Life, faith & Literature

Connect the Dot # 9 

https://nation.com.pk/25-Oct-2016/life-in-literature

Literature reflects life. While reading Life of Pi this morning, I came across this line “the reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.  Three Dots. One theme 

The first dot is a continuation of the introductory remarks. The work in focus is Yann Martel's 2002 Man Booker Prize-winning novel – ‘Life of Pi’. The line of thought continues “Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can... But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud”. Life of Pi is a story of faith and Barack Obama in a letter to the author stated that it is an ‘elegant proof of God’. The story is also bordered on the concept of the ‘primordial soup’ from where all the life forms emerged. Primordial soup can even be described as water which in Hindu religion is the source of Life. The journey of Pi in the lifeboat along with Richard Parker is a journey of transformation and he is moving closer to God/faith. Due to a clerical error, the Thirsty becomes Richard Parker. Thirsty in the middle of the ocean. Pi is named after a Parisian swimming pool which is described as a pool “the gods would have delighted to swim in” The lifeboat, Pi, Richard Parker and the sea brings to my mind the poem which was inscribed on a block of wood on the desk of US President John F Kennedy. The poem is given below: 

Thy sea, O God, so great,

My boat so small.

It cannot be that any happy fate

Will me befall

Save as Thy goodness opens paths for me

Through the consuming vastness of the sea.

Thy winds, O God, so strong,

So, slight my sail.

How could I curb and bit them on the long?

And saltry trail,

Unless Thy love were mightier than the wrath

Of all the tempests that beset my path?

Thy world, O God, so fierce,

And I so frail.

Yet, though its arrows threaten oft to pierce

My fragile mail,

Cities of refuge rise where dangers cease,

Sweet silences abound, and all is peace.

- Winfred Ernest Garrison

The second dot is about the life portrayed in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is the story of political prisoners in Siberia. The central character Ivan strives to stay alive in the prison. He shows that the way to maintain human dignity is not through outward rebellion but through developing a personal belief system. Shukhov may be treated like an animal by the Soviet camp system, but he subtly fights back and refuses to submit. Faith can be a means of survival in the oppressive camp system. God, faith, and prayer mark Shukhov’s expansion beyond his usual thoughts of work, warmth, food, and sleep.  

The third dot is based on the book Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee. This thin book is about the story of K who is physically deformed and is hated by everyone including his mother. He spends his time living off the land one day at a time. After realizing that his mother’s dream is to go back to the countryside, he begins his journey with his mother. The goal of his journey is to assist his mother and fulfil her wishes, what he believed to be his original purpose in life. On the way, his mother dies and he carries the ashes of the mother in a box.  Michael happens to stumble upon his gardening skills by doing what he had to for survival. He loves his life as a gardener.  Michael K's is a memorable character for his resolve, his steadiness, his modest and determined way of being.  He believes that “A man must live so that he leaves no trace of his living." Becoming a gardener is Michael's best bet for living out his philosophy.

Life means to live, making the best of the given resources. What is your perception of life? 

Space probes and robots

Connect the Dots # 8

There is no end to human curiosity. It is the Ulyssean spirit that takes the mankind forward.  

 

Source: CNet

‘Touchdown confirmed’ was the announcement that launched a thousand smiles and hugs at the Insight mission control in NASA. The spacecraft Insight landed on the surface of the Mars after completing a seven month and 485 million km journey through space. The title of the mission is meaningful because the probe will provide fresh insights into the interior structure of the red planet. Scientifically Insight stands for, (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) As soon as the Solar panels attached to the spacecraft is charged, it will initiate the use of a robotic arm to deploy a seismometer and a probe designed to measure the heat beneath Mars’s surface. The seismometer will record Marsquakes and study meteoritic impacts. The number of Marsquakes will indicate how geologically active the planet is. The heat probe is a mechanical mole that will drill to a depth of five meters, to take Mars’s temperature. Marco-a and Marco-b, the two CubeSats will function as radio relay stations and they will pick up signals from Insight and relay them to Earth. You can explore more about Insight using this link – 

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/

Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images

The second dot is about the Parker Solar probe. The mission is to study the Sun’s behaviour. It is the first spacecraft to be named after a living person - astrophysicist Eugene Parker, 91, who first described solar wind in 1958. The parker probe during its seven-year stay in the space will make 24 loops around Sun to study ‘the physics of the corona, the place where much of the important activity that affects the Earth seems to originate’. (BBC) The Parker probe is also the fastest man-made object which can travel at the speed of 690,000km/h i.e. we can travel to Tokyo from New York in just under a minute. The Parker Solar probe is about the size of a car.  “We’ve been waiting 60 years for the technology to mature enough for us to do such a risky mission. It really is going somewhere we’ve never been before,” says project scientist Nicky Fox who has been working on this project for the past 8 years. Parker Space probe (PSP) will dip into the sun’s atmosphere, where it will have to tolerate temperatures of around 1,400C (seven times hotter than a kitchen oven). PSP will sit behind a heat shield. This special hi-tech parasol will keep the spacecraft alive and able to work. You can join PSP as it moves closer to its objective by clicking on this link - https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe

