Guest post from Arvind -- 1

Arvind is taking a course on 'practical philosophy' ( wwww.practicalphilosophy.org).

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Practical Philosophy Class I.


The organization


The organization itself is a not for profit organization where every person involved from the instructor to the personnel that staff the cafeteria volunteer their time. The organization was founded in London in 1938 and is dedicated to the spreading of philosophy to all people. At 195 $ the price in New York is probably very nominal considering that they might use this just to cover the cost of real estate.



Some recent news about the organization and the course I am currently doing occurred when Hugh Jackman, the British actor enrolled for this course in London, and later mentioned it on the Oprah Winfrey show as something that changed his life significantly for the better. When I enrolled I did not know about Hugh Jackman, but now I have an interest in this actor as some one whose life path traversed some common point.



The environment


The school was at a very nice part of town, upper east side, one block away from the park. The building itself also doubled as a day school for kids and the day school focused on philosophy as well. The class room was very informal and retained the homely characteristic inherently endowed by the home that was later converted to the school. The building had a nice basement with a book store and a cafeteria. The book selection had a surprisingly large representation from India . Aside from the Vedas and the Upanishads there were a significant number of surprising books such as the Sundara Kandam. There was a section on Economics related books and there was one author, whose book I intend to buy, whose thinking was recommended by Einstein and Shaw as the most relevant thoughts on economic systems. I will be buying the book soon and will write more about this author and his thinking.



The students, teacher and environment of learning.


The teacher was a gentle speaking middle aged man who came to the school as a student many years ago and remains a student taking on other classes here. Since I showed up a couple minutes late, I couldn’t catch his name. When Nandita introduced herself, it became obvious that he knew something about Indian culture and philosophy when he related her name to “ananda” and happiness. Also, he explained that the word wisdom comes from the Sanskrit word “Vid” for knowledge. ( On a side note, simple Indian names for e.g. vidya, janani, bhooma are all increasing beautiful to me.)



Every one had to say why they came to take this class and the categories of answers were ( a ) looking for tools to solve problems with their lives

( b ) understanding themselves (my reason)

( c ) understanding the world and others

( d ) curiosity about what philosophy is (nanditas reason)

( e ) why am I here and what is my purpose and

( f ) my dad signed me up for this.



I couldn’t help feeling, although I hope I am wrong, that those who came for ( a ) and ( c ) will fail without mastering ( b ). So I hope, for their sakes, they are not looking for instant answers. I think ( e ) is an excellent question but one that has been incorrectly answered by all non empiricial philosophers and put to rest by Darwin – easily the greatest philosopher of all time.



One of the dudes, who was volunteering and who I struck up a conversation with asked me what I do was extremely keen on knowing how money can be made on financial markets. This was a complete antithesis to what most people expressed in the class as what they signed up for.



The instruction method


The lesson began with the interesting suggestion to “not accept anything stated right away nor reject anything right away” but to experience it, ponder over it and then act. That was a promising note to begin with.



Early on in the lesson, some of the features of how this course may play out were apparent to me. The instructor was saying that something would be a selfish thing to do and I interjected and observed that he was implicitly passing a value judgement on selfishness. I was earlier expecting that such concepts (selfishness) will be dealt with individually and axiomatically be discussed. However, the instructor was more along the lines of experience it for yourself and you will see that selfishness is not a good thing. At this point some one else interjected and asked if gift giving is a selfish thing if you feel good about it. And some other answers were provided and none of them made any sense to me.



But I think this discussion drove home some features of this course. First, it was not going to be an axiomatic exploration from first principles after a detailed examination of what goes into first principles. The course is going to be “here are some things to think about experience it for yourselves.” So it had a bit of a touchy feely type effect. However, I think the approach has its merits – a wide set of issues are presented and even if you come away with an incomplete understanding of any of them, there is exposure to many things and gradually you may learn to deal with each one of them. The second feature was that this is a people oriented course, designed to make it friendly for people with various view points. There was no rush to bring the discussions on track – the approach was along the lines of all is good, lets not rush, everybody matters. Now, I tend to agree with this feature because If philosophy cannot help us connect with each other and appreciate each other for being fellow travelers on our respective survival journeys what else can. So I began to appreciate the lack of structure. I suppose the attitude to adopt for this course is like the attitude a first time traveler to India has to adopt - with patience and compassion, you can see beauty when you are not expecting to see it. Other wise it’s a really rough ride.



The lesson



The lesson could be thought of as having two parts. The first part encouraged thinking and the second emphasized action in the form of two meditative sessions that were led by the instructor.



