Second thoughts on The Argumentative Indian

I had thought that I would find much to dissect, discuss and disagree with in the remaining part of the book. No such luck. The rest of the book is a meandering look at whatever seems to catch Mr. Sen's fancy. His love for Tagore and Ray are obvious and explicitly stated. Nest he goes into an analysis of what's wrong with India, with particular regard to its inequalities, whether related to gender, caste or class. I do agree with most of what he says there, but then he doesn't say anything path-breaking either. Nothing I didn't already know or suspect. How class inequalities impact every other cause of social, economic, and political inequity is something, however, I had not considered before. It makes sense, of course, as he points out when discussing communal riots across India in the last half century and more. He makes the very valid and I'm sure, underappreciated point that while most victims belonged to quite different communities, they belonged to the same class, the underprivileged and deprived. His talk on gender inequalities did not reveal anything new to me. I've always held that female empowerment has to go way beyond the freedom to get gainful employment outside the home. Education and exposure to the world to open up her mind to the possibilities there are out there are vital to make the woman an effective agent of change in the family and society. One thing I didn't know was that South-east Asian countries and China follow the same demographic trends as India with regards to preference for male progeny and the resulting skewing of the sex ratio and other indices of female health and well-being. I had assumed that with increased industrialization and a higher standard of living, those societies would have followed the Western trends towards a higher proportion of females at all age points. It seems that social ideas and practices that plague India are the same that affect these countries too. Makes you wonder then, why this male preference arises in Asian countries in the first place. As my wife pointed out, dowry as a modern institution prevails mostly in India and as far as we know, not in SE Asia. But I think, the malaise goes deeper than simple financial outlay. Asian countries are still preponderantly patriarchal. Male domination leads to the desire for male offspring. In the West, for a number of reasons (not least the dire shortage of males in the workforce post the two World Wars), females have gained a better foothold in the workplace and the society at large. Of course, the stress on education in the west over the last couple of centuries has helped to no small extent. When the opportunity arose in the 1910s, there were a lot of educated, willing women joining the workforce in various capacities. The trend got strengthened in the Second World War, and women's lib has never looked back since. I feel that in India and other Asian countries, this necessity never arose and most Indians still look upon the idea of women working as a matter of economic necessity rather than an essential part of their life experience and personality. As a result maybe, the ideas of women empowerment that arose with education and employment have not yet taken root here. Of course, Sen does not go into the depth of this question, and rightly so, because this would be a book in itself.

I still have some 50 odd pages to go, but I don't think I shall be really impressed by anything in the pages to come. I had kept my expectations deliberately low while buying this book because I have only too often endured the disappointment of dashed hopes, and I am thankful to say that I have not been misplaced in my assumption this time. By no means unreadable, but by the same measure, not a masterpiece either.

The Argumentative Indian

Have started reading Amartya Sen's 'The Argumentative Indian'. Although I've only just begun the book and have only read 50 odd pages, I have come across passages where I felt the need to annotate the margins with my own thoughts about the point being raised by the author. I have done that, infrequently, in the past but always felt like I was in some way vandalizing the book. At other times there wasn't enough space in the margins and I wonder if they could print such books with ample space for you to jot down your own thoughts on the page. In this case since I am reading the book during my daily commute, penning on the margins isn't advisable. I remember as a young teenager when I took my diary along with me on my trip to Shimla with friends. I tried writing my thoughts on the bus and didn't get down more than a few lines. It was so shaky and uncomfortable that I gave up the idea immediately. So with this book I plan to put my thoughts about what Sen has written not on paper but on my laptop instead. Waiting till I finish the book would entail a very long wait and I would forget half of what I had thought of saying by then.

The first two chapters I found somewhat enlightening though not particularly noteworthy. He talks about how we have a long history of dialogue, discussion and toleration of dissent in India, even when it comes to religion. Most of it I knew already, but the story of the sage Javali and how he rebukes Rama for his actions was new.

