Blog Archives

Time Passages: The Music Of Al Stewart

Posted on January 16, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

“Two broken tigers on fire in the night
Flicker their souls to the wind”

Two of the most beautiful lines that I’ve heard in all of my musical journeys. Can you believe a song, a rock song at that, that grabs you like a thriller from the first lines and doesn’t let go till the end, almost eight minutes later. And the song has a beautiful, sad ending like a great epic. And the song is the chronicle of the Third Reich’s disastrous invasion of Russia, the beginning of its end, told from the perspective of a Russian foot soldier.

Or how about this song, “The Running Man”, that chronicles the life of a hunted man (a Nazi ?), running from the hunted, that starts with:

Before the phone hits the receiver
You’re halfway to the door
The voice said ‘get out while you can,
There’s just ten minutes, nothing more’

Or a song about the French Revolution called “Palace of Versailles” that starts with:

The wands of smoke are rising
From the walls of the Bastille
And through the streets of Paris
Runs a sense of the unreal
The kings have all departed
There servants are nowhere
We burned out all their mansions
In the name of Robespierre

Probably no other rock artist has set history to such beautiful music and woven such compelling historical tales as Al Stewart.

I was introduced to his music in Paris. When I went to meet a friend in one of the company apartments, I heard this beautiful music coming from one of the rooms. I asked what the music was and who lived in that room. I was told that the guy who lived there was a snob who had the most expensive and gorgeous sounding music system in all the company. Snob or not, I wanted to know what the music was. I knocked on the door and entered his den. A guy sat on the floor, sprouting a moustache and an attitude. I introduced myself and asked him what was playing. He said, “Al Stewart”, disdainfully. The song that I heard was “Roads to Moscow”, the song whose lines I quoted at the start of this post. The album was “The Best of Al Stewart“.

I remained in the room listening to the rest of the music and a few months later, the snob and I were good friends. We’d spend hours listening to music. I was coming to Paris from my years spent in small towns of Southern India where western music was hard to come by. And what did come by was the mainstream stuff, stuff that I had grown tired of, stuff that was unmemorable a week or a month later. I was in search of something less ephemeral, more soul grabbing. Deepak introduced me to a lot of new music, music that went under the genre of progressive rock, of groups such as Yes, ELP, Rush and King Crimson. Of all of them, the only two that remained are Al Stewart and Camel.

Al Stewart has a pleasing and distinctive voice to accompany his distinctive musical stories. Hear it once and you can recognize it again quite easily, just like Mark Knopfler’s guitaring. His musical journey began with a guitar and this voice, singing folk rock songs of intimate portraits gleaned from his life. Stories of girl friends – won, lost and love still searching – of friends and their lives, of street life and characters like history teachers. Here are some lines from one of his early songs, In Brooklyn:

‘Oh I come from Pittsburgh to study astrology,’
She said as she stepped on my instep,
‘I could show you New York with a walk between Fourth Street and Nine.’
Then out of her coat taking seven harmonicas
She sat down to play on a doorstep sayin
‘Come back to my place I will show you the stars and the signs’
So I followed her into the black lands
Where the window frames peel and flake
And the old Jewish face behind the lace
Even now trying to get to see what’s cooking
Just John the Baptist in the park getting laid thinking there’s no-one looking
And its eighty degrees and I’m down on my knees in Brooklyn

Interestingly, his first single, in 1967, included guitaring by the legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page. His albums also featured good instrumentals such as “A Small Fruit Song” from his third album, Zero She Flies. At one of his concerts, he joked that jazz is what happens when a musician continues to play even after they don’t know what they’re playing, this despite his third album containing an 18 minute track that chronicled his love life. The song reads like a rock version of Raj Kapoor’s “Jaane Kahan Gaye Woh Din”. Wikipedia credits the song as being the first mainstream record release to include the “f” word. I like how the song ends:

Of all the girls I ever knew
some loved and some denied me
And all the words I ever said
have been no use to hide me
And all the songs I ever sung
each one of them untied me
And all the girls I ever loved
have left themselves inside me

Wikipedia has this to say about this stage of his career: “Stewart was a key figure in a fertile era in British music and he appears throughout the musical folklore of the age. He played at the first ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono pre-Lennon, shared a London apartment with a young Paul Simon, and hosted at the legendary Les Cousins folk club in London in the 1960s.”

Things began to change with his fifth album, “Past, Present and Future“, released in 1973. Six of the eight songs from that album had historical roots from melodies about the second World War to a portrait of the American president, Warren Harding, to one about the prophecies of Nostradamus. This was the first album to be properly released in the US, though it didn’t receive much airplay on commercial radio stations due to the length of its best songs.

