Virtual get-togethers

Originally published in The Hindu's Open Page. 

The virus that separated the whole world has paradoxically brought extended families closer than ever before

Thank you, COVID-19.

Could we pause, for a few moments, the constant doom and gloom of COVID-19 and reflect on some of the positives from this harrowing experience? I am not suggesting we forget the travails wrought by this pandemic and the heroic efforts of our frontline workers. I am merely stating that focusing a bit on some of the brighter spots of our day helps us stay afloat amid the tides of COVID-19 gloom.

Despite separating the whole world, the novel coronavirus has paradoxically brought my extended family closer than ever before. I hail from a large family of uncles, aunts, cousins and their spouses, and a growing number of nephews and nieces. Back in Chennai, the entire family would congregate for every festival in my grandparents’ house. Summer holidays meant cricket with cousins, and conspiring for plans to stay at aunts’ places. Even as many in my generation immigrated to the U.S. and Australia, the family stayed close. My mother and aunts would frequently get together for movies and shopping. The Deepavali congregations in Chennai continue like clockwork; even those in the U.S. get together at least once a year.

COVID-19 put an end to all this. Suddenly there were no more dinner get-togethers. No more movies. No more flights to Seattle or California to meet cousins. The naming ceremony of our family’s newest member went unattended by most of us. Every household in our family is now hunkering in isolation, hoping for better days to come.

And yet, something has changed. The family has come alive virtually. Our family's WhatsApp group, called “Namma Family”, used to be filled with unacknowledged forwards, but has now become the congregation-central for the family. Virtually we reach out to one another on the group through conversation, updates, photos, cooking experiments, and jokes. COVID-induced boredom has spawned off new hobbies and creative experiments in each one of us and the group has become the stage to share our new-found skills.

An aunt suggested a talent challenge wherein a nominee produces a creative work within a day and then nominates the next. What began as a chance for the tots to present their rhymes has now been embraced by the young and the old! With every submission, we are discovering previously unknown facets to our family members. We discovered a cousin’s passion for Sanskrit linguistics, another’s taste in poetry, and a third’s attempts at creating animations from still art. The MBA graduate created a survey to test one another’s knowledge in family lore. The questions brought back cherished memories from decades ago. Even the most reticent members of the group, and newcomers into the family have been swept into this exercise. Every creative project is met with thundering support, and feedback. The creative bar keeps being raised and we eagerly look forward to what is next.

If not for COVID-19, I doubt the Namma Family Talent Challenge would have existed. We would have missed out on so many creative masterpieces from our own and most of us would have continued spinning in the whorls of our day-to-day lives. This has been a silver-lining in my life during the times of corona.

On Knowledge and Change

I recently finished reading Amitav Ghosh's genre-bending novel, The Calcutta Chromosome. Is it science-fiction? Is it a historical novel? Is it a mystical thriller? Why not all three? The book held me in spellbound attention and left me with the aftertaste of philosophy. An epistemological insight that is oft-repeated in the novel is the inherent nature of Knowledge to cause Change.

"Knowing something, changes it."

"One can only know history because the act of knowing something, changes it so that what one just learnt is already obsolete."

If knowing something changes it, can one make something change in "a certain way" by making it be known "in a particular way"?  That is a guiding premise in the book.

Isn't it a wonderfully fascinating idea? It gives me goosebumps to even imagine it.

When I first encountered this premise in the book, a few disconnected ideas flashed in my mind like shooting stars. I remembered an echo of a long-forgotten lesson in quantum mechanics of how the act of measurement or observation ("knowing") alters the object under observation into just one (a rather mundane unary) manifestation of its otherwise plural possibilities.

Almost immediately, my mind train chugged along to other stations of knowledge induced change. Why, I was reminded of the childish game of Chinese Whispers. Convey a secret message to the first person in a long human chain and have them convey it to their neighbor. By the end of a long train, the secret is often altered into an unrecognizable mess, albeit a bit funnier.

