The Spirit of Inquiry

My 5 year old asked me about ghosts the other day. He wanted to know if ghosts really existed and whether I believed in them. It was a little after he and his elder brother, my 8 year old, watched the movie Bhoothnath for the n'th time. I guess he was confused by the conflicting responses he got from everyone he asked, every time he saw the movie. (And I bet his elder brother had been feeding him all kinds of stories about ghosts, just to scare him.) So now the younger tyke wanted a definitive answer from Daddy. I told him that ghosts were people who have died but whose memories lived on inside our minds, which sometimes took shape in our imagination as though they were still really alive. Difficult to explain phenomena like hallucination to a five year old, so that's about as close as I got.

That conversation set me thinking about the subject of spirits and ghosts. As a teenager with a strong scientific temper and a keen interest in the physics of the infinite (astrophysics) and the infinitesimal (nuclear physics), I'd already dismissed that kind of talk as mumbo-jumbo. Even so, there were a bunch of questions about ghosts I used to ponder over (when not preoccupied with questions about Schroedinger's cat) just assuming, for the sake of argument, that ghosts were a real phenomenon. For example: Do ghosts age? Is the ghost of Newton older than the ghost of Einstein or are they both "frozen" at the point in time when they died? If one were to "see" Newton's ghost, would he look as he looked at his dying moment or would he look as he would have looked if he were still alive today?

When I was watching the movie Ghost some years ago, I found myself wondering whether the character played by Patrick Swayze, as a ghost, would ever get to change his shirt. It must be rather uncomfortable to have to eternally be clothed in the outfit one died in, I thought. Ditto in the movie The Sixth Sense, which made the line "I see dead people" famous, in which the ghost played by Bruce Willis continues to wear a blood-stained shirt all through but realizes it only at the end. I found that odd. (Such mundane trivia do bother me, even as I watch highly engaging movies.)

Reflecting about it now, after having answered my son's question, I found the idea of a spirit that might exist without a body quite fascinating to investigate (provided one is equipped with the knowledge and tools brought to us by studies in psychology, physiology, anthropology, phenomenology, epistemology and various inter-disciplinary branches of knowledge that draw from these subject domains -- which I don't claim to be). On a related note, there seem to be as many imponderables about the subject of human cloning, along the same lines. The movie Multiplicity played with the idea of cloning, introducing minor changes in capability and personality in the many clones of a single human being, to create amusing situations. But it opened out so many interesting questions, including the question of how each of the clones must have felt -- about themselves and their past(?), the world around them and about one another. But how does one even begin to find answers to such questions?

The common thread running through such questions is the notion of consciousness as we humans experience it. Unfortunately, human consciousness doesn't seem to lend itself to much scientific investigation beyond a point. Clearly, there are obvious limitations to empirical experimentation as a methodology for inquiry into the idea of a spirit without a body. You can't die and then come back and record what you were conscious of when you were dead. Worse, you can't even demonstrate that you can't do that. Or even that you can. Experiments like the ones in the movie Flatliners don't count, because those are near-death situations, not actual death, though they kept pushing the limit in that movie.

But there are no constraints in conducting what scientists like Einstein called 'thought experiments' in the laboratory of our minds. And the reason I have so many references to movies popping up in this post is that the entertainment industry, where having a vivid imagination is just table stakes, is a fertile environment for such thought experiments. The same goes for science fiction movies and their relationship with real-world scientific inquiry, and with real-world technological innovation. Quite often, being bold and going where nobody has ever gone before results in best-sellers and box-office hits, for writers and film-makers who explore extraordinary topics in the spirit of inquiry (not always scientific as it turns out). And that in turn inspires investigations, discoveries and inventions in real life through a process of true scientific inquiry and/ or technological innovation. But that's another story, and another digression.