The third dot takes us to the capital of South Korea Seoul where you can see AI in action.  You’ll find bins that politely ask you to fill them with rubbish, and automated smart apartments that anticipate your every need. The subway system is spotless, efficient, ubiquitous, with wifi so strong my fingers can’t keep up with my thoughts. People don’t read the print-and-paper book on the subway. Even inside the toilet, we have the wonders of AI in action. Smartlet from Korea’s Daelim is one smart potty which has a control panel with close to 20 buttons. 

The apartment buildings are examples of the ‘Internet of things’. When you pull into the garage; a sensor reads your license plate and lets your host know that you have arrived. Another feature monitors the weather and warns you to take your umbrella. An internet-connected kitchen monitor can call up your favourite cookbook. Apartment owners wear wristbands that allow them to open doors and access services in the building. Hubo, a charming humanoid robot is another that is a representative of the AI revolution that is happening in South Korea. The humanoid robots can provide assistance to the elderly and can even provide emotional companionship. JunHo Oh the creator of Hubo says that in the future “Everything will be roboticised.”

The future is getting shaped and it will unlock new worlds. How do we prepare ourselves for this changing worldview? How will we descibe it -  a utopia or a dystopia? 

Death and Creativity

Connect the Dots # 7 

Tonight, we explore the life of three creative minds. All of them had a fascination with the visual medium. They will be remembered for ages to come. This post is also a kind of tribute for one of them. 

[File: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters]

RIP Bernardo Bertolucci– One of the doyens of the Italian film industry who was almost as important as Federico Fellini. I have seen two of his creations. One is the highly significant political movie – The Last Emperor and the Eve Green starrer – The Dreamers. The former one is about the Puyi, the last emperor of China and how he dies in the prison after he is dethroned because of the Chinese revolution. The movie is one of the rare movies which was shot inside Beijing’s Forbidden City.  The Dreamers tells the story of the American student who is caught in ‘an erotic triangle’. The movie is set in the background of the 1968 Paris student riots. I am planning to watch the movie for which Bernardo Bertolucci is still remembered – Last Tango in Paris. Bertolucci was 77 and he was suffering from Cancer. The Last Emperor got 9 Oscars all of those for which it was nominated. Right from his childhood, he was raised in an artistic atmosphere. Bertolucci was a communist and most of his creations reflect this strong anti-fascist temperament. When asked in 2013 how he would like to be remembered, Bertolucci told AFP: "I don't care." "I think my movies are there, people can see them," he said at a presentation of a 3D version of "The Last Emperor" to mark the 25th anniversary of its international release. Bertolucci was awarded an honorary Palme d'Or for his life's work at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. 

The second dot/story is from an article which appeared in the November 23rd issue of NYT. It is about the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman whose centennial birth celebrations is planned this year. (He died in the year 1918) Many studies have been done on his films, exploring his themes and the techniques. To commemorate the centenary celebrations a new set of Blu-ray discs was released titled - “Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema”. It is a 30-disc set, which presents 39 feature-length films and two documentary shorts by Bergman, along with an in-depth array of supplemental materials. It is packaged as a two-volume book (one holds the discs, the other comprises 248 pages of essays and notes) Film critics have dismissed his movies as creations less important because they have fewer (film) secrets to impart to the modern audience. Glenn Kelly who wrote the article and who has reviewed the Blu-ray set says that it ‘certainly offers dozens of hours of engagement, illumination and even entertainment’. You can get more information about this collector’s item from this link: https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/1427-ingmar-bergman-s-cinema

The third dot is about a Brazilian illustrator who designed the jersey of the Brazilian soccer team. Aldyr Schlee died on November 15th.  He had skin cancer. Even though Aldyr was a professor he was best known for his design of the Brazilian soccer jersey. When he was 19, he came across this contest sponsored by the Brazilian newspaper, The Morning Mail. The only requirement was that the jersey had to use the colours of the Brazilian flag: blue, green, white and yellow. What was created Aldyr Schlee became ‘one of the best -known uniforms in professional sports — a canary yellow shirt trimmed in Kelly green with a touch of stark white, along with shorts of ocean blue’. The Brazilian team wore the uniform for the first time in the year 1954. On November 16th,2018 when the Brazilian team played against Uruguay, they observed a moment of silence in memory of the creator of the design on the jersey that they were wearing. 

The fourth dot pays homage to Prof. George Thomas who passed away this morning. He was the Assistant professor at Deva Matha College, Kerala. 

