'Madrasan'?

Whatever T.V. viewing I do is when I am lying on the bed at which time I can't read books or do any browsing. I rarely watch T.V. when sitting, an exception being when there is a ding-dong battle going on between any two of the trio of Nadal-Djokovic-Federer. Most of the programs seem like prolefeed. I am from the same school of thought as Roald Dahl. Old fashioned, no? I begin the day by getting the Indian news headlines, then watch BBC for a few minutes and then usually switch to some sports or nature channel.

Once, when the nurse was channel surfing, I came across a re-run of an episode of 'We the people' on NDTV.This episode was called 'We the Tweeple' because it was about the effect of social media like Twitter and Facebook so I decided to listen to it. There was a discussion about a blog post called 'An open letter to a Delhi boy' apparently written by a girl who called herself 'Madrasan'. It seemed that the post had gone viral on Twitter and had been the subject of much discussion. I first thought that the girl had studied in a madrassa and the post had something to do with religion. But the girl (who was present in the program) did not look the orthodox type who had gone to a religious school.

I missed part of the discussion because Jaya had come into the room to ask me about something. I then heard the girl say that she had received death threats and had to go to the police. Since all too often this is the preferred method of displaying the much acclaimed 'religious tolerance', it seemed to increase the likelihood that the post had to do with religion. But there was no mention of religion during the program so I was puzzled.

When I finally managed to sit, I checked with The One Who Knows Everything - Google (you thought it was Neetu Singh, didn't you?) - and it turned out to be a fiery post that had nothing to do with what I had thought it might be about. I was on the wrong track regarding 'Madrasan'.

Doctors' dilemmas

One recurring thought that I had while reading The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee was about how doctors dealt with all the sights and sounds of misery, pain and death all around them. One of the main characters in the book, Sidney Farber, is described by Medical World News thus - 'Sidney Farber’s entire purpose consists only of “hopeless cases”.' The author of the book (you can listen to him talk about the book) writes about the time when he faced such dilemmas:

The stories of my patients consumed me, and the decisions that I made haunted me. Was it worthwhile continuing yet another round of chemotherapy on a sixty-six-year-old pharmacist with lung cancer who had failed all other drugs? Was it better to try a tested and potent combination of drugs on a twenty-six-year-old woman with Hodgkin’s disease and risk losing her fertility, or to choose a more experimental combination that might spare it? Should a Spanish-speaking mother of three with colon cancer be enrolled in a new clinical trial when she can barely read the formal and inscrutable language of the consent forms?

I wonder how doctors deal with such dilemmas on a daily basis. I sometimes have to go to the casualty ward of a hospital for getting the tracheostomy tube changed and I shudder when hearing the screams of patients on whom some emergency procedure is being performed. Doctors will be encountering such scenes every day. There must be some psychological mechanisms that must be kicking in that enables them to deal with such traumatic scenes everyday. I read an interesting piece about the struggles that doctors face. Here is another piece about when a patient is ready to talk about death, but a medical student is not.

Apart from giving an account of the various approaches used to treat cancer, the book also tells about the problems faced by the doctors and patients during the early days of surgery. At that time there were two major difficulties. The first was that the patients had to endure immense pain during surgery because there was no anaesthesia. The second was the problem of infection after the surgery. Nobody knew what caused the infection. There is a description of a typical operation theatre of those days:

At Bellevue, the “internes” ran about in corridors with “pus-pails”, the bodily drippings of patients spilling out of them. Surgical sutures were made of catgut, sharpened with spit, and let to hang from incisions into the open air. Surgeons walked around with their scalpels dangling from their pockets. If a tool fell on the blood-soiled floor, it was dusted off and inserted back into the pocket – or into the body of the patient on the operating table.

That looks like a scene from a horror movie.

Blasts from the past

While reading The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, I came across a few passages that reminded me of the time when I was regaining consciousness after the stroke.

In an essay titled A View from the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map:

“There you are, the future patient, quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and – no time to think – out you go.

“You descend. You hit the ground...But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to?... No road. No compass. No map. No training. Is there something you should know and don’t?

“The white coats are far, far away, strapping others into their parachutes. Occasionally they wave but, even if you ask them, they don’t know the answers. They are up there in the Jumbo, involved with parachutes, not map-making.”

Later he writes:

The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, "I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I've seen the dark man very close."

I regained consciousness fully over many days - like darkness turning into bright sunlight gradually over many days. I cannot convey the gestalt of the experience especially as it was such a long time ago. I will just mention some salient points that I remember.