Two albums later came the meteoric “Year Of The Cat”. Al Stewart is mostly known to everybody for this album. He says that this was attempt to construct a chart-busting album. “If this didn’t work, I don’t know how to create one”, he said. It had fewer historical songs than say “Past, Present and Future”, but the three that it did were gems: Lord Grenville, On The Border and Flying Sorcery. The title track is among my all time favorites, along with Roads to Moscow. His description of the woman in the title track is brilliant and unique:

She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a water colour in the rain

as is the the starting of the song:

On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime

It is a song that speaks to the senses with lines of incense and patchouli, blue tiled walls, drum beats and rhythms.

The rest of his albums never quite achieved the popularity of Year of the Cat though they possessed gems such as Merlin’s Time, Running Man, Song On The Radio and Palace of Versailles. He mostly disappeared from the mainstream radio scene. But that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to put out albums. His last album “Sparks of Ancient Light” was released in 2008. The highlight of the album was the song “Shah of Shahs” about the last days of Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran. He sings:

After these processions comes the sweeping up
The rag and bone possessions, an old tin cup
The army trucks have hauled away the newly slain
The angry crowd retreats, but they’ll be back again

And the prisoner in the palace does not understand
The ingratitude around him after all he’s done and planned
But if this the way that it must be then he’ll be damned
If he will let them take away his perfect dream

….

He cried inside the limousine and at the airport too
Where the soldier knelt before him and kissed his shoe
He flew across the desert and the open sea
While they tore down all his statues and his legacy

And the victor greets the newsmen with a strange and stoic style
They take a hundred thousand pictures and in none of them a smile
But this is just the way that it must be now for a while
he’s only come to bring another perfect dream

Luckily for me, he still tours, performing at small, off beat but popular stages. He is back to being a folk artist again, singing his popular and not-so-popular tunes with a just a guitar. He’d sometimes be accompanied by his then collaborator, guitarist Laurence Juber. Almost twenty years after I first heard his song, I saw him perform live. He came to the Bay Area twice within a year and we saw him both times, driving nearly two hours each way the second time. His concert was charming despite the lack of orchestration because he also spoke well, with understated, wry British humor.

In the music shops of Paris at that time I lived there, only a handful of his albums were available, all very expensive. So Deepak and I purchased an album each, Year of The Cat, and its followup, Time Passages. I had to wait till I came to the US to buy some of his other albums. After collecting seven of his albums, I thought I had enough. For a while, he vanished from my music scene as jazz and Mark Knopfler supplanted just about everything else.

Then Maya was born. A child can begin a journey of rediscovery. One afternoon, looking for some music with an afternoon mood, I played Lord Grenville and Year of the Cat to Maya. She was hooked to both songs and for over two months now, they continue to be the songs she takes to her afternoon nap. I’ve introduced other songs such as Time Passages, Almost Lucy and Palace of Versailles, all of which she likes. Roads to Moscow is one of her favorite bedtime tracks. Last night, she evan began humming the chorus of the track. As I listened to Roads to Moscow, to her humming and watched the joy in her face as she listened to the song, my thoughts harked back to my history with Al Stewart and I drifted into those Time Passages.

It was late in December, the sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind go
Drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Well I’m not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are the things that don’t last
Well it’s just now and then my line gets cast into these
Time passages
There’s something back here that you left behind
Oh time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Al Stewart picture from flickr, courtesy of ac4lt.

Leave a Reply ?

Animal Minds

Posted on August 11, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt

There are many books that address animal behavior and attempt to explain them. I was disappointed by many of them, because they didn’t seem rigorous in their approach to the explanation and many other explanations seemed possible. Some others were not as well written and easy to put down. The one book that illuminated the landscape brilliantly, was well written and consequently is the one that I highly recommend to anyone interested in animal minds (and baby minds) is Marc Hauser’s “Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think”. While I think the book seems a tad too certain about the results analyzed and I remain skeptical of some of the conclusions drawn, it nevertheless remains a book I deem worthy of curling up with.

I had read the book a while back and I remembered it again when I was writing the entry “Birdbrain” on my blog. I stopped at the local library to jot these few passages from the book that will hopefully be tantalizing enough for a reader of this blog to get the book. If nothing else, the few passages I’ve selected will hopefully illuminate the kind of thinking that is required to attempt an answer to what animals think.

