The limits of caring

 A friend posted recently about something their child did to raise money for a worthy cause. That got me thinking: what do I as an adult do for things I care about? My wife and I donate every year to causes that are near to our heart: to support development and social justice in India, women’s rights, worldwide medical and disaster relief, etc. From our perspective, it is a substantial amount annually, say something close to what we put aside for one of our kid’s college funds in the same time period. 

The amount, though significant from our perspective, is not something that puts a crimp in our desired lifestyle. So that got me thinking: the causes I that say/feel I care about, how much do I really care about them? Going beyond giving or charity, how much we do really care about others? Does that caring decrease as we go further away from us? Seems like it does, at least for me. If one of my kids was sick and needed expensive medical treatment, I would go to the edge of bankruptcy and beyond to provide whatever care they needed. Job, lifestyle, hobbies: all would fall a distant second to taking care of our child. With a close family member or a friend, I would contribute substantially, be willing to take a hit on career/lifestyle but perhaps not to the edge of personal financial or professional ruin. As I go further away from our core group of people in my life, my willingness to take a hit to help someone reduces. As I consider people or causes that I do not know personally, I still care but there is an “otherness” to this caring. 

If we had a doctor who said “I am willing to put in 100% effort to save this patient because I know them, but only 2% on this other one because they are a stranger”, we would think that is ridiculous. Yet, that is what we all seem to do in our daily lives when it comes to caring about and helping others. Why is that not ridiculous? Is caring about a small set of people or caring to a limited extent about something the same as not caring at all? At the extreme end, we call someone who cares just about themselves selfish. What about someone who only cares about themselves and the ten closest people in their lives? At the other end of the scale, if we have people who treat every person absolutely the same, whether they are family or friends or strangers, would we like such a person? 

Is love/caring only meaningful when it is limited?

A poem inspired by the Narmada Bachao Andolan

The poem is in Hindi, there is a translation at the bottom

आपने कहा देश की समृद्धि की लिए
मेरा गाँव डुबाया गया
मेरे दूबे खेतों के आधार पर
बिजली का उत्पादन किया गया
पर जिन्हें वोह बिजली मिली
उन्होंने उसके लिए क्या खोया?

आपके वादे के बलबूते पर
आप कहें हम जमीन छोड़ दें
पर तब हम क्या करें
जब आप अपना वादा तोड़ दें?

जिस देश की विकास की आप बात करते हैं
उस देश का अटूट हिस्सा हूँ मैं
बिसरे लोगों और टूटे वादों का
अनकहा किस्सा हूँ मैं.

Translation:

For the prosperity of the nation
My village was flooded
My flooded fields provided the basis
For you to generate electiricity
But the people using that electricity
What did they lose?

Based on your promises
You say we should give up the land
But what do we do then
when you break your promise?

The country whose development you talk about
I am an integral part of it
The forgotten people and the broken promises
I am their untold story.

Why I volunteer

What can you alone do? Everyone in India is corrupt! All NGOs in India are just there to make money! Even if you do some changes in some small area, India is so big that you will not make any real difference!

Have you heard these before? I have. Not from strangers, but from my friends and family. People very dear to me and who wish me well. People say these things when I tell them about my volunteering for AID (Association for India's Development) and what AID does.

Here's what I say: I am not alone. I work with a very dedicated and smart group of people who want to make a difference in how the other 70% of India lives. These are not people who live in ivory towers and think about doing good for mankind. These are people who know the ground realities of India and decided to take up the challenge nevertheless. I tell them, yes, I know about corruption in India. That is something we have to fight. Ignoring it is not going to make it any better. Any work that I do as part of AID may not solve all of India's problems, but we will make a start. If it takes longer than our lifetimes to make a difference to all of India, so be it. At least we would have begun the work.

The reason why I volunteer for AID is that I feel a deep and abiding sense of gratitude for receiving so much from India. As the other 30% of India, I grew up eating plentiful food provided by farmers who were at or below the poverty line. I drove on roads built by laborers who got paid the minimum wage or less. I got educated in a government run college for a fraction of the real cost. At the end of all this, I still had the freedom to decide where ever in the world I wanted to work to do the best for myself. How could I not be grateful? To me, there is no better way to repay India than making a difference to the lives of the people who are receiving the least from it. AID's philosophy of not shying away from tough problems and looking deep at issues to discover and solve underlying causes makes sense to me.

These words by Rabindranath Tagore exemplify my dream for India:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

I volunteer for AID to help realize this dream.

What I want in my computer

I was sitting at home and wondering about the computers that we spend a significant amount of our time with. Thought it would be fun to write up a wishlist of everything my perfect computer would have, so here goes:

1. Would run all day without needing to be charged. My phone does this today, my laptop needs to be able to do this as well. Lugging around an ugly powercord is very cumbersome and annoying.


2. Comes on instantly when I open the lid. Yeah, I know Windows tries to do that in one of the power down modes, but that is just keeping everything running and draining the battery. My machine should boot up instantly.


3. Very simple but strong security check. Not having to type in a combination of letters, characters and numbers for security. Possibly something which recognises some unique aspect of the owner.


4. Once I am in, I just select the action that I want to do. I want to browse the web or check mail or develop software or run my financial package. I do not want to know about the application behind it, I do not care. One way to think about it is to say that every new software which is developed advertises a series of actions/functions that it can perform and advertises/registers them with the OS. As a user, I make a decision about selecting the actions that I want my machine to be able to do, if the OS does not support it, it gives me a list of actions I can buy from any number of external sources.


5. Has a marketplace from where I can buy any app that I want. Ideally, when I buy a new system, it automatically comes with some number of "credits", which I can use to buy software that I really want. No gunk comes preinstalled on the machine. I can purchase more credits if I want. All my purchased software should be available to me whichever machine I am working on.
6. Seamlessly enable me to type and draw and switch between the two pretty quickly. If I am taking notes and I feel I want to draw a picture, I should be able to do this from the "keyboard" (some enhanced form of it) without having to select a pen from some application, do my drawing, go back to typing mode, etc. I type words, make some finger movements to draw my diagram and then continue typing.
7. Lightweight, can hold with one hand, but with a large enough screen for real work.

The lost art of thinking : Part II

Funny, I had a post on this topic a few years back and it again popped up in my head because of a few things I heard recently.

One of them was Al Gore's latest book "The Assault on Reason" which he was talking about on NPR. