any Indians leave alone a bengali apart from one bengali girl, and only because I had known her earlier. I wouldn't have talked with more than 99 % of these Indian university students if I had been living in India - I didn't see any reason to hold their hands just because I was 10,000 miles away from home. When I did start making Indian friends - they were friends because I liked them - not because they were Indian.

But as luck would have it - yesterday I did end up missing some bits and pieces from back home. Some bits I do miss every day but I haven't missed Park Street and Lord Sinha Road in a very long time, and so it was curious to miss these things and some others on the 4th of July of all days. "I keep telling you that I didn't miss anything. Those places kept invading my head. I missed not a thing!"

Independence Day in the United States is celebrated with parades, barbeques, songs, and overall it's a day for eating and spending time with family and friends. It's also as I mentioned a grand day for fireworks. In Washington I hear they have lovely parades, and I know that any military base camp can fire one shot for each of the 50 states on Independence Day. These I have never viewed for myself.

Yesterday inspite of the grey weather and my own glumpiness - some of us got together. Alicia, Ian, Beth, Pablo, Namrata, Saptarshi, Guha and myself got together for a barbeque and we ate, chatted and drank and had a nice time. There were different salads including pasta salad, macaroni salad, potato salad, coleslaw along with corn on the cob, cheese and crackers, chips and salsa. There were vegetarian burgers and hotdogs, and paneer tikkas for the vegetarians, and great big juicy hamburgers, humongous polish pork sausages with stuffing, regular hotdogs and fish tandoori for the meat eaters. There were grapes, watermelon, blueberry crumble, cookies and ice-cream for dessert. There was also a fair bit of beer on the side. I had almost finished a good bit of the fish tandoori while standing in one corner when the others had been pecking at the chips and downing their beer and chatting around the kitchen table, and for the main meal I had bits of the different salads and had a great big polish sausage, which reminded me yet again why I can't be a vegetarian for good. I also had four pieces of the blueberry crumble, which Beth had made, and I would have had more if my tummy could have taken another bite. It was a good gathering yesterday evening inspite of the grey drizzles.

We went out for a walk later on in the evening and spotted some fireworks here and there. I was also reminded of the time very many years ago when I'd done something utterly naughty and had gotten scolded for it but hadn't minded even though I'd felt rather sheepish. Many years ago I had put a couple of chocolate bombs under half a coconut shell, lit the wick, and had jumped the highest at the resultant explosion. One of my friends insisted for the entire evening that she couldn't hear right with one of her ears. Now of course I'm too old to be pulling pranks of a similar sort. Alicia had some sparklers, and some rocket-looking fireworks which apparently didn't need to be put into a bottle but needed to be "planted" into the ground. Guha and I wondered how the rocket would launch itself into the air since it was being "planted" into the ground. Namrata hollered from the background, "Rockets are very dangerous. They attack people. I know of a boy who was killed because a rocket went straight through his neck." Ian said that we weren't supposed to plant the rocket into the ground but put it inside a bottle (that sounded familiar). Alicia scolded me for trying to peel off the paper cover. Guha was worried that the rockets would hit the power lines overhead. Saptarshi and Pablo were merrily playing with some blazing pink sparklers. I was thinking of coconut shells and chocolate bombs. I lit the "rockets" after planting them in the ground with Guha poking them in for good measure, and they turned out to be more like very vibrant tubris. So there was nothing to worry about. But right till the end I honestly expected the rockets to go flying into the sky.

At some point we were talking about the U.S constitution and when that was framed and when it was adopted. The Articles of Confederation was put into effect in 1781, which was signed by the original 13 states. However over the years, a confederation was seen as lacking in some important respects. For one thing, there was no centralized government to provide some overarching unity of purpose. Secondly, there was (therefore?) a lack of standardized laws and additionally there were no regulated means of raising funds for common purposes. Even a standardized coinage system did not exist. It was to address these and other issues that Congress met in early 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation. And it was on the 17th of September, 1787, 11 years post independence that the U.S constitution was formally adopted. We did crack some jokes about the length of time in between The Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution by the 13 original states (Rhode Island, the last of the thriteen, ratified the constitution not until 1790) - but it seemed not that long considering that it is afterall a grand constitution. Piddly-plunking a dissertation these days takes some students close to a decade if they are not careful while some are able to waltz out with one in two years flat.

Some time during the course of the eve' Beth said that it was quite funny to think that out of all of us who had gathered together for the July 4th celebration there was only one American. Well there were two. Alicia and Beth. The rest of us were Indians, Eucadorians or Canadians. And the Indians outnumbered the rest as we almost always end up doing.

Now this post must be concluded. Some other day I'll talk some more.

Take care...

Ha-ha...

Robert and Sarah - both 10 years old - are in love. They've been playmates for over half a decade, and they want to get married right away.

Robert, like the gentleman he is, approaches Sarah's father one afternoon. Sarah's dad sees the serious youngster, asks him to take a seat after offering him some lemonade.

