#still in india barely have service but i can at least post One

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

‘Major’ Oil Spill Off California Coast Threatens Wetlands and Wildlife (NYT) A pipeline failure off the coast of Orange County, Calif., on Saturday caused at least 126,000 gallons of oil to spill into the Pacific Ocean, creating a 13-square-mile slick that continued to grow on Sunday, officials said. Dead fish and birds washed ashore in some places as cleanup crews raced to try to contain the spill, which created a slick that extended from Huntington Beach to Newport Beach. It was not immediately clear what caused the leak, which officials said occurred three miles off the coast of Newport Beach and involved a pipeline failure. Mayor Kim Carr of Huntington Beach said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon that the spill was “one of the most devastating situations our community has dealt with in decades.”

The Pandora Papers (Foreign Policy) The massive leak of secret financial data has revealed the offshore wealth of some of the world’s most powerful people. The data, dubbed the Pandora Papers by International Consortium of Investigative Journalists—the group that spearheaded the project—shows how far some world leaders, billionaires, and other oligarchs have gone to hide their wealth. Considering the vast wealth of America’s own oligarchs, it’s surprising on first blush to see no U.S. names mentioned. One simple explanation, put forward by the Washington Post, is that U.S. millionaires and billionaires have enough tools available within the U.S. tax code to shield most of their wealth already.

Spain’s foreign tourism soars but well below pre-pandemic level (Reuters) Foreign tourism to Spain rose rapidly in August as looser travel restrictions tempted back summer sunseekers though visitor numbers remained at around half their pre-pandemic levels, official statistics showed on Monday. The number of foreign tourists visiting in August more than doubled from a year ago to 5.19 million but was still barely above half the level seen in 2019, the National Statistics Institute said on Monday.

Farmers among 8 killed as India protest erupts in violence (CNN) At least eight people were killed when violence broke out in India’s Uttar Pradesh state on Sunday after a car linked to a federal minister ran over two farmers taking part in a protest against controversial farm laws. A farmers’ union spokesperson said Sunday the deaths happened after a convoy of vehicles associated with junior home affairs minister Ajay Mishra Teni “ran over several protesters.” Protests in Lakhimpur Kheri began on September 25 after Teni reportedly said “farmers should reform themselves or they will be reformed,” according to CNN affiliate CNN-News18.

India’s Christians living in fear as claims of ‘forced conversions’ swirl (Guardian) It was a stifling July afternoon when the crowd moved into the small district of Lakholi, in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, and gathered outside the house of Tamesh War Sahu. Sahu, a 55-year-old volunteer with the Home Guard who had begun following Christianity more than five years previously, had never before had issues with his neighbours. But now, more than 100 people had descended from surrounding villages and were shouting Hindu nationalist slogans outside his front door. Sahu’s son Moses, who had come out to investigate the noise, was beaten by the mob, who then charged inside. As the men entered the house, they shouted death threats at Sahu’s wife and began tearing posters bearing Bible quotes down from the walls. Bibles were seized from the shelves and brought outside where they were set alight, doused in water and the ashes thrown in the gutter. “We will teach you a lesson,” some people were heard to shout. “This is what you get for forcing people into Christianity.”      Sahu’s family was not the only one attacked that day. Four other local Christian households were also targeted by mobs, led by the Hindu nationalist vigilante group Bajrang Dal, known for their aggressive and hardline approach to “defending” Hinduism. Since the beginning of the year there have been similar attacks across Chhattisgarh, already the Indian state with the second highest number of incidents against Christians. In some villages, Christian churches have been vandalised, in others pastors have been beaten or abused. Congregations have been broken up by mobs and believers hospitalised with injuries. The police, too, stand accused—of making threats to Christians, hauling them into police stations and carrying out raids on Sunday prayer services. The attacks have coincided with renewed attention on a longstanding claim from rightwing Hindu groups: that a string of forced conversions are taking place in Chhattisgarh. Such claims have been made by senior figures in the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which governs India.

Japan’s Parliament elects former diplomat Kishida as new PM (AP) Japan’s parliament on Monday elected Fumio Kishida, a former moderate turned hawk, as prime minister. He’ll face an economy battered by the pandemic, security threats from China and North Korea and leadership of a political party whose popularity is sagging ahead of a fast-approaching crucial national election. He replaces Yoshihide Suga, who resigned after only one year in office as his support plunged over his government’s handling of the pandemic and insistence on holding the Tokyo Olympics as the virus spread.

New Zealand admits it can no longer get rid of coronavirus (AP) New Zealand’s government acknowledged Monday what most other countries did long ago: It can no longer completely get rid of the coronavirus. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a cautious plan to ease lockdown restrictions in Auckland, despite an outbreak there that continues to simmer. Since early in the pandemic, New Zealand had pursued an unusual zero-tolerance approach to the virus through strict lockdowns and aggressive contact tracing. Under Ardern’s plan that starts Tuesday, Aucklanders will be able to meet outdoors with loved ones from one other household, early childhood centers will reopen and people will be able to go to the beach. The dates for a phased reopening of retail stores and later bars and restaurants have yet to be decided.

3,000 Yazidis Are Still Missing. Their Families Know Where Some of Them Are. (NYT) The voice messages sent by Abbas Hussein’s teenage son are heartbreaking in their matter-of-factness. The boy, a member of Iraq’s Yazidi minority who was kidnapped by Islamic State fighters seven years ago, asks about his mother and wonders why his father has not been in touch. In the messages sent last summer to his father, an unemployed laborer, the son says his captor will not let him send any more because his parents have not delivered payments as demanded. “Father, if you don’t have money, that’s OK. Just let me know,” says the teenager, who still has the voice of a child. “I will work and save money and give it to him to let me talk to you.”      Mr. Hussein has known for more than a year that his son and five other relatives are being held in Turkish-controlled northern Syria by a former ISIS fighter who joined the Syrian National Army—a Turkish-backed coalition of armed opposition groups that includes mercenaries and Syrian rebels. He’s one of roughly 3,000 Yazidis still missing after being captured by ISIS during its takeover of parts of Iraq and Syria. While most of the missing are presumed dead, hundreds more are thought to be alive and held captive in Syria or Turkey. In some cases, their families know where they are and have even been in contact with them or their captors. But financial support from governments and private donors, as well as interest from them in finding the missing Yazidis, has dried up.

Taliban-style security welcomed by some, feared by others (AP) It wasn’t 7 a.m. yet and already the line outside the police station’s gates was long, with men bringing their complaints and demands for justice to Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers. Something new they immediately found: The Taliban fighters who are now the policemen don’t demand bribes like police officers did under the U.S-backed government of the past 20 years. “Before, everyone was stealing our money,” said Hajj Ahmad Khan, who was among those in line at the Kabul District 8 police station on a recent day. “Everywhere in our villages and in government offices, everyone had their hands out,” he said.      Many Afghans fear the harsh ways of the Taliban, their hard-line ideology or their severe restrictions of women’s freedoms. But the movement does bring a reputation for not being corrupt, a stark contrast to the government it ousted, which was notoriously rife with bribery, embezzlement and graft. Even residents who shudder at the potential return of punishments—such as chopping off the hands of thieves—say some security has returned to Kabul since the Taliban swept in on Aug. 15. Under the previous government, gangs of thieves had driven most people off the streets by dark. Several roads between cities are again open and have even been given the green light for travel by some international aid organizations.

Deadly, historic Tropical Cyclone Shaheen departs Oman after devastating flooding (Washington Post) In the course of a single day, an exceptionally rare hurricane-strength storm unloaded up to four years’ worth of rain along Oman’s northern coast, causing deadly flooding. Named Tropical Cyclone Shaheen, the tempest slammed ashore late Sunday, about 50 miles to the west of Muscat, Oman’s capital city. The storm has since departed, but not before leaving 11 dead in Oman, mostly because of flash flooding and landslides. The storm was also blamed for two fatalities in Iran, where the bodies of two fishermen were found.

[paramsiddharth]

#15: The Independence Day

However tempting the title may be at suggesting my life is at peace now, it painfully isn't. I don't want this to prevent me from glorifying the decades of freedom from colonization we have enjoyed, how much we have recovered from post-colonization trauma, and how we are more responsibly planning to evolve in future. Lots of love to my country. I love my dear Bihar, I love India. I am grateful to my parentland for everything it gave me, such as the beautiful cultural heritage and the opportunity to identify myself as a proud Indian. 🇮🇳 I give my heartfelt pranaam to my nation.

Why is it always such that I make a post, disappear for months (or years), and then make a sudden reappearance? I love writing. Why this discontinuity? I asked myself this question.

I realized it is because I am always too overwhelmed by my past and future to express my present without hurting myself. And don't expect me to mourn that; It is part of my situational awareness, learning from my experience, and practical preparedness and I'm not ashamed.

I'm not proud either, but there's little I can do to change the circumstances I'm put in. The very reason behind my continuous complaining and being a crybaby is because that's what has happened to me throughout my life, and continues to. There are plenty of people to blame, but definitely not me.

I will start talking about the time after the day I posted that Kharagpur blog, but I will move in a logarithmic fashion i. e. Increasing the amount of focus on the part closer to the plateau (present) rather than the cliff (past).

Do you use olive oil at home? Is it a common ingredient in most of the food that you have at home? I recently learnt an interesting truth about food oils. Mustard oil, olive oil, and refined oil are the 3 major oils used to cook. In my family everything is cooked in mustard oil. I used to watch recipe videos and wonder why the colour of the oil looked so different. Turns out they generally use olive oil.

Based on what mom told, mustard oil is much more fatty and considered not good for health, at least in comparison to olive oil. That being said, mustard oil comes for a lot cheaper than olive oil. So do we use less healthy oil to cook food for saving money? Yes. Are we the only ones? I really don't know.

As much as I don't want to, I pity myself. It's pathetic, but every time I pity myself, I assume it can't get worse. But it does. It very much does.

5-6 days ago, my parents had a very violent fight. I was there to get them to settle, and since my classes were not going on, I could give more time to home. Despite my struggle to get both my parents to be peaceful, they kept saying things to each-other for half the night, and kept hurting themselves, mentally and physically. I was there to help them, but they weren't welcoming to any support. And I understand why. They must feel like they are put into a position where they can't express themselves to anyone, and that nobody can feel what they are going through.

Folks and friends tell me not to get in between when they fight. I wouldn't… If only it remained verbal. But it gets worse. It gets physical, in a manner that they end up hurting their internal and external biologies causing more than just short-term damage. I barely manage to save the day everytime… Because I love them. I don't want to listen to my friends. My parents are my everything. Losing one of them means losing half of my life's purpose. I'm nothing without them, no matter how they are.

And I managed to calm them down. 3 days ago, we woke up to a news that wasn't initially so devastating: The water motor wasn't working. It had been a common problem, I easily assumed it will be fixed soon. We got it checked, had some analysis done, some parts bought. By evening, it was still being worked on, and that made the situation tense. The day ended with the news that the plumbers will come the next day and attempt a better fix, something they referred to as "slizing" (I think it supposed to be slicing). I didn't eat much that day, for reasons. Others ate less too.

So we got the "slizer" expert the next day. The whole day was going to be a wasted struggle again, and what happened at home made it far worse. The lack of food, hydration, and sanitation made our patience and moods worse. My parents had an argument, and once the light was sparked, it ended up being probably the worst fight they have ever had in the whole lifetime. One where they almost hit each-other. I came in between as a shield and got beaten up instead, gladly so. But will I always be able to get in between?

The situational dilemma hit me harder than the physical strokes. I was pulled down deep into the realization of how traumatizing the past 5 years have been for my parents. From being loving, caring, and supportive, they've become beasts. They have turned into people with no emotional control, and mood-swing patterns that encourages self-harm exclusive to interpersonal fights between those two.

As much as they fight, scream, misbehave, and misunderstand each-other while arguing, they are the only 2 adults I could ever rely on. The rest of my ostensible family has been far more hostile to us, in a much more heart-penetrating way than physically. Who else can I look up to? And even if I had anybody else to look up to, my parents are the 2 people I will never let go of. It is my life's purpose to see them happy, and I won't let anything go wrong before that happens.

Their hatred for each-other while fighting is no longer silenced by their want to live, and their heart no longer melts by the thought of their kids' happiness. They aren't able to think straight during a fight. What would a person in this condition be advised to do? Take therapy, I suppose. We can't afford that. Will the one who advises us pay for our therapy? I'm sure not.

Money is the one big thing in our life that's our biggest joy and harshest pain at the same time. If we had more money, none of our current problems in life would remain relevant. We will be able to cure everything, including our financial instability and mental illnesses. We will be off to a happy life, constantly evolving. If only we had more money. If only…

Let me slap myself out of this dream. It isn't here yet. A minimum of 2 years before I even get on my feet are to be borne with patience and… Struggle. No, my parents have to remain together, no matter what. The hardwork they did for their whole life, won't lose meaning so easily. We're close, and we will make it. I will get a good job and change everything. I will be able to fix us. I will do it… Won't I?

I wasn't able to cry, because I hadn't had water for 50+ hours. My parents eventually lost energy and got diverted by updates from the plumbers and the expert. It failed. They didn't even attempt the "slizing" part. Maybe next day.

Day 3. No eating, drinking, peeing, or excreting. We felt like lifeless blobs, and it was harder for us to make it through, considering my mom has an OCD. Although we were convinced that the service folks were fixing the water issue, we also knew the kind of people we have in Muzaffarpur. They were using our helplessness as a measure to maximize visible worktime and increase the payment. The only thing they were aiming for is profit. No sense of wanting to provide quality service, no concern for our degrading health, nothing. They were just extending and pulling out days from our lifeless schedule.

On day 3, we slightly hinted that this would be the last day we let them work. We ensured them that if they don't fix it by the end of the day, instead of wasting more money into something that isn't even working, we will urgently invest into getting a submersible pump installed, the ultimate answer to all water problems in the poverty-stricken lands of India.

God knows how, by the end of the day, water started coming. We were not relieved, especially I. Not instantly. I waited for the next morning, and then, was a little calmed. After having the payment report (just because I make it sound professional doesn't mean it was, it was an informal description of how much we have to pay and a disambiguation telling why), we realized the fixing cost us over ₹22,000. That's a lot of money for a sudden life problem. And then the motor stopped working again in the evening, whereafter we asked them to have a look again. A quickfix and it started working after adding some water in the pipe.

We are firm that the next step is to get a submersible pump, but even if we put aside the financial challenge for a moment, this season isn't the best one to get it installed. In fact, that should be our last resort, if all options are exhausted, like it would have been if day 3 ended in a disappointment too. But now we have some time to think, plan, and gather money. ₹80,000 isn't a small amount (that's to start, you know it's always more than it seems).

It was the independence day. Wow, what a beautiful day. An independent country, where there are lakhs of smiles of people happy and proud of their country. And lakhs of neutrally frowned faces who don't even know what a country is. All they know is food, water, shelter, and survival. I felt them, I can tell. It must be worse. I wish we had a little more independence too. A stable financial life, my mom's OCD cured, feels like a lovely eye-tearing dream.

Hahaha… I don't know why I'm crying. Is it because of the trauma of 3 painful days? Is it the fear of my parents getting into a fight again? Is it the painful possibility that I might not get a good job because of my not-so good college or my own ineligibility? Or is it just me, a 19 year-old who doesn't even know what to do with his life and is struggling to survive mentally, physically, biologically, academically, and socially?

For those 3 days, I was in a state of suffering. Since I didn't eat much, I didn't need to use the bathroom, but I would have loved to. I would have loved to satisfy my dry throat with some water. Having not drunk or eaten in days had fatigued me. If you want a feel of how long it had been, here's a day 3 picture of an initially dark yellow arhar dal cooked on day 1:

Still, I was receiving phone calls.

Them: Hey Param! What's up? Can you help me with this thing?

Me: Hi, I'm sorry, I can't… I'm kind of in a problem… ...(trying to explain my situation).

Them: That stinks! Sorry about that, dude. Take care. Oh, by the way, can you help me out with this quickly? I really need to do this.

This makes me realize how awfully tooled I have always let myself be. If it was a regular day, I would have probably let go of my busy time and helped them out, but I was in pain. I was enraged. Very angered by their stubbornness and lack of concern for my happiness, when I have always been the one who was there for them. I hung up and left my phone. I didn't feel like touching it anymore. Life felt obsolete.

Evening, day 4, we were preparing for dad's birthday next day. Planning a surprise, we ordered a cake for him by collecting some money. We were very excited. Little did we know our happiness was about to be shattered… That's when the water had stopped working again. We know it got fixed later, but the intensity of the trauma in the moment embedded itself deeply into our hearts, and despite the want to be excited, we weren't very relieved after the news that it was working again. We were constantly afraid it will stop working again.