I found myself disagreeing with parts of his third chapter, where he talks about the BJP and Hindutva. The book was written before the last general elections of course, at a time when the Congress had just regained power after defeating the BJP. In one sentence he seems to imply that the parties allied to the BJP, the 'secular' ones like the AIADMK, the Trinamool, and the TDP fared badly because of their association with the BJP. he doesn't follow it up but just mentions it and walks away. "The voters seem to have been particularly harsh on most of the secular collaborators of the BJP." to quote him. I think this is a misinterpretation of voting trends. Tamil Nadu typically votes overwhelmingly for one party in an election only to shift entirely to the opposite end the next time round. The DMK and the AIADMK have both been alternately swept into power and swept aside in an equally convincing manner. This happened before anyone allied with the BJP and will happen again. The TDP lost because, by popular consesus, Chandrababu Naidu was seen as having focussed all his energies on the Andhra capital and broadly ignoring the vast hinterland, especially the Telangana region (which includes Hyderabad). Agriculture was hit very badly and farmer suicides were in all the news. The Trinamool I won't hazard a guess about since I don't know that much about it but the party has come into prominence only lately following the Singur agitation and other such events. Only after gaining mileage from these has it built itself as a credible alternative capable of defeating the left parties who've held sway in Bengal for over three decades now. So what I want to say is that looking at all this I don't think it was association with the BJP that cot these 'secular' parties their vote share or their seats. In fact, the BJP in power was a much milder version of the virulent ultra-right party that we see now. They were on their 'best boy' behaviour in a manner of speaking. Of course, I might have simply misinterpreted what Sen wrote and maybe he didn't mean it this way; it does seem unlikely I did though, given his left leanings.

Roots of morality? Pt.2

This was one of the major questions I struggled with when I was reading “The God Delusion”. Dawkins, of course quoted extensively from the Bible to make the point that wherever we get or morals from, it’s most certainly not from that book. He might be right. I haven’t read the whole testament, but what I have read, i.e. the first few books up to Job, don’t disprove his claims in anyway. The Old testament god seems to be a rather jealous, vindictive, and violent deity. And he eggs on his followers to do the same. Time after time before they enter the promised land, the Israelites are reminded to show the original inhabitants there no mercy and massacre the lot. But there are exhortations to act morally too, even if only with one’s religious kin. There are, however, numerous examples that bear out Dawkins’ claim. But he doesn’t delve further into it and lets it go at that.
Be that as it may, I still think morality had its roots in religion. Not the bible per se but in various interpretations of it. God was merciful, at leas tin his later iterations. There was talk about goodwill towards all and helping your fellow man, and more importantly on good acts. We would all have to pay for our sins come judgement day! Of course Hindus believed in rebirth and that your past sins would come to haunt you in the next life. But in every case, it was the idea of balance in nature that a belief in god and a cosmic order brought about that made man moral. And I come back to the same question. In the absence of that cosmic order, why be moral?
Or to strike even deeper, why define morality like this? Who’s to say what action is moral or immoral? What’s right and what’s wrong? On what basis do you ground your basic ethic? How do you define that basis? How can you defend it? Morality become nothing more than a set of common rules that we agree upon to play fair, and the person who can break those rules without getting caught is the most successful. Which brings me back to square one. I’m tired of thinking in circles and yet I can’t seem to find a way to break free from it.
Of course, no matter how much I want to believe that the existence of god would make some sense out of this chaos, it doesn’t make it real. I forget who said, “If God did not exist, mankind would have found it necessary to create him.” True words, indeed.

Roots of morality?