“I will show how insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive science have begun to revolutionize our understanding of animal minds. Animals do have thoughts and emotions. To understand what animals think and feel (italics are the authors), however, we must look at the environments in which they evolved. All animals are equipped with a set of mental tools for solving ecological and social problems. Some of the tools for thinking are universal, shared by insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, including humans. The universal toolkit provides animals with a basic capacity to recognize objects, count and navigate. Divergence from the universal toolkit occurs when species confront unique ecological or social problems”.
…
The only way to understand how and what animals think is to evaluate their behavior in light of both universal and specialized toolkits, mechanisms of the mind designed to solve problems. And the only way to evaluate the validity of this approach is to test our intuitions about animal minds with systematic observations and well-controlled experiments”.

Later in the book, he provides an example of such evaluation. He mentions an observation that he made back in 1987, in a forest in Uganda, while observing three chimps, a mother, a son and her one year old infant daughter. The son departed after feeding on a tree, leaping onto a tree some distance away. The mother followed, but the daughter did not, staying back, screaming. After waiting a while, the mother went back to the daughter and swinging the tree back and forth, managed to reach the tree the son had jumped on to. She then made herself a bridge between the tree where her daughter was and the one where her son was. The daughter felt safe crawling on her mother to reach the other tree. Hauser writes after describing this scene:

“What I witnessed was magical and immediately invoked a suite of questions concerning maternal care. How often do chimpanzees create natural bridges ? Do they create a mental image of their body bridging a gap in the trees before actually stretching across the canopy ? Do they create bridges for any yearling, juvenile, or adult in need ? How does an individual recognize another in need ? Does a mother empathize with her daughter when she is stuck behind, screaming ? Would she empathize with an unrelated yearling frozen in the same position ? To address these questions, we would need to make additional observations. The insistence on replication is not a silly scientific ritual, performed by priests in white lab coats. It is a tool for understanding whether an event is common or rare, and why it occurred.”

The book is filled with such interesting anecdotes, questions raised by these anecdotes, further studies designed to answer these questions and conclusions. He writes in the prologue:

“The following series of questions and answers will inform our discussion.

  • Do animals think ? Are animals conscious ? Are some animals more intelligent than others ?

I think these are unhelpful questions because they are vague, relying on general concepts that are often defined on the basis of what humans do. In this spirit, I will generally avoid using the words, “think”, “conscious” and “intelligent”. Instead, I will ask about mental phenomena that are more precisely specified.
……

  • Do animals have emotions ?
  • Do animals communicate ?
  • Are animals guided by instinct ?
  • Do animals have rules by which they abide, and sometimes break ?”

And finally, here is why this book may be of interest to people interested in baby minds:

“In contrast to most books on animal thought and emotion, the ideas I develop here depend critically on recent findings in the neurosciences and studies of human infant development. Studies of the brain, which can be explained without technical jargon, are critical for our exploration of the animal mind and its evolution. Several authors claim that animal thought is limited or nonexistent because animals lack language. … I argue that language is not necessary for certain kinds of thought, and that the most profitable comparison among species is between animals and human infants.”

[ 1 Reply ]

Robert Sapolsky

Posted on July 27, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt

I was thirteen when I sank my teeth into my first science book, George Gamow’s classic, “One, Two Three,…Infinity”. A friend of my father, taking pity on my Erich Von Daniken collection, loaned the book to me. “Read real science, Dinesh”, he said. “Why ? What is wrong with what Daniken says ?”, I bristled. I had just discovered godlessness and thought that he wanted to brainwash me back into godliness. I picked up Gamow with some skepticism. Though a little hard to follow, the writing grabbed me like a thriller. Soon, I was poring over Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction works. His book “The Collapsing Universe” made a lasting impression. Black holes and big bang and universes that collapsed only to be reborn again! Far more fascinating than those mythologies I was raised with, I thought, because the wonder was of the real kind, not the believing kind.

Till I turned 22, my existence was defined by the limits imposed by small provincial towns of the 70′s and 80′s India, towns that my father found himself transfered to. One such constraint was the complete lack of a decent bookstore. Pulp fiction for adults and some Enid Blyton for kids marked the boundaries of literacy. Once I graduated past Enid Blyton, I found nothing to bridge the chasm between her and James Hadley Chase. And forget about non-fiction works. In those backwaters, I couldn’t even create a list of books that I wanted to read! The public libraries in most of these towns was filled with “classics”, rows upon empty, dusty rows of books that hardly interested the general populace. Any denizens were usually older people finding ways to kill time or maybe some college students looking for textbooks to borrow or reference. Only when we went to Bangalore could I attempt to quench this hunger for books. Gangaram’s Book Bureau, located conveniently on Bangalore’s main thoroughfare, M.G. Road, became a favorite haunt. Once inside, I found myself so half-crazed from this hunger for books that the rows and rows of books only made me dizzy. Like a starving man who finds himself in front of a sumptuous buffet, I ran from row to row. Which one to pick, which one to reject. So many to read, so little money to buy, so little time to decide. The experience was simultaneously intensely exciting and painful.

Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and “Dragons of Eden”, Bertrand Russell’s “ABC of Relativity”, Gary Zukav’s “The Dancing Wu-Li Masters” and Fritjof Capra’s “Tao of Physics” are the science books that I most remember from those days. Physics and cosmology were worthy of reading as I moved swiftly past the biology titles.

As I grew older, I moved away from these works into reading more about history and politics. My political awakening came rather late in my life, well past my thirties. The lack of political discussions in my house (The emergency Indira Gandhi declared unconstitutionally barely got mentioned) probably contributed to this singular lack of interest in politics. As I grew older still, my interest swung back to science, but this time to biological sciences such as evolution and cognitive science, how we became who we are and what keeps us here. Melvin Konner’s classic work, “The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit” got me started down this current road.

In this realm, I encountered several lucid expositors. Carl Zimmer, Matt Ridley, V.S. Ramachandran, Michael Ruse and Daniel Gilbert easily come to mind. To read just about anything written by these folks, I consider a worthy use of my time. Robert Sapolsky is the most recent addition to this pantheon. I had heard of Sapolsky’s work “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” while helping prepare the coursework for the course at Stanford University taught by the non-profit organization I volunteer with, Magic. Being all the rage at the time, I never managed to get a copy from the local public library. A couple of years went by and a month or so ago, looking for some other book, I ran into Sapolsky’s “Monkeyluv and Other Essays On Our Lives As Animals”. Right from the start, the book reached out and grabbed me. Wonderfully witty writing, lucid explanations of complex subjects and a wonderful choice of subjects made him delectably unputdownable. While we stayed at our friend’s place for a month, I ran into his other book, “The Trouble With Testosterone” which only solidified his reputation with me. Writing such as his, makes me envious, makes me want to stop writing in disgust. What’s the point of writing when you have such talented people, I ask myself sometimes.

Here are some samples of his writing:

“As a scientist doing scads of important research, I am busy, very busy. What with all those midnight experiments in the lab, all that eureka-ing, I hardly have time to read the journals. Nonetheless, I stopped everything to thorougly study the May 10, 1999 issue of People magazine, the double special issue, “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World”. It was fabulous. In addition to full-color spreads and helpful grooming tips, the editors of People have gone after one of the central, pressing issues of our time. “Nature or Nurture ?”

“As most newlyweds quickly learn, intimate relationships, even the most blissful, can buzz with tension. Couples typically find themselves struggling over money, in-laws, ex-lovers, and how much the woman’s placenta should grow when she is eventually pregnant. That last one’s a killer.”

“We all have encountered Reinhold Neibuhr’s serenity prayer at some point: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference’. Behavioral biology is often the scientific pursuit of that prayer.”

Each essay starts with some mundane observation and then dives deeper to reveal some brilliant nugget of biological research.

In all of biology, evolution and instinct are top dog these days, taking over years of rule by behaviorism. A lot of science is reductionism, the attempt to understand large, complex systems by breaking them down into smaller, more understandable subcomponents. The attempt to define all physical laws using quantum mechanics is one example of such a method. In biology, sequencing the human genome is considered by many scientific and lay people to be the key to understanding human behavior. “Gene for happiness” found, reads one headline while another proclaims, “The God Gene found”. We’re nothing more than the sum of our genes. If a cause has a strong genetic component, there is squat the environment can do, so the proclamation goes. In both “Monkeyluv” and “The Trouble with Testosterone”, Sapolsky eviscerates this mania and style of thinking (The New Scientist had a similar article about taking a more nuanced approach to Dawkins’ Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype metaphors).

“One of the most important concepts in all of biology is that you can’t really ever state what the effect is of a particular gene, or what the effect is of a particular environment. You can only consider how a particular gene and a particular environment interact. Gene/environment interactions are so important that you can’t be taught the biologist secret handshake until you use the phrase in conversation at least once a day”, he writes in Monkeyluv, in the introduction to one of the three threads than runs through the book. The second important thread that the book deals with is the “intertwining of our brains and bodies, their mutual capcity to regulate each other”. The final subject addressed in the book is the intertwining effects of biology and culture on each other. Meaty subjects, but dispatched with wit, erudition and lucidity.