Let's get back to our own inquiry into the question of consciousness removed from body. As sentient beings our bodies (normally) come equipped with the 5 senses, whose job it is to capture and deliver sensations to us. The dynamism of time ensures that things are never static, as in a photograph -- we are always in real-time, continuously seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching and feeling things. As sapient beings we continuously think about stuff that we see, hear, smell, taste and touch and feel. That's how we learn and grow. Even a computing machine has input / output devices as its peripherals, which connect it to the rest of the world by providing a conduit for data flow. Assuming an advanced computer can be aware of itself (we're not really too far from developing one), could it be aware of itself bereft of its I/O interfaces? Could sapience exist without sentience? That's my big question.

It takes more than intelligence to be human, as we know (though when we interact with some people we begin to doubt that). As different from machines that can think, humans also have a priori impulses: the sexual urge, for one, and the creative urge, for another -- we've all had spontaneous feelings and great ideas that seem to have come out of nowhere. But even these need a vehicle, which the body provides: a medium through which stimulus and response are received and delivered. The experience of a body has a crucial role in shaping what and who we are, what and who we become as our bodies change, and how we think and feel about ourselves and our worlds. If we believe we look good it makes us more confident, even vain, but if we believe we look ugly, it erodes our pride and leads to low self-esteem, even depression.

Our self-image depends a lot on the size, shape and overall appearance of the bodies we wear. The loss of a limb or an organ or a faculty significantly changes us and how we interact with and relate to the world around us. Helen Keller was an amazing human being who lost two of her senses before she was 2 years old, yet rose to become a towering figure in her time. Her determination to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges continues to be a source of strength to many in similar situations, to this day -- one may even say her intrepid spirit lives on in their hearts and minds and inspires them to achieve their goals despite all odds.

Surely, loss of the whole body would have a dramatic impact on what and who we become? How would we feel about losing our body, and in fact, what does 'feel' mean in that context? Can we feel or think without having a body? What interface would we then have with the world around us, to interact and transact with others, to give and to receive, to act and be acted upon? What is growth and learning and how could it possibly come about without interactions and transactions that can only be effected through an I/O interface of our bodies? Can we be creative without our bodies? How would creativity manifest itself in the case of a ghost?

Questions about ghosts haunt me even if ghosts themselves don't. Maybe I should just be satisfied with the explanation I gave my son and enjoy the rest of my weekend.

Filling Buckets Or Lighting Fires?

"Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire" -- W. B. Yeats

I was reminded of that quote today as I read a news report in the The Times of India excerpted here below:

The 86th Constitutional amendment making education a fundamental right was passed by Parliament in 2002. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, a law to enable the implementation of the fundamental right, was passed by Parliament last year. Both the Constitutional amendment and the new law came into force from today. 

Future generations of Indians will look upon this as a 'Great Leap Forward' for the Indian education system, notwithstanding the fact that it happened on All Fools' Day. It certainly would be a giant leap when successfully implemented, in terms of enabling 10 million children with access to schooling. Of course, there are several unanswered questions at the implementation level, including the dearth of qualified teachers, lack of suitable facilities, the potential for malpractices, etc., but let's assume that we will find ways and means of overcoming these challenges. But there is a larger issue here, even at the conceptual level, and that deals with  our understanding of, and approach to, education itself. And that's where the quote from Yeats comes into the picture. When it comes to Education Reforms, are we seeking to light fires or are we continuing to fill more buckets (and that too, more efficiently)?

I found myself wishing that they had more accurately called it 'Right to Literacy' because that's what it really is. Yes, it deals with primary education. And yes, it comes under the rubric of "Education Reforms" with a capital E and a capital R. But let's not confuse education with literacy. Or with skills training. While all three are important, each has a specific purpose and each plays a unique and vital role in shaping our children's lives as they grow into adults. Literacy gives them the basic tools they would need to learn more, acquire knowledge, develop skills, etc. and training empowers them with a range of capabilities -- some general, some specialized. But education builds character. Unfortunately, nowhere in our education system do we really focus on the last part. A few exceptional schools make an earnest attempt, but that stems more out of their own independent vision than from a systemic requirement.