Morality. It’s a question I can’t get out of my head. And I don’t mean morality as it’s interpreted today, in terms of sexuality. Who’s having sex with who and how and are they married and what not. That seems to be the only thing morality is concerned with today. Greed, corruption, theft, murder are all bad and condemnable, but show us a sexually ‘immoral’ person and we all get up in a lather. Not I, though. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about all the other immoral things. To cheat, to lie, to wrong, to kill, and so on. And the moral actions too. Altruism, philanthropy, kindness, helping the needy and so on. What is the root behind all this? What stops us from wronging someone? What makes us help others, especially those who can’t return the favour?
Tough questions. I struggle to find the answer. Why should it make us feel good to do the ‘moral thing’? After all, it’s not giving us any tangible benefit. Not cheating at cards, for instance, might lead to me losing the game, and that doesn’t make me happy. Spending my hard-earned money on someone else in charity only means I have less to spend on myself. I’m sure similar emotions would be felt by almost everyone. Then why do we do it?
Some researchers in such fields, socio-anthropologists perhaps, say that it’s a social imperative. Any group where individuals don’t help each other is doomed to fail when competing with a group where they do help each other out. On the face of it, it makes sense. ‘Higher’ animals like primates do show some rudiments of social responsibility more than ‘lower’ animals. Makes sense that a group would prosper if its members were aiding each other. But which individual would be most benefited in such a group? The one who was most ‘moral’ and helped everyone else, or the one who helped only those who were in a position to reciprocate and not others? The latter, of course. He’s conserving his resources and making use of them in the most efficient manner and evolution would reward him. Similarly with humans, the person who cheated just a little bit, enough to benefit himself but not to trouble others too much, or one who could cheat more but slyly enough so as not to get caught would be the most successful. The one who doesn’t give to charity or help those in need would have more for himself. So why do we do it?
I think it’s because of the belief in god. That there is balance in the world. The belief, ingrained in us from childhood, that if we do good it will come back to us. If we help others, we would get it when we needed the same. That there were consequences for our actions. And this belief gave us meaning. “tu bhala kar tera bhala hoga. Aur darvesh ki sada kya hai?”
But take god out of the equation and you have nothing that ensures this balance. Then why would you do right by anyone? Why wouldn’t I cheat at that game of cards, once I was sure I wouldn’t get caught? Why wouldn’t you murder someone if it helped you in anyway? Why would you or I give to charity to help unknown people who couldn’t repay you? Why would Bill Gates set up a charity worth millions instead of spending it all on himself, buying everything on this earth? Why would I teach any hypothetical kids of mine to be moral, do good, help others, be kind? Why would I not tell them to be supremely selfish and do whatever it took to succeed? Why wouldn’t I do it myself?
If the law of averages governs my life events and some good and bad things are going to happen to me irrespective of my actions, I might as well do all the bad I can safely do to maximize my chances of getting as much ‘good’ as I can in life. After all, all my wrongdoings aren’t going to come back and bite me in the ass! Why would you help a person dying on the street? He will almost certainly not be there if ever you are in such a situation! The same principle would apply to every human transaction, every interchange. Greed, selfishness, callousness would characterise our actions. Even the most intellectual people would find it hard to rationalize moral actions on an individual level (how I hope I’m wrong!). No, if there is no doctrine of ‘karma’ that holds true, we might as well do pretty much what we please.
This was one of the major questions I struggled with when I was reading “The God Delusion”. Dawkins, of course quoted extensively from the Bible to make the point that wherever we get or morals from, it’s most certainly not from that book. He might be right. I haven’t read the whole testament, but what I have read, i.e. the first few books up to Job, don’t disprove his claims in anyway.