I would like to quote a line from the movie, Downsizing which I watched recently,  ‘When you know death comes soon, you look around things more close’. Is it true? 

Of memory, dreams and sleep

Connect the Dots # 6 

CtD #6 explores the human mind in the context of the three titular ideas. Memory is content-based, a dream is a process and sleep is an activity. These three ideas are explored through different stories/dots for the purpose of demystifying or decoding.

The first dot is a personal response to the novel Ignorance by Milan Kundera  which I read as part of the Reading Challenge in Readers’ Rendezvous.  The novel offers rich insights into exile and memory. Using the Odyssean tale of homecoming, Milan Kundera weaves a modern tale of nostalgia and personal memory. I was able to identify myself with some of the emotions portrayed in the novel since I too had a brief stay in a land which was far away from my ‘home’. Even today I am living the life of an internal emigrant away from my original home… but little closer.

I was able to make an immediate connection with the opening lines of the novel, Irena’s friend Sylvie asks her, 

“What are you doing here? “

“Where should I be?” Irena asked.

“Home!”

“You mean this isn’t my home anymore?” 

Kundera himself an émigré from Czech in France has rampantly used the themes of emigration and exile in his works. The novel deals with the return of the two central characters to Prague. Josef from Denmark and Irene from Paris. Irene is accompanied by her Swedish boyfriend. Kundera creates a narrative which oscillates between the lives of Irene and Josef. Irena realizes that people really aren’t interested in her experience of exile. The first chapter ends with the lines – “Odysseus sighting his island after years of wandering; the return, the return, the great magic of return”.  The second chapter contains an extended description of the word nostalgia as it appears in different languages. Nostalgia in the Greek language is defined as nostos (return) and algos (suffering), is the suffering caused by an unpassed yearning to return.  According to Kundera, the stronger the nostalgia the emptier the recollections. The more Odyssey suffered, the more he forgot. Nostalgia doesn’t heighten memory’s activity. The novel’s primary concern is all about memory and forgetting. Josef tells that seeing his old watch on his brother’s wrist “threw him into a strange unease. He had the sense he was coming back into the world as might a dead man emerging from his tomb after 20 years”. He describes his mother tongue as an “unknown language whose every word he understood”. The journal which Josef kept during his school days serves as another symbol of memory. He wonders looking at his own handwriting “How can two such alien, such opposite beings have the same handwriting? Kundera successfully mingles the political strife with the personal alienation and heartbreaks. The Communist regime serves as a background against which the lives of Josef and Irena is explored. The novel is described as ‘a novel of return’. Even though I have finished reading the novel, it is still growing inside me and in the near future, I will prepare an exclusive blog on Milan Kundera’s Ignorance. 

The second dot is based on the article which appeared in the NYT on November 15^th. The article deals with dreams and it comes with the one-line description – ‘Where your brain goes when you’re asleep helps you when you’re awake’. The article discusses the sad fact about how we disregard our dreams. As we reach adulthood, we go by the age-old wisdom that we shouldn’t ‘dwell on our dreams’. We are given lessons that say that dreams are juvenile, self-indulgent and that we should shake off their traces and get on with our day. The writer Alice Robb who has authored the book – ‘Why we Dream’, talks about how for the past two years she along with her friends meet and talk about their dreams.  According to her, there is a way the dreams will sneak into our conscious territory and influence our daytime time mood. She further illustrated the benefits of dreams by describing them as ‘a breeding ground for ideas. Dreams may even help us ‘consolidate new memories and prune extraneous pieces of information’. It is interesting to note that the book by Alice Robb opens with a quote from the novel by Susan Sontag titled ‘Benefactor’.  ‘I understand why most people regard their dreams as of little importance. They are too light for them, and most people identify the serious with what has weight. Tears are serious; one can collect them in a jar. But a dream like a smile is pure air. Dreams, like smiles, fade rapidly. But what if the face faded away, and the smile remained?’ (Why we Dream, Alice Robb) The article in NYT which is titled end with the lines – ‘Even in dreams we know who we are.’ You can explore the world of Alice Robb using this link to her blog - https://muckrack.com/alice-robb

Source: Google

The third dot is based on the article which appeared in the August issue of National Geographic magazine. The title as it appeared in the cover page is – Sleep – The New Science of Slumber. The article says that every night of our lives we undergo a startling metamorphosis. The article traces the history of sleep from 350 B.C when Aristotle wrote an article “On Sleep and Sleeplessness” and to the invention of ‘electroencephalograph’ in the year 1924 by the German psychiatrist. The machine records the electrical activity in the brain. The article explores the importance of sleep in childhood development and health. Poor sleep in kids has been linked to diabetes, obesity and learning disabilities. What is most interesting about the article is the description of a performance by the composer Max Richter who has created a minimalist, scientifically informed piece that aims to guide listeners through a rejuvenating rest. It lasts eight hours. The article is a cautionary one which gives the message – A full night’s sleep now feels as rare and old-fashioned as a handwritten letter. It explores the different stages that human beings undergo in their sleep. The stunning description about this journey is ‘a serpentine, surreal descent into an alternative world’

You can watch the musical composition by Max Richter in this link: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHMCE-c8sUc

What happens to us in our sleep? Are we caught in the interplay between dreams and memory? 

