The Lotus Haze

Odysseus removing his men from the company
of the lotus-eaters [via Wikipedia]

My eldest son is a big fan of the Percy Jackson novels. The stories are set in the modern era heavily interwoven with ancient Greek mythology. Last night, the kids and I watched a recent movie based on the book The Lightening Thief. In the story, Percy and his friends are on an urgent quest to return Zeus's stolen lightening bolts to him; if they fail, the Gods go to war, and the world will descend into chaos and darkness.

There's a scene in the film, where the characters wind up in Las Vegas in a fictional place called the Lotus Casino. The characters are repeatedly offered lotus cookies which, when eaten, put them in a euphoric haze divorcing them from any concerns of their quest. When they finally snap out of the haze (based on divine intervention from Percy's father Poseidon), they realize they lost 5 days. The story is based on the Greek myth of the Lotus Eaters, where a race of people living on an island of North Africa consume narcotic lotus fruits and flowers causing them to perpetually laze in peaceful apathy.

This morning I couldn't stop thinking about this story. Like many, the world of ancient Greek myth and how it relates to my personal daily experience often feels ancient and distant. The modern world, steeped in rationalism and a generally monotheistic world view tends to dismiss these lessons. We can feel so evolved, confident in our hardened monotheistic, agnostic or atheistic stances. I think its easy to look at this world of goat men with a complex pantheon of quibbling deities and dismiss it all as being simply fanciful. While its true these stories are not "realistic," I think many of their lessons have simply morphed -- perhaps influenced by, perhaps evolving independently, but always taking on the vocabulary of their respective traditions. For example, within my own Sikh tradition, the lotus eating world is referred to as maya, or the illusory world; its the one we're mostly steeped in. We pre-occupy ourselves with the mundane, materialistic and pleasurable while often dismissing the more important work of world improvement -- things like the elimination of poverty, war, and suffering --  as too distant, naive, or not possible.

So I started asking myself, what are my lotus cookies? Am I in a laze of peaceful apathy? Then I realized I had just spent an hour of my morning thinking about real-estate. Not to knock anyone who thinks about real estate, I actually think its quite important for folks who need a home or earn a living from it, but for me, well, I don't -- its just a mentally lazy distraction. I also started thinking about the hours I laze away doing things like: dinking around on my ipad, obsessively reading the news, twiddling with my phone, and facebooking or twittering.

Sadly, I realized the list is quite long. So, after this reflection, I had an overwhelming urge to start my day with a non lotus eating activity. Doing something "world improving" feels so grand and abstract. I wasn't quite sure what it could be, so I decided to just write up these thoughts in the hope that someone somewhere might benefit. And now, I leave you with the clip from the movie that inspired this post.

Tossed to the Facebook Backshelf

Last night, at dinner here in a small village high above Dharamsala, with our new friends from Sweden and Austria, someone mentioned their grandparents just had their 60th anniversary. I said, "That's so wonderful, to enjoy such a long marriage. Unfortunately, perhaps the last generation to stay married. Since then, we've all learned to throw away our spoons, plates, and cameras, why not out marriages too." A bit cynical, unfortunately, and I'm not sure how the thought popped into my head, but I fear there is some truth to it.

100 years ago, even something as simple as a spoon was considered a permanent heirloom, to be washed, polished, reused, and ultimately handed down to a subsequent generation. Nowadays, not only do we presume plastic spoons are to be tossed, even our formalware might get a Martha Stewart inspired overhaul every few years, just to keep us current on the latest designs. With rapid advances in electronics, we know ahead of time our new iPhone 4 will be uncool, and fit for the tossing a mere couple few years after its purchase. Its a rare first generation Indian immigrants' child that can't remember vinyl runners winding down hallways, up stairs, sprawling over chairs, and wrapped around the sofa. That generation, born in an impoverished pre-partition agrarian India, cherished their goods, and made great efforts to preserve them well into the future. Not only did that generation cherish their goods, but also their social relationships.

I remember throughout my childhood, whenever my parents announced we were leaving for a vacation, to a place like California, we kids would get really excited; we presumed our time would be spent at Disneyland, or wandering the glammy streets of Beverly Hills. We'd be so annoyed to find the reality of us sitting in a dark house in a no name suburb for weeks in the relatively uncool (literally and figuratively) climes of Yuba City. Few of us in the modern generation can envision "sacrificing" our hard earned 2 weeks of vacation to visit second cousins in a non-descript locale, but this was normal for my parents, as these relationships were cherished in the old country, more generally, in pre-industrial society.

We of the modern world were raised early on to know that social connections, like spoons, were to be disposed of when the economic need had arisen. I recall being 8 years old, and extremely anxious about moving across the country, primarily because I was leaving my friend network behind. I of course thought I would return to visit, in the summers, or on holidays, but alas, that was never to be. They are friends whose names I can't recall enough to even locate them on Facebook. In the modern world, we know we have to pack up and move; we move for jobs, for college, for graduate school, for fun, for a change. Sometimes we return, but often we don't. I recall being 17 years old, 2000 miles away from home, and clinging to the phone, calling friends and family alike, in an attempt to keep these links real, alive, and relevant. Over time I learned that most folks loved the chats to keep up, some would even return calls, but a very rare few would actually initiate such communication. And then we face a great paradox of our time. Ancient eastern wisdom says, "be in the here and now, focus on the moment you are in, do not live in the past, or in the future, live now." And ultimately, when faced with this, the friends of where we are become more important than those of where we were. And indeed, like spoons, plates and cameras, even our friends, become disposable. I suppose there has been some improvement, for in recent years, we don't need to fully toss out friends, we can downgrade "real" friends to "just Facebook" friends.

