#but even as well-meaning as people can be i think indian society is fundamentally always going to be awful for unmarried women

[iamthekarmapolice]

my other childhood friend is getting married today and im deeply grateful to be here and not there

[alatismeni-theitsa]

(1/2) I know this is some controversial topic and that you sometimes cover US politics, but what do you think the american left needs to improve to reach to more people and be taken more seriously?; It's unbelievable that in the very 2021, apolitical folk are still fallin into the whole "the leftist are a bunch of crazies" narrative, we may do some pushback the last three years against conservative politics.

(2/2)  But it's still not enough; on your personal opinion, what fundamental core value needs to be changed to engage to these apolitical people and that leftist want politics to improve the quality of life of the population without being labeled as a "petulant, whiney children" There's some greek-flavored advice that we can apply to our discourse? Thanks in advance :)

========================== END OF ASK ======================

Ooooo… Great question! And by “great” I mean “Do you want me to go down in flames and get cut a thousand times with pitchforks??” xD But it’s very interesting so I will answer it! And you will be subjected to an essay of 3.200 words 😘💅 (I want to be meticulous, don’t come at me)

Please assume the tone is light and conversational. I am not in a very serious or dramatic mood, and I don’t want to estrange any group by assuming the role of an all knowing tutor or someone who always has the high moral ground. This is just 1am blabbering.

I am not against leftists. On the contrary, I know their side so well that I think I have a solid opinion on its flaws. (I have friends who are left- okay I’ll stop xD) Needless to say, the right side also has flaws and the two sides often share flaws. But right now, we are only talking about the leftists. And of course, #notallleftists xD I recognize that leftists are ordinary and diverse people with empathy and capability of critical thinking and problem-solving (Did I mention I have friends who ar--) Jokes aside, I think my following is quite left leaning and I am not bashing them here. I am criticizing the movement as a whole and trying to see where it can be improved.

***** Anyways, I will generalize the bad traits for the sake of everyone’s time, it’s what I am saying! So, when I say “they” I will probably mean “some” or “the bad apples” etc.  *****

To begin, US leftists don’t want to, but they are accidentally imperialist xD Unfortunately, they don't know much about other countries, and they don’t usually have knowledge of countries they are talking about if they don’t have an immediate connection to them. Not knowing things is fine, but when people on this site are like “ugh Americans” this points to an ignorance and a sort of entitlement that doesn’t occur this often in other countries. My internet cycle is overwhelmingly leftist and yet I continue seeing willingness for ignorance all around - and when I check it’s not by conservatives.

Leftists think their (social and not) politics apply to every country and culture, that people in different countries classify themselves as they do in the US. And when people from those countries talk about their problems, there is always an American that wants to give input based on American politics, and without knowing the situation in this other country they want to talk about. Ironically, the last one is a behavior of conservative politicians. Conservative politicians and citizens sometimes think it’s fine to intervene in other countries for “the greater good”. Well, leftists do the same but on the internet. It stalls conversation and makes it messy and force foreigners to apply to American standards.

Because leftists don't understand social differences between countries, they project their own politics, and that can make them seem obsessed with skin color and blind to cultural diversity. They act like only Americans or certain countries have every lived through colonialism and suffered slaughter and slavery. (Because they don’t feel the need to study and learn further.) To an American that might not be the case, but when Americans converse with foreigners about foreign issues, they seem to have a blind spot.

They act as if only white, cis, straight people can be perpetrators of imperialism. Booyyy I have news xD Yes, of course white, cis, straight people can be perpetrators of imperialism, but the attitude that they are the first to blame, always, it’s faulted. I have many experiences, but let’s start with a very simple one, of an Indian American young woman who thought only a lota can clean you with water in the toilet, and that Europeans haven’t heard of bidets or any other means of cleanliness (or that they have the bathtub RIGHT THERE xD) One of the highlights was a Black woman insisting “Medusa was Black because my grandma told me” despite what Greeks were telling her.

Another thing that stuck with me was the case of a Greek who wanted to write about the people who happen to be a minority in the US (you would call them poc I guess). Many people from those countries were enthusiastic about the project and aided the writer as much as they could, sharing culture and realizing how many things in common they had. But it was from same populations in the US that the writer found people who blamed them for daring to write something outside of their culture. (To explain, most US Americans were fine, but only in the US were some who were hostile). Or, I have seen Chinese Americans being offended by a certain thing (I think it was something about fashion) saying “this is an offense to Chinese culture” meanwhile Chinese people from everywhere else in the world (99% of Chinese, I’d say) said “I don’t understand… this is fine!”

Many US American poc categorize all light skinned Caucasians of the world as White Americans and the rest are the “cultured” Black or Brown people. US Americans are now learning that Slavic cultures exist and it’s… something else to watch leftists realizing light skinned people can have great embroidery and they are not actually stealing Mexican traditional clothing xD (reference to an obscure “calling out” comment on tik tok).

I don’t specifically target US poc here, I am just mentioning that everyone conveniently forgets them as if they are untouchable and never said anything ignorant, while they are as active on social media causes as other Americans. In fact, if most poc are aligned to a side, that would be the Left. They are a very big part of the progressive movement – and that’s why I am giving so much space here for them – but then it seems they can’t have a share of the “bad” things of the leftist movement, only the good. Which is humanly impossible, to be always correct.

That’s one of the problems of leftism, that in a way pardons certain minorities and by doing that it not only lets the problematic bubbles grow but also infantilizes those minorities because it passes the message that “they can never do anything wrong”. While background matters when having an opinion, I see that skin-color goes ridiculously above opinion on these matters, which is not very egalitarian. When I argue with a person, the last thing I see is the person’s skin color. When someone says “ancient Greeks were actually a Black nation ad then they became White” I don’t care how this person looks like. No matter your skin color, you must take responsibility for the misinformation you are spreading. I won’t assume that because someone is a poc that they can’t study and learn more about the matter of discussion.

So… the “issue” doesn’t come from being white, cis, straight etc but from being raised as a US American. I don’t imply by any means that being a US American is bad. The last thing I want to do here is enforce guilt. (If you are feeling guilty already I must be mistaken in my wording so I am sorry for that). I am talking about certain beliefs that come with raised as a US American. Similarly, many beliefs a Greek can have are because of their environment. Everyone is affected by their background in one way or another. 

American leftists believe that even the piss poor British farmers benefited from colonialism – and still benefit perhaps on a systemic scale. So, with the same logic, even the lowest layers of the US American society benefit from imperialism and war crimes overseas. (Truth is the quality of living in the US is great and extremely progressive compared to most of the world, because of the US’ politics. I had analyzed this in a previous post). But American leftists never mention that when it comes to THEIR case, because it doesn’t give them an advantage.

To tie it up with how American leftists see the world, there is youtuber I like, who is a US American woc and one time she said “My country is bombing Brown people” in an annoyed tone and it just sounded so offensive I closed the video. It’s obvious the youtuber doesn’t support the bombing, but it was just the phrasing which left a bitter taste in my mouth the whole day. It was the fact that 1) she could make a statement in an annoyed/joking tone 2) people in those countries don’t identify as “Brown” outside the US (and you are talking about them now) 3) your country is indeed bombing them so maybe at least categorize them as they wish?? They have a certain ethnicity, so mention that and stop categorizing them like dog breeds! They already have the bombs, do you want them to hear Americans categorize them like that?

Moreover, many US leftists think they care about other countries while, in actuality, they don’t. They just want to make other countries have the exact progressive US politics - because that’s the only “correct” political system they know. That shows even in kind of superficial matters. In a movie about Greek mythology, they will make sure there is an American Arab, an American Black person, an American East Asian person etc (which would be a cast that would reflect American diversity, not Mediterranean) and are hesitant to cast Greeks or ask Greeks how the portrayal of the story and figures could be better and respecting.

Another thing, they take everything too personally. They think success and failure of a movement is highly dependent on them as an individual. It’s difficult for them to approach a harsh past or present situation in a levelheaded manner because they don’t realize this situation has been universal. So, they feel a special kind of guilt and that makes them over apologetic but also overzealous (like a righteous self-flogging zealot) and that is what drives people away. They combine that behavior with ignorance about the rest of the world, and you can see why a non-US American might want to keep their distance.

I had some Americans apologizing to me because their ancestors did something to Greeks and just… don’t. I know you have the best intentions, but it makes everyone – even me – feel bad. There is no need for apologizing because 1) you and your family did nothing wrong 2) it was centuries ago 3) this bad shit happens/happened literally everywhere. You might as well apologize for your people knowing how to cook. It’s FINE, really, it’s FINE. For instance, do you think I have a grudge on YOUR people running a slave trade six centuries ago while there was dozen active slavetrades in the area, and while Greeks of the Byzantine empire probably bought slaves some decades before they were sold to slavery themselves? Do you see what a mess this is? Not only it doesn’t fix anything, but you also put unnecessary weight on yourself, as an individual. It’s fine to be aware and trying to fix past mistakes - if it’s possible - but there is a certain delicate process that must be followed. Not… whatever this is.

To continue on the extreme individualism, leftists think it's the end of the world if they have done or said something controversial (and that's also because they have cultivated a culture where any small transgression is a potential danger to the whole society :p aka "the left eats itself"). Around them people feel they must tread on eggshells just in case they phrase a thing wrong or post something that could be linked to a person the Left doesn't like.

The left is also on the extremes, so I have to put 1000 disclaimers every time I say something. (I guarantee that the example with the Chinese people will be translated by some Americans like “Theitsa promotes Asian hate!!”) Do you know who doesn't annoy me if I don't put 1000 disclaimers? Certainly not Conservatives. I had more harassment from leftists than I had from actual nazis, even though my blog is not conservative or (god forbid!!) supportive of nazism or any type of supremacy. Even nazis completely understand my beliefs before they send hate. (It might be odd but I never had one not understanding my point xD) But the leftists who sent hate misinterpret stuff, or they don’t bother reading actual posts. The funny thing is that I usually agree with these progressives in 99% of issues but they don’t care asking or learning, they just decide our morals are opposite. I mean they don’t have to like me, but many leftists don’t even read the basics.

On top of that, leftists rarely want to have a conversation with a conservative. I don't say go and AGREE with a conservative, I say just talk. (see? I feel the need to clarify here because many leftists might say “Theitsa wants us to go and AGREE with conservatives! Does Theitsa want us to become nazis and homophobes???”) How does one feel they have to be sooo righteous and then cauterize every member of society who disagrees with them? Why do leftists rarely want to have a conversation? Some people were ready to attack me for referencing a meme which referenced Steven Crowder, as if that shows I am his supporter 😩 (Guilty by association is strong on the leftist side and it’s very reminiscent of authoritarian tactics, another thing that needs to be improved, to my opinion.)

I don’t support Crowder (I know Crowder has done awful stuff) but I shouldn’t be scared to admit I like the “change my mind” episodes. (Flash news, leftists, you might like a part from a person’s work and not 100% support that person!) I like the episodes because both sides are heard, the conversation is civil (for the most part xD) and I can see the thought process of the two speakers as they explain their worries and what solutions are out there.

Most of all, in those episodes I see how BOTH sides CARE about the SAME problems, it’s just the perspectives that differ. And those conversations highlight the issues the left hasn’t studied very well, so it helps the leftists understand what they need to learn in order to better society. But where the “immaturity“ of the leftist side can show is in the unwillingness to approach the “opponent“ as a human just like them.

(They might instead prefer to call Mexicans white supremacists and claim that “whiteness” has no color because quite a few poc voted Republican, as some leftist news sources have stated)

What is more, is it just my idea or conservatives understand leftists better than leftists understand conservatives? Of course both sides jokes about the other one but I am talking about the serious talks. Leftists just describe conservatives as horrible people who want all minorities to perish and we must not talk to them while, surprisingly, the conservatives are the ones who stereotype less the opposite side. (I am talking about the normal, moderate people). From what I have seen, most simple people who are conservatives DON’T want the US’ ethnic and sexual minorities to perish. They are worried about problems they don’t have a good understanding about. And the only way to make them understand it’s to… talk to them, show them what good the left to offer.

Some leftists think conversation is “emotional labor” but 1) that applies to actual labor as in… jobs, so stop invalidating doctors, nurses, teachers etc, 2) yeah, sorry, sometimes things get difficult and you have to explain your side. (As non US-Americans endlessly have to do for US-Americans). That was, is and will be life until the sun swallows us all. You can’t be THAT militant on social media with 100 posts per day and remembering 50 different campaigns about social issues but the moment someone genuinely asks you for directions on your side you shut them off with “why do you demand labor from me? Do your own research” (hint: most likely they have done their research, but they are stuck, and you don’t help them like this).

If you are very tired and don’t want to explain (as it is your right) you can be polite about it and not blame the individual about their circumstances when they are trying to learn. If you DO want to explain but you get tired, be more organized. Have posts and F.A.Q.s ready, or send them to someone else (a friend, a blog, a youtube channel, an article, whatever). Instead of leftists arguing their positions, sometimes they are like “Do more research and realize I am right.” Yyyeah the other person is not gonna do that – especially because you haven’t pointed them anywhere or supported your position with arguments. Moreover, leftists can have the attitude of “I stand for PROGRESS, how can I ever be wrong??” Weeell things are not black and white and me, you, everyone has the potential to not have a not that beneficial to society position at some issues no matter where we stand on the political compass.

For the “petty whiny children” thing, I believe a lot of people might think that because the youth is usually making noise about progressive issues on social media. It’s true that oftentimes in social media discussions their emotions get the best of them (it’s happened to everyone) but combined with the lack of life experience they may have about the world, the argument sounds silly. (I heard one leftist university student say that the US shouldn’t have borders because borders are bad but then they realized they don’t want people to come and go as they please in the US, so she said there should be SNIPERS in the borders to shot everyone who tries to get in…….)

And, as I mentioned, the leftists are very quick to cancel and attack for the slightest transgression so people prefer to deal with the conservatives who can, at least, take a slight misstep, than meddling with people who are going to cancel them for doing or not doing a small, insignificant, but not ‘woke enough’ thing. Leftists are constantly checking each other to see if they are doing better and better (even in silly issues) and that can be intimidating to someone who is new to politics.

Some leftists get REALLY turned on by righteousness (Frollo villain style) and instead of trying to unite the society, they aim to divide it further. They don’t want to create bridges but burn them and find themselves on the “right side“ of morals.

And, last but not least, they don’t realize leftist propaganda is a thing. Malicious people are EVERYWHERE and they don’t just magically avoid the left. Leftists are not automatically super virtuous people. There are some manipulators and bullies around, so one has to be cautious even with leftist sources. (Cross-examine stuff, always. You might have the best intentions but accidentally share something nonfactual because you trusted a source).

