A love of poetry

While a love for poetry may seem inseparable from a love for words, you feel a special fondness for the poem (or quip, or short story) that gets the job done while using them—words—sparingly. They may be epigrams, miniatures or punch lines. Here are a few wonderful examples:

Pride of place belongs to the author of “fleas,” the shortest successful poem in the language. Here it is in its entirety:

Adam
Had ’em.

Note how the poem, brief as it is, formally does what good light verse typically does: with its unlikely rhyme, it smoothes seeming clumsiness (“Had ’em”) into antic dexterity. And it does so with—another hallmark of light verse—a polished finish. But there’s more. The poem actually offers a “criticism of life”—Matthew Arnold’s touchstone for poetry that addresses the “spirit of our race.” Doesn’t it say, in effect, Why fuss over minor annoyances, as we’ve been doing since the beginning of time, given that complaining has done nothing to alleviate our lot? 

But my favorite is:

Candy
is dandy
but liquor is quicker.

On a graver note—as grave as humankind is capable of—what about “Jesus wept”? Surely, the shortest verse in the Bible may be the most affecting.

And what about haikus, particularly when they intimate a far larger story than they tell. Here’s an especially terse example by Buson :

I go,
you stay;
two autumns.

The separation referred to may be a literal two years. Or it may be metaphorical. Departing, remaining—in either case, it’s a loss, the season of loss. A single entity—a couple—devolves into a pared, shared falling away.

The most touching English-language haiku belongs to Seamus Heaney:

Dangerous pavements.
But this year I face the ice
With my father’s stick.

In a mere seventeen syllables, the poem evokes a complex, compromised psychological condition. There’s comfort in the notion that Father is sheltering us with that stolid stick of his. And there’s anguish and vulnerability in the implication that the stick has been transferred because Father has died—recently, within the past year. As we set off from home into the freezing outer world, all sorts of emotional accommodations must be discharged.

Concision in its broadest spirit encompasses far more than a stripping of verbiage. It clarifies the contours, it revels in the sleek and streamlined. Poetry remains the domain where concision consistently burns brightest. Here are two six-line poems whose psychological richness surely couldn’t be duplicated in a full page of poetic prose. The first is W. H. Auden’s “Epitaph on a Tyrant”:

Perfection of a kind was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

We have here some Nazi monster listening to Schubert lieder at the end of a workday devoted to the Final Solution. Or Henry VIII admiring a Holbein portrait right before ordering another innocent to the executioner’s axe. Or Caligula attending a lighthearted masque on the heels of a highly productive brainstorming session with his court torturer. Here is, ultimately, the whole haunting, ever-repeating saga of the good ship Civilization foundering when a madman somehow seizes its helm.

And then there is Donald Hall’s “Exile,” a poem that presents the double bonus of being a few syllables shorter than Auden’s and having a draft history of dramatic excision: Hall initially composed and published the poem in a hundred lines, of which ninety-four were eventually trimmed:

A boy who played and talked and read with me
Fell from a maple tree.

I loved her, but I told her I did not,
And wept, and then forgot.

I walked the streets where I was born and grew,
And all the streets were new.

We don’t know whether the boyhood friend survived his fall. But we do know this was a friendship of an especially fertilizing sort for a budding poet: a bond fusing the warmth of natural boyish amity to the pleasures of shared literary observation. Then, in stanza two, a girl materializes. The romance that evolves is clearly puppy love, with the ephemerality of its kind. Yet its one-time intensity turns out to be haunting: the sort of thing you wind up, years later, writing a poem about.

The poem is a lovely example of a familiar, maddening, ever-alluring paradox. The poet seems to be arriving at something significant, and we’re following him there. You’re approaching a riddle, closer and closer, until suddenly it looms before you, the arc of your existence—your life!

And now there’s everything to say. 

Nikhil complains to Dad about Papa

Dada I am writing to you about your son. He is not listening to me at all. The other dayI was enjoying my gangnam dance and music and he came and changed the tv channel. And to what? Soccer! Can you believe it. I ran to Mama though she normally sides with papa. But this time she sided with me. So papa had to change the tv back. But by that time he said the program was over. Dada is that possible?  How can the dance be over ? Anyway I refuse to give him a high five and have hidden the remote. So there , serves him right, no dada?

PS everyone says my gangnam style dancing is great. So when you come here I will teach you and maybe even dadi. Do you think she can dance, dada?

The worlds oldest man reflects on his life..

Sadly, the world’s oldest man, Walter Breuning, died yesterday.  

When Walter Breuning of Great Falls, Montana died on April 14 this year, he was 114. Far from inactive, Breuning remained vibrant and outgoing until the end of his life. He maintained extraordinary balance in his day-to-day activities, valuing both time socializing with fellow residents at the Rainbow Senior Living retirement home and solitary afternoons spent reflecting on the past century.

Part of Breuning’s philosophy on life included embracing change. For a man who saw the invention of everything from the automobile to the computer, these words hold special pertinence. “Every change is good,” Breuning said. Embrace change, even when the change slaps you in the face. (“Every change is good.”)

On his 110th birthday, Breuning claimed to have outlived five or six of his doctors, whom he visited only twice a year. He took only a single baby aspirin a day, and he walked without assistance until he broke his hip at 113.