Been thinking about God and morality off and on these past couple of months. I feel every thinking man, if he really examines the question, will find it hard to justify hie faith in God. Is there a God? If yes, then what is his contribution to this world? How does he play a part its day to day workings? The more I look at it, I find myself veering to the point of atheism. But years of religious background doesn’t wash off that easily. And I find myself retreating to the cosy, safer and much more comfortable embrace of Deism, the belief that the Creator set out some rules at the beginning of Creation and hasn’t since then taken an active role in the play of existence. I look at the formation of stars and planets and they seem to follow strict physical and chemical rules. I look at the emergence of life and there seems nothing divine about it. An amalgamation of self-replicating molecules in a constant struggle to multiply and pass themselves on, in an unending battle against others of its own kind. In a few hundred million years, the sun will die out and earth will be uninhabitable and there’s nothing God is going to do about that either. Meanwhile the struggle for the survival of the fittest continues in its own ferocious, pitiless way and I don’t see any intervention there either. So if creation, nurture and annihilation are preset in our universe according to known, immutable laws, whither God? Wherefore God? Did He just set some rules and then sat back to enjoy the show? Something like making a complex graphic program and executing it for His amusement? Where is the evidence of his direct intervention? “Ishwar Allah, terey jahan mein, nafrat kyon hai, jung hai kyon?” the Upanishads ask, “Why is it that Brahma made this world and leaves it so? If, being all-powerful he leaves it so, he is not good; if not all-powerful, he is not God”
These are valid questions and I find the answers religious men give to them almost farcical. The good that happens in your life is due to His benevolence, the bad is despite His efforts. I can’t find a more masochistic system of thought. If I win, it’s not because of all the effort at preparation I put in, but all due to God, who presumably likes me more than all the other competitors. If I lose then it wasn’t because God failed me, but because I deserved it. Such was my fate. Of course the weapon of last resort that religion has is to claim that we are too ignorant and small minded to really understand God’s master plan for us all. Maybe your kid who dies at the age of 2 due to some horrifying genetic disease was sent to you to teach you suffering. I might ask why that poor infant was made to suffer on my account. And if I were to ask how exactly God bring this whole thing about? Did he knowing that I needed to suffer pain, brought me to fall in love with and sire a child with the one woman with the exact genetic makeup to compliment mine and then make sure that on the sperm with the relevant genes to cause that specific abnormality ended up fertilizing the egg? Imagine God messing around the Fallopian tubes! Not to mention the 256 people who set about mating 8 generations ago to bring about me with this specific genetic makeup. Like I said, farcical. Look at anything you attribute to God and ask yourself what did God do to make this thing so? Anything. I have yet to find one thing I can truly say was made by God to be exactly like that. All that you see around you is like it is for a reason. A chemical, physical, biological rule explains it fully. If not, then you can rest assured there is a reason though we haven’t worked it out yet. And don’t go around ascribing these rare things to God, for once they are explained, God will be responsible for one less thing in your count. Like the formation of the earth, our heliocentric planetary system, the evolution of myriad forms of life with the same basic genetic code, our descent from ape-like ancestors and so on. Look at the things we attributed to God and can’t anymore.
So I return to my original question, is there a God? I honestly don’t think so though I just as honestly hope there is something akin to Him. Even coming from a family with the least little bit of religiosity in its veins, I still find it disconcerting to completely disbelieve in God. I hear voices saying, “There still is meaning in life” but I find a little measure of despair. The idea that there is no Great Plan makes sense to me in a logical sense, but it’s a hard thing to accept. I consider myself an intelligent, thinking individual and if I find it so difficult to accept, how much more so would it be for a person of lower intelligence (not being vain or anything here; I know there are people with greater intelligence than me and similarly those with lesser), especially one brought up with a religious background to accept atheism. His whole world would come crashing down around him. Religion is one of the strongest moorings for so many that I think it would be impossible for them to imagine a world without God.