Three lives in the Wild...

Connect the Dots # 5

This Saturday night episode of Connect the Dots features the life and times of three women who lived in close association with the natural world. This is also the time when BBC is celebrating the stories of 100 women from around the world. If you would like to explore more about the BBC project, you can click on the link given below: 

https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c779dqxlxv2t/100-women

The first dot is about the primatologist Dorothy L. Cheney who worked with the primates and studied the complexity of their thought process and social structures. She passed away recently on November 9. She was a spectacular scientist and the author of the book ‘A Primate’s Memoir’. She has undertaken numerous expeditions to understand how the primates understood the world around them. She discovered that they think in far more sophisticated ways than it was anticipated. She had an empirical approach to her research. She didn’t lock herself up in a laboratory with some caged animals instead she went to the wilderness of Africa and studied gorillas, baboons, vervet monkeys and other animals. She and her team recorded the sounds of the vervet monkeys and played it back to study the reactions of the primates. Dorothy L. Cheney and her team recorded the findings in their first book, “How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species” which was published in the year (1990) Dorothy strongly believed that you cannot study about the primates by looking at their dead bodies or the single animals brought home as pets. To have a deeper understanding of the primates it is essential to study them beyond their physical appearances and observe them patiently, witnessing their social interactions. Born in Boston, Dorothy L. Cheney had spent parts of her childhood in Malaysia, India and Netherlands. Her father was in the foreign service and the family kept moving from one place to another. Her father, Edward Cheney died in a plane crash in the Philippines in 1976. After her marriage to Robert M. Seyfarth who was a Zoologist, her life changed. He had plans to go to South Africa to study the baboons. Dorothy L. Cheney recollects that moment when she decided to take the zoological plunge along with her husband. “I thought, ‘What the hell, this could be fun for a year or two,’ so I decided to put off law school and join him,” she said in an interview. (NYT) She received a PhD in Zoology at Cambridge in 1977. Dr Cheney talked about the animals in a 2007 interview with NPR. “They seem to know a huge amount about each other’s social relationships and each other’s dominance ranks,” she said, “so the social complexity, on the surface anyway, appears to be very similar to that of a very complex human society, and yet they’re not humans. (NYT) 

The second dot examines the life and times of Jane Goodall. A regular personality that is featured in the university curriculum in India and abroad. This dot features details from the interview she gave to the Guardian in May 2018. She is 84 years old and she is seated in the office of the Jane Goodall Institute in London, wearing a VR headset watching the special series ‘The Wild Immersion’, a VR project to raise awareness about the natural world. Jane Goodall talks about the ultimate aim of this project is to make the kids interested in the wild. She is also afraid that this VR video will be the only way the children will connect with the wild because most of the animals are on the verge of getting extinct. In the year 1986, she stopped her operations at Gombe and now is a full-time activist attending awareness programmes, giving lectures and being part of the campaigns around the world. She confesses to the fact she has little time to watch movies, but she did watch the Planet of the Apes series because the production house consulted her on the chimp behaviour. 

The third dot is from NYT about a vintage photographer who worked without a camera. Her name is Anna Atkins and she is a British botanist. She invented the photobook in the 1840s. She is famous for making the blueprint of the marine plants in the year 1843. Her blueprints were published in the magnum opus “Photographs of British Algae”. Some of the pages from that book are displayed in “Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins,” at the main branch of the New York Public Library. You may access the same using this link: https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/blue-prints-pioneering-photographs-anna-atkins. Anne Atkins father is the one who inspired her to continue with her passion for making illustrations of the natural world. She also took the bold step of circulating/showing her work to her contemporaries

to get their expert opinion and feedback. Her magnum opus took almost a decade to complete. 

We stand in awe before these three women who took the road less travelled. What kind of life lessons can we acquire from these three lives? 

Untouched and uncontacted…

Connect the Dots # 4 

These dots examines the tales of human exploration and how it has destroyed something original and genuine. 