We desperately tried to stay happy and celebrate his birthday. 12 AM, August 16, we sang happy birthday. Crying on the inside and smiling on the outside, we made ourselves believe that we ought to be happy for survival. The desperation was visible on our faces. Here are some pictures:

Now that I'm out of it (pray, the water works fine), I still don't feel so good about it. I want to hug my parents and stay in their arms forever. I want to see them smiling and keep talking to them forever. I want to be able to forget my pain and begin a happy life with my parents someday. Other people won't help me achieve that, I will.

I attempted to get myself a job offer at some good companies, and the recruiters would admit that I'm worthy and eligible and all, but then conclude, "…but our company generally gives only on-campus opportunities.". I get it. I'm not in an IIT. Not privileged enough to be allowed to compete with those IITians I'm far better than. I'll not have a chance, because they'll never come for on-campus opportunities to my college. Bless the IITs, for they've now stolen a hundred options of success from me despite my hardwork.

It is the interview season. I recently had a huge spam of texts and phonecalls by my seniors, asking, requesting, and even threatening me to help them with their online coding entrances. I clarified that I find it ethically wrong, but they continued to mentally disturb me by saying stuff that they, as my elders, shouldn't. I made a post on LinkedIn regarding that. I was so mentally tortured I couldn't take it anymore. And guess what? The responses were equally surprising and hostile.

A good number of people supported. By "supported", I don't mean "liked the post". Anybody would do that for free. Rather, some people appreciated my bravery and told me I did the right thing. On the other hand, some others simply scolded and criticized me brutally for the defamation of JUET, the possibility of JUET being blacklisted by recruiters, and making LinkedIn an unprofessional platform with my plea. What value I hath wrought from years of hardwork didn't seem to be anything to them. Shame on them for looking down on someone they should have been supportive to. And all those cowards who enjoy the perks of the flattery of such devil elders, may they suffer the consequences. Ahh!

Life is so stupid. Why am I working so hard? Whom for? Hello? Is anybody ever going to acknowledge me? Am I ever going to get any appreciation? EVER? Why me? Why? 😭

The question is on me. I've come far enough to understand how this universe works to a much better extent than before. Will I be able to plan my future strategically and always do what's right for me and my family? I hope I do. I hope I don't disappoint the one person who is always there to support me: Myself.

I had once felt like I saw God, but suddenly there was no God. I looked around. Nothing. I was alone. All by myself. Nobody was there to help me achieve my dreams. I suddenly felt this urge to be so grateful for what I have, and not assume that this is the worst it can get. It could get worse, and there's a lot I can get out of my present rather than worrying about my future. And you, dear reader, ought to be grateful for what you have, too.

I sincerely take my leave now. ❤️

Lots of love,

Param Siddharth.

[realitywarpinq]

(reposting bc tumblr removed my post from the da tags and I’d really love to know other people’s thoughts on Thomas and O’Brien bc I wasn’t here when s1&2 were airing so missed all the fandom stuff)

I had a lot of thoughts about this and in trying to put them into words I had even more and yeah needless to say it got quite long so… anyone who wants to read some character analysis and my thoughts about why Thomas and O’Brien’s relationship played out Like That pls see below the cut!

I think if Siobhan Finneran had planned to stay on the show we might’ve got a better arc for the two of them. S3 to me plays entirely like, upon hearing she wanted out, jf scrabbled around for a way to make her exit organic because he hadn’t previously considered O'Brien ever leaving Downton. Then, for lack of something better, he discovered a great old plot unsticking device, Homophobia.

O'Brien displays two key ‘positive’ traits throughout three seasons - 1) loyalty and 2) the softer side of her that appears when looking after those she cares for/is sympathetic to (s1 Cora miscarriage - though ofc there’s a large element of guilt to that - s2 Cora’s spanish flu, Mr.Lang’s ptsd and s3 when Alfred arrives)

While O'Brien’s 'blood is thicker than water’ ideology towards the Alfred/Thomas situation makes sense for her character, I’ve always seen the progression of s3 as an absurd overreaction. I mean, while it would be frustrating that your friend was unwilling to help give your nephew a leg up in his profession it’s like… not the end of the world? And Thomas has a point - he worked hard for years to earn his position and Alfred barely knows where to put the serving spoons.

Thomas actively sabotaging Alfred’s work (ruining Matthew’s jacket) is definitely something to fall out over, but trying to have him exposed, fired, arrested and sentenced to years of hard labour???? Hello???? A Bit Much, perhaps??? Also, from whom do we think Thomas learnt to behave this way in the first place??

She’s a ruthless person who will use anything against someone to achieve her goals - in this case revenge and humiliation. To get Thomas to make a move on such an performatively masculine and heterosexual man is the ultimate power play. It communicates that even though they aren’t friends anymore Thomas still listens to what she has to say. She’ll always be the wiser of the two, like she’s been the puppet master behind their schemes, and as much as he thinks himself too smart to deign to help Alfred, she can manipulate him as easily as she would someone who hasn’t spent years as her accomplice (and should know exactly what she’s like and capable of.)

If Siobhan hadn’t been leaving the show this would’ve been the perfect “checkmate” moment for her. It’s the ace in her deck?? (idk anything about cards) it’s her final move. She’s clearly known about Thomas’ sexuality for years and this is her saying “See how easily I can use this against you? Exactly so get back in line.”

Of course then Thomas could’ve pulled out his trump card, the soap. And then O’Brien would choose whether or not to call his bluff, ultimately settling on shifting the power dynamic in their relationship to more equal footing - if it wasn’t such a terrible secret for her I honestly think she’d be impressed by his threat. She’d underestimated him and it appears he’s actually learnt well.

So, in this bad timeline in which she left the show, when Jimmy wants to put the issue to bed and she seems hell bent on seeing Thomas behind bars, that’s the part where it all seems excessive to me, stumbling into ooc behaviour.

But they had to raise the stakes in such an ooc way in order for the wedge between them to be irreparable because she HAS to leave. Since s1 they’ve been thick as thieves, and how do you break a bond that strong? Betrayal of the highest order, which is not something we’ve seen to such a degree from O'Brien until now. It’s vicious and unrelenting, and comes right after we’ve been introduced to a more empathetic side of her in s2. A backwards step for her character. It’s totally fine for characters to go forwards and backwards in their progressions as people, in fact it’s more realistic that way, but she runs away to India and is never seen again.

We know O'Brien has been at Downton a long time from the way everyone talks about her, and in explicit canon Thomas has been there for ten years at this point. So how could such a fiercely loyal person do such a complete 180 on the only friend she’s seemingly ever had, downstairs or up?

Because of this it’s only at this point that I truly cry bad writing. Everything up until then could possibly be worked out between Thomas and O'Brien - they’re both strong-willed, goal oriented people with very specific moral codes and loyalties, they know how it is; cross them and they have to get you back somehow.

It’s just a shame that Siobhan wanted to leave, really, even though I completely respect the decision.

I’m so curious as to where Thomas’ storyline would’ve gone if she’d stayed. Baxter never would’ve replaced her and he would’ve had at least one friend/ally during the conversion therapy/depression/social isolation storyline that led to *what it led to*, if they’d even decided to go down that route at all with Thomas still having someone on his side. I also wish we’d got to learn more about O'Brien as a person, seen the more human sides of her that we got glimpses of in s2. There would’ve been ways to do that without reducing or overdoing the antagonistic role of her character.

tldr; looking at their relationship in s1&2, I think the only reason it went wrong was because it had to. If it wasn’t for Siobhan Finneran leaving I think Thomas and O’Brien would’ve had some entertaining ups and downs but ultimately stayed friends or at least allies. Maybe they could’ve even helped one another achieve lives outside of service if the show wasn’t written by an upper crust Tory who punishes any of his working class characters who dare to dream above their station and repeatedly uses gay suffering as a narrative device ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[lance798]

Shams: Online Computer Repair and Remote Virus Removal

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3. Guaranteed - Really? Does the site disclose to you who will be fixing your PC? Are the name, qualifications and experience of the PC specialist posted on the site? I have called a portion of these as far as anyone knows Microsoft guaranteed sites and when I asked precisely which certification was held with Microsoft and the PC administration organization couldn't offer me a response.

4. Free Antivirus Software: The online PC administration organization offers a free antivirus programming after the maintenance. Know that they are just giving you something you can get with the expectation of complimentary yourself. Once more, you get what you pay for. Free antivirus programming may be superior to nothing, yet just barely. I eliminate malware consistently from PCs that are ensured by free antivirus items and they are extremely contaminated. Just the antivirus items that you buy are satisfactory. At the point when a far off PC fix organization gives free sub-par items to clients it gives them an incorrect conviction that all is well with the world that will prompt their PC at last getting hit by an infection. A PC professional that is truly paying special mind to your general benefits will offer to sell you a quality item that works.

5. Free Scan Scam: Here's the way it works. You call a far off PC fix administration in light of the fact that your printer doesn't work. The online PC administration says they will interface with your machine and mention to you what's up free of charge, no commitment. At that point you can choose what to do straightaway. Free finding! Sounds great, correct? Heaps of individuals succumb to this. So the PC specialist associates with your machine and runs a program (that they have made) that claims to do a sweep of your PC. In only 3 minutes this product reports many library blunders, many issues in the occasion log, many infections, trojans and spyware. They disclose to you that you must sort this out immediately before the entirety of your documents vanish and your PC will not work by any means. After the alarm strategies, they give you an unbelievable cost of $300.00. Subsequent to paying that and they evidently fix every one of these blunders, odds are your printer actually won't work. However, the genuine actuality is - there isn't a piece of programming on the planet that can mention to you what's up with a PC shortly. I have more than twenty years of involvement and I can reveal to you that it a few hours of cautious work to appropriately assess a PC. I have helped numerous clients who revealed to me they had quite recently encountered this trick. Luckily they called me and by and large their PC was not in close to as terrible a shape as they had been persuaded.

6. One Year Service Contract Scam: Pay $300 each year and call for distant PC fix as frequently as you need. On the off chance that it sounds unrealistic, it likely is. I've conversed with bunches of individuals that have been singed by this. There is just a single way an online PC fix organization can offer that and stay in business, and that is to not satisfy their guarantee. The help contract is long and in fine print and isn't perused by most clients. I have understood them. The fine print says that in the event that you trouble them an excess of they can just cut you free, give no further PC help, and not give you any discount. Their advantage will be in getting new clients to pay the $300, not in giving PC help to you again and again. You additionally need to contemplate whether such a PC administration organization will even still be ready to go a half year as it were.

7. Cold pitch Scam: "Microsoft called me and said my PC is tainted." I have heard this on many occasions from individuals that call me for exhortation. I reveal to them first thing: "I'll be glad to do an infection check and perform malware expulsion on your PC for $59.99, yet know this first, what you were told isn't accurate and it was not Microsoft that called you. Microsoft doesn't call anybody and they would have no chance to get of knowing whether your PC is contaminated." This trick is normal. In the event that you get this call don't be frightened and don't be suckered into paying them to "fix" it.

8. The Big Company Scam: Many of my clients have disclosed to me that they went to an organization site for their PC issues and got a number and afterward called and conversed with HP, or Dell, or the rundown goes on: Microsoft, IBM, Norton, Toshiba, and so on and this organization revealed to them they had huge numbers of issues, they required malware expulsion and different fixes to deal with pop ups, a lethargic PC, or different issues and they could fix this at a specific cost. What these individuals didn't understand is that they were not really talking with the genuine organization they thought they were. Numerous online PC administration organizations deceitfully publicize that they are Dell, or Microsoft or whoever. They set up sites and Google advertisements intended to fool you into deduction they are support for HP or whoever. When they make them think they are the organization that made your PC, or your product or your printer, at that point they have a superior possibility at selling you their next trick. Whenever you go to a site take a gander at the URL and see where you are. On the off chance that it says for instance, FixMyHP.com or something to that effect and not, HP.com, at that point you are potentially on a trick site.

[rahulkota87]

Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register for Citizens (India)— a combined look

While we are about to finish the second month of CAA and NRC protests across our nation and in the midst of it we will be celebrating yet another republic day. It could not have been more ironic, though also more real as to what holds true to our democracy if we hold it dear.

While there has been lot written on what is happening and if one should be worried or one should not be, whether this is instigated or the pressure against those who are protesting is instigated, I thought we need to keep the reading of the act’s, bills in question to keep it bare why somethings matter and if there is instigation or real problem lurking for us to them mend ways later knowing we stepped into something which was a problem from beginning (we have done this many time over now, whichever government it be). So let me begin with the same in as methodical manner as possible..

CAA 2019 specifically brings the following —

In the Citizenship Act, 1955 (hereinafter referred to as the principal Act), in section 2, in sub-section (1), in clause (b), the following proviso shall be inserted, namely: — “Provided that any person belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, who entered into India on or before the 31st day of December, 2014 and who has been exempted by the Central Government by or under clause © of sub-section (2) of section 3 of the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920 or from the application of the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946 or any rule or order made thereunder, shall not be treated as illegal migrant for the purposes of this Act.

then

(3) On and from the date of commencement of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, any proceeding pending against a person under this section in respect of illegal migration or citizenship shall stand abated on conferment of citizenship to him

There are other aspects too in terms of reduction of terms of 11 years period to 5 years to identify a person for requesting citizenship, but that also is a polarising one with granting of such right only to specific people.

But lets get back to the basics from the CAA reading above -

Please note that this is not our refugee policy so we are not speaking about what is going to happen from here onwards, that would be a story for some other time, hopefully one which is debated and discussed first. Thus CAA is more like a one time sweep since it covers people who are in India on or before December 31, 2014.

With the cut-off date set at December 31 2014, the number of people who are likely to benefit from the amendments stands at 31,313, a figure submitted by the IB during a parliamentary committee hearing on the bill in 2016. But there is a larger expectation that millions of people who have been illegally residing in the country will now feel empowered to apply for citizenship (but again those covered in the communities stated in CAA).

So the above clearly states and also HM did state this in the parliament that this act is looking to make good of the past. This act is not future looking but is looking back and doing the one time sweep for correction. Getting people on-boarded as citizens (but only those who fit the bill above).

Next in line comes NRC, currently limited to Assam with Assam accords but is expected to be mandated to all states in India. Now lets read the requirement of NRC properly —

Following documents and conditions are necessary to prove Indian citizenship and be eligible to enroll in the NRC,

Electoral roll

Land and tenancy records

Citizenship certificate

Permanent residential certificate

Refugee registration certificate

Any government issued license/certificate

Government service/ employment certificate

Bank or post office accounts

Birth certificate

State educational board or university educational certificate

Court records/processes

Passport

Any LIC policy

Above these widespread protests which are happening in the nation when one reads these 2 acts together, there is a different problem and different fight which is happening in North East, where the original Assam Accords and NRC base definitions came from . The main reason for this has been that north-eastern states have for long faced large scale migration from neighbouring countries and resultant protests from indigenous residents over the strain this migration placed on the social, economic and political fabric of the region right since the 1960’s . The protests here is on account of specific regions not covered in CAA and thus against legitimisation of all immigrants from any country irrespective of their faith as they still believe that this will again undermine their right to land and will be overrun by other population.

Specific lines from the act are which when you draw on the map will show how much of the other is left out where people are stating that the Assam accords and NRC they or their ancestors were promised is undermined —

Nothing in this section shall apply to tribal area of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram or Tripura as included in the Sixth Schedule to the Constitution and the area covered under “The Inner Line” notified under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873

++++++++++++++++++

Now lets look at the above together, once NRC is established and all people of India have to prove their citizenship then one of the above documents would be required. You would note something like Aadhar card has been ignored since it has been given to all people in India and government did not consider is as apt base line document since rigour of establishing citizenship was not strong while providing Aadhar. One glance the list and a lot of us would say this is easy for anyone, but those who would have worked with low income family groups would note how much problem this bodes to them.

So NRC will ask for the document and if one does not have any of the above and is from the communities listed in CAA can then claim citizenship under the amendment, especially if they are in India before December 31, 2014.

Those who are not covered then have the question to answer not just to the government but themselves about which country do they belong to even after having a few generations of living in India.

Some examples are -

Tamil hindus who were repatriated back from Sri Lanka in 1970s, the generations since then working in tea gardens of south do not have proper paperworks to claim citizenship. How do we classify them or do they claim they have come from Pakistan or Afghanistan?

Muslims who are not having proper documents (I take this as a point since NRC issue will not be a problem for Hindus, Sikhs, Parsi, Christian since they have at the very least an option to claim themselves to be one to be covered under CAA requirement (stating their ancestors came in India from the said countries), thus the point of HM a lot of illegal immigrants will come forward and register themselves).

Thus this pushes those from minority communities or those persecuted from other regions to keep their original past aside and get covered under the scope provided, which would not be fair to them and if they stick to who they are, they are currently unsure of how they will be perceived — an undocumented person in this nation after a few generations of his / her family living under the said democratic constitution of India.