Is it a fundamental nature of the human mind to change what it knows? Is it impossible to make something be known and yet make it fool-proof to change? I was instantly reminded of something I read in Frits Staal's book, Discovering the Vedas. This primary challenge of passing knowledge without change transfixed the Vedas's earliest composers. As eternal truths, it was paramount that they not be allowed to change from mouth to ear to mouth. And hence, they codified error-detecting and error-correcting codes within the texts themselves and the teaching methods of the text. As any Veda-paatshala student can attest, the emphasis in Veda learning is initially of rote-memorization; of not just the words, but primarily the tone, inflection, and spirit. The text themselves are composed to certain mathematical meters and any destructive change that affects the meter can be instantly recognized and fixed. Perhaps here at last is a rare success story of knowledge not leading to irretrievable change.

But is such knowledge-driven change necessarily a bad thing? If preventing change needs a lack of action, then why know anything at all? Is the world to be a museum of wonders held behind bullet-proof, sky-high glass walls? Sights to be admired from a distance, but never to be touched, rolled on the floor, handled among friends, stained with the accidental spill of coffee or wine, or changed and altered in even a microscopic way? Are we to be relegated to the roles of bit-parts in this vast world and never aspire to create wonders of our own to be left for the progeny to admire? Isn't newness, by definition, a change from the usual? If change through knowledge is a terrible idea, how can any newness come into the world?

If you are of the analytical bent of mind, imagine the following flow-chart. There exists a "Thing" in a circle. An arrow of "knowledge" emerges from the circle and leads to a second circle, "Action". An arrow of "change" emerges from the "Action" bubble and hurtles towards the first bubble "Thing". What happens to "Thing" now? Why, of course, it becomes a "New Thing". And the cycle continues, ad infinitum.

One can trivially imagine examples of highly destructive cycles of change. Man learnt about the usefulness of river sand to create mortar and concrete. The knowledge resulted in action that created incredibly useful newness in the world  – schools, bridges, temples, office complexes – but also immeasurably destroyed rivers and riverine ecosystems through the plunder for river sand.

Perhaps a happy compromise is that knowledge-driven change is A-okay as long as it is channeled towards something moral and honorable. In the river sand example, the change towards bridges and schools is great, but the change towards dry rivers and sunken river-beds is to be avoided. If the analytical mind begs for another flow-chart, imagine the previous one and make two minor alterations. The arrow of "knowledge" is now replaced with the arrow of "knowledge guided by moral worldview". The circle with "New Thing" is now termed "Better Thing". And thereby, we have a virtuous cycle of change.

And hence, perhaps the only thing worth preserving against wanton change or mischief is this sense of morality or a moral worldview that can guide the application of knowledge towards actions that can result in constructive change. Perhaps the only things worth preserving are rules or edicts that can timelessly apply to every scenario and guide the knower into selecting better actions and avoiding destructive ones. The only things worth guarding against the winds of change are the moral principles that can midwife better change in everything else. Perhaps, now I better understand why the Vedas are so zealously preserved against change.

Lessons from a father

Note: The following is an article written by my mother after the demise of her father in March, 2020. I edited the article and felt its content will be useful to everybody. I have retained my mother's usage of the first-person. 

The year 2020 has been a mixed bag of emotions for my family. The year dawned with great promise and joy thanks to the marriage celebrations of my sister's son, and then my own son in quick succession. Attended by a host of relations from near and afar, both ceremonies were presided over by my stately father, aged 94 and still going strong.  

My father at my son's wedding in January 2020

Shortly after, on the 6th of February, I was met with the shocking news that my father had fallen in his home, where he preferred to live alone after my mother’s demise a decade ago, and had fractured his thigh bone. That fateful accident triggered a steady decline in his health until he passed away on the 25th of April. I write this post on the 7th of May, shortly after the conclusion of his Subham, the ceremonial thirteenth day funeral rites. Thanks to the raging pandemic sweeping across the globe, the funeral rites were sparsely attended with just the closest family - my siblings, and their significant others. 