 Breuning also accepted death—a lesson he learned from his grandfather long ago. Upon getting ill, he was quoted as saying, “If I’m not going to get better, I’m supposed to go now.” Accept death (“Never be afraid to die because you’re born to die.“).

Breuning’s life, which spanned three centuries, offers a porthole into the past, and perhaps a glimpse into the future; a future where we may expect to live years longer than our forebears. For anyone looking to live a long, healthy life, Breuning left behind a short list of his secrets for longevity—habits he insisted allowed him to live to be 114 years, 205 days old.

Breuning attributed his health and longevity, in part, to his diet. “[People] just eat too much!” he said. Beginning in 1978, Breuning cut out his evening meals, eating only a big breakfast and lunch. He attributed his old age largely to these eating habits, emphasizing the importance of moderation. “I think you should push back from the table when you’re still hungry,” he said.

While Breuning’s two-meal-a-day plan contradicts the nutritional guidelines most of us follow, scientific studies confirm that calorie restriction increases life expectancy. When the body receives only the nutrients it needs to survive, it’s spared the effort of processing excess calories. For example, mice that are fed calorie-restricted diets show increased life spans and delayed onset of age-related chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and stroke. Scientists believe that low-calorie diets slow aging by limiting “oxidative damage,” the long-term effect of processing food on the body’s proteins, fats, and DNA.

For generations, people from the Japanese island of Okinawa have believed in the dietary practice of eating until they’re 80 percent full. This habit, known as “Hara Hachi Bu,” probably contribute to the islanders’ remarkable longevity, one of the highest in the world: on average, women in Okinawa live to be 86 years old, and men average 75 years. Okinawans have the longest life expectancy for people over the age of 65.

In addition to eating only two meals a day, Breuning’s dietary habits included drinking a lot of water and eating a couple of pieces of fruit with his meals. He also drank a little coffee every day. “I drink half a cup of coffee with breakfast and a cup with lunch,” he said.

In his list of tips to living a long life, Breuning emphasized the importance of helping other people. During his 31 years in a retirement home, he spent his mornings visiting and encouraging other residents, as well as talking to curious visitors stopping in to see the world’s oldest man. Help others (“The more you do for others, the better shape you’re in. There are few rewards in life as great and sweet as helping others and expecting nothing in return".

A report released by the Corporation for National and Community Service, The Health Benefits of Volunteering: A Review of Recent Research, backs up Breuning’s hypothesis that selflessness pays off. It found that people who volunteer live longer and have lower rates of depression and heart disease than those who don’t. “The more you do for others, the better shape you’re in,” Breuning said.

The dream of retirement is common across the United States. After 40 years of hard work, it’s a well-deserved reprieve from the demands of the workday. But according to Breuning, working long past retirement age could hold one of the keys to longevity. “If you keep that mind and that body busy, you’ll find it’s in darn good shape,” he said. After having worked for 50 years as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway, Breuning retired at 67, and took up a clerical position at the local chapter of the Shiners Club, which he held until he was 99 years old. He insisted that working into old age contributed to his long life.

“Don’t retire until you’re darn sure that you can’t work anymore,” Breuning said. “Keep on working as long as you can work and you’ll find that it’s good for you.” This belief is supported by the authors of The Longevity Project, a psychological study launched in 1921 that examined the lives of 1,500 people from childhood to death. Many of the study’s participants who lived into old age continued to work, at least part-time, long after they hit retirement age. According to the study: “The continually productive men and women lived much longer than their laid-back comrades.”

By following Breuning’s advice, and having a little luck, who knows, perhaps you’ll be a centenarian too.

In defence of bureaucracy

We are all familiar with tales of inept clerks wasting people’s time, focusing on inane procedural concerns at the expense of common sense and elevating the protocols of paperwork for their own sake over the functions bureaucracy is ostensibly intended to perform. We have all been to the post office; we’ve had to renew passports, file quarterly tax payments, fight phantom parking tickets. We’ve all had infuriating encounters with customer service divisions, the privatized bureaucracy of consumer capitalism. One can customarily secure conversational sympathy with tales of inefficiency at voting stations, or the impossibilities of decoding medical bills and sorting out insurance coverage. Such stories are as safe and neutral as talk about the weather; contempt for bureaucrats conveys a comfortable, conventional normality.

But are these fair? And indeed how did such horror stories of clerical uselessness become so socially useful, so tellable? Where did the conventions of the bureaucratic nightmare tale come from? 

Media history professor Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing attempts to answer this question by way of a tour of post-revolutionary France and the nineteenth-century milieu that helped spawn “bureaucracy” as a pejorative term. Kafka joins thoroughly researched narratives of a few notable civil servants of the era with some psychoanalytically oriented speculation to trace the evolution of “the psychic life of paperwork”—how it has served not only as a field for passive-aggressive political action and a source of scapegoats for state authorities but also as a well of perverse wish fulfillment for citizens eager to acknowledge paperwork’s inevitable dominion over them.

This wasn’t the intent, of course. The hope of some of the French revolutionaries was that paperwork would rationalize the state, that it would depersonalize power and destroy the corrupt networks of aristocratic influence. Kafka quotes from a 1791 French administrative directory that advised that “letters of recommendation will be perfectly useless” in petitioning the government and “might even become dangerous, in that they can foster the belief that one is soliciting a favor or a grace that one does not have the right to obtain through justice.” As Kafka puts it, “A world of privilege was becoming a world of rights; the personal state was becoming the personnel state.” 