Ok that was all, I think. To anyone who comments, PLEASE keep the tones down, have a conversation, take it slow, remember it doesn’t help us being hateful towards each other. (And causing serious friction wasn’t the purpose of this post). Oh, and if you need a clarification on something I said, before gossiping with your friends about how awful I am, do me the courtesy of first asking me what I meant xD

[gllded]

*dj khaled vc* anotha one -- DJ KHALED.  i’m mac, if y’all didn’t know, coming in hot with a second character !! please welcome maharani jodha devi of karnataka, india to genovia. she’s here for strictly diplomatic reasons, but who knows 👀 that can change  .... anyway, take a look under the cut to know more about her and if you want to plot  ( not just w/ jodha but also with madeline if we haven’t already something going on ), just come bother me on discord -- i am in the group chat -- or if you’re old school, send me an ask and i’ll answer you back privately (; 

THE GOOGLE SEARCH

⋆ ° ⟡ ( DEEPIKA PADUKONE, thirty-three, cis female, she/her ) has JODHA DEVI, the MAHARANI (QUEEN) from KARNATAKA (INDIA) arrived yet? i heard they can be quite MILITANT, but also CHARISMATIC. there’s rumours they’ve come to genovia for STRENGTHENING DIPLOMATIC TIES, but you never know. FAMILY JEWELS HANDED DOWN FOR CENTURIES, CEDAR WOOD INCENSE BURNING, and HER FATHER’S LEATHER-BOUND JOURNAL always remind me of them. ( its mac and cheese )

THE WIKIPEDIA PAGE  ( cw. death, authoritarian ideologies )

her father told her she was blessed by the gods the day she was born, as a warm summer storm drowned out the sound of her mother’s cries while in labor. a bolt of lightning struck just outside the gardens of the summer palace just as she took her first breath --- a premonition, her grandmother would tell her --- solidifying her as an heir of the maharaja of the great naval state. her mother named her jodha, after the great warrior queen, hoping to give her daughter strength and compassion. all of these things were destiny, she’d later claim, that she was a force to be reckoned with; that she was unstoppable, unavoidable, untamable by even the ones closest to her. 

she lived, like many other rajkumaris, never wanting for anything, so beloved by her family and cherished by her servants. she was the jewel of their kingdom, a beauty to behold, and so so lovely. yet none of what they thought could compare to the love and adoration the people had to her older brother, the crown prince and first born son. 

jodha would always be second, but she would never be satisfied. while she loves her brother, she just knew it was she who deserved to be in his position. so even from an early age, she prepared herself. while he was being groomed by scholars and their father’s advisers in the palace and the capital city, she was out making trips to the country, walking along the paths of local marketplaces and visiting remote sugarcane farmers. while he discussed history and policy with the lords and high-borns, she talked about sports and the latest film with other kids her age. he was becoming the figure to be looked up to by the people, meanwhile jodha was becoming the figure to eventually lead the people. 

in her own strategy, she had seen so much of her country, had gotten to know its people, had gotten to know what made it so beautiful, and had gotten to know its fundamental imperfections. she aimed to be of the people, seeing the flaws in the infrastructure built by her own ancestors, and devised policies of her own that would fix all of it. it only took a strong enough ruler and unfortunately, jodha knew her brother wasn’t going to be that ruler. 

it had begun in earnest, after she graduated university, having enlisted in the military. at first for basic training, and then slowly up the ranks after she realized she would need support. jodha campaigned for herself as she befriended cadets, made loyalties with the commanding officers, and even spread lies and conspiracies about her brother to further weaken the image of his ability. she had played the long game, hoping eventually to request an audience with her father to prove to him that she was right for the throne, but the maharaja’s illness and sudden death following threw a wrench into her plans. 

jodha was still in mourning when they organized, knowing her brother’s coronation was just around the corner. they had to act quickly and brashly, sending troops to the nobles who would support her brother’s claim and leading her own small infantry into her brother’s chambers. with tears forming in her eyes forced her brother to concede the throne to her, never once failing to tell him that she loves him, but she loves her kingdom more. 

nearly a year later, karnataka flourished under jodha’s rule. she was able to provide education to the poorest of villages, establish more free clinics than the other indian states, promote equal rights for women, and introduce tax reform that would benefit the common people as a whole. she took her kingdom above and beyond what her forefathers were able to -- what her brother would have been able to -- but did so with an iron fist. 

in order to get all of that done so quickly, jodha took more than a few liberties in implementing her policies. certain nobles were stripped of their titles and riches. select industries and universities were punished if they did not meet the 50/50 gender requirement. people who vehemently opposed her were to just disappear without trace. she held her kingdom and her people on a very short leash, but the results speak for itself. and a few fundamental freedoms is a small price to pay in return for a society with a better quality of life for everyone. 

but because her claim is still so new, jodha knows she needs strong allies. she’s been on a world wide tour to establish diplomatic ties, and genovia, in all its pomp in finding its crown princess a spouse, just so happened to be a central hub for a number of royals. 

THE DOSSIER

- in this verse, india was never colonized by the british and therefore never unified into one homogeneous contry. instead, india stands as different states / regions, each governed independently by a royal / high-caste family. jodha and her family has ruled over karnataka, a coastal state in the south western part of india, for centuries. her ruling palace lies in the capital city of bangalore, and her state is best known for its navy as well as its abundance of aged temples and picture-perfect landscapes.  

- jodha’s mother died when she was a young child, only providing her father with two legitimate heirs. her father did remarry, at one point, but did not bear any children with the second wife. because of her mother’s untimely death, the maharaja kept his daughter close, finding the qualities he fell in love with surviving in their child. she became his favorite, being allowed privileges her brother was not allowed because he was in line to rule. to this day jodha still can’t say for certain that her father would have allowed her to rule instead of her brother. 

- jodha keeps her brother under military arrest in their ancestral palace somewhere in the remote countryside. to the public, he willingly abdicated his throne to live a private due to the overwhelming loss of his father. as expected, the nobles and scholars who would have supported him raised questions to which jodha either imprisoned them or had them quietly executed for treason and conspiracy. 

- while it is technically a monarchy, karnataka now runs under a loose authoritarian structure. while people are free to pursue happiness, they are limited, namely, in their freedom of speech and political affiliation. all media outlets are government owned and regulates its content to ensure no negative rhetoric of the queen and her regime slips through to the public. evidently this means that no one, but the key figures involved, know about the militant coup that occurred to place jodha at the seat of power. 

- she believes the ends justify the means. she understands the implications of her rule and how she overthrew her own brother, but believes she is right in doing so to ensure the well-being of her people. 

THE RELATIONSHIPS

- diplomatic allies. their respective countries could already have diplomatic relations or they’re building. either way, jodha needs allies, not only to strengthen her kingdom but also her claim as international recognition of her legitimacy can help her reputation as a whole in the public eye. 

- old schoolmates / people from her past. she went to university in europe to better her english skills before going back to join the military. as a part of the military she could have also traveled to your country and met with you in that capacity.  ( think of how prince harry was allowed to serve in the military ) 

- friendlies / acquaintances. jodha is charismatic and people-oriented at heart. she doesn’t believe she is inherently malicious, and she sure as hell wouldn’t show it if she were. but in keeping diplomacy, she’s friendly and will try to handle situations with ease. 

- enemies. maybe you just think she’s suspicious or that she has ulterior motives. either way, not everyone has to get along, and jodha is not going to back down from a fight. 

[szymonwalendowski]

Othello - race and ethnicity

DEFINITIONS AND CONTEXT The play written by Shakespeare in the XVII century is the very first whose black protagonist is portrayed in a positive way, allowing the text to acquire a vital role in the history of drama. Yet the clarity regarding Othello’s race has not always been so unquestioned. As the play has been reproduced on stage thousands of times over the past centuries, so has the perception of Othello’s skin colour. Starting from the publishing of the play in 1622 the characters dark skin remained intact, up to the 1820’s when a scholar by the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a paper in which he states - ,,Can we imagine him [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth? […] It is a common error to mistake epithets applied by dramatis personae to each other as truly descriptive of what the audience out to see or know.” (Coleridge, 385). Following the release of this essay Othello was depicted as light-skinned or bronzed until the 1870’s. The problematic approach to the protagonist’s skin colour has been evident throughout history, as well as discussed in the play itself. The term moor refers to somebody from the region of Arabia, Palestine or North Africa, generally speaking - Muslims. These people had the possibility to receive high ranks and gather large fortunes (just like our protagonist did) OTHELLO VIEWED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIETY At the time, England’s population consisted almost entirely of white Europeans, and the few black people that lived in the area were heavily associated with negative traits such as dishonestly and hostility. Thus most of the literature created before the publishing of the Shakespearean drama, rarely incorporated characters of colour, and if they did, they were presented as evil, cruel villains, with the sole purpose of causing chaos and pain. Shakespeare’s play acknowledges societies perception of black people, but does not support it. Othello is consistently judged for his race, called racial slurs and undermined by people of lower rank, that nonetheless, feel entitled to insult the man. This is most visibly conveyed in Act I Scene I of the play, before Othello is even introduced. The reader/viewer witness a conversation between Iago and Roderigo during which they discuss the ‘unlawful, socially unacceptable’ marriage of Desdemona and Othello. In fact most of the racially charged vocabulary comes from those two characters and Brabantio, who later joins the scene as well. However, it is evident that Othello has managed to gather respect in his position, as the Duke of Venice, when praising him to Brabantio claims - ,, your son in law is far more fair than black” ( 1.3.291). Said as a compliment, but still undermining the man for his blackness, this is an ideal example of what Othello was usually faced with. Common pre-existing stereotypes in the culture of XVII century England regarding black men, state that they tend to be overly jealous; are exaggeratingly passionate (hence unreasonable) and gullible. All these mentioned traits have been portrayed by Othello in his behaviour, and used by Iago to manipulate him. Fundamental concepts – • Othello is generally respected as a military man. • The Duke of Venice, a person of a very high rank, respects Othello’s opinions, treating him more seriously than his own senators, which is presented in the act 1 scene 3, where the dynamics between Othello, the Duke, and Brabantio are shown. One of the symbols of respect is that Othello was greeted first, before the senator. • Although he is positively perceived, characters do not ignore his race, which makes him an outsider despite his behavior and status. How other characters refer to Othello? Starting from Iago, the characters name derives from Santiago, which is a symbolic title for people who fight against moors ( or moor-slayers ), meaning that he is by nature supposed to be opposed to Othello. Iago, being the villain he is, insults everybody around him, but he has a designated vocabulary reserved primarily to either describe or infuriate Othello, as he refers to him as an old black ram contrasting him with Desdemona represented by an ewe. Desdemona on the other hand deeply admires her husband. Unlike what the people in her surroundings think, she is infatuated in Othello. Portrayed as one of the strongest feminine characters in Shakespeare, Desdemona opposes to her fathers will, falls in love with a man her when socially it would have been unthinkable to do so, and even follows him to war to Cyprus. Her defiant personality has led some to believe that her love for Othello was kindled by his race. Othello’s skin colour, symbolises his exoticism, creates an atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity around the man, and this is what attracts Desdemona the most. She is fascinated by him. Their love is also illustrated by the imagery of the night, representing Othello, adoring the day, symbolising Desdemona. Nonetheless, their romance will be testified against her, as Iago presents her rebellious personality as a reason for her to cheat on him, creating dramatic irony. Emilia as well as Iago directly correlate Othello’s dark skin colour with his evilness. Most characters believe a black ‘outside’, meaning physical appearance, must be related with a dark ‘inside’, accusing him of malicious intents and cruelness, solely based on his exterior appearance. Fundamental concepts - • Most of the characters in the play refer to Othello using race- and ethnicity-centered epithets, i.e. “the Moor”, “the thicklips”. • Characters that aim to present him in a negative way, like Iago, often use various animals with negative connotations, for instance “Barbary horse”, or “an old black ram”. • The dark color of Othello’s skin is used to symbolize sin and evil. For example, Iago uses the term “blackest sin”, and Emilia “blacker devil”. How does Othello refer to himself? In the face of constant judgment based on his physical appearance, it is inevitable for Othello to not think poorly of himself. In Act I Scene III, the character attributes his problems in expressing his language in a courteous manner to his years spent in the military, but as the play progresses, his insecurities start surfacing. By the time the reader reaches Act III Scene III, he states – ,,Haply (perhaps), for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That clamberers have” – thus blaming his racial identity for the qualities he lacks. The phrase above reflects how self-doubting the character must have been of himself, if in the moment when he is presented the biggest doubt of his life, he immediately turns to his ethnicity seeking for a part of him to blame, to point out what he was most afraid would happen. Othello, indeed, numerous times wonders why Desdemona fell in love with him, and even feels anxious about having such a lovely wife. The low self-confidence of the character ignited by years of racial marginalizing, has made him an easy target for manipulation, as Iago manages to smoothly slide into Othello’s mind, pull out his biggest doubts, and without providing an explanation leave him to his thoughts. The final monologue of Othello is also crucial in understanding his perception of himself. As he prepares the knife that will later lead to his death, he lays down his principles. He asks the witnesses to ‘’Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate/ Nor set down in malice” a final plead to be remembered by his service for the state, behavior and human, instead of skin color. Othello also makes reference to his race by including exotic metaphors, and his final sentances are as follows – ,,And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took bt th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him – thus!” As Othello retells the sotry of one of his many victories while serving for the state, he indicates that he, himself, has become an enemy of Venice. By degrading himself to the level of those he despised most, which is visible in the vocabulary he used to describe the enemy nation, he presents himself as equally worthless as those who he killed, and subsequently stabs himself in a deadly lunge. At his moment of death he identifies himself as a foreigner that despite their biggest efforts, never managed to become part of the society that so deeply rejected him. Fundamental concepts - • Othello often acknowledges his ethnicity, often combing it with some stereotype, like saying that he is a bad speaker because of his race: ”Haply, for I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation” • He is conscious of the fact that he is an outsider, but he also knows that his service to Venice is important and that he is a trusted and successful soldier. • In his final monologue he uses many exotic metaphors (dropping tears as fast as Arabian trees, Indian throwing a pearl away), a reference to his background. OTHER LOCATIONS REPRESENTED o Venice - a very well prospering place due to international trade. Its location by the sea not only enabled business connections but also allowed many cultures and races mix in the city. Venetians were considered very open minded at the time, as they emphasised work and their interests rather than religious values imposed by the church. As they liked to point out – “we are Venetians first, and Christians second”. The city was a place of ambiguous morals, perhaps the only city at the current time in which an interracial marriage, such as that of Desdemona and Othello’s, would be somewhat eligible. o Florence - in Shakespeare’s time the city was considered to be the center of education. Cassio, a Florentine, speaks in a very elegant manner, which confirms this perception of Florence. A Florentine was also used to describe homosexuals, and other males with high femininity levels. o Cyprus - a place very different from Venice, as it is a fortified outpost. The island plays a very important role in the play, as the actions starts unfolding once the characters arrive. The size of the area is smaller and the political situation is uncertain enhacing the atmosphere of the island being a dangerous outpost unlawful territory, making it the perfect place for Iago to carry out his evil plan. Cyprus was also the birth place of Aphrodite, a mythological goddess of love, which ties in with the themes of love and jealous.

[mayrasportfolio]

Othello in the context of race and ethnicity

DEFINITIONS AND CONTEXT

The play written by Shakespeare in the XVII century is the very first whose black protagonist is portrayed in a positive way, allowing the text to acquire a vital role in the history of drama. Yet the clarity regarding Othello’s race has not always been so unquestioned. As the play has been reproduced on stage thousands of times over the past centuries, so has the perception of Othello’s skin colour. Starting from the publishing of the play in 1622 the characters dark skin remained intact, up to the 1820’s when a scholar by the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a paper in which he states -  ,,Can we imagine him [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth? […] It is a common error to mistake epithets applied by dramatis personae to each other as truly descriptive of what the audience out to see or know.” (Coleridge, 385). Following the release of this essay, Othello was depicted as light-skinned or bronzed until the 1870s. The problematic approach to the protagonist’s skin colour has been evident throughout history, as well as discussed in the play itself.

