The edification of priviliged white people is not my vocation

This is a declaration of purpose, a clarification of intent, and an admission of disinterest.

This not a manifesto of hatred. It is not an expression of patronization towards my own kind: people of color. It is not a plea for anything, least of all for empathy from the very people whose edification it disavows. It is not whimsy, flimflam, spiteful, childish, angry, evil, reprehensible; nor a dozen other names that it shall probably attract but not deserve.

This essay does have the flaw of being paradoxical: by its very existence — and with the few references at its end — it intends to inform. It is difficult to escape this paradox. I won’t try to.

In the second decade of the 21st century, living in the richest country ever to have existed, I’m constantly surprised to find myself in the company of people who are ignorant of the struggle that people of color, people of non-binary gender, immigrants, poor people, and other under- and un-privileged groups go through on a daily basis. This struggle is continual and unabated. It is caused by transgressions both covert and overt, both subtle and coarse, and often perpetrated by the selfsame people who profess ignorance of their own privilege.

In the last few years, I have experienced several incidents that have convinced me that the job of educating white, upper middle-class people is uninteresting and unsatisfying in the extreme:

1. Summer 2013. A white male colleague refers to the US Civil War casually as the “War of Northern Aggression”. He also questions me if I have any principles (because I have opinions different from his) — while we are driving to have dinner at my brother’s house who had graciously invited him as a guest.

2. Summer 2014. A white male colleague — after several notorious incidents of sexual harassment of women at tech conferences have come to light — publicly asks if we really need to support women-in-technology causes.

3. Fall 2015. I get “feedback” at work that states that I’m “too formal with clients”. Upon inquiry, it turns out it reflects my practice of speaking in full sentences using proper grammar. There is no attempt on the part of those giving this “feedback” to discover that I learned English as a second language as an adult, and have constantly worked on overcoming this handicap. The “feedback” also ignored the large amount of literature that indicates that foreign accents (especially those associated with “brownness” or “blackness”) are looked down upon in the United States, and are equated with ignorance.

4. December 2015. In the aftermath of candidate Trump’s promise of a “Muslim ban”, a white male software engineer asks me via Facebook if I’m “planning on blowing anything up while I’m here [in the US]”. (He knows that I’m a US citizen and that this is my home.)

5. Summer 2016. A white male colleague derides me under the guise of feedback that my posture and voice aren’t impressive enough. He can’t seem to see that he’s 6’4”, with a booming voice, and I’m much shorter.

6. Spring 2017. A white male colleague addresses me curtly in public, and later has the temerity to commend me (in writing) for not losing my temper under his verbal fusillade.

7. Fall 2017. A white male colleague jocularly accuses me of plagiarism in public after I recite an all-too-famous piece of literature.

This is just a sampling of the events that white people of privilege whom I know have perpetrated. In the face of such blissful cluelessness, I admit that any attempts on my part to cure this institutional ignorance are bound to fail. Therefore, I resolve to hereby make no more such attempts.

I have been blessed with the friendship, love and support of many friends and family, for which I’m humbly grateful. I will focus the finite capabilities of my limited life on enriching my relationships with these beloved souls. To the general population of privileged people; especially privileged white people; I have nothing left to say.

References

1. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
2. What I Told My White Friend When He Asked For My Black Opinion On White Privilege
3. This Comic Perfectly Explains What White Privilege Is. The last line says something like “Please educate yourself”. The end.

"Essays After Eighty" by Donald Hall

Donald Hall's composition of essays found me by accident. Looking for Bertrand Russell's "Unpopular Essays" in a library shelf, the fingers and eyes instead got stuck on this delightful little compendium of reminiscences by an octogenarian poet who admits to being abandoned by poetry.

Donald Hall was a poet laureate of the United States for one year. This was a recognition and sadly, a culmination of decades of prodigious poetry writing. (He frankly admits to not being a productive poet during his tenure, and resigned a year later.) He wrote more than 20 books, many (but not all) of poetry. He also wrote for children, on baseball, and on art.