Paperwork was also to be the means for allowing all of a nation’s people to scrutinize government activities. After all society does have has the right to ask all public agents to give an accounting of their administration. This mirrors the contemporary enthusiasm for open government and transparency among some activists and is the apparent raison d’etre for WikiLeaks. The idea was taken to astounding (and absurd) lengths by the Jacobins, who mandated that “all relations between all public functionaries can no longer take place except in writing.”

While this desire can turn documentation into what Kafka calls a “technology of political representation” by which citizens can track whether the state is serving their interests, it also makes paperwork into a voracious medium that authorizes blanket surveillance of citizens and their reconstitution as vulnerable data sets as a condition of citizenship. You are no one without your permanent file. 

Instead of optimism, the specter of paperwork permits cynicism to flourish. Privilege may temporarily disappear into the meticulous procedures of paperwork, which become recognizable rituals of impartiality, even if no one is satisfied with their actual performance. Anyone who has ever visited the DMV has taken part in this grand democratization of frustration. In a state where the DMV is the model institution, everyone is equal in that they are equally miserable. But paperwork also opens new avenues for the exercise of influence that are just as opaque as any earlier systems abused by elites. As documentation proliferates, so too do auditors auditing the clerks, and auditors auditing those auditors, and on and on to theoretical infinity. This network of data and overtaxed inspectors and processors has the effect of creating a miasma of competing claims for legitimacy, as well as ample opportunity for doling out preferential treatment, circumventing the law, subverting authority, serving oneself. Information becomes obfuscation, particularly under the pressures of “surveillance and acceleration". The state needs to know more to function fairly, but with more information comes more urgency to process it all, yielding even more information to process and sending fairness further over the horizon.

For reactionaries of all stripes, complaining about the inefficiency and tyranny of clerks who were never intended to be vested with authority has long served as an excuse to call for both limited government and enhanced executive power. For conservatives, clerks are de facto usurpers whose seemingly arbitrary authority has broken free from the constraints traditionally placed on it by social status. Decrying bureaucracy and all its tedious and procedures, in fact, serves as a good way of recasting the arbitrariness of any given class system as natural, organic, justified.

But revolutionaries too have found a convenient scapegoat in bureaucracy. Better to expedite a more direct execution of the sovereign will than have power dissipated among legions of petty civil servants all narcissistically defending their tiny bailiwick to no great national purpose. Better to have flexible authority and get things done.

Bureaucracy, Kafka argues, can be everybody’s enemy, and can thus serve as the organizing principle for otherwise untenable alliances, like the one between eighteenth-century liberals and democrats, or between some contemporary working-class voters and the neoliberal elites they vote for. Sowing contempt for bureaucracy, in the form of lambasting all government efforts as inherently inefficient, full of “lazy” and “parasitical” civil servants and their “bloated” pensions, remains a potent tactic of right-wing populism, but whereas conservatives of old evoked a nostalgic class paternalism to cure paperwork’s ills, the American Right offers a myth of self-sufficiency, of everyone for themselves, with no claims to be filed and no burdens to be shared. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, comes to stand for the inevitable outcome of all types of collective power, the emblem of neutered individualism. 

And since paperwork is an evil that proliferates no matter what the form of government, it can seem irrelevant to mount any political fights to reform it. Politics is thus reduced to the pettiness of sorting out strictly personal grievances, which in turn worsens bureaucracy, as these sorts of selfish claims are precisely what bureaucracy exists to process.

The inefficiencies and inadequacies of paperwork—and the clerks whose thankless task is to manage it—lend themselves to being used to construct the fantasy of a natural, uncorrupted, hierarchy- and bureaucracy-free direct democracy. Instead of a regime of mistrust, regimentation, and endemic “cover-your-ass” punctiliousness, let there be glorious horizontalism, an oral culture of power as presence, not paper. In this sense, paperwork encourages a misunderstanding of power as a medium, divested of actual people responsible for abusing it. Pursuing the dream of domesticating power becomes a matter of endless formal restructuring, while the mundane organizational work of politics is demonized as the sort of bureaucratic troublemaking “everyone” wants to dispense with.

Paperwork has often been regarded as if it were endowed with a will of its own. Paperwork explosion’ expresses both a threat and a wish. Yet the traces of human error never vanish. In our encounters with paperwork, “carelessness is conflated with uncaring and the indifference of the state appears to be given a permanent, material substance. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Kafka sets out to “account for how this medium makes everyone, no matter how powerful they may be in reality, feel so powerless.” But feeling powerless and actually being powerless are not at all the same; blurring the difference between the two may be the most far-reaching ideological function of frustration with bureaucracy. Representing paperwork as a great leveler, as subject to the same “unconscious forces” across the social body, threatens to exculpate the powerful for their abuses of authority and to make corruption a sort of unfortunate by-product of humans’ inevitable tendency to make transcription errors. Mistakes are made, and nobody’s perfect, so let’s not play the blame game.