The combination of the reading of the two acts reveals much more problem. Independent reading of these two acts may not show something as a problem though any divisive policy statement undermines our constitution. But there seems to be little to look away from when we read the act properly together and the amount of burden it will leave on the individual to prove their right to be called Indian. Some might say this is collateral for nation strength, but some will say this is central to reducing the secular aspect of our constitution.

[calamity-bean]

Unexpectedly and quite by accident, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole researching the historical Charles Frederick Des Voeux. 

I’ve learned a lot about the Franklin Expedition and its members lately through the brilliant efforts of the Terror fandom... But it occurred to me that I’ve seen barely any mention whatsoever of the real Des Voeux! Possibly this is simply because I’ve missed it, in which case, my bad; possibly this is because no one’s interested, in which case I’ve wasted a lot of time. But I got curious. So I started digging, and I found...

...not a ton, I’m afraid. Not in great detail. As Sir Francis McClintock noted, Des Voeux was young. His career was still just starting, and he simply hadn’t had much time yet to leave his mark. Yet he’d already been noted for his “intelligence, gallantry, and zeal.” He’d already traveled widely, served in multiple wars, and was recommended to the Erebus by none other than Fitzjames, who described him as “a most unexceptionable, clever, agreeable, light-hearted, obliging young fellow, and a great favourite of Hodgson’s, which is much in his favour besides.”

So here’s everything I’ve got on the real Charles Frederick, as best I could stitch together from naval records, histories, and more. Also featuring some thoughts on his portrayal in the TV series; Goodsir “in ecstacies”; a bit about Hodgson; and quite a lot of Fitzjames.

A quick note on accuracy. I’m not a historian. I tried my best. Most of the info here about Des Voeux’s naval career comes from sources that seem credible and that often back each other up. The bit I’m more cautious about, though, is his ancestry and early life, because the only source I could find claiming any knowledge of that was Burke’s Peerage, and Burke’s has been known to be... wrong. For lack of any info to the contrary, I’m going to give y’all Burke’s version of events for now, but for more on my findings and reservations, see the Sources section at the end of this post. And if you have more info on ol’ C. Freddie or spot any mistakes, feel free to let me know!

Edit, 11/9/18: Good news! @francienolan was kind enough to send me a newspaper clipping from The Colonies and India, May 25, 1895, featuring a statement from colonial governor George William Des Voeux supporting Burke’s claims. I’ve updated bits of this post accordingly and have added G. William’s statement to the Sources section at the end, but I’ve also left my original discussion of Burke’s information intact.

Early Life

According to Burke’s Peerage, Charles Frederick was the second son of Reverend Henry Des Voeux, himself the third son of Sir Charles Des Voeux, 1st Baronet of Indiaville, in the Queen’s County, Ireland (now County Laois). Ireland? But Des Voeux is a French name, right? Yes! It was also not the family’s original name, but yes, their origins were French. Marin Anthony Vinchon de Bacquencourt picked “Des Voeux” as his new surname after having a falling-out with Catholicism, which resulted in a falling-out with his family, which resulted in his emigrating from Normandy to Ireland. De Bacquencourt’s son, the aforementioned grandpa Sir Charles, was born in Ireland, got rich in India, repped Carlow Borough and Carlingford in the Irish House of Commons, and was created baronet in 1787. Fittingly for a house whose founder chose the name voeux (which can be translated as “wishes”), the official family motto was Altiora in votis: “Greater things are the objects of my wishes.”

Burke’s doesn’t bother listing Charles Frederick’s year or place of birth, because that would make my life too easy. But we can make some guesses. We know that his big bro (Henry Dalrymple) was born in either 1822 or 1824 and that his immediately younger bro (Charles Champagne) was born in 1827. (1827 also marks the death of Rev. Henry’s first wife, Frances Dalrymple of Barrow, County Derby, married December 1, 1812. Assuming C. F. was legitimate, which I’ve found no reason not to assume, Frances would have been his mother.) Thus, assuming at least a year between children, we can estimate that Charles Frederick was born no earlier than 1823 and no later than 1826.

As for where... The baronetcy was in Ireland, yes, but Henry Dalrymple was born in England — specifically, in Carlton, Nottinghamshire, which is also where Rev. Henry married his second wife, Frances (Fanny) Elizabeth Hutton, in 1828. If Rev. Henry’s family was in Carlton in both 1822/24 and 1828, it seems possible they were there when Charles Frederick was born, too. The genealogies I’ve found have had wildly different opinions about Rev. Henry’s total number of children, but according to Burke’s, at least, between his father’s three wives, Charles Frederick had eight full or half siblings: five brothers and three sisters. Some sources list fewer; some list even more! Who knows!

Alas: that’s all I’ve got on his early life, and it frustrates me that so much of it is based in reading between the lines. I do want to note the baronetcy’s coat of arms, which I found intriguingly squirrel-centric. Pictured up top, they consisted of a red field with a gold vertical stripe containing a squirrel above a Maure, with another purple squirrel as the crest. I mention this for one reason and one reason only: I now cannot stop thinking of Sebastian Armesto’s snarky, moody Mr. Des Voeux as a grumpy squirrel.

The Second Syrian War (1840)

Fast forward to 1840, when, happily, our information becomes much more specific. This year marks the first record I’ve found of Des Voeux’s naval career, when, according to McClintock, he served in the Second Syrian War (the Second Egyptian–Ottoman War) under Commodore Sir Charles John Napier, captain of the Powerful.

Des Voeux would now have been between the ages of 14 and 17. He definitely was not yet a mate, but I couldn’t find his exact rank at the time or any other particulars of his service in this conflict.

I know this post is supposed to be about Des Voeux, but I’d be remiss not to mention that another familiar face was also in the area: our good buddy James Fitzjames! He’d been a gunnery lieutenant aboard the Ganges (under Captain Barrington Reynolds) since October 17, 1838, and when the war began, his ship headed for the Mediterranean alongside the Powerful and the Implacable. James made himself rather notorious here by undertaking the tricky (and highly perilous) task of sneaking into Beirut one night, distributing a proclamation by Napier to the Egyptian soldiers camped there, and sneaking out again, which pissed off Egyptian commander Soliman Pasha al-Faransawi so much he put a price on Fitzjames’s head. Normal Tuesday night for James Fitzjames, really.

Whether Des Voeux and Fitzjames ever crossed paths in the Mediterranean, I don’t know. But they definitely did during...

The First Opium War (1841–42)

All aboard the Cornwallis! Pictured above, this 74-gun third-rate ship of the line hosted treaty negotiations following China’s defeat in 1842, and during the war itself, it served as home to Des Voeux as well as at least three other future members of the lost Franklin Expedition.

You can probably guess that Fitzjames was one of them; this war was, after all, “the time he got shot by the Chinese.” He’d caught the attention of Sir William Parker during the Syrian War and, after getting home and serving just a few weeks aboard the Excellent at Portsmouth, was appointed to the Cornwallis, Parker’s flagship, in April or May of 1841. 

Fitzjames recalls that Des Voeux was “a mere boy” at this time (he would’ve now been between 15 and 18) and that he was en route to join the Endymion, commanded by Sir Frederick Grey. Des Voeux did indeed transfer to the Endymion at some point during the war, though I’m not sure where or when. The Cornwallis departed from Plymouth July 3, 1841, and reached Chusan on January 12, 1842; the Endymion departed Plymouth February 2, 1841, but had to refit its mainmast at the Cape of Good Hope and its hull at Aden, and THEN spent some time in the East Indies, so it didn’t reach Chusan till July 5, 1842. I’m not sure whether Des Voeux stayed on the Cornwallis all the way to China or whether he joined the Endymion at some port en route. Somewhere in the midst of all this, he also found time to serve as a naval aide-de-camp to General Sir Hugh Gough, the British commander-in-chief.

Another future Erebite to serve on the Cornwallis in China was Stephan Stanley, though Fitzjames tells us his time on board was brief, and I don’t know that it overlapped with Des Voeux’s. And, last but not least: George Henry Hodgson. At this time a mate, he was appointed to the Cornwallis on June 5, 1841, and distinguished himself in his service, particularly at Chinkiang (Zhenjiang) — so much so that he was rewarded with a lieutenant’s commission on December 23, 1842, shortly after the end of the war. He would probably love to tell his fellow officers about his role at Chinkiang over dinner sometime, I reckon, if even the slightest mention of that battle didn’t make Fitzjames launch into his whole bullet-wound saga again.

Perhaps the Cornwallis is where Hodgson’s particular fondness for Charles got its start. At any rate, the acquaintance with Fitzjames would prove fateful (and indirectly fatal) for Des Voeux.

Officer’s Examinations and Training (1844)

The next mention I’ve found of Charles Freddie comes from May 1, 1844, when he passed the examinations required for lieutenant rank and was promoted to mate / sub-lieutenant. Congrats!

Shortly after, in June, he was appointed to the Excellent (formerly the Boyne, above) at Portsmouth. I previously mentioned Fitzjames being employed on the Excellent also, as was Hodgson at various times. It was, in fact, a training ship — a gunnery school anchored north of Portsmouth Dockyard where sailors trained in such skills as artillery and mathematics by, say, firing big guns into the creek. Fitzjames served here in 1838 from January 19 to October 17, and then again for a few weeks in the spring of 1841. Hodgson served for some time starting in October 1840 and then again starting November 27, 1844; and Des Voeux served for “several months” starting in June 1844. Captain Sir Thomas Hastings was commander throughout all these years.

And now, at last, we reach 1845.

The Franklin Expedition (1845–??)

Des Voeux joined the crew of the Erebus on March 4, 1845, on the recommendation of James Fitzjames, who selected him based on their service together aboard the Cornwallis. He was now no older than 22 and no younger than 19. 

We all know how this ends, even if we don’t know exactly when or how Des Voeux died. The National Maritime Museum’s collection contains a scrap of a wool shirt trimmed with cotton, cream colored, that was found by Inuit of Repulse Bay at a campsite near the mouth of the Back River and obtained from them by John Rae. A group of men from the expedition had starved to death at this camp. Near the left edge of the fragment, in line with the buttonholes, is inked “F:D:V: 1845.” 

I suppose that’s not necessarily proof Des Voeux died at that camp; another man could have appropriated the shirt before or after Des Voeux’s death. But we know Des Voeux was at least still alive by May 28, 1847, when he and Graham Gore signed the record left in the cairn at Victory Point:

“28th of May, 1847. H.M. ships ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ wintered in the ice in lat. 70° 05′ N., long. 98° 23′ W.

Having wintered in 1846–47 [sic; it was actually the winter of ’45–46] at Beechey Island, in lat. 74° 43′ 28′′ N., long. 91° 39′ 15′′ W., after having ascended Wellington Channel to lat. 77°, and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition. All well. Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the ships on Monday, 24th May, 1847.

Gm. Gore, Lieut. Chas. F. Des Voeux, Mate.”

Funnily enough, Des Voeux was technically not, by this time, a mate. One of the things that started me down this research rabbit-hole in the first place is that I came across a source referring to him as a lieutenant. That took me rather aback! The TV show never refers to him that way. As it turns out, though, Her Majesty did indeed promote Des Voeux, by brevet, to lieutenant on November 9, 1846. This was announced in a November 10 supplement to the London Gazette, which printed his new rank amid a long list of other officers whose various commissions were all to be dated to the 9th. Of course, by this time, the expedition had been gone more than a year already, the ships were already icebound off the coast of King William Land. Neither Des Voeux nor any of his shipmates could ever have learned of this. (The other mates — Sargent, Couch, Hornby, and Thomas — all received their commissions during the expedition, too.) As such, a lot of sources do refer to Des Voeux by his official rank of lieutenant, but for the purposes of the expedition itself, as far as we know, he continued to function as a mate.

Side note: It just so happens that I’m posting this on November 9, 2018. So... Happy 172nd anniversary of that promotion you never knew about, dude.

Tragedy is unavoidable with the Franklin Expedition, but I want to end this little history on a happier note. The following anecdote comes from a journal Fitzjames kept from June 8, 1845, a couple weeks after the expedition left Greenhithe, to July 11, the day before they continued onward from their stop at the Whalefish Islands in Greenland’s Disko Bay. Here they left the last of their letters ever to reach home. On Wednesday, June 25, 1845, Fitzjames recorded this pleasant scene of Des Voeux helping Goodsir collect specimens:

“I am now writing, 11 P.M., lat. 63°, near about a place marked on the chart as Lichtenfels. The sea, as the sun set half an hour ago, was of the most delicate blue in the shadows; perfectly calm — so calm that the Terror’s mast-heads are reflected close alongside, though she is half a mile off. The air is delightfully cool and bracing, and everybody is in good humour, either with himself or his neighbours. I have been on deck all day, taking observations. Goodsir is catching the most extraordinary animals in a net, and is in ecstacies. Gore and Des Voeux are over the side, poking with nets and long poles, with cigars in their mouths, and Osmar laughing.”

I think this a sweet way to remember them all: happy in each other’s company, laughing, on a beautiful summer’s eve. And wow, you can really tell it’s summer in the Arctic when the sun’s just set at 11 p.m., huh?

Thoughts on Des Voeux in The Terror (2018)

It’s been a bit surreal getting an idea of the real Des Voeux after only knowing him from The Terror. I haven’t read the novel, so I can’t speak to Dan Simmons’s depiction; as for the TV series, on my first watch-through I barely noticed him at all. By my second watch, I’d since taken notice of Sebastian Armesto in general, and I made a special point of recording every sign of Des Voeux in every episode: what he says, what he does, his personality, etc.

The show’s version of Charles Frederick is not terribly likable. He’s condescending to Goodsir and hostile to the Inuit. He’s sardonic at the best of times and, at worst, a mutineer, a cannibal, the killer of Tom Hartnell, a pathetic figure last seen begging Silna, whom he always disparaged, for help. He does not, in short, much resemble the friendly, good-humored boy who caught sea creatures for Goodsir and was so well-liked by Hodgson and Fitzjames.

But even on the show, he’s also portrayed as a highly capable officer — highly trusted, even, right up till the mutiny. Heck, part of the reason the mutiny succeeds is because he’s so trusted: in 1.08, when Crozier says they need a mate to guard the armory, Fitzjames immediately suggests Des Voeux, unaware that he’s already under Hickey’s sway. In 1.04, too, Fitzjames entrusts him with guarding Silna on her first night aboard the ship. It’s an echo (perhaps an unintentional one) of the real Fitzjames’s regard for the real Des Voeux — a regard which inadvertently doomed the younger man by securing his spot on the expedition in the first place, and which, in the show’s version of events, is all the more bittersweet in light of his eventual betrayal.

There’s an echo, too, of Des Voeux’s training aboard the Excellent that shows in his facility with artillery, maths, and calculations. In 1.02, he leads the party to the cairn so accurately that Gore says he deserves a prize for his orienteering, and in 1.05, we see him performing calculations to determine atmospheric pressure based on the speed of sound. He’s put in charge of armed parties multiple times throughout the series, suggesting he’s capable with a rifle, if tragically twitchy-fingered at times. There’s even an echo of his service in China in the East Asian–esque shirt he wears as a costume at Carnivale.

I don’t know whether the writers had the real Des Voeux’s background in mind when coming up with ANY of this; for all I know, I’m reading too deep into coincidence. But it’s interesting all the same. And though I really don’t mind that the show decided to make Des Voeux rather unpleasant — that version is an interesting character in his own right — I can’t help but feel a new and surprisingly deep attachment to him now that I’ve spent so much time trying to get to know the real guy, who left so few traces other than his name on some papers and a fragment of shirt.

Sources

Edit, 11/9/18: In the original version of this post, I expressed a lot of concerns about whether Charles Frederick was truly of the Indiaville family of Des Voeuxes, as I couldn’t find any source other than Burke’s to verify it. Happily, it turns out that Sir George William Des Voeux, a governor of Fiji, Newfoundland, and Hong Kong, wrote the following to The Colonies and India on May 25, 1895:

“Being, to my great regret, unable to attend the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the departure of the Franklin Expedition, I venture to ask of your courtesy the permission to make known through your columns the fact that injustice has been done to the memory of one of the officers of that expedition by the misspelling of his name upon the memorial column in Waterloo Place. The officer in question was my brother, Charles Frederick Des Voeux, mate (subsequently promoted to lieutenant) in the Erebus, Sir John Franklin’s ship.”

G. William was definitely the son of Rev. Henry Des Voeux and a descendant of de Bacquencourt, and thus, despite all my reservations, it appears that Burke’s genealogy is indeed... correct! I’ve left my original discussion of Burke’s Peerage intact below, though, for anyone interested.