The lumps of white coral shone round the dark mound like a chaplet of bleached skulls, and everything around was so quiet that when I stood still all sound and all movement in the world seemed to come to an end. It was a great peace as if the earth had been one grave, and for a time I stood there thinking mostly of the living who, buried in remote places out of the knowledge of mankind, still are fated to share in its tragic or grotesque miseries. In its noble struggles too—who knows? The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?                                     Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim  

 

Source: Wikipedia

The first dot examines the article by Michiko Kakutani, the American literary critic and the former chief book critic of the New York Times. Her article on the life of Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett is titled as ‘An Explorer Drawn to, and eventually Swallowed by, the Amazon’. Colonel Percy made a series of adventurous excursions into the remote parts of the Amazon. His adventures are the subject matter of the book “The Lost City of Z”. Colonel Percy faced hostile tribesman armed with blow darts and poison arrows and encountered crocodiles, jaguars, piranhas, vampire bats, giant anacondas, and every pestilent insect imaginable, from cyanide-squirting millipedes to ‘sauba ants’ that could reduce a man’s clothes to threads in a single night to ‘eye lickers’ that invade the pupils. But Fawcett and his two companions on a 1925 expedition, his 21-year-old son, Jack and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimell, never returned from that trip. In 1953, nearly three decades after his mysterious disappearance, The London Geographical Journal declared: Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest. Fawcett’s adventures are said to have helped inspire Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, “The Lost World” in which explorers “disappear into the unknown” of South America and find a land where dinosaurs have escaped extinction, as well as “Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils,” one of the novels spun off from popular “Raiders of the Lost Ark” movie. 

Source: NYT

The second dot is about the 82-year-old Indian anthropologist, T.N Pandit, who has worked with the hunter-gatherer tribes of the Andamans. The article about Mr Pandit appeared in the NYT on May 5, 2017 – ‘A Season of Regret for an Aging Tribal Expert in India’. Pandit wrote the only book on the Andaman tribals, The Sentinelese, which is sadly out of print today. He has made contact with some of the world’s most isolated people. It took Mr Pandit and his colleagues more than two decades to persuade the tribes known as the Jarawa and Sentinelese to lay down their bows and arrows and mingle peacefully with the Indian settlers who surrounded them. The process was very slow, involving trips into the remote jungles areas to leave gifts for people who would not show themselves. He discovered that there is a tribe that lived in isolation on a 20-square-mile island called North Sentinel and had barely seen at all. In the end, Mr Pandit agrees that the Jarawa were hurt by putting down their bows and arrows. “The negative impact of close contact is inescapable, but it is sad,” he said. What an amazing community but it has been diluted in its outlook, its self-confidence, its sense of purpose, its sense of survival. Now they take it easy. They beg for things” Mr Pandit doesn’t harbour any hope when he says, “In the course of time, these communities will disappear, he said. “Their cultures will be lost”. 

 

Source: Indian Coast Guard

The third story/dot is about the widely discussed news article about the American who tried making contact with the Sentinelese people and how they killed him using their bow and arrows. There are different versions emerging about this accident. Some news channels call him as an ‘adventurist’, others as an ‘evangelist’. The Sentinelese, an ancient people believed to be part of the earliest migratory wave out of Africa to Asia, have violently resisted intrusions. Following the devastating 2004 tsunami, an Indian Coast Guard helicopter surveying the island for survivors encountered tribals trying to bring it down with spears and arrows. In 2006, two Indian fishermen were axed by the tribals after their boat accidentally drifted near the island.

Should we leave the uncontacted and untouched in their own turf? What rights do we have to disturb their indigenous existence?

The following articles were used as references to prepare this blog: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/books/17kaku.html?mtrref=undefined

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/world/asia/anthropologist-India-Andaman-island-tribes.html

https://qz.com/india/1473128/andamans-sentinelese-who-killed-john-chau-werent-always-hostile/

https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/12031

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-last-island-of-the-savages/#.W_gT1C0Q0UT

Fascinated by the Divide...

Connect the Dots # 3 

 

Tonight, Connect the Dots look at the some of the gaps/fissures that exist in our world. It is not the solution or the remedy that is discussed, but the division/dichotomy itself. How deep-rooted it is and how it manifests itself in the society. Just as we study the human capacity to love it is amazing to look at how people can draw a line of hate in their minds. t is interesting to look at how the human mind has the power to stay divided inspite of the ‘texts’ that exhorts and preaches love and tolerance. 

The first story is adapted from The International New York Times about the old Yugoslavia which from a unified chunk became a fragmented realm. (Refer to the timeline of disintegration in the map above). Mostar,the Bosnian city has  two fire stations,two garbage collection companies, two hospitals, two electricity companies, two bus stations, two popular nightclubs and two soccer teams. If there is a fire alarm ringing in Mostar, Sabit Golos, a veteran firefighter, knows that he does not have to worry unless the flames burn something on the Muslim side. Of the two Fire brigades, one is made up mostly of Muslims like Mr. Golos, who are responsible for putting out fires on the east side of the old front line and a second one staffed by Catholic Croats that douses flames on the other side. The line vanished long ago but it lives on in the mind, an emblem of the ethnonationality fissures that exist in the country. Muslim children attend high school in the same building as Catholic Croat students but never mixed with them because students went to classes in shifts - Muslims from 7:30 a.m. and Croats from 2 p.m., a common arrangement. The school toilet is the only place where students from different ethnicities come together. “Interaction between people of different ethnicities has been banished to the smelly toilets," says Professor Azra Hromadzic the author of the book ‘Citizens of an empty nation - Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina’. Azra Hromadzic teaches anthropology at Syracuse University. 