A large colored photograph of my father in gilded framing was placed on a table for the rituals. As I stared at the slender, dark-skinned man in the photograph, with his prominent forehead, sharp nose and astute eyes, I was reminded in colored flashes of my childhood, the small and big sacrifices made by my parents to raise their five children into respectable stations in life. I was struck by his ironclad will and peculiar zeal towards his family and was reminded of the incredible life he had lived. 

My father, Sri T. R. Srinivasan was born on the 17th of January, 1926 near Kumbakonam. Hailing from a small village called Tiruvalliyangudi renowned for Kolavilli Ramar temple, a prominent Vaishavite shrine, my father was schooled at Little Flowers Convent in Kumbakonam. Growing up in extreme poverty amongst seven siblings, he was the first person in his family to clear the SSC examination (standard XI by today's metrics). Through a stroke of good fortune, at the age of 18 he entered Central Government service as a Lower Division Clerk in the Office of the Protector of Emigrants and posted to Mandapam camp, a refugee center near the coastal town of Rameswaram. At Mandapam, he quickly learned typewriting and shorthand to become the personal assistant to the Camp superior who was an Indian Civil Services cadre bureaucrat. Through his boss, my father acquired a taste for the exalted administrative services and vowed to raise a bureaucrat in his future family! 

The caption is in my father's hand

On the 15th August 1947, as India celebrated her newfound freedom with crackers and festivities, my father got engaged to my mother Smt. Saroja and acquired in her a most worthy life-partner. Their partnership lasted till 2010 when she pre-deceased him and their long union gave their children a chance to celebrate their 60th, 80th, and golden wedding celebrations. 

My father shares his birth date with Tamil Nadu's former Chief Minister and film superstar Sri. M. G. R. In his own way, my father was the superstar of the lives of his children! Since he was denied a chance at higher education, he was determined to ensure all his children were graduates or higher. He pushed us to strive a little further at every stage of our lives. After college, he encouraged all his daughters to work which led to all of us joining the Banking sector. His son joined the Indian Administrative Services, fulfilling one of my father's oldest dreams. All his children have had long and successful careers, enriching marriages, and today his grand- and great-grandchildren are spread all over the globe. 

In 2018, I retired as a Deputy General Manager at SBI after thirty-eight years of service. Over these years I have been known as an extremely hard-worker, a skilled Banker and a qualified financial adviser. However, most of the golden truths of professional and personal life were instilled in me by my father much before I joined SBI. I share a few of these life-lessons that he passed down to his children through his words and lifestyle. 

• Spend within your means.

Every month my mother and father would sit together and jot down the mandatory expenses for the month. Instead of splurging on notebooks, my mother would carefully tear old calendar sheets into quadrants and use their backsides for accounts keeping. Once expenses had been listed, they would ensure some amount is always reserved for future savings. Whatever is left after that is the only discretionary spending for the whole family. Decades later, despite reaching a much better place financially, I am still driven by this model of money-management: identify expenses, reserve savings, spend whatever is left if needed.

• Increase your income. 

A large family necessitated my parents to find new ways to augment their income. A small portion of our home was rented out to a succession of tenants for several years. Being a shrewd orator and effective writer, my father would write short stories, articles, and poems in local newspapers and magazines for small remunerations. My mother provided tailoring services to neighbors, sold postage stamps, and even reared two cows to sell milk! In such varied and versatile ways, my parents increased the family income and made it possible in later life to send their children to college, marry them well, build a home, etc. 

• Savings vs Liability.

At the young age of thirty, my father had the brilliant forethought and daring to purchase a large plot of land in a swampy neighborhood called West Mambalam in Chennai. With a meager salary and four children already, it was a big risk, albeit a calculated one. He procured a loan from the local bank to buy the land and construct a house. For many years after, paying back the loan EMI was the foremost expense in our home. I still remember accompanying my father every month to pay the monthly EMI. Those trips to a bank at an early age inspired me to become a Banker in later life. This experience taught me that savings alone are not enough. It is also important to cleverly use liabilities in pursuit of grander objectives. Today the plot of land he purchased for Rs. 500 is worth several crores and has provided homes for several generations of his progeny. 

• Live with contentment.