Original version of this section:

Most of the info in this post comes from one or more of the following:

The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in Arctic Seas (Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, 1859)

A Naval Biographical Dictionary (William Richard O’Byrne, 1849)

Papers and Despatches Relating to the Arctic Searching Expeditions of 1850 (James Mangles, 1852)

The National Maritime Museum

The Royal Navy Lists

These sources corroborate each other sufficiently that I feel pretty OK about the info gleaned from them, which primarily pertains to Des Voeux’s naval career. As mentioned up top, though, the only source I could find on Des Voeux’s ancestry and early life was Burke’s Peerage. At least four editions (of the editions I could find scans of) explicitly identify Rev. Henry Des Voeux’s second son as our Des Voeux. “Charles-Frederick, R.N., lieut. on board one of the ships of Sir John Franklin’s ill fated expedition” appears in the 1898, 1910, and 1914 editions; the 1907 edition reads “Charles Frederick, R.N. lost in Sir John Franklin's expedition.”

Burke’s isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s definitely been known to make mistakes, and I really wanted to find another source verifying that our Charles Frederick was, indeed, of the Indiaville family, in case he could possibly have come from some other family also called Des Voeux. Basically, my concern has been: What if Burke’s just plain wrong? What if the idea that this lost member of an infamous expedition belonged to the Des Voeuxes of Indiaville was an invention erroneously conjured up later, simply because they happened to share a name?

Unfortunately, the genealogies and peerage lists I found were contradictory and/or glaringly incomplete. Even the ship’s musters from the Cornwallis, Endymion, etc., could have been immensely helpful here, as they sometimes list ages and even place of birth (though the Erebus’s manifest doesn’t list either for Des Voeux), but the National Archives hasn’t yet digitized the records from the relevant ships and years.

Another frustration is an inconsistency — or, rather, a lack of detail — in Burke’s itself. While some editions explicitly link him to the expedition, many earlier ones (such as 1845, ’48, ’50, ’58, ’60, ’61, ’65, and ’68) refer to Rev. Henry’s second son simply as... “Frederick, R.N.” No “Charles”; no further detail. I’d feel much more secure if a full “Charles-Frederick” had appeared in editions printed before the Franklin Expedition became so infamous. Even these earlier editions, though, all at least note that “Frederick Des Voeux” was Royal Navy — R.N. — and they shorten his siblings’ names as well. Henry Dalrymple is listed simply as “Henry”; Charles Champagne is just “Charles.” So “Frederick” could, conceivably, likewise be standing in for two given names, e.g. Charles Frederick. And something must have happened to Frederick by 1894 to render him dead, missing, or otherwise ineligible for a title, as the baronetcy skips straight from Henry Dalrymple (5th Baronet) to Charles Champagne (6th). 

In the end... Who knows. I can’t prove he was of the Des Voeuxes of Indiaville; I can’t prove he wasn’t. For what it’s worth, though, I can tell you that like 50% of the guys in the Indiaville family were apparently named Charles and/or Frederick. If nothing else, our boy would fit right in.

[southeastasianists]

IMAGINE THAT THE LANGUAGE YOU speak with your friends, with your family, with people on the street, a language unique to your country and objectively very interesting and cool, is, officially, considered lesser and unworthy. This kind of thing has happened around the world throughout history: African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers in the United States, for example, have also had their language marginalized and demeaned by the ruling power. Now, it’s happening in Singapore.

Singapore is an immigrant country with four official languages: English, Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin. Officially, English is the most commonly spoken language in Singaporean homes, having recently and just barely edged out Mandarin. Unofficially? That’s completely wrong. Because what’s likely the actual most common language spoken does not appear on the census. That language is called Singlish.

Singlish can broadly be categorized as a creole, which is a full language that arises suddenly, usually with one language as its base, but with unique grammatical features and many words from at least one other language. This kind of language comes about when people who don’t speak the same language are suddenly living in the same place. Many creoles came from the slave trade: one person speaks one language, another speaks a second language, and they’re both moved to a place where they have to work together and live together and communicate. The base language is usually the language of the ruling class or imperial power; it’s a language that those two slaves need to understand a little, but they bring elements of their own languages into it. At first, this kind of language is classified as a pidgin, which is sort of a shorthand that exists solely for necessary communication alongside other full languages. But in some cases, it evolves into a full language of its own, one that can handle all the tasks any other language handles, at which point it’s called a creole.

Singlish has its base in English, because Singapore was a British colony for most of its modern history. But the vast majority of the population came from countries where English was not the dominant language, mostly mainland China, Malaysia, and India. Thus Singlish was born.

“Singlish itself, in its full-blown version, can get quite hard to understand [for non-Singaporean English speakers],” says Jakob Leimgruber, a sociolinguist and assistant professor who wrote his thesis on Singlish. Singaporeans are rarely monolingual, and conversations can often include bits and pieces, or full sentences, in multiple languages, which can make trying to isolate Singlish a bit tricky. But, despite the fact that Singapore is made up of multiple ethnic groups who speak different languages, Singlish itself is “remarkably consistent,” says Leimgruber, across the entire populace.

At least, it’s consistent across all ethnic groups. Socioeconomically, it’s more likely that poorer and/or older Singaporeans would speak Singlish more often; younger and wealthier Singaporeans are more likely to be able to switch between Singlish and more widely understood varieties of English. But Leimgruber says that few, if any, Singaporeans would be completely unfamiliar with Singlish, largely due to the country’s compulsory military service, which places people from all economic backgrounds together.

The language includes lots of loanwords from the other major languages spoken in Singapore, especially Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. These are really, really common, to the point where sometimes it can sound as if the speaker has simply switched languages mid-thought. And there are some pronunciation things; words that end with a lot of consonants, for example, tend to get simplified, so a word like “texts” would be pronounced more like “tex.” But it gets much more interesting than that; it has a whole mess of totally distinct grammatical features that make it unusual.

An easy one to understand is the word “lah,” which is what’s known in linguistics as a tag. It’s attached, often but not exclusively, to the end of sentences. It’s roughly similar to the Canadian “eh,” and various other English words or phrases used around the world (“right,” “you know,” “innit”). It is ubiquitous in Singapore, as associated with Singlish as the Canadian “eh” is with Canada, although interestingly there is no pause between the end of the sentence and “lah,” as there is with “eh.” Imagine it as just…not having a comma. “So you’d just race into it lah”? Singlish has so, so many of these lightly modifying tags: leh, mah, lor, hor, har, ar. They all convey slightly different things about the relationship between the speaker and listener, or the way the speaker wants the listener to interpret what was just said.

Interestingly, the Singaporean government does not have a firm definition of what “standard English” means.

Singlish speakers use the present tense when referring to people who are alive, or probably still alive. In English, you might say, “I went to Thailand last year, and the guide spoke fluent Spanish.” In Singlish, it would be, “the guide speaks fluent Spanish.” The thinking is that the guide continues to speak Spanish; whether you are in Thailand does not affect the guide’s ability to speak Spanish.

Then there’s the word “kena,” which is pronounced something like “kih-NAH.” There are words like this in Asian languages such as Malay and Hokkien, but not really in English. It’s a grammatical word used to mark the passive and usually right before or even instead of a verb; it means something, some verb action, happened to the subject of the sentence. Interestingly, it’s only ever used for negative things; you could say “the teacher kena scolded him,” but not “the teacher kena praised him.” “Tio” is similar, though it can be used for positive actions as well, like “She tio money on the ground.”

The English word “then” has, in Singlish, been changed to “den,” and its meanings have been pretty radically changed. It can be used to describe an action that will happen in the future, as in ”I den talk to you.” It can be used in about a dozen other ways, meaning “therefore,” as a link to a previous sentence, or alone as a sarcastic sort of “oh yeah?” meaning. The pronunciation might subtly change as well, by lengthening or dragging out the final consonant, to indicate the way in which the word is being used.

“Den” is one of many examples of ways in which Singlish sort of sounds like English, but actually packs a whole other bunch of meanings into it. If you were to just translate “den” as “then,” you wouldn’t really be getting it; you can’t use “den” in some places you’d use “then,” and vice versa, and it sometimes means something other than what “then” would mean.

Singlish also uses a lot of reduplication, which is repeating the same word. English doesn’t do this much; it might have a phrase like “very, very big,” in which the repetition is used to amplify the word “very.” “Very, very big” is even bigger than “very big,” which is bigger than “big.” In Singlish, that’s not at all how reduplication works. Take a sentence like this: “Your son short short.”

For one thing, that’s not a typo; Singlish, like Hebrew and a few other languages, simply doesn’t use the verb “to be.” (Singlish also often omits articles like “the” and “a/an.”) But the reduplication thing: “short short” doesn’t mean “very short.” Instead the reduplication of the word is a dampener, taking the whole phrase to something more like “short-ish.” This kind of reduplication can be used with both adjectives and verbs; you can take a walk walk, which would be a very mild stroll.

Anyway, that’s just a brief survey, and it might even underplay exactly how different from English Singlish really is. Leimgruber says Singlish is mostly mutually comprehensible with English, but I’m not so sure. Take a look at the Singlish dub ofBeauty and the Beast.

Singlish is spoken across all ethnic groups in Singapore, even across economic strata. But the government hates it. Since the year 2000, the Singaporean government has been conducting a campaign called the “Speak Good English Movement,” which is specifically designed to discourage the use of Singlish and encourage the use of standard English.

Interestingly, the Singaporean government does not have a firm definition of what “standard English” means; they aren’t strictly teaching British Received Pronunciation or New England Prep School English or Australian English or anything else. By “standard,” they seem to simply mean “English that can be readily understood by English speakers outside Singapore.”

The campaign is not overtly violent or racist in the same way marginalization of Irish Gaelic or AAVE speakers was and is. The Singaporean government does outreach, posting signs around public transit telling people the “correct” way to pronounce words, hosting writing competitions for kids in school, that kind of thing. “These words are very similar and many often get them confused, but do you know when it’s more appropriate to use a particular word? Put your grammar skills to the test and see how you fare!” reads one quiz. Is it “The mother put her children to sleep at night” or “the mother put her children to bed at night”?

The government’s reasoning is that English is the international language of commerce, and that Singapore has an inherent advantage because, it being a former British colony, English is already widely spoken. But if instead it’s Singlish that people are speaking, this could make for a serious obstacle to international financial success.

Since the early 1980s, the idea that any one language can be “correct” or “good,” while others are “incorrect” or “bad,” has been widely panned by linguists. Bill Labov, pioneering linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, was among the first to study AAVE as a regular language, one with rules that can’t be broken and unique features and an evolution, rather than as some mangled form of standard English. Since then, the idea that all languages are just, you know, different, rather than good or bad, has been the norm. Singapore’s shunning of Singlish is, from that perspective, retrograde and maybe even offensive.

Singlish itself is pretty well-studied, though a lot of the publications—dictionaries, for example—are more jokey than serious academic works. And Singaporeans have not risen up to protest the marginalization of Singlish. “There’s much less of an advocacy for Singlish in Singapore,” says Leimgruber. There are some—again, jokey—organizations, like the Speak Good Singlish Movement Facebook page. (“Harlow, welcome to the Speak Good Singlish Movement. Our Gahmen has been damn siao on, trying to tell us to speak good engrish, good chinese. This is the Facebook Singlish Speaker’s Corner, let it all out my friends. Don’t be paiseh.”)

But Singaporeans seem fairly comfortable switching between Singlish and Singapore-inflected English, or Mandarin or Malay or any of the other languages spoken in Singapore. Leimgruber says that Singaporeans don’t disagree that some mutually comprehensible form of English is important to learn, and in many situations (speaking to foreigners, job interviews) will switch to English. The degree to which people are aware of the differences between Singlish and English varies; most Singlish speakers will probably not use the many Mandarin or Malay words when speaking a more standard English, but some of those grammatical differences would likely remain.

But, says Leimgruber, Singlish is not really in any danger of dying out, despite the government’s hopes. (He says that in cases where the government really feels the need to connect with the populace, like in elections, government officials will sometimes lapse into Singlish.) It’s as close to a unique national language as Singapore gets lah?

[inaturalist]

A Mouth Gaping Viper - Observation of the Week, 1/13/19

This “yawning” bamboo viper, seen in India by prasannaparab, is our Observation of the Week!

“When I was in high school I used to collect nature and wildlife related newspaper cuttings, and also got hold of a few old National Geographic magazines, which helped in developing my interest on this subject,” says Prasanna Parab. “At that time, going into the wild or nature watching was just an unknown domain at home.”

He says that mentors like Paresh Porob (Range Forest Officer, Goa (India)) and Shambhu M V (Indian Forest Service) “sensitized me about nature, provided me the opportunity and inculcated the essential discipline and patience required for documenting natural history, this presented a plethora of opportunities for me to travel in the wild.” Prassana began photographing butterflies - his photo of which have been used for the management plan of the Netravali Wildlife Sanctuary, where he has been named an Honorary Wildlife Warden - but is now also taking photos of birds, arachnids, orchids, and more.

Prasanna encountered the above snake back in 2014 while visiting Netravali Wildlife Sanctuary with Honorable Wildlife Warden Benhail Antao and Louise Remedios E Antao and tells me

we sighted this bamboo viper perched on a stick near a stream in an evergreen forest. Since none of us had a macro lens, we patiently watched this for 5-10 minutes, flickering its tongue with very slow movement. Suddenly, I saw it slowly opening its mouth, I was far away owing to the fact that I had a Canon 100-400mm tele lens; I quickly managed to snap 6 sequential images of this yawning behavior.

While the viper might appear to be baring its fangs in preparation to bite or at least scare off a threat, that’s likely not the case. I consulted with NHMLA herpetologist Dr. Greg Pauly (@gregpauly) and he was sent me an explanatory list of four probable reasons a snake might mouth gape (aka yawn):

1) Stretching fangs and jaws after eating a large meal. This is basically just getting everything back into a comfortable position. Owners of pet snakes will be quite familiar with this. Sometimes people think this is because they need to reposition their jaws after "unhinging" them, but of course snakes don't unhinge their jaws. That's just a common misconception.

2) Stretching fangs and jaw musculature in preparation for eating a large meal.

3) Drawing in chemicals that can contact the vomeronasal organ.

4) In some species, a wide open mouth is used as a threat/warning display. This is common in cottonmouths and parrot snakes.

5) There are certainly other reasons still awaiting to be discovered. Owners of pet snakes will have witnessed their snakes yawn in situations that don't fit into the above categories. For example, I think snakes sometimes yawn just to stretch critically important muscles and joints that don't get much day-to-day use otherwise. But nobody has really demonstrated this.   

Dr. Pauly believes this bamboo viper is likely opening its mouth for reason number 3 or possibly 5, and is not aware of this species using it as a threat display.

This species of viper is found in southern India, often among bamboo, and is known to prey on birds, lizards, and other small animals. It should not be confused with other members of its genus, some of which are also commonly called bamboo vipers. Like all vipers this species has front fangs (shown wonderfully in Prasanna’s photo) which can fold back when not in use, and its venom is hemotoxic, meaning it damages and disrupts the circulatory system. Members of the other major venomous snake family, Elapidae (cobras, mambas, most sea snakes, among others), have fixed front fangs and their venom is generally neurotoxic, meaning it disrupts the nervous system.

While he has been photographing wildlife for many years, Prasanna (above) tells me me he only recently discovered iNaturalist while at “the Spider India Meet 2018 at Amba Ghat (Maharashtra, India) organized by Siddharth Kulkarni (The George Washington University, Washington DC) and Dr. Atul Vartak.” He attended a talk by Rohit George (@rohitmg) that discussed citizen science and soon started looking into iNat. He says, “I went through the website several times and noticed that a lot of knowledge is being shared and circulated which can aid science in a huge way, thus prompting me to make more keen observations and share them on iNaturalist.” He’s currently posting both his past observations (like this one) and present observations here.

- by Tony Iwane

- Nice article about Siddharth Kulkarni and Dr. Atul Vartak’s documenting of a new spider species in India. 

- Here’s a New York Times column featuring Rohit George and an amazing spider-mimicking moth he found.

[doodledialogue]

Interview series - What after B.Arch? #12

Interviewee: Ar. Lolia Mary Post-graduation: Masters in Environmental Planning | School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India

What prompted you to take up this particular program? 

I felt the need to focus on larger scales and broader perspectives of development, to understand the dynamics of how and why we have different types of built landscapes across various regions. By the 4th year in my undergraduate study, I was gravitating towards learning more about natural systems and environmentally sustainable designs. Master’s in Environmental Planning was the most appropriate course, which fit my inclination and interest w.r.t scale and natural systems.

When did you take up master’s?

I got into Master’s course immediately after Bachelor’s.

My advice is simple: if you have a clear inclination towards further studies and have examined why you need to pursue a master’s course and a preferred subject, I don’t think you should stop yourself from immediately joining a course. But if you are inclined to practising Architecture in the long run and do not feel the need to further your studies immediately then you might want to get into practice. This will buy yourself more time to think through.

When did you start with the application process considering the time for application, scholarship/bursary deadlines etc.?

I started enquiring and doing my research on the application process, subjects/courses, colleges etc. around the beginning of the 5th year of the course. Of course, towards the last semester in Architecture, it was more intense.

One should start researching, reviewing courses and colleges at least a year before (if not a year and a half). This will give you more options and enough time to weigh your options. If planning on taking up courses outside of India, then one might want to give oneself at least 15 months’ time so as to not miss courses starting at different times of the year.

