It seems to me, modern life can be so solitary and transient. It seems societally we pay such a high price for our fancy dish washers, fiscal freedom and uber mobility. Many of our societal psychopaths wake up, go to work, stare at a computer, maybe send a few emails, or chat on the phone, go home, open up a bag of fast food, stare at the tv for a few hours, sleep, and repeat; with the exception of an occasional murder or mutilation, they have virtually no human contact.
I'll rant a bit, and maybe some logic will emerge. I've been thinking, basically, in America, we've got plastic spoons, and paper plates that we whip out when guests come to visit since washing them is too much effort. We design our homes with a maximum shelf life determined up front. The building I lived in at college was specifically designed to last only 30 years. It was, of course 50 years since the buildings birth when I lived in it, but that's besides the point. In the modern era, divorce is nearly the norm.
In part since we move a lot, and are no longer connected for lifetimes to our villages or communities; people come and go in our lives, isolating us further. I keep in contact with no one from my elementary school years in Indiana, 1 person from my junior high school years, 2 from high school, 1 from college in Chicago, and 3 from my years in Boston. Of the nearly thousands of people I have encountered in my life and had atleast a few dozens of hours of communication with, I keep in contact with perhaps 70 or so, and maybe 15 on a regular basis. Of those, perhaps a handful are "good" friends and not mere aquaintances. I'm not terribly abnormal either. I read a statistic the other day saying the average male American over the age of 60 has 1 friend. 1! I read another statistic, I can't remember it exactly, but it was something like 200 years ago, the average person met, physically met, less than 50 people in their entire lives.
I was chatting with a guy from New York City a few years back. He was distraught since he and his girl friend had broken up. It turns out she lived in San Francisco, and he in New York. He said he hated San Fransisco. I asked why. He said, "Its very easy to meet someone in SF. In fact, some random person I met 5 minutes ago is my new best friend. I was there for a couple years, I thought I had some real friends. Then I'd show up at the airport, and call up a friend for a ride home, and they'd say they'd love to, but they're at a party, or out, or just can't. They'd say, just take the bus." He said something like, "maybe I can't make a new best friend in New York in 5 minutes, but atleast I know they'll pick me up at the @$@%##@'n airport!
We're all guilty. Sunday I was up at the mountain snowboarding. It was a terrible day with avalanche danger so high, that all interesting lifts were closed, and I was, needless to say, unable to go into the backcountry. In addition, the road home was closed due to avalanche blasting, so I did what any easily bored snowboarder does on such a day, I made my way up to the pub. I sat down and was enjoying a nice black and tan, when a guy asked if he could sit with me. I said sure. We started chatting and I was having a good time. Soon, his friends showed up, and I was sucked into their group, and we were chatting away. Eventually I said goodbye and made my way home. I was thinking that I will likely never run into these folks again, even though they only live a few minutes away from me.
Showing posts with label ramblings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ramblings. Show all posts
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
macro-views
its over a week since we returned, and i'm still rising at 5AM. nayan wakes up at 4, and then eats his first breakfast. after feeding him, he roams the house playing with his toys. here's a post from a few days ago while back in india:
when i read things in the US, about the war in iraq, and political instability, i tend to put the information and my mental image of the place into a little box that i can open and close -- typically when starting and stopping a news article, or conversation on the topic. punjab, as most of you know, experienced quite a sustained period of insurgency and political instability. from the early 80s until the mid 90s, punjab was in essentially a state of war. sikh separatists were fighting for an independent nation to be called khalistan. it was a 'terrorist' style war that affected nearly everyone in punjab, my family included. one thing that strikes me while here, is that while society has returned to "peace and stability," the wounds of this period are still very fresh. another thing that strikes me, is that there are bizarre conspiracy theories for just about everything, including the khalistan question.
let me start by explaining my macro-view on the period of conflict. i should first say, i have a read a small amount and spoken with a number of people over the years, but i by no means have a thorough academic understanding of the subject. anyway, to distill a large complex topic into a couple lines, basically, here's my take:
1. sikhs, are a relatively prosperous people, and fierce warriors both respected and feared in pakistan and india.
2. we also have a violent history of battles to control greater punjab. (read kushwant singh's history of the punjab for more info).
3. in addition, india in general is composed of ethnically, religiously, linguistically, and culturally diverse people which have historically been segregated into independent "nations." the indian national identity is a relatively new phenomenon in the thousands of years of indian history.
4. in addition, india is a poor country with deeply entrenched corruption and an utterly innept and extensive beauracracy.
5. india and pakistan have been essentially at war since their foundings; india has never truly accepted that pakistan has a right to exist, and pakistan, feeling threatened, has struggled to break up the nation of india in an attempt to address its perceived threat by leveraging an understanding of point 3.
