Anti-Hypothesis!

If you find Arvind's hypothesis on the probability of the current financial crisis becoming a precursor for another baby boom counter-intuitive, come back. We shall talk.

The premise of his argument is that a baby boom has historically followed a state of national distress - true but the line of reasoning goes completely haywire after that. He goes on to comment about how they ( Americans ) have always managed to overcome the realities through their enhanced productivity giving such examples as the WW-2, the war on Vietnam and the 9/11 strikes. But on looking up data ( here, here and here ), that story doesn't seem to hold ground. For instance, the real baby boom in the United States happened after World War -2 precisely between 1946 and 1964 when birth rates went up dramatically ( nearly 16 % - 2.85 million births in '45 to 3.41 million births in '46) and not during World War-2 where, to requote him, people managed to overcome the realities through their enhanced productivity and abilities to handle stress. Moreover, this baby boom happened not only in the United States but in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Sweden, Germany and heck, even in India after '47. Has the world seen that kind of a baby boom after that? Not really. Not after Vietnam ( the war on Vietnam happened in '75 and the birth rate has been going up barely 1% each year after that ) and also not after 9/11 ( the number of births in 2002 actually went down from 2001).

What, then causes a baby boom? Rather than, to quote Arvind again, crises leading to increased sexual activity in a nation ( which I am assuming was intended to be funny than of any real argumentative value ) it is an increased sense of social well being and security, immigration, a realignment of responsibilities among men and women leading to the man leading the conventional role of the bread-winner and woman of the home-maker. All these factors usually happen as a package only after a major war when young males return from their war-time duties, couples reunite, women go back to their usual responsibilities of bearing offsprings and the social and economic restraints that stopped them from starting families disappear and there is a heightened desire among human beings to bond and procreate.

So, now would the current financial crisis be a precursor to a baby boom? Hard as it may have hit the United States' ( and now Europe's ) financial stability, it is noteworthy that it has not caused an economic upheaval like in the Great Recession. It is because the finance community - investment bankers, analysts, financial advisers - form a very small group ( less than 7% of the employed American population if I remember an Economist article correctly ) so that a few ( relatively speaking ) lost jobs and some foreclosures on some bad mortgages do not convert to an economic crisis. Moreover the hardest hit by the financial crisis seems to be people in their 40's where losing a job or a stake in a company could be analogous to death in a battlefield ( very low probability of gaining it all back ), and by the time they ( the country to be precise ) recover from this crisis ( which could be atleast 3 years from now, if not more ) they would be as good as out of the fertile pool.

Point being, without an economic crisis ( rather than a financial crunch ), without a war-like situation, without great instability all leading to a heightened sense of social and economic security ( which an aftermath of this financial crisis do not guarantee ( taxes, remember? ) ) a baby boom seems highly unlikely.

P.S: Writing a reply-post on this wouldn't be worth your time. No, seriously!

On the nature of memory and the art of novel.

I am obviously not going to write anything on the topic. Just came along a very interesting observation by Kundera in his collection of essays, Testaments Betrayed. This blog, nostalgia being its prominent motif, would do good to have it in its patio.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it is happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the imagination is unable to help our memory along and reconstruct what has been forgotten. The present - the concreteness of the present - as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet; so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination. We die without knowing what we have lived.

The need to resist the loss of the fleeting reality of the present arose for the novel, I think, only at a certain moment in its evolution. In Boccaccio the tale exemplifies the abstraction that the past becomes upon being recounted: without concrete scenes, nearly without dialogue, a kind of summary, it is a narration that gives us the essence of an event, the casual sequence of a story.

All I am capable of while listening to a fanatic is sit frozen and wonder about the miniaturization people can bring about in a human being in the name of 'enlightenment'. Its only more chilling when the loudest arguments come from parts where men thought the most for the nation. I think of religious fanaticism and arguments or fights based on them as arguments between two men who can read and write, yes, but don't have a mind or knowledge to think. So if you give two magazines, say India Today to one and Outlook to the other and asked them to discuss the same topic for a certain prize money, ( something about which they are hitherto blank and written using different examples, references ) it would be amusing, dismaying for some, to watch the men disagreeing and arguing over issues which never existed, quoting exclusively from the few pages of text that have been fed to them, all for the prize and without reason. What difference could you possibly find between these men and those fighting over the Koran and the Gita and the Bible?