• People in white dresses used to come and go and it was some days before I could distinguish between nurses, doctors and physiotherapists.
• I had felt a couple of times that I had been wheeled away somewhere accompanied by a lot of people. I learned that I had initially been in ICU1 from where I was shifted to ICU2 and thence to the ward. Only then did I come to know that that there were two ICUs - the first one for the more critical patients and the second one for more stable patients. I had been a Lazarus risen (well, not exactly 'risen') from the dead.
• Jaya told me about a nurse who had promised her that she would take care of me in ICU2 and keep her updated on all developments. The nurse had come to visit me when I was in the ward. I could not recognize her at all. She must have been one of the voices I heard regularly.
• Initially, I was not sure what time of the night or day it was. Various cues - changes in nurses' shifts, sponging, time when Jaya came to the hospital etc. - helped me to guess the time.
• I had felt many pin-pricks at intervals in different parts of my body. I realised that these were actually injections.
• I had felt my head periodically becoming very cold. These must have been the times when I was being given a head bath.
• I remember hearing the sound of rainfall many times. When I regained consciousness, I wondered what these sounds had been because it doesn't rain often in Coimbatore in May. I eventually surmised that they must have been the sound of water from the taps in the bathroom.
• I could dimly hear in the background what sounded like commentary of the Cricket World Cup. But wasn't it some days away? I gathered from some conversations I heard around me that I had been in the hospital for about 3 weeks so it was indeed the the Cricket World Cup.
• I remembered voices frequently asking me to breathe deeply while something cold was pressing on my chest. These would have been times when doctors were examining me with stethoscopes.
• I frequently heard about something called tracheostomy. People used to look at my throat sometimes. Whenever I coughed, the nurse brought a tube that was attached to a noisy machine, near my throat. There was something in my throat but I didn't know what it was. I gradually learnt that this tracheostomy was a hole in my throat through which secretions that I coughed came out and were sucked away by the tube.

All these realisations were on a continuum - at one end of the scale, all was confusion; at the other end, it was all clear. It took some days for me to traverse that continuum.

The problem of evil - II

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is God both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

- Epicurus

The problem of evil has exercised many people for ages, an example being this TED talk. There is even a name for this study - theodicy. Whenever there is a natural disaster, there will be all sorts of Panglossian rationalisations by the faithful about why a benevolent god had to cause so much misery in this best of all possible worlds. I searched one site - Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True - and found several such amusing rationalisations. All one can say is that the religious mind is very creative. In all the pious hand-waving, one never finds an answer to the question, 'What do they expect the world to look like if there was no god?'

In his book, Arun Shourie writes about when Gandhi said that an earthquake in Bihar was caused by the sin of untouchability. That untouchability is a bane in India is unquestionable and Gandhi's efforts to eradicate it were admirable (On being told that the shastras endorsed Untouchability Gandhi replied that a shastra contrary to reason ought to be burnt. “I have so much faith in the correctness of the position I have taken up that, if my taking up that position results in weakening Hinduism, I cannot help it and I must not care.”) but to say that it caused an earthquake! Gandhi said that the earthquake was divine chastisement, that a calamity happens because of our personal sins and have spiritual causes, that the earthquake is fit punishment by god for the sin of untouchability, etc. Shourie writes:

I recoil at the next proposition that we would assume that the calamity has occurred because of our sin, as this would teach us humility. It could just as well internalize unwarranted guilt. With all the hardship that he already has to bear, should my son believe that any calamity that befalls me is also because of some sin he has committed, as this belief will make him even more humble and sensitive than he already is? Such considerations weigh heavily with me.

It was this aspect of organised religions of arousing unwarranted fear and guilt that increased my negative feelings against them. They are experts at stoking guilt feelings among emotionally vulnerable people in order to line their nests. Wherever religions have the upper hand, It is bad news for women, so it is strange that they manage to recruit self-righteous women to torture other women. And society views them as normal and harmless expressions of concern and help. Harmless, my foot.

Shourie discusses extensively Gandhi's responses to the persecution of Jews in Germany. He refuses to accept that if somebody follows the same methods that he successfully followed against the relatively more civilised British, he would have disappeared in the middle of the night never to be heard of again, as indeed happened to many people. He shows the classic signs of a person of faith - he is absolutely certain that he is right and no argument from any quarter persuades him to change his mind. And he keeps advising others to be humble! Shourie comments:

And it is manifestly circular. Non-violence is certain to melt the stoniest heart. When Hilter's heart clearly does not melt, that is because sufficient numbers have not offered themselves for immolation. And when someone asks, 'But aren't six million sufficient?' the answer clearly is, 'But they did not have love in their heart.' And how do we know that they did not have love in their heart as they entered the gas chambers? From the fact that Hitler's heart did not melt...

