Men don’t cry

There is a popular myth that grown men don’t cry because they have been so trained from their childhood. But is that really true?

After all who chokes up at sappy movies? Who gets so swept away by excitement that they leap to their feet and hug complete strangers? Who falls apart when a relationship ends? The surprising answer: men. Granted, the movie is likely to be Field of Dreams, the exuberance explodes in stadiums and the breakup may be their idea. However, new research reveals that a man's emotional life is as complex and rich as a woman's, but often remains a mystery to him as well as to any woman who loves him.

Why are many men so emotionally clueless? Blame the male brain. "Men are hard-wired differently," says David Powell, PhD, president of the International Center for Health Concerns, who explains that the connection between the left-brain, home of logic, and the right, the seat of emotions, is much greater in women. "Women have the equivalent of an interstate highway, so they move readily between the right and left brains. For men the connection is like a meandering country lane, so we don't have such ready access to feelings."

Also there is this idea that being a real man means being in control -- of others and of yourself. “And crying is a metaphor for loss of control," says Katz, author of The Macho Paradox. "That's the heart of the matter right there.”

But this cuts both ways- women may prefer the sensitive types over the macho male in theory, but when push comes to shove and it is about men showing their emotions, many women are quite clear, "If there's going to be someone crying on someone's shoulder, I sure as hell don't want him crying on mine."

In some cultures, men can cry only three times in their lives: when they are born, when their parents die, and when their babies are born. While there has been some shift in acceptance of men's vulnerability, there's a long way to go before we have fully evolved men.

It seems that real men do cry and a recent U.K. poll has named R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” “the song that makes men cry the most.” The 1992 hit from the alt-rock legends topped 10 tear-jerkers by the likes of Eric Clapton, U2 and Bruce Springsteen, according to Spinner.com. The survey was organized by PRS for Music, a company that collects and pays royalties to more than 70,000 members.

And the top 10 songs that are male tearjerkers:

1. “Everybody Hurts,” R.E.M.


2. “Tears in Heaven,” Eric Clapton


3. “Hallelujah,” Leonard Cohen


4. “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Sinead O’Connor


5. “With or Without You,” U2


6. “The Drugs Don't Work,” The Verve


7. “Candle in the Wind,” Elton John


8. “Streets of Philadelphia,” Bruce Springsteen


9. “Unchained Melody,” Todd Duncan


10. “Angels,” Robbie William

Obama Draws 26,000 For Madison Rally (VIDEO)

The art of living--and dying

From times immemorial man has sought to find the secret of happiness and the art of living. From the Greek philosopher Epictetus to today’s Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, all try to define what should be the ideal life for happiness and fulfillment. In “The art of living”, Epictetus shows that a happy life and a virtuous life are synonymous. Happiness and personal fulfillment, he says, are the natural consequences of doing the right things. His discourses outline the path to happiness, fulfillment and tranquility, no matter what ones circumstances happen to be. His teachings for a happy life may well be encapsulated in the serenity prayer:” grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Unfortunately the “art of dying” has far fewer scribes.

While much has been written about how to live, less has been written about how to die. While “ death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits”, the actual process is less clear. All of us understand that death will come to all of us or as the poet puts it

“ Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come”. Shakespeare

Yes there is a vast literature on death and dying. But virtually all of it is intended to help people cope with the emotional trauma involved in the process and its aftermath. Some like Diane Athill do venture to write about the end: “There are no lessons to be learnt”, she says in her book “ Somewhere towards the end, “no discoveries to be made, no solutions of offer. I find myself left with nothing but a few random thoughts…although a human life is less than the blink of an eyelid in terms of the universe. it is amazingly capacious. One life can contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and warmth, grabbing and giving.”

But others like Dr Nuland, in his new book “ How we die”, take a different tack. He describes the actual physical processes by which various diseases drain us of our vitality and take away our lives. He chooses six of the most common diseases of our time whose characteristics are the stoppage of circulation, the inadequate transport of oxygen to tissues, the flickering out of the brain function, the failure of organs and the destruction of vital centers. He describes the mechanisms of cancer, heart attack, stroke, AIDS and Alzheimer’s disease with clinical exactness and sometimes with painful but poetic prose. Dr Nuland draws upon his life of thirty years dealing with those who will leave this world as a result of these afflictions. But, he says, for most of us the process of dying may have neither dignity nor the absence of pain.

In the past ‘ ars moriendi ‘ or “the art of dying” was a religious and spiritual endeavor. Those were the times when the only possible attitude to the approaching death was to let it happen and to accept one’s fate with resignation and fortitude. But now we live in an era of the art of saving life. With the advent of modern medicine, doctors are rarely willing to give up their attempts to solve the riddle of life, especially the ending of it. Unfortunately, thus, we rarely go gently into that good night.