The term moor refers to somebody from the region of Arabia, Palestine or North Africa, generally speaking -  Muslims. These people had the possibility to receive high ranks and gather large fortunes (just like our protagonist did)

OTHELLO’S RACE VIEWED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIETY

At the time, England’s population consisted almost entirely of white Europeans, and the few black people that lived in the area were heavily associated with negative traits such as dishonesty and hostility. Thus most of the literature created before the publishing of the Shakespearean drama, rarely incorporated characters of colour, and if they did, they were presented as evil, cruel villains, with the sole purpose of causing chaos and pain. Shakespeare’s play acknowledges society's perception of black people, but does not support it. Othello is consistently judged for his race, called racial slurs and undermined by people of lower rank, that nonetheless, feel entitled to insult the man. This is most visibly conveyed in Act I Scene I of the play before Othello is even introduced. The reader/viewer witness a conversation between Iago and Roderigo during which they discuss the ‘unlawful, socially unacceptable’ marriage of Desdemona and Othello. In fact, most of the racially charged vocabulary comes from those two characters and Brabantio, who later joins the scene as well. However, it is evident that Othello has managed to gather respect in his position, as the Duke of Venice when praising him to Brabantio claims - ,, your son in law is far more fair than black” ( 1.3.291). Said as a compliment, but still undermining the man for his blackness, this is an ideal example of what Othello was usually faced with. Common pre-existing stereotypes in the culture of XVII century England regarding black men, state that they tend to be overly jealous; are exaggeratingly passionate (hence unreasonable) and gullible.  All these mentioned traits have been portrayed by Othello in his behaviour and used by Iago to manipulate him.

Fundamental concepts – • Othello is generally respected as a military man. • The Duke of Venice, a person of a very high rank, respects Othello’s opinions, treating him more seriously than his own senators, which is presented in the act 1 scene 3, where the dynamics between Othello, the Duke, and Brabantio are shown. One of the symbols of respect is that Othello was greeted first, before the senator. • Although he is positively perceived, characters do not ignore his race, which makes him an outsider despite his behavior and status.

OTHELLO’S RACE REFERRED TO BY OTHER CHARACTERS

Starting from Iago, the character's name derives from Santiago, which is a symbolic title for people who fight against moors ( or moor-slayers ), meaning that he is by nature supposed to be opposed to Othello. Iago, being the villain he is, insults everybody around him, but he has a designated vocabulary reserved primarily to either describe or infuriate Othello, as he refers to him as an old black ram contrasting him with Desdemona represented by an ewe.

Desdemona on the other hand deeply admires her husband. Unlike what the people in her surroundings think, she is infatuated in Othello. Portrayed as one of the strongest feminine characters in Shakespeare, Desdemona opposes to her father's will, falls in love with a man her when socially it would have been unthinkable to do so and even follows him to war to Cyprus. Her defiant personality has led some to believe that her love for Othello was kindled by his race. Othello’s skin colour symbolizes his exoticism, creates an atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity around the man, and this is what attracts Desdemona the most. She is fascinated by him. Their love is also illustrated by the imagery of the night, representing Othello, adoring the day, symbolising Desdemona. Nonetheless, their romance will be testified against her, as Iago presents her rebellious personality as a reason for her to cheat on him, creating dramatic irony.

Emilia, as well as Iago, directly correlates Othello’s dark skin colour with his evilness. Most characters believe a black ‘outside’, meaning physical appearance, must be related to a dark ‘inside’, accusing him of malicious intents and cruelness, solely based on his exterior appearance.

Fundamental concepts -

• Most of the characters in the play refer to Othello using race- and ethnicity-centered epithets, i.e. “the Moor”, “the thicklips”. • Characters that aim to present him in a negative way, like Iago, often use various animals with negative connotations, for instance, “Barbary horse”, or “an old black ram”. • The dark color of Othello’s skin is used to symbolize sin and evil. For example,  Iago uses the term “blackest sin”, and Emilia “blacker devil”.

OTHELLO’S RACE FROM HIS OWN PERSPECTIVE

In the face of constant judgment based on his physical appearance, it is inevitable for Othello to not think poorly of himself. In Act I Scene III, the character attributes his problems in expressing his language in a courteous manner to his years spent in the military, but as the play progresses, his insecurities start surfacing. By the time the reader reaches Act III Scene III, he states – ,,Haply (perhaps), for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That clamberers have” – thus blaming his racial identity for the qualities he lacks.

The phrase above reflects how self-doubting the character must have been of himself if at the moment when he is presented the biggest doubt of his life, he immediately turns to his ethnicity seeking for a part of him to blame, to point out what he was most afraid would happen. Othello, indeed, numerous times wonders why Desdemona fell in love with him, and even feels anxious about having such a lovely wife. The low self-confidence of the character ignited by years of racial marginalizing has made him an easy target for manipulation, as Iago manages to smoothly slide into Othello’s mind, pull out his biggest doubts, and without providing an explanation leave him to his thoughts.

The final monologue of Othello is also crucial in understanding his perception of himself. As he prepares the knife that will later lead to his death, he lays down his principles. He asks the witnesses to ‘’Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate/ Nor set down in malice” a final plead to be remembered by his service for the state, behavior and human, instead of skin color. Othello also makes reference to his race by including exotic metaphors, and his final sentances are as follows – ,,And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took bt th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him – thus!” As Othello retells the sotry of one of his many victories while serving for the state, he indicates that he, himself, has become an enemy of Venice. By degrading himself to the level of those he despised most, which is visible in the vocabulary he used to describe the enemy nation, he presents himself as equally worthless as those who he killed, and subsequently stabs himself in a deadly lunge. At his moment of death he identifies himself as a foreigner that despite their biggest efforts, never managed to become part of the society that so deeply rejected him.

Fundamental concepts - • Othello often acknowledges his ethnicity, often combing it with some stereotype, like saying that he is a bad speaker because of his race: ”Haply, for I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation” • He is conscious of the fact that he is an outsider, but he also knows that his service to Venice is important and that he is a trusted and successful soldier. • In his final monologue he uses many exotic metaphors (dropping tears as fast as Arabian trees, Indian throwing a pearl away), a reference to his background.

OTHER LOCATIONS REPRESENTED

o Venice - a very well prospering place due to international trade. Its location by the sea not only enabled business connections but also allowed many cultures and races mix in the city. Venetians were considered very open minded at the time, as they emphasised work and their interests rather than religious values imposed by the church. As they liked to point out – “we are Venetians first, and Christians second”. The city was a place of ambiguous morals, perhaps the only city at the current time in which an interracial marriage, such as that of Desdemona and Othello’s, would be somewhat eligible. o Florence - in Shakespeare’s time the city was considered to be the center of education. Cassio, a Florentine, speaks in a very elegant manner, which confirms this perception of Florence. A Florentine was also used to describe homosexuals and other males with high femininity levels. o Cyprus - a place very different from Venice, as it is a fortified outpost. The island plays a very important role in the play, as the actions starts unfolding once the characters arrive. The size of the area is smaller and the political situation is uncertain enhancing the atmosphere of the island being a dangerous outpost unlawful territory, making it the perfect place for Iago to carry out his evil plan. Cyprus was also the birthplace of Aphrodite, a mythological goddess of love, which ties in with the themes of love and jealousy.

[thevividgreenmoss]

...Anyone who knew Eqbal in conditions of struggle knew subliminally that his loyalty and solidarity were unquestionable. He was a genius at sympathy. When he used the pronoun "we," you knew that he spoke and acted as one of us, but never at the expense either of his honesty or of his critical faculties, which reigned supreme. This is why Eqbal came as close to being a really free man as anyone can be. 

This isn't to say that he was indifferent to the problems of others, or blessed in that he didn't have problems of his own. This was very far from true. But he did give one the impression that he was always his own man, always able to think and act clearly for himself and, if asked, for others. His subcontinental origins in Bihar and Lahore steeped him both in the travails of empire and in the many wasteful tragedies of decolonization, of which sectarian hatred and violence, plus separatism and partition, are among the worst. 

Yet retrospective bitterness at what the white man wrought and at what his fellow Indians and Pakistanis did were never part of Eqbal's response. He was always more interested in creativity than in vindictiveness, in originality of spirit and method than in mere radicalism, in generosity and complexity of analysis over the tight neatness of his fellow political scientists. The title of one of his most spirited essays, on Regis Debray, was entitled "Radical but Wrong." 

When I dedicated my book Culture and Imperialism to him, it was because in his activity, life, and thinking Eqbal embodied not just the politics of empire but that whole fabric of experience expressed in human life itself, rather than in economic rules and reductive formulas. What Eqbal understood about the experience of empire was the domination of empire in all its forms, but also the creativity, originality, and vision created in resistance to it. Those words-" creativity, " "originality," "vision"-were central to his attitudes on politics and history.

Among Eqbal's earliest writings on Vietnam was a series of papers on revolutionary warfare which was intended as a refutation of standard American doctrine on the subject. U.S. counterinsurgency experts see in Vietnamese resistance a sort of conspiratorial, technically adept, communist and terrorist uprising, which can be defeated with superior weapons, clear-cut pragmatic doctrines, and the relentless deployment of overwhelming military force. What Eqbal suggested was a different paradigm: the revolutionary guerrilla as someone with a real commitment to justice who has the support of her or his people, and who is willing to sacrifice for the sake of a cause or ideology that has mobilized people. What counterinsurgency doctrine cannot admit is that the native elites whose interests are congruent not with their country's but with those of the United States are not the people to win a revolutionary war. In confronting the arch-theorist of this benighted view-none other than Samuel Huntington-Eqbal. Put it this way:

In underdeveloped countries the quiescence which followed independence is giving way to new disappointments and new demands which are unlikely to be satisfied by a politics of boundary management and selective cooptation-a fact which the United States, much like our ruling elites, is yet unable or unwilling to perceive. There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America's insistence on stability, between our impatience for change and America's obsession with order, our move toward revolution and America's belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the "third world," our longing for absolute national sovereignty and America's preference for pliable allies, our desire to see our national soil freed of foreign occupation and America's alleged need for military bases.... As the gap widens between our sorrow and America's contentment, so will, perhaps, these dichotomies of our perspectives and our priorities. Unless there is a fundamental redefinition of American interests and goals, our confrontations with the United States will be increasingly antagonistic. In the client states of Asia and Latin America it may even be tragic. In this sense Vietnam may not be so unique. It may be a warning of things to come.

What emerges in these writings is the opposition between conventional and unconventional thought and of course the even deeper opposition between justice and injustice. In his preference for what the unconventional and the just can bring peoples by way of liberation, invigorated culture, and well-being, Eqbal was firm and uncompromising. His distrust for standing armies, frozen bureaucracies, persistent oligarchies allowed no exceptions. Yet at the same time, as he showed in his great essay on Debray, it is not enough to be unconventional if that means having no regard for tradition, for the goods that women and men enjoy, for the great stabilities of human life. Eqbal was shrewd and illusionless enough to realize that overturning societies for the sake of revolution only, without sufficient attention to the fact that human beings also love and create and celebrate and commemorate, is a callous, merely destructive practice that may be radical but is profoundly wrong. 

...No one has more trenchantly summarized the various pathologies of power in the third world than Eqbal in the three summary essays he wrote for Arab Studies Quarterly in 1980 and 1981.9 Once again, unlike many of the second-thoughters and post-Marxists who populate the academic and liberal journals today, Eqbal remained true to the ideals of revolution and truer yet to its unfulfilled promise. To have heard him lecture over the years, passionately and sternly, about militarism in the Arab world, in Pakistan, in Algeria and elsewhere, was to have known the high moral position he took on matters having to do with the sanctity and potential dignity of human life either squandered or abused by strutting dictators or co-opted intellectuals. Creativity, vision, and originality of the kind appreciated by Eqbal in his great friend the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz are the measure for political life, not the trappings of honor guards, fancy limousines, and enormously bloated and all-powerful bureaucracies. 

The measure is the human being, not the abstract law or the amoral power.

I think it must have been difficult to hold on to such ideals and principles. Most of Eqbal's written work, and indeed his activism, took place in dark times. Not only did he take full stock of the devastations of imperialism and injustice all over the globe, but in particular he more eloquently than anyone else inventoried the particular sadness and low points reached by Islamic cultures and states. Yet even then he managed to remind us that what he mourned is no mere religious or cultural fanaticism, as it is usually misrepresented in the West, but a widespread ecumenical movement. Moreover, though not an Arab himself, Eqbal reminded Arabs that Arabism, far from being a narrow-based nationalism, is quite unique in the history of nationalisms because it tried to connect itself beyond boundaries. It came close to imagining a universal community linked by word and sentiment alone. Anyone who is an Arab in his feelings, in his language and his culture, is an Arab. So a Jew is an Arab. A Christian is an Arab. A Muslim is an Arab. A Kurd is an Arab. I know of no national movement which defined itself so broadly. 

In such a situation and with such a heritage, Eqbal saw the degradation of ideas and values that grip Arabs and Muslims alike. Let me quote him again. This is in the aftermath of the Gulf Way in 1993:

We live in scoundrel times. This is the dark age of Muslim history, the age of surrender and collaboration, punctuated by madness. The decline of our civilization began in the eighteenth century when, in the intellectual embrace of orthodoxy, we skipped the age of enlightenment and the scientific revolution. In the second half of the twentieth century, it has fallen. I have been a lifelong witness to surrender, and imagined so many times-as a boy in 1948, a young man in 1967 ... and approaching middle age in 1982-that finally we have hit rock bottom, that the next time even if we go down we would manage to do so with a modicum of dignity. Fortunately, I did not entertain even so modest an illusion from Saddam Hussein's loudly proclaimed 'mother of battles."

This on the one hand and on the other the multiple degradations of what he once called the fascism and separatis clearly identifiable, seemingly hostile but symbiotically linked trends, in his Pakistan. Former Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his family, former president General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, and their coteries plundered the land, demoralized the population. They tried to subdue the country I s insurrectionary constituent cultures and failed, but at the price of more blood and treasure. And everywhere, as throughout the Muslim world, they provoked, if they did not actually cause, the rise of Islamism, which as a secularist Eqbal always deplored. 

But ever the fighter and activist, he did not submit in resignation. He wrote more and more in earnest and in 1994 undertook his grand project of founding a new university in Pakistan-Khaldunia, aptly named after the great Arab historian and founder of sociology, Ibn Khaldun. In this project and his enthusiasm for it, Eqbal was no Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but like Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, he took as his motto "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. This was part of the man's rareness, knowing how to rescue the' best available in a tradition without illusion or melodramatic self-dramatization. For him, Islam, Arabism, and American idealism were treasures to be tapped, despite tyrants like Zia ul-Haq and Henry Kissinger, whose manipulations and cold-blooded policies debase and bring down everything they touch.

Edward Said, Introduction to Eqbal Ahmad’s Confronting Empire

[deepjams4]

The 8th March

“This piece I dedicate to my brave daughter who has proved that women can fight all odds in the gravest hours of their lives and come out triumphs and to all other brave women with die hard attitude on this Mother Earth”

I was just sitting and thoughts started knocking me regarding the 8th March or the International Women’s Day! Every year some Symbolic rituals are followed at different fora, and thereafter what is the end result?

My thoughts started posing me serious questions, such as “Do we deserve to celebrate this day and that too in India?” “Do we really have any face to talk about this subject?”

All these thoughts and many other questions started hammering my mind. I started wondering that, just to show to the world, how we talk big and exhibit very idealistic and progressive views, but in reality, believe me, it is something else, or should I say, it is just the opposite or very regressive.

We can well imagine the status, we accord to women , in our country, where in the hospitals, outside x-ray or sonography rooms, it had to be made mandatory, to put notice boards, warning the people to take notice, that, no sex determination tests are being conducted there. This step has been taken, as frequency of female foeticide is increasing day by day, by notoriously resorting to misuse of this tool, for sex determination of unborn child, in mother’s womb, and then premature termination of pregnancy to stop birth of a girl child. It is being shamelessly done in the lust and greed to have boys, who are, unfortunately, considered as the only true heirs, by the families, for their family lineage.