One of the themes that we were asked to think about during the course of regular life over the next week was “What would a wise person do in this situation?” The interesting thing about this exercise is that beneath its vagueness lies a great depth of potential. No definition of a “wise man” was given although people were queried for what they thought a wise man was. One dude who had studied philosophy for a while offered an interesting characterization (by no means a definition.) He offered “an intelligent man is one who can find a way out of a difficult situation. A wise man is one who does not get into a difficult situation.” I think the power of this exercise is two fold. If followed properly it forces you to increase awareness of your actions over the week by asking this question before acting. Second by deliberately leaving the definition of a wise man open ended, you are forced to work out for yourself what makes an action wise in a given situation.



The second theme for the week was to think about the following story. A proud leader of a pack (murder?) of crows thought less of the rest because he could fly faster. One day he boasts to a swan that he knows 101 ways of flight and shows each way off to the swan. The swan says he knows just one way and to show that they start flying and the crow initially is very fast and often comes back to the swan and encourages him to fly faster. Eventually the crow tires out and the swan rescues him from death.



I think there a lot happening in this story and will try to write some of it. The first thing to note is that the story is structured so pride takes a fall. So it is kind of a threatening moralizing story – do this stuff and you are in deep shit. I don’t like these kind of morals. However the story is an excellent launch pad for the following types of inquirys. I’ve written down the questions first and then some of my thoughts on them.



What is pride. What conditions are necessary for it to exist. Is pride necessary. In what circumstances is pride beneficial/dis beneficial?
Is it necessary to know many things? (101 ways of flight.) What knowledge is useful and what isn’t?




Pride
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No man can be proud of himself. Man can only be proud of his image of himself. This idea, which I derived from JK’s teachings, is powerful in recognizing that pride cannot exist without an image of oneself. And by pride we mean the act of admiring attributes of the image of oneself. This image goes by many names “identity” and so on. Pride usually stems from an inability to be happy about oneself and results in one being happy about the image of oneself.



So is pride a “bad” thing? That’s much much trickier to answer than what the story will have you believe. This requires you to have some understanding of what is good. For this discussion, I only need to use one attribute of goodness to illustrate my point. I think any act undertaken by any species for its survival is a good one. So, for example, I would claim that when a cheetah hunts down a deer the actions of both species (attack and defense) are good acts and there is a goodness maximation of sorts in effect during this hunt. (When KFC mass manufactures chicken sandwiches, sorry no goodness there, man can perfectly survive without chicken.) Given my definition of goodness, I can speculate situations where pride can be good unlike what the story leads you to believe. Pride is an extremely useful weapon when man has to fight for survival. In our evolution there have been many points in time where there were not enough resources for all men to survive. Warriors who prided themselves on their art could have survived better than those who took no pride in quality. So yes pride can be a good thing.



Is it necessary to know many things?
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Again, in this story an aesthetic principle (do one thing do it well) is falsely represented as a utility maximizing precept (it is more useful to know one thing (the swan survives) well than to know many things.) I personally love the aesthetic idea and have used it well, but I very much doubt its universal utility. (Of course it is not necessary to know anything more than you need to but that is a tautology.)

Electronic bhangra

I think I already recommeded Salon's Audiophile column, where they have one new music download everyday. The selection is informed, eclectic, always interesting and occasionally a real find.

Here's something I liked: a punj club music thing. It grows on you the more you listen. This is the URL for the dwnload page:
http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/2006/08/02/bikram/

, but you'll first have to see an ad. You can go to www.salon.com, see the ad and then paste the URL in.

Here's the writeup on the piece from that page:

Daily Download: "Kawan" (drum 'n' bass remix), Bikram Singh
New York-based Bikram Singh is a rising dance music star originally from Punjab,
 India, known for mixing Punjabi folk melodies and vocal styles with bhangra and
 electronica. This track is a duet between him and Gunjan, remixed with a stuttering
 drum 'n' bass beat by Scottish bhangra producers Tigerstyle. 

Puzzle!

Okay, this is an old old puzzle/test that we had a lot of fun with, back in the Philadelphia days. Try it.


The puzzle consists of questions in this format:

16 = O in a P

You need to figure out what the O and the P are. Answer in this case: Ounces in a Pound.

Here are the rest of the questions:


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1.) 26 = L of the A
2.) 1001 = A N
3.) 7 = W of the W
4.) 12 = S of the Z
5.) 54 = C in a D (with the J)
6.) 9 = P in the S S
7.) 88 = P K
8.) 13 = S on the A F
9.) 32 = D F at which W F
10.) 18 = H on a G C
11.) 90 = D in a R A
12.) 200 = D for P G in M
13.) 8 = S on a S S
14.) 3 = B M (S H T R)
15.) 4 = Q in a G
16.) 24 = H in a D
17.) 1 = W on a U
18.) 5 = D in a Z C
19.) 57 = H V
20.) 11 = P on a F T
21.) 1000 = W that a P is W
22.) 29 = D in F in a L Y
23.) 64 = S on a C

Will post the answers in a few days .

Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu

This is the latest Kamalhasan movie. We saw it recently. Very unmemorable. A serial killer movie without much to recommend it. I hope Indian cinema does only a brief stop at the serial-killer/other-mindless-killer theme on its march to modernity. A dead-end theme to begin with and even more irrelevant in the Indian context. Two small points of interest:

-- in the movie Kamal is a police DCP from Chennai who goes off to the US to investigate some murders there involving Indians. There he works with a NYPD cop and outshines him and solves the crimes more or less single-handedly. Even 10 years back one could not imagine someone convincingly trying to show an Indian person showing up his Western counterpart on their home turf. One can literally see the change in confidence happening in real-time. Another interesting thing was that they had dialogue in English (in the US part of the film) with Tamil subtitles. Again something quite new to Indian cinema.
-- I took the photos above from my cameraphone, the last one is inside the theater, a still of the movie itself. A cameraphone opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.

Newspaper watch -- Bush/Chavez/Ahmedinejad

Its a week for memorable quotes. Chavez at the UN General Assembly (ie. in NYC):

Yesterday the devil came here and this place still smells of sulphur

(About Bush, who spoke earlier).
Whew.
Also - "He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world". Chavez quoted from Chomsky, Aristotle and Hitchcock.
He was warmly applauded it seems, which is very intriguing. Imagine Condoleeza Rice and henchmen sitting in front of a video screen: "Mali !!! I caught the representative from Mali applauding ! Off with their development allowance for next year ! Rewind!"

Ahmedinejad also slammed the US and UK though not quite so memorably. "hegemonic powers" who impose "their exclusionist policies on international decision-making mechansisms including the security council. And " some even have a bleak record of using them (nuclear bombs -- ed) against humanity"

I'm curious how all this is 'playing' in the US. Are any of the inciendiary quotes mentioned in the newspapers at all. If you live in the US and have the tempo, write a comment on how your local media reported it.


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In other news, the front page story is a Delhi traders bandh which turned violent and 3 people (including an infant) were killed. I don't understand this story properly, but it seems the Supreme Court is imposing strong directives on the Delhi government to clean up years of malpractice in zoning (stuff like setting up a shop or office in an area where you are not allowed to do that). Another story is from Karnataka where the government is going to abruptly derecognise 1,416 schools across the state. The reason (again I'm not very clear) seems to be that they claim to be English medium but are actually not really teaching English medium.

Both these stories point to a trend of coming to grip with years of corruption/misgovernance/that kind of stuff. But the way it happened in these two cases is in a completely top-down way with no discussion, dissemination or consensus. The medicine might well kill the patient.

(The Hindu of Sep 21st , Friday)

Newspaper watch -- Manmohan/Castro

After their 1-1 meeting:

Manmohan: I felt I was in the presence of one of the greatest men of all time

Castro: I want this photograph to be seen by 1 billion people


Strange stuff. I wonder if the US knows or cares.
(The Hindu of September 19th)

Plant a tree

Here is something really cool that I saw somewhere on a highway (slightly modified to sound better):


The best time to plant a tree is 15 years ago.
The second best time is today

"Crash" ..land

Saw the Oscar award winning movie "Crash" last night. It had a great premise and started off well, but finally I felt that it fizzled out. The different strands of the movie didn't come together properly and no uplifting message either:-). At the end of the movie I was left trying to recollect what the various strands were and trying to figure out if there were any resolutions. Still, neat movie with some sublime moments. It does get to the heart of the stresses and strains of modern life and I agree strongly with that part of it. One is beset by random stuff all the time and you feel powerless and out of control and sometimes you end up showing the frustration on someone else. The pic presented of Los Angeles is pretty bleak. The melting pot doesn't seem to work, and the episode with the HMO is telling.

John Wright's Indian Summers

This book by John Wright, ex-coach of the Indian mens' national cricket team came in for some flak recently after its release. It was first released in New Zealand and based on some excerpts, people here got riled. However after its release here, its proved to be a pretty reasonably book, with lots of good things to say about the Indian players and India in general. I bought the book to send to Arvind. I did a speed read of it as I am not that into cricket and here is what stood out for me (if you want to read the book, the following may be a bit of a spoiler) :

the Indian cricketing establishment is really what is standing between us and having the best cricketing team in the world. The selectors do all kinds of nonsense in doing the team selection and that damages the effectiveness of the team a lot. The stars like Dravid and Tendulkar come across as fairly beleagured -- highly talented guys but without full support from the system. Other than that there are other things like the huge weight of the expectations of the country, the difficulty of handling the huge material rewards when things go well. And the training and fitness need to go up a notch. None of this is very new, but its good to hear it from the horse's mouth.