IIT Bombay, where I spent my late teens and early 20s, has as its motto "Gyanam Paramam Dhyeyam" -- Sanskrit for "Knowledge is the Supreme Goal." The IITs excel in selecting the brightest (read: most analytical) young Indian minds (of those that have opted for the science stream in high school and chosen to pursue engineering as a career, as opposed to medicine) and then honing their pre-existing analytical skills to near perfection, through years of rigorous training in a highly competitive environment. What the IITs do not do, or even attempt to do, is to provide a well-rounded education to their students -- an education that would help them understand, for example, that the supreme goal is the development of the sensibility to apply knowledge judiciously, and not just the mere acquisition of it, as a literal reading of the IIT Bombay motto might suggest. Only the well-educated mind would be able to interpret this motto wisely, and understand the difference between letter and spirit, between acquisition and application. So this is the feedback loop in which this issue is stuck: the minds that run the IITs are the minds that believe that (acquisition of) knowledge is the supreme goal. And that too when what they mostly do is develop analytical skills and impart technical knowhow.

Our children have a right to a decent education too, not just a right to literacy and a right to training. Now that we've taken the first step today, I wonder when we will take the next one. And what, exactly, that would be.

Dictional Differences: Dictates vs. Didactics

I've given up my indignation over the hijacking of the Hindi word avatar (pronounced "uhv - taar") by English-speaking Westerners (who pronounce it as "av - uh - tar"). I used to get bent out of shape about this mispronunciation and fought it passionately till I found the numbers on the other side of that fight overwhelming. So gradually I decided to let it go, as I had many years ago with a similar fight about the Hindi word karma. But there was a whole war I had yet to lose. Having won some ground, the other side started advancing further by dictating terms of use to me. They started correcting my own pronunciation of avatar, trying to highlight the difference between the English neologism and the original Hindi (actually, Sanskrit) word. And this would get me all riled up, especially if the individual doing the dictional dictation was a condescending NRI / PIO with an attitude (who according to me should have fought the battle on the same side as I).

Over time I learned to let that go too. I may not quarrel any more -- at my impassioned best maybe put up a feeble protest. But I will not accept this dictate. Ever. I'd rather face rebirth as a lower avatar in my next life, than say "av - uh - tar". So what if it is now an English word with an English pronunciation? I'm no orthoepist but I'm of the opinion that words can be pronounced as per their original phonetic structure, even after they've been adopted by another language and adapted (mauled might be more accurate) to suit the marauding language's phonemes. Have the French stopped pronouncing words like penchant or accoutrement or bête noire the French way and embraced the American pronunciation for such words? If they have Gallic pride, don't we have Indian pride?

Be that as it may, I've given up fighting the dictional war over avatar. But there's another war that I am still fighting and shall continue to fight for as long as I have to. It is about preserving the spelling and pronunciation of the Indian name "Gandhi", which has been coming under increasingly strong pressure lately to morph into "Ghandy". I have vowed to fight it through dictional didactics -- I shall correct every written or spoken instance of "Ghandy" that I come across, anywhere in the world and anywhere on the world-wide web, by teaching the concerned author or speaker the correct spelling or pronunciation as the case may be. Not so much out of respect for the man we've all been brought up to revere as the Mahatma, but more out of a sense of outrage that my compatriots who may happen to be closer to the source of the error either don't care or don't seem to be pushing back. Or pushing back hard enough.

I'm quite certain that people who've learned to spell and pronounce Javier Perez de Cuellar and Dag Hammarskjold can also learn to spell and pronounce Gandhi correctly, if taught to do so. My anger is not directed against them. My anger is directed against Indians who don't think it is important to educate their friends from other (predominantly first world) cultures about the pronunciation of Indian names or words from Indian languages. These are mostly the same Indians who modify their own names to make them more user-friendly to the English-speaking world, or, worse still, just adopt the nearest American-sounding name. (Side note: in my case, Westerners tend to mistake my first name for Herman, when written, and Eamon or Hammond, when spoken. But I'm usually quick to point it out and to help them with a mnemonic -- getting them to say "hey" and "month" in rapid succession till they get it right.)