According to the decennial Indian census, the sex ratio in the 0 to 6 age group in India has risen from 102.4 males per 100 females in 1961,to 104.2 in 1980, to 107.5 in 2001, to 108.9 in 2011. The position would have worsened only, in the following years. This is indeed a very the sad outcome because of a son obsessed society.

Unfortunately, this is not the end on the domestic front. If the girls are born, they are subjected to many discriminations. Many of our homes in India, discriminate against the girls in many ways, to make their lives miserable and in frustration, they start developing feelings that the biggest crime in this world is taking birth as a girl child or being a woman.

Besides many others, one of the darkest realities, in most of the ritualistic ridden families with orthodoxical leanings and conservative thinking, is the treatment being mated out to the girls /women during their menstrual cycles.

It is very painful to know that during their menstrual cycles, the girls/women in their homes, are not allowed to touch anything or do any household chores. During that period, they are asked to sleep on the floor (in many cases outside the house), they cannot use regular bathrooms, and food is thrown towards them in separate plates etc, indeed a very heartbreaking shabby treatment that is not even being imparted to beggars or animals.

Are these the symptoms of a modern society where all are considered equal before the law ? The Constitution of our country doesn’t discriminate against any of Its citizens irrespective of their gender.

This practice is prevalent in houses of many well educated families. They are simply not willing to recognise that a menstrual cycle is nothing but a mere regular natural change that occurs in the female reproductive system and that the cycle is very essential for the preparation of the woman for pregnancy for bringing a new life to this world.

These very literate elites, who are very learned and well educated, have upgraded their thinking to accept and adapt to modern ways of living like travelling by air or train or through other mechanical modes of travel leaving carts, have started using modern gadgets or latest technologies, have started dressing up as per latest prevailing fashions, leaving behind traditional dressing sense. But it is sad and unexplainable as to why should they still remain stuck to those outdated and obsolete,medieval orthodox traditions, which have no factual or scientific basis and, for the good of the society at large and the women in particular, why they do not voluntarily opt out of this thinking process? They really need to be persuaded.

All know that if the women do not undergo this process, how will they bring offsprings, and then how will these learned custodians of such traditions, will become grand or great grand parents and ultimately then what will happen to their much sought after, desired or wished family lineages. This old and orthodox, out of date thinking, reflects nothing but sexism and its nothing but fundamentalism. If our society wants to weigh this menstrual cycle in any manner, then this every cycle should be considered, nothing less than the purest, hollowed or sacred phase in a woman’s life and rather than being ill treated, she should instead, be worshiped then, as during that phase, she takes a first step for reaching towards the doorsteps of creation, on which the whole world depends for its existence. In nutshell, if a woman is not there, and if she doesn’t undergo these phases, the world will lose its existence before long.

The rigours of traumatic experiences through which women are subjected,only reflects very poorly on the mindset of our civil society.

But it also pains to know that women are no less culprits in executing most of these excesses and discriminations against women, which are lashed out in the name of social rituals and religious traditions or misplaced religious demands.

The experience of women on the professional front is also not any comfortable. This front is also not displaying any rosy picture. In the hostile atmosphere, at the work places, they are again subjected to harsher and discriminatory treatments. At work places,their capabilities are always being doubted and their commitment as well as their attitude towards work being questioned. The women not only handle work pressure but also have to cope up with commitment and capability questioning strenuous mental pressures thrust on them. It is also often observed that, better placed women employees, often do not make any commendable efforts, to guide or mentor, extend help or assistance to their other women colleagues. Sadly their comaraderie is generally missing. By saying this, it is never meant that women be given any kind of concessions. Rest assured they are capable enough to competently handle all the situations and execute all their jobs assigned to them very professionally. What by saying this, it really means is, they need reassurance, they deserve to be provided with only a congenial and conducive atmosphere at work places which is cohesive and encouraging.

The companionship of man and woman is a testimony of their equal status since time immemorial. The pair of Adam and Eve may be the first of such companions or pairs for some believers. Their names are always taken together in one breath.

Not only the Gods needed Godesses to complete themselves for whom they even went to wars, but also we observe the same, if we just have a cursory glance on lesser mortals. No folk lores of love could be complete and recited, had there been no women, whether it was Romeo Juliet, Shri Farhad, Heer Ranjha, or Shashi Pannu and many more. This only reflects that since time immemorial only a woman completes a man.

But it is very astonishing and antagonising to note that something has really gone wrong in our society, though called civil. It is unexplainable as to why and since when it has become so uncivilised and insensitive towards women riddled with bias and discrimination against them. Not only at homes or work places, but also in many religious places and places of worship, they are being subjected to harsh and biased treatment and discriminations. Men are culprits by their silence.

A question certainly arises , “Are women, children of a lesser God?” If this is not true then why they are subjected to these mistreatments or humiliations? Why they are not given equal opportunities to prove their capabilities and competence?

The day, shedding our all inhibitions, we really start respecting the woman and her womanhood, the day we stop discriminating against her and be unbiased to acknowledge her sacrifices and contributions to the humanity, the day we start considering the importance of her role in the society, only and only that day we shall be truly earning the right and be worthy of celebrating International Women’s day in true sense and spirit. Otherwise, it shall end up, just being another ritual.

The women also have a bigger responsibility towards other women. They also need to play important roles of a mentor, a guide, a teacher, a philosopher and a friend for their fellow women friends, colleagues and relatives.

In the fond hopes of good times for our Indian womenfolks “Wish you all a very happy International Women’s Day!”

[tacitcantos]

That Time The Dresden Files Was Still Accidentally Racist

Link to Part 1

In my last video I looked out how Jim Butcher’s Changes contains some troubling stereotypes about the maya, painting them as violent and their gods as demon vampires of the red court. I highly suggest going back and checking that out before continuing this video. In this one I’m going to look at why it’s troubling to cast Christianity as a positive and heroic force pitted against mayan vampires.

The Christian god exists in the Dresden Files universe, but has a very hands off presence. He does exert his power through subtle means though, and every Christian character, institution, or item in the series is unambiguously good and lacking in any kind of flaw. In Changes they’re also all positioned directly and explicitly against the red court.

The most blatant example of this comes in the final battle of the book at Chichen Itza. In the Dresden Files universe there are three holy swords that are physically incapable of being used for evil without shattering. One of Harry’s allies wields one in the battle, and at one point becomes possessed by a Christian angel or holy spirit, and shouts up at the red court vampires of outer night:

"False gods! Pretenders! Usurpers of the truth! Destroyers of faith, of families, of lives, of children! For your crime against the Mayans, against the people of the world, now will you answer! Your time has come! Face judgement Almighty!"

--Ch. 46, Changes

It’s important to place Changes’ representation of christianity in the broader context of media. In the last video I talked about how while human sacrifice was a legitimate portion of mesoamerican culture and religion, it’s overrepresented in media to the point where human sacrifice becomes the entirety of pre-columbian mesoamerica's identity and cultural legacy.

To illustrate why this is problematic, imagine for a moment if every representation of christianity focused on it’s obsession with sacrifice and suffering. And christianity does have just as much an obsession with both as the maya or aztec religions: Growing closer to God through suffering is a key aspect of christianity: it’s why martyr’s are so celebrated and turned into saints, why until the modern day mortification of the flesh through wearing a hair coat or fasting or engaging in self flagellation wasn’t unheard of among the clergy, and why even in the modern day mother Teresa believed in the beauty of suffering and may have withheld painkillers from patients in her care because of it.

And while drawing a thorned rope through the foreskin of your penis like mayan kings did for the prosperity of their kingdom rightfully sounds horrific, the ritual mutilation of genitals is one of the core tenets of another Abrahamic faith: circumcision in the jewish religion is not just a custom, but an actual covenant and contract with god.

But Christianity’s obsession with suffering isn’t something that’s reflected or engaged with in popular media. We may see Jesus on the cross in artistic depictions, but obsession with suffering doesn’t permeate and define Christianity in fiction the way human sacrifice permeates and defines mesoamerican culture and religion in fiction. For example, The Dresden Files puts a magical spin on only the positive aspects of Christianity, not the ones obsessed with suffering. As we discussed, christian characters and holy objects are unambiguously good in The Dresden Files.

These are the representations Jim Butcher chose, the side of christianity he decided to legitimize by giving magical weight in the books. In his fictional world we see vampire maya performing human sacrifices to quench their blood thirst, but we don’t see monks with backs bloody from the scourge performing dark rituals for Jesus, don’t see angels who want to cause mass suffering to kindle the light of god in people’s hearts, don’t see vampire conquistadors crossing to the new world so they can slake their thirst in the blood of millions.

That last image of conquistadors crossing to the new world and committing atrocities just so that a few souls could be saved through conversion? It’s not actually as fictitious as you might assume.

To fully understand why it’s problematic to cast christians as good guys against evil mayan gods, we have to look again at context and history. While nowadays we tend to think of the religious aspect of the conquistadors as a flimsy pretext in their true hunt for gold, the conquistadors were actually devoutly religious, and very much saw themselves as instruments of God. Here’s a passage from a book called 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus that explains it well:

Famously, the conquistador Bernal Díaz de Castillo ticked off the reasons he and others joined Cortés: “to serve God and His Majesty [the king of Spain], to give light to those who were in darkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do.” In Díaz’s list, spiritual and material motivations were equally important. Cortés was constantly preoccupied by the search for gold, but he also had to be restrained by the priests accompanying him from promulgating the Gospel in circumstances sure to anger native leaders. After the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish court and intellectual elite were convulsed with argument for a century about whether the conversions were worth the suffering inflicted. Many believed that even if Indians died soon after conversion, good could still occur.

--Pg 143

The conquistadors very much considered there to be a moral dimension in their actions, that they could save the souls of the maya from false idols. And in the world of the Dresden Files, they were right: the christian god was good, the maya were ruled by demons, and no matter how many had to die along the way, the conquistadors saved them.

The book never explicitly states this, but it’s the only logical conclusion to draw from the world Jim Butcher’s created. It’s not a leap: it’s all there on the page, validating the atrocities the Spanish committed. It’s the equivalent of writing that there was a cabal of evil jewish wizards that really were manipulating post war Germany, or that africans really were half ape creatures that worshiped dark spirits.

And look, there’s always going to be issues imposing supernatural elements on the real world, on putting a magical spin to real events. Doesn’t it always invalidate real world triumphs and tragedies to say it was really magic at work or some secret society? I don’t think so, but I do think it matters how you do it. To illustrate what I mean, let’s look at another fantasy book that has vampires superimposed onto the real world: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, 70% of whose premise is right there in the title.

In the book, ante-bellum plantation owners were in reality vampires who enslaved black africans to use as cattle. So why isn’t that problematic, if making mayan gods vampire is? The answer is history, and what side of the it the story is taking. While it can be argued that it’s problematic for a white writer to be appropriating black suffering for his fantasy novel and that turning the cruelty of real humans into monsters lets them off the moral hook, the underlying thematic message is sound: African chattel slavery was bad, and the people who did it were bad.

And that thematic message about slave owners being bad is a message we still need to hear because it’s not an open and shut case in America today that the south were bad guys or even that slavery was bad.

And it matters that Jim Butcher is essentially putting a magical spin on racist conquistador propaganda, because the Dresden files is a hugely popular book series: as any of the covers are happy to tell you, Jim Butcher is a 1# New York Times best selling author. Changes isn’t an english class short story that will be read by fifteen people, it’s a book in a massively popular series that was read by millions. When a book reaches that popularity level, everything in it has an impact.

And what is the impact of Changes? Obviously it’s impossible to track, but as I mentioned in the last video the maya are by no means a dead people or culture, with around six million living in central America today. What’s the impact on public perception of them from a book like this? Just as it isn’t an open and shut case for some people whether black slavery was bad, it isn’t an open and shut case whether hispanics broadly, and central Americans specifically, are culturally valuable. Not when refugees fleeing violence riddled countries are caged, not when the president repeatedly uses racist dog whistles to refer to them.

Like I said in the last video, I don’t think Jim Butcher did any of this on purpose. I think the air we breath is filled with culturally and racially problematic ideas and he didn’t question them: of course the maya gods were violent, of course the christian god is good, and isn’t the idea of vampire maya just too badass to pass up?

Ironically if he’d stopped to think about his bias’ Butcher could’ve easily written Changes in a way that would’ve sidestepped most of the issue without even having to fundamentally alter the plot. One way to do it would’ve been to shift the red court’s origin to conquistadors who came to the new world for slaughter.

It could even be a plot element that Quetzalcoatl or a proxy of his shows up in the final battle to help Dresden. I mean, it’s not that much of a reach: in the original book Odin shows up to fight in the battle at Chichen Itza.

None of this is to say you can’t like the Dresden Files, or even Changes specifically. Hell, I got caught up in Changes as I was rereading it for this video and forgot just how exciting and well paced the books are. But if fantasy means anything, then we shouldn’t pretend it doesn’t when we run into something we don’t like, shouldn’t simultaneously say it can inspire us and that it’s just mindless fun, shouldn’t shy away from the problematic aspects of it. If anything we should engage with it more, expect more from those authors and stories we love and value.

[prettylittlecostumers]

Moody Monday: Top 5 Upcoming (and just released) Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books On My Radar.

 One does not simply read too many books. I simply don’t function without one (or ten) good books on my nightstand. The day I’m able to replace all my furniture for piles of books I’ll have reached a lifetime goal.

Above: Me, with my books. Mine. My own. Hoarding much? (Meme source: quickmeme.com)

No, seriously, reading opens a window into such wonderful places for me. It’s like flying.  And depending on how long it’s been since you guys first bumped into my ramblings, you have probably guessed by now that Fantasy (along with history) is my thing.

So I’m alwys watching for new releases, and so far, these are the upcoming (or just released) sci-fi and fantasy books that I wanna get my hands on. There were many releases that are part of longer series, but those would get the post very confusing and I wanted to keep things simple. So, for this list I focused on solo novels or first chapters only. Here we go:

Top 5 Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels I wanna read right now:

5 - The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang

From Amazon: “When Rin aced the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies—it was a shock to everyone: to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who believed they’d finally be able to marry her off and further their criminal enterprise; and to Rin herself, who realized she was finally free of the servitude and despair that had made up her daily existence. That she got into Sinegard—the most elite military school in Nikan—was even more surprising.But surprises aren’t always good.Because being a dark-skinned peasant girl from the south is not an easy thing at Sinegard. Targeted from the outset by rival classmates for her color, poverty, and gender, Rin discovers she possesses a lethal, unearthly power—an aptitude for the nearly-mythical art of shamanism. Exploring the depths of her gift with the help of a seemingly insane teacher and psychoactive substances, Rin learns that gods long thought dead are very much alive—and that mastering control over those powers could mean more than just surviving school.”

R.F.Kuang’s Chinese fantasy epic sounds very interesting. My kind of Fantasy is the one that has history in the mix, and her approach to the Opium Wars and Turn of the Century China mixes nowadays dilemmas - like bullying - with shamanism and traditional Chinese culture that is still largely unexplored in western literature. I can’t wait to dive into this one!

4 - Semiosis by Sue Burke

From Amazon: “Colonists from Earth wanted the perfect home, but they’ll have to survive on the one they found. They don’t realize another life form watches...and waits... Only mutual communication can forge an alliance with the planet's sentient species and prove that humans are more than tools.“

Again, Amazon’s description falls short of what I’ve heard. I’m fascinated with languages and linguistics. I’m a Tolkien fan right? What drives me to this “Lost in Space” type of story is exactly the part that language has to play in it. But I can’t say more until I actually read it...