What preparation did you do before starting master’s? I did some background study on environmental planning and prepared for moving to a new city. The school did not hold any pre-master’s programs/induction week/courses. I spoke to alumni and professors of the program.

Did you have to give any entrance tests? How did you plan for them?

SPA’s admission procedure at that time (2010) had two stages of candidate evaluation;

Stage 1) Detailed application form submission (Statement of Purpose, Portfolio-CV, and application form, Scorecards in Architecture and Scorecard of GATE exam)

Stage 2) Short-listed candidates are called in for a short written test and an Interview thereafter

Based on the results of these stages of review, the final list of successful candidates is put up.

It is ideal if you also qualify and secure a good rank in GATE; this will increase your points at the admission ranking and also help secure GATE scholarship.

How long was your program?

It was a two-year course. Courses began in July 2010 and ended in April 2012. Post-program opportunities were not available.

Did you have post-masters plans in mind when you took up masters? Or did you go with the flow?

My intent was to work in planning and environmental sector wherein I gain experience while working in all types of organizations (research-based organizations, government based, NGO, corporate etc.). I had given myself the flexibility for seeking job opportunities with an open mind initially, so it was easier to go with the flow. My idea was that I need to experience each type of organization to better understand how the sector itself functions.

How was the experience at the school?

It was quite rewarding given the exposure received especially to be able to hear and learn from pioneers, decision makers and change makers of planning and development in India. There is no stopping on how much one can learn because it is up to the individual to take initiative.

Even though at times chaotic with multiple perspective and reasonings, this chaos opens one’s horizon of knowledge and gives you the grounding required to understand planning and development in a developing nation like ours which is much complex unlike developed nations. This is my take.

How was the teaching at your school?

The teaching was heavily anchored on in-depth research (within the constraint of time), brainstorming, discussions, group work and field work. This is important so as to learn; how to agree to disagree, resolve conflicts and evolve balanced recommendations considering multiple aspects. This skill is fundamental while practising the profession of planning as it is multi-sectoral in its nature of practice on ground.

Classes were a standard 9.00am-5.00pm, five days a week with occasional special classes during Saturdays. Yes, there was quality time for extracurricular activities.

Tell us more about the mentors.

All the faculty in Department of Environmental Planning were very approachable (they still are) and one could approach them at their department rooms freely and they were accessible except when they were occupied with prior appointments.

I’d like to especially remember and thank Prof. Aseesh Maitra, Prof. Meenakshi Dhote, my thesis guides Ar. Anita Tikoo and Asst. Prof. Neha Tripati Goel for their wisdom, inspiration, patience and endurance.

Were you involved in research projects/competitions while studying?

Partly, through our studio and department projects.

Could you tell us in brief what your thesis/dissertation/final project was about?

It was on developing a model framework to evaluate landscape for its functional capacity to perform ecosystem services.

What kind of dialogue did you have with your professors?

I had the best thesis guides I could ask for. Ar. Anita Tikoo and Asst. Prof. Neha Tripathi Goel were exactly who, I and my topic needed. They always asked the right questions and also encouraged and stirred me to ask the right questions. They were open to hearing my thoughts and provide excellent critique was truly involved as my thesis guides. I think asking the right questions and encouraging us to ask questions pushes one to seek answers ourselves and thus expand the scope of learning.

How was the structure of your meetings with the guides?

We had a structure and a tentative schedule with targets applicable to all students. But over and above both my thesis guides were available for discussions whenever I required, to review with them. We had discussions before the scheduled submission and presentation of the work.

Did you encounter any challenges while doing your thesis?

I cannot remember any negative challenge. Thesis is about taking up a challenging research-based topic which you try and engage with in-depth for the given time. And a good thesis topic shouldn’t and cannot end with the final submission or jury presentation because it would have a further scope of examination and enquiry.

Could you please tell us about the thesis assessment system?

We had intermittent presentation and grading through the various stages of the thesis semester. It concluded with a final jury presentation (external and internal jurors) and submission of the report.

How did you manage the finances?

Fully funded by my kind and loving parents as I hadn’t received any scholarship.

Could you tell us about your accommodation?

Stayed in the campus hostel. The hostel building was right at the campus and barely took 5 minutes to walk to the department.

Did you travel while/after studying?

Yes. As much as I could.

Through Architecture and Environmental Planning course, I travelled to Jaisalmer, Jaipur, Udaipur, Junagadh, Kutch, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Puri, Bhubaneswar, Varanasi, Sarnath, Nainital, New Delhi, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Bhopal, Batindha, Puducherry; with the intent of experiencing the city and architecture, some were part of the studio projects/thesis and some places were purely leisure. 

Are there any notable incidents/ anecdotes from post-grad studies that you wish to share?

I can’t think of any one incident. I often tell people it was so much fun learning and going to the classes especially because we were a small group of 12 students (12-15 seats in M.EP course) and luckily we synced and worked very well together through consensus and disagreements. Of course, all the campus extracurricular activities and travelling was awesome, thanks to a lot of friends from my B.Arch times who were also studying various Master’s courses.

How much one learns and grows is up to the individual. Professors and guidance can only show you the options and directions available and it’s entirely up to you to choose the path of your interest/capacity. And for that self-reflection is important.

How do you think doing a master’s degree helped you?

Unlike many other courses which are focused on individual students and individual projects; planning requires persistent and successful collaboration across sectors and specialized professionals. Apart from the learning of the subject and the way it was taught, one of the important takeaway was, the first-hand experience of the strength of collaboration which enabled a smooth transition into the profession, especially in the initial years.

The university met my expectations to a great extent. The information about the course on the website reflected reality.

Did the city/country you studied in play a major role during your postgraduate study? 

Yes. At least for Planning course, it ensured a sound foundation of the context (social, political, economic and environmental) that I would be working in for the next 7 years.

Could you please tell us about your current work and future plans?

I am currently working remotely as a consultant for a project and another programme run by an NGO. I am quite adaptive in nature, so my future plans are also very dynamic. My area of interest is applied research and hence I am open to any good platform that enables it.

What message would you like to give to students/professionals planning their post-graduate studies?

Well, whichever course one chooses, ensure that you know why you want to take up the course (for whatever reason be it professional, ideological, or simply self-growth). Do your research on the various options that you have w.r.t courses, universities and locations worldwide.

About the interviewee…

Lolia Mary is an Architect and Environmental Planner and has been working in the sector for the past 7 years. She completed her Postgraduate course (Master’s in Environmental Planning) from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi.

She has worked with an NGO, with a research-based practising organization as well as with a government agency over the past seven years. She recently moved to Germany and continues to work remotely as a consultant to a few organizations in India.

[ayearofpike]

The Last Vampire 5: Evil Thirst

Pocket Books, 1996 179 pages, 18 chapters ISBN 0-671-55050-0 LOC: CPB Box no. 654 vol. 9 OCLC: 34952388 Released June 4, 1996 (per B&N)

Sita has not heard from her new friend and her baby, and is worried that her daughter might have already carried out her evil scheme. There is a way she can find out, though: a local anthropologist claims to have a document written by a teacher in ancient Egypt that foretold the next coming of a Christ figure, to be born on the day that Sita’s friend had her baby. It adds fuel to the fire that this might be for real when Sita realizes the teacher was her friend, back when she first left India, and Sita knows of her abilities. Maybe together, Sita and the group that has formed around this ancient text can save the baby. Or maybe not.

For what should have been a straight-up  sequel, this book certainly throws in a new story all of a sudden. We’re following Kalika, we’re wondering what’s going to happen to this immaculate conception baby, and now there’s Egyptians. As per usual, it seems that Pike can’t ever leave a thread of research unexplored in multiple books. We got the Egypt thing in The Visitor and The Lost Mind, so I guess it was just something he was learning about and excited to share.

I remember, at the time, being excited that these last three Sita books were coming out in such quick succession. Finally, I said to myself, he’s got a plan of where to take this story and will finish it up and get on with his other work. And TLV4 certainly lived up to that promise. But I got to the end of this one and thought: OK, that’s wrapped this up. Where could he possibly take it from here? (Answer: we’ll find out next time.) Unpopular opinion: I thought The Hunger Games could have been done (and stronger) in one book. So I wasn’t super thrilled when Pike all but closed the story here and BUT WAIT there’s one more coming this fall!

That’s not to say that this was a bad story, necessarily. We start with Sita and Seymour (who of course isn’t leaving her again) in line for a lecture on this ancient text, three months after the confrontation with Kalika on the pier. You might remember that Sita had told her friend to call in a month, so naturally she’s upset and anxious that she hasn’t heard from her. She hasn’t told Seymour how she brought him back to life — as far as he’s concerned, he passed out in the cold water and woke up in the mountains. But they go in to the lecture, pausing to meet the anthropologist’s adult son, who gives Sita a ladyboner for only the second time in recent memory. 

The lecture is a lot like stuff we’ve seen. The anthropologist (whose last name is Seter; this will be important later) talks a little bit about how he found the document and what it says in regards to a messiah, but mostly he answers questions. Sita has a couple of pointed questions about the calendar system and the gods mentioned in the text, which has her intended effect of getting Doc and Son to meet with her after the lecture. She says she wants to see the whole thing, and to convince them to let her into its presence she claims to have another document written by this ancient teacher. Of course there is no such thing; Sita didn’t even know this one existed, and she hung out with the teacher literally the whole time she was a teacher. But she’s still a vampire, and so she’s able to hypnotize the boys into believing her and letting her follow them to their facility in Palm Springs, where the scroll is kept.

There are like 20 True Believers at the place, and Sita’s been eavesdropping across the traffic and knows they have weapons to protect the Next Coming from the Dark Mother. She also knows they are suspicious of her, so she tries not to alarm them. Though she does touch a five-thousand-year-old papyrus scroll with her bare hands while she reads her teacher’s handwriting. Yes, it looks real. She promises to show them her imaginary scroll later, then goes out to the desert and meditates on what she saw. This allows for a nifty device where Sita can remember how she met her teacher, some hundred years after she was turned, and how even before she started having visions and healing people Sita knew she was special.

She goes home in the morning and immediately the phone rings. Of course it’s Kalika, taunting Sita about her wild goose chase after this scroll and warning again that she won’t be stopped in her search for the baby. Sita picks up enough background audio to get an idea of where Kalika might be staying, and Seymour thinks maybe this was intentional. He saw Kalika open up B-Baller and wants to get the fuck out, but Sita knows that this might be an opportunity to get rid of her, if she can get the True Believer Militia to take her out. To get Seymour on board, she finally tells him the truth of his death and rebirth. But before they call in the heavy artillery, they have to find Kalika, so they track down buildings that match Sita’s audio clues and find Kalika living in the first one they check. Lucky? Or on purpose?

Sita and Seymour take off for San Francisco to corner Doc and Son after another lecture, with articles that show the danger of the Dark Mother. OK, so a lot of them are murders caused by Eddie, and there’s also the Matrix/Blade chase and the nuclear explosion. The only thing she has in her file that Kalika actually did is a story about a dead b-baller who had his throat ripped apart. Still, it’s enough for Doc and Son to believe that there’s a dangerous force in Los Angeles and they’d better try to take it out. They send a strike force into Kalika’s apartment, twenty people with assault rifles and body armor, in a pincer formation through the door and both balconies, but she murders them like so many ants. Sita races over to try and stop the carnage, but Kalika hits her with a still-dying body and chucks her off the eighteenth-story balcony into the pool, because Pike.

By the time she gets back to the observation window, it’s too late. Kalika has killed the snipers posted there, and basically made Doc shit his pants and give up everything about the ancient Egyptian document. (Lucky for Son, he wasn’t in the room.) They blast back to the True Believer facility, and sure enough the basement is a wreck and there are scraps of parchment everywhere. Sita reads about the coming strife in the early months of the Next Coming and where he’ll encounter it, about war between worshippers of Set and worshippers of Isis, and on a separate piece of papyrus (of a different texture) about the coming of the Dark Mother, Kali Ma. So everything she understands is true.

But she still doesn’t understand where this document came from. She meditates on her relationship with the teacher some more, and remembers how she didn’t cast Sita out upon discovering her vampiric nature. She thinks about how the teacher slowly turned into a miracle healer, with herbal remedies and some kind of auric repair service, before being discovered by the region’s queen and being asked to interpret a dream. The teacher interprets it to the queen’s satisfaction (and her high priest’s consternation) and is then kept on to work in the palace. Surely there will be no conflict of interest.

Sita next finds herself in B-Baller’s mom’s house again, where she learns that he was diagnosed with end-stage leukemia and given three months to live. New information that might change how she views her daughter’s nature. She still doesn’t know where to look for the next step, though, so she decides to check back at the ice-cream truck where she found Book 4′s deus ex machina, just in case there’s another one. And sure enough, the homeless dude is there, and he wants to play blackjack, which gives Sita just enough clues to go along with the ancient document and realize: New Friend and Baby are at Lake Tahoe. Yes, somehow this ancient Egyptian was able to predict that there would be a casino there, where you could play blackjack, and the storage and dealing device they’d use to hold cards at the tables would be called a “shoe.” Shhh, just go with it.

We get another flashback chapter, where Sita tells us about the queen going whole-hog in reversing the state religion from Set-worship to Isis-worship (as alluded to in the document), and Sita having to protect her teacher friend from countless assassination attempts. They happen as the high priest of Set is a master of Seedling, forcing others to do his will, and his will is to have minions go kill the usurper. (Which ... I fuckin’ told you, this is Cold One II.) This ultimately leads to Sita facing off against the high priest out in the desert. She feels like, hey, no sweat, I’ve been a vampire at least as long as Edward Cullen, I can take this dude. But what she didn’t realize is that the high priest has invoked an ancient lizard through the use of mind-melding and identical twins (which, like ... you know) and is stronger than she realizes. Plus he has power over the elements. He melts her sword, stabs her with a poisoned dagger, and manipulates the sand to lock around her limbs, then leaves her in the desert to be eaten by flies while he returns to town and takes over. At high noon, sure enough, there’s a massive earthquake that knocks Sita free of her bonds, and when she gets back to town ... there is no town. There’s just a hole. So she figured the high priest lost control and ended up killing everyone, including himself.

The remaining four Freedom Fighters drive to Tahoe and quickly triangulate on the house where New Friend is hiding. But they’re too late — Kalika has been there, and grabbed the baby, and is boating out across the lake with him. Sita manages to sink the boat, but Kalika and the baby make it to an island. She swims out there and corners them, but before she can make Kalika do anything Doc’s Son arrives to help. Or does he? Quick as anything he’s got a knife to Sita’s throat ... a knife that looks oddly familiar. 

Remember the last name and how I said it would be important? Seter. Set-er. Set worshipper. Now, I’ve left out the part about how this dude was adopted by Doc as an older teenager, which might throw a wrench into the foreshadowing of the name. Like, would a high school senior really change his name even if he was taken in by a caring old man? I’m not sure I’m all the way on board with this, even if it was needed to make him seem more connected to the cause by giving him the same name up front.

So he takes Sita’s gun and blasts the unholy fuck out of Kalika, then cuts Sita’s throat with the poisoned dagger and stabs it into her back, and then he boats off with the baby, who only now starts crying. Sita figures it’s all over, she misread the scroll and now humanity is totally fucked. Only Kalika works her way over to Sita and feeds her the blood pouring from her exposed heart, giving enough to heal her mother before she dies. When Sita makes it back to shore, she finds Doc dying of heart failure, unable to believe that his adopted son would have betrayed him so hard to the point of having a heart attack. She also finds Seymour bleeding out from a shotgun blast to the stomach. (I really don’t know if Pike knows how a shotgun works, if he thinks you can shoot one nine or ten times without reloading.) There’s no more Jeebus Baby blood, so she has to turn him. And that’s the last we hear from Seymour in this book.

Sita has more important things to do, like finding Jeebus Baby and Lizard Priest. And she thinks she knows where they’ll be: at the place where New Friend had relations with a giant blue star. She starts thinking about New Friend, which makes the star show up, and once more Sita is floating as a transparent ghost vampire or whatever the hell. She spots Lizard Priest below, and he’s waiting for someone: a spaceship full of lizards that is made of some kind of ethereal stuff. Sita realizes that her only chance is to go into the spaceship and possess one of the lizard aliens. She’s in the strongest and ugliest one when the ship lands and the aliens start taunting the baby. But Sita forces the alien to look into the baby’s eyes, and the mesmer of the baby protects her from being subjugated by Seedling, and she grabs the lizard’s knife and stabs Lizard Priest in the eye. And suddenly the spectral aliens disappear, and Sita has Lizard Priest’s knife embedded in his eye. She does the other one and grabs the baby, and then slits his throat for good measure. There’s a whoosh as the spectral aliens take off, and Sita and the baby start back to the car.