My father was always simple in his lifestyle. In his early years, poverty made any kind of luxury unimaginable and yet, even in his later years when he was financially much better off, he never sought nor cared for luxury. Perhaps the only extravagance I remember of him was applying for a Bajaj scooter and waiting patiently for six years for its allotment. He used it sparingly, mostly preferring his cycle to commute to work. My father cared for the few things he owned and didn't care much for any other material possessions. Over the last decade of his life his austere living became even more minimal as he disposed most of his possessions. His most prized possessions were liberally handed over to his children and grandchildren and he retained only the barest essentials for himself. Despite living in a mostly empty house for the last ten years of his life, I cannot remember him being more content. Truly, contentment is a state of the mind.

• Do your duty.

Despite being from an orthodox Iyengar family, my father was never overtly religious. He rarely discussed religion or faith with others and was wary of such topics. Likewise, he was never inclined towards charity. He was living proof of the idiom 'Work is Worship' and all his children imbibed this ferocious devotion to one's work. Despite beginning at the lowest rung of the ladder, his career took him all over the country (Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Bombay, Madras) and he eventually retired as the Public Relations Officer, a gazetted position, of the Regional Passport Office at Bombay. 

During my own retirement ceremony in 2018, with my father in attendance in the first row, I was honored when my CGM commented on my Herculean work ethic even a few days before my retirement. I remember with great fondness my father's interactions with the CGM after the retirement function where he beamed with pride at his daughter's successful career. Doing one's duty with rigor was considered the foremost dharma in our household and I have strived to uphold that throughout my  career. 

My father at my retirement ceremony in 2018

To summarize, it is known that the Bhagavad Gita extols three ways to transcend our human condition: Karma Yoga (the path of duty), Jnana Yoga (the path of knowledge), and Bhakti Yoga (the path of faith). My father exemplified the life of a Karma Yogi. Through honor, discipline, grit, and visionary thinking he uplifted an entire family into a higher sphere financially, culturally, and socially. While his time on earth has come to an end, his words, memories, and influences will guide his children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren for decades to come. 

- Smt. Kousalya Venkataraman

Dhan Vapasi: "mo money no problems"

When I first heard the phrase "Dhan Vapasi" it seemed like a war-cry for the repatriation of funds, affectionately dubbed as black money, stashed by rich Indians in overseas bank accounts in the shady watering holes of the financial world such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. In contrast, Dhan Vapasi called for the repatriation of money – Indian money – from a much closer proximity: from India's governments. 

Dhan Vapasi is the brain child of serial tech-entrepreneur Rajesh Jain, one of the masterminds behind the BJP's election campaign during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He is a man of big ideas – one of his other goals is to rewrite the Indian Constitution along of the lines of the American Constitution – and Dhan Vapasi is certainly a very big idea. 

Dhan Vapasi is centered around the idea of Public Wealth and the right of every Indian citizen to derive income from it. Public wealth is defined as everything not owned by private parties such as public lands, mineral deposits, forests, public sector undertakings, government guest houses, ambassadors with red sirens, etc. 

The argument for Dhan Vapasi rests on the following equation:

When public wealth is suitably and effectively utilized it can create sustainable income for its owners, the Indian public. Due to a combination of historical and political reasons, most of India's public wealth is legally owned and controlled by the Government of India and state governments. Starting from the Chanakya's Arthashastra the ruling classes have tried to usurp and control natural wealth, particularly land, in the name of public welfare. This process was accelerated by the British and hasn't slowed a beat since Independence in 1947. Dhan Vapasi conservatively estimates public wealth in India as Rs. 15 lakh crores (15 followed by 14 zeros!), or roughly Rs. 50 lakh per family. 

Governments (states and center) are sitting on this incredible stockpile of public wealth. And yet, instead of effectively utilizing this wealth to generate prosperity for all Indians, Dhan Vapasi claims that governments across all political stripes have done the opposite. They have willfully mismanaged this wealth to enrich their own pockets. Dhan Vapasi claims that such mismanagement and corruption is unavoidable given the improper incentives baked into our political system. To come to power politicians have to spend obscene sums of money and grease multitudes of palms. Once in power, they have a very limited timeframe to recoup this vast investment. This incentivizes public loot for personal enrichment. Public wealth is treated as a cash-cow and on those occasions publicly-run enterprises go belly-up thanks to incompetent administration, the government bails them out using more public money. A case in point is the recent Air India bail-out. There is no reason for the Indian government to run an airlines and yet it continues to prop up a shambolically-run organization. 