6. the US funded the mujahedeen in afghanistan to fight the soviet union back in the 80s. since the muj (1 of which is now the infamous osama bin laden) despised the american christian "infidels", the US had to route funding through the pakistani ISI (pak's CIA). well this was no small sum of cash, the ISI, routed a good chunk to the muj, but an even larger chunk went to itself, to essentially build a war chest, and fund what virtually amounts to an independent pak government.
ok, so what of the punjabi separatist movement? basically, a group of who i'll call separatists had legitimate grievances, harnessed a general spirit of economic malaise and tribalism to gain a modest voice, then morphed toward violent resistence. ISI saw an opportunity and started routing funds and started some training camps. the indian government mistepped a few times very signficantly (operation blue star), and popular support for the separatists rose, along with communal tension. then the government granted too much power to the police, in a society where virtually no checks and balances on the police exist. the police, not unexpectedly, ran amuck, killing lots of terrorists, but also many many innocents in their path. eventually, the police were able to drain popular support for the insurgency (mostly by making the situation so violent, that the populace just wanted it all to end), and stop it.
well i thought i would get further than that, but it turns out my couple lines grew into more. anyway, i'll come back to this topic sometime soon. my basic point was supposed to be, that a sort of intellectual analysis ending in a macro-view of a situation, is so utterly irrelevant. when you actually live through something like this, what you see means so much more.
a good friend of mine, who fit the visual profile of a terrorist (which i should mention included about 50% of all punjabi's), was brutally tortured on multiple occassions. only afer his family sold off ancestral land, raised a very large ransom, and paid off the police was he liberated. he figured out later that he was picked up, because a guy he had a conflict with in his juvenile college days was picked up, and under heavy torture, stated his name. this was a common occurrence, people took advantage of the situation to deal with their enemies. this friend went on to tell me many first hand accounts of utter brutality that were previously neatly wrapped up in my macro-view of these days as "instability." i often hear this here in punjab, that what one reads from afar, is so completely different from what those here who lived through these dark days experienced. hearing these first hand accounts from my friend really brought this point home for me.
when i read things in the US, about the war in iraq, and political instability, i tend to put the information and my mental image of the place into a little box that i can open and close -- typically when starting and stopping a news article, or conversation on the topic. punjab, as most of you know, experienced quite a sustained period of insurgency and political instability. from the early 80s until the mid 90s, punjab was in essentially a state of war. sikh separatists were fighting for an independent nation to be called khalistan. it was a 'terrorist' style war that affected nearly everyone in punjab, my family included. one thing that strikes me while here, is that while society has returned to "peace and stability," the wounds of this period are still very fresh. another thing that strikes me, is that there are bizarre conspiracy theories for just about everything, including the khalistan question.
let me start by explaining my macro-view on the period of conflict. i should first say, i have a read a small amount and spoken with a number of people over the years, but i by no means have a thorough academic understanding of the subject. anyway, to distill a large complex topic into a couple lines, basically, here's my take:
1. sikhs, are a relatively prosperous people, and fierce warriors both respected and feared in pakistan and india.
2. we also have a violent history of battles to control greater punjab. (read kushwant singh's history of the punjab for more info).
3. in addition, india in general is composed of ethnically, religiously, linguistically, and culturally diverse people which have historically been segregated into independent "nations." the indian national identity is a relatively new phenomenon in the thousands of years of indian history.
4. in addition, india is a poor country with deeply entrenched corruption and an utterly innept and extensive beauracracy.
5. india and pakistan have been essentially at war since their foundings; india has never truly accepted that pakistan has a right to exist, and pakistan, feeling threatened, has struggled to break up the nation of india in an attempt to address its perceived threat by leveraging an understanding of point 3.
6. the US funded the mujahedeen in afghanistan to fight the soviet union back in the 80s. since the muj (1 of which is now the infamous osama bin laden) despised the american christian "infidels", the US had to route funding through the pakistani ISI (pak's CIA). well this was no small sum of cash, the ISI, routed a good chunk to the muj, but an even larger chunk went to itself, to essentially build a war chest, and fund what virtually amounts to an independent pak government.
ok, so what of the punjabi separatist movement? basically, a group of who i'll call separatists had legitimate grievances, harnessed a general spirit of economic malaise and tribalism to gain a modest voice, then morphed toward violent resistence. ISI saw an opportunity and started routing funds and started some training camps. the indian government mistepped a few times very signficantly (operation blue star), and popular support for the separatists rose, along with communal tension. then the government granted too much power to the police, in a society where virtually no checks and balances on the police exist. the police, not unexpectedly, ran amuck, killing lots of terrorists, but also many many innocents in their path. eventually, the police were able to drain popular support for the insurgency (mostly by making the situation so violent, that the populace just wanted it all to end), and stop it.