3 - The Feed by Nick Clark Windo.

From Nerd Much?:  “What would happen if every thought, emotion, and idea were instantaneously shared through a massive international network? What would a global society built upon this look like? And what would happen if this network vanished?That is exactly what happens in Nick Clark Windo’s close-to-home sci-fi, The Feed. Kate and Tom had kept their use of the Feed to a minimum while it existed — but when their six-year-old daughter vanishes in a world suddenly disconnected, they must use whatever means and resources they can to find her. The world is filled with disease and danger overnight, and people change when their lives are changed in such a fundamental way. Don’t miss out on this terrifying, near-future sci-fi tale of family, humanity, and massive change.”

Well, this is just my cup of tea. I think considering Cambridge Analytica, and all the Facebook data collecting fiasco (which gave the world the most dangerously spoiled manchild to ever sit in such a high position of power, among many other Alt-right “gifts” around the globe), “The Feed might just be the most relevant book released in 2018. That’s it for my preview. I’ll tell you more when I read it.

2 - The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander.

From Amazon: “The Only Harmless Great Thing is a heart-wrenching alternative history by Brooke Bolander that imagines an intersection between the Radium Girls and noble, sentient elephants.In the early years of the 20th century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island. These are the facts.Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to be righted. Prepare yourself for a wrenching journey that crosses eras, chronicling histories of cruelty both grand and petty in search of meaning and justice”.

From what I’ve heard so far, Amazon’s description doesn’t do this masterpiece justice. Bolander mixed Alt-history (the Radium Girls) with fantasy (The elephant culture) to weave a powerful female narrative. I know I’ll suffer, I’ll cry, I’ll be furious, and I can’t wait. It’s our knowledge, our struggle, our thirst for change after all.

1 - The Fall of Gondolin by Christopher Tolkien (Ed.)

I’ve been waiting and hoping for this one since “The Children of Húrin” came out! The Fall of Gondolin is one of the most compelling narratives within “The Silmarillion“. Morgoth and Ulmo, the Lord of Waters, stand against each other through Tuor, Ulmo’s chosen messenger, and king Turgon’s pride. The tragic downfall of Turgon’s dream-like hidden city deserved this closer look and I will be suffering ‘till my copy arrives! August 30th can’t come soon enough! Here’s a lil something to help pass the time ‘till then... Blind Guardian’s own retelling of the Fall of Gondolin aka “Mirror Mirror”.

[mood-report]

ESG Is Financial Veganism

The girl at the health food store with the dreadlocks and the pretty eyes leaned closer after I asked my usual question.

“I just had nine fillings,” she said in a low voice.

It was my vegan question. The same question I always ask them.

How are your teeth?

They spill their truth like water. Never any anger, only relief. As if they just need to confess to someone.

“Have you thought about slowly adding back some meat?”

“I’m ready to start, like right now.”

That’s how quickly a vegan can quit being a vegan.

When it stops working.

This is how social mood can change in an instant, because what happens at a micro-personal level occurs the same way at the macro-societal level.

Just like that.

The study of real-time social mood is about trying to pinpoint when these flashpoints happen.

This is why I increasingly view the current ESG phenomenon as nothing more than a social mood by-product of The Age of ZIRP.

I’m seeing the wholesale institutionalization of ESG as simply an extreme psychological manifestation that occurs near the end of long trends, such as passive investing or Modern Monetary Theory.

My thesis is that Zero Interest Rate Policy eventually causes tick-the-box malinvestment the same way that veganism is often a tick-the-box diet choice.

Sure, ESG investors, like vegans, have their hearts in the right place. Who doesn’t want a cleaner, nicer world. No problems there.

But what about the unintended consequences, such as a mouthful of cavities, or sky-high energy prices?

Wait...won’t green energy mean free energy?

Not really.

Green energy won’t even be clean energy.

This is far beyond the irony of a Tesla being refueled by coal-generated electricity.

As far as the Davos crowd is concerned, “green” could simply mean that a well-funded polluter purchased enough carbon offsets to qualify as a “green” company, thus “ESG” for anyone playing tick-the-box investing from home

Let the Mom & Pop companies (if any survive) worry about complying with evermore ESG mandates if they want access to working capital. Big polluters buy offsets, baby.

As the Davos crowd increasingly guilt-shames the world toward their stated goals of global de-carbonization by de-funding fossil fuel projects, and as former Goldman Sachs executives electrify and digitally tokenize commodities as a test case for then tokenizing everything (in order to replace passports with global social-credit scores based on what you consume from “womb-to-tomb”), we could soon see how quickly an ESG investor can quit being an ESG investor.

How might that happen?

When it stops working.

The law of unintended consequences.

I once lived in the California desert as a raw foodist for a while to heal an illness, which basically meant I was vegan by default.

I got over the illness but nearly died trying. And one of my teeth had developed a small chip in it from the lack of nutrition.

My neighbor, an Ayurvedic teacher, intervened in his own quiet spiritual way.

“Dude, you look like you’re gonna die,” he said.

Even with my best tan ever, I had just been thinking the same thing.

It had stopped working.

I was the king of all-you-can-eat Indian buffets after that. Chicken Tikka Masala was my middle name.

And my tooth miraculously remineralized.

So consider a scenario where rapid de-carbonization causes energy, base metals, and rare earth metals prices to skyrocket as ESG mandates cause supply shortages just as post-Covid energy demand increases.

Electricity prices skyrocket.

Gas prices skyrocket.

Food prices skyrocket.

iPhone and Beyond Meat prices skyrocket.

Well meaning people are easily sucked into the deep-digital, fully electrified “open society” fairy tale on the theory that no borders, no oil, and no privacy will mean no more wars, strife, pollution, and eventually, no more poverty.

Pure utopian bullshit.

The wars will be fought by you to regain your freedom.

The strife will be yours.

The pollution will continue. (China, through its influence over the Paris Accord, will maintain its current carbon emissions until 2030, while the USA and others must impose growth-stalling emissions curbs immediately.)

The poverty will be yours, thanks to slower growth coupled with skyrocketing prices straining already hobbled economies and citizenry.

If you don’t comply with the continued demands of the Davos crowd, you will be deleted.

Since there would be no cash, you won’t be able to buy anything.

You won’t escape because you won’t own a car, and your social-credit score, suddenly being zero, wouldn’t allow you to.

And in a world with no borders, there’s no “place” to escape to anyway.

Such a fully digital, fully electrified world would also be fabulously fragile. What happens when the electricity goes out?

Grid failure would be feared more than nuclear war.

The potential for such a dystopian scenario, no matter how remote (yet openly fantasized about by Davosian devotees), is why I’m viewing current fundamentals in commodities as extremely symbolic of a world that will eventually be forced to re-learn natural laws that can’t be rescinded.

More on this theme later (including how Bitcoin and Tesla fit into it), but the price of commodities being the cheapest ever relative to the S&P 500 may be trying to tell us something.

[writingwithcolor]

Pluralistic distinctions in Hinduism

Hi everybody!  If you follow my personal blog, you may have noticed I've been busy becoming a doctor, which unfortunately meant I had to be effectively dead to the world for a couple of months.

But now that's over, and I'd like to address a couple of points that have come across the WWC space in that time.  Some of these are unanswered questions on Indian history and Hinduism and some relate to questions that have been answered already that our followers have raised some commentary on, so if you asked a question about any of those topics, please read through this post as it's going to cover a lot of ground.

One question (directed at me in particular), asked how it is possible for a person to be both a Hindu and an atheist.  Another raised some concerns about the view of the sacredness of cows in modern Hinduism, and the intersection of cow-veneration and caste.  I think both of these intertwine and ultimately come together in the same place.

To start, let me deconstruct the basic structure of a common or garden Hindu myth:

Indra and/or Brahma: *does something stupid*

Indra and/or Brahma: I screwed up.

Indra and/or Brahma: Halp.

Vishnu: *concocts elaborate plan to restore order to the world, usually involving shapeshifting, logical technicalities, and possibly orchestrating a war or two*

If that looks silly to you, compare it to the central story of Christianity:

Humanity: *does lots of stupid stuff*

God: Y'all are screwed up.

God. You need halp.

God: *concocts elaborate plan to save mankind, involving shapeshifting, logical technicalities, and ritually sacrificing himself to himself*

Please resist the temptation to come at me for this, literally everyone.  I'm casting everything in deliberately silly terms, because if the Hindu myth looks silly to you and the Christian myth does not, you're merely getting a sense of what I did growing up, only in reverse.

Nontheistic Hinduism   

If you take the words of what we commonly call "religion" literally, you miss a great part of the picture, and I believe this is true for a literalist/fundamentalist and for a nonbeliever.  When we look at a religion, we must examine it as a historically-situated phenomenon, because that's what it is.  A religion doesn't just arrive one day fully-formed, even in the case of a single founder, which Hinduism doesn't even have.

"Religion" comes from the Latin religio, meaning "bond" or "reverence."  In a broader sense, it means "obligation," "sense of right," or "conscientiousness."  Already it seems obvious how subjective those terms are.  You may have heard of the "Just World hypothesis," which underpins most religious thinking, in that if we just do the right thing, destiny/fate/the world/the next world will naturally pan out in our favor.  The trouble with that, even if you believe it's true, is that you're still stuck trying to figure out what "the right thing" is.  Enter sacred texts, which seem to be formulas for the right behavior and belief, and it looks to many like we've got an answer to this problem.

If only it were that simple.  "The right thing" turns out to be different in every text you read, because these texts were written in different times and places by different people who, if they found some way of living that they thought was "the right thing," found something that worked for them in that time and place, but wouldn't necessarily function for anyone else anywhere or anywhen else.

Our ancestors may have promulgated a lot of BS that has since been proven wrong, but they weren't stupid.  They at least tried to make sense of the world but due to environmental factors and limited horizons around the world, those explanations they came up with, in sacred texts and practices and rituals, differ from each other in crucial ways.

But they do say something about how humans have viewed the universe and our place in it over time.  That's what I find compelling: the multitude of ways that our ancestors attempted to explain the workings of the universe.  I think the comparison and contrast tell us much more about ourselves, how we work, and our place in the world than any religious dogma.  What's cool is the pluralistic thought and argumentation and attempts to analyze real phenomena that might just happen to be wrapped in a context that we in the modern world view as religious but in ancient times it was just how a given group of people lived.  Personally, I couldn't care less about the specifics of salvation and divine grace and devotion.

So, yeah, I'm really not interested in hearing about how great and liberating your religion is.  That's great and I'm happy for you, but I really want nothing less than to participate.  Stop trying to convert me, please.

People often argue that being confronted with death makes you religious.  I would beg to differ.  I've dealt with a lot of death, especially in recent years, and if anything it's made me less theistic, not more, but also more thoughtful, more nuanced, and more appreciative of family and human connection.

With such an attitude, in a world constantly strained with tensions between different religions, and between the religious and non-religious, it's difficult to sit comfortably in any single group identity.  So, yes, I very often feel like I have no spiritual and political bedfellows other than people who've been dead for 1300 years and will forever dwell in anonymity.

In that sense, I've been lucky to have the background I do.  Although history is full of heterodox views springing up all over the world, in India many of them were recorded and never fully stamped out by political entities that favored the orthodox.  I have to chalk this up to the origins of the thing we call "Hinduism" being a very organic synthesis of elements from South, Southeast, East, and Central Eurasia, which all brewed together in the Indian subcontinent into a chaotic patchwork of tribal and communal distinctions in practice and belief that were, until about 1 CE, probably far more fluid than they were rigid.  It's always been impossible to enforce a singular belief system in that part of the world, so in that mix, people believed in all sorts of gods, and some of them believed in none.

There have been codified schools of thought that explicitly denied the validity of established rituals, the existence of and even the human need for belief in gods.

I talk about a few of them here.

Some quotes:

There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world. Nor do the actions of the four castes, orders, and others, produce any real effect.

- a verse attributed to the Cārvāka school

God is unproved.

- Sāṁkhyapravacana Sūtra, 1.92

But, after all, who knows, and who can say

Whence it all came, and how creation happened?

- Nāsadiya Sūkta, verse 6 (Rig Veda, 10.129)

Yes, despite the stereotype of India as a land of spiritual supernaturalism, explicitly and implicitly nontheistic belief systems have existed there since nearly the beginning of recorded history.  Sanskrit has a larger non-theistic literature than Ancient Greek or Latin.  "Hinduism" became the catch-all term for the collective indigenous beliefs of the Indian subcontinent, regardless of particulars.  The terms  "Hindu" and "India" come from the same derivation (referring to the Sindhu, or Indus, River in the northwest—but I won't assert that the two terms mean the same thing, as that is categorically untrue).  Therefore to claim that atheism is somehow "un-Hindu" is historically, anthropologically, and linguistically ignorant.  While perhaps unusual, disbelief in gods and the supernatural is as valid a position in "Hinduism" as any other.  It does mean, though, that it also coexists under the same label as its polar opposites—strong theism, superstition, and virulent fundamentalism.

Cows and Hinduism 

  This tension can be seen in some of the issues surrounding the position of the cow in modern Hinduism.  This potentially arose in the first place for secular reasons—it is true that cows probably acquired some status of reverence because of their utility in tilling fields, providing milk, dung for fertilizer, etc.  But meat is also a pretty useful product.  Did you know that modern India is the world's 5th largest beef producer, 7th largest beef consumer, and largest beef exporter?  All this despite legislation against cow/bull/bullock slaughter in half the country.  Plenty of societies through history have both valued the cow's utility while alive and dead.  Why the special status in Hinduism?

Cows have always been useful animals, but also more expensive to keep and maintain, compared to other herd animals such as sheep or goats, so they became a symbol of wealth in ancient Asia.  This association is thought to be very old, potentially dating to before the Indo-European expansion.  As they were expensive, only those at the top of the social heap could afford to keep many, and in ancient India, that was the Brahmin caste.  If you want to keep your cows, you can't have the possibility that someone's going to poach it for dinner, and so casting the cow as a respected or venerated creature is a pretty effective way to do that.  This also means that you get to keep your symbol of wealth and status and the poors don't get to have any.

As cow sacrifice and beef consumption is actually very well-attested during the Vedic period, what probably happened is that around 800 BCE, with the ascendancy of the Kuru Kingdom and the codification of rituals at a state and urban level, beef-eating began to be disfavored by lawgivers.  Heterodox movements at the time, which would give rise to Buddhism and Jainism, also emphasized vegetarianism and as these were becoming popular among all social classes, the orthodox priesthood adopted certain hallmarks (like vegetarianism) which had the side effect (intentional or otherwise) of making avoidance of cow slaughter into a status symbol.  So previously enthusiastic meat-eaters became strict vegetarians.  Other non-Vedic elements made their way into the Brahminical religion around this time, such as the cycle of birth and death, and these ideas are regarded as a characteristic of Hinduism today. However, as the influence Brahminical orthodoxy was limited to a core in north-central India, around the modern Delhi area, beef-eating continued as a practice on the frontier.  Today, Nepal, the most Hindu country in the world, consumes beef quite freely.

As mentioned before, you can argue that "Hinduism" isn't really a single thing.  When someone says that Hindus don't eat beef, what they mean is that certain varieties of Hindus don't eat beef.  Some Hindus don't out of religious reasons.  Some hold no religious belief against it but don't do it out of habit or tradition or other ethical consideration.  Some religious Hindus thrive on beef.  Beef is typically a nutritionally-dense, readily-available food for poor and working class people, including those from disadvantaged caste groups.  The act of condemning them for their eating habits or taking away a primary source of nutrition using a religious excuse is an act that can't be disconnected from its historical and sociocultural underpinnings discussed in the previous paragraphs.  An attitude toward the cow that may have started as an innocent economic consideration has become laden with a ton of cultural baggage about as complex as the history of the subcontinent itself.