The second dot is about a literary fissure which existed between two literary giants. Their story of animosity is the content of the book 'The Feud by Alex Beam. The review of the same appeared in WSJ (December 17 - 18, 2016). Russian author Pushkin is the reason behind the enmity between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. The review begins with a lovely quote by Samuel Johnson, ‘Very slender differences will sometimes part those whom long reciprocation of civility or beneficence has united.’ which kind of sums up the adage - What unites, divides. Both Wilson and Nabokov became friends because of the common passion that they shared – Russian Literature. The warmth of their relationship is embedded in these lines “the two were working on translating a “little tragedy” by Pushkin, the 1830 play “Mozart and Salieri.” “It is quite perfect now,” Nabokov wrote to Wilson in 1941, after the New Republic had published their translation. “You have played your Mozart to my Salieri.”Pushkin’s play is based on the real-life bonding between the Austrian composer Mozart and the Italian composer Salieri. Pushkin again was the reason behind the rift between these two authors. Edmund Wilson publicly criticized the translation of Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by Nabokov. He wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1965, describing Nabokov’s language as “uneven,” “banal” and recondite. From a stage in their relationship where they both used to call each other Bunny and Volodya, they moved to a stage where they called each other ‘repellent’ and ‘philistine’. The book review begins by making a reference to other fights in the literary arena - ‘Verlaine shot Rimbaud. Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel. Hemingway considered Fitzgerald a whiner, and Coleridge belittled Wordsworth as “no poet.” But no literary feud has been quite as literary, or as graceless, as the one that erupted in 1965 between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov. 

The third dot is a visual representation from the torn social fabric of America. 

Source: https://allthatsinteresting.com/segregation-in-america

Hate does not require any effort on our part because it is a part of the human existence.                        ( https://www.taosnews.com/stories/my-turn-why-is-hate-easier-than-love)  - Is this statement true? 

Collect… before it is too late!!!

Connect the Dots # 2

Today we will explore three dots which are based on the central idea - The need for a clean-up drive. The first story is from the WSJ (20-11-2018). The article opens with the question - 

Who is littering my playground?” The speaker is Lauren Deeley who is  as ‘a new type of eco-warrior who practices ‘plogging’ – picking up litter while jogging. Th term plogging was coined in 2016 by the Swede Erik Ahlström.  She started plogging 10 years ago while living in Costa Rica. She says that when people walk on a mountain trail they spend lot of time looking at the ground. She used to get annoyed at the litter strewn around on the ground. She would comb the area for ‘microtrash’ which is normally found under rocks and behind bushes. Deeley worked quietly tidying up the trails of the Green Mountains in Vermont. 

Laura Deeley maintains a blog at http://laurendeeley.wixsite.com/tp-is-gross. She says that the act of plogging has helped her to slow down “I’m in more in tune with nature and my body, “she says. “I notice the way the sun comes through the trees, the different types of mushrooms on the forest floor, how my body is feeling. It’s a very meditative workout. “Even when she travels, she hikes and runs with a trash bag and recycles her finds. “It physically pains me to see something and not pick it up, she says. “You can also learn a lot about a city or culture based on what you find on their trails". 

The second dot is from Science Illustrated (AU) where there is an article about a small satellite that is trying to catch the orbiting waste by means of nets and harpoons. Space junk has become a serious problem for the astronauts and especially to the ones manning the International Space Station. It was in July 2015 that the ISS was threatened by huge piece of space junk that was travelling at a speed of 50,000 km/h – 20 times faster than a bullet. The junk is not a threat just to the astronauts but also to the network of satellites which may get pulverized and block our access to space. To prevent untoward incidents the scientists from the University of Surrey, England launched a satellite which will remove the dead satellites. On June 20, 2018, the RemoveDEBRIS satellite was launched into orbit from the International Space Station. This satellite will release a small nanosatellite which it will try to catch the junk satellite in a net. If this old fishing method can work in space, the net could prove to be the most versatile method for cleaning up. As part of the next step, RemoveDEBRIS will also use harpooning to bring the junk satellites to the atmosphere where eventually they will burn. In 2023 the e.Deorbit mission will for the first time try to remove space junk from Earth’s orbit. 

The third dot is about the sperm whale which got washed up in eastern Indonesia which had a large lump of plastic waste weighing 6 kilos in it's stomach, including flip-flops and 115 plastic drinking cups. Two statements from the Indonesian officials are worth quoting here.