Convinced that governments cannot be trusted to effectively utilize public wealth for public welfare, Dhan Vapasi calls for the liquidation of most of India's public wealth. It argues for the immediate auctioning of public lands, mineral deposits, privatization of public undertakings, etc. and distributing the generated income to every Indian as an annual payment of Rs. 1 lakh per family. Dhan Vapasi asserts that this income will have transformational benefits to India, including eliminating extreme poverty, generating millions of jobs, reducing the avenues for public corruption, and rendering unnecessary most public assistance schemes.  

Dhan Vapasi's website includes a booklet and a deeply informative wiki on India's public wealth. The booklet is rambling, repetitive, long on moral justifications and short on implementation details. It is also self-contradictory in places. For instance, to the question of whether the people can be trusted to responsibly spend the income from Dhan Vapasi, the booklet retorts, "If the people are capable enough to assume the responsibility of choosing their political leaders — that’s democracy — why are they incapable of deciding what they should do with their own wealth?". Dhan Vapasi's invectives against the political system would suggest that the people are clearly incapable of selecting the right political leaders; wouldn't it follow that they cannot be trusted to spend their wealth responsibly? 

I see Dhan Vapasi are an interesting garb for a Limited Government manifesto. The movement calls for the complete disentanglement of most of the Government's powers, leaving behind just three – the  Army, domestic law & order, and the courts. A Dhan Vapasi Bill has been crafted and the organization appeals to politicians across the political spectrum to rally around this singular objective. Instead of organizing around abstract ideals such as Libertarianism or Classical Liberalism, Dhan Vapasi is a call to organize around an end-product – Rs. 50 lakh per family – and sees Limited Government as a natural fallout of this desirable end-goal. 

Though the scheme may seem too simplistic, its true power rests in its simplicity and potential 'to go viral'. Like the war against black money, Dhan Vapasi could become a powerful rallying cry in the public imagination. It is ripe for adoption by anti-establishment movements. Even if the idea of Dhan Vapasi is impractical at a pan-national level, it could be applied to every level of public governance  – panchayat, municipal, state, and federal. Could we devolve lands and resources owned ineffectively by city municipal boards? Could we offload government interests in at least a few PSUs? Are there more such low-hanging fruits for Dhan Vapasi? 

It is self-evident that the Indian state is too big and too powerful. The remedy cannot be a call to cut it down to the size of a post-card. The government has to do more than just manage the army, the police, and the courts. It has to protect the environment, regulate responsible business practices, promote welfare-schemes for the historically downtrodden, provide basic education and healthcare for the neediest, and more. It remains my hope that by offloading the government of things it need not do, it can better focus on the things it should do. 

Further reading:

• An excellent conversation between Amit Varma and Rajesh Jain on The Seen and the Unseen podcast. 
• The Dhan Vapasi booklet and wiki. 

A Reading Challenge ramble

Goodreads is not for everyone. The website isn't the most responsive, the reviews are mostly unorganized, and the iOS app can be clunky... and yet, I have stuck with it for five years now, despite not logging in for several months at a stretch. The reason is that Goodreads has become a place to chronicle my personal reading habits and preferences. On Goodreads I reflect upon my past readings and discover new things to read. My social interactions on the social network begin and end, for the most part, through additions to the 'Want to Read' and 'Currently Reading' shelves.

One aspect of Goodreads that has enriched my reading over the years is its annual Reading Challenge. The idea is simple: at the beginning of the year you set a personal goal of reading some number of books during that calendar year. The rest of the year, through a combination of personal drive and fear of public shame, you try to read enough to meet the goal. Nobody wants to be the person who aims to read 60 books in a year and yet stands at 3 books read by the beginning of December. 