You walk the ever barren fields in a mad state of this crazy country and the shrieks - helpless, deserted - of girls, daughters of the same fate and mother enter your ear and gets trapped in that area between your eyes, where I believe the conscience is, and never escapes. Raped, breasts lightened off from the body and then, as the final honour for being women, sent to another world. Walk a little further and you see a child crawling, struggling to stand up and walk to go find his father and mother and brother and everyone he had ever seen or touched and if the people of his beloved motherland continued to get enlightened the same way, he would not have to travel too far. Such piety, such devotion for the unseen, the Harry Potterlike characters of the myth, you stand and freeze.

As you dream of of the lines of a book never written or that unique business gambit never thought of or that last bead in the string which unified all scientific theories ever known to man, the sanctity gets destroyed when you think that dreamt under the same sky with the same unsurety of the closed eyes are dreams of erasing civilizations, religions, people, ideas. A certain group of our enlightened ones do not think favorably about a religion whom they call a minority. They want the traces of this minority ( the number which funnily enough far exceeds the population of the United Kindgdom and France put together ) to be scored out of the nation. Then proceeding to a larger scale, they want a nation to be scored out from the face of the world.

It would be helpful now to bring those two men who could read and write but with hobbling minds in. They were blank about their issues and hence the argument which ensued guaranteed that nothing could come out other than the few lines of print they could read and enlighten themselves with. And if the prize money depended on a definite conclusion, they could go on and exchange a few blows if they felt the argument was going nofuckingwhere. And then supposing there were two such men in each team and one team eventually blew the other out and after all that a meagre prize was awarded? A civil situation indeed! Iran could be an example of this team and situation.

Today, the whole concept of religion and everything coming out of it, is based on a feeling of superiority. "My religion and its teachings - holy". And the feeling of superiority, of being the elder brother, the magisterial outlook, I believe, often leads to supression, disregard and violence. If instead the prime mover was a feeling of inferiority? Levels of inferiority driven by ones literacy and intellect. I am a firm believer that a self respecting human being is not motivated in an academic environment for his own good as much by a feeling of insecurity and inferiority as by anything else. And this motivation could really not lead to violence or unreasonableness and irrationality because they in turn could only lead to your downslide in such an environment. This, on an evolutionary basis would lead to a nation whose religions would be reason and intellect and knowledge rather the ones based on shaky, unseen scruples and hence to a perfectly developed democracy and nation.

Its funny how people adapt themselves to the stuff they read. So when you read a sentence that makes no sense, you adapt yourself to the "writer's point of view" even though the writer would have failed miserably in conveying what he wanted to, at the first place. Its funny. The more you don't understand, the higher the writer stands in your top 5, top 10 lists. Jim Morrison, for example, in An American Prayer sings poetry - most of which floats 6 feet over my head. I prefer to call such stuff psychedelic and I think they are fun to listen to. So when he sings, " Out here we is stoned, Immaculate " , I gape at the shenanigan of the guy and his beautiful meaninglessness to me - so much so that I get a poster of him and worship him. Its an art to make unreasonableness and meaninglessness sound meaty. The art for me is poetry. Psychedelic poetry, rather. An act only Gods are capable of. Right now my Gods are Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison. Their songs are my mantras. Its a good thing they are dead. We have never seen Gods, right?

There are moments in your life which you always want to hold onto. Moments, so special, they seem to define in a single instant all the joy that is there in your life. Times, at which when you look back, they seem to be posters of your favorite classic movie. And a song to associate with them. Memories so beautiful, your heart aches.