“Although we have not been to deduce the cause of death, the facts that we see are truly awful,” Dwi Suprapti – Marine Species conservation coordinator at WWF Indonesia. 

“It is possible that many other marine animals are also contaminated with plastic waste and this is very dangerous in our lives.” – Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan – Minister of Maritime Affairs.  

How do we connect these dots and what is the action plan that we have for the future? 

Books, pages and the Reading Space…

Connect the Dots # 1

In tonight’s Connect the Dots, we will be looking at three stories/dots. 

The first story appeared in the Wall Street Journal (19-11-18) and it is titled as Literary Dimensions. The news story is about the Sinan bookstore in Shanghai in China. The bookstore was open for 60 days initially and due to public demand has now established itself as a permanent place for reading. The bookshop is open every day from 4 -8 PM and it has become a hub for writers, editors and literary critics to share their ideas and thoughts. The existence of such a book club gathers importance in the context of the rise of the internet and e-commerce which have created a fragmented reading habit among people. 

This description about the bookstore is quite alluring: A short stretch of narrow spiral stairs leads up to the bookshop, where book lovers find the decor and lighting resemble those of a typical Shanghai mansion in the early 1900s. Visitors can spend an entire day there, sitting on leather sofas or chairs, drinking coffee and reading.  One of the founders of the bookstore, Kan Ninghui describes the bookstore as “the beating heart of books for book lovers.” 

The second story/dot is from the archives of CNN and it is about the bookstore in Southampton known as October Books. The owners were forced to relocate their shop to another location which was 500 meters away from the old location. They were worried about the act of shifting 20,000 books and furniture to the new location. The volunteers behind October Books appealed for help and there was a huge response. Thousands of people came forward to ‘lift and shift’ the books and all the books were delivered to the new location within a few hours. 

The third story/dot is the article from Business Insider which informs us that students learn more effectively from printed textbooks rather than from the screens. This is due to the disruptive effect that scrolling has on comprehension. The kind of engagement that we can have with the printed text (dog-eared pages, lines of text underlined and added with questions and reflections) is more than that of a digital text. The article exhorts that there should be a place for the printed text in spite of all the technology-based system of learning. 

What is your response to these three dots? What kind of big picture is emerging from this? Please do leave your comments and feedback at the bottom.

Yuval Trivia

https://www.ted.com/speakers/yuval_noah_harari

-->

Dear bloggy, 

Today I am continuing with the streak of writing blogs for the fifth consecutive day. I feel that I am back in business and with the beginning of Connect the Dots soon @ RR, I feel that I will have something to post every day. Today was a hectic day with the workshop on Mechanics of Thesis Writing but I was aware of the importance of this post and I was getting ready. I had this article which appeared in the International New York Times about Yuval and I was able to finish reading it as I sat there listening to the speakers of the day. Whenever I got time, I read this article and was able to finish it by the time seminar got over for the day.  So what I plan to do is to post a lightweight blog post from the article which I read today which is titled – Tech C.E.O’s are in love with the Principal Doomsayer. I am skipping the heavy weight thoughts for another day. Today I will share about the other side of the author whom I adore – Yuval Noah Harari. 

1. He has a PhD from Oxford.
2. He is 42 years old.
3. He is an Israeli philosopher and History professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
4. Mr Harari grew up in Kiryat Ata, near Haifa and his father worked in the arms industry.
5. His mother who was working in an office now helps her son in handling the mail.
6. Yuval gets about 1000 messages every week.
7. He is gay, and his husband is Itzik Yahav. Yahav’s mother is their accountant. 
8. Ridley Scott and documentarian Asif Kapadia are adapting Sapiens into a TV show. 
9. Mr Harari is working on a children’s books to reach a broader audience. 
10. The couple is vegan and Harari is sensitive to animals. 
11. The couple watches TV every day. 
12. In December Harari plans to enter an ashram outside Mumbai for 60 days of silence.
13. He believes in the word – Detached – He says, “If I was a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment.” 

The ideas presented above are from this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/business/yuval-noah-harari-silicon-valley.html

The Perks of being a Wallflower: Movie Review

It is a rare thing to watch a full-length movie on TV channels. Most of the time I just flip through the channels and most of the time I catch good movies when they are almost near their half-way mark. Tonight, was an exception, I was able to squeeze in some time to watch the movie – The Perks of Being a Wallflower and it was indeed a worthy treat. I felt connected to the movie in many ways and I guess, that’s the secret of any successful artistic creation. The movie traces the story of a wallpaper – ‘A wallflower is someone with an introverted personality type (or in more extreme cases, social anxiety) who will attend parties and social gatherings but will usually distance themselves from the crowd and actively avoid being in the limelight. The name itself derives from eponymous plant's unusual growth pattern; against a wall as a stake or in cracks and gaps in stone walls. "Wallflowers" might literally stand against a wall and simply observe others at a social gathering, rather than mingle. This could be due to anxiety, shyness, lack of social skills or self-esteem’. (Wikipedia)by the name of Charlie who befriends his seniors (Sam and Patrick) at school and how the trio discover the true value of friendship and most importantly growing up together. 