There is a neurological problem called hemineglect in which patients fail to notice one half of their field of vision, typically the left half. It is as if one half of the world doesn't exist for them. Similarly, believers seem to neglect one half of the balance sheet. They go ga-ga over birds and butterflies but fail to notice the bedbugs. Dan Dennett says in this interview that the tendency of not blaming god for disasters but praising him for bounties is a relatively recent one. (He may be speaking about the monotheistic religions; I don't know.) In 'On The Origin of Species', Charles Darwin wrote:

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see or we forget that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that, though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.

God seems to love spectator sports. He equips predators with brilliant adaptations to catch prey. He also equips prey with equally splendid adaptations to escape. Then he sets them against each other. David Attenborough puts things in perspective.Listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the idea of a loving, competent god is the last thing that occurs to me.

It is puzzling that most people prefer the simplistic religious explanations to the much more awe-inspiring scientific explanations. One reason could be that the latter require much more time and effort and most people are too busy to bother. It is much easier to simply accept the received wisdom of the society they happen to live in and keep getting 'offended' at the drop of a hat. Richard Dawkins rightly observed at the Jaipur Literature Festival that tradition, authority, revelation and faith are bad reasons to believe anything.

As for me, as Paula Kirby says regarding religious arrogance disguised as humility (the first two comments after this review are good examples), 'Give me the indifference of the laws of physics rather than the hubristic self-righteousness of the religious any day.' My disregard for the religious fairy tales has increased after my stroke after I started thinking about these issues a bit. Thinking is trouble for religion. No wonder priests lay so much emphasis on faith: don’t doubt - accept unquestioningly what those with a hotline to god say.

The problem of evil - I

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for his reputation if he didn't. -Jules Renard, writer

I knew that Arun Shourie has a handicapped son who is confined to a wheelchair but I didn't know anything else about this. So when a neighbour gave me a book that Shourie has written about this, Does He Know A Mother's Heart?, I jumped at the chance to read it. I was also intrigued by the subtitle - 'How suffering refutes religions'. It turned out to be somewhat different from what I had expected. It is the first book I have read that has mostly to do with religion.

In the first chapter, he describes the struggles of his son, now 35, who has cerebral palsy. He cannot walk or stand and cannot use his right hand. He has vision problems which have been exacerbated by the rupture of the membrane of his right eye which has caused tremendous pain. Some months back, he had convulsions necessitating a stay in the ICU. He has managed to retain his joie de vivre inspite of all these problems. I once read that Gary Sobers has a sixth finger on his left hand and the article said that the good Lord didn't know when to stop while pouring the goodies down that gifted left side. In the case of Shourie's son the bad Lord didn't know when to stop when buffeting him with various ailments.

Shourie says that if you see a father ill-treat his helpless, handicapped child, you will be aghast and will try your best to separate the two. You will want the father thrown into jail. But what happens if that father is The Father - God?

Why does the perspective of so many of us change at once? Suddenly, they exclaim, ‘There must be some reason God has done this.’ Suddenly, they shift the blame to that poor child: ‘Must have done something terrible in his previous life to deserve such hardship...’

And yet the child loves. He laughs. He is filled with joy at the littlest things – a tape of Talat Mahmood, lunch at a restaurant, the visit of an aunt or a cousin..... What are we to conclude? That the cruelties rained upon him by his father have ‘built his character’? That they have instilled forbearance? Are we to infer, ‘See, while to us the father seems cruel, in fact he never inflicts more hardship on the son than the son can bear'?

Were we to say and infer as much, that would be not just obnoxious, it would be perverse. And yet those are the exact things that , as we shall see, a revered religious text says about God: He inflicts hardship upon us to build our character; He never imposes more hardship on a person than the latter can bear.

Having heard such 'explanations' after my stroke, I know where Shourie is coming from. Bertrand Russell was right - “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.” They trivialise the hammer-blows that people receive on a regular basis.

The benevolent god then gave Shourie another of those 'one in ten million' blows - his wife was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson's disease. She has had it for 22 years now.Her symptoms have worsened over the years, she finds it difficult to eat by herself now and has suffered a few falls but has luckily escaped serious injuries. (Believers will say that god helped her to avoid injuries! You can't win.) It is a wonder that in spite of all this Shourie has had the mental fortitude to be editor of the Indian Express and Times of India, a minister in the government of India and write 26 books. He also mentions the trials and tribulations of some near and dear ones.