Mundane activities gain special meaning just because it was shared by someone close to you. The most ordinary seems extraordinary just because you know someone had felt the same way about it. You feel good to be alive. The air around you seems so fresh, you overbreathe. Life, at times, does seem beautiful even with all its imperfections. Or maybe, the imperfections make it seem more beautiful. Such an irony. You live for the future but the past, your memories, gives your life all its meaning.

The Great Gig in the Sky

A lady in a white dress floating like a silk ribbon in an infinite silver-white gray-black sky, stretching across its vastness, holding onto nothing. A man in black shades standing in an ashened earth, looking at the sky, at the ribbon, the lady. This is the image I get every time I hear TGGITS. Effigies of anxiousness, of loneliness, of hurt and of all that I set to achieve and I could not, of death keep flashing before me like nasty ogres.
It’s like seeing your own dead self. How would it feel? To see yourselves dying. Lonely, underachieved, holding onto life, which is past you. Chilling. The lady is me. And the man is me too. Right now, I am afraid to face death and so I can’t face life. Explains why he is wearing black shades.

A familiar cry of the engine. Road lay down itself for you like a slave, like a whore. Use and They shall abuse. Trees pass by like strokes of a painter’s brush. Faceless beings like specks of dirt on a white canvas. The shadow of you on a thick cloud of exhaust breathed out from your latest pursuit. Forth ho, before you are lost.

A crooked scooter waiting for his master. A murdered [1] truck, his master lost. Many beads of red on its face. Free and happy and dead. Woman riding the pillion. Hip drawn back, chest ahead. Cheek resting on a cushion. Rider resting on a softer one. Cog up, move ahead. What you see is what you don’t get.

A proud dog barks. A prouder one sleeps, in a pool of sauce. Liver out, eyes in. Red, hot bitch. Highway to another (spell-check: a nether) world.


[1]: Murdered by whom, one might ask. Mr. McFate of course, who else?

Your only defence against your own people is sleep. A long, long, long sleep.

I stood at the balcony sipping a cup of coffee , looking at a child playing with her plastic football. The unfinished concrete floor she was trotting on barely seemed to bite her naked feet. Or even if it did, she din't seem to care. Every moment she spent seemed to be moments of unadultered joy, of consummate innocence. One second Time seemed to fly by, another second i looked at her and Time seemed to stop by and join me in the audience , to watch something as pure as that. Maybe the floor was watching too and enjoying the touch of her cushy feet and in the indulgence had forgotten it's prick.
Her grandfather was watering the plants in a small garden surrounding the apartment. The gush of water, from whatever space was left between his thumb and the tip of the pipe, seemed to be as welcome for the plants as for the water escaping the pipe. He seemed to establish some sort of connection with the plants through the water, a smile that would'nt leave his face. A smile which suggested contentment at the way life treated him. At the way all the events leading to his retirement lined up to salute him. The smile of an old man content with life can easily be confused with the smile of one prepared for the eventual, I thought. What could possibly defeat such a man? The smile had to be there.
The water trickled down from the leaves to the concrete floor and formed a neat stream. The sun glistened its edges and it moved lazily, sometimes hither sometimes thither, like a man with no particular deadline to meet. It moved, melanizing the floor along its path. And as it moved further, it broke off into two parallel streams. The streams seemed to look longingly at each other like they never wished to be separated. They never imagined that they could even have a separate existence. They had never bothered to make one out from the other. Even the floor seemed to cry for them and the tears seemed to be the streams themselves.
But then something happened. Maybe it was the wind. Maybe a slight slope. Or maybe, just maybe it was their longing. They were no longer parallel. They meandered towards each other.And as they neared, one stream for once showed a sense of urgency. The other reciprocated and the next second they moved along lazily again, as one. Again as two bodies, one soul. A sweet pang in my chest. The nature seemed to smile at the stream. The Sun shined ever so mildly, not wanting to dry them off and the floor did his best by nudging them through a slope as if sending them for a honeymoon.