Essays After Eighty is just that: a book of fourteen essays spanning a brief 134 pages. These are memories of a life well-lived and well-enjoyed. From his pre-war youth in Wilmot, NH to his years in France with his first wife, Kirby. From his appointment as a teacher at the University of Michigan to the breakdown of his first marriage and a rather late period of sexual liberation in his 40s (if my math is right). From his meeting his second wife, the poet Jane Keynon (almost a generation younger than him) to moving back to his native New Hampshire. From fighting a battle with cancer and winning --  to finding out that Jane had leukemia and seeing her die of it only 15 months later. From the first signs of fear of old age:

"Earlier, if I was 51 and the [recently departed] cadaver was 53, for a moment I felt anxious. If the dead man was 51 and I was 53, I felt relief."

to the inevitable comicality of later old age for those of us who (may) reach it:

"As I escorted my date to New London's Millstone one night, the hostess asked if my companion was my granddaughter. We both shrieked "No!" and never saw the hostess again. Most of my dates were mistaken for daughters, not granddaughters."

Hall pokes humor at his increasing physical frailty, at the ever-approaching bugaboo (he's much too jovial to justify specter) of death, and at the tragi-comedy of otherwise banal life. His memories are fresh and refreshing despite having taken 85 years to ferment in a 150 year old house built by his great grandfather. There is death everywhere in this book: his parents, grandparents, an aunt, both wives, his dog Gus, a casually killed garter snake -- "I stepped on its head and threw it outside", woodchucks, an almost-pet chipmunk, and almost-vermin mice. There's even time to genially mourn the destruction of a comfortable blue armchair by exuberant firemen. Yet this is a book about mortality, not morbidity. Hall does rue that one day, there will be no one left to remember what he remembers -- which is a lot: from the New England Hurricane of 1939, Pearl Harbor, VE Day, VJ day, JFK, Vietnam to 9-11 and Usain Bolt. However, he never lets the book sink into self-loathing or even self-pity. Even as he contemplates his present life -- living only on the first floor of his ancient house, microwaving Stouffer's TV dinners while inching towards his kitchen with his walker in a knee-brace, and eating these dinners alone with his dentures and a Red Sox game on TV -- he is ebullient:

"My problem isn't death but old age."

Or even more magnanimously:

"Not everything in old age is grim."

It may have taken him the better part of 9 decades, but Donald Hall sure has a poignant insight about the relevance of it all:

"At 16, poets think that if they publish in a magazine that will be it. When it happens, it is not it. Then they think it will be it when they publish in Poetry. No. The New Yorker? No. A book? Good reviews? The Something Prize? A Guggenheim? The National Book Award? The Nobel? No, no, no, no, no, no. Flying back from Stockholm, the Laureate knows that nothing will make it certain. The Laureate sighs."

That's a lesson which we can be thankful to Donald Hall for sharing.

End of the experiment

It was to be expected, wasn't it?
Isn't this how all experiments end?
At least the controlled ones,
The scientific ones,
The "proper" ones;
Where the experimenter has prepared
The specimens with care,
Divided them neatly into two groups —
Control group and experimental group —
And carefully tested for one variable?

All such experiments end one way,
Regardless of what happens
To the hypothesis:
Disproven or not yet disproven.
(As scientists incessantly remind us:
Good hypotheses are falsifiable,
And hence can never truly be proven.
Their best hope
Is constant fortification
By surviving several experiments.)

The way all experiments end
Is at the laboratory sink.
Where flask, pipette and petri dish
Are cleansed of the last vestige
Of all specimens —
Control or experimental.

The experimenter, being well-pleased
With data so meticulously gathered,
Is expected to have scant respect
For his now-used, now-worthless specimens.
It's not a moral question for him,
It's simply following protocol.
For this is how experiments must end:
"Please wash all equipment when you're done."