But this was not most of us wanted. Most of us hope for a swift death or a death during sleep “so I wont suffer”. We all cling to an image of our final moments that combine grace with a sense of closure; we long for a perfect lapse into agony free unconsciousness. Death has now become enshrined in the modern myth of the longed for ideal of “ death with dignity”.

A major culprit in upsetting this is, paradoxically, the advances in modern medical science. The quest of every doctor in approaching serious disease is to make the diagnosis and design and carry out the cure. It is the fuel that drives clinical engines of medicines most highly trained specialists. Oncologists and others are particularly loath to give up on their attempts to prolong life with all that medicine has to offer. Patients often have substantial reasons for not going further when only a diminishingly small possibility exists that they may survive or lead a modicum of a normal life on recovery. The cost of the procedures may simply not be worth the price they are willing to pay. But in their obsessive search for prolonging life, specialists are rarely willing to admit defeat and to share the dire predictions with the patient.

A second is the hard fact is that the complexity of these cures often requires hospitalization. The intensive care unit becomes a secluded treasure room of high tech hope within the citadel in which the sick are segregated so that they may be better taken care of . However, the isolation among strangers is not what they want and need in their final moments. They are instead abandoned to the good intentions of highly skilled professionals but who barely know them. The hospitals have thus become a place of solitary death. Eighty percent of American deaths now occur in hospitals.

But the dying too bear a responsibility not to be entrapped by a misguided attempt to spare those whose lives are intertwined with theirs. Death belongs to the dying and to those who love them- and not the doctors who attend them and attempt to prolong their lives at all costs. What is needed more than anything else is a restoration of the certainty that when the end is near, our last moments will be guided not by the bioengineers seeking to prolong our life but by those who know who we are and what we want. That should be our hope. The hope, the assurance that there will be no unreasonable efforts, is an affirmation that the dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life. It is a dignity that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of ones own death as a necessary process of nature that permits our species to continue in the form of our children.

Dr Nulund ends his search with his heartfelt plea about his own life “ When my time comes,” he says, “ I will seek hope in the knowledge that insofar as possible I will not be allowed to suffer or be subjected to needless attempts to maintain life; I will seek it in the certainty that I will not be abandoned to die alone; I am seeking it now in the way I try to live my life so that those who value what I am will have profited by my time on earth and be left with comforting recollections of what we have meant to one another.”

The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them. The greatest dignity to be found in death is thus the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all.

In the end, the art of dying, it seems to me, is the same as the art of living.

Delhi- an expats view

Here is a wonderful piece on Delhi even as the news is all about the Commonwealth games disaster....

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Simon Cox captures life as an expat in a fascinating city ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2010

I first visited Delhi ten years ago, drawn not by the city but by one of its citizens. I had fallen in love with a Dilliwalli I met at university in America two years before. It was past time I saw her in her “native place”, as Indians put it.

We visited the usual tombs, markets, shrines and gardens, including the domed presidential palace on Raisina Hill that once housed the viceroy. Our trip coincided with a visit by the wives (they were all wives) of the British High Commission. They cooed and fussed, like previous owners checking up on the new landlords. One even looked for dust under the carpet. It was a relief to escape into the palace’s Mughal Gardens, where a tiny Dilliwalla peed on the lawn while his parents smiled helplessly.

Delhi can be grand, but it is rarely solemn. The people can be rude, but never cold. Earlier this year I returned to Raisina Hill to watch India’s military bands beat the retreat, overseen by members of the camel cavalry. After the last bugle was sounded and the last bagpipe squeezed, a switch was flicked, and Delhi’s imposing imperial buildings, strung with bulbs, lit up like a Christmas decoration.

Visitors to Delhi often see a faded glory, like a grand carpet collecting dust. The city is casually littered with history, much of it neglected or buried under the paraphernalia of the present. But Delhi’s past will surely be overshadowed by its future. There are three times as many Indians alive today as there were at Independence in 1947, and Delhi is home to over 16m of them. Over the next three decades India should begin to regain the economic clout it lost over three centuries. To visit Delhi in a mood of nostalgia, then, is to close your eyes to history in the making.

Many people mourn the lost elegance of Old Delhi, the courtly city founded in the 17th century by the Mughal emperor Shahjahan. The decorative flourishes that adorn Old Delhi’s mansions, courtyards and commercial buildings are now obscured by the more formidable geometry of telephone wires, power cords and television cables. But Old Delhi’s decrepitude is deceptive. Those crumbling balustrades and decapitated colonnades conceal a growing prosperity. Stock brokerages sell shares in upcoming IPOs to sari merchants with cash to spare. In the Coronation Building, once Old Delhi’s poshest hotel, the upper rooms now belong to commodity-futures traders, reclining beside their terminals, as they track prices set in Chicago.