 Kafka argues that paperwork facilitates “fantasies of power and powerlessness,” but leaves the nature of these fantasies and the social forces that mold them beyond the reach of transformation. Our stories about bureaucracy provide us the elusive satisfaction that the state never can. We exact a pleasing narrative revenge on systemic political inadequacy. But the cost of this satisfaction is fatalism: we accept that “you can’t fight the system” to take comfort in not having to try.

Obama speaks to Israel

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

President Obama spoke in Jerusalem on Thursday. It was a wise, audacious and courageous speech. 

The Last Letter

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The Last Letter

A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness. 

The mea culpas of the pundits

No, there has been none.* 

One of the most dispiriting thing in recent commentary on the ten year long Iraq war has been the clean chit that that most pundits and so called political elites have manage to earn on the TV air waves. None of them have apologized for their deception and lies that cost thousands of lives. John Judis tries to lay this out in his piece below but it is way short of what needs to be done. Look I am not suggesting they all commit harakiri - although I also think the country deserves at least a few victims- but really should they all  be allowed to continue to preen and pretend a knowledge they clearly don't have on the air? There has to be some accountability for being wrong especially if it costs the country a trillion dollars and thousands of lives? Can we not banish them for say a period of seven years from the public discourse and send them to a half way house for the politically inept and cowardly ? Thus when some of them now pontificate like say Fred Hyatt editor of the Washington Post, should not the public know how wrong he was about the Iraq war ? If Paul Wolwowitz deigns to come on TV, should he not have a red mark on his face for his role in this tragedy? In olden times , women were branded as witches so all could beware their machinations, why should we not do the same to these modern day hucksters- none of which have been punished till this date for thie complicity i these crimes? Sometimes I feel the US society is too forgiving and hence ends up with a continuous litany of such crimes. 

There were, of course, people who opposed invading Iraq—Illinois State Senator Barack Obama among them—but within political Washington, it was difficult to find like-minded foes. When The New Republic’s editor-in-chief and editor proclaimed the need for a “muscular” foreign policy, I was usually the only vocal dissenter, and the only people who agreed with me were the women on staff: Michelle Cottle, Laura Obolensky and Sarah Wildman. Both of the major national dailies—The Washington Postand The New York Times (featuring Judith Miller’s reporting)—were beating the drums for war. Except for Jessica Mathews at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington’s thinktank honchos were also lined up behind the war.

In December of 2002, John Judis was invited by the Ethics and Public Policy Center to a ritzy conference at an ocean front resort in Key West. The subject was to be Political Islam, and many of the best-known political journalists from Washington and New York were there. The conversation invariably got around to Iraq, and he found myself one of the few attendees who outright opposed an invasion. He found fellow dissenters to the war in two curious places: the CIA and the military intelligentsia. 

These dissenters were entirely right about the war, and nothing that has happened since then has weakened their case. The United States got several hundred thousand people killed to install a regime that may eventually prove to be as oppressive as Saddam Hussein’s, is closely allied to the Iranian government, and has proven as likely to give oil contracts to Chinese firms as to American firms. And oh yes, Iraq didn’t have “WMDs” after all—a ridiculous acronym that the administration and its supporters used to equate the possession of chemical or biological weapons with the possession of nuclear weapons.

The people who had the most familiarity with the Middle East and with the perils of war were dead set against the invasion. That includes not only the CIA analysts and the military professors, but also the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which rejected the administration’s claims that Iraq was about to acquire nuclear weapons. But they were not in a position to make their voices heard. The CIA analysts were reduced to creating half-cocked schemes for getting a report on the far-flung future to the White House, which they hoped someone would read. The military dissenters, as we know, were silenced by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. And the State Department was ignored by the White House.

Some people in Washington still haven’t recanted (unless we missed an editorial on Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post op-ed page apologizing for the newspaper’s leading role in stoking the flames of war), but most of the people John worked with began to doubt the war within about four months. John;s own experience after Powell’s speech bears out the tremendous power that an administration, bent on deception, can have over public opinion, especially when it comes to foreign policy. And when the dissenters in the CIA, military, and State Department are silenced, the public—not to mention, journalists—has little recourse in deciding whether to support what the administration wants to do. 

While open public discourse is essential on major issues of the day equally essential is the sense of accountability brought on by at least a modicum of punishment. As with children, if we spare the rod, can continuous bad behavior be far behind ?

* I stand corrected, here is David Frum, Bush's speechwriter, in Newsweek:

"Over the past 10 years, there have been few days when the war in Iraq was absent from my thoughts. People often ask me whether I have regrets. It seems absurdly presumptuous to answer the question. I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me. And yet ... all of us who advocated for the war have had to do some reckoning. If the war achieved some positive gains, its unnecessary costs—in human life, in money, to the prestige and credibility of the U.S. government—are daunting and dismaying. If we’d found the WMD, it would have been different. If we’d kept better order in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam, it would have been different. If more Iraqis had welcomed the invasion as we expected, it would have been different. If the case for the war had been argued in a less contrived and predetermined way, it would have been different. But it wasn’t different. Those of us who were involved—in whatever way—bear the responsibility." 

Jesuits and me

To readers of my blogs it must be amply evident that I am an unabashed admirer of the Jesuits. This admiration started in school that I went to and which was run by the society of Jesus in Bombay. I had transferred from a secular school and the discipline and rigor of the school came as a refreshing change. But it was the fathers who taught me who left an indelible mark.

