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Teach A Man To Fish

Posted on June 14, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

A wise friend told me about the modern variation to the old adage about fishing and feeding. The new version goes like this: “Feed a man a fish and you’ll have to feed him for the rest of his life. Teach a man to fish and he’ll wipe out the fishes.”

I thought this was catchy, but didn’t know how true it was. Last week, via a link from kottke.org, I came across this shocking visual put together by David McCandless, author of a blog on the UK daily, The Guardian.

Vanishing Fish by David McCandless

David explains the picture:
“This image shows the biomass of popularly-eaten fish in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1900 and in 2000. Popularly eaten fish include: bluefin tuna, cod, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, pollock, salmon, sea trout, striped bass, sturgeon, turbot. Many of which are now vulnerable or endangered.”

David explains another very crucial and chilling point, about memory and public policy. He says that most of us who’re trying to protect these fishes don’t even know how rich the seas were once upon a time, because we have no memory of them, the damage done before our generation was born. So, whatever policies we come up with are already poor. As W.S. Merwin wrote in the poem, Witness:

I want to tell what the forests
were like

I will have to speak
in a forgotten language

If you thought, well that is why I eat farmed fish, you’re out of luck. Following a link from David’s blog, I came across this 1 minute video that succinctly summarizes why eating farmed fish isn’t better, it might be worse!

Eating Fish from Nigel Upchurch on Vimeo.

When Maya and her children question our carelessness and profligacy, the bereft land that we bequeath them, how shall we answer ?

Gray Whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
- A Coming Extinction, W.S. Merwin

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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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While I Was Gone

Posted on May 4, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

A small brown wren in the tangle
of the climbing rose. April:
last rain, the first dazzle
and reluctance of the light.               – Cuttings, Robert Hass

While I was gone, April has turned to May. The fickle weather has given way to blazing heat these past few days. Will the very wet winter yield to a very hot summer ?

And then in mid-May the first morning of steady heat
the morning, Leif says, when you wake up, put on shorts and that’s it for the day.
when you pour coffee and walk outside, blinking in the sun.
Strawberries have appeared in the markets, and peaches will soon;       
- Late Spring, Robert Hass

The very wet winter has created such a lush life that pollen allergies seem to be all the rage. Maya and I have been plagued with runny nose and Maya had a low grade fever for three nights. Local newspapers speak of pollen counts are the highest in 20 years.

I wasn’t gone anywhere. Had just battened down, caught up on the daily rhythms of waking up to Maya’s “Papa”, the knowledge that Shanthala was ten thousand miles away. Caught up in the cooking, cleaning, working that filled my days. And time spent with friends visiting us from India who stayed for two weeks. Caught up in placating Maya who thought that their appearance had something to do with Shanthala’s disappearance. Who expressed her unhappiness at their presence, showed what seemed akin to sibling rivalry, an unwillingness to spare my time and attention.

While I was gone, a final chapter in the story of Osama vs Obama was written. Osama had been dead for two days before I came upon the news. That’s how conversant I was with my laptop.

While I was gone, stories kept unspooling in my head, but went unsaid, unwritten. The eyes were held spellbound by the chiaroscuro of light and rain, sun and clouds, of the beauty of spring flowers, lupine and california poppy, ice plant and feral cabbage. But the hands remained frozen, unable to sculpt the words that spoke of what the eyes saw, the body felt an my whole being experienced.

A man thinks lilacs against white houses, having seen them in the farm country
south of Tacoma in April, and can’t find his way to a sentence, a
brushstroke carrying the energy of brush and stroke    – Spring Drawing, Robert Hass

And now I’m back from my exile. Again. Thank you for waiting, dear reader.

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Musings From An Airplane

Posted on March 29, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

I envy men who’ll see their wives and children tonight.

Exactly three months shy of Kitty’s departure, I got on a plane to Prague to attend the same conference that I attended when he was alive. He was alive and Maya was just a wisp, a dream. Now, I’m on my way to Prague again and he’s the wisp, a slowly, slowly, fading memory while Maya is real, probably upset at being unable to make me stay and not knowing how to express the feeling. I left like a thief, unable to even kiss her goodbye as I left, afraid that she’d cry. This is the first time I’ve traveled for more than a night away from her, and even that single night has been only once. “Don’t forget the two times you left us alone in my mother’s house”, I can hear Shanthala say.

