The Moral Trickiness of the Ramayana

Rama and his story have been hovering around in my head these days because that's been the story that I tell Ani during dinner time.

Most Hindus would find offense at the thought of criticizing Rama, one of the avatars of one of our chief Gods, Vishnu. The Ramayana itself in all its flowery Sanskrit prose waxes eloquent about what a perfect man Rama is, in his form, morals, actions and thoughts.

So, sometimes I think I should narrate the Ramayana to Ani the way I heard it: as though Rama's actions and thoughts cannot be questioned. Yet, the texts that form the basis of all Hindu philosophy, the Upanishads, are anything but reverential towards any deity. They are factual, logical and make conclusions based on evidence, all the while acknowledging that there is something greater and more mysterious than what we can ever comprehend. 

When I recall that, I don't feel too compelled to tell my son Ani about Rama the way I heard it as a child: as though he were a deity and whatever the only way to think about his story is the way the Ramayana proclaims it. Because once he grows up and starts thinking about it independently, of what the story has to teach, he'll find that there are all sorts of moral dilemmas cropping up. To think of Ramayana in a literal, "he is the God and we have to blindly accept his story" way would not only vastly underestimate it, but also lead to all sorts of dangerous thinking. 

Yesterday night, we paused at Vali's killing. For those not in the know, here's a brief precis: Rama's wife Sita has been kidnapped. He and his brother Lakshmana are looking for her. They come across Sugriva in the jungle on their travels, who promises to help them, in turn for Rama helping him become the king of Kishkinda. The current king of Kishkinda is Sugriva's brother Vali. Rama agrees; Sugriva challenges Vali to a fight; Rama hides in the bushes, and while Vali is thus engaged in fighting Sugriva, kills him with an arrow to his back. 

Vali, while dying, cries out in anguish at the unfairness of these tactics. "If you had come to me for help in seeking your wife, Rama", says he, "I would have instantly helped you, with no conditions. You are supposed to be a king among men, the most perfect of all, and yet you  fought me in an underhanded and devious way and killed me with a blow to my back when I was not expecting it". 

And then Rama replies with something like, "I asked Sugriva for his help first and he offered it immediately. And this was the price of his offer. I could not, in any conscience, reject it. This is the price you have to pay, Vali, for having banished Sugriva from your kingdom*"

* Long story short: Sugriva thinks Vali is dead after he goes to fight some bad guys. He goes back to Kishkinda, crowns himself king, marries Vali's widow and adopts his son as his own. Vali comes back, enraged to find Sugriva has taken over just about everything that should belong to him, defeats Sugriva in a fight and banishes him.

Hmm.. is it just me, or does anyone else find Rama's reply rather unconvincing? I can't help feeling that Vali is quite justified in his laments. 

In Nabokov's Lolita, the writing is sly, insidious. You keep reading it, and you're completely sympathizing with the narrator and you feel, yeah, it's totally okay for him to be lusting after a child. It's not until you put the book down and escape Nabokov's web of words that you suddenly realize that the writer has made you complicit, that he has tricked you into completely agreeing with something terrible.

Sometimes I think Ramayana is like that. You go through a few hundred pages of Rama's greatness, his nobility yada yada yada (by the way, is his nobility ever shown in any real instance? Or is just always averred to be true, but with no proof? Sure he's supposed to be a great looking guy- with extraordinarily long hands "that come up to his knees", and he's real handy (haha) with a bow and arrow, and he's a dutiful son, but what else? How is he noble?), then you come across these sudden instances which strike a totally jarring note.

Now, if Rama had said, "Yes Vali. Shit man, you're right. What I did was totally not right, but I'm desperate. I need help, and Sugriva was the first to offer it and I grabbed hold of it as quickly as I could. I'm really sorry", now that makes sense. And in fact, it makes him more real and human. It also shows that Rama is aware of his faults. Reading something like this makes someone who worships Rama think about the times when they do something that isn't quite right and that doesn't sit well with the conscience.

But by getting off on to a high horse, "Well Vali, all that has happened to you is really your fault. If you had only been a better brother....", Rama shows himself to be not so perfect after all. Kind of petty, really. And, in fact, deaf to conscience.