Visitors flock to Humayun’s Tomb, a magnificent 16th-century mausoleum second only to the Taj Mahal, and to the haunting Jama Masjid, a mosque built a century later. But Delhi has not stopped building spectacular monuments. In 1994 work began on a 108-foot, bright orange statue of Hanuman, the monkey god, completed 13 years later. Worshippers enter the temple through the screaming mouth of a demon crushed underfoot. At 8.15am, twice a week, Hanuman’s mighty hands rip open his chest, by means of an “automatic electronic mechanism”, to reveal Ram and Sita sitting inside. Its designers lack Shahjahan’s taste. Indeed, they lack any taste at all. But who needs Mughal refinement when you have animatronics?

Delhi’s new prosperity is not a wave sweeping all before it. Instead it courses through the city in rivulets, working around what came before. Indeed, large tracts of the city seem entirely lost to development, trapped in eddies that go nowhere. The city, clogged by more vehicles than Mumbai and Kolkata combined, is full of pastoral enclaves and bucolic interstices, where children play cricket, vagrants slumber, and cows mooch. Walking from my old neighbourhood, Nizamuddin East, to my new one, Jangpura Extension, I once got lost in a socialist arcadia: the staff colony of Hindustan Prefab Limited, one of many sleepy public-sector enterprises left over from a previous era. A monkey clambered on the modest staff homes opposite the CITU (Centre of Indian Trade Unions) building, which proudly boasts a hammer and sickle.

India’s government is good at making time stand still, and for all its commercial hurly-burly, Delhi is still a government town. A bureaucratic mindset extends beyond official corridors into other walks of life, filling a resident’s days with sluggish transactions and self-important people. It takes for ever to settle the bill in many shops and restaurants, presumably because only one or two designated personages are permitted to handle the till. These well-known irritations make me all the more appreciative of Delhi’s many unheralded examples of economy and efficiency. Five minutes from our new flat, an Afghan bakery serves warm, doughy rounds of bread, fished out of a tandoor oven with long prongs. You pay upfront and your rupees, placed on a plank of wood, mark your spot in the queue like coins on the rail of a pool table.

Another example is the kabariwallas, who recycle the old newspapers and magazines I use to line my nest. They pedal around Delhi’s neighbourhoods, announcing their passage with a low cry, as resonant in its own way as the Qawwali singers of Nizamuddin. If I answer his call, the kabariwalla will climb the stairs to my flat, open his jute sack, and relieve me of my Economist and Tehelka back catalogue. At the end of this process a few rupees change hands. I was surprised to discover that he paid me, rather than the other way round. Indeed, as Kaveri Gill explains in her book “Of Poverty and Plastic”, the defining feature of kabari is that the collector pays for it. The term refers only to the “dry”, clean waste handled by castes who steer clear of the “wet” organic and inorganic garbage that others scavenge from municipal dumps browsed by cows, crows and pigs.

The refuse collectors are not the only Dilliwallas rubbing shoulders with a surprising profusion of wildlife. Renowned for its gardens, Delhi sometimes comes closer to a jungle. I remember at the zoo watching an uncaged monkey taunting its captive brethren. Birds of prey, including dark-winged kites and hawks, perch on floodlights and swoop on unsuspecting pedestrians. I once took a boat trip on the slick, black waters of the Yamuna river, and the boat was immediately enveloped by a cloud of Hitchcockian gulls.

Back on dry land, Delhi’s 260,000 feral dogs bark and brawl. Last year, one of them sank its teeth into my wife’s leg. Like many of Delhi’s villains, the mutt enjoyed total immunity, shielded by zealous animal-welfare rules sponsored by Maneka Gandhi, one of Indira Gandhi’s daughters-in-law. In her compassion for strays she surpasses even the Mahatma, who wrote that “perfect, erring mortals as we are, there is no course open to us but the destruction of rabid dogs”.

Ten miles to the south, Delhi’s greenery gives way to rocky scrubland, punctuated by quarries and several lonely lakes. The area is home to the world’s most bashful peacocks, the occasional mongoose, verminous monkeys and amorous Haryana motorbikers, who scratch declarations of love into the bark of a solitary banyan tree. It can be refreshing to find some solitude above and beyond the city, but I long ago concluded that Delhi’s best sights are its people. Lodhi Gardens, for all the beauty of their trees and tombs, work best as a backdrop to the bright bouquets of children, nannies and parents, enjoying picnics or badminton. Even traffic jams are enlivened by young couples holding each other tight as they zip past on their motorbikes.