One the plane, a book called “Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name” kept me company. It told the story of a woman who goes in search of her biological father when she learns that the man she called father was not biologically so after he dies. She had been abandoned by her mother when she was thirteen. Her mother vanishes and is never found. It is a sparse, literary thriller, a thriller not in the sense of a whodunit, but a thriller nevertheless for creating a tension in the woman’s quest for her biological father, for an attempt to decipher who she is, of who she may be. The writing is simple, unadorned, nothing got in the way of the story. When I pause in my reading and look outside, the plane is over some mountain range, the white of the peaks offset by the black of the valleys. I wonder if the plane went down and I couldn’t keep my promise to Maya of returning soon, would she grow up seared and searching. I’ve heard of a woman who lost her mother when she was six or so. Her father remarried. To help turn a corner on the past, they forbade any discussion of her biological mother and severed all contact with her relatives. I heard that even when she was sixteen, when everyone was in bed, she’d comb the house looking for pictures of her lost mother.

Loss. I knew the word, but not what it meant. Now I know the word like I know breathing. I know now that I can never protect Maya from ever knowing it’s meaning. With life comes loss. Just as the poem said, the ledge itself invents the leap:

The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,
Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,
The merest thought of airplanes. You can call
It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;
But it isn’t the unfathomable fall
That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,
It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap. – Fear of Happiness by A.E Stallings

It’s light again outside. I see the landscape is no longer wild, desolate, mountainous and snow covered. The day looks beautiful. Just enough wisps of cloud to accentuate the blue of the sky. I see a winding river with boats and barges plying its waters. I wonder if it is the river Rhone, wonder if Shanthala had passed this way when she toured Europe with her parents. I imagine people on the boats, the captains navigating the vessels, the crew working the ship. I wonder if they live nearby or if their homes are far away. I wonder what their lives are like. In so many ways so much like mine, yet so different. All those differences adding up to such different lives, to such different people. They say the devil is in the details. But as I imagine their lives, I think god is in the details, the mystery is in the details, the wonder is in the details.

A few months ago, I was on my way to the airport, the first time I was leaving Maya for a night. As the cab approached the airport, I saw two giant planes, taxiing to their runway. Flight. Escape. Runaway. Bolt. The words had come unbidden to my mind. I wondered why. Did I crave for a break from the relentless of parenting ?

As the cab approached my terminal and slowed to edge itself in front of the terminal, I saw a man hurriedly hug an older woman and rush into the car to drive away. In one of the few scenes I remember from the movie “Love Actually”, a narrator says that if you ever think that love is dead, just go to the arrival lounge of an airport and you’ll see people surrounded by love. If the arrival lounges are where love blossoms, are departure lounges where they wither or just seek respite ?

I felt like I was running away from love that morning. Love that lay asleep in bed. Love in the form of a toddler, almost three, and Shanthala. I longed to hold both of them for a while before I left home, but that would’ve woken them up and Maya would not have let me go so easily. If she had started wailing, I would have found it difficult to leave. That day, as I waited for the taxi, I heard her stir on the baby monitor and ask for me, but thankfully she went back to sleep without fully waking up. I say thankfully, but I’d be lying if I didn’t add that I was also a little saddened. I wanted her to wake up and demand me, make me not go.

That time, I was at the airport because I wanted to surprise another loved one, my sister – younger by 9 years – who was graduating that week. I knew that she wanted me to be there when she was awarded the certificate. I wanted to be there too. My sister is how I  discovered that I had a side of me that loved babies and wanted to care for them. This graduation would mark the end of a journey began 10 years ago when she first came to this country. The road had meandered and almost gotten lost in the undergrowth. Not that it mattered to me that she didn’t finish her Masters. I wanted her to be content is all. But I was heartened to see her return to the course years after she had walked out of it, return of her own accord and finish it with flying colors. So I wanted to be there when she walked on stage.

That weekend was also my mom’s birthday and I thought that she might be pleased at the gift of my being there for my sister’s graduation. “There’s only the two of you,” she’s fond of saying, as if we were the sole inhabitants of a lonely outpost from Cormac’s “The Road”. “You must take care of each other”. She frequently asks me to visit my sister, on the other coast, always worried that the geographical distance might become the metaphor for the relationship.

Leaving Shanthala had always made melancholic. With the coming of Maya, this has only gotten worse. I wondered if I was really sad or if a part of me was only aping what I’d seen my father do in such situations. When he was away, he’d never really enjoy himself. Even in a city playing the latest English movie, which he so loved to watch and which he got so little opportunity for in the provincial towns we lived in, he’d not go to the cinema. “I don’t enjoy watching a movie without you all”, he’d say.

I didn’t understand him then. But on a plane, crossing oceans, I envy men who’ll see their wives and their children tonight.

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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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