Been reading a lot on the evolutionist-creationist debate recently. Of course from the evolutionists’ point of view, coz that’s where my belief lies. One chapter I recently read was on how there were so many imperfections in the human body and how that was clear proof that man was not ‘designed’ by a higher intelligence but rather evolved from non-human ancestors. A number of examples are mentioned, not the least of which in the spine, never designed to remain upright. In fact even walking which we take in our stride (bad pun) is not a very smooth process. If looked at in detail with a fast motion camera and by studying the actual muscle motions involved, the human walk appears to be a series of ungainly motions, in fact it’s said that we actually fall from one step to the other. The examples are endless, truly. Our body architecture is just not designed to work as efficiently as possible. It’s merely a working model of ill-fitting parts that compromises here and there to make things work. It has been shown that if the optics of the eye were better, human vision would be in the range of 6/3, not 6/6. I could keep on pointing out such instances. The more I think about it, the more come to mind. I can’t possibly imagine what creationists have to say about all this, but I’m sure they’ll think of something, or they’ll just refuse to accept these as true. Whatever. But the chapter I was reading also gave examples from the animal kingdom of various ‘inefficient’ designs. One particular example was the marsupial Koala bear, whose baby pouch is upside down! Apparently the Koalas developed from a burrowing ancestor in which the turned around pouch served the purpose of keeping dirt out of the infant’s eyes and mouth as the mother dug. While explaining why the pouch had not turned right side up once the Koalas started climbing trees, the author (Dawkins) hypothesizes that the genetic change necessary to bring that about might be creating a lot of embryological turmoil, ultimately leading to non-viability of the foetus. He puts forward this theory in a number of places, for example the extraordinary course of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in the giraffe and so on. He postulates that the evolutionary benefit of changing the design to a more efficient pattern must be outweighed by the other deleterious effects that the same mutation, necessary for the beneficial effect, had on the embryo. On the face of it, it sounds plausible. Makes sense and it does explain a lot of odd things we see in anatomy. Even when we look at the cellular level and try to imagine what it would entail to change some embryological development pattern in the foetus, we can see that, for example, changing the sites of development of the kidney-ureter system and the testes-vas deferens system so that the vas doesn’t end up looping over the ureter and goes straight to the penis could only result from a profound change in foetal development. And every medical student how even small changes in embryonic development can have such disastrous consequences.
But it occurred to me that surely not every change for the better ( i.e. towards a more efficient body part) would necessarily require such major upheavals. Some changes like maybe the disappearance of the appendix in humans might not require whole scale alterations and some other changes might even bring with them other beneficial changes. Quite possible. After all the narrowing of our larynx is thought to be responsible for humans developing vocal communication which lay the groundwork for our social and cultural evolution. Maybe the change that brings about, say, the inverting of our retinas also makes our peripheral vision better by improving the acuity of the peri-macular retina. My point is that just because certain beneficial changes are not seen in our or any animal’s bodies doesn’t mean that change is improbable, or carries with it a baggage in terms of negative, deleterious effects. That is a very narrow Darwinian perspective of looking at random imperfections. One thing that everyone seems to have forgotten is the element of chance.
Maybe, the beneficial mutation to bring about the specific change has never happened. Darwinian Theory is based upon random mutations which get selected because they have something better to provide to the body that carries it. Granted. 100% correct in my view. But that doesn’t mean that all possible combinations of genetic code have been tried out. Maybe a mutation turning the koala baby-sac downside up is just around the corner. And maybe it has no other effect on the koala embryo, or maybe it even makes it better at climbing trees. After all, the way I see it, all mutations are a question of odds. When the DNA is being duplicated, there is a specific odds ratio that a mistake will occur. The odds may be high or low, depending on how stable that particular segment is. And the higher the odds, the less the chance of that particular change occurring. Let’s say for example’s sake, that the odds are 1 in a 1000 that a generation of Koalas would have one baby with the inverted pouch. Let’s say that the change would have no other effect on the Koala. All hypothetical, of course. I haven’t the faintest idea how such odds could be calculated, or in fact if they could be calculated at all. But assuming those odds, people think that in a thousand generations, the change would be brought about. And that’s where the fallacy lies. 1 in a 1000 are odds, not certainties. It’s just a chance that this particular change would appear in a thousand generations. But it might not. 1 in a 1000 doesn’t mean literally 1 in 1000, 2 in 2000 and so on. It might not even mean 100 in 100,000. These are just odds and might hold true at very large numbers or maybe not true at all. So what I mean is that chances are chances, not certainties and maybe the right mutation is right around the corner!

In late ’93, I was in class 12th at DAV College. It was our first experience at staggered classes, having been in school with a fixed system of classes one after another. In college, we had free periods in between. In the second term, we had our practicals, I forget whether biology or physics, in the afternoon, around 2PM or so. So instead of going back home for lunch even though it was a ten minute bicycle ride away, we preferred to hang around college in a bunch, having lunch in the hostel mess (4.50/-, can you believe it?) and chatting away the idle hours. Maybe a trip to the neighbouring girl’s college. But most of those afternoons have slipped out of memory. I don’t recall what exactly we did all those years ago. One afternoon, however, remains fixed in mind. It was late autumn, and a balmy sun shone down on a few boys, full stomached and lazy enough to want to do nothing but lie in the college lawns and chat. I lay on my back feeling the warming tendrils of the weakening winter sun tickle my skin. The grass was fresh cut and scented. Pillowed on my arms I looked up at the sky, blue and clear. The more I looked, the bluer it seemed. As I lay there gazing, an eagle entered my field of view, wheeling around in the stratosphere, a black speck in the deep blue. I followed it in its course. It glided effortlessly, seldom flapping its wings. From that distance it was a like a beautiful dance unfolding before my eyes. It was truly a beautiful sight, but what I remember most of that moment is that as I lay there watching the eagle, I felt that never again would I have such leisurely carefree pleasure. That as I grew older I would yearn for such moments when I could just put my cares aside and immerse myself in one moment.
Today, over a decade and a half later, as I walked in a dewy garden, my laptop weighing my shoulder down, waiting for my conveyance to take me to work, thinking about the surgeries I had to do today, wondering if yesterday’s case had gone fine, about what I chores I had pending for the evening, I suddenly realized how prescient I had been all that time back.