A Curve Closed

Her short cropped hair admitting few curves
Like her equations, a trove of frugal beauty.
Of surfaces, toruses, and closed curves--
Real things in an imagined topology.

A geodesic is the shortest curve
Amongst all like it:
The laconic prefect of an unruly class
That stands and speaks for them all.
What it lacks in length,
It makes up for in weight --
Though not in the literal sense;
Euclid won't allow it!
But it carries the weight
Of other wanton, wasteful curves.
It speaks for all, despite being the shortest.

Thus it was with the curve of her life
Brief though it was --
How illogically, unfairly, painfully short!
It carried the weight
Of not just her ambitions
Across continents, cultures, classrooms, conferences;
But also those of more meandering life-curves.
That accomplished not so much,
Longer and loopier though they were.

And though I can't speak for her,
Ungifted, untutored, unprepared and unskilled as I am,
She speaks for me
Through her scintillating work.
The geodesic of her life,
Though it closed too soon,
Is yet the weightiest one of all.

For Maryam Mirzakhani

August 2017

July 4th in Vietnam

I was invited to attend day 2 of the 4-week long teacher training in Kim Dong Elementary School in Tay Ninh. It was a privilege to be able to observe and learn 16 teachers from the region absorb and ask questions from the small group of American teachers about  "teaching as leadership".

Spending July 4th in Vietnam is poignant in its own way.

This being Vietnam, memorials are everywhere. From the life-sized bust of Ho Chi Minh in the meeting room we were in, to pictorial-memorials of fallen heroes -- everyday people whose lives were cut short by the curse of war -- adorning the hallways. It's a somber reminder of how war and conflict makes heroes out of everyone -- sometimes needlessly, often without solicitation.

May we learn from our own independence the burning desire of other peoples to be independent like us. Even people who once had to fight to be independent from us.

Tây Ninh

It took us the better part of 36 hours to get from Flossmoor, Illinois to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. An hour to get to O'Hare airport. A couple of hours waiting at the airport for our non-stop, 15+ hour AVE airlines flight to Taipei, Taiwan -- the Boeing triple-7 (extended range) can directly connect any two airports in the world. A couple of hours waiting there. A three hour flight to Ho Chi Minh City. A couple of hours in immigration at Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport -- turns out, you do need separate visas for 8-year olds! An hour from the airport to the Nikko Hotel in Saigon's bustling "District 1".

Safa and I are indebted to Dr. Janelle Scharon for letting us string along on this trip. Dr. Scharon has the important work of coordinating a group of first-year teachers under the aegis of Teach For Vietnam. Safa and I are simply taking in the sights, sounds, aromas and tastes of what, for all of us, is a new country.

Ho Chi Minh city is a vibrantly perfect conflation of motor-scooters, friendly people, and sumptuous food. In the first 24 hours, I had two kinds of chicken, pizza with shrimp, [1] iced tea, iced coffee, and sugar-cane juice from a street vendor (it was nicely sealed).

On the morning of Monday, July 3rd, we traveled from Ho Chi Minh City to Tây Ninh about 3 hours to the northwest. The landscape alternates between urban congestion and rural farmland -- often within the course of minutes.

I met the other coaches who have flown in from places like Houston and Beijing. I was happy to listen in on their conversation about how to help the 16 teachers in this program and offer a few suggestions (about feedback and retrospectives) when asked. I do not have formal training in childhood pedagogy; however, I'm planning to make myself useful with the skills I do have.

[1] I have recently transitioned from being a vegetarian to allowing chicken and seafood to infiltrate my diet.

Electromagnetism

The crackle of static
Excited electrons
Jumping out of their assigned orbits
Arcing through the air
The photons they emit
Glance off the brown iris
Of your eyes
A micro instant before
The electrons contact my skin
A full instant before your fingers
Touch mine;
Triggering dormant nerve cells into action:
Racing impulses to a brain
Where eager synapses trigger thoughts
That stoke the imagination for a while,
Yet never incite the tongue to speak,
Nor the limbs to act.

