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Around San Francisco With Maya: Civic Center

Posted on June 13, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

When I lived near Paris, I didn’t go to see the famous places until the very end. I vividly remember the hectic schedule that I put together to see the Louvre, Les Invalides, Musee D’Orsay, Jardin Luxembourg. You name it and I probably saw it in those last few weeks. With the exception of Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. We both knew at some level that things would never be the same between us again and this girl and I were going through this frenzy of doing things together for the last time.

Here I am, twenty years later, near another beautiful city and I haven’t really seen it except for the Golden Gate, Crooked Street and Golden Gate Park. That is a little exaggeration, because I have seen a few other places, but nevertheless, the city has largely been a stranger to me. In the past few months that we’ve been coming up to the city with Maya, we’ve finally started to get to know San Francisco better.

The day began with Maya wanting to have croissant and milk, her favorite breakfast when we come up to the city. She then wanted to go play at Dolores Park. Summer is almost here and that means San Francisco is beginning its second winter. The wind was shaking the trees like some storm was heading our way and it was cold. Shanthala elected to stay indoors a little longer and so, Maya and I took the public transit and headed to the park. Once we got there, we found that the play structure was sealed off, torn down for renovation. We stood there wondering what to do when we saw an old tram approaching. Papa, lets just get on the tram and go, she said. So, thats what we did.

We got off at some random stop when Maya thought it fit to get off. We wandered the streets a bit and Maya said that she wanted to ride a tram into the tunnel and then take the stairs to surface from the tunnel. Instead of doing our usual run up to Embarcadero, I decided to jump off the tram at the Civic Center. Maya had seen the City Hall from the car a couple of times and so she was eager to see it up close.

We followed a sign titled United Nations Plaza to the surface from the underground. What a beautiful sight greeted us!

The sight seemed straight out of some European city. Maya squealed her delight and started running up and down the wide, pedestrian mall. And her delight turned to squeals when she spotted the fountain behind us.

Signs of how little I know of the world I’m immersed in becomes apparent once again. The entire place is covered with aspects about the UN. Quotes from different people about the need for UN, date the UN charter was signed, a pillar for each year since the UN wS founded with a list of nations that joined that year and so on. I thought that all this was in keeping with the name of the plaza.

Almost seventy years ago, between April 13 and June 26 of 1945, 50 allied nations met in San Francisco with the aim of setting up a global organization that would help resolve conflict through peaceful means. The US along with 50 other allied nations and various non-governmental agencies crafted the UN Charter, here in San Francisco, creating the UN. So, the plaza we were on was not just another dedication to the UN. It was where the UN was founded!

The plaza was mostly empty except for a homeless man sitting by the fountain. Gulls and pigeons were the only other animals that seemed to have more than a second’s interest in the place besides us. Maya ran round and round the fountain, chasing the birds or just watching the water. The fountain is not particularly pretty or memorable.

Back in 2003, the fountain was almost demolished. From a newspaper article published in 2003:
“It’s become an intolerable situation, and we don’t have additional resources to continually clean it,” said Alex Mamak, a spokesman for the Department of Public Works.

 

Department crews clean out human filth and hypodermic needles every morning, only to find a new mess the next morning, Mamak said.”

Something happened after that time because the fountain is still here and looked quite clean. The only droppings I saw were the birds’.

After exhausting the novelty of the fountain, Maya headed towards the Civic Center, passing a large statue of Simon Bolivar on horseback and a monument called the Pioneer Monument.

Along the way, pillars framed the mall upto Bolivar’s statue with each pillar dedicated to a year when one or more nations joined the UN. One of my memories from history lessons from school is that only 4 nations were not part of the UN, one of which was Switzerland, a nation long famed for its neutrality. So, what do I see on the pillar dedicated to the year 2002 ? Switzerland.

As we approached the City Hall, Maya spotted a children’s playground and took off running. I stayed behind, trying to get different shots of the City Hall.

After lunch, Maya, Shanthala and I headed to Embarcadero where Maya spent a considerable time playing at another fountain, the strange looking structure called Quebec Libre. Constructed by a Quebecois sculptor called Armand Vaillancourt, it is a structure that Shanthala immediately considered ugly, grotesque and an eye sore. It seems to be an opinion shared by others. One critic called it, “Stonehenge unhinged with plumbing troubles” and another described it as “the funeral of beauty in art”. One blog recently bemoaned the logic behind spending $1000 a day to pump water through the fountain.