One of them was Father Beech, a tough Irish catholic who led us into mysteries of Shakespeare and taught us to appreciate poetry. Father Beech was a bull of a man who, the story goes, could lift, over his head, an average size seventh standard schoolboy, purely with the strength of his mighty right arm. Nobody that I know, had actually seen him do it, but legend has it that he could roll up his sleeve and perform the feat anytime, and none among us whom he taught English Language, English Literature, and Scripture, at St. Mary’s school in Bombay, long, long ago, in the nineteen-fifties, ever doubted it. He made me a lifelong admirer when he selected me to play the title role as McBeth in the annual school play. That he would select a dark hued, mildly obese Indian lad to play the starring role came as a quite a shock to me. He went to teach me about spirituality and how merit would, if persisted with, reap its own reward.

Jesuit education was based on the principles of character formation elaborated by St. Ignatius of Loyola. It is this which gave Jesuit education its special character. The Jesuit school aimed at the integral personal formation of the students. 

 to help the students become mature, spiritually oriented men of character:
 to encourage them continually to strive after excellence in every field;
 to be clear and firm on principles, courageous and resolute in action;
 to be unselfish in the service of their fellow men and become agents of progressive social change;
 to instill in then a true national spirit, a deep love for the motherland, an appreciation of Indian culture, values, language, and things Indian, and a keen civic and social sense.

But even more than their educational objetives, it were the the fathers who imparted it that really remain in ones memory.

Another was Father Balaguer who was then the most learned of the Jesuits and was the principal of St Xaviers college. Now I did not go to St Xaviers but my three cousin brothers did. Purely by chance I met him for the first time at their residence and got into a spirited argument with him. I dont even remember what the subject was. Anyway later I was to find out that he wrote along letter --still my treasured possession -to my father arguing that I was too precious a talent to simply spend my life as an engineer. My father was as surprised as I was and replied in a long courteous letter appreciating the interest Father Balaguer had decided to take in his son." I have been a teacher", his letter said, " half my life and to see this passion and involvement in a student by an educationist of your calibre is really inspiring." 

Needless to say, despite this letter, in my headstrong views, I did not join his college -- many times to my regret- and went onto a career in engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and MIT.

As I look back the memories of the care and concern these Jesuit fathers displayed in me kept me buoyed through many a troubled time in the future.

How to be happy inspite of......

In recent times just as I recovered from a painful bout of shingles, I developed an even more painful nerve affliction, and just as I was getting over this with the help of accupuncture, I managed to stumble and break my wrist! But through it all one thing kept me sane and, dare I say happy, was  my daily phone call from my grandson. Here he is on the phone - note the concern- chiding me:

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During lean times we all hang on to things that remind us of joyous times and experiences. The fact is that being dissatisfied creates a not only a host of emotional and physical problems but also lowers our job performance. We tend to carry these negative emotions into our homes and neighborhoods,  further hurting the relationships we cherish most deeply. But you can thrive on the job and in life and experience joy along the way by doing just one thing:

Choose to be positive.

Sounds clichéd, right? It's not and here's why: Choice is the ultimate expression of autonomy. It's the one thing we can control when times get tough, and it's how we remain true to ourselves. Famed Austrian psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl called this type of choice "tragic optimism." which simply means, "saying yes to life in spite of everything."It's necessary to face our challenges head on. Avoiding or ignoring problems and the negative feelings that go along with them doesn't work, and actually makes us feel worse. Yet, we can't force ourselves to be positive. Becoming optimistic is not a matter of the will. It's a byproduct of purpose. We can only say "yes to life" when we know what it looks like and how to get there. We can only be positive when we have something to look forward to.

Here's how to start: The next time you face a negative situation (or any situation, for that matter) ask yourself this:

"What meaning can I create from this experience?"

When we ask this question, something remarkable happens. We awaken to the possibility of the present, the moment-by-moment unfolding of existence. We begin to see every experience (whether good or bad) as an opportunity to impart significance to our actions.When we approach life in this way, our focus shifts from the feelings of an experience to the meaning of an experience. It's not that we ignore negative feelings or pretend they don't exist (remember, that doesn't work). Rather, we choose to create meaning alongside our feelings.

Follow the 4 R's here. Recognize your feelings (acknowledge them), release them, re-focus on your quest, and repeat as needed.

So this is your quest -- use your experiences to become a better version of yourself and enrich the lives of others.

This is how we create meaning. This is how we say yes to life. This is how we choose to be positive. Creating our own meaning fuels optimism because it gives us a purpose, a tangible reason to wake up in the morning. By living in the present, we also discover who we are, what we love (our passion) and what we can become. 

Even though our journeys may be different, the pathway to positivity is the same. When we choose to say yes to what we are given by living in the present, making meaning of each day, our experiences go from dread and "I can't wait until today is over" to appreciation and purpose.