Despite reading being a mostly private affair, a reading habit is often flaunted in very public ways. When I first signed up for the challenge in 2014, driven partly by this desire to flaunt, I set myself a target of reading 50 books – a ridiculous reach considering I was to join grad school midway through the year. Unsurprisingly I failed to hit my target, but I didn't fail too badly. I managed to read thirty five books that year – the most I have ever read in a calendar year. The quality of my reading was fairly high as well. From Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; from Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence to Hamid Kureishi's The Black Album, I was exposed to a wide breadth of ideas and writing styles that year. By the end of 2014, I was inspired to write this about my reading that year. 

2015 was a regression to the mean. I could read just seven books, albeit books of remarkable note such as Fahrenheit 451 and Donna Tartt's The Secret History. This was also the year I truly discovered Salman Rushdie, despite having read some of his works back in India. You see, to realize the magic of his words one must have experienced the life of a cultural transplant, lost between two cultures, forever in known places and yet never at home. Shame, his book on Pakistan, ranks in my all-time top five. To me, Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are in a league of their own. They are like glass-blowers with words, they make language weave and twist in mesmerizing ways that one can't fully understand but still recognize as beyond one's abilities to mimic. 

The poor showing in 2015 lowered my expectations for 2016. A book a month was all I asked of myself. The score at the end of the year was a very healthy 15. One book that stands out, in hindsight, from that year is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. I have always fancied melancholy in literature, especially when it is tied to a good plot and relatable characters. 2016 was also the year I was introduced to graphic novels, thanks to my friend Clint. 

If 2014 was my Steven Spielberg year – voluminous – then 2017 would be my Daniel Day Lewis year. I read half as many books, but each one was a hit out of the park. Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses will rank as one of the most involved reading experiences. The North Water was chilling and brutal. Zadie Smith's On Beauty was wise and cool. I was breezing through incredibly complex works and my writing improved, including my technical writing at work! At one point I was reading over two hours a day. 

Sadly 2018 was another regression. I was still spending time with the occasional gold nugget, such as Salman Rushdie's Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights, but the bulk of my reading during the year consisted of Tintin on my iPad. For most of the latter half of the year, I didn't touch a physical book. This continued into the early months of 2019. Eventually in March, I logged into Goodreads and saw Reading Challenge progress updates from many of my friends. I was very disappointed with myself and set myself the lowest bar yet. I challenged myself to read merely six books in the remaining nine months of the year. 

When you are coming back to reading after a long layover, it doesn't bode well to start with an award-winning literary work. My incipient attempts at reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North or the Moor's Last Sigh quickly failed. The books were too deep and the language was too convoluted. I needed an easier read that could keep me engaged. Around this time, I ran into my school friend Radhika who highly recommended The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh. She gifted me her own personal copy, rife with her underlinings. The gift became my motivation and I plowed my way through the book. It was a work of non-fiction that ruminated the lack of climate change as an actor in contemporary literature. While Ghosh's searing insights into the depredations of the western model of economic growth was enjoyable, the bits I loved the most were his anecdotal passages that bore resemblance to his works on fiction. Fiction will always remain my first love. I followed it up with Sing, Unburied, Sing. It was a weird book; a mishmash of the scars of racism in the deep south and the unquenched thirsts of spirits roaming in the afterlife. It was marvelous, dull, and terrifying in parts. Next came When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. As expected it was a tearjerker. Paul's life reaffirmed something I have long believed in – it is through the confluence of disparate ideas and interests that the greatest writing is born. Paul's deep interests in literature, philosophy, medicine, and morality was evident and inspiring. 

My rapid progress encouraged me to rise my target for the year to ten books. Let's see if I can achieve it. I am currently reading Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbaari, and John Le Carre's The Honorable Schoolboy. I will be tweeting about my reading this year on Twitter chain. 

You can find my Reading Challenge scorecards here:

2014 Reading Challenge

2015 Reading Challenge

2016 Reading Challenge

2017 Reading Challenge

2018 Reading Challenge

2019 Reading Challenge