But, Maya was oblivious to all of this. There was water and she could get wet. That’s all that mattered as she ran along the pathway that took her into the heart of the fountain, with water spilling all around her.

The afternoon turned out to be quite beautiful and warm. Thanks to Maya, we were enjoying a mild summer day in the city that is considered by many to be the city to visit in the US.


 

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Maya, Now and Then

Posted on June 2, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

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Spring Rain

Posted on May 29, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

Now the rain is falling, freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,

a Pacific squall started no one knows where, drawn east
as the drifts of warm air make a channel;
it moves its own way, like water or the mind,

and spills this rain passing over. The Sierras will catch
it as last snow flurries before summer, observed only by
the wakened marmots at 10,000 feet,                             – Spring Rain, Robert Hass

The day began beautifully, with just enough specks of white cloud pinned against a blue sky. It is Memorial Day weekend and summer is almost here.

By the time Maya woke up from her afternoon nap, the sky was gray. I want to go to Dolores Park demanded Maya. Shanthala demurred because she thought that it might rain. The prediction says less than 1 mm, I said, lets take her to the park. So we set out.

As we reached the park, water came down like a fine spray, too fine to be a bother, but not insufficient to be ignored. Maya dashed off to play. Shanthala and I sought shelter from the rain under some slides. The spray turned to drizzle and drizzle turned to a fine rain. Spring asserted a reminder that it wasn’t yet done.

But, Maya couldn’t be deterred. Most parents were scurrying home when we reached the park. The rather crowded park was mostly empty. A group of young people were dancing to beer and loud techno music. Maya stood under the rain staring at them. Soon, she began to sway to the incessant rhythm of the music.

I remembered what Sir Ken Robinson had said in his talk. Why isn’t dancing as common in the curriculum as math and language. After all, don’t we have bodies ? I remembered my awkwardness at dance. My father loved dance music and took the opportunity to shake to the rhythm whenever he could. My mom thought it shocking or at least, unacceptable for a grown up man to do what he did. I imbued my mother’s shame and not my father’s abandon when it came to dancing. Probably, I also felt that if I couldn’t be good at it, I shouldn’t try. How strange, what we chose to copy and what we chose to avoid from each of our parents.

The city, usually a brilliant sight from the park, was almost invisible in the rain.

The night before, Maya woke up in the middle of the night and vomited. She vomited three more times before she slept fitfully the reminder of the night. The sheets were a mess and we retired to another bedroom to sleep. As I struggled to fall back asleep, I thought about how unfazed we parents of this generation are with our children’s malaises such as vomiting. Two generations back, at least in India, it must have been so difficult for a parent to know what to be afraid of and what not to be. Children died of the most simple things, things such as vomiting. But I also think about how easy my parents made parenting seem. I think I’d go mad if I had to stay home and care for Maya full time and cook and take care of the house. And I don’t think this is because I’m a man, thought that may have something to do with it, with how I was raised and what I was told was in store for me.

But parents also thought differently. I know of no one of my generation who wasn’t scared of their father. I don’t want Maya to be scared of me. But she does get scared when I lose my temper, as I sometimes do, when I can’t find a way around her obstinacy to even simple requests. For example, she insisted on eating an unripened banana despite my attempts to explain why that wasn’t a good idea and offering her a ripened one. Sometimes, the explaining helps. The other day, she wanted to wear her underwear back-to-front i.e. wearing what is front at the back. Insisting and pleading that she wear it the right way didn’t help. I then got out one of my own and wearing it the way she wanted to, explained the problems with doing so. She immediately switched to wearing it the right way. My parents would’ve whacked me and made me wear it the right way.

As frustrating as her obstinacy seems, it also makes up for a lot of rewarding moments, because she doesn’t give up at many other things. She did about 10 minutes on the treadmill on Friday. After almost a month of saying she wanted to run on it, but refusing to when I offered to help her, she did it mostly on her own on Friday. I found it delightful watching her slow up the ante, going as fast as 5 mph before deciding that 3-4 mph was far more comfortable. She first figured out if she could stop the treadmill when she wanted to, without my help. Then she slowly increased the amount of time she spent walking before she switched off and integrated (that’s my theory) the experience. Then she increased the speed. She is resolute in trying to figure it all out by herself, asking for help only when she’s in trouble or can’t figure it out.