The Jesuits

Here are some fun facts about the Jesuits that I bet you did not know:

1. They invented the trap door. Without the Jesuits, who wrote and directed plays in their 16th and 17th-century schools, modern theater—and film—would be vastly different. To take one example, the Wicked Witch of the West wouldn't have been able to disappear so easily in "The Wizard of Oz."  Jesuits also invented or perfected the "scrim," the sheer curtain used in theaters today.
2. They discovered quinine (called "Jesuit bark" in the 16th century) used today for anti-malarial drugs and, not incidentally, for tonic water. Without Jesuits you wouldn't be enjoying your gin and tonic. Nor would the West have known as early about ginseng or the camelia flower.
3. Their founder, St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the Spanish-soldier-turned-mystic may be the only saint with a notarized police record: for nighttime brawling with an intent to cause bodily harm. (Needless to say, this came before his conversion.)
4. Their dictionaries and lexicons of the native languages in North America in the 17th century were the first resources Europeans used to understand these ancient tongues, and still provide modern scholars with the earliest transcriptions of the languages. 
5. They located the source of the Blue Nile, and charted large stretches of the Amazon and Mississippi Rivers. 
6. They educated Descartes, Voltaire, Moliere, James Joyce, Peter Paul Rubens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fidel Castro, Alfred Hitchcock and Bill Clinton; not to mention Bing Crosby, Vince Lombardi, Robert Altman, Chris Farley, Salma Hayek and Denzel Washington.
7. They founded the city of Sao Paolo, Brazil. 
8. There are 35 craters on the moon named for Jesuit scientists.  And Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scientist, called “master of a hundred arts” and “the last man to know everything,” was a geologist, biologist, linguist, decipherer of hieroglyphics and inventor of the megaphone. 
9. They inspired the film "On the Waterfront," based on the groundbreaking labor-relations work of the Jesuit John Corridan, who worked in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. (His part was played by Karl Malden, who, last year, died 50 years to the day after Father Corridan.)
10. They count 40 saints and dozens of blesseds (near-saints) among their members, including the globe-trotting missionary St. Francis Xavier, and count among their famous "former" members Garry Wills, John McLaughlin and Jerry Brown. And now, a pope!

Stop talking, be happy

The quiet people often tend to be ignored in our extroverted cultures. But are we missing something ? The fact is that introverts form the backbone of our societies and we ignore them at our peril.
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 Quiet , a new book by Susan Cain, shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so. Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, she takes the reader on a journey from Dale Carnegie’s birthplace to Harvard Business School, from a Tony Robbins seminar to an evangelical megachurch, and charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal in the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects. She talks to Asian-American students who feel alienated from the brash, backslapping atmosphere of American schools. She questions the dominant values of American business culture, where forced collaboration can stand in the way of innovation, and where the leadership potential of introverts is often overlooked. And she draws on cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to reveal the surprising differences between extroverts and introverts.

Cain begins her account by establishing that Western culture has increasingly adopted an ‘Extrovert Ideal,’ in which louder, bolder, more effervescent and risk-friendly individuals are valued over and above the quieter, more reserved, contemplative and heed-friendly ones. While Western culture has a long history of favoring the extrovert, she argues that this bias has steepened since the industrial revolution, and particularly in the past century as the West has become ever-more urbanized and commercial. Over the course of this time-frame, a Culture of Personality, perhaps best represented by the motivational guru Tony Robbins, has come to replace a Culture of Character, best represented by such figures as Abraham Lincoln.

But introverts have an important role to play in many areas of society that is now often being overlooked. For one, the introvert’s greater willingness to listen to others and their input makes them better leaders than is generally recognized. Second, their heed-friendly temperaments serves to better protect them against dangerous situations, and makes them particularly valuable in such professions as financial investing, where undue risk is not only known to get individuals in trouble, but entire nations, and even the entire international community. Third, the fact that introverts tend to have a heightened moral sense makes them well-suited to fill the role of the social conscience of society, which is often valuable in protecting the downtrodden, and also in saving societies from their own recklessness. Finally, the added thoughtfulness and persistence of introverts, and their heightened capacity to work independently, often gives them an edge in creative enterprises such as art and technological innovation, as well as in more intellectual industries such as science and engineering.

 Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to show that some of the best and most creative ideas do in fact come from the ranks of the introverted : just consider some of the prominent names: Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Vincent Van Gogh, W.B. Yeats, Frederic Chopin, Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot, J.M. Barrie, George Orwell, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seusss), Charles Schulz, Steven Spielberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates and J.K. Rowling. 

Aside from these introvert superstars, numerous scientific studies reveal that these shining examples are no fluke. For instance, in a study performed between 1956 and 1962 out of the University of California, Berkeley, researchers “assembled a list of architects, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and writers who had made major contributions to their fields, and invited them to Berkeley for a weekend of personality tests, problem solving experiments, and probing questions”. The researchers also followed this study up with a study that looked at the most creative people from a wide assortment of less heralded professions. As Cain reports, “one of the most interesting findings, echoed by later studies, was that the more creative people tended to be socially poised introverts. They were interpersonally skilled but ‘not of an especially sociable or participative temperament.’ They described themselves as independent and individualistic 

It seems that only about 25% of people are Introverts. Here are a few common misconceptions about Introverts:

Myth #1 – Introverts don’t like to talk.
This is not true. Introverts just don’t talk unless they have something to say. They hate small talk. Get an introvert talking about something they are interested in, and they won’t shut up for days.

Myth #2 – Introverts are shy.
Shyness has nothing to do with being an Introvert. Introverts are not necessarily afraid of people. What they need is a reason to interact. They don’t interact for the sake of interacting. If you want to talk to an Introvert, just start talking. Don’t worry about being polite.