I read somewhere that 100 years ago, the average person had 50 social contacts in their entire lives. This was because most existed in an agricultural economy, lived in a village, socialized primarily with fellow villagers, and only rarely ventured beyond the village. Now, its a truly uncool Facebook or Twitteroid that has a mere 50 "friends." We live in multiple cities, we vacation in multiple countries, we interact with humans we've never met, all of which means we have far more than 50 social contacts. Its significantly easier today to meet new people, and we do, so I suppose it is only inevitable that some we've met from before, disappear from our lives.

As we travel, on some level it makes me sad to know my kids have gotten used to entering a new place, playing for weeks with some local kids, and then leaving abruptly, never to see the kids again. My son, when he was 3, and we were spending time in Norway, became fond of our dear friend's nephews. He actually only spent perhaps 5 hours with them, but Nayan shrieked for over a week about wanting to see them again. I wonder if we aren't hardwired for longevity in social contacts, especially when we form an emotional bond, and if our modern world's new found fondness for "social disposability" isn't, well, unnatural.

Its become a ritual of ours, and most travelers nowadays, to exchange Facebook info, on departure. It makes saying goodbye easier, and it leaves future interaction possible. Facebook interaction is definitely lame while compared to real interaction, nonetheless, it does seem like a slight improvement over utterly disposable friends.

I'll leave you now with a slightly related, but nice little "Goodness, Gracious Me" clip.

Life's Short Says Seneca

Now that we've reached India, and are in the warm protective embrace of family, the questions have started. So what are your plans? The truth is, our plans are none -- we are simply out of life plans right now. I feel like I've been on a very long road trip, and not the literal one we were just on, but the metaphorical life journey, and we've managed to pull over into a rest area to have a look around, eat some warm paranthas, and flip through the atlas. I had one goal for this trip, and it is being met. My goal was simply that our lives would slow down -- that time itself would slow -- that a great life divider would appear: before the trip, and after. Back home, we have a wonderful life; we're blessed with loving friends and family, a beautiful city, a lovely neighborhood, and work that I love. All this is such great fortune, and I strive to be thankful every day, but the one thought that couldn't escape me, is that our life is simply racing by. I would blink and a new holiday season would be upon me. Mondays would appear as if I had just taken another breath. My 10th anniversary appeared and it was only moments before we were completing our final lavan. I was chatting with a good friend about this, and he suggested I read a classic philosophical work by Lucius Annaeus Seneca titled On the Shortness of Life. It was great advice. Here is a short but poignant snippet:

Though all the brilliant intellects of the ages were to concentrate upon this one theme, never could they adequately express their wonder at this dense darkness of the human mind. Men do not suffer anyone to seize their estates, and they rush to stones and arms if there is even the slightest dispute about the limit of their lands, yet they allow others to trespass upon their life—nay, they themselves even lead in those who will eventually possess it. No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life! In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal. And so I should like to lay hold upon someone from the company of older men and say: "I see that you have reached the farthest limit of human life, you are pressing hard upon your hundredth year, or are even beyond it; come now, recall your life and make a reckoning. Consider how much of your time was taken up with a moneylender, how much with a mistress, how much with a patron, how much with a client, how much in wrangling with your wife, how much in punishing your slaves, how much in rushing about the city on social duties. Add the diseases which we have caused by our own acts, add, too, the time that has lain idle and unused; you will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count. Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!"⁷ What, then, is the reason of this? You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals. You will hear many men saying: "After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties." And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!

The Twittering Ecstasy of Communication

About a decade ago a good friend of mine and I were discussing the on coming evolution of humanity toward a more united, more immediate, interconnected borgification-like thought process. He recommended I read Jean Baudrillard's Ecstasy of Communication. The French philosopher, as I recall, was arguing that communication is basically without meaning, that it is the communication itself that is communicated -- Baudrillard saw humanity as becoming all consumed, "orgiastically," by its ever increasingly sophisticated ability to communicate.

It is an interesting point, and one that I've been sensitive to. On deciding to blog, adopting social networking apps, etc. I've always had this nagging sense that these activities have an innate element of narcissistic junior highschoolness about them. At the same time, I've always felt this instinctive need to broadcast communicate -- from late in my teen years when I studied creative writing, to subsequent technical publications, to more recent blogging efforts.

Many reactionaries to the "Twitterification of the Web" tend toward a Baudrillard-esque take. By the "Twitterification of the Web," I mean the increasing emergence and dominance of the "What am I doing now" type functionality that Twitter introduced and social networking sites like Facebook extended through automatic status update broadcasting. I often hear the argument that this "crap is just a giant waste of time" -- certainly there is some truth in this, but recently I ran across an article by HorsePigCow that discusses some direct benefits of Twitter in particular. I was struck by the one line, that Twitter is a "serendipity enabler" -- its an interesting idea, that broadcasting snapshots of life minutia provides entry points for the interested listener to latch on and react to -- and perhaps, this one I'm really holding out for, we can create a rural-like social encounter experience in the urban world, i.e. just run into our friends instead of planning a priori encounters. The author provides the example of her tweet of arrival at an airport that led to a serendipitously present friend to hear the tweet, and arrange to meet.

Well, to make a long story short, I thought I'd finally dive in and give Twittering a try. So as an experiment, I'm now tweeting. You'll find my last few tweets available on the ChaloBolo website in the right column below the post topics section. You can follow any of the links should you be a fellow tweeter interested in subscribing.