User Profile

Ethics is hard.

If I've learnt something all these years, it is this universal maxim. Everybody wishes they'd make ethically sound choices in their lives, but more often than not, ethical choices are in contrast with cost and convenience. Nowhere is this more apparent than the way we consume food.

There are a lot of similarities between food and religion. Both are deeply personal choices which are erroneously thought of as having a clear, set winning answer. Both divide people into disjoint sets where they vehemently try to outdo one another in following "The Right Way". And of course, both are deeply political.

My personal journey in food, as in religion, has been quite tumultuous. Coming from a vegetarian family, I used to feel discomfort in sitting at the same table where somebody was eating meat, used to scoff at the smell of eggs and couldn't go near anything related to fish (this is still the case). Then somewhere along the way, I decided that I don't have a right to reject things which I haven't experienced myself and started indulging in this forbidden fruit. I tried everything I could get my hands on, but never reached that stage where I could appreciate the hype. Having gotten a taste of the other side, I made the decision to quit everything and slowly move back to being a vegetarian/vegan.

This was the point where I started to seek out reasons to convince me of my choice, and came across this book.

I wouldn't call this a balanced book in the sense that the authors' convictions are clear from the start, however where this shines is the way they use evidence to reach their conclusions rather than playing on guilt and shame. The basic fact remains, and this I have confirmed with many of my non-vegetarian friends as well, that we know too little about where our food comes from and our choices would be different if we were armed with this knowledge. The authors visit few American families and observe their eating habits, and then take us through some factory farms where the brutalities are quite graphic and sometimes hard to read and difficult to digest.

However, one qualm that I had while reading through these chapters, was the over-importance of ethics in our everyday choices. Not everyone wants to live a Kantian life full of moments filled with questioning their every choice. Life is hard to live anyway. I was delighted though to find a section dealing with this exhaustion:

Sometimes the very success of the ethical consumer movement and the proliferation of consumer concerns it has spawned seems to threaten the entire ethical consumption project. When one ethical concern is heaped upon another and we struggle to be sure that our purchases do not contribute to slave labor, animal exploitation, land degradation, wetland pollution, rural depopulation, unfair trade practices, global warming, and the destruction of rain-forests, it may all seem so complicated that we could be tempted to forget about everything except eating what we like and can afford.

I'm facing this situation myself when I eat eggs and drink milk in the morning - if every time I consume an animal product, I have to think about where this is coming from and whether I've unintentionally hurt an animal - to say that my day-to-day life would be unpleasant would be an understatement. However, we should be cautious of throwing the baby out with bathwater - the choice doesn't have to be between over-indulgence and starvation; we just need to be a bit more conscious of what we consume. To borrow an economist's favorite phrase: there's always a trade-off. We just need to be aware of the ones we are making.

All in all, I found this to be quite an informative read, albeit a bit dry in places, but would definitely recommend.

Now that I've moved away from reading fiction, I find that I face a lot of inertia to pick up something purely for pleasure. Maybe this is a nasty by-product of wanting to be as "productive" as possible. But the more I have drifted away from reading for pleasure, more mechanical the whole process has become for me. Partly to avoid this feeling, and partly because of my shame at seeing my bookshelf filled with dusty unread books, I picked up this one to assuage my feelings of guilt.

I had not expected the journey to be this beautiful!

Salman Rushdie doesn't need an introduction. He has been routinely hailed amongst one of the best contemporary writers of our time. It only speaks of my ignorance that I had only heard about him because of his controversies - outcry for Satanic Verses, fatwa issued against him - and only knew that one of his novels, Midnight's Children, had won a Booker Prize. I don't have a fond memory of reading Booker Prize winning books, bitter from the day I read White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. But as I got sucked into the universe created by Rushdie, my initial skepticism gave way to awe and admiration.