"So how are you doing, Robert? Everything okay?"

"Oh, yes Sir. I'm doing very well, thank you. I needed to talk with you today because Sarah and I have decided to get married and would like your blessings."

Sarah's dad thinks it's rather cute and amusing and decides to humour the young boy.

"That's a good idea son, but don't you think you should wait for some years?"

"Oh no, Sir. We love each other and don't want to stay apart anymore."

"I see. But son, what about living arrangements? Where do you plan to live?"

"I'll move into Sarah's room, Sir. She has a bigger room, and the bathroom's right next to her room."

"I see. But what are you going to do about money? How are you going to provide for yourselves?"

"We've thought about that. I make $14.00 a week and Sarah makes $12.50. That's $26.50 a week between the two of us, which is $106.00 a month. We've also got a savings of $520 between the two of us. We'll get along nicely. Neither one of us is a big spender, Sir. It's the occasional soda or sandwich that we go out for, and maybe a movie - apart from the books that we buy. But we've decided to eat inside, and watch movies at home, and get the books from the public library - at least until we have some decent savings set aside."

Sarah's dad is tickled pink by this point.

He looks at Robert with a twinkle in his eye, and says, "Well son, I see you've got everything planned out beautifully. But what are you going to do if a baby comes along?"

With a very thoughtful look in his eyes, Robert says, "We'll take our chances, Sir. We've been lucky so far."

Sarah's dad is no longer tickled pink, and across the street, Granny Dorothy (who's a little dotty) shoots up from her bed yelling, "The elephants. The elephants. The bellowing elephants are here!"

P.S: Read the above a couple of weeks ago somewhere....

Curious expectations

A rather curious experience in the outside world makes me write this post. I’ll write a post about teaching some other day. In some ways, this incident has little to do with my being a teacher although I do wonder how I can get some sort of a positive message across without sounding as though I am preaching or trying to force people to act, behave or think in a certain way.

Somehow, I had innately imagined that individuals who have felt marginalized or victimized in some way or the other – great or small, medium or slight – experience greater empathy and/or sympathy if they also have the benefit of being able to reflect (that is they are not fundamentally incapacitated in their mental abilities) upon their victimization and marginalization in society, which could either be at the institutional or at the individual level. Thus somehow I have almost “expected” people who have faced some sort of discrimination to be sensitive to different forms of discrimination. Thus, I would think that I would be more sensitive to the stigma faced by other groups, say for instance the sort of ridicule the physically handicapped face (especially in India) or what the elderly may face simply because they are seen to belong to a particular social category, especially if I have been viewed with negative bias because of my religion, race, sex, national identity or ethnic status. It’s the idea of abstracting the concept of discrimination and seeing how it can affect people across different groups.

But it doesn’t seem to work that way. People may be acutely aware of how they or their ancestors because of their social membership in a particular category have been subject to torture or insensitivity and how that has had adverse effects on them as an entire social group – but they don’t seem to feel that being prejudiced in some form or another against an entire social category is also a form of discrimination. I do agree completely that people can have personal likes and dislikes, and as long as there is no abuse or undesired violence involved or force or compulsion – I don’t see why we can’t just let human beings be who they are without trying to subjugate them. And I will always remember that famous line, which in my own head runs something to the effect of, “I may disagree with what you say or how you see some things but I will always defend your right to be…” I can quite see how behaviour and particular forms of behaviour and actions that human beings engage in can cause rift and strife and plenty of unpleasantness, yet I don’t think I have ever understood how active hate, indifference, and apathy can be directed against entire classes of people. Oh, I know it exists – that doesn’t surprise me. It’s just that after so many years of formal education I haven’t gotten any closer to understanding the factors or the causes or the processes behind human hate, indifference, and apathy.

On the other hand many people whom I’ve come across in my personal life and academic life have been such militant equalizers with their claim that “all human beings are the same. Bring them up the same way – and they’ll be all the same – dammit!” that they have made me roll my eyes all the more (since these people were/are of my same age group and have had more experiences, or so I would think). Also I’ve come across people who have talked so much about being the “victim” or else are so obsessed with social inequality, marginalization, discrimination and patriarchal structures that they don’t seem to see that sometimes individual level explanations are not only indispensable but that discrimination does not and cannot explain all the ills that exist in society and that patriarchy certainly is not responsible for all that is wrong with the womenfolk of today or the world of today. They seem to be completely unaware that certain things have just gone too far.

Fairly recently, I remember people (who are in gender studies and have gotten their PhDs) say “Figure skating is a flagrantly sexist sport.” Ice skating as a sport apparently serves some sort of a patriarchal interest and indulges some sort of a male perversion and was being held up as an example of institutional discrimination and male domination. I had replied and quite cheerfully that a) both men and women participate in figure skating b) it is an aesthetically appealing sport c) I liked watching it every now and again when I could and had always watched it as a kid and d) I was neither a pervert nor a male and hadn’t been either – not in this lifetime at any rate. I don’t remember whether I’d been subject to the patriarchal hegemonic discourse lecture that time around.