Myth #3 – Introverts are rude.
Introverts often don’t see a reason for beating around the bush with social pleasantries. They want everyone to just be real and honest. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable in most settings, so Introverts can feel a lot of pressure to fit in, which they find exhausting.

Myth #4 – Introverts don’t like people.
On the contrary, Introverts intensely value the few friends they have. They can count their close friends on one hand. If you are lucky enough for an introvert to consider you a friend, you probably have a loyal ally for life. Once you have earned their respect as being a person of substance, you’re in.

Myth #5 – Introverts don’t like to go out in public.
Nonsense. Introverts just don’t like to go out in public FOR AS LONG. They also like to avoid the complications that are involved in public activities. They take in data and experiences very quickly, and as a result, don’t need to be there for long to “get it.” They’re ready to go home, recharge, and process it all. In fact, recharging is absolutely crucial for Introverts.

Myth #6 – Introverts always want to be alone.
Introverts are perfectly comfortable with their own thoughts. They think a lot. They daydream. They like to have problems to work on, puzzles to solve. But they can also get incredibly lonely if they don’t have anyone to share their discoveries with. They crave an authentic and sincere connection with ONE PERSON at a time.

Myth #7 – Introverts are weird.
Introverts are often individualists. They don’t follow the crowd. They’d prefer to be valued for their novel ways of living. They think for themselves and because of that, they often challenge the norm. They don’t make most decisions based on what is popular or trendy.

Myth #8 – Introverts are aloof nerds.
Introverts are people who primarily look inward, paying close attention to their thoughts and emotions. It’s not that they are incapable of paying attention to what is going on around them, it’s just that their inner world is much more stimulating and rewarding to them.

Myth #9 – Introverts don’t know how to relax and have fun.
Introverts typically relax at home or in nature, not in busy public places. Introverts are not thrill seekers and adrenaline junkies. If there is too much talking and noise going on, they shut down. Their brains are too sensitive to the neurotransmitter called Dopamine. Introverts and Extroverts have different dominant neuro-pathways. Just look it up.

Myth #10 – Introverts can fix themselves and become Extroverts.
A world without Introverts would be a world with few scientists, musicians, artists, poets, filmmakers, doctors, mathematicians, writers, and philosophers. But no, introverts can't become backslapping extroverts and why should they ?

The culture that we live in may be tilted towards the extrovert at the expense of the introvert, but it is still possible for the introvert to use their skills and wiles to carve out a fruitful and happy life for themselves. It just takes a little understanding, a little know-how, and the will to make it happen. 

Everything you wanted to know about coke?

The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. But yet it has become one of the largest soft drinks i  the world. How did it all happen?

 In 1863, when Parisian chemist Angelo Mariani combined coca and wine and started selling it, a butterfly did flap its wings. His Vin Marian became extremely popular. He had inadvertantly created a new compound -Cocaethylene which works like cocaine, but with more euphoria.

Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, and Arthur Conan Doyle were among literary figures said to have used it, and the chief rabbi of France said, "Praise be to Mariani's wine!" Pope Leo XIII reportedly carried a flask of it regularly and gave Mariani a medal. 

Seeing this commercial success, Dr. John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta -- himself a morphine addict following an injury in the Civil War -- set out to make his own version. He called it Pemberton's French Wine Coca and marketed it as a panacea. Among many fantastic claims, he called it "a most wonderful invigorator of sexual organs."

But as Pemberton's business started to take off, a prohibition was passed in his county in Georgia (a local one that predated the 18th Amendment by 34 years). Soon French Wine Coca was illegal -- because of the alcohol, not the cocaine. Pemberton remained a step ahead, though. He replaced the wine in the formula with (healthier?) sugar syrup. His new product debuted in 1886: "Coca-Cola: The temperance drink." After that Coca-Cola "quickly caught on as an 'intellectual beverage' among well-off whites." But when the company started selling it in bottles in 1899, minorities who couldn't get into the segregated soda fountains suddenly had access to it. 

Hale explains: "Anyone with a nickel, black or white, could now drink the cocaine-infused beverage. Middle-class whites worried that soft drinks were contributing to what they saw as exploding cocaine use among African-Americans. Southern newspapers reported that "negro cocaine fiends" were raping white women, the police powerless to stop them. By 1903, [then-manager of Coca-Cola Asa Griggs] Candler had bowed to white fears (and a wave of anti-narcotics legislation), removing the cocaine and adding more sugar and caffeine."

Hale's account of the role of racism and social injustice in Coca-Cola's removal of coca is corroborated by the attitudes that the shaped subsequent U.S. cocaine regulation movement. Cocaine wasn't even illegal until 1914 -- 11 years after Coca-Cola's change -- but a massive surge in cocaine use was at its peak at the turn of the century. Recreational use increased five-fold in a period of less than two decades. During that time, racially oriented arguments about rape and other violence, and social effects more so than physical health concerns, came to shape the discussion. The same hypersexuality that was touted as a selling point during the short-lived glory days of Vin Mariani was now a crux of cocaine's bigoted indictment. 

U.S. State Department official Dr. Hamilton Wright said in 1910, "The use of cocaine by the negroes of the South is one of the most elusive and troublesome questions which confront the enforcement of the law ... often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the negroes." Dr. Edward Williams described in the Medical Standard in 1914, "The negro who has become a cocaine-doper is a constant menace to his community. His whole nature is changed for the worse ... timid negroes develop a degree of 'Dutch courage' which is sometimes almost incredible." Yes, even the Dutch were not spared from the racism.