Basically, nice book

PS: Right now the TV is on and the channel we are on is advertising a special: "The King is Back" on Sachin Tendulkar.

"That man on the road" ...

.. is 'contemporary telugu short fiction', edited by Ranga Rao. I bought this recently and have been reading it slowly, its not that easy a read. There are several interesting points that come to my mind.

-Translated Indian vernacular stories are quite fascinating. One enters a whole other world that people like me, steeped too much in the English language and western literature, and burgeoise (sp) upper middle class Indian experience, rarely enter. BTW, there is an excellent series called "Katha", which is a yearly anthology of translated Indian short fiction, and that was my first exposure to this flavor of writing. In the case of the current book, its obviously of particular interest to me as its all Telugu stories. The Telugu-ness is there in full measure, in the names of he authors (Boya Jangaiah, Toleti Jaganmohana Rao, Allam Rajaih ...) and the personalities portrayed in the stories. There is a real vitality to some of the stories and an addressing of contemporary problems that is quite intense. There is a anguishing tear-jerker of a story called 'Mariya' about the harsh treatment and exploitation of a poor Christian family (in the story they are called 'Kirastanis', apparently the Telugu-ization of 'Christian', something I didn't know). There are a couple of other quite affecting stories about social problems. There is one story about the diehard socialist/communist crowd that is probably still to be found in academic and journalist circles. There is a very amusing piece about one man's adventures in the stock market. There is a science fiction (!) piece called "Manava Factor". There is a wicked little story about a family trying to retain their competent but rebellious servant maid. And there is a fantastic little piece following the conversation of a husband who has been reading too much of the wrong type of poetry and is getting prejudiced against women, and his wife who handily demolishes his arguments. That story is entitled: "Can't dance ? Blame the percussionist !" and begins like this:
===
'Yemandi!'
'....'
'Why don't you respond?'
'....'
'Please take your tea'.
'....'
'Look here, it is getting cold'

===
That is so *fantastically* (to my mind) evocative of an Indian family milieu. It even happens at our (ie. mine and Priya's) house now and then. Its great fun trying to back-translate:

"Yemandi!"
...
"Ami badulu chepparantandi ?"
...
"Tea theeskondi"
..
"Idigo chuudanadi, tea challaripothunnadi"

===

The last few lines of the story are like this:
(Husband) "I never imagined that you are so fair-minded. Don't you deserve a reward for this ?"

"Stop it!"

"You haven't displayed any so far, where has this modesty come from?"

====

Ahem... anyway, as you can see I am quite taken with the book.
There is a very erudite afterword by the editor Ranga Rao. BTW, the name Ranga Rao and his book "Fowl Filcher" are a fragment from my memory from way back, but I vaguely assumed he was Kannada (probably confusing him with Raja Rao) and found out with this book that he is Telugu. He discusses some fine points of translation, and also talks about the current state of telugu literature. According to him, current telugu writing is vibrant and in good shape. Nowadays we are seeing more writing from the backward Telengana and Rayalaseema area which is a welcome trend, as well as more Dalit and women writers.

"The English Teacher"

Not to be confused with the movie/book , The English Patient. The English Teacher is the novel by R.K. Narayan. I read this recently.

Narayan is a funny author. The absolute 'deadpan' quality of his work is somewhat unique. I read through some of his short stories and by the time the story was finished, as far as I could see any action or plot had not even begun. He reports on the minutiae of daily life in such detail, and in some cases I wonder what's the point here ? 'Waiting for the Mahatma' was one of his better ones and I enjoyed that quite a lot, especially the setting during the Independance struggle and the mixing up of the factual character and events of Indenpendance along with the fictional story. The English Teacher ... falls somewhere in between in my opinion. It drags a little with the minutiae thing ('la vie quotidienne' to get French about it), but it has something that is not usually there in Narayan's writing, which is -- tragedy. In this book one of the main characters dies. Especially in light of the minutiae business, this is quite a shocking thing to see in a Narayan book. It is quite interesting to see how Narayan writes about the death -- one might imagine that given his sole focus usually on lighter things (like the virtues of south indian filter coffee!!) that he would have some trouble writing about death. I would say he does. The description is very clinical and detached, and the anguish and grief does not show in the writing at all, though in the readers mind it is very clear, due to the clearly palpable affection between the protagonists (even that affection is between the lines as Narayan does not convey it too well!). Perhaps that is the point, that he is able to convey these deep emotions very strongly without actually saying anything strong at all.

Anyways. Not that compelling a read, but quite interesting.