Rushdie has a peculiar way with words, an authoritative stance where the sentences bend over backwards to dance to the master's tunes. He weaves them in and out and creates intricate relationships between the story, storyteller and reader. You need to be acquainted with the history of India and Pakistan, or at least be familiar with the events surrounding the partition, in order to grasp fully what he has set out here to do. The book is filled with brilliant uses of metaphors and similes, creating a parallel universe of Pakistan during the tumultuous years after partition. The sentences are measured and precise, neatly packed with an intricate plot and the social commentary (with a tinge of satire) leading you towards the destination.

If it's not yet clear, I unashamedly loved every part of Shame and I'm excited to dig more into Rushdie's works!

I find India really fascinating sometimes, even though I've lived my whole life here. What the cultural multitudes and colorful festivals hide underneath is an ugly facade which threatens to break everything that has been built over the years. What I find most fascinating is how we've conditioned ourselves to ignore the blatant reality and move ahead with an oblivious calm, living in shit and aspiring for the gold.

Caste and religion are two of the most contentious topics out there, so much ingrained in our day to day life that one cannot even comprehend that any alternatives exist. Ambedkar had tried to show an alternative way out, and it only speaks of the deep-rootedness of the system when all we remember Dr. Ambedkar for is writing the Constitution (albiet not a small feat by any stretch), while all his life he had worked to shake the society off from the chains of caste.

This annotated edition is the perfect way to educate oneself about the almost forgotten history of a radical man who dared to question the status quo and to demand justice, fighting not against a foreign invader but with his fellow countrymen, and who has been sidelined from every history book that is taught in the country.

Caste is part and parcel of a Hindu life. I did not realize or experience this until I entered college. Although it remains rather concealed amongst students, it reared its ugly head whenever the matter of reservation (Affirmative action in west) was discussed. Arundhati Roy put this brilliantly in her forward:

> ‘Merit’ is the weapon of choice for an Indian elite that has dominated a system by allegedly divine authorisation, and denied knowledge—of certain kinds—to the subordinated castes for thousands of years. Now that it is being challenged, there have been passionate privileged-caste protests against the policy of reservation in government jobs and student quotas in universities. The presumption is that ‘merit’ exists in an ahistorical social vacuum and that the advantages that come from privileged-caste social networking and the establishment’s entrenched hostility towards the subordinated castes are not factors that deserve consideration. In truth, ‘merit’ has become a euphemism for nepotism.

Even now when I no longer believe in religion (Hinduism was never my religion, it was my parents' religion which I inherited, much like everyone else), I still get asked for my "last name" as a proxy for my caste. It is so seeped into our consciousness that we can't help but feel a reverence whenever we come across someone from a "higher caste", or to feel discomfort when we meet someone from a "lower caste". This prejudice even trumps religious beliefs in India - even though their
scriptures don't sanction it, the elite Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all practice caste discrimination.

The arguments put forward by Ambedkar for breaking up the entire caste system is a brilliant demonstration of the crystal-clear thinking of a man who left such a huge legacy on the Indian subcontinent and made sure that the future of India is steered in the right direction. He is criticized for asking for a radical transformation of society when India needed to unite everyone to win its freedom. What these criticisms seem to miss is that every radical man/woman is considered
radical precisely because i) they go against the cultural norms and ii) they question the deep-rooted prejudiced beliefs. There will never come an "appropriate" time for reforms, as is sadly evident with the still prevalent caste discrimination almost 90 years after Ambedkar decided to storm the gates.

It's a travesty that he still remains, for the large part, forgotten.

-------------------------------

This is also available on my website here.

A fine book which dives deep into the prevalent social attitude of creating gender differences and how difficult it becomes to disassociate oneself from the gendered identity. The more I think about gender, more and more I become entangled into this weird loop of seeing every social thing in a different light.

Those seemingly-innocent "bro" comments between male friends, saying that the new hire in the team is a "diverse candidate", claiming "they don't have the balls to do it" as if two-round-eggs-in-a-sac somehow magically makes you superior to everyone else - all of these reinforce the gender stereotypes. Cordelia discusses at length about all the subtle cues that we don't even notice but which has a pretty significant impact on how we treat others. It's amazing how difficult it has become in today's world to not discriminate sexually, more so especially for a parent to bring up their children in a gender-neutral way.