The year is almost half over. I often wonder how effectively I use my time. Maya has been listening to Pink Floyd’s classic “Dark Side of the Moon” of late, especially the song Time. It was one of the first songs whose lyrics stayed with me. I especially ruminate over the ending.

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say 

I’ve always rejected the notion of hanging on in quiet desperation. I’ve rejected waiting till I’m older, more settled to do something more such as explore the world, play the guitar or enjoy a sunset. What no one told me about parenting is that it involves a lot of waiting. Everything else has to be mostly put aside for the first few years. At least, that’s how it has seemed to me. I wonder if half-scribbled lines is all I can show at the pearly gates. I’m so numbed at the end of the day, I just lapse into mindless activities like browsing or checking email (not even responding) instead of doing something more productive. It takes me a while before I can tackle chores or even indulge in a little writing.

Life knows no moderation. We have this relentless demand on our time when they’re young and a relentless ache in our hearts when they’re older and not around as much as you like them to be. Why can’t you, life, show some moderation, moderation that is demanded of us for a good life.

Yes, I miss my solitude. But then, when Maya holds my face and says “I love you Papa”, as she did for the first time last week, with a tenderness in her eyes that made me think she said the words with knowledge, not a mere parroting, I think the price has been worth it. I remember that with parenting, time has a beauty that is both casual and intense.

There were orange poppies on the table in a clear glass vase,

stained near the bottom to the color of sunrise;

the unstated theme was the blessedness of gathering and the

blessing of dispersal—

it made you glad for beauty like that, casual and intense,

lasting as long as the poppies last.        – Spring Rain, Robert Hass

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Pointed Observations

Posted on March 26, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

Maya is intensely curious about people and their interactions. When we go to a restaurant, she can’t stop swiveling around to try and see everybody who’s in the place. People next table are subject to intense scrutiny if they’re engaged in an animated conversation. “She’s your daughter”, Shanthala usually says when this happens. At times, Maya points at the people and asks us what they’re doing or tells us her thoughts on what’s going on or attempts to mimic their conversation. All this of course results in our gently hushing her and trying to get her to not stare at people so much or even point. Pointing is rude, we say, people don’t like being pointed at. She’s even more curious about the denizens closer to her age. If a child is crying, she stops everything she’s doing and stares at the child and the adult(s) involved at the scene. Sometimes, she gets right up in their face as the adults attempt to pacify or admonish the child. She then comes to us and pointing at the child informs us that the child was crying and asks us why. More hushing and more “please don’t point” statements.

At such times, I often wonder, at the origins of the rituals we ask Maya to engage in or desist from. Is the behavior universal or predominantly Western or Indian ? Is it quite old or was it relatively unknown as recently as when I was a child ? What about other animals, do they have similar behaviors ?

Yesterday, I came across an article in one of the blogs that I often follow, ICICI. The article was titled “Human avoidance in pointing: a cultural universal?” The author of the article wondered about the universality of pointing and the reasons for its taboo. He requested fellow anthropologists and other similar practitioners to respond. Reading the responses and the links to the papers that were put out and engaging in a little contemplation on my own provided interesting insights into yet another fascinating aspect of human and animal behavior.

Consider the following experiment. There are two opaque bags and into one, a person places some food. A chimpanzee is shown the two bags and two different things are tried. In one case, the bag with the food is pointed at by a person. In another case, the bag with the food is tilted so that the chimp can see the food. What do you think the chimp does in each case ? In a different experiment, instead of pointing or tilting, one of the experimenters deliberately marked the bag with food with a large X and clumsily dropped the marker into the other bag. Which bag do you think the chimp chose ? Now instead of a chimp, if a toddler is brought in and the experiment is repeated. What do you think the toddler does in each case ?

The chimps picked the right bag when the bag was either tilted or marked (they seemed to note that the dropping of the marker was accidental and ignored that and went for the bag with the X), but they failed to pick the right bag when it was only pointed at. Just to be clear, if one chimp stares at an external location, another chimp can follow the gaze and venture up to the spot targeted by the gaze, even looking back at the other chimp if there is nothing there. In other words, they can “project an imaginary line of sight through invisible space”. But they do not point or follow pointing. It appears that pointing is a human trait. This is fascinating.