well i thought i would get further than that, but it turns out my couple lines grew into more. anyway, i'll come back to this topic sometime soon. my basic point was supposed to be, that a sort of intellectual analysis ending in a macro-view of a situation, is so utterly irrelevant. when you actually live through something like this, what you see means so much more.
a good friend of mine, who fit the visual profile of a terrorist (which i should mention included about 50% of all punjabi's), was brutally tortured on multiple occassions. only afer his family sold off ancestral land, raised a very large ransom, and paid off the police was he liberated. he figured out later that he was picked up, because a guy he had a conflict with in his juvenile college days was picked up, and under heavy torture, stated his name. this was a common occurrence, people took advantage of the situation to deal with their enemies. this friend went on to tell me many first hand accounts of utter brutality that were previously neatly wrapped up in my macro-view of these days as "instability." i often hear this here in punjab, that what one reads from afar, is so completely different from what those here who lived through these dark days experienced. hearing these first hand accounts from my friend really brought this point home for me.
Monday, January 02, 2006
philoso-fi-zation
was at a dinner party w/ some interesting friends of friends. i've always known i know very little about philosophy, but now i'm convinced i know absolutely nothing.
back when i was in college, i loved the idea of hanging out in a cafe and being immersed in a nietzche book. i even went out and bought some despite being utterly clueless and drool dazed during my 15 minutes of browsing. i assumed some nugget of enlightenment would leap out and into my brain after a half day of staring at the pages. my highschool english teacher always warned us, "read that crap while sittin' on your kitchen counter. that way, when your face smacks onto the floor, you'll be nice and awake to start that paragraph over again."
after repeated attempts at "thus spoke zarathustra", no nuggets were jumping, and the kitchen counter trick didn't help much either. while i gave up trying to read this stuff, i never gave up having the books around. i liked them on my book shelf, and on the cafe table. after all, the image of the philospher was still so exciting to me. well after the fall of communism, 6 years of happy marriage (me-thinks some of this nonsense was typical teen impress-the-girl angst) and a conversation with my friend haitham (who's 7+ years into a PhD program at the university of chicago), i can safely say, the image isn't quite what it once was.
what bugs me about this field, and similar fields, is the intentional obfuscation of delivery. this group of friends is able to explain simply just about anything i ask about. so... why the heck can't the authors? i shouldn't just pick on philosophers, i find this phenomenon all over the place. the engineering equivalent of this is writing a technical paper while unnecessarily using inanely complex mathematics to describe a relatively trivial idea with moderately interesting results.
perhaps what i should be railing on, is the intellectual inferiority complex that drives one to obfuscate ideas. i mean, if you have a good idea, wouldn't you just want to clearly explain it so people know what it is? this whole diatribe reminds me -- i read this great geek analysis of post modernism. its called how to desconstruct almost anything - my postmodern adventure by chip morningstar and you can read it HERE.
back when i was in college, i loved the idea of hanging out in a cafe and being immersed in a nietzche book. i even went out and bought some despite being utterly clueless and drool dazed during my 15 minutes of browsing. i assumed some nugget of enlightenment would leap out and into my brain after a half day of staring at the pages. my highschool english teacher always warned us, "read that crap while sittin' on your kitchen counter. that way, when your face smacks onto the floor, you'll be nice and awake to start that paragraph over again."
after repeated attempts at "thus spoke zarathustra", no nuggets were jumping, and the kitchen counter trick didn't help much either. while i gave up trying to read this stuff, i never gave up having the books around. i liked them on my book shelf, and on the cafe table. after all, the image of the philospher was still so exciting to me. well after the fall of communism, 6 years of happy marriage (me-thinks some of this nonsense was typical teen impress-the-girl angst) and a conversation with my friend haitham (who's 7+ years into a PhD program at the university of chicago), i can safely say, the image isn't quite what it once was.
what bugs me about this field, and similar fields, is the intentional obfuscation of delivery. this group of friends is able to explain simply just about anything i ask about. so... why the heck can't the authors? i shouldn't just pick on philosophers, i find this phenomenon all over the place. the engineering equivalent of this is writing a technical paper while unnecessarily using inanely complex mathematics to describe a relatively trivial idea with moderately interesting results.
perhaps what i should be railing on, is the intellectual inferiority complex that drives one to obfuscate ideas. i mean, if you have a good idea, wouldn't you just want to clearly explain it so people know what it is? this whole diatribe reminds me -- i read this great geek analysis of post modernism. its called how to desconstruct almost anything - my postmodern adventure by chip morningstar and you can read it HERE.
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