It's all about the mindset, but this benign word is the most difficult to change. I'm not claiming myself to be immune either. I can't count how many times I've said something really stupid when discussing something with my girlfriend, and it's only when she objects on my choice of words that I pause and reflect on how wrong it was. Reading this book was one baby step towards consciously trying to change that status quo, and I'd recommend doing this to everyone else as well.

I have had a very curious relationship with religion, although now that I talk to others, it was a much more normal experience than what I led myself to believe. I followed the typical path of receiving a particular religion from my parents (born a "Hindu child"), which had a supporting role in my life up until my late-teenage/early-adolescent years.

As is the norm for every child brought up in religion, I used to consider myself special believing that I had a "personal relationship" with God. There are so many good things about religion, but this in particular I believe to be the best part - this soothing feeling that somebody is watching over you in times of distress. During my early college years when I lost my faith, I was most afraid of having lost this rescuer of last resort (I wrote a short poem on this which you can read here). During times of despair, I frequently wondered what would've happened had I not been brought up in a religious family.

This book combines two of the most morally contentious issues that have always puzzled me - Religion and having a child. While I don't swing to the other extreme of subscribing to antinatalistic views, I do frequently wonder how it is that people don't question the morality of bringing a sentient being into the world, whose life (to a major extent) will be affected by how they are brought up by their parents. Children are shaped by the identity of their parents during their formative years, and require a significant struggle during their adolescence to be able to make independent decisions of their own. This struggle is more pronounced in matters of faith - an overwhelming majority of children wind up believing in the same gods that their parents believe in.

What can be done to lessen this automatic behavior so that children are more confident of picking their own battles and faith? This book presents insights from the people who tried to do exactly that.

It is a wonderful collection of essays from parents who are non-religious and want to bring up their child in an environment which enables them to question the authority and dogma. While just raising them secular doesn't make them superior to everybody else - bigotry is never dependent on faith - it is the independent exploration that is crucial. The essays deal with nuances of raising children in secular homes, going pretty much against the society, and how to deal with disagreements. Unfortunately, there are few essays in the end which swings the pendulum to the other end, concerned with finding "Humanist" and "Unitarian" communities which I found to be dull, however, the rest of the book remains a pleasant and insightful read.

My notebook is filled with highlights from the book, but there's one paragraph in particular that I want to share, which nicely defines the central theme of these essays.

One thread runs throughout this book: Encourage a child to think well, then trust her to do so. Removing religion by no means guarantees kids will think independently and well. Consider religion itself: Kids growing up in a secular home are at the same risk of making uninformed decisions about religion as are those in deeply religious homes. In order to really think for themselves about religion, kids must learn as much as possible about religion as a human cultural expression while being kept free of the sickening idea that they will be rewarded in heaven or punished in hell based on what they decide—a bit of intellectual terrorism we should never inflict on our kids, nor on each other. They must also learn what has been said and thought in opposition to religious ideas. If my kids think independently and well, then end up coming to conclusions different from my own—well, I’d have to consider the possibility that I’ve gotten it all wrong, then. Either way, in order to own and be nourished by their convictions, kids must ultimately come to them independently. Part of our wonderfully complex job as parents is to facilitate that process without controlling it.

I'd highly recommend this book to everyone. This review is also available on my website.

It's so strange to find a book beloved by everyone else, and find it so disappointing. The more I kept listening to the audiobook, the more and more I kept getting annoyed at his false modesty and complete sense of disrespect for people that he made fun of. Maybe he was a charming, goofy guy in his personal life - and there's no question about his legacy in his professional life - but if the intent of this book was to show how down-to-earth, carefree and charming Dr. Feynman was, it had exactly the opposite effect on me.

Pulling a prank on innocent bystanders and having a good laugh about it is one thing; deliberately keeping your tips in glasses full of water and then boasting about the mess that the waitress had to deal with in his memoir is a completely different thing altogether. And I had just started the chapter about his "bar outings" and how he used to pick up girls there, that's when I lost all patience for the book.

For people having some time on their hands, please read this: Surely you're a creep, Mr Feynman