Santa's Letter

Christmas brings with it the portly figured, the jolly old, the one with the supernatural ability to ascend a chimney with a mere nod of his head, Santa.And with him comes aunty Claus with recipes so delectable, they seem like god's gift to the gastric juices.Yammy! But let Mrs Claus' recipes not make me wander off the subject of the post. So talking about Santa , although this guy is all fun to watch and talk about, i've never been able to come up with a satisfactory theory to support his existence. So when northpole.com shouted that one could write a letter to Santa and he would most definitely get back, i found the entire idea fishy.
Nevertheless, i decided to write the old man the letter and maybe take a stab at pulling his leg too. Following the specified links ,i reached the page from where i could send the letter.Send the letter i could, but not before i answered a few friendly questions.It asked if i've been naughty or nice through the year. Not the one to take chances, i decided that i was nice throughout. The next question, i should say, perplexed me a bit. Did i have a chimney in my house? Now these are times when Mumbai doesnt even have space for a gas-stove.So the chimney was no doubt a difficult proposition. I decided that the exhaust fan in the kitchen was a very good substitute for the chimney and Santa would be logical enough to understand. I checked "yes". Good enough. Next, i had to choose from a variety of toys, the one which i wished the most for Christmas. Not difficult given the options.Stuffed toys and toy trains being some of the choices. I chose cars and trucks. Next step, i had to enter my wishlist. After entering the initial four wishes, i noticed that the list was unfulfillable even by Santa's standards. I mean, even if he could, he would'nt. The four wishes were names of four actresses.(I would have named them . But going by the heavy popularity of this blog, i fear the people concerned might read this too and sue me for their own convenient reasons.) Moving along , i finally reached the " write a special message for Santa" section. I wrote, "Dear Santa, i hope the cars and trucks mentioned above are the real ones and not some stuffed toys. Am just curious how you are gonna come driving the cars and trucks via the chimney. Anyways, take care."
I sent the letter , hoping that my doubts about the old one's existence were wrong and that he came by on Christmas eve (via the chimney or wherever else he wanted to),the fleet of cars and trucks following him.
The letter i sent yesterday and the matter had slowly started to vapourise from my rather humble RAM that a friend of mine mentioned something about Santa today. Flicker-Flicker went the overhead tubelight and next second,i was in front of the PC. Sure enough, i had got a reply from Santa( supposedly him ). The letter went like this:
"
Dear Sujith,

Thank you for writing such a wonderful letter! We have had a great year at the North Pole. The reindeer have been playing reindeer games to get in shape for the long trip Christmas Eve, and the elves have been busy getting my sleigh packed with lots and lots of toys.

Once my sleigh is packed and ready to go, I'll be off on my journey around the world. I'm reading your letter right now, and it looks like you've been a very nice boy this year. That makes me so happy. Keep up the good work!

While you are asleep on Christmas Eve, the reindeer will land my sleigh on your rooftop so I can hop down your chimney.

I see that you like cars and trucks. I like cars and trucks, too. They are lots of fun to play with, and we have some very exciting new cars and trucks this year. The elves have been very busy this year making many new and different cars and trucks for Christmas!

Well, I must get back to my workshop now and help the elves finish up the rest of the Christmas toys. We have to have them ready to go soon--we don't have a minute to lose!

Ho! Ho! Ho! Have a Merry Christmas!

Your Special Friend,
Santa
"

I never thought "Dear Santa.....take care" made a great letter.Oh well.The next few lines seemed to be of little interest to me what with him blabbering about his reindeers and elves and sleighs and toys.He had already made plans to park his reindeer run sleigh on my rooftop and then come hopping down through the chimney. I hoped i could somehow inform him that i dint really have a chimney and he could possibly come down by stairs. The next para was to be the most important for me. But this one , infact, turned out to be the real dampner. The alliteration of "cars and trucks" confirmed my doubts about the fishiness of the entire "send a letter and we'll get back" thing. It was quite obviously a computer generated letter.;-( The spirits touching ground level i read the para once again, now replacing "cars and trucks" with "girls". This once done, the spirits had taken an about turn northwards and i could be seen smiling and beaming at every soul near me, strangers included,a fresh hope of the man in red turning up with all his "goodies" !

Merry Christmas Guys!