News not views

In a blog entry, Neha Paliwal points out that food prices after all have not been so much of a trigger for Arab Spring. Earlier Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed had declared food price volatility a fundamental trigger for political instability. Neha points out that inflation-adjusted prices have in fact not gone up in the middle-east – so it's difficult to assert that food prices had a big role to play in the Arab Spring.

It just goes to show that we lack the standards which can let us measure the accuracy of political analyses. Some scrutiny is needed before fiction can make it to the public masquerading as analysis. The conclusions which journalists and writers often draw on economy and politics are subjective – even fictional. Although our institutions – law and governments - don't run on subjective grounds yet somehow a wide gap seems to exist between law and media when it comes to ed-pieces and commentary on economics or politics. It's not just that media stories read a lot different from documents of law. It's that what media offers as analysis is often a selective medlee of laws and data.

Such gaps won't be a problem if entertainment is all that media was offering. But unfortunately truth is claimed to be offered in those sweeping conclusions drawn on politics and news. The interpretation of data – whether it be that of Mr Ahmed, Paul Krugman or Jim Cramer - seldom receives scrutiny. We assume the truth in extrapolation of data judging by the repoutation of the author or the journal.  Stating the extrapolation or adding scatter plots often don't sell the story - so what we're sold instead are prose of doom or self-appraisal written by people who we trust. This may not offer us consistency or semlbance of a truth but allows us to choose our news the way we swtich channels on TV.

Empire State of Mind

While reading Amit Chaudhari's Afternoon raag today some distant memories of my own childhood were evoked. Growing up in Northern India, it seems strange that some of us lived with our minds placed outside our vast country. We had been colony for such a long time that being a colony was ingrained in our society. I was too young at the time to have understood the post-colonial context of my surroundings but I can clearly remember of my English teacher and my grand-dad having an unexplained respect for the British. My dad on the other hand - a rebellious believer of Indian self-dependence – did not pay much respect to the West. He seemed conscious of the Western might and he was proud of having studied at an early Victorian college but somehow managed to fight the tendencies to fall in love with the West – as if having learned the futility of such romance from the previous generation.

The West existed in such unspoken subjects in my childhood. My grand-dad had taken British for granted and at school and without realizing I too was a part of this same system. We all had a tendency to assume British supremacy in all matters. We spoke local tongues but whenever someone had to make a strong argument, switching to English seemed natural. It gave it that official touch. All disagreements over anything in fact came to an end if someone could quote from a book published in English. The possibility of publishing something in English ourselves was so distant that nothing in our world could have possibly questioned the authenticity of a book written in English. In a strange way therefore the Empire was still in our minds even if in reality it was long gone.

resigning from the act

As I try writing finishing up my article I find a pattern that has recurred in my life - I wrap up and move to something purportedly more productive. As a kid this was the math assignment - which would always take longer and which I would always be late for.

My interest in math was always and had always been only a philosophical one. I never liked numbers even though I was moderately good at it. I enjoyed Math only after I had discovered algebra and coordinate geometry; I enjoyed it more when I found they were one and the same. I would've loved to give some more time thinking or writing about it but as I grew up, becoming a lecturer in philosophy seemed as bad as resigning from life. It probably appeared much worse to my dad. In the end, I had to wrap up my act, attending the classes for a more commonplace and a more mundane profession.

Writing Course in London

To inspect some major defects in my writing I enrolled myself into a course for journalistic writing. I knew that I have nothing to lose - I have been writing only for myself (other than long boring investigative emails that I have to write at work) - so it was to be a nice experience finding out what real journalism is about.

I am amazed so far - discovering what some of my peers have set themselves to write about. One student who has been published multiple times wants to write from her own experience about recovering from loss of hearing. Another student, a farmer's daughter, is pitching a story about eating only from local produce grown in a small Scotland village. I esp loved the last idea. The student is also a documentary producer and I certainly believe this is worth a documentary. 

I myself have not been able to write anything substantial - I have been thinking of two articles - one about bullying and the other about mobile-apps for weight- loss. But I am in an environment where I am inspired to write.

small town

When I look at all of us who didn't grow up in big cities I find ourselves still trapped in our small town - a place where most of happiness is tied to our small close-knit community. Our needs, whether emotional or physical are met within a few hundred people we have known for most of our lives and even though non-conformance is not an option here, we don't miss it because we have never felt the need to rebel. Life moves at its own pace here and there is a general feeling in all of us, often in defiance of reality, that we can take on anything that threatens to destroy our happiness.

It is probably difficult for a city-dweller to appreciate this life of contentness but a small-towner longs to reunite with this idyllic world that has no pretense, no hierarchy nor any pressure of any sort.

When a small-towner is thrown out of his habitat, he fails to enjoy the city life. He is a misfit everywhere he goes. He acts nice where he is meant to be practical and he is awkward where he needs tact. He doesn't like the hierarchy because he hasn't seen it before. He has neither felt any intense life-ambition nor known the ignominy of being nobody. Unable to do much to change this hierarchical world though, he ends up trying to assimilate himself at his new home. He extols hierarchy, ambition and the drive to achieve success in life. He finds the brutality of competition necessary even though he feels himself to be a victim at all times.