I don't eat beef myself.  I've eaten it before, and it usually made me feel a bit ill.  I guess descent from countless generations of vegetarian Brahmins left my gut unprepared for that particular kind of meat.  Beef production also uses too much carbon for my comfort and I once ate a hamburger in front of a cow and it turns out they have very judgey eyes.  I'm holding out for vat-grown meat, personally.

However, when states in India pass beef bans, they do it on the grounds that it's an honored animal in Hinduism, and while that's true, there's a historical and social context behind that and not all varieties of "Hindu" actually observe that prohibition.  Politicians are doing it cynically to drum up support among a certain contingent of "values voters" so they can keep their jobs in the next election cycle.

Regarding the place of religion and cows in modern India, many people, intimately familiar with the realities on the ground, have written on the topic better than I ever could.  With the arrival of a new wave of invaders and colonizers, Europeans and the British in particular, identities shifted yet again, and those echoes are felt all over the modern republic.  Here's a good read. 

Hinduism and Pluralism   

When we take care to not drop all adherents of a particular religion into a sack with the worst ones, we need to remember to extend that courtesy to all religions, because all religions have assholes trying to make everyone around them think like them, and those are the people we usually end up hearing about on the news.  The choice to eat or not eat beef (or anything) is a personal one that, while informed by society and background and culture, isn't solely determined by it.  A claim, by a Hindu or non-Hindu, that any particular thing is "the Hindu way" is to fundamentally misunderstand the history of the thing that we've come to call "Hinduism."

I don't think it's a coincidence that societies like the Gupta Empire, the Tang Dynasty, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Italian Renaissance are regarded as "Golden Ages" and were also more open to pluralism and heterodoxy than the societies before and after them.  Scholarship, philosophy, and science always flower when different views speak to and challenge each other freely and openly, and when they challenge the established power structure, even unsuccessfully.  If you can't withstand a robust challenge to your worldview, then you're not growing, and if you're not growing, you're failing.  If you have an allegiance or affection to a particular identity, then you owe it to yourself and those like you not to let the ones you call your own succumb to the worst among them.

So, I'm happy, comfortable, and proud to claim the label of Hindu even if I believe humans made demons and humans made gods, and that the stories I grew up with are just (really cool) fantasy.  I do it because the Hindu right would like everyone to believe that there is a single, homogenous Hinduism that never actually existed, and that is a view that I find at best impoverished and at worst geopolitically dangerous.  By claiming the label "Hindu" when I refuse supernaturalism and pseudohistory, I am able to do a small part to render that worldview false.

--Mod Nikhil

[pumpumdemsugah]

It's not regressive to talk about vaginas or the like but the issue is people associating them with womenhood when there are many trans men/nb people who will very much live with vaginas for the rest if their lives. Trans people just dont generally deserve to be unincluded or discouraged away from seeking medical attention. It really is life or death for a lot of people so it's easy for some to get worked up to the point they're scarcely representing the point they're trying to make.

there’s no short way i can put this so im not going to try lol  (i did a bit)

i think it’s dumb as shit to suggest  you should never associate those things with womanhood  when there’s an entire history surrounding it, laws, abusive social dynamics and way of treating you that comes with it. regardless of what would be the best way to think of womanhood this is one exists now and fucks up lives now so some will want to talk about things the way its happening it and i dont see the point in always dabbling in the how it should be at the cost of what it really is like. 

many already understand or at least part understand themselves that way because of what was mentioned before. there’s lots of ways i think of myself as a woman and my body is a part of it in a way that’s caused me a lot of strife.  it’s not just a simple association but is the basis for patriarchy in almost all male dominated so it’s unreasonable to think its unrelated to womanhood (to whatever degree) especially when i think about the brutality done against my enslaved foremothers and how those things still impact the Caribbean and has formed west indian womanhood. it’s impossible when i think about how traumatising i found puberty and how irresponsible the adults around me handled my years of distress at my new body by reassuring me id become fuckable. those experiences happened because of my body and how it’s seen and because of a particular way of seeing womanhood. im not suggesting i or anyone like me ought to be the only one that gets the mic but im going to be there  the things im uncomfortable with about my body & experiences are still my story.  for me i dont need to be comfortable with something to say its apart of me or i would of found a less stressing way of naming my sexuaity than jumping titty first in lesbian  

there are going to be topics that for different reasons (if its not just being a general ass or self centered dickhead)  some may find hard to be around and  its important to take that on but the discussion of oppression  and the whats and hows or isn’t a comfortable a task and shouldn’t be measured by if its validating but if its dealing with the truth of people’s lived experiences and sometimes doing that means looking at more types of lived experiences. while i do believe in honesty that might make everyone uncomfortable, im also not for being crass. 

 people back themselves into a corner and think the only way to show how something is ignored and pressing  is to act as if anything that’s more well known is a non-issue and unfortunately people directly and indirectly do this and when you’re painting women’s issues centred around pregnancy, vaginas etc like that and calling it all white feminism or white girls being dumb that’s a fundamental problem that’s literally bog standard misogyny parading as critical thought. it’s gotten to the point where popular recent ideas would be harmful to the women in my family back in the caribbean (in their Black- got pulled out of school in their mid teens glory) so somewhere along the way it stopped being around calling out unhelpful, dumb white feminist shit and just being repulsive and disconnected from reality. even if period art is not my thing you have a right to make it given the mess that is society. i made those post cause those things happen over and over again. telling people that  misogyny and sexism 101 are still misogyny and sexism genuinely needs to be said. if it was isolated thing then i wouldn’t care. it’s not just “getting worked up” but there are people doing this and are heavily involved with the feminist movement(s) and need to get their mutharass in order and talk to people outside their  echo chamber of a feminist group or friendship group saying they’re feminist obsessed with looking intersectional but being so in thought or action…nah 

[zenosanalytic]

Empire of Cotton: A Gloss

So I got Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert last year, and I finally started reading it after finishing The Fifth Season earlier this week and, while I’m not far into it yet, there’s just so much important stuff in here that needs to be understood and there’s this one particular section which I think really encapsulates that with its sheer Density of plain-spoken busting of capitalist myths, but it’s a bit long, so I’m just going to share it below the cut, and say my piece:

“...For decades, representatives of the chartered European East India companies had complained about the ability of Indian weavers to sell their goods to competing European companies, competing Indian banias, traders from other regions of the world, or even to private European merchants who operated independently of the companies, creating competition that raised prices. Profitability could be increased only if the Europeans could force weavers to work for their respective companies alone. Monopolizing the market became the way to drive down weavers’ incomes and drive up the selling price of particular goods.”

So just keeping score, according to these cotton merchants, the actual “founders” of global capitalism let us not forget: Open Markets, Competition, and Free Labor = Bad; Monopolies and Compelled Labor = Good. So much for the foundations of Capitalism.

“European traders were helped in securing cotton cloth in the quantity and quality they needed, and at the price they desired, because their business practices were reinforced with political control of increasingly extensive Indian territories. They came not just as traders, but increasingly as rulers. By the 1730s, the Dhaka factory, for example, hosted a contingent of military personnel and arms to protect the company’s interests. Most dramatically, by 1765 the British East India Company---a group of merchants---ruled Bengal, and in the decades thereafter expanded its control over other South Asian territories. Such territorial dreams were furthered by British merchants’ increasing investment in the raw cotton trade between India and China by the late eighteenth century, which made them hope for the integration of western Indian cotton tracts into East India Company territories as well. This assertion of private political power by a state-chartered company over distant territories was a revolutionary reconceptualization of economic might. States shared sovereignty with private entrepreneurs.”

Two Points: 1)Local states(many of them aristocratic private states of their own) lacked the strength or integrity(military, economic, and institutional), and the UK government lacked the interest, to resist or restrain the East India Company, and so it came to dominate, it established its own Private State, and the “British Empire” eventually rose from this process of private conquests eventually ceded to an initially quiescent, though tacitly supportive, central government. Private States thrive where Public States are weak. 2)The EIC could never have succeeded at this without the tacit approval of the UK central government, expressed in; allowing its inactive soldiers, sailors, and ships to sell themselves as mercenaries to the EIC; allowing its armories to sell arms and ammunition to the EIC; allowing the EIC to use its charter to do things which its charter did not authorize, such as selling shares(which means issuing debt; the two are the same thing on a balance-sheet) to generate funds to then bribe local polities, either to fight for the Company, or “just” to corrupt local governance. A possible larger takeaway: Wealth sickens societies as much as it does individuals.

“Among many other things, this new combination of economic and political power enabled European merchants to gain greater control over textile manufacturing, especially by increasing control over weavers. Along the Coromandel coast the influential Indian merchants who acted as brokers between Indian weavers and European exporters increasingly were replaced by agents who were under much greater control of the European companies already in the seventeenth century. In Surat, which, like Bengal, would fall under company rule in 1765, the Board of Trade of the governor-general expressed in 1795 its dissatisfaction with

“the system in practice hitherto of having a Contractor who has not himself any immediate connection with the manufacturers or weavers, but engages in subordinate contracts with a large number of Native Merchants of little property or probity and though bound in responsibility, are not competent to pay a penalty if forfeited, and than in fact the goods never came into their possession, and apprehend that the difficulties now existing, will not be removed but with its abolition or very material alteration”

Removing the Indian middlemen promised foreign merchants better control over production and the ability to secure greater quantities of piece goods. To that end, the East India Company tried to bypass independent Indian banias who had historically connected them to the weavers by giving that responsibility to Indian “agents” whom they put on their payroll. The Board of Trade in London instructed the governor-general in great detail how to recast the system of purchasing cotton cloth, hoping thereby to “recover to the Company that genuine knowledge of the business,” and thus acquire more cloth at cheaper prices by implementing the “grand Fundamental principle of the Agency System.”

So here we see that private EIC state in South Asia dictating, through its “Board of Trade”(on-the-nose, I know, but reality’s writers have never been all that subtle), that India’s natural level of cotton production(how much cotton its growers&weavers choose to make at the price on offer) and natural balance of trade re: cotton(how India’s merchants choose to distribute that production to buyers based on the prices they offer) is neither high enough nor enough in the favor of British Industry(meaning: “willing to sell cotton and cotton-products to the EIC at artificially below-market prices”). Here is that private state of the East India Company(chartered by the UK central gov as all corporations are chartered by their governments. Because they are legal creations) stating its desire to force the people of India to act contrary to how they choose to act through law and regulation, solely because it would increase the profits of the East India Company in the cotton trade, and colluding with the central government back in England on how to do so(based, in part, on their similar promotion/subjection of the weaving trades in unguilded Lancashire). Tell me again how Capitalism loves Free Markets and Choice, and hates Bureaucratic “Red-Tape”.

“Through its Indian agents the company now made direct advances to weavers, something the British had not done in earlier years, which was greatly aided by territorial control and the attendant political authority. While weavers had always depended on credit, the novel insertion of Europeans into these credit networks along with the efforts of European merchants to monopolize economic control of particular parts of India made them ever more dependent on the company. Already by the middle of the eighteenth century, European companies sent these agents deep into the manufacturing centers in the countryside near Dhaka, agents who increasingly set the terms of production and thus succeeded in lowering prices. In the 1790s the East India Company even encouraged weavers to relocate to Bombay and produce cloth there---all with the goal of being able to supervise them better “without being extorted by the servants of the Rajah of Travacone”.”

First: Yes, modern Capitalism did not invent credit[1]. Second, India’s cotton industry initially worked on a “putting-out system”(the book deals with this in greater detail; this was the basic system for cotton production everywhere) and European capitalists sought to dismantle this system(as opposed to supporting its development, as in Lancashire. Again; the book deals with this in greater depth) explicitly because they did not control it, Indians did, and so could not use it to abuse labor. Third, here we see how credit and materials-access can be used to control people and restrict their choices, especially when those extending credit(specifically to access materials) also dictate your access to customers[2]. Fourth, considering how all of this was about controlling the native cotton industry of India and stealing from India producers and merchants its profits: Tell me again how India was an “Underdeveloped”, “Uncivilized”, place and culture, “Unimproved by Science or Art” that needed “The White Christian Man” to save it from its own “Benighted Backwardsness”.

“The encroachment of British power on the subcontinent meant that weavers increasingly lost their ability to set prices for cloth. According to the historian Sinnappah Arasaratnam “they could not produce for any customer they chose; they had to accept part of their payment in cotton yarn; they were subject to strict supervision of the process of manufacture by the Company’s servants who were located in the village.” Weavers were now often compelled to take advances from particular merchants...

...To further their goal, the company now employed its coercive powers toward the weavers directly. The company hired large numbers of Indians to supervise and implement new rules and regulations, in effect bureaucratizing the cloth market. Extensive new regulations attached weavers legally to the company, making them unable to sell their cloth on the open market. Company agents now inspected cloth on the loom, and endeavored to ensure that the cloth was, as promised, sold to the company. A new system of taxation penalized those weavers who produced for others.

The company also increasingly resorted to violence, including corporal punishment. When a company agent complained that a weaver was working illegally for a private merchant, “the company’s Gumashta seized him and his son, flogged him severely, painted his face black and white, tied his hands behind his back and marched him through the town escorted by seapoys [sic] [Indian soldiers in the employ of the English], announcing ‘any weaver found working for a private merchant should receive similar punishment’.” Such policies produced their intended results: Indian weavers’ income fell. In the late seventeenth century, up to one-third of the price of cloth might have gone to a weaver. By the late eighteenth century, according to historian Om Prakesh, the producer’s share had fallen to about 6 percent... By 1795, the company itslef observed an “unprecedented mortality among the Weavers”.”

And all of this for what? To alienate the weavers and spinners of India from their labor and transform the compensation they ask for their labor and materiel from a Price to a “cost of production”. To steal from them the product and value of their own work through brutality, humiliation, injustice, and illiberty; to deny them the natural right to decide, or even so much as negotiate, the worth of their work, and who they will share, give, or sell it to. And for no reason other than the stuffing of the Company-men’s own greedy pockets.

To call this “Capitalism” makes it more complicated that it really is. It asserts a theoretical and philosophical basis it doesn’t really have, and grants it a practical rigor it doesn’t really deserve. It’s just powerful people doing whatever they can to make themselves richer. It’s just amoral, overriding greed. “Capitalists” don’t care about free markets or piracy or competition or contracts or Rights or “the invisible hand” or any of the rest of their claimed values and, as any history of “Capitalism” shows, they never did. It’s always just been about getting more however they can, and no matter how much suffering they inflicted to accomplish it. It’s always just been about building themselves up by grinding other people down.

[1]though I’d argue this less means credit predates capitalism than that capitalism is a much, much older system than we tend to think of it as. Or maybe that capitalism is rooted in and grew out of far older behaviors and mindsets which tend to get ignored in this discussion, depending on how you prefer to look at it. Like: reciprocity, and what you might call “delayed reciprocity”, has been a part of human cultures since, very likely, before they were human; the recontextualizing of that into commercial/financial terms as “debt” and “credit” is, to me, a sort of “capitalification” of reciprocity, morality, and social existence. Debt: The First 5000 Years was a useful book to me on this subject.

[2]This seems Quite Relevant to the modern USian question of Net Neutrality which: Tell me again-again how Capitalism loves Free Markets and Choice, and hates Bureaucratic “Red-Tape”.