And that’s the end of The Last Vampire 5: Evil Thirst! So you see what I mean by ending the story? Sure, they have to drive back to Lake Tahoe or whatever and return the baby to his mom, and Seymour’s a vampire now at long last, but ... is any of it necessary? Is it even germane to the part of the story that will come next? I honestly don’t remember, but I think probably not? We’ll find out next time, as the Pocket editions of the Sita stories come to a close.

[aalapdavjekar]

On Identity

First published in October, 2020.

At the age of fourteen, I found myself in my first online chatroom. "Asl," they asked — early Internet slang for age, sex, location. It was never self identifying information. No one was interested in names. No one cared about what you looked like. You were free to be anonymous as long as you provided a small token of details from which the rest could be inferred. Your interests were apparent from the room you were in and your avatar dropped other crumbs of personality. The concept of anonymity was still years from making sense to me yet the obliviousness to physical identity was real. The idea of a fourteen year-old from India soon became dull. So, I decided to get creative.

Some days I would be a 75 year-old living in rural Mongolia who had just purchased his first computer after selling 25 of his favourite sheep. On another, a divorced mother of three, fresh out of prison, looking for advice on everything from makeup to homeschooling. Each day was a blank slate, a new role to fill, a fresh start. Identity on the web is as literal as fiction. It could be as entertaining as you wanted it to be.

Regardless of how you chose to portray yourself, your personality was a central component to how each story was laid down. Regardless of how out there you wanted to go, to an extent, most would assume you were giving out correct information. In theory, you could be the Pope pretending to be the Queen. Not many would care but most would find it funny.

No one can judge the unknown. On forums such as Reddit, getting a new identity is as easy as coming up with a new username. There’s no one to question your motives, judge you by the colour of your skin, or ban you for being too young.

You have no age on the Internet, no gender and you have no country. Your username might change, your writing will mature over time, new subreddits will be found, some will disappear.

Yet, like real life, people can and do judge you based on certain criteria. Online, credibility is based on reputation — call it Internet points, karma, the number of followers, likes, etc. To some online services, these signify your commitment to your role. Like seniority in a real life occupation, Internet points signify how long a profile has been around. The Reddit karma system which was primarily developed as a reward mechanism also serves as an easy way to distinguish between credible profiles and inflammatory and digressive posters — trolls. If you post worthwhile content, you get upvotes — points! On the other hand, if people don’t like what they see, you get negative points. Unlike the virtual world, physical age plays a very important role in real life in determining your credibility. It gives people an easy excuse to ignore your opinions depending on how old you are while giving way to cultural cliches such as respect your elders or tradition is sacred. One of the harshest — kids are stupid might almost seem like a mathematical axiom but ignores certain aspects of the child that are seldom found in adults such as the ability to quickly master languages or adopt new skills.

ASL in the offline world is very much like the Internet. The major difference is that it’s much easier to catch someone lying. As an Indian teenager, I could never pretend to be a 75-year old Mongolian even with the best makeup advice. Yet, there were other ways to pretend. At the time, I thought of myself as shy but I could still stir up some confidence when I had to talk to strangers. I only had to pretend to be charming, smart, and interesting. Society even had my back. “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up,” they told me at school. “Always dream big,” they proudly added. Years later, I realized all these statements only translated into, “get a bigger salary.” So, yeah, they were pretending too. Eventually I came to the conclusion that everyone was pretending. Everyone I interacted with had a story to tell. They all had a big bag of words that they used to confidently describe themselves. Most interesting of all, they all took the story they told themselves and others very, very seriously and would happily clock you in the mouth if you merely hinted at anything otherwise. Like calling someone out in the chatroom for their alleged fakery, painting someone as a liar in real life was akin to assault. But my conclusions weren’t based on some impulsive thought. They were carefully considered observations. The wall of pretense we erect is not even a conscious decision. Almost always, it is based on years of cultural indoctrination.

Who are we?

Culture is a weird one. The typical North American and South Asian of the 1950s could be considered living centuries apart from each other. The Indian, most likely an illiterate farmer barely making ends meet, could not dream of life in the American Golden Age — minimum wage that could pay for two cars and a mortgage. He could not conceptualise the existence of luxuries such as refrigerators, ovens, swimming pools and shopping malls, hospitals and discotheques, or the ability to travel the world on tips earned while bartending. The average Indian farmer desired healthier bulls, better harvests, regular rainfall, obedient wives for his sons. But then, as much as now, drastically different cultures still overlap in certain ways. The Indian farmer, much like his American counterpart, looked to his neighbour to understand himself. If the Jones next door bought a fancy new car, everyone living in the neighbourhood wanted something better. If the Kumars next door threw a huge wedding for their son, inviting everyone from the closest twenty villages, the Chopras dreamt only of throwing a larger party next year. The collective psyche of each culture is only a reflection of the desires of each individual. But cultures, homogeneous or otherwise, are an echo chamber. They consciously or subconsciously produce edicts, rules and regulations that individuals integrate and pass on. Whether it’s capitalism good, communism bad in the American psyche, or India good, Pakistan bad in the Indian, from economic policy-making and government initiatives to television programming and pop art, everything must adhere to cultural norms and traditions. Unless it fits the identity of the collective and follows a cultural narrative, it will be discarded.

Take the never ending list of Indian god-men and celebrities who are routinely treated as infallible figures worthy of worship. Devotees are often so unflinching in their faith that they are willing to overlook overwhelming evidence of rape, murder, exploitation and extortion. This is not unique to India. Charismatic personalities have sway over swaths of people all across the world. Whether it’s Trump, Duterte, Bolsonaro or Modi, the ability to pander to the masses and speak to the cultural norm is more important than competence at one’s job. Trump gave voice to a collective that was scared of immigrants taking over their jobs. Years later, his ineptitude would lead to one of the worst administrative failings in American history and the death of over 400,000 people in the course of the pandemic. The actions of the Indian government during the second wave need no mentioning.

In many countries, questioning one’s cultural norms is akin to treason. Similar to questioning a person’s opinions, questioning the integrity of a political ideology often leads to terrifying consequences. The BJP’s rise to power in India has been followed by the arrests of intellectuals, academics, students, poets, and doctors for voicing opinions against the party. This is quite the routine for authoritarian governments. In the 1950’s, Mao Zedong’s government in China persecuted and killed half a million of its educated populace before launching the Great Leap Forward, a project that aimed at transforming China from an agrarian economy into an industrial power. While it looked great on paper, it led to the greatest famine in history and resulted in the deaths of at least 20 million people. This failure politically weakened Mao. In response, he launched another program to weed out and eliminate dissidents, killing another million in the process while leading to the destruction of thousands of Chinese historical and cultural artifacts. What was the outcome of this violence? It only strengthened Mao’s hold over the masses. His personality was now a cult.

To call humans sheep would be unfair because sheep are never pushed off a cliff by their masters. Human societies, on the other hand, are rife with power struggles, deep hierarchies, discrimination, and violence. Yet, each of us identifies as a good person. We can rationalize why we are good, therefore we must be good. No country in the world would ever think about labeling itself as a force of terror, cruelty, and animosity, but we can easily call “the other” any number of names. We look to our family, friends, and society to support and reinforce these views — call them nationalism, patriotism, freedom, equality — regardless of how accurate or even relevant these views might actually be.

Oscar Wilde said, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

Our identity does not quite work in favour of our individual or collective happiness. We associate a feeling of national pride towards statistics, numbers, and symbols. Rising GDP is popularly correlated with the “wealth” of a country, but many forget that this number just smashes together a country’s total economic output over a period of time without distinguishing between “good” and “bad” economic activity. Even the man who came up with the concept, Simon Kuznets, was of the opinion that the number had nothing to do with individual well-being.

We look to our history to understand where we came from without realizing we have many incomplete pieces to an enormous puzzle. Many contemporary Indians would associate themselves with the iconic Indus Valley civilization and think of the core of their cultural and religious identities as unchanged for thousands of years. However, the morals and the values carried by the average Indian today — monogamy, marriage, vegetarianism, holidays and celebrations, rites and rituals — all stem from thousands of years of mingling with the outside world. What we define as violent invaders and conquerors today have played an important role in shaping our culture into its current form. Not only did the Mughals contribute to our aesthetics and our lexicon but they also brought with them mathematics, science and philosophy. Global trade helped carry the Indo-Arabic number system (the numerals 0 to 9) to Africa, Europe, and eventually to the rest of the world. The British brought their own legal and judicial systems, passed down from the Romans, the railway infrastructure, and a bizarre penal code which sought to divide the subcontinent culturally, morally, and geographically according to their own prudish Victorian attitudes.

Hinduism, a major global religion today, has its roots in the Vedas, a collection of manuscripts believed to have been written by ancient sages at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ. The Vedas described the lives and spiritual pursuits of the priestly class, the Brahmins of ancient India. Before being written down, they were orally passed on from teacher to pupil. The Vedas described the lives of gods, rites and rituals, spells and incantations, all of which have their roots in even earlier animistic traditions, or the worship of animals, plants and nature — a theme common to the birth of nearly all religions. These texts were central to the agrarian communities that inhabited the Indus Valley. However, one might be hard pressed to call this Hinduism. These ancient traditions later branched out into numerous schools of thought such as Samkhya, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta, each with their own unique set of philosophies.

Due to the geographical scale of the Indian subcontinent, the diversity in language, culture, and race, the ideological descendants of Vedic traditions were in the hundreds, if not thousands, and were regarded as a way of life by those who practiced them. The word ‘Hindu’ was simply used to describe people living near the Sindh, a river that flows through the northwestern part of the subcontinent. The word had nothing to do with the individual beliefs of these people. The modern form of Hinduism developed in the 18th century through reformist movements started by Ram Mohan Roy who wished to rid Hindu traditions of superstition and promote rational and ethical ideas about the religion. Thinkers such as Dayananda Sarasvati, Paramahamsa Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekanada, would develop the idea of a unified Indian continent and seed missionary movements that brought Hinduism to the shores of Europe and later, the United States. Savarkar, who used the term hindutva to describe ‘the quality of being Hindu’, brought on a politically-charged connotation to Hinduism. This was further fueled by the Indian Independence movement that promoted the idea of ‘India as a Hindu nation’ before the eventual partitioning of the subcontinent along religious lines.

It is a topic of much debate whether an organized and unified Hindu nationalist identity that brought the sheer variety of the subcontinent under one banner to overthrow colonialism would have naturally evolved without the presence of the British Raj. More importantly, the idea of a ‘Hindu nation’ starkly contrasts the cultural openness of the early inhabitants of the subcontinent, and their acceptance of hundreds of cultures and different belief systems, which is ironic considering the foundation of Hindutva is based on the myth that India has always been a country for Hindus.

What are we?

Does my cat know he’s a cat? Do animals know of themselves? What about viruses and bacteria? You might say no to all of these questions and state that the ability to know oneself is unique to homo sapiens. The correct answer is debatable but not really the point I am trying to make. What if I asked you what you made you believe you were human, or conscious, or even real? There is good reason for you to believe in all of those things because you might think it’s ridiculous to believe we are just deterministic machines running on genetic code. Surely, we must have free will. Surely, we must be the most intelligent byproduct of evolutionary pressures. Surely, we must be the only creatures capable of stewarding the Earth. Surely, we must be correct about the things we know and accept as fact.

How comfortable would you be if none of these were true? I won’t attempt to answer these questions here because these are an entirely separate discussion but my point is that we believe we are a number of things only because we have identified with these beliefs for a good portion of our lives. Like the Ptolemaists who believed the Earth was the center of the Universe, or Creationists who believe ‘the Earth is 6000 years old and dinosaur bones exist only to test our faith in god’, there may still be numerous misconceptions of reality that we accept as common fact. Regardless of what these beliefs are, it’s critical to understand that our beliefs are our identity. Through many years of indoctrination, people on opposite sides of the Korean Demilitarized Zone still identify as human beings, but their world views are starkly different. One might defend the ideals of capitalist society while the other might think his leader is god and gladly give his life to protect this belief.

There is no distinguishing between one’s beliefs and oneself. Our beliefs form our habits, which in turn form our personalities. We live our lives from the point of view of our beliefs; a home forged from our own subjective interpretations of the world. We hold ourselves accountable to our identity; define ourselves with tokens of adjectives, layers of tradition and symbolism, while in the meantime, we fight to preserve every shred of it, and live the rest of our lives in a struggle to cultivate it. We try to keep it sacred, unique, and immutable. Otherwise, we ask ourselves, what is the point? We work tirelessly to make sure we’re not just another cardboard cutout while raking in trophies, certificates, photographs, children, exclusive club memberships, Internet points — anything to expand our fairytale legacy; anything to suppress our natural mortality and increasing vulnerability. We judge ourselves not through the motivations, beliefs or struggles of others; we judge others based on ourselves. Identity is a relational web. It is a comparison sheet we use to analyse our place in the world. It helps us weave a meaningful story to answer difficult questions such as: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die?

No one is born religious. No one is born to identify with a particular piece of land. No one is born to identify with a particular political party. No one is born as a specific identity. We are all simply products of indoctrination. Every single day, from the moment we are born, our education begins — not towards an ideal of truth but towards survival. The agenda of the education system is only a reflection of the cultural landscape it inhabits. Perhaps only science can claim the ability to course-correct and steer its way towards better models of the universe. Humans, meanwhile, are not so flexible. Between years three and four, most children start forming opinions about the world and themselves. I am this. I like that. This young identity is shaped through an education system whose primary objective is passing exams, failing which the child is immediately labelled as stupid. The child is routinely compared with their classmates, labelled any number of things — shy, honest, hardworking, problematic, unmotivated. Their place in the world begins to solidify. The child, in most cases, assimilates these assessments as accurate characteristics about themselves, never questioning their validity.

Over the course of a lifetime, many layers of identity are crafted and worn, each accentuating every other. Our identity has an appetite. It must consume knowledge and meaning or risk starvation. Some may be consumed by this hunger, turning into narcissists and megalomaniacs. Others might see through the illusion. Yet, most people never manage to leave their opinions behind, not enough to provoke a different perspective because the need never makes itself apparent. Most people internalise their self-beliefs themselves to the point where they are defined by them. People tend to stick with people who think like they do. They fall into a loop of self-compliant views and confirmation biases. Eventually, this simplistic view of the world and the self becomes hardwired and impossible to outgrow. Anything that challenges these hardwired beliefs is first ignored as fake news, but eventually, it brings forth an increasingly agitated response. The stronger the hold of identity, the greater is its tendency to fight back against change. People might call themselves vegan, neo-marxist, jazz aficionados, liberal, Muslim, pan-romantics, Indian first, Maharashtrian second, [enter artist’s name]’s biggest fan. They might have good reason to suspect these words as truth. Regardless of their accuracy, these are just layers of identity, to be worn as per the demands of the situation, like seasonal clothing.

When people communicate, it is a specific identity that does the talking. When I am speaking to my boss, I wear the mask of a loyal employee; when I am speaking to my son, I wear the mask of a loving father; with a stranger, all the politeness I can muster; with a foe, skepticism, mistrust, anger. We carry countless and distinct identities, only to utilize a specific ASL — a condensed and limited disclosure of the ego based on the situation and circumstance. These are like webpages which hide the underlying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code while only showing you what you wanted to see — a funny cat video. The individual’s relational web grows with every new encounter, every new discovery about the world. It begs to answer only one question — Where is my place in the world? The relational web offers a map to reality; a model that seeks to understand and tailor itself based on experience. This is an intrinsic biological mechanism without which the ego cannot survive.

Our identity is life itself. It is the very antithesis to death. These are polar opposites: creation and destruction. Identity forges meaning while death snatches it away in an instant. While the pursuit of meaning is a lifelong endeavour, ageing is a paradox. Ageing in the modern world is the contradiction between wanting a longer life as well as infinite youth. A trillion-dollar anti-aging industry that only seeks to postpone the inevitable, is testament to this fact. In the meantime, all we are left with is the pursuit of polishing our individual story. Some might cherish the annual event that signifies the day they were born while others might hate it, resenting the lives and achievements of others associated with a smaller number while casting everyone else into a basket of irrelevance. Perhaps this is why the shadow of anonymity offered by the Internet is such a comforting place to live. But whether offline or online, my ASL is whatever I want it to be as long as it gives me the joy that I seek and the comfort I need to go on.

There is no point in living in a cage of dubious and limiting self-beliefs. I am not suggesting you could fly simply by identifying as a bird. I am merely suggesting identity is an emergent phenomenon. It is a continuous carving and remodeling of the ego. It evolves in response to experience of an immediate environment because it is essentially a tool evolved for survival. With that knowledge, at the very least, it might bring you a step closer to staying open to new ideas and possibilities. Just don’t take yourself too seriously.

[designdekko]

Public sanitation: Design interventions lead the change

A 2017 report by the WHO found while 74% of the world’s population used at least a basic sanitation service, approximately 2 billion still did not have access to basic sanitation facilities like toilets and latrines – a rather shocking statistic when weighed against the amount of progress you see in the world today. Another highly disconcerting statistic on the subject is from a UNICEF blog, which noted 673 million people still defecate in the open, for example, in street gutters, behind bushes, or open water bodies.