When Charlie says – “Dear Friend, I'm sorry I haven't written in a while, but I've been trying hard not to be a loser” I can see a part of myself reflected as I struggle sometimes to stick to a regular writing routine. Charlies crush and the girl who kissed him first (played by the energetic Emma Watson) gifts him a typewriter to encourage him to write more. In the long run, even I have plans to buy a typewriter to emblazon my thoughts and ideas. In fact, the movie opens with this journal entry from Charlie -[voice-over] “Dear Friend. I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn't try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have. Please don't try to figure out who I am. I don't want you to do that. I just need to know that people like you exist. Like if you met me you wouldn't think I was the weird kid who spent time in the hospital. And I wouldn't make you nervous. I hope it's okay for me to think that. You see, I haven't really talked to anyone outside of my family all summer. But tomorrow is my first day of high school ever, and I need to turn things around. So, I have a plan. As I enter the school for the first time, I will visualize what it would be like on the last day of my senior year. Unfortunately, I counted, and that's one thousand three hundred and eighty-five days”.

The second connection with the movie can be found in this dialogue:  Sam: “Oh my God! They're playing good music. Patrick: Holy shit. Holy shit. They are, they're playing good music!”. Like Almost Famous and Baby Driver, this movie too has a rich soundtrack and music is therapeutic for the characters and the audience. The tunnel song with the affirmation statement from Charlie (closing scene) is one of the best scenes in the movie. There are various mix-tapes made and music is always played in the high school parties and weekend get-togethers. The movie ends with the voice over of Charlie “I don't know if I will have the time to write any more letters because I might be too busy trying to participate. So, if this does end up being the last letter, I just want you to know that I was in a bad place before I started high school, and you helped me. Even if you didn't know what I was talking about or know someone who's gone through it, you made me not feel alone. Because I know there are people who say all these things don't happen. And there are people who forget what it's like to be 16 when they turn 17. I know these will all be stories someday. And our pictures will become old photographs. We'll all become somebody's mom or dad. But right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening. I am here, and I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful. I can see it. This one moment when you know you're not a sad story. You are alive, and you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you're listening to that song and that drive with the people you love most in this world. And at this moment, I swear, we are infinite.” 

The third connect is about bouncing back to life and finding yourself again and again. Charlie discovers (makes the audience discover) this through narrating about his life. Coming to terms with his childhood memories and in spite of the problems he had making new friends, Charlie ultimately triumphs and the movie is interspersed with these lovable quotes to supplement this triumph of the human spirit.  Charlie: My doctor said we can't choose where we come from, but we can choose where we go from there. I know it's not all the answers, but it was enough to start putting these pieces together. It also makes fun of the system of education and the expectation that everyone is supposed to get good grades. There is this scene where everyone is given their annual grades and how Patrick celebrates his below average status.  [Patrick holds his report card] Patrick: C minus, ladies and gentlemen! I am below average! Sam: Below average! Patrick: Below average! The ultimate homage paid to human triumph is the one-liner associated with the movie – We are Infinite. 

The fourth connect with the movie is about books and reading. There is a special bond between Charlie and his English teacher. In the first scene, you can see Charlie scribbling the answers to the questions asked in the class. Being a wallflower, he doesn’t have the courage to raise his hand to answer. The teacher as he monitors the class discovers that Charlie has all the answers in his notebook takes a special interest in him. The first book that is taught in the class is To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee and there is a scene where the book cover is torn by a bully and how Charlie applies scotch tape to put the cover back in one piece. The teacher and student start sharing and discussing books. They even discuss issues related to growing up. 

Charlie: Mr Anderson? Can I ask you something?

Bill: Yeah.

Charlie: Why do nice people choose the wrong people to date?

Bill: Are we talking about anyone specific?

[Charlie nods]

Bill: Well, we accept the love we think we deserve.

Charlie: Can we make them know that they deserve more?

Bill: We can try.

The best part of this bonding based on books between the teacher and his student is at the end when the teacher asks the class the question – How many of you will continue reading for the pleasure of it? Only Charlie raises his hand (first time he does it) and we can see the smirk on the faces of his classmates.  

The movie is based on the book by Stephen Chbosky and there is a link between this writer and my previous blog. He has tweeted about Stan Lee in a memorable manner "With great power comes great responsibility."  Rest in peace, Maestro.  Thank you for making our world super.  #stanlee. 

The following links were referred to get inputs for this blog: 

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wallflower

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallflower_(people)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1659337/?ref_=ttqt_qt_tt

https://twitter.com/StephenChbosky?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Chbosky