Every day in Delhi is a pageant of colour, clamour, charm and cruelty. There is no shortage of comings and goings to observe. My only regret is that as a white foreigner there are precious few inconspicuous nooks for you to observe from: you cannot make yourself invisible. People watch me watching. And I always blink first. Over the years, I have found a few spots that allow unobtrusive views of Delhi’s street theatre. I used to escape from Nizamuddin East through a gap in the railings that seal it off from the outside world. I would emerge behind a public toilet opposite the railway station, which bustles with rickshaws, taxis and red-jacketed porters, their copper registration badges tied around their arms. The road past the station leads to a pair of bridges crossing the ganda nallah, or dirty stream. One bridge affords sneaky views of the streetmarket on the other, where I can happily watch people haggling over the price of ginger or a cut of chicken. I can also see one of Delhi’s better-appointed slumlets, where women fetch water, wash their children’s hair, or dry chilies beside the train tracks, as their husbands play cards outside. I can cross the bridge several times before having my fill of this tableau.

Ten years after first visiting Delhi, I am now gearing up to leave. Hong Kong, I am sure, will give me all the anonymity I miss in Delhi. My new office, on the 60th floor, has panoramic views that are hard to find here. I’ll be far less conspicuous, far less visible. But I doubt that Hong Kong will be as watchable.

What Obama should say ( and do)

It is time to fight.

During the past few months, Obama has been inflicted with death by a thousand cuts. While he has –rightly, in my view, shrugged off each of these minor nicks- birth certificate, Muslim, Christian, socialist- the cumulative effect, unfortunately, in the face of silence, has been to generally and gradually weaken his presidency and maybe his teams resolve. Little drops of blood do add up. And indeed that has been the objective of the republicans all along. Obama’s team just did not notice it or choose to ignore it or at least did not mount a spirited enough response. But no longer. It is time to fight back even bloodied as they are.

This is what Obama needs to say and do:

“Four years ago we embarked on a journey to change this country and the world. We knew it was going to be difficult. Changing the status quo is never easy. We wanted to carry a message of hope and change because we believed that everything was possible if we came together as a country to tackle our problems. It is true that we may have underestimated the power of the forces arrayed against us- the republicans hoping for “waterloo” moments, special interest groups and lobbyists, big moneyed groups. But remember despite this massive opposition, we have achieved a lot of what we set out to do:

Our economic team has helped prevent the collapse of the US into the second great depression and the world economy

US economy has shifted from a tailspin to some measure of stabilization and some prospect of job growth next year;

Major investments have been made in green technology laying the foundation for the future

The race to the top in education spending has created reform in a large number of states from the bottom up,

The size of Peace Corps has been doubled, Pell grants increased substantially and a major fillip given to Volunteerism

A stimulus package has helped undergird infrastructure and will probably do more to advance non-carbon energy than anything that might have emerged from Copenhagen.

Universal health insurance (with promised deficit reduction!) is now law of the land providing coverage to over 20 million of our fellow citizens, covering pre existing conditions, allowing students to stay on their parents plans - a goal sought by Democrats (and Nixon) for decades.

Equal pay for women has been passed into law.

And all this in just two years into our first term. And remember where we began:

In 2008, just two years ago,

The country faced a fiscal crisis and a second great depression

We were mired in two wars abroad

We were losing 750000 jobs per month

Dow was at 6000

There were no investments in infrastructure or green technology

The American auto industry faced bankruptcy.......

All of this was the result of eight years of republican profligacy and mismanagement. And adherence to policy prescriptions, which were proved to be resoundingly wrong.

The issue we face today is simple and we have a choice. Do we go back to the ruinous policies of the republicans which led to this financial and economic crisis in the first place or do we continue to build a better future for ourselves based on the new foundations of fiscal responsibility, green economy, better health care, and a competitive educated work force. Do we continue to be embroiled in foreign wars without end or do we disentangle ourselves from wars that should never have been fought.

Be certain of one thing, the republicans only promise a return to the past if they take power and will strive to undo all the gains we have made and tear down the foundations that we have laid.

We may not yet have got everything right in the first two years but we have laid the foundations for the future and will correct and improve those that we have

We have finished one war responsibly as promised and will also finish the second leaving our country to focus on the future

We will build on the foundations for the new economy

We will create a 21^st century economy to lead the world

We will tackle the immigration problem

And we will bring the long-term deficit under control

This we believe and we must continue to have faith in our abilities to shape the future.

Not participating is not an option. Sitting at home hoping for change will not achieve anything. As the poet Dante has said "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality”.
Anything worthwhile is worth fighting for and persistence is the noblest of virtues in the pursuit of our objectives.

It is time to fight for our beliefs and values and the vision we have for our country. “