The twinkle in your eyes,
The jolt of static,
The touch of your fingertips
(A digital connection of the physical kind),
And the thoughts they inspire --
A four-beat symphony of attraction,
Of electricity and magnetism
That lives in the fecund imagination
Of a mind
Trapped in a timorous body --
Too timid to act.

March 2017

#OneMigrationPerGeneration

This article is about migration of human populations.

My father was born in India under the British Raj. When he was a child, his parents took him and his younger sister — my now deceased aunt — from Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh to Khulna in what was then the eastern wing of the nascent state of Pakistan. 

I cannot claim to know their exact thoughts. My grandfather died when I was 4. My father talked about it infrequently during my formative years. When he did mention it, it was with an air of descriptiveness. Emotive expression isn't his style when he's discussing history, literature, linguistics or logic — a bit ironic since those are his passions. Of course he spared us the goriest parts of the migration: the ghost trains that crossed the borders, full of murdered corpses and the slaughter of neighbors by neighbors. Those details I was left to learn upon adolescence by sneaking into his sizable library. 

As stoic as my father has been about his first migration, I know it affects him. What affects him more, however, is the second migration he made. 

My father spent most of his boyhood and early youth in Khulna and Dhaka. He learned the Bangla language, in which he retains his fluency despite decades of sparse use. He found a job there, and then a wife — an émigré like him — and he and my mother overcame the challenges of raising a growing family on a meager salary with admirable aplomb. By the late 1960s, they had achieved a respectable, if delicately poised, balance in financial stability and societal integration. 

The seeds of decades of disaffection, sown by dishonest governments and fomented by mistrustful leaders at all levels of society, were bound to sprout sooner or later. By 1969, they did. Sectarian tensions escalated, discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and mother tongue became the new norm. My father, despite speaking fluent Bangla and being an integrated member of society, was rather suddenly "the other". He recounts one vivid incident which laid bare to him the stark realities of the times.

As an employee of the national airline, he often flew between Dhaka and Karachi for work. Despite the tensions, he never made much of these travels. On one such trip, one of his long-time friends and colleagues joked with him in Dhaka "next time you return from Karachi, you'll need your passport and a visa". 

My father loves Bengal, as much as his father loved India. However, he could read the signs, as I'm sure his father read a generation before him. Over the next several months, he packed up his belongings in Bengal, applied for a transfer to Karachi, and moved his young family from Dhaka to Karachi. As it turned out, he got his timing just right: the tumultuous Pakistani national election of 1970 started a precipitous series of events culminating in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state in 1971.

All this turmoil has had an affect on my father. "Patriotism", in the traditional sense of "my country, right or wrong", rings hollow with him. He is nevertheless a loyalist — a remarkable trait to carry throughout a life that has seen him being loyal to so many regimes. However, he has always drawn a clear distinction between the concepts of State and Government, and an even clearer one between Justice and Statehood. 

As he spends his twilight years in his little apartment in Karachi, surrounded by his beloved books, watching yet another state crumble around him; this simple man — having outlived so many states and countless governments — is an inspiration to me to value Justice over all formal structures.

Now I spend my most vigorous years in the United States, having undergone my own migration as a (much!) younger man from Karachi to Chicago, confronted by the contemporary reality that I may yet be a persona non grata here in what I consider my home. I do not know what the future holds, but I have resolved to cap this familial tradition to #OneMigrationPerGeneration. As far as I can, I will resist attempts to be marginalized, cast out and "othered".

Just as my father painstakingly instilled it in me, I also resolve to teach my daughter the relative importance of Justice, Statehood and Government, so that the migration she embarks upon (hopefully a couple of decades from now but no sooner) is more fruitful and positively evocative for her than the ones undertaken by her forefathers.