Most urban millennials are unaware of the actual impact human waste and its incorrect disposal has on life across the planet. But trips around the country highlight the glaring shortcomings of India’s public sanitation system and every successive government’s inability to stick to its pre-electoral promises of improvement on that count. Of course, there has been improvement, but the pace at which we are changing isn’t still satisfactory.

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In 1999, the Indian government introduced the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) to accelerate sanitation coverage throughout the country, particularly in rural areas. It focused on information and education to generate public demand for sanitation facilities, particularly in schools. The TSC made some progress, but it suffered from its relatively low priority and ineffective deployment of resources. Renamed Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in 2014, the GOI, armed with a barrage of shocking statistics and a revised mandate, took up the cause with renewed vigour, putting a significant dent in the widespread problem of sanitation.

Where to draw inspiration from?

Japan’s spotless, pop-anime, Kawaii-cute, tech-driven toilets are the stuff of legend, with tourists excitedly using them for that perfect Instagram moment. In fact, the country gained global media attention for its Tokyo Toilet project. Who’d think a public urinal would make for a perfect photo-op?

Switzerland is one of the world’s favourite tourist destinations, has toilets so clean that you can lie down in them. In Paris, the City of Light: a monolithic domed structure stood with a few scattered people standing in a queue in the middle of a Parisian cobble-stoned street. A sliding door whooshed open, revealing a clean albeit soaking wet toilet inside. Pictorial instructions outside the loo read: Post a single use, the entire toilet is sealed and sanitized, and only then access is granted to the next person.

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All this was planned and executed before the pandemic took over the world. Also, it is free. It is definitely impressive but is this a viable option for a country like India with its large populace and disparate economic structure?

Modern problems need modern solutions. I spoke to Rohan Chavan, principal architect at RC Architects and the mind behind Lightbox, a one-of-kind public urinal for women with space for social gatherings. Rohan engages with projects and issues related to public and community sanitation, urban design, affordable and low-cost housing, single-family houses, space design, and institutions. His signature approach to design created the Lightbox. This public urinal redefines the concept of ‘restroom’, taking it beyond just being a public toilet and creating a unique, visually attractive space that caters to the peri-urban female population living in and around the Thane region in Maharashtra (India).

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Over a short phone interview, Rohan spoke of how, as a designer, he took the initiative to design the Lightbox when Agasti, a social enterprise working in urban sanitation in Mumbai, floated a brief.

Wanting to create something to take to the municipal corporations to add to public sanitation infrastructure, in the hopes that it would be a departure from the largely unappealing ones that already existed, Chavan structured his design around a tree, aware that paucity of space in an urban setting was likely and he would have to work with what he was offered. His design was just as adaptable to smaller or larger spaces and could be tweaked to fit different venues.

Also Read | Bright whites, chrome yellows, and curved geometry put together a space that promotes life

Lightbox is covered under the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals at #5 – Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Built around a large tree, the 10’ x 30’ restroom features two urinal blocks each at both ends, with a standard washbasin, a nursing room and a toilet for handicapped or senior citizens. The centre of the restroom was a garden measuring 15’ x 10’ that was meant for various activities like a place to rest, a free gallery to display art for amateur artists, a place for lectures and awareness campaigns, celebrating festivals, seasonal activities and events.

The central garden was a metaphor for spaces where people can sit and relax under a tree in the shade and socialize. The restroom with toilet blocks was fitted with a biodigester to reduce freshwater use and improved waste management. It also included a nursing room and amenities like sanitary pads vending machine and incinerator, CCTV cameras, mobile charging points, and a panic alarm system.

Rohan’s efficient use of modern materials resulted in natural light in the restroom, eased the process to keep the toilets clean and ensured high durability and construction within a specific budget. Rohan, however, is quick to point out that the design can be customized to fit a variety of sizes and use different materials, thus making it more sustainable.

Chavan recounted an instance when policemen at the police station across the street from Lightbox were so taken with the concept that they eagerly inquired about why there were no such facilities for men. He was also excited about the amateur artist showcase within the restroom, an unusual venue for an art show but an important one to highlight the accessibility of art and the opportunity to incorporate culture into everyday life.

While Lightbox sees social interaction as the key to the solution, LooCafe wants to hit the root cause of why public sanitation projects fail: Lack of safety, technology, and revenue-generating opportunity.

Also Read | An Ambitious and Thoughtful Vision for Montreal’s Largest Insular Park

With over 450 locations to its name, LooCafe, the brainchild of Abhishek Nath, MD & CEO, Ixora FM, is all set to expand across Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Karnataka. The concept is a simple tuck shop with a public urinal attached, sizes ranging from 4x8 ft, 20x8ft and 40x8ft, made of a shipping container or pre-fabricated materials to maintain long-term cost-effectiveness – basically a study in upcycling. And the brand is constantly learning, adjusting its designs and making changes where necessary. A cafe is attached to the front to add a layer of revenue generation opportunity. The attractive facades and cosy, clean interiors are home to thoroughly cleaned and disabled-friendly washrooms which use several sensors and technology to make them sustainable, clean and trustworthy.

With an increase in road trips during the pandemic and transportation of goods and personnel across state lines, initiatives like LooCafe are a viable business model and encourage safe sanitation practices, thereby slowly but surely transforming the nation’s response to public sanitation.

Also Read | Everything's Visual: food photographer Shumaila Chauhan and visual artist Shaun D'sa

The societal impact of projects like Lightbox and initiatives like LooCafe was clearly visible. Such unique design interventions represent a burgeoning design collective bent on creating distinctive architectural and spatial perspectives. Some of these are initiatives that governments and municipal corporations across the country must take advantage of and be utilized by the public.

Yes, there have been concentrated moves to build a network of public urinals, with their glossy tiled facades promising better facilities and clean services to its users. But inside, in barely-lit caverns of fetid water, lie disease and stench and the hopelessness of an impoverished citizenry in desperate need of what others might constitute as a fundamental human right.

Also Read | Public sanitation: Design interventions lead the change

However, hope now lies in the hands of a few thoughtful individuals contributing ideas and government bodies prioritizing public sanitation in their regular mandates and worldwide recognition of an endemic issue deeply rooted in neglect.

The article is part of a series of blogs by the writer on public sanitation and design interventions experienced during her travel around India and the world. Views expressed are of author.

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[psykonee]

A decade on a tropical island

My skin burns easily.  I dislike feeling sweaty.  I like the freshness of cold weather. I generally dislike crowded places.

I never thought I would spend a decade in one of the planet’s smallest, hottest and densest tropical islands.

Singapore.

Mistaken preconceptions

English as a main language does not mean a culture that is very similar to that of other mainly English speaking nations.

Having chewing gum is OK, even though nowhere sells it.

One of the richest countries in the world has some extremely poor people – for example elderly people working as cleaners and collecting cardboard.

Behind the ultra modern façade there tends be a more traditional and conservative mindset.

Surprises

Male Singaporeans having to do national service for 2 years, which at least some resent having to do.

The first group (late 1960s) to do national service had Israeli instructors.

The reason the police on the metro system look like teenagers is that they are.

The legality of prostitution.

Sometimes it is older Singaporeans that are most likely to be openly breaking the rules – for example during the Covid lock-down last year, it was common to see groups of older Singaporeans together in a way that was in breach of the restrictions.

At least at the level of individual seats elections can be genuinely competitive.

The normalcy of families having live in maids.

Very little built after independence (1965) has been considered worthy of protection from redevelopment.

Around 80% of Singaporeans live in homes that have 99 year lease holds from what is effectively the state.

How many Singaporeans live with their parents until well into their 30s.

The degree of language fluidity – for example, being with an Indian Singaporean who ordered drinks in Mandarin.

Singlish – an officially frowned upon blend of Chinese dialects with Malay, Tamil and English which is an organic part of the Singaporean identity, as opposed to many other things which have been driven from the top down.

Pre-covid the largest event in favour of making progressive changes each year has been Pink Dot.

The amount of green space, particularly in the core part of the island. It is not uncommon to see monkeys, otters, monitor lizards and other wildlife.

Understanding

The location on the map at the junction of the main sea routes between East Asia and India, the Middle East and Europe makes a port here logical.

The colonial legacy is complex.  The influence of the early, segregated city plan is still clearly visible in terms of street names and the nature of the oldest buildings.

WW2, defeat and occupation are critical to making sense of the structures created and the decisions made by the post-independence leaders.

Without Lee Kuan Yew (the first Prime Minister) things would have been very different.  He effectively got to play Sim City for real.

The country became independent from Malaysia and not directly from the UK.

Singapore was not a backwater at independence (the grand colonial buildings in the core of the city attest to that), but it did have serious issues (amongst other things few natural resources, housing problems) at independence.

To become what it is now has required a huge effort by many over the decades, but it has come at a high cost.

Not all laws are enforced equally.  There are some that are very strongly enforced (e.g. the ban on recreational drugs) and others which exist more on paper than in practice (e.g. the colonial legacy anti gay laws).

Singapore may have a populace that is majority Chinese by background, but it is very different from China and cannot be assumed to side with China (or any other country) on anything.

The degree of direct and indirect state involvement in the economy is far more than a crude look at economic freedom indices would suggest.  In some cases the largest companies in local sectors have significant (in some cases, controlling) shareholdings by the country’s sovereign wealth funds.

This is not a police state, but it is one of the safest countries.  In general there is quite a lot of latitude in what can be said or done by people.  People are largely free to be supportive or critical of the government or anything else here.  At the same time there some things which would be possible elsewhere which are barely tolerated here (e.g. protests are legal in just one place, a legal strike is almost unheard of).

Relative to many countries in the same region Singapore is in many respects liberal, open and tolerant.

People

Anyone can be Singaporean.

Kiasu – a fear of missing out, which makes behaviour around limited events pretty predictable.

Kiasi – a fear of death, which in practice means an avoidance of taking risks.

Conformity tends to be valued over individuality.

Stability is highly valued.

I have found that it is generally guess correctly from a conversation with a Singaporean if they have spent a significant part of their lives outside the country or not.

It is a village on a larger scale, which can be both a source of community and suffocation.

There is an emphasis on self and family reliance, which at its best makes people strive to be as successful as they can be, but at its worst can lead to an indifference in the well being of others.

Given the mix of people and cultures there tends to be a live and let live mentally for the most part in public spaces.

There can be a tenancy by some to resort to official means (e.g. reporting something to the police) instead of trying to resolve disputes without the involvement of the authorities.

Related to this there can be a tendency towards passive aggressiveness over directly confronting problems.

There can be a very hierarchical view of organisations, which can lead to a rigidity and inflexibility.

People will help you if you ask, but it is much less common to get unsolicited assistance.

Ideals and the reality

To be a clean city, but it is maintained more by an army of low paid workers, than a deeply ingrained culture of care of civic spaces. The amount of waste in piles at the beaches can be depressing.

Racism is officially not tolerated in any circumstances.  In practice it is easy to find examples of racism e.g. coming across rental listings that make it clear Indian applicants are not welcome.

To have gender equality, but in practice a patriarchal and defined gender roles remain strongly ingrained.

Education is highly valued, but with a strong emphasis on scoring high marks on structured exams it can lead (along with other factors) to a square box mindset and a lack of creativity.

Officially there are four languages (English, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil).  In practice many things are only in English, often in English and Mandarin and rarely only in the other two outside of some limited contexts.

Speculation on further evolution

Same sex marriage is more likely to be legalised in the medium term than recreational drug use.

Singapore is continuing to slowly liberalise at its own pace – for example many films that were banned in the previous century are now available on streaming services.

Can you forge a national identity with what appears to be a largely top down approach?  It will be interesting how this evolves over the coming decades.

The same party has been in power since before independence.  It is likely that other parties will win more seats (currently they hold 11% of them) in future elections.  If and when it happens a successful and peaceful transfer of power would be a momentous event.

Fragmentation of experience by linguistic and other factors in a small, young country which is open to the influences from louder places.

How Singapore has changed me

I can eat with chopsticks.

I effectively ceased to cook after realising eating out was cheaper, arguably tastier and easier.

I have eaten far more varied food here than anywhere else, tried so many new things.

Eating out alone feels normal.

I see more value in a collectivist approach than an individualistic one than I used to.

Paying $20 for a single drink no longer feels as outrageous as it used to.

My body has adjusted to the heat and humidity.  30C now feels normal and 20C can feel cold.

I walk slower to remain cooler.

Travelling 10km within the country feels like a long way.

I can understand and use some Singlish.

I tryto talk slower and clearer because it makes it easier for others to understand what I am saying.

Those who I am friends with and work with is far more diverse than before.

I have toned down some of how I tend to be naturally (swearing a lot, directness) in order to be more accommodating of others.

I have become quite used to standing out in many places due to my appearance.

Singapore has felt like home for some time.

Miscellany

The number of Singaporeans who have thought I am Australian.

The airport is the world’s best in terms of ease of use and facilities.

The one time my beer glass was freely refilled was while eating dinner I found myself amongst supporters of one of the opposition parties who were ecstatic the night they won a seat in a by-election from the ruling party.

The government information adverts (e.g. visit your relatives more than once a year) shown in some cinemas would not be taken with a straight face in many other countries.

The unexpected can lead to things grinding to a halt as orders are awaited.

The ubiquity of high speed internet access has made controlling what people can see, read or experience effectively impossible.  A great firewall is not a viable option here.

[aliahaider-blog]

Chala Vahi Des (Preface from 2017 for a book I've barely started)

I wrote the following piece a year ago with a plan for a photobook with various poems and short stories to accompany the photos. Many things have changed since then, like my mind about whether this should still be a photobook or should instead just be a novel or memoir, and, despite the title of my blog, I have yet to make that much progress on it. I figured that if I make some of the completed portions public to allow free-flowing criticism or comments, then maybe I'd be more motivated and directed towards creating something that makes remote sense. So the excerpt contained within this post starts from the beginning with a preface of the book. Some initial parts of this preface may be provocative, and if you happen to be outraged by my first two paragraphs, I implore you to just continue and finish it, because it's likely you won't by the end of it. Enjoy the reading!