These are also the same Indians that disparage other Indians who don't get the pronunciation of names like, say, McMahon or names of places like, say, Worcestershire. I use a rather colourful expression to refer to such sub-species of Indian origin but I'd rather not reproduce here in full. It consists of 3 words: the first two are 'Cocky Caucasian' and the third word is the unprintable one. (Hint: it is a hyphenated word, referring to a person who fellates men, and alliterates wonderfully with the first two words.) And if you've got that right you'd know that's not a racial slur against Caucasians; it's an obloquy aimed at the obsequiousness of Indians who think that cultural acquiescence brings personal acceptance (and who, in the first place, crave such acceptance by the first world). This is the problem: obsequiousness when facing West to interact with first world citizens; superciliousness when facing East to interact with their compatriots back home who haven't had as much exposure to the occident. Even if I could deal with the former, I find it impossible to reconcile to the latter.

Yet another reason for me to be pissed off with these Cocky Caucasian [unprintables] is that their sort of behavior plays so easily into the hands of the hard-core right-wing Hindutva bigots who are looking for every opportunity to oppose what to their eyes might appear to be a new avatar of colonialism or Western imperialism or religious proselytizing. Look at the way they react to St. Valentine's Day celebrations in India, every year. Why does this have to be a case of two extremes? One set of Indians with a zero tolerance policy towards other Indians imbibing Western culture, and the other falling all over themselves to get accepted by the West. We don't seem to be able to embrace diversity without it having to be a struggle to keep our cultural identity. A struggle that some think they win by digging their heels deeper into the quagmire of regressive morality (which they confuse with tradition), and others readily and willingly surrender to at the altar of acceptance by the West.

I'm all for cultural osmosis. When I travel, I love to soak-in the sights and sounds of the place, mingle with locals, speak their language if I can, or try to learn it, enjoy the local cuisine, and sing and dance the local song and dance. I'm not hung-up about where I come from or how different I am from the people I am amidst, nor am I scared of losing my sense of self by opening myself out to another culture (on the contrary, I revel in it, and it adds to my sense of self). When it comes to identity, "They can't take that away from me", to quote the lyric of an old song. And neither do I go to the other extreme by jumping out of my own skin and into one I was not born in. Or born with.

Cultural osmosis is a two-way process -- you learn some, you teach some. I learn the correct pronunciation of Dalziel and I teach the correct pronunciation of Gandhi. There is mutual respect. Everybody goes home enriched.

Why Does Benevolent Dictatorship Have To Be An Oxymoron?

It all started with a link I shared on my facebook page a few days ago, to an article from The Economist on the US healthcare bill and the challenges before the Obama administration in getting the job done. In the comments that followed, we discussed the inability of democracies in general to take strong decisive action quickly, and how differently something like the healthcare bill might have played out in a place like China. Somewhere along the line the topic turned to dictatorships and I posed the question that forms the title for this post. My question sparked off a debate in the ensuing comments and that's when I thought that an open blog is a better place to have that debate than a restricted facebook page. But before I got into open debate on this subject, I wanted to conduct a small experiment. I wanted to find out if people thought about this question in the same manner as I did.

Could it be that my question is misunderstood to be an assertion that a dictatorship can never be benevolent? That's not what I had meant, but it occurred to me that if I had used the word "did" instead of "does" it might have given than impression. Could it be that the question as it now stands is being confused with another question -- one with "did" in place of "does"? I wasn't sure. So before launching into open discourse through this blog, I decided to test responses of people in general to the way the question might have been phrased. That test was carried out through a 'teaser' which I posted at my mini-blog on Saturday, inviting readers to respond with their interpretations of the two similar sounding questions. As evident from the comments on that post, most people understood the two questions in more or less the same way as I did.