“The Trouble With Testosterone” is a collection of 17 essays on “the biology of the human predicament” dealing with some aspect or the other of human behavior and the roots of such behavior in the animal kingdom. Some of the essays such as “Beelzebub’s SAT Score” and “The Dangers of Fallen Souffles in the Developing World” are more cultural and political than they are biological and except for Beelzebub, I found every one of the essays eye opening at some level.

Sapolsky teaches at Stanford University and is an active researcher unlike many other science popularizers. He continues to publish scientific papers while writing remarkably erudite works for laypeople. Talking about his writing style, he says that he never took a course in writing. He says that he honed his writing skills in Africa where he spent countless months of lonely existence studying the life of baboons. To counter the loneliness, he took to writing letters to his friends, family and colleagues back home, explaining the discoveries of the day. Writing the same thing, over and over again, helped him to whittle down the inessential and find ways to write the same thing differently each time. He commutes from San Francisco every day via public transport which takes up two hours of his day. He uses this time to spend writing, a time that is protected, regular and accessible.

I can’t recommend his books enough.

Leave a Reply ?

Are Parents Irrelevant ?

Posted on June 2, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt

“Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality ? This article examines the evidence and concludes that the answer is no”.

Thus began an article published in 1995 in the eminent psychology journal, Psychological Review. In 1997, the American Psychological Association awarded the author of the article, the George A. Miller Award for “outstanding recent article in psychology”. A book based on the article titled “Nurture Assumption” was declared a NYT Notable Book and went on to become a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Steven Pinker, in a glowing foreword for the book, called her work “truly rare” and said, “I predict that it will come to be seen as a turning point in psychology”.

The iconclastic author was not a distinguished academic or considered an expert in the field. She was a former writer of college psychology textbooks. Many years ago, she had been rejected from pursuing her doctorate in Psychology at Harvard University by George A. Miller, of the very same George A. Miller award. Described as an “elfin, fragile grandmother”, the author’s story of rise from obscurity to fame was itself eye-catching.

I ran across a reference to “Nurture Assumption” via the usual, often visited Frontal Cortex. I was struck by the argument that parents are not particularly important in determining a child’s behavior (and only as an footnote or afterthought is it mentioned that “parents are not important in determining the child’s behavior outside of the home”). Was this just a “cherished cultural myth” as Harris put it ?

Even at a very superficial level, the statement that parents don’t matter rang false. Just take genes. But, I like to think I’m open minded and give every idea some measure of my consideration before discarding it. Of course, being a parent and thinking that this was one of my greatest responsibilities in life made my curiosity more than academic (and may even have biased my opinion). So, I checked out the book from the local library.

Harris writes lucidly and cogently. She wastes no time in getting to the bone of her contention: “‘Heredity and environment’ – that’s what we called them back then. Nowdays, they’re more often referred to as ‘nature and nuture’…. Nature and nurture rule. Nature gives parents a baby; the end result depends on how they nurture it. Good nurturing can make up for many of nature’s mistakes; lack of nurturing can trash nature’s best efforts. …. Nurture is not a neutral word: it carries baggage. … The use of nurture as a synonym for environment is based on the assumption that what influences children’s development, apart from their genes, is the way parents bring them up. I call this the nurture assumption. … My first job is to show that the nurture assumption is nothing more than that: simply an assumption“.

Ahh! I said to myself, she’s already modified her eye-catching start. She’s replaced “parents” with “parenting”. But even the modified hypothesis felt a little too far-fetched. Here I am, struggling to this day with neuroses caused partly, I think, by attitudes instilled in me by my parents. I see my sister struggle with her share of them and Shanthala too. And we’re not the only ones. You read (and hear) about abused kids becoming abusive in their later lives, of the culture of fathers abandoning their responsibility, begetting generations with such behavior. So, is “any parenting” good enough ? Everything I’ve read makes me think that parenting is part biology, part culture. Was she addressing aspects of middle class, white American culture ?

Harris rested her focus on the field of developmental psychology and it’s practitioners whom she terms “socialization researchers”. She writes: “Socialization research is the scientific study of the effects of the environment – in particluar, the effects of the parents’ child-rearing methods or their behavior toward their children – on the children’s psychological development. It is a science because it uses some of the methods of science, but it is not, by and large, an experimental science. … Since socialization researchers do not, as a rule, have any control over the way parents rear their children, they cannot do experiments. Instead, they take advantage of existing variations in parental behavior. … In other words, they do correlational studies.”