​2017 has been a year of mishaps. And despite the Trump-era chaos that embodies 2017, it’s not the reason for my dissatisfaction with the year, it’s just a supplement. More than anything, 2017 has been a year of losing some friends and even more battles. A year of bad days and even worse grades. A year of people whom I thought might not ever leave, leaving. A year of sitting and watching as one lived their dreams out in Madrid, another preparing to spend the summer in London, another in India, and DC, and lots and lots in California, and so on. And after watching all this, I'm still in Texas. Texas has been a trap. I've felt stuck, enclosed, like I should be somewhere other than this state. It's like a star dies every time you try to positively represent a state that hits the fan at least once a day. You put a smile on your face ready to go to class and breathe the fresh Texan air around you and then you find out your friend's been arrested for possession of marijuana. He’s facing jail time, contributing to Texas’s shiny “7th highest incarceration rate in the country” honor. A star falls. You lift your head up again, though, trying to take on the next day. Now your friend's pregnant. Just another statistic that puts Texas at #3 on the teen pregnancy rate ranking. A star falls. Move on, keep going. You made it to Social Problems class for once. The topic of the day is child marriage, and you learn that Texas has not yet banned child brides. Another star falls. Well, it can only get worse. And it does when your local public health official couldn't save a mother from dying while delivering her baby. Texas has now become the state whose 3 largest cities are among the top 4 cities with the highest uninsured population, and the maternal mortality rate is 30 per 100,000 births. And you can't do anything about it. I looked these all up, obviously, to feed the already-growing animosity I had towards Texas. I've been finding myself in dilemma after dilemma. Stuck in a state where my gay friends are denied service at restaurants. In a state where seeking women's health services means enduring lines of berating, threatening protestors. In a state where guns are second to Jesus and affordable health care is the spawn of Satan. In a state where Terry Jones is considered a freedom fighter and Malcolm X a terrorist. In a state where refugee labor runs the economy yet it's the first of 50 to deny refugee entry. In a state where mosque burnings are frequent and Qur’an burnings even more frequent. In a state where, because I’m Pakistani, I’m not good for anything if it’s not giving someone surgery or fixing their computer or enduring hate crimes as a gas station clerk. I’ve found myself in the dilemma of wanting to leave. Wanting to venture far out from the remote thought of Texas. Seattle, Portland, Santa Barbara, somewhere with coasts where your feet don’t get tangled in algae every 3 seconds and festivals where you burn 40-feet wooden statues instead of religious sites. Wanting to join my lost friends to all their aforementioned locations, where people that look like me and talk like me can be expected to be the first them the world had seen instead of what their parents’ friends would make of them. ​But I couldn’t. I’d had three years. I went to California but came back. I went to Canada but came back. To Boston. DC. Spain. I could have made myself disappear in any of those places but I came back for something more than the fact that I could provide for myself here, or be provided for by my parents. Being stuck sucks because once you escape you feel uncomfortable, unaware, scared. But being stuck also feels great, because it forces you to make what you can of your resources. It’s not a feeling of homeliness vs. unhomeliness; it’s something bigger. There must have been something I enjoyed about myself in Texas. And I found it being stuck here in the year of mishaps. For every burnt mosque I found, I found a Jewish temple willing to rebuild it. For every Qur’an a zealous pastor tried to burn there was a hero on a skateboard who snatched it from the fire. I found my joy in the South Asian enclaves of DFW and Houston and, yes, surprisingly, Amarillo, where I’ve tasted some of the best chicken karahi and chicken tikka and fried paneer of my life. I found my joy in a dorm room where a Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Sudanese, Iraqi, Saudi, Palestinian, Jewish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican and American group of friends set aside their differences because that’s what they’ve had to do their entire lives to make friends. I found joy in the rolling hills and the red canyons and the greenbelts and the blue holes and the cornfields and the wind farms and the riverbeds of this prolific state. I found joy in the fact that being one of the only kids of Pakistani descent in my school only meant being one of the first to do something spectacular for those that came before and those who will come after. And I, surprisingly enough, found lots of joy in Texas blue grass music. Studying literature, I became fascinated with the concept of identity, namely that of diasporic identity. And I missed a major aspect of diasporic identity when it finally came to me determining my own. An identity is one that the identity-seeker creates and the heritage embraces, and vice versa. In other words, I had to accept my identity internally as well as in accordance with my surroundings. All my surroundings. That is what I failed to do since I became sentient. I am American; my country claimed me as its citizen. I am Pakistani, my parents made sure to pass that heritage down to me as I grew up. But almost always, I am only one of those at a time. Other times, I am neither. Rarely was I ever both. In America people ask, “So what are you? Where are you from?” In America, I am presumably not American. I’m Pakistani. But my Urdu has become broken, my knowledge of Pakistani politics has almost zero value, when I go to my parents’ homeland I’m told not to talk to people because they’ll know I’m American. Because when I’m in Pakistan, I’m American. But I’m not both at the same time until I meet other people who experience the same thing. So I’ve come to terms with making that part of my psyche flexible. Some parts of my identity I’ve claimed, but they haven’t claimed me, and vice versa. But by being stuck here yet finding that joy in things, I’ve found that reciprocity in Texas. I am a Pakistani-American Texan. I bask in chicken tikka and American patriotism and southern hospitality all at once. I find solace in the red-pink sunsets across the Amarillo sky, relaxation in the swims in the Barton Creek greenbelt, excitement in SXSW and ACL and all the other musical acts Austin offers, meditation in the 6000-foot deep Palo Duro Canyon, reflection in the icy grasps of Texas’s historic blizzards and the chokehold of its historic floods and the sweaty embrace of its heatwaves. I find inspiration in the ones that get out and give back—in Beyoncé, in Cary Fagan, in Hakeem Olajuwon, in Wes Anderson, in Rick Husband, in Matthew McConaughey, and so many more. I can attribute Texas's setbacks to the many negative experiences I've had my entire life: bullying, Islamophobia, drought, isolation. Yet it would be wrong to discredit the places and people in Texas that have put a genuine smile across my face the past 18 years. I find being Texan to be a challenge every day, but I find that every day I complete that challenge it brings me closer to claiming the place as my own. Every day I mourn a fallen star for every time a Texan or a group of Texans screws something up, but every day I also find a Texan or group of Texans who have stayed long enough to pick up those fallen stars. And that’s the Texan I’ve become. Not one who turns their face away from a dire situation just to be free from Texas’s setbacks, but one who stays long enough to fix those setbacks and free Texas of dire situations. “Chala Vahi Des” is a song by a group of musicians who met in Rajasthan, India to record an album called Junun. The album featured Urdu, Hindi, Hebrew and English singers, who sought to turn the borders that were being fought over in Rajasthan into a place for ghazal, the “poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain." “Chala Vahi Des” literally means “let’s go to that country,” and I found it fit to use such a phrase as the title of this book to invite others into my personal Texan heritage, which spans much broader than state politics and rodeos and southern accents. This book is meant to acknowledge Texas’s fallen stars, celebrate the reignited ones, and illuminate entirely new ones as we progress. It’s somewhat sad and realistic to say that I’ll eventually leave Texas, but before I depart I hope to go so far as encapsulate the glamorous yet rigorous upbringing that I and many others have had for the past 20, 30, 40-something years of our lives here. -Ali Haider Fort Worth, TX

[shirlleycoyle]

How the Whiteboard Took Over the Office

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

You know something that you probably haven’t had to deal with in a while if you’re an office drone? The whiteboard.

A classic example of what happens when you have a space to collaborate, the whiteboard had a bit of a moment in the late 20th and early 21st century as offices around the world embraced them for writing down ideas and brainstorming with a group of their peers—all things that people now do in the discomfort of their own homes.

But as rumors emerge of people being pushed to go back to the office, the whiteboard might be ready for its big comeback, even if you, personally, might not be.

Let's talk whiteboards, dry-erase markers, and why the chalkboard stuck around for decades after it was made obsolete.

Image: Roman Mager/Unsplash

Before we talk about whiteboards, let’s discuss the dusty nostalgia of the chalkboard

I don’t know about you, but the most drive-me-crazy noise I can think of is nails on a chalkboard. It’s a pretty aggressively painful noise, and I don’t know about you, but when that’s my overarching memory of chalkboards, I’m fully in favor of retirement in most cases.

I will concede chalkboards are great in certain settings, such as when painted on a wall or used in a hipster restaurant or coffee shop, where the artistic value of the chalkboard outdoes the questionable functional value of the material.

But chalkboards were never perfect for their primary use case. Today we may talk about things about our computers in terms of dark mode, but we weren’t using bright, overbearing OLED screens to display information within a foot of our faces—we were trying to convey information using dark blocks of slate, usually black or a dark green and definitely not backlit, to teach students from a long distance. And honestly, it was hard to do—the contrast was simply bad, and it was just not as easy to see as a plain white surface.

For some reason, chalkboards evoke a certain quaintness in dining establishments. Image: Egor Myznik/Unsplash

And of course, chalkboards created lots of dust. And dust, honestly, sucks—a major byproduct of trying to display information on slate. Back in 2011—you know, literal decades after we were fully into the era of whiteboards—researchers with India’s National Environmental Engineering Research Institute researched the impact of chalk dust in a “clean room environment.” and found that while there was no toxic effect, it could create allergic byproducts.

And the research, highlighted in The Guardian by Ig Nobel prize organizer Marc Abrahams, generated this once-in-a-lifetime bon mot: “During teaching, entry of chalk dust in the respiratory system through nasopharyngeal region and mouth could be extensive in teachers due to their proximity to the board and frequent opening of mouth during lectures and occasional gasping and heavier breathing due to exhaustion.”

Which is why it’s probably a good thing that we finally made the move to the whiteboard, which solved the problems with contrast and, at least for some teachers and students, minimized the potential health impacts that came with teaching with such a dusty material.

But it took a while for the whiteboard to finally break through in the classroom. A big reason as to why might very much be tradition—because there is evidence that the whiteboard was introduced more than 80 years ago, and it didn’t take off for decades afterwards.

“The old-fashioned blackboard is on its way out of the schoolroom today. Whiteboards are the newest thing. In fact, the whole idea of going to school is becoming glamorous.”

— The lead sentences from a 1950 Associated Press story reporting on new trends highlighted at the convention of the American Association of School Administrators. (Yes, that’s correct. There was a time we talked about whiteboards like we talked about Chromebooks or iPads.) At the time, the report noted that the primary tool that teachers could use with the writing surface was crayons.

There is an apparent whiteboard inventor who is not getting any credit for his work, despite originating the idea two decades before other claimed inventors

We know that the whiteboard is common today. But who the heck invented it?

This is a classic example of a story where if you simply Google it, you’ll miss out on some clear evidence of prior art. (And if you are a regular Tedium reader, you know the importance of looking past the point where the answer emerges.)

If you look on websites about whiteboards (here’s an example), you will read two names credited for its invention—Martin Heit and Albert Stallion, both of whom came upon the idea in the 1950s. Heit apparently surfaced on the idea after using a marker on a film negative, while Stallion, who worked for a steel company, came upon the idea of putting enamel on steel—an idea apparently met with skepticism from his employer.

Both sparks led to companies that eventually commercialized the devices in the early 1960s. Stallion founded a company, Magiboards, that is still around today; Heit, who died last year, sold his patents to a company called Dri-Mark, which is better-known today for selling the markers used to test whether or not a bill is counterfeit. (Which feels like a Tedium piece in and of itself.)

These two men may hold claims to popularizing the invention and introducing what became common materials for building whiteboards in the modern day, but evidence of putting writable white surfaces on boards predates their work by two decades.

One early claimant that surfaces at least two decades prior is a man named Paul F. Born, a mechanical engineer who (in a syndicated photo and newspaper article) is credited as installing one in a classroom in Elgin, Illinois, where he served as head of the district’s school board, in 1937. Given the chance to write on his invention (using compressed carbon rather than chalk), he wrote:

This “White Blackboard” is dedicated to the eyesight of school students and to the creation of a more cheerful atmosphere in the classroom.

A teacher said of the invention: “Boy, what a relief from the dismal, funeral-like appearance of most schoolrooms.”

If Born did invent it, evidence is relatively strong he was first—as mentions of the idea picked up soon after Born’s experiment surfaced in the news—but he does not seem to have patented the idea. There were differences—rather than plastic or steel, Born’s innovation relied on painted glass. Nonetheless, Born’s work caught the attention of Edward Podolsky, a medical doctor and writer whose book The Doctor Prescribes Colors, published in 1938, nicely dovetailed into Born’s idea.

“Not only is black chalk on white board easier to read, but the white color of the board imparts a decidedly cheerier atmosphere to the entire classroom,” Podolsky wrote of the Elgin experiment. “After several months of use it has been found that besides. relieving eyestrain, the whiteboards combined with light-colored walls make the classroom more cheerful, and learning a much more pleasant adventure.”

This seems to be the general vibe around whiteboards at the time—the first mention of the material in The New York Times, in 1938, seemed to imply that educators and parents alike were ready for a little less blackboard in the classroom. “Yellowboards and greenboards have been tried and found wanting,” the short editorial comment stated. “But glass treated with white pigment seems to fit the bill.”

And it did nonetheless draw skeptics. After news of Born’s work earned a strong reaction in Texas’ Lubbock Morning Avalanche in the fall of 1937, members of the school board, not understanding that chalk would not be necessary for a white blackboard, expressed concerns that “things would get pretty dirty” if black chalk was used. (To be fair, the newspaper made it seem like black chalk was necessary based on the cutline in the prior day’s paper.)

Of course, if you’re reading this, you most assuredly know that the whiteboard did not enter most classrooms until the 1990s or later. After a few years of early interest—including an appearance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that may have been the first public experience many New Yorkers had with whiteboards—the Times barely mentioned the surface again for more than 40 years afterwards. Personally, I graduated more than 20 years ago, and can’t remember seeing a single whiteboard in my various schools during my time in K-12. (Maybe I wasn’t observant.)

But when I went to college, I remember they were relatively common—though not fully replacing chalkboards. If the whiteboard was clearly better, why did the chalkboard stay so dominant for so long afterwards?

For one thing, we have to talk about the materials used to write on whiteboards.

1993

The year the company Microfield Graphics first released Softboard, a dry-erase board that featured built-in networking capabilities. Basically, you could write on the board using traditional dry-erase markers, and then the board would detect the colors using built-in laser scanners and recreate them for virtual users over a dial-up modem connection. Despite its seemingly niche nature, the tool found lots of use in the federal government during the late ’90s, with FCW reporting that NASA, the U.S. Postal Service, and the U.S. Supreme Court all using the tool. The idea found interest among computer science students who saw an opportunity to render whiteboards obsolete. Oops.

Admit it, this is a familiar setting for you. Image: Slidebean/Unsplash

Why the whiteboard became popular in the corporate world before the classroom

It, of course, took a while to come up with the right approach to solving the problem of blackboards. It wasn’t just having white surfaces to write on—it was also about coming up with a way to clean those boards with the same ease of use as a chalk eraser, dust notwithstanding.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, two competing teams—one in Japan and one in the United States—were working to solve a problem that perhaps threatened the long-term mainstream status of the whiteboard: cleanup.

One inventor working on this was named Jerome Woolf, who worked for a company named Techform Laboratories, who developed the plastic surface and the general concept of the easy-drying and quick-erasing ink from the markers. The other was the Pilot Pen company, which perfected the ink that became the key element of dry-erase markers.

“The writing ink of the present invention is designed to dry almost immediately after being applied to an impermeable writing surface of metal, plastic or ceramic material, yet retain sufficient water after drying so that the ink may be removed from the writing surface by wiping with a dry erasing material even under conditions of low humidity,” the Pilot patent stated.

The dry-erase marker has become an overly common part of the business-world experience. Image: Mark Rabe/Unsplash

And once that problem was solved, the whiteboard found its way into businesses, becoming a hot commodity starting in the 1980s, but schools—where whiteboards were first implemented—proved much slower to embrace the technology. As a 1987 New York Times piece noted, whiteboards faced more practical concerns in schools that businesses generally didn’t have to worry about:

Whiteboards have not caught on well in schools because of higher prices and the tendency of students to walk off with the markers. But in corporate offices and conference rooms, it has been bye-bye blackboard, as the screech of the chalk and the cloud of chalk dust fade into memory. Aside from permitting color presentations, whiteboards can double as projection screens for slides or transparencies.

Whiteboards moved into schools slowly, however, and part of the reason for this is that they often weren’t retrofitted into old schools, but added to new ones, because it was treated as an element of the school’s design.

There’s also the element of permanence. For many businesses, whiteboards developed around thin layers of plastic are fine. But teachers were often working with whiteboards or chalk boards for hours each day, and their work needs to hold up for long periods of time. Which means that whiteboards in schools need to be made of higher-quality materials than whiteboards in offices.

Ultimately, when you break it down, a modern chalk board is not all that dissimilar to a modern whiteboard—these days, they’re both treated sheets of metal, something called a “porcelain” surface, which tends to cost more than the plastic sheets but is much higher quality. (After all, if you’re a school and whiteboards are essential to your teaching, you don’t want the cheap stuff.)

But the difference is what goes on those sheets; whiteboards tend to use glossy enamel, while chalk boards have moved away from slate and now use a less glossy, more ceramic enamel.

And, of course, there’s the whole nostalgia element of this. A 1996 Hartford Courant piece pointed to this when interviewing teachers critiquing the differing surfaces. One teacher told the newspaper that the familiar sound of chalkboards was important to them (and that they hated the smell of the markers), while a company that sold traditional chalkboards made the bet that they wouldn’t stick around.

“I think that the markers are just a fad,” said Dave Allen of the Connecticut Blackboard Company, which was still selling slate boards to schools.

That feels like a bad bet.

In the 1970s, artist John Baldessari perhaps created the first work that lived up to the whiteboard ethos, a self-explanatory document called “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” in which the phrase is written numerous times in a cursive script, not unlike the way that Bart Simpson wrote on chalkboards in the intro of The Simpsons.

As part of a broader artistic project at the school where he taught, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Baldessari had his students write the phrase all over white walls, and he did some of that writing himself. (He also disowned his earlier works, so there was no turning back. The boring art was dead.)

Baldessari’s approach, something of a modern art rallying cry, was basically dry-erase art without a dry-erase board. It looks like the kind of thing that people create with whiteboards today when they’re looking for some kind of mental spark that leads them to their next big idea. In a lot of ways, Baldessari was brainstorming at the widest possible scale.

These days, the whiteboard has found increasingly novel contexts, beyond the office or the classroom, and even the pandemic hasn’t entirely dampened its potential. A popular note-taking tool, the RocketBook, has gained popularity by mixing the best elements of whiteboards (that is, the erasability and reusability) into something that looks like a traditional notebook, offering a little of the manual and the automatic in one package.

But the thing is, whiteboards are amazingly well-suited to office environments, as they encourage deep thinking in a setting where anyone can pick up a dry-erase marker and go. Compare it to, say, journaling. Some people’s brains just work better that way.

My favorite collaborative moments involving a whiteboard didn’t involve a meeting or a discussion session, but a game of hangman on a wall of whiteboard paint during Friday-night happy hours. It created a way for us to mentally meet up with our coworkers over a beer and have a little fun that had nothing to do with impressing a client.

Whiteboards became a tool for collecting the storms of our brains in groups, a powerful element of discussion that went far beyond what we could do with paper and pen alone. And even in an era of screens, sometimes the handwriting just carries more power.

But let’s give some credit to the guy who made a pitch for them first, because it seems like he deserves a lot more notice than he’s been getting.

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