One comment went directly to heart of the matter, undistracted by the main thrust of that post (which was to elicit subjective interpretations of the question) and undeterred by the instructions in bold type. And I agree wholeheartedly with that comment. In my opinion, the idea of a benevolent dictatorship doesn't have to be an oxymoron at all. However, there is no mistaking the fact that it has been one right through our troubled history. Our collective level of maturity (or lack thereof) as a species, up until our current stage of our evolution, has rendered it an oxymoron. This is a generalization, and of course, there will always be exceptions. If we look at the history of the world, dictators who were bad guys (the general rule) stack up way higher than dictators who were good guys (exceptions that prove the rule). And this has made 'fascist dictatorship' a pleonasm and 'benevolent dictatorship' an oxymoron. But does it have to be so? It is not impossible to envisage a future for mankind in which we evolve into more mature beings in this respect. A future in which dictatorships, if any, would generally be of the benevolent kind, and tyrannical despots would be the exceptions. This is my perspective for this debate -- I want to explore what makes us the way we are in the present, and what needs to change to make that future happen. It's really not about whether or not certain specific regimes in certain specific countries are or aren't benevolent dictatorships, and if so, what that proves or disproves (though my facebook debate did tend to go down that path).

To me the crux of this debate lies in understanding the turn in the grain of human nature that makes (most) people behave differently when they acquire power. This is not just about dictators. This is also about people who become hugely successful in a short period of time, and therefore experience a kind of empowerment that they had never experienced earlier (much like dictators when they seize power). Abraham Lincoln once noted: "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power" (to which I'd append "or give him overnight success"). And then we have that old adage: Power corrupts and absolute Power corrupts absolutely. It seems that the tendency for moral standards to drop when intoxicated by the power to realize any desire of one's choosing is a well known and widely accepted attribute of human nature as we know it today. So what makes this happen?

Anyone who has just recently come into a position of authority would remember their experience of the rush -- the heady feeling of wielding power. This is as valid for dictators and political leaders as it is for other individuals in civil society (businessmen, artists, athletes, etc.) who are suddenly successful and who achieve fame and recognition overnight as it were. The knowledge that one enjoys an unprecedented amount of power, which gives one the ability to exercise one's will on a range of issues (each of which has a greater impact on more things) does indeed produce an intoxicating feeling. In my opinion, this state of mind is triggered by two twin driving factors: the removal of constraints and the availability of choices. However, this comes with a price tag. The freedom to do pretty much as one wishes, coupled with the empowerment to make those wishes a reality, brings its own complexity.

I recently came across an interesting article that quoted Clay Shirky (a teacher, consultant and writer focused on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies) who in his keynote address at a conference, said "Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity." Highly insightful, to say the least, and in the context of studying the psyche of a human who is suddenly empowered, it helps understand the mindset of someone who all of a sudden has before them an abundance of choices around just about anything within their purview and no explicit accountability to any specific authority other than themselves. Coupled with the fact that their sphere of influence and control has also rapidly expanded in a short time, this significantly raises the level of complexity that the mind has to deal with. This creates tremendous anxiety as a talk on TED that I watched some time ago explains.

The ability to deal with that anxiety is predicated by two main pre-requisites: intelligence and maturity. Intelligence enough to recognize the choices, analyze possible responses to situations, understand the implications of each response, and so on, and the maturity to recognize the responsibility implicit in each action, and most importantly, the maturity to be rooted in a value system and to maintain its robustness as the incumbent grows into the position of power. This is where most dictators (and many instantly successful people) have failed. This is what makes them anything but benevolent as they grow more and more powerful. And therefore, this is what has made benevolent dictatorship an oxymoron, generally speaking.