She goes on to write a withering criticism of socialization research as a science because correlation is not causation,  because they ignore the effects of genes in arriving at their conclusions. She also, quite validly, talks of the “effects of the effects of genes”. She says, “A child’s timidity causes his mother to reassure him, his sister to make fun of him, and his peers to pick on him. A child’s beauty causes her parents to dote on her and wins her a wide circle of admiring friends.” In other words, parents are more patient with happy children than grumpy children, parents tend to show off their cute, smiling bundle than sensitive, crying infants. Did the child smile more because the parents were patient with her or the other way around ?

Harris postulated that compared to parenting, genes and “peer groups” are more predictable factors for how children turn out. In the modern nuclear family, with overspent and overworked parents, the effect of peer groups on the ever increasing number of latchkey kids seems quite logical. I wondered how this theory held up in other cultures. In small tribal groups where the shared values of the group are much higher than in modern urban neighborhoods, the effect of peers and parents is probably identical. The same can be said of traditional societies like the one I grew up in, where people from a common caste share a ritual and tend to spend time together. In such a system, even at school, kids tend to mix with others “like them”, are encouraged to do so by their parents and elders.

The history of parenting in America makes for interesting reading. Ann Hulbert’s “Raising America” is an excellent, well-written and detailed guide on this subject. In the Introduction, she writes: “Raising children has rated very near to sex – and to success – as an American fixation, especially since the start of the twentieth century and particularly among the middle class. ‘In no other country,’, one historian noted in the 1950s, ‘has there been so pervasive a cultural anxiety about rearing of children.’” Among the books I browsed soon after Maya was born, I recall one of the authors commenting on how strange it is, this modern tradition of women going to hospitals to give birth, armed with books rather than with mothers and grandmothers. My speculation is that this is not unusual for a country based entirely on immigrants. In many cases, the immigrants landed without their elders or relatives, without the benefit and wisdom of their prior experience in raising kids. Subsequent generations moved away from their parents in search of opportunity. Homesteaders faced the task of raising kids almost alone. The industrial revolution had ushered in a new belief in technology and in white coated scientists dispensing wisdom in subjects that fixed assembly lines, diseases and parenting. So, coupled with the isolation from the parenting wisdom of prior generations, turning to the experts for guidance on parenting became commonplace.

Ann Hulbert writes that national conferences on parenting peppered the past century, with support coming, in many cases, from no less an authority than the White House, conferences such as the National Congress of Mothers in 1899, Conference on Modern Parenthood in 1925, Midcentury White House Conference on Youth and Children in 1950, White House Conference on Families in 1980 and White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning in 1997. The goal was to find the scientific underpinning of parenting and use them to guide a new generation of parents. Ann Hulbert writes: “At the successive meetings, each marking a new generation of parents and of expertise, the verdicts grew more mixed and alarmed: scientific lore was spreading, yet hand in hand with rising expectations of parents’ and children’s performance went rising apprehensions of failure as the American family, everyone agreed, fought for survival in a society rapidly encroaching on its hallowed terrain. … As the new millenium approached, ‘raising a scientifically correct child’, … risked becoming a ‘neurotic national pastime’.” Books such as Parenting Inc. document the continuing neuroses.

Much of American psychology was dominated by behaviorism and empiricism, ideas based on the assumption that we’re born blank slates, that who we become is largely (if not solely) based on environment (or nurture as the word became more commonly used). Proponents of this school such as James Broadus Watson famously proclaimed that given a dozen children and complete control of raising them, he could turn them out to be whoever he wanted them to be: engineer, doctor, beggar-man, thief. These experts decried mothers against kissing and cuddling their babies, warning them that this would result in adults ill-suited to the demands of an impersonal, urban, modern world. Ironically, a few years later, some of these very same experts then charged that autism was caused by “frigid”, emotionally aloof mothers. What a mess! Behaviorism is in severe decline, but by no means completely dead. In many fields such as socialization research, it apparently plods on. People continue to believe that their bad parenting is a principal cause in their children turning out to be bad.

The pendulum on personality is swinging on the momentum of nature today. Newspapers and blogs proclaim on a regular basis how a gene has been found that is considered responsible for some behavior such as alcoholism and even novelty-seeking behavior. People who emphasize genetics more than environment are called psychological nativists. Steven Pinker is a prominent nativist.