The Coca-Cola we know today still contains coca -- but the ecgonine alkaloid is removed from it. Perfecting that extraction took until 1929, so before that there were still trace amounts of coca's psychoactive elements in Coca-Cola. As Dominic Streatfield describes in Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, the extraction is now done at a New Jersey chemical processing facility by a company called Stepan. In 2003, Stepan imported 175,000 kilograms of coca for Coca-Cola. That's enough to make more than $200 million worth of cocaine. They refer to the coca leaf extract simply as "Merchandise No. 5." The facility is guarded.

Vons grocery store in Los Angeles, California sells 12 cans of Coca-Cola for $6.59 — 54 cents each. But the tool chain that created this simple product is incomprehensibly complex. Each can originated in a small town of 4,000 people on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra. Pinjarra is the site of the world’s largest bauxite mine. Bauxite is surface mined — basically scraped and dug from the top of the ground. The bauxite is crushed and washed with hot sodium hydroxide, which separates it into aluminum hydroxide and waste material called red mud. The aluminum hydroxide is cooled, then heated to over a thousand degrees celsius in a kiln, where it becomes aluminum oxide, or alumina. The alumina is dissolved in a molten substance called cryolite, which is a rare mineral from Greenland, and turned into pure aluminum using electricity in a process called electrolysis. The pure aluminum sinks to the bottom of the molten cryolite, is drained off and placed in a mold. It cools into the shape of a long cylindrical bar. The bar is transported west again, to the Port of Bunbury, and loaded onto a container ship bound for — in the case of Coke for sale in Los Angeles — Long Beach. The bar is transported to Downey, California, where it is rolled flat in a rolling mill, and turned into aluminum sheets. The sheets are punched into circles and shaped into a cup by a mechanical process called drawing and ironing — this not only makes the can but also thins the aluminum. The transition from flat circle to something that resembles a can takes about a fifth of a second. The outside of the can is decorated using a base layer of urethane acrylate, then up to seven layers of colored acrylic paint and varnish that is cured using ultra violet light, and the inside of the can is painted too — with a complex chemical called a comestible polymeric coating that prevents any of the aluminum getting into the soda. So far, this vast tool chain has only produced an empty, open can with no lid. The next step is to fill it.

Coca-Cola is made from a syrup produced by the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta. The main ingredient in the formula used in the United States is a type of sugar substitute called high-fructose corn syrup 55, so named because it is 55 per cent fructose or “fruit sugar”, and 42 per cent glucose or “simple sugar” — the same ratio of fructose to glucose as natural honey. HFCS is made by grinding wet corn until it becomes cornstarch. The cornstarch is mixed with an enzyme secreted by a rod-shaped bacterium called Bacillus and an enzyme secreted by a mold called Aspergillus. This process creates the glucose. A third enzyme, also derived from bacteria, is then used to turn some of the glucose into fructose.

The second ingredient, caramel coloring, gives the drink its distinctive dark brown color. There are four types of caramel coloring — Coca Cola uses type E150d, which is made by heating sugars with sulfite and ammonia to create bitter brown liquid. The syrup’s other principal ingredient is phosphoric acid, which adds acidity and is made by diluting burnt phosphorus (made by heating phosphate rock in an arc-furnace) and processing it to remove arsenic.

A much smaller proportion of the syrup is flavors. These include vanilla, which is the fruit of a Mexican orchid that has been dried and cured for around three months; cinnamon, the inner bark of a Sri Lankan tree; coca-leaf which comes from South America and is processed in a unique US government authorized factory in New Jersey to remove its addictive stimulant cocaine; and kola nut, a red nut found on a a tree which grows in the African Rain Forest (this may be the origin of Coca-Cola’s distinctive red logo).

The final ingredient is caffeine, a stimulating alkaloid that can be derived from the kola nut, coffee beans and other sources. All these ingredients are combined and boiled down to a concentrate, then transported from the Coca-Cola Company factory in Atlanta to Downey where the concentrate is diluted with water infused with carbon dioxide. Some of the carbon dioxide turns to gas in the water, and these gas bubbles give it effervescence, also know as “fizz,” after its sound. 12 ounces of this mixture is poured into the can.

The top of the can is then added. This is carefully engineered: it is made from aluminum, but it has to be thicker and stronger to withstand the pressure of the carbon dioxide gas, and so it uses an alloy with more magnesium than the rest of the can. The lid is punched and scored so that a tab opening, also made of aluminum, can be installed. The finished lid is put on top of the filled can, and the edges of the can are folded over it and welded shut. 12 of these cans are then packaged into a painted paperboard box called a fridge pack, using a machine capable of producing 300 such packs a minute.

The finished product is transported by road to a distribution center, and then to my local Vons. The tools, which span from bauxite bulldozers to refrigerators via urethane, bacteria and cocaine, produces 70 million cans of Coca-Cola each day, one of which can be purchased for about two quarters on most street corners, and each of which contains far more than something to drink. Like every other tool, a can of Coke is a product of our world entire and contains inventions that trace all the way back to the origins of our species.

But the sad fact is that this famously American product is not American at all. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. 

Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.