All this is in a heart-rending first chapter and a brief epilogue. The rest of the book is devoted to examining various texts - Bible, Koran, Hindu scriptures, Gandhi's writings etc. - to determine what they say about the question of suffering. It is instructive how often those who know what dress god wants you to wear ascribe everything to 'the inscrutable will of god' or, as Shourie quotes Indian televangelists as saying, 'sab maya hai.' I found myself skimming rapidly through the parts quoting passages from these texts. Reading whacky tales, sophistry, circumlocutions, deepities etc. is not my cup of tea. You know, sentences like

-She abides in the Self as the Self.

-All illusion is suffering.

-Only the Real Self is happiness.

-Killing the jiva is to abide in the Self.

-Being Brahman he goes to Brahman.

Boy, give me animal camouflage any day. When I see sentences with all sorts of combinations of I, You, Inner, Outer, Self, Karma, Brahman, Atman, etc., I doze off. Shourie has the patience of Job to wade through these texts. If I was asked to read one of these books, I wouldn't have got past the first page before I started thinking like Jerry Coyne.

All scriptures had weird tales and I kept asking myself, 'Do people really believe these things?' If pushed, believers will say they are metaphors but one person's metaphor is another person's reality. As it says in this article, 'For goodness sake, people, the talking wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more plausible.' I am not surprised that some clergymen eventually get tired of making stuff up. Shourie writes:

But how is one to bring oneself to believe all this? The way to do so is not to reason. Not to ask too many questions! Think of His bounties, we are told, not of His reasons, not of His essence.

God keeps demanding absolute, unconditional, abject surrender from his devotees, reminding me of one of Christopher Hitchens' most evocative phrases - surrendering to the will of god would be like living in 'a Divine North Korea'. God seems to have an incredible appetite for violence, often for the grave misdemeanor of not ego- massaging him properly. Quote from a friend of Shourie's who recites Persian poetry: "I do evil and You punish me with evil / Pray what is the difference between You and me?'

I was surprised to find religion being criticised by a member of the BJP, one who thinks man made god and that even dumb animals who have no conception of god show levels of self-sacrifice equivalent to the best of humans, indicating as an example this famous video. After looking at the scriptures of various religions, Shourie inclines towards Buddhism (as Ambedkar had done). I had read that in the Sangh Parivar's version of Indian history, people like Buddha, Ashoka, Kabir and Akbar don't exist because they are not Hindus. I wonder what they think of this book. (Shourie himself seems to be a complex character and some views he expresses in the book don't square with some statements he seems to have made in the past.)

You can watch interviews with Arun Shourie about his book and other issues on NDTV and CNN-IBN.

PS: The book mentions Gandhi as saying that Indians are by nature non-violent. I wonder where he got the idea from.Every day T.V. news has reports of horrific violence from some

part of the country. One of the most revered texts of Hindus, the Gita, is a call for militaristic action.

Much obliged, Plum

“[He] saw that a peculiar expression had come into his nephew's face; an expression a little like that of a young hindu fakir who having settled himself on his first bed of spikes is beginning to wish that he had chosen one of the easier religions.”

- P.G. Wodehouse

The first thing that comes to my mind when someone mentions Valentine's Day is that P.G.Wodehouse died on this day in 1975.He is widely considered to be the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century. I have no trouble agreeing with that. Consider this sentence from 'Carry On, Jeeves':

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

Or this in 'Joy in the Morning':

I don’t say I’ve got much of a soul, but, such as it is, I’m perfectly satisfied with the little chap. I don’t want people fooling about with it. ‘Leave it alone,’ I say. ‘Don’t touch it. I like it the way it is.’

As Stephen Fry says:

If you are immune to such writing, you are fit, to use one of Wodehouse's favourite Shakespearean quotations, only for treasons, stratagems and spoils. You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour. Like Jeeves, Wodehouse stands alone, and analysis is useless.

You don't read Wodehouse for the plot which, in many cases for example, would consist of goofy, upper class gents getting into an improbable mess from which they would be extricated by a Spinoza-reading 'gentleman's gentleman'. In the hands of other authors, this would soon become boring. But Wodehouse plays with the words in such a way that age neither withers nor custom stales the hilarity of his descriptions. And those names! How did he think up names like Gerald Anstruther Vail. George Cyril Wellbeloved. Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe (of Matchingham Hall in Much Matcingham no less), Major Wilfred "Plug" Basham, Pongo Twistleton, Dame Daphne Winkworth...