Parenting has largely been the domain of women with men acting as interested bystanders and more concerned with “bread winning”. The swinging pendulum of parenting advice struck mothers squarely in the face, barely registering a glancing blow on the fathers. The experts speaking from the “scientific” podium only heightened the guilt the women felt, making parenting seem an onerous burden. With the rise of feminism, the women began to fight back. In the process, they sometimes threw the baby out with the bath water, rejecting attachment theory, aspects of evolutionary parenting traits, the benefits of breast milk etc. as proclamations of a male dominated world designed to enshackle women in permanent slavery.

Judith Rich Harris stepped into this climate to relieve parents of their burden by pointing out that many of these so-called sciences, had really no basis in science, were more about correlations than causes, using statistical mumbo-jumbo to reach inconclusive conclusions, ignoring many critical factors such as genes and interaction with peers. However, in the true style of an American, she went entirely in the opposite direction and proclaimed that parents hardly matter in the final psychological development of a child and that peers were “everything”, a theory which she admits doesn’t have much evidence either. Ann Hulbert writes that Harris’ theory conformed to the Western faith in personal responsibility and in an unbroken continuity between past and present.

Recently, the simple nature vs nurture debate has been taking a beating. For a fascinating insight into this debate, two wonderfully erudite and readable guides are Matt Ridley’s “Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human” and Robert Sapolsky’s “Monkeyluv: And other essays on our lives as animals”. In one particularly brilliant chapter, “The Madness of Causes”, about the search for the causes of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and manic-depression, he seesaws back and forth between genetic and environmental causes, showing how impossible it is to separate the effects of genes and environment. The first section of Sapolsky’s book is similarly illuminating, and with much more humor. Sapolsky says that we must use the term “gene/environment” to refer to their combined effect. He writes: “Genes don’t cause behaviors. Sometimes, they influence them. … What that means is that the effects of a gene on an organism will usually vary with changes in the environment, and the effects of the environment will vary with changes in the genetic makeup of the organism.“

Returning to Harris, does she think parents are completely insignificant ? In a chapter titled “What Parents Can Do”, Harris writes: “.. it wouldn’t be fair – and it wouldn’t be accurate – to leave you with the impression that parents are wallpaper”. She talks of treating kids well because that’s what you do to sustain a good relationship. She ends the chapter with: “Don’t worry about what the advice-givers tell you. Love your kids because kids are lovable, not because you think they need it. … Relax. How they turn out is not a reflection of the care you have given them.”

Many years ago, when we first began to try conceiving, a friend advised me that “children are not like algorithms. You cannot expect predictable output based on specific input”. A common joke goes “Before I had kids, I had three theories on parenting. Now, I have three kids and no theories”. Given the modern world and its demands, the nuclear family and its consequences, parenting is hard. Why should I spend time with Maya when I can be busy at work, seeking the next promotion, the next patent, the next accolade ? I’ll certainly be more acknowledged for that rather than caring for Maya (a friend pointed out that even Buddha abandoned his responsibility as a parent). Why should I bother spending time with Maya instead of setting her in front of a TV and writing this entry at 6 PM instead of 2 AM ? Because I hope that in the process, I can teach her something about valuing people more than objects, about how I valued her and my time with her. I can only hope that all this will lead to us being close twenty, thirty years from now, that she can cherish this relationship and use it as a guide for her future relationships. Beyond doing our best and hoping, what more can we do ?

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” – Kahlil Gibran

Leave a Reply ?

The White Tiger: A Review

Posted on March 22, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt
I just finished reading Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger. Two days, about 275 pages. It is an exciting read. The protagonist is a self-titled entrepreneur in Bangalore except that he’s not what most people imagine when they hear the word entrepreneur. He is a driver (chaffeur seems to grand a word for what we have them do in India) who goes on to own and run a fleet of taxi services for call centers in Bangalore, financing his startup by murdering his ex-employer and stealing his money (I’m not spoiling anybody’s read as this tidbit is revealed by the end of the first chapter). Along the way in this rags-to-riches story, he narrates the wretched life of the poor in India’s gleaming economy, starting from his birth in a little village in Northern India to his venture into a provincial town and eventually to Delhi and Bangalore. Landlords, caste system, joint families, the corruption, voting scandals, Ukranian prostitutes, the treatment of the poor by the rich and the treatment of the rich by the poor are all covered territories in the relatively short span of 275 pages. The short span also means that characters remain caricatures in some cases. But it is a mark of the driving narrative that despite revealing the ending right at the start, I was completely engrossed, cared about what happened to the protagonist (though I can’t say that I liked him) and kept turning the pages. I probably read the whole book in about four or so odd hours across two nights.