As a parent, I engaged in pointing very early on with Maya. Naming various objects involved pointing. Current research seems to indicate that around their first birthday, infants begin to point to draw an adult’s attention at something that caught their eye. Researchers differentiate between two different ways infants use pointing. Infants point to get something, say “get me that ball daddy”, and they point to direct the adult’s attention at something of interest, say “look at that bird daddy” (I’m not saying they can verbalize bird or ball, of course). Interestingly, autistic kids only engage in the first kind of pointing (called protoimperative i.e. a rudimentary command) and not in the second (called protodeclarative i.e. a rudimentary declaration). Even apes raised by humans can apparently engage in protoimperative pointing but not in protodeclarative pointing. Postdeclarative pointing to achieve joint attention is considered by many to be a key step in infants developing a theory of mind (i.e. the knowledge that people have mental states which can lead to certain behaviors and that other’s may have mental states different from one’s own). As the author of the ICICI blog entry notes, pointing is a trait acquired in humans even before the onset of human language.

If pointing is such a key characteristic, why do we then dissuade its use as we grow older, i.e. why is pointing such a taboo ? There are several reasons given, all slight variations of each other, in my opinion. Pointing is calling attention to or singling a person out for some specific reason and the reason is usually not complimentary. Pointing seems entwined with blaming or accusing in our society. As the Dire Straits song goes, “When you point your finger ‘cuz your plan fell through, You got three more fingers pointing back at you”. And there is of course the well-known term “finger-pointing”. Further, the person pointed at, feels isolated and loses the safety of being invisible in a larger whole. Another possible reason is that pointing implies a dominant-to-subordinate relationship such as in a parent-child case. We point at our children and admonish them to not engage in some behavior. One commenter on the ICICI blog narrates an anecdote from Ecuador where a mother explained that it is dangerous for a child to point because of the evil eye of the person being pointed to. In short, pointing is very threatening.

So is it a universal taboo to not point ? One of the commentators to the ICICI blog article says that based on his work with the Yucatec Maya in Mexico, he doesn’t think they  consider pointing taboo. But that’s about the only evidence I found that the taboo against pointing is not universal.

Pointing gets convoluted to get around the taboo of not pointing. People in Southeast Asia such as Laos and indigenous people in Southern America, Africa and Australia engage in “lower lip pointing“. The Vezo in Madagascar use a fully bent index finger to point at superiors and those they revere including whales. And of course, there is the Judas kiss.

Another fascinating piece of information that I learned is that there is a disorder called heterotopagnosia in which the patient is unable to point at someone else’s body parts. They pointed at their own body part when asked to point at another person’s body part. They had no problem grasping the other person’s body part, they just couldn’t point to it. The Neurocritic blog has more information about this strange malady.

Little did I know when I first started down this path, of the simple act of pointing.

I’m working on my poems and working with
my fingers not my head. Because my fingers

are the farthest stretching things from me.
Look at the tree. Like its longest branch

I touch the evening’s quiet breathing. Sounds

of rain. The crackling heat from other trees.

The tree points everywhere. The branches can’t
reach to their roots though. Growing longer they

grow weaker also. Can’t make use of water.
Rain falls. But I’m working with these farthest stretching

things from me. Along my fingertips bare shoots
of days then years unfurl in the cold air.     – Long Finger Poem by Jin Eun-Young

References:
1. Twelve-month-olds point to share attention and interest, Liszkowski et al, 2004.
2. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition, Tomasello et al, 2005.

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A Baby’s Online Life

Posted on March 6, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

“A recent study published by AVG, an Internet security company, found that 92 percent of American children have an online presence by the time they are 2. One third of mothers in the  United States said that they had posted pictures of their newborns online, and 34 percent of American mothers had posted sonograms of their babies in the womb. According  to the AVG study, American mothers are more likely to post pictures of their children online than mothers in any other country.”

This is from a recent story on NYT called “The Digital Lives of Babies“. On a fairly periodic basis, I see a commentary on our new fangled online life. I’ve commented a couple of times (here and here) on the commentary, on what my rationale is and what I suspect our collective rationale might be for the surfeit of information about us that we’re willing to put online. This article in NYT is the first that I’ve seen about the online lives of babies.