[centaurrential]

The first.

The nice thing about blogging is that one doesn’t need to follow a strict academic essay structure: the issues and concepts I want to write about are always architectures built upon some underlying causal, foundational plot. It would be nice if we could hyperlink the written representations of our thought processes, but alas, that is one domain in which modern technology has fallen short. You might see that I jump around between topics, but I promise there are connections everywhere. So, here we go!

I’ve been hesitant to write about what ignites my passion the most.  

There are a couple of reasons for this.

For one, save for some semblance of a university degree I attempted to put together years ago, I have little in the way of ‘respectable’ credentials. I rely on my own observations of what is happening around me. A high school friend once revealed to me a technique in visual arts that has stuck with me since. “Draw what you see, not what you know to be there.” I have applied this not only to achieve realism in the scant visual artworks I have produced and which have gone unseen by most others, but also to compose a coherent understanding of my world--or in other words, everything I feel. This “motto” of sorts shows that we often ignore details about our experience that are in plain sight. Despite holding this key, I am well aware that I have not necessarily earned any institutional authority to write on the matters that compel me so--yet, as a person who has simply lived and observed, I still feel that I should express myself, for what ever it may be worth.

Second, though my risk of legal and political persecution in some form or another is not as dire as was obviously the case in the past with established thinkers, I’ve felt compelled to dress my thoughts in verse, marching what I think are critical ideas down the runway, letting the audience gently scrutinize the layers of different conceptual fabrics in motion rather than to place what is thought to be controversial on a podium, open to the personalized savagery of modern “progressive” critique. Misunderstanding is a very real fear of mine as I believe it is one of the greatest tragedies of the human condition. I suppose, as a sensitive person who is deeply emotional and deeply invested in my own thought as a means to a better world, my intent up to now has been to create a buffer of some sort between what I theorize and the ideology-driven hate that tends to characterize Internet culture (which, incidentally now, always carries a ‘social media’ component with it). But I don’t wanna hide anymore.

Something I’ve noticed about that very vehicle for thought is how utterly unforgiving it is. Someone uncovers a person’s past involving a stupid, ignorant mistake along the lines of political incorrectness and suddenly all the good they may have recently put into the world evaporates because there is some sort of twisted expectation of social perfection we’ve adopted--even though there is some overlap between this absolutist, impossible approach to other, equally fallible human beings and the tendency to wax poetic about one’s own cathartic emotional experience, along with a new awareness emerging from the remnants of self-destruction, and forcing ‘compassion’ toward oneself in light of one’s mistakes.

The message is that “I” can learn, but “you” cannot. It seems that people are so volatile these days, they’re ready to pounce without really thinking about what a person is trying to say in earnest. And while I believe that we should work hard at our collective and individual duties to skepticism, I cannot condone, to the furthest reaches of any influence I may have, the deadlock of pseudo-critical thinking when it involves scapegoating and self-righteousness.

I sense (and feel) a lot of (justified) anger, and many well-meaning individuals are looking for a place to which they can direct such intensity. The unfortunate thing is that the fire mutates into hostility toward people who don’t deserve it. Shuffle formless anger into boxes designed to look nicely and glamorously radical, and chuck it at those who--excluding the really terrible people in the world--are honest and serious about answering the questions of “how to achieve the maximum possible distance from pain”, and, “what is, essentially”, and you’ve got a problem on your hands. Nothing is ever as simple as we’d like it to be.

And by the way, I find the dismissive “ok, boomer” attitude reprehensible. Like, OBVIOUSLY there are going to be differences among generations in “opinion” and lifestyles and so on. And obviously past generations have made what we now deem to be ‘mistakes’. But just like any individual who may regret past actions, whether personal or professional, one makes decisions supported by the most convincing reasons they can muster, and so they do the best they can with the knowledge they have at hand, at some particular moment. Maybe some visionaries in the past were able to extrapolate from the contemporary and predict what would happen in the future. Even if their equivalents exist in society today, we will not know for certain the downright traumatizing effects current societal mechanisms could force to manifestation in the years beyond, until they actually become fact. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And, there is wisdom that only comes through living life. That, I’m afraid, is not up for debate.

I must say this here, now. I realize I’m walking on eggshells with what I’m about to say.  But, while it is clear that there is a significant degree of ‘white privilege’ in North American society, I’d be careful to declare ‘privilege’ an inherently white experience.  It is an historical reality (and is therefore biased). Not all ‘white people’ are the same; and it is CERTAINLY not the case that it has only been ‘white people’ that enforced slavery, for example. And it is definitely true that different members of different religions and different races and different ethnicities and different cultures and different dialects have, historically, perpetuated evil across many axes. Furthermore, I believe that the explicit and intentional denigration of ‘white people’ MADE BY WHITE PEOPLE THEMSELVES is probably one of the greatest expressions of white privilege. How secure must one feel if they can freely diss their ‘own kind’ and know that nothing diabolical will happen to them? We owe justice through opportunity to people we have marginalized, but that is not the way. I just think that people are either willfully ignorant, accidentally ignorant, or have forgotten that all kinds of people can be villains, and further that a truly corrupt person will even torture people with whom they may have a great deal in common.

I tend to think that ‘intersectionality’ is a seriously important concept and is most empirically aligned with individualism. People move around more, cross-cultural contact happens more; global connection ushers cuisine, rituals and traditions, spiritual beliefs, and languages into landscapes that were previously barren of particular social technologies. The result is a person who may have many characteristics sort of in common with others who share those qualities in a scattered manner, but unless one of those forces was exceptionally prominent in the person’s life, the commonality is negligible.

Emergent from this phenomenon is the serious tension between individual self-actualization and the requirements for so-called proper functioning of the broader ‘community’ to which one feels they belong. The needs of each can often be at odds with one another, and it doesn’t appear to be an easy task to resolve this conflict. I do know that sacrifices will have to be made, as there is always a price to pay; I almost think of that as a universal law.

When I was 19 and took a philosophy of feminism class, I started noticing what problems arise when a mode of thinking is assumed to apply to a particular “community” (loosely speaking), just because its members all share some intrinsic quality. In the particular case I’m talking about, it was “being female”. When someone speaks the word ‘feminism’, it is loaded. You have liberal feminism, eco-feminism, radical feminism, third-wave feminism, black feminism, post-colonial feminism, and so on. The relevance of these various types is stretched so thinly throughout the human landscape that one could legitimately wonder why those theories should even be considered to have anything in common. In other words, how can you possibly come up with an ethic of revolution that applies universally to, I dunno, how many billion people in the world? Here’s a situation: women in the West, particularly in the Deep South, are fighting for their choice to have an abortion. Meanwhile, in some parts of India and China, female infanticide is more common than a decent person should like to admit, and that’s not because Indian and Chinese women want it! Asking someone who is thoughtful in ANY respect if they are a feminist is like asking someone if they believe in God, and that is not, nor should it be, an easy question to answer.

To be clear: what I am talking about is definition, and if you break down the etymological components of that word, you see that it is about deciding what sorts of conceptual boundaries must be drawn (the finiteness)--to determine what is included, and also what is excluded. My belief is that it is actually the interplay between those qualities intrinsic to a person and external forces placed upon us that dictate the degrees of self-satisfaction and happiness we experience.

That pain is to be avoided is generally unquestionable, though the finer details of rational action (because I do see the treatment of pain as an issue of rationality, and as something more fundamental to the exercising of rational action than market economics is) are still up for debate. And, I suppose, that is the case for many injustices that an active, voluntarily thinking society wishes to eradicate. I’d like to return to that topic some time in the future, but what concerns me today is the issue of essentialism.

Essentialism has been a problem for philosophers for a really long time. Often it is conceptualized as “what makes something that thing”, but in my view, Essence seems to lie in the realm of the experiential. In one minor paper I wrote for a metaphysics class, I argued (incompletely) that an object’s ‘essence’ could be partly defined by the function one identifies when they come into contact with said object. For example, because even though chairs can be made up of different numbers of legs, or be of different colours, or be upholstered or not, we place them into a category of ‘something to be seated upon’. But then again, there are many things that can be sat upon, and, on the other hand, one does not look at a real life dog and think of it as an object that innately serves a purpose, let alone is built for one.

So why am I talking about what seems to be an obscure and useless topic?

It is the utility of Essence that gives form to our experience. And for those who believe that we erroneously categorize and judge every single damn thing we come across in our lives, go ahead and try to reverse neurological evolution through time of geologic scale. I mean, this mode of existence came to be before we even defined what ‘values’ were.

Tangentially, my introduction to the study of philosophy started with the great divide between ‘rationalism’ (ie. some inherent structure which creates the capacity to ‘know’ already exists in a person at the time of birth) and ‘empiricism’ (the school of thought where a person only collected knowledge through experience after they were born with a ‘blank slate’ of a mind). I never understood why the distinction between rationalism and empiricism was so important, because it seemed so obvious that our system of moving through the world was a combination of the two. We see now that the belief in one to the exclusion of the other is just plain stupid: genetics, epigenetics, logarithmic counting in BABIES, education, debate, and research, all contribute to an individual’s understanding of the world. (It is this idea, too, that contributes to my belief that free will is an illusion [though a helpful one at that] and that ‘luck’ is an epistemological concept. I will also use this idea to, eventually, communicate my argument that astrology is theoretically plausible, but that involves discussing archetypes and the cyclical nature of our known world...) Note: “Epistemology” is the study of knowledge and how we come to accumulate it. I went on this tangent because I think we need to demonstrate a great deal of respect for both pre-existing neurological realities and the staggering potential of science to teach us about our environments and ourselves. There are some core things about us that we would be wrong to ignore, and unforgivably so if the sound science is right there.

We do not typically go through life coming into contact with objects or people and checking off items on a list that comprise criteria for something being what it is (unless, of course, you’re prone to collect little hints as to whether a potential lover loves you back or not.....). To do so would reduce the fluidity with which we interact with externalities. That being said, I can conceive of a time when one goes outside for a cigarette in the night and watches a creature (as I just did) that may be a cat, or that may be a raccoon, cross the road. You peer at this creature for several seconds, up until the point that you conclude, and are certain, that it is, indeed, a cat. It is then that you can move on with your life. Perhaps what helped you to come to this conclusion was a short list of criteria that separate catness from raccoonness. Obviously that would be more efficient than consulting an exhaustive mental list of “cat properties” and comparing it to a similar list, but of “raccoon properties”. But even so, by the time you’ve witnessed the cat/raccoon, you’ve already filtered out any possibility that the creature might be something else, like a stray dog, or a lizard, or a floating chair. In conclusion, I propose here that context is essential to Essence. And Essence is a fully whole sensory experience, insofar as your sensory faculties work. This is why it is so hard to define.

The social relevance of the concept of Essence is becoming more important with the emergence of identity politics, the crises in feminism, “queerness”, the feminine/masculine dichotomy, and even paradigms in psychological health. Inherent to Essence is continuity, and no one can argue against the notion that we rely on general continuity to go about our daily lives.

But out of continuity develops expectation. Expectation is immensely helpful for the reason I laid out above. Additionally, in public, we rely on a common yet tacit understanding that individual members of the public will behave in a way that is safe and appropriate for everyone. The problem is, if you have experienced a good chunk of your life, well into adulthood, having never seen an unfamiliar and idiosyncratic expression of certain properties, why WOULD you do anything else other than fumble in your acceptance that that is the way something is? Your mind scrambles to organize what you are interacting with in the way that makes the most sense.

I was once accused of being an essentialist because of some remark I made referencing biological differences between men and women. I wondered if the dude was joking because I really cannot grasp why someone would think that the differences are trivial. Lately I’ve toyed with the conclusion that there must be something essential, something bounded, about the way we express ourselves, which matches what we are that isn’t seen by absolutely everyone, including exuding femininity or masculinity. If there wasn’t something essential about these “descriptions”, why would anyone make an effort to look a certain way in the first place? Or, why would anyone have a subconscious tendency to adopt certain characteristics? The point I’m trying to make is that communication in the form of appearance is just as important as a verbal explanation of something, and can in fact be more truthful than what is verbally expressed. Whether one wants to admit it or not, you are offering information that allows others to draw conclusions about you. And it’s not that you merely fulfill a checklist of the sort that I mentioned earlier. It is that, often, though not always, each separate quality supports all the others, forming a sort of “mesh-like” coherence. If there wasn’t something essentially feminine that you identified with, or something essentially masculine that you identified with--if these things didn’t matter--there would be no point in going to great lengths to change your appearance to communicate something. (And I think this holds even in the case of the non-binary person.)

Of course, judgments are made all the time about people, which have nothing to do with being transgendered or cisgendered. A person asks you your age. Why? Because they’re collecting information about you and the particulars in the category of “age” should reveal something about you that you’re not stating explicitly. And this information is only grounded in other information the inquirer has about you. And the only reason this information might be reliable is because a consolidation of an individual’s past experiences tells them that a certain age represents an axis of consistency of mentality and/or behaviour. The deductions we make are not always accurate, but if we didn’t instinctively think of this information as important, we wouldn’t seek it!

I will now apply the above problem to sort out why we are in such a mess, socially. First of all, the person is born into expectation of behaviour. That expectation depends on their sex at birth (assuming the person is not intersex), their social, economic, political class, the levels of education their immediate family members have achieved, their spiritual practices, et cetera. It seems to me that feminism arose in the first place because of the particular kind of anticipation of behaviour that swirls around whether you have a testicle-penis or a uterus-vagina combination. The traditionally ‘male’ realm was the unexplored frontier to many women; it was one of excitement, possibility, and opportunity, and arguably more freedom than the domain to which women were typically assigned: the home. Women can produce babies, and if you could produce babies then you SHOULD produce babies, and you should care for them too. And not only that, but by virtue of the fact that you are a mother you can’t even fathom leaving your babies behind. I haven’t yet come across a proper articulation of why this point is so crucial to understand. The women who have the term “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) slung at them are attacked by people who don’t understand that this fundamental difference in expectation between female-born individuals and male-born individuals is looming in the background, and how damn well important it really is, because it inevitably shapes a person’s perception of the world and quite possibly the expectations they have of other people! And the perception that falls upon you isn’t just something you can shed on a whim. And also, why are people surprised that this is still an issue? Even as advanced creatures we still succumb to evolutionary forces. I don’t think any reasonable person could say that “you aren’t female even if you feel female”, but it’s not about how you “feel”. It’s about what happens between you and people once they figure out a vital fact about you. It’s about the context in which you, a whole being, operate. You want to talk about oppression? I think your self-identity being misaligned with how other people think you should be is pretty high up there in the ranks.

So, to digress a little: the notion of changing yourself and making an impression on strangers, making a difference in the world, is intoxicating. But we enter dangerous territory when visions of child-rearing and home care become afterthoughts. Child psychologists have identified the age range between 2 and 4 to be particularly crucial in socializing children; it is at that age that they are the most impressionable with regard to how they learn to interact with others. That’s not really a huge window to make sure you ‘get it right’. I think the family unit, whatever its configuration may be, is pretty foundational to the rest of society. While many people presently carry harmful opinions about things we don’t understand, and changing those opinions tends to be rather difficult, the most radical, most powerful thing we can do to initiate reform is to make sure the children we are responsible for grow up valuing honour, kindness, and a sense of duty and justice, not just in relation to themselves and their immediate families, but to society as a whole.

People are throwing tantrums because society hasn’t given itself an overnight makeover. I think that anyone involved in politics understands, either consciously or unconsciously, that even though political institutions and bureaucracies were created by real people, they’ve sort of become fragmented away from human life and are entities of their own, floating above our heads like clouds in the higher atmosphere, and which do not have any readily identifiable boundaries. It appears that the various bodies of legislation and bureaucracies have become so bloody complex in correlation with the complexity of human interaction that they seem almost impossible to disentangle. Furthermore, ideas take a long time to die...if they ever even do.