The book which won last year’s prestigious Man Booker Prize is free of literary gimmicks and style that I find so off-putting. Those would also be out of place, given that the story is narrated in first person by the protagonist, Balaram Halwai. The writing takes backseat to the narrative and never rings false, words that might seem strange when mouthed by a half-literate (half-baked as he calls himself) but street smart man. Three years ago, the award was won by another Indian, Kiran Desai for her book “The Inheritance of Loss”. The writing was quite beautiful, but the narration and the characters left me so cold, I didn’t care what happened to them by the end of the first chapter. Earlier this year, I tried reading Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”, another Booker Prize winner and the winner of “Booker of Bookers” (the best novel of the past 25 years). I was so put off by his writing style that I again gave up in about fifty pages or so. His writing style frequently comes in the way of his narration, a style that seems more a style than of any substantive value. Arundhati Roy’s “God of Small Things”, another Booker Prize winner suffered from the same disease.

The book is not without metaphors and styles. The whole novel is in the form of letters to the Chinese Premier, who’s imminent visit to India, triggers the protagonist to write the letter, to reveal the true nature of entrepreneurs and India, a story that he says the Premier will not by told by any of his Indian hosts. The battle between India and China for West’s admiration (and money) is well known. Indians constantly talk about China and compare themselves against it. Adiga names the area from where the protagonist hails, Darkness, which is really what the villages of Northern India are. A key politician is called “The Great Socialist”. Many characters are only known by their animal names, names such as Mongoose, Buffalo and Stork. To the rather long list of stories that are used to describe Indians, he adds his own, the Rooster Coop.

The narrative itself does not reveal anything new, at least to Indians or those who know India beyond the headlines and glamour. When I narrated the story to Shanthala, she remarked that reality is far more multi-faceted than these single-faceted narratives. I found Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance” a far superior work that traverses a similar landscape as The White Tiger, but is set during the time of Emergency, that single blotch on India’s democratic period. I cried several times as I read that book. In comparison, the saddest scene in the book left me only feeling sorry for the state of affairs of the poor. Maybe that is only rightful since the narrator does not want your kerchief (he’s busy trying to take the shirt off your back). The narrator says that post-Independence, the only law that ruled the land was that of the jungle, eat or be eaten. If this book is about a prey turned predator, Mistry’s book was those who could not (or did not) turn predators. I found Mistry’s work a finer etching than this one is (it is also a much fatter etching, clocking nearly double the number of pages).

I found the coincidence of this book winning the Booker Prize and “Slumdog Millionaire” shining at the Oscars interesting (apparently, I’m not the only one). Both reveal the dark underbelly of India. I read a description of India that said “India is like a snake, it’s head is in the 21st century and it’s tail in the 19th”. Both works are about the tail end of life of India. Many in India dismissed Slumdog as “poverty porn”. Shanthala and I went with a friend to watch the movie, on a whim, not knowing what it was about. Our friend walked out a third of the way through the movie. “Bullshit”, he said, “This is what they choose to show about India. All this stuff doesn’t happen anymore”. I found the scenes and what befalls many of the children in the movie so harrowing, I sat down and cried (sissy!).

Recently, NYT published a story about how, even today, the malnutrition of children in India is worse than sub-Saharan Africa. For example, compared to China’s 7% (there is that comparison with China again), 42.5% of children under 5 years are underweight in India. Childhood anemia in India is three times higher than in China. Other far poorer nations have progressed much farther in reaching UN’s Millenium Development Goals. I can understand their anger, though I don’t agree. I find in their anger the anger of an insecure individual, trying to show that he’s made it too, that any pointing out of his flaws by the other success stories is only an attempt by them to downplay his success and a sign of their insecurity.

A part of their anger probably comes from feeling that the West has shown this side of the country for so long, that it’s stale. “Don’t you have anything new to say ?”, they say, “Move on. There are other stories to tell in this country now, stories that should make you feel less condescending”.

How strange! The West constructs an idea called “nation state” and we, those who singe at the slightest criticism from the West, swear allegiance to it and feel that our self-worth is tied up with it. “Power”, Dorothy Rowe wrote in Beyond Fear, “is always about who does the defining and who accepts the definitions”. We have accepted a particular definition of success and choose to measure ourselves against it instead of accepting definitions that seem far more life-giving or more aligned with the goals that many of the same people profess.

Leave a Reply ?