For some students who are specializing in gender or queer studies or race - everything in society can be boiled down to patriarchal domination or discrimination based on sexual orientation or racism or some form of a combination of all these ills. The ones who see this priceless combination of discrimination (race, gender and sexual orientation) are viewed as being utterly remarkable because they have been able to locate all the important social links that cause all the ills in this world. Some graduate students have even told me that according to them – all White students should experience absolute guilt for their treatment of Blacks (African-Americans). It doesn’t even matter whether these White students have never felt anything but goodwill towards Blacks in general and are also aware of how racism functions in the current United States society. They must still experience guilt and feel the absolute shame. They must carry the guilt of their predecessors.

Now I am not a big one for guilt. True – it has its functions and its role in some situations but endless guilt or absolute guilt does not appeal to me too much. Also, I don’t see the point in actively shaming someone who has not actively done anything wrong apart from belonging to a particular social category (I have never seen it worth my while to call all men beasts or all women idiots or all Whites racists or all African Americans victims). I have also come across my share of White students, who believe that racism is completely a thing of the past while class discrimination has never been an issue in the United States (and there are traceable reasons as to why they believe thus) while being completely aware of gender discrimination and also being aware of the need to address it (for this awareness, I have not been able to locate any clear reasons). It isn’t possible, I know, to always change how people think (and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do that) but I know I made a bit of progress when I asked students to think about the school system, the tracking system, the location of schools in particular neighbourhoods and the available resources, the taxation system, and differences in access to education (no matter how flawed the education system is) and how different opportunity structures are blocked because of some forms of stratification. I got some reviews from students where I was labeled a “racist” and one where I was called the “worst instructor” the student had ever had but I got a couple of students who by the end of the semester really did seem to have shifted perceptibly even if infinitesimally in how they viewed stratification and social identity markers and social categories of people. And I certainly didn’t shame or accuse anyone.

And all this is not to say that I don’t for a minute think that I am above reproach. I am a member of this community of social "scientists" (!) after all – and I don’t really have any answers to any of the meaningful social questions and am indeed just as confused about some issues as I had been when I’d formally started studying this discipline some 15 years ago. Furthermore I know how embarrassingly loud of a militant I was and have been and can be even now if pushed a bit or if I get it into my head that I am being pushed.

Stereotypes are common, and not always are they false. But about that some other day. The problem is when I start treating individual human beings in a certain way based on a stereotype that I carry in my head. Differences amongst human beings are also something that simply are. And I almost want to insert a footnote at this point saying: quite apart from social identity markers (such as race, creed, caste, religion….) – there are also individual differences which are no longer talked about because such talk isn’t seen to be politically correct (popular writers thankfully enough, write about these very sensible issues in a no-nonsense manner - but of course we, fancy academicians are too good for the likes of them!). Human beings differ in their talents, abilities, in their habits, in their predispositions, in their likes and dislikes….

Sometimes, like it or not, people may also be prejudiced. Prejudices for the most part are based on stereotypes. This is a good time for a Soc 100 quiz question to get my own frames in order: what is prejudice? In short, it is the collection of often irrational and preconceived notions (which are sometimes resistant to change even in the face of new and incoming information) regarding an individual but more often regarding a group of individuals based on some social identity. Prejudice, much like stereotypes, can be both positive and negative. But whereas positive stereotypes exist for both out-groups and in-groups – prejudices more often than not remain positive for the group one is in, that is the in-group (more likely than not), and negative for the other group, the out-group – whichever group that may be.

But more importantly (at least for now), what is the most sensible way to tackle that form of prejudice and/or bias given that people will have their own tastes and preferences? I’m not asking them to like or dislike groups of people but I do want to get them thinking why it seems so hard for them to “socially accept” a group of people. In different semesters there are different things that evoke very strong sentiments. This time it is sexual orientation, which I don’t remember being a problem in previous semesters. But how does one address the issue? Especially when one happens to be the instructor in a class where half the class just seems to be innately aware that non-acceptance of and/or active discrimination against people who belong to a minority group is unfair and where another half is not so sure about the same, and don’t see anything wrong about not-accepting or being suspicious about or being rather wary about an entire category of people? And it’s not as though the students in the second group are insensitive or non-intelligent otherwise. They participate in discussions and have made many pertinent points so far….but I am rather perplexed at this point.

The irony is not completely lost on me. All along I had been quite sure that a group of people who belonged to the same social category would respond in the same/similar way (as though belonging to a particular social category bestowed on them some identical characteristics, tastes, and dispositions) to certain social processes (in this case legal and/or social discrimination). Why on earth should they? It's been an eye-opener to me for sure....and in more ways than one.