Of Opposites, Continua and Love

Opposites, sometimes, are not really what they purport to be. We take the opposite of X to be Y but in reality X and Y form a continuum. The thing that is really in sharp contrast to that continuum turns out to be Z, which stands orthogonally to the duality of X and Y. If that's too much math for a Saturday night (especially on the eve of Valentine's Day), let me make my point through a simple example: black and white might be understood to be opposites, with shades of gray forming the continuum between one extreme and another, but it is colour that really distinguishes itself from the black-gray-white continuum. We find that this applies in other cases as well.

We take atheism to be the opposite of religiosity / faith (in God), but even atheism involves belief in something -- it is a committed position at one end of a continuum defined around theism. Atheists are not sceptics, they are believers: they're convinced that there is no God. Theirs is an assertion of non-existence, not a challenging of existence. Agnostics on the other hand keep their minds and their options open. They do not take any specific position on the question of existence of God. Some might choose to adopt a 'don't know / don't care' attitude, but others, who do care, know that they will never know for sure, since they forever live in doubt. These are people who can never abandon reason to take the 'leap of faith', and, paradoxical though it may sound, may not even commit to being sceptics or rationalists. Such is the nature of doubt, that in its quintessence it turns on itself ipso facto. The presence of doubt is the absence of faith. It is the asking, challenging, will-not-accept-as-given nature of doubt that causes it to disable belief and faith. Doubters are never sure: they live in a world of uncertainty and will always be suspicious of anyone with strong convictions about anything.

We take hate to be the opposite of love, but both love and hate exist on the same emotional plane. They form a continuum of consummate passion at the extremes, that tends to result in behaviour that is generally viewed as irrational and/or unpredictable. Economics, on the contrary, studies the rational and predictable behaviour of participants in free markets. It deals with needs and wants and demand and supply and, assuming rational actors, predicts the behaviour of markets under various circumstances. It presupposes a clinically dispassionate (if not cold-bloodedly detached) approach to exchanging surpluses for deficits in order to fulfill needs or wants. This is the very antithesis of love. When you love, you don't track levels of demand and supply to arrive at a pricing strategy. You don't try to gauge which one of you needs the other more and then go on to determine where your negotiating leverage might come from. You don't think "What's in it for me?" and you don't expect stuff in return. Whether it is your child, your parent, your sibling, your partner, your lover, your friend, your country, your community, your club, your god, your cause, your car, your pet iguana -- in love, you give out of the sheer joy of giving. Whether your love god is Eros, Philia, Storge or Agape, you so revel in loving a particular person/ place/ animal/ thing, that you are scarcely conscious of your own needs and you don't care how much of your self and your resources you're giving away. Supply is seemingly immeasurable, perhaps infinite, even though Demand may at best be marginal if not altogether non-existent. You don't think of the consequences of that giving. You don't think of where it puts you vis-a-vis the loved one, in the context of the political dynamics of the need for emotional fulfillment and the kind of power-play that it quite often involves. What really stands in stark contrast to love, therefore, is detachment. Not indifference, but detachment of a certain kind: the kind that enables a political assessment of the economics of need. This is something to think about over this Valentine's Day weekend, as we celebrate love.

Just as the continuum of theism-atheism is to doubt, so is the continuum of morality-immorality to amorality. Just as the continuum of love-hate is to dispassion, so is the continuum of charity-cupidity to self-interest. Those who want to save the world must rise above all of these continua -- above the polemics of climate change evangelism versus denial, above the arguments of religious fanatics and materialistic consumerists, above the debates between altruistic social workers and avaricious profiteers. Saving the world needs serious work. It needs an open and questioning mind that remains free from the predilections of moral/ religious beliefs and passionate/ missionary zeal. However, freedom from belief should not mean complacent agnosticism, but the relentless search for knowledge without biases. Similarly, freedom from passion should not lead to apathy or indifference but should foster sensitivity towards the right kind of concern: a concern for ourselves and the world we live in, and the future of our children and our children's children and the world we bequeath to them. Perhaps this needs a fifth kind of love god to symbolize it, that the Greeks didn't think of.