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.

July 4th, 2016

How does one measure the worth of a nation conceived in liberty yet not constant in its affirmation that all people are created equal? A nation that shares none of the bonds of religion, race, ethnicity and history that so obligingly bind the tribes of the old world. A nation whose entire fabric is spun from the singular thread of freedom ­— that most elusive of ideas that's forever under threat, is rarely enjoyed in repose and must always be protected against decay and decrepitude. A nation whose history, brief though it is, is nevertheless rich with tales of selfless valor and yet punctuated by sordid episodes of inhumanity. One measures the worth of such a nation by honoring its virtues; by recognizing that its greatest contributions to humanity have come about when it has healed the wounds of the hireling and slave, the orphan and the widow, the homeless and the tempest-tossed. One measures the worth not by tallying the nation's worst moments — when it wrought the scourge of war by foul footsteps undertaken in fear and haste — but by gazing upon the land illumined by liberty's smile, with humility and resolution intertwined, knowing that its best days are yet to come.

Death of a literalist

Justice Antonin Scalia has passed away. As a common person, unschooled in law and affected by it only as it governs and restricts my daily life, I disagreed with much of what Justice Scalia had to say from the bench. Yet I'm saddened by his demise and I hope that his is not the last voice of strict literalism on the Supreme Court of the U.S.

I strongly disagree with Justice Scalia's opinions on women's rights, gay rights and the death penalty. I was happy when he was in the minority in cases which furthered the humanist cause in these areas.

However, I value the fact that he was a strict literalist when it comes to the U.S. constitution. This is, of course, something for which he was criticized and derided. His unfailing belief that the constitution is not a living document -- something I also disagree with -- drove the entirety of his legal thought. In this, he was true to his words and beliefs.

In unflinchingly holding to his literalist value system, Justice Scalia pushed the rest of us to debate with each other, win each others' approval, persuade our opponents and pass laws -- the basic way a democracy is supposed to work -- to cause societal improvement. In restraining the court's reach, he may have thwarted progress on issues that I value; but he also curtailed the oppressive power of government when it could easily have worked against me and my fellow citizens. Two examples:

1. In Kylo v. United States, Justice Scalia opined that thermal imaging of a suspect's house counted as "search", and was protected under the fourth amendment to the U.S. constitution. This means that the state needs a warrant before it can use such technology, even though the technology does not require physical access to the property being searched.

2. In Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, Justice Scalia wrote the strongest language limiting the power of detention of U.S. citizens by the federal government, even when such citizens are found in a combat zone where the United States is waging a war.  "Justice Scalia envisions a system in which the only options are congressional suspension of the writ of habeas corpus or prosecution for treason or some other crime." It is quite telling that Justice Scalia was unmoved by the fact that President Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War -- for Scalia, it was the constitution or bust.

We don't always need people in positions of power with whom we agree all the time. We need principled people with whom we may disagree. The benefits are twofold: such powerful people help us refine our arguments when we disagree with them. Secondly, by the force of their principles, they help us attain goals that would otherwise elude us all.

So while I admire Justice Thurgood Marshall -- he who criticized the foundational principles of our country as being unideal -- I can find respect for Justice Scalia, too, perhaps as much his polar opposite as one can expect to find.

Requiescat in pace, Antonin Scalia.

Shelley Could've Said IT

Music when the notes surcease
Keep the mind in a state of ease
Wafts when sweet violets wither
Stay the thoughts scattered thither

Rose leaves in the autumn wind
Gentle feelings cannot rescind
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone
Warm affection slumbers on

December 2009