So, how best to put all this forth to an enraptured 4 year old? I toyed briefly with the idea of making Rama confess that he hadn't been all that great after all, by molding Rama into some image that I would like him to be. But ultimately, I went with the truth...the Ramayana version, that is. But I added a couple of "Hmm.. so do you think that was particularly right of Rama to do, Ani? Killing someone who wasn't expecting to be hit in the back with an arrow like that?" Ani obediently shook his head, but was that because he truly felt it was wrong, but because I clearly expected it of him? Who knows?

Couple of moral dilemmas coming up in the Ramayana, and I need to think about how to put it forth to Ani. One is Vibhishana's defection from Ravana's side to Rama's and the other, of course, is the biggie: the supposed banishment of Sita by Rama after he rescues her. "Supposed" because it's not actually part of the original Ramayana, but is thought to have been tacked on to the epic at a later stage. Oh, and a third one: Sita's trial of fire after her rescue to prove to the world that she is still indeed "pure". 

Poor Sita. Can't catch a break: kidnapped first, then refuses all of Ravana's enticements and never sits foot into his house, lives outside under a tree for all those months, refuses Hanuman's aid to get rescued and instead waits for Rama to avenge her kidnapping, and THEN, despite all the evidence (Hanuman, all of her guards, practically every citizen of Lanka) showing that she never shared Ravana's bed, she still had to put up with all sorts of humiliations and nonsensical tests to prove her purity. Jeez. 

The Malaysian Airlines Mystery

Oh my gosh, this theory is heart-pounding! It's diabolical and brilliant. And it might just be true.

Is there anybody in the world who has not been boggled and captivated by the MH370 story?
Prayers to those poor folk aboard that plane....

Durga

Hurray! My little baby girl turns 1 tomorrow!

Little Durgoose, when you grow up and discover this blog, feel free to treat it with appropriate filial disdain. And always remember that mummy wants only happiness and good health for you forever.

No Man's Land

People get confused by postdoctoral research fellowships.... and nobody gets more confused about them than postdocs.
Postdocs are, by all accounts, the slavish workhorses of the academic research industry. As a postdoc, you:
a) get paid lower than staff;
b) don't get perks enjoyed by staff, like parking or  8-hour workdays or accessible child care or free food on Employee Appreciation Day (gimme at least a cupcake, dammit!)
c) don't get no respec' from nobody
d) don't get any recognition from lay public when you tell them what you are (huh? postdoc? you mean you're not a real doctor?)
e) are nowhere close to being faculty, so let's not even talk about how you don't get faculty perks
f) aren't permanent, so don't count in university- or institute- census counts
g) are expected to move on, but are given no training in how to do so
h) are expected to bring in grant money, but see (b)

The Higher-Ups will, no doubt, benevolently smile and say that all this provides incentive for postdocs hurry the heck up with their training and move on... okay then Higher-Ups: why do residents get paid more than we do? How come their training has clear goals and expectations and milestones?
Sure, they save a few lives here and now, but I will save millions of lives in 20 years. Gimme that money!

So postdocs, I realize I'm hardly one to dispense with advice, being very much in the same boat as the rest of you, but here's my two cents: You don't owe anybody anything. Stay in the job as long as you feel you are getting value out of it, leave as soon as you can. You may ask, "But Varsha! Leave where? And how? We are over-educated, overly book-smart, but we have no clue how to find a job in real life! And all our contacts are postdocs too!"

To which I shall reply, "Use thy postdoc for getting all this stuff! Create an alter ego and build skills that are useful for getting real jobs, not temporary scientist positions. You're getting paid peanuts, and you might as well use the time and money for advancing your goals, without alienating your boss". Don't get me wrong, some bosses are amazingly great (like mine, for example). But can he provide you a job for the next 10 or 15 years? Most likely not.

So, let me take my own advice and get cracking....

To frost or not to frost

My attitude to cake is undergoing an insidious, not-so-subtle, and possibly permanent change.

When I first started to bake regularly, about a couple of years ago, once Ani got old enough to get excited by it, I was all for low-fat, low-sugar versions. I would assiduously study lipid profiles of various oils and butters, check out glycemic indices of various sweeteners and experiment with whole-wheat, instead of all-purpose, flour and so on.

And I would never make frosting.

Have you ever tried making frosting? It's very easy: take a gazillion pounds of the fattiest substance you can find, and add a gazillion kilograms of powdered sugar (if you don't have confectioners'.. in which case, add some corn starch to the mix). Beat the heck out of it and voila! It's a living, breathing, sinfully tempting nightmare to anyone in the least bit artery-diameter-conscious.