It is said that it is best to avoid reading Wodehouse in a public place because you are liable to sudden bursts of laughter which might make people think that you are off your rocker. I have this problem even at home. I will be lying quietly on the bed staring at the ceiling when I will start cackling like a demented kookaburra on thinking of some absurd situation in some Wodehouse novel and folks at home will think I have lost it. I am a fan of anything by Wodehouse like 'the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all'. As Lynne Truss says:

“You should read Wodehouse when you’re well, and when you’re poorly; when you’re travelling, and when you’re not; when you’re feeling clever, and when you’re feeling utterly dim. Wodehouse always lifts your spirits, no matter how high they happen to be already.”

Wodehouse has put me in some ticklish situations. I couldn't resist quoting a passage from this article (I remember reading this conversation but I can't recall which book it was in):

At the start of his book, McCrum can't resist quoting a passage that once again shows how beautifully Wodehouse can puncture sententious and over-serious opinions. I can't resist it either. It goes like this. " 'I wonder if I might draw your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius? He said: "Does anything befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web."'

I breathed a bit stertorously. 'He said that, did he?'

'Yes, sir.

'Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass."

Predictions

It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future", said Yogi Berra (or Neils Bohr or Mark Twain depending on the source). Ask the experts. Learning from the Heart is a book written by Daniel Gottlieb who suffered a spinal cord injury that left him quadriplegic at the age of thirty-three. He writes:

"People look at me and imagine themselves in my position and feel fear. I certainly did that when I was younger. Because of my disability, I have already experienced what most people will as they age. I consider myself very lucky as I listen to my middle-aged fellow humans worry about their losses. All the stuff they fret about now, I already have endured, so I don't have to be concerned. That frees my mind up to worry about all sorts of other things!"

He was right when he said that you can't predict your future very well. If someone had told me before my stroke that I will be a quadriplegic , will not be able to speak, but will not go mad, will read a lot of astronomy and evolution and find them interesting, become more rational, I would have said they were nuts. But that is precisely what has happened.

Of course, I would first have felt a stab of fear at the thought of being locked-in. I would never have thought that instead of keeping on lamenting, I would have preferred to live in the moment. Jaya also never imagined that she would have been able to deal successfully with all the challenges since my stroke. Many people who have known her since childhood have been surprised by her resilience. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert says:

Able-bodied people are willing to pay far more to avoid becoming disabled than disabled people are willing to pay to become able-bodied again because able-bodied people under-estimate how happy disabled people are. As one group of researchers noted, “chronically ill and disabled patients generally rate the value of their lives in a given health state more highly than do hypothetical patients [who are] imagining themselves to be in such states.” Indeed, healthy people imagine that eighty-three states of illness would be “worse than death,” and yet, people who are actually in those states rarely taken their own lives.

How we interpret ambiguous stimuli depend on factors like context, frequency, recency, etc. The biggest sources of exploitable ambiguities are the varied experiences in life. As soon as an imagined experience becomes an actual experience, the brain looks for ways to interpret it in a way that allows us to appreciate it. As Gilbert says:

Consumers evaluate kitchen appliances positively after they buy them, job seekers evaluate jobs more positively after they accept them, and high school students evaluate colleges more positively after they get into them. Racetrack gamblers evaluate their horses more positively when they are leaving the betting window than when they are approaching it, and voters evaluate their candidates more positively when they are exiting the voting booth than when they are entering it. A toaster, a firm, a university, a horse, and a senator are all just fine and dandy, but when they become our toaster, firm, university, horse, and senator they are instantly finer and dandier.

Although our brains are very good at putting a positive spin on things, it doesn't mean that we have a Panglossian view of every experiences. Rather, we have a psychological immune system that defends our minds against unhappiness, functioning in a similar way to the physical immune system.

... when we face the pain of rejection, loss, misfortune, and failure, the psychological immune system must not defend us too well (“I’m perfect and everyone is against me”) and must not fail to defend us well enough (“I’m a loser and I ought to be dead”). A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it (“Yeah, that was a lousy performance and I feel crummy about it, but I’ve got confidence to give it a second shot”). We need to be defended – not defenceless or defensive - and thus our minds naturally look for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably closely to the facts.

When we are stuck with an experience and cannot change it, we begin to change our views of the experience. In Gilbert's words - "We just can't make the best of a fate until it is inescapably, inevitably, and irrevocably ours." There is more but for that you will have to read the book. Edge once asked many public personalities to give their favourite equation and Gilbert gave this equation for why it is so hard to predict how we will feel in the future.

PS: In his blog, Gilbert gives a psychologist's take on The Vagaries of Religious Experience.