There are many among us small-towners who fight this inherent unhappiness. We are in the city but our heart lies elsewhere. We love the big-city but we often find the brutality of this world unbearable. The dualism kills us and rejuvenates us at the same time. We have ambiguous feelings but we have started loving the ambiguity itself. We are fond of our yoga classes, our drugs, our alternative music and foreign food. Yet we all have an unsaid commitment to money-making. We are scared of fakes and of being mislead because we know the disasters of loving a pretentious woman or a Chinatown bracelet. The small towner in us often finds his escape from small-town pointless but he sticks to his guns , often rebelling but returning after a small vacation. There is some sort of Stockholm syndrome at work with big cities as our invincible oppressor.

There are many of us trapped in the small-towns of our heads so even if we live big in big places we would be in our small-town forever.

Experiments with English

Every now and then I find my English writing abilities inadequate to express myself - largely because the way my mind works. Trained as a computer scientist, I find comfort in generalization. There is that mathematician inside me asking to find simple and clear definitions which can be used to describe the complex situation which I am looking to understand and describe. Fewer descriptions and simpler words are better than ornate details. Clearly this tendency works antagonistically with good writing.

A good writer finds the right word not by seeking building blocks of a grand theory but by choosing a word that associates a familiar feeling or a phenomenon with what he or she intends to describe. Perception is a lot more important than theorization here. Of course a good writer doesn't knows how to balance these two tendencies whereas I don't.

Another factor could be that English is hardly a first language for me. To this day I find faults with English grammar - as if to justify my shortcomings. I don't like the fact that just logically putting words together is never enough in English writing. One has to worry about how the whole sentence sounds in the end, checking if there are any word-repetitions of any kind, avoiding a sentence so long that the modifiers get detached, making sure the pronouns are referring to the right subjects and so on, If you're accustomed to using mathematical languages or a language with a heavy-weight grammar like that of Sanskrit or Latin, then such activities seems just extraneous and often boring.

Here are some examples where I wish English grammar could provide some enhancements :

1. The form What + are, Whatever+are is hardly used in English. "The cup can be replaced by what is now in gift box." is OK, but "The flowers would be replaced by what are on the patio." sounds awkward. An English speaker deals with the unavailability of the plural form of what in English by adding dummy objects. "The flowers would be replaced by things lying on the patio." is  a perfectly fine sentence. But a plural what could've been better.

2. The problem with ambiguity with the modifier's object is well-known. In a sentence, "I read the book lying on the floor."- one doesn't know whether it is the book or the person lying on the floor.

3. Could we make sure words like welfare and farewell don't mean things so different?

Book Review

I have been reading a book by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Before getting to the book I had read one of the articles by the author published in The Atlantic last year and found it very interesting and true (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/racism-without-racists/245361/). Googling up authors usually gives you information about an their personal life, appearances on RV and News etc. but this time I got straight to this book probably because Mr. Williams was still in the process of marketing the book.

It is a well-written book. He surprises us with his inside knowledge of the hip-hop culture, his own experiences and echoes of hip-hop music, and switches over seamlessly to deep introspection, exploring ideas of love, attachment and political voice, things that we don't associate with hip-hop anymore.

Living in Harlem, I myself was told by a lot of people in the neighborhood that hip-hop isn't what it used to be. There was a whole social-movement side of it that has completely disappeared. I may not have listened to James Brown as a teenager but I could see and feel the power of his music in its political statement.

The author argues that the black community has somehow consciously stuck itself in a gansta culture, devoid of social introspection, a world that is unreal. The black community, according to Mr. Williams, rejects education and adores dirty-cash. He may not be the first one to think that way. Public intellectuals and entertainers alike have often hinted at a certain bliss in ignorance. President Obama himself has talked many a times about something being fundamentally wrong on the streets of the US.

It is difficult to hold such a position simply because the lack of acceptance of education and other Western institutions itself is a reverberation of years of oppression. For one thing, blacks were not even allowed in colleges for a long time. Even though we do live in a time when pretty much every institution is open to all, the desire for education hasn't developed equally in all ethnicities. Mr. Williams account of his own experiences makes it appear as if his proximity with the cannon of Western literature had liberated him. In saying so, he seems to be arguing that Western Cannon itself is the only way to achieve true liberty - a thought that would be contended by many of contributors of the Western cannon themselves.

In this memoir he does express a certain frustration when his interests didn't align with his friends any more. He seems to blame the black community for not accepting Western means- its ideas of beauty and love - but chooses not to inspect the history of black and white relationship in the Americas as a factor that might have inhibited the dissemination of Western ideas to all its subjects.

Though the writing style is excellent and the realism of his account riveting, the author does limit his scope to raising questions, instead of trying to answer them. He is not a sociologist, he admits in the end. His honesty in rest of the book as well makes it a very interesting read.