Rather than viewing child-rearing as a burden, I choose to view it as the greatest responsibility and the greatest tool we have for genuine change. I feel, honestly, that sometimes we waste energy trying to convince people of something where there is no convincing possible. We often preach to the choir because they’re the only people who make us feel heard--but our own little choirs already know and believe what we know and believe.

So. I think, once I reviewed what I said above, that I’ve attempted to illuminate a conundrum about simultaneous utility and danger found in the act of expecting. This “study” of sorts is a microcosm of a world where darkness and light are aspects of all things. I’m convinced that the formulation of potential is expressed in binaries, but unlike computers, we are able to interpret ambiguities, and in many pockets of society people are tolerant of self-expression. With so many belief systems up for grabs, and with the world as it is in its ebbs and flows, it is up to the individual to craft their own transcendent values as a way to “orient themselves”, as Dr. Jordan B. Peterson put it. Be mature and do not dismiss nuance. Challenge yourself. And for God’s sake, the next time you’re thinking of buying that innocuous avocado that’s become the symbol for the Millennial generation, ask yourself what is more important: dismantling violent and antisocial Mexican drug cartels, or supporting Mexican farmers who are trying to make their ways through life, just like every. last. one of us.

[vsplusonline]

We measure our success by economic impact, not market capitalisation: Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/we-measure-our-success-by-economic-impact-not-market-capitalisation-satya-nadella-ceo-microsoft/

We measure our success by economic impact, not market capitalisation: Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said it was important for technology to be regulated as it becomes increasingly critical, although he cautioned that over-regulation could increase costs to businesses, especially entrepreneurs. Calling privacy a human right, Nadella told ET in an interview that Microsoft would conform to India’s proposed privacy rules. He also said the company’s success was defined by its economic impact and not because of its high market capitalisation. Edited Excerpts:

Two of the large technology companies with trillion-dollar market caps are headed by Indians. Is that number important to you? (Amod Malviya), co-founder of Udaan, put it well: What is more important to us is the overall surplus and economic value that gets created in every country and in every community we work in.

When I come to India, I make sure we’re talking about our technology. (Take) Apollo Hospitals, they created a new AI model for the South Asian population with cardiac issues…A unicorn like Udaan was able to achieve success with just 17-18 people.

If you’re creating that local surplus, we (Microsoft) will even have the permission to operate. That is true in every country — in India, the United States and in the UK.

To me that is what is most important.

If you just celebrate your own market cap and you don’t see success broadly around the world, then I think that market cap is going to be very transitory.

You have said that we need to build technologies in areas such as health, agriculture and education, not just focused on consumer tech. How can India build for the world? There is nothing wrong with the consumer economy getting lots of innovation. After all, the mobile revolution along with consumer internet companies have really changed the lives of people, in terms of their access to services.

The question now is, can we make it broader? Here is a company that says electric vehicles are going to be our future, let us completely create a new grid effectively for batteries. That’s a startup here that’s relevant everywhere. Or, take this company that says I can build an exoskeleton device for anybody with spinal cord injuries, and they’re already taking it to North America.

Those are all very innovative ideas coming out of India that have global relevance.

You have spoken about being open to regulation and about ethics in Artificial Intelligence. Yet, there has been a pushback from local teams every time governments try to bring new policies on data localisation or digital tax. As technology becomes much more pervasive, just like we have regulation in food safety, like we have the Federal Aviation Authority for air traffic (in the United States) and so on, we will always have regulation for things that are very mission critical in our lives and society.

Privacy is a human right. We implemented the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, but (also) took the subject rights and implemented them all over the world. In India, there will be equivalent legislation and we will conform to it.

Even around AI and AI ethics, it’s ultimately a tool. How the tool gets used is something every country and society will need some norms around…one issue with overregulating anything means you fragment things, you increase transaction costs. The last thing you want to do is increase the cost of doing business for successful entrepreneurs from here.

Your remarks on the Citizenship Amendment Act recently were seen as controversial. Were you taken aback? I think every country is going to define their own policies around immigration and national security. In democracies, it’s the people and governments that decide. I mostly speak from being someone who grew up here…proud of my heritage of a multicultural India and as an immigrant, my hope is that this country continues to be a progressive democracy that really helps more people find that this is the land of their dreams. I think this is what is true about India today and I am very confident that it will be true of India in future.

The political discourse in the US recently has been anti-big business. One (Democratic Party) candidate has talked about breaking big tech companies like Facebook. What is your view? Ultimately, every company effectively has the moral licence to operate in any community because what it creates, empowers and enables. Just because you are big doesn’t mean anything. One of the things that we all have to re-acquaint ourselves with is, perhaps, what’s the social contract of a corporation. It is about finding profitable solutions to the challenges of people on the planet.

In your book, you talk about the Gini coefficient, but you are not obviously a believer in extreme equality…Would you like to expound on that? I am not a political scientist or an economist. I get enthusiastic when some of the cutting-edge technologies like HoloLens is being used by first-line workers in a manufacturing (unit) to basically tame the learning curve, which means they are getting better wage support. That’s a fantastic use of technology and its implication, even taking broader job creation and wage support. Ultimately, that’s what needs to happen.

Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani talked about a very deep partnership. What are its main elements? Fundamentally, they have really bet on our platform. They are big users (of our products). They’re also looking at how they can use the cloud infrastructure to build new types of solutions for some of the ambitious (plans) they have around small and medium-sized businesses… our identity there is to give them the technology and help them realize their ambitions.

You transformed Microsoft’s culture. Is that here to stay? Nothing gives any company a God given right to stay. It comes down to staying true to your mission every day and a culture that allows you to stay relevant and express your mission with changing technology. I feel really good about the cultural meme we picked around growth mindset…you have to confront your fixed mindset each day. Will it stay? It is a function of each day — whether you wake up and say, I am not perfect and what can I learn, and the day you feel you have even achieved a growth mindset means you don’t have a growth mindset. That is the paradox. It applies to human beings, it applies to organisations.

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[sonofazania]

SBWL (Sabaweli): To Tell You About My Campus

The end is gravely interesting. I begin from the end.

Excuse my ignorance but I hate the person who came with a methodology that students be tested on Tests and Exams so as to check if they are fit to proceed to the next level of their studies, Tautona who speaks Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana fluently in a predominately Nguni area, cursing and moaning chatting to his girlfriend.

Epistemology. You see, you are now being a typical politician on campus. What is wrong with you? Why always use these big words mnganiwam? Daluxolo reprimanding his friend from Sekhukhuniland in Limpopo. Rumor says, that Tautona, is a product of parents who are witchdoctors since he is from Limpopo. Daluxolo always misrepresents Limpopo for ‘Limpompo’ yet he is the first to label Tautona a lekwerekwere because he speaks broken isiXhosa.

Often when they attend ceremonies, funerals and orphanages in Mthatha, Centane, Tsolo, Ntambankulu, Msombomvu, when Tautona is invited as a speaker, this idiotic moron from Bizana infamously known, as Daluxolo feel utterly embarrassed. For his friend sounds like as if he is lekwerekwere.

‘Epistemology, simply means,’ he would first clear his throat as if something is about to choke him: ‘ehhhh, that it is philosophy of knowledge.’ By know we should know everything that exists has a philosophy, even football does. Besides who said a word is a big word, if you don’t knoqw the meaning?

Daluxolo would raise an argument as if he is in a mass meeting, ‘don’t patronize me, you are a fanatic of bombastic words!’

‘Come on, if you don’t know a meaning of a word look it up in a dictionary, there is no such a thing as a big word,’ Tautona adds: ‘no matter the size of the word, for as long as you don’t know its meaning, then it is precisely a big word.’

This conversation between the two would go on and on to an extent where they would just attract a crowd playing pool in the tuckshop with curiosity. Rebuttals from Tautona who is an Africanist rejecting a fallacious usage of the word ‘lekwerekwere’ in a context that many Afrikan brothers and sisters were killed since ‘lekwerekwere’ is associated with a foreigner who is in South Afrika coming from Afrika. Europeans are arrogant, look how they have successfully divided and conquered us. In absentia we are killing each other defending their notorious colonial borders which are a consequence of their Berlin Conference of 1884. How dare we see a foreigner coming from the same motherland soil as all of us?

The end of everything that transpired on campus is remarkable and fascinating. For the first since 2016 Daluxolo has managed to get a minimum of 40% for all his modules thus he has DP and qualifies to exams for all his modules. For those who didn’t know what is DP it represents that you have ‘duly performed’ to write an Exam.

Their campus is very small with about 6708 registered students in 2019. It has exactly three Faculties: Engineering, Education and Business Management. Daluxolo is doing a BTech in Human Resources (HR). Tautona is totally disturbed to learn that for BTech there is a module called Research Methodology: whereby one is ridiculously expected to define what is research, its purpose after you have practically done the actually research. Decolonising a historically and presently ‘black university’ is doing away with such backwardness because it undermines the intellectual capacity of an Afrikan student.

Tautona, is residing on-campus at Block N. It is haunted by evil spirits, from Nigeria, the fellows from the room neighboring his once alleged. How those came remains a deeply miraculous untold narrative. Remarkably his residence has it all. From unashamedly and fully devoted bazalwane Christians, who are not afraid to daily worship the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit trice in a day. To those who consume liquor almost as if they want to commit suicide digging their graves thus beating God’s time when He will decide for them to die. Finally severally folks who are ‘politicians’ from commonly known major political student organizations on campus.

Quite depressing is that this block N is waterless. Other blocks on-campus do have water yet this block N seems to always run out of water. The result of this is disastrous: the students and Aunty who works there suffers. For students, is when they want to shower, to cook and take a shit. For Aunty who cleans is often confronted by toilets where people took a shit without flushing. Or on Mondays when she cleans and there is just no water. Thanks God for our wonderful sweety-pie all in the name of green tank outside who is our savior as far a water is concerned.

Daluxolo has a five-60 at block A. He is terrified by black cats often he does question how the SRC and University managers are planning on removing that black cat at the bathroom of that residence. Frankly it was one Azania Azania who traumatized Daluxolo that the black cat has now little kittens when she recently posted on Facebook. She dropped it hilariously, little she knew, she out rightly nearly drove Daluxolo to comma. Since he is from Bizana he is forced to ‘man-up’ because we live in an aggressive patriarchal society. And certainly he does not want to seem effeminate for fearing cats.

‘I will draw the computer, mouse, case, keyword,’ continued an Indian lecturer: ‘I want to demonstrate something, I am sorry you are studying Information Technology (IT) without any computers.’ This drives Tautona furiously insane. He does not even have a laptop for that matter. Even if he did, it would have been ineffective for the lecturer would not give special treatment to him. Relatively students here come from poor background and there enemy is the class struggle. He was informed that computers were last bought in 2010 and were never replace. Moreover, as a result, over the years’ students have decided to be thugs and steal mouse’s, cables, keyboards and the like.

The beginning. Eish, my younger sister is here for walkings-in. I pleaded with her to apply last year and she only applied for NSFAS. Now I have no option but make sure she is part of this multitudes who want to enter in the system. But it seems like Mafoko took valuable lessons from the Head of ICT Mr Selwane. They are here to shot. I see us being wounded by bullets today. Yeah neh! Damn being an Afrikan student you always get shot at, even for demanding a right to access education?

‘Registration is a mess today Daluxolo,’ asserted Tautona.

‘Well I feel like the campus shutdown is inevitable,’ he responded.

‘No, no, no, they must wait. I am targeting EMS for my younger sister.’

‘Oh yes, I heard students are being admitted there, quickly rush’.

On campus there is not even water, there is a threat that Student Affairs is threatening to prohibit special cases to allow students without paying a cent. The SRC or Interim SRC must never mislead students. The political power here on campus rests with political formations, not SRC or certainly individuals in SRC. Daluxolo, ‘if they don’t unite for the betterment of an Afrikan child then they will become victims of University managers’. Mnganiwam, ‘I heard that the reason SRC Elections did not take place last year is because one person stopped them!’ Tautona jiggled.

‘Don’t be a fool, or are you ignorant?’

‘Well……….’

Daluxolo interjects: ‘We have no messiah here in our campus.’ Annoyingly he continues: ‘SRC Elections did not happen because the new imposed SRC Constitution was rejected and Student Affairs could not find a company to run elections in Butterworth after IEC chickened out on them’.

‘But you are making sense, how could elections be stopped by one person?’

The leadership of the Interim SRC is then calling a mass meeting. Wow. My younger sister is taken at EMS for Education. Let me ring mama. ‘Hello mama, it is very tough, I got her inside but they want R300 immediately’. Yes, I got old-lady today. She is stingy like an HOD of IT who failed dismally to give students a braai in Durban for their Academic Tour though it was part of the trip, now I will pocket R800 remember R500 is my personal allowance she promised me. In addition, I am ready to discuss at the mass meeting today and eventually argue we need mass action. I really do not have registration fee and I do not qualify for NSFAS because of N+2.

For Daluxolo and Tautona are an epitome of violence from a society whereby egalitarianism exists on paper in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa not pragmatically. In their campus they spend their academic life in protest demanding basic things like water and lecturers which are compulsory for teaching and learning. More time spend in the national road N2 then being in class. Moreover, protesting for meal allowances because hunger is their biggest enemy.

Now Engineering is threatened to be taken away from campus. Education tried its tricks with PGCE, but apparently, the matter is resolved. However, now that ABET is replaced by Foundation Phase, why BEd for Technical and EMS is not uploaded online for next year on applications? ‘Remember also in Accounting we won’t have BTech for Auditing and CMA since they are now replaced by Advance Diploma,’ concludes Daluxolo almost as if he is a god of thinking.

Allowing a government that is ideologically bankrupted to bring about meaningful progress in academia is a hopeless dream.

It is Friday night. The music from Chesa is too loud. Daluxolo and Tautona are funded today by NSFAS ingenile imali ya bafundi. They have all bought groceries now it is time for socialization with the youth, the energetic and vibrant people. Mingling is fundamentally fundamental.

‘I feel intoxicated now…can we go?’

Daluxolo tipsy retorting: ‘let us walk with other students.’

‘Why is that so mnganiwam? I am not afraid of amapharaphara!’

Just last week they took a phone, bank cards and a pair takkies from this other boy from block J. He was pretty much brutalized and couldn’t stop cursing.

‘You are drunk wena Tautona, I ain’t risking anything,’ an anxious Daluxolo.

‘Okey…oke, I will go dance with that girl akere you are a shumane yourself Daluxolo.’

The residence disky gusha tournament is continuing. We are also have seen people who can easily make it to PSL and salvage the sinking ship of the Happy People, Orlando Pirates, but unfortunately they are disadvantaged by where they are based. These players are just marvelous to watch for playing this beautiful game so exceptionally.

‘We won a gusha,’ excitedly remarks Tautona, almost as if he was a player.

Finally he is done with Exams but going to Limpopo it is too soon. He is planning to go to Bizana with Daluxolo in end of November. He knows very well that there is an injury of Wi-Fi in the rural shanty village of Limpopo and more home chores since he is the only man in the family after his father disappeared in the big city of lights. Stalling perhaps is a necessity.

Both Tautona and Daluxolo are tested in their trials and tribulations and will not rest until they are proud graduates of their campus. It has significantly mold and shaped their thinking. Success is a must and the only way out. It does not matter how long it takes them, nobody knows their story but quitting is not an option.