My healthy, virtuously naked cakes had varying degrees of success- sometimes spectacularly amazing (did you know that you can replace butter/oil and eggs altogether with whole milk yogurt? or a ripe avocado?); at other times, not for the faint-hearted (have you ever tried adding millet flour, or ragi, as it is known in India, to cookies or cakes? Unless you have a penchant for chipped teeth, don't add millet flour ever to anything that needs to be baked).

In the past few months though, my craving for frosting has drastically increased (as has my waist-line). Maybe I'm falling sick? Maybe I'm secretly stressed out? Maybe my insulin levels are out of whack? Can I excuse myself on grounds of being merely human?

I used to cheat: I would make frost-free cakes at home, but sneak in a decadent frosting-covered delight for lunch from the cafeteria. Then, my slide towards cake-perfidy accelerated: I have started making frosting up my cakes at home: chocolate ganache, buttercream, strawberry cream! Yum!

Much to my amazement, Ani doesn't like it. He always gobbles up the frosting when we buy cake outside, but he absolutely will not eat whatever I make at home. He insists that it is not healthy. I pause momentarily out of shame.

At least Ani's admonitions have the effect of making me think twice about making off some insane kingdom of frosting, as I wish I could sometimes.

Fascinating and brilliant

There was a time when I would have sniffed and turned away from anything to do with computer science. No more! Ever since I took the Learn-to-Program course by Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries on Coursera, I am hooked.
Now this article makes for great reading and turns a bunch of computer programers into super-heroes.
The right inspiration for me as I struggle to write what should be a fairly straight-forward piece of code but which I cannot wrap my head around...

Travel, climate change and thoughts on recycling

Here's a fantastic chart about the relative carbon footprints of different modes of traveling. It's informal, of course, calculated on the fly, but the graphic at the end really hits home the point of the best modes of travel.

Interestingly, driving a car (according to this guy's calculations) is actually worse than flying a plane. Which sort of defeats the point of the article, wherein the author describes his efforts to reduce his carbon footprint by deciding not to take a flight to destinations any more, and takes a bus instead.

That article, at first reading, made me feel a bit holier-than-thou: we only have one car, we recycle and I take the bus everywhere! Then, on second thoughts, I realized that even our seemingly kosher lifestyle isn't all that green: while we may not fly too much, we are responsible for our parents' annual trips to the US; as a family, we drive everywhere; and our lifestyle in the US is definitely less environmentally friendly than our lifestyle back in India.

The rest of this article is going to make some broad generalizations, which may not be true for the whole country, but they were true in my household and among the people I hung out with, both in India and in the US.

In India, recycling is not something you boast and feel righteous about, you just do. Everything gets reused, from plastic bags to computer parts. Food (usually) isn't dumped into trash bags; it either gets dumped it into a hole in the ground for composting or given as left-overs to people who can't afford a decent meal. Old clothes are given away to someone else, or reused as dusting cloths (I once saw an old pair of underpants on the floor of someone's kitchen, used as an all-purpose mop cloth... perhaps a bit extreme).  Broken electronics are never thrown away; they get repaired. Old newspapers, paper products can be sold in stores for a small amount of money. There is a real market for recycled goods.

In the US, recycling is not a natural way of life. It requires thought and planning. We throw away used or broken furniture, electronics and clothes. Recycling is the 'good deed for the day'.  Earnest college students believe it will bring its own karma. And there is the forced feeling of virtue- one needs an excuse for using recycling goods beyond that of saving money.

I think the reason for these drastically different outlooks are rooted in the approach to money. In India,  it is practical (and expected) to recycle and save money. In the US, it is considered a sign of stinginess for relatively well-off families not to buy new furniture, but to reuse old ones.

Secondly in India, there is a general awareness of waste (maybe because trash isn't cleaned up tidily as it is done in the US). So people think twice about trashing things.

And thirdly, you cannot go anywhere in India without being aware that there are people less fortunate than you are. Even if you drive in an air-conditioned car with dark windows, you will see kids rooting about in garbage bins, people begging, painfully undernourished babies crying. Poverty in the US has a different face. And for an immigrant (and perhaps locals too), the rules of etiquette and political correctness are intimidating: is it kind to offer food to someone who looks hungry or will that be taken as an intolerable insult? Even more intimidating: what if this hungry-looking person has a gun?