But, there are already over 500 million Facebook accounts. Practically everyone online is on it, at least among the Internetati. There are tens, if not a hundred, mobile apps that we can use to share our presence with an online community. We can inform the world where we’re sipping java or vino la casa, where we’re enjoying dosa or tapas or what bookstore, museum or park we’re in. We’re sharing everything from the momentous (sonograms, wedding plans, breakups and fights with depression) to the momentary (sipping a latte at this new cafe, it sucks!!!). So what’s so special about posting pictures of babies ?

When it comes to kids, I’ve found parents, at least the ones I know, quite conservative in posting pictures of their babies online, especially accessible to anyone. Most put them behind closed walls, pseudo-protected by passwords, giving access only to close family and friends. I know of one friend who refuses to post any pictures of his child online. I read that in some Mayan cultures, people forbade photographing children for fear that the child’s soul was too fragile and therefore susceptible to capture by things like photographs.

Fear is the overriding factor when it comes to posting kids photos online, at least to many parents, according to this article titled “Parents, safety advocates debate risk of  publishing photos of children“. According to the article: “According to U.S. Department of Justice data, there are about 115 “stereotypical  kidnappings” a year, in which a child is taken by a stranger, detained overnight, transported at least 50 miles, held for ransom or abducted with intent to keep the child permanently, or killed. About 46 of those are killed. In a country with 70 million children, that’s a rate of about .00005 percent.” Even organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children caution on their website that when posting photographs of children online: “… [to] limit access to those you know personally and trust. To limit anyone else’s potential misuse of a photograph of your infant, carefully consider anyone’s request to take a picture of your infant and only share photographs of your infant with those you know personally and trust.”

Once, when I was playing in the park with Maya, I saw a woman was taking pictures of what appeared to be her child. She was shooting pictures of the child wearing different hats. Maya approached the child and started playing with her. After a while, the woman approached me and asked me if she could shoot pictures of Maya and use it on an online store that was planning to open. She promised to send me all the pictures that she took of Maya and also send me the link of her store when she opened it. I agreed and she took a few pictures of Maya wearing some of the hats. She emailed me all the pictures that she said she had taken and a few weeks later sent me a link to her website too which had a picture of Maya wearing her hat.

I didn’t think twice about saying yes to her request to take Maya’s picture. I didn’t agonize over whether the woman was going to sell Maya’s pictures online some place bad. Should I have ?

But the focus of the article in NYT isn’t about this fear. It is more concerned with the effect these online photos will have in how the children perceive themselves as they grow up. The author writes:
“The spontaneity and casualness of snapping family pictures has given way to the calculated, self-conscious display of family members, usually children. … The proliferation of adorable babies and children on the Web makes you wonder, above all, how these children are being perceived by the parents who snap their images, not to mention how they are learning to see themselves.”

On what basis do I select a picture of Maya to post online ? Consider the one posted above. I didn’t post that one until it made sense, as part of this entry. There were two pictures that she sent me and Maya’s face was better visible in this one. The one of Maya’s birthday, I picked to show as many people who had come as possible and I had only 3 pictures, one of which was shaken and the other which contained me and not Maya’s nanny. If we’re making calculated choices about the pictures we pick, I suspect we always have been. With the advent of digital photography, it is just easier to snap away and cull and Photoshop later, unlike the previous era where developing pictures cost a lot of money. But even the previous era, I remember culling pictures to decide which ones went in a photo album and which ones in a shoebox someplace. One criteria that everyone chooses, I suppose, is to cull those in which we look less like the mental image of ourselves. When we post online, do we cull differently ? Are parents looking for an opportunity to post their kids pictures online and hope they go viral ? I like to think that I don’t and I doubt if any of the parents we know think that way. As social animals, we like to share, we like to hang out at corners and indulge in some idle chat. As parents, talking about our kids seems a natural subject, after all we live it and breathe it as intensely as anything else we might experience in our lives. That is not to say that some parents indulge in some kind of one-upmanship or only talk of how wonderful their kids are. But to brand an entire generation that way seems like a little egregious. Maybe there is an entire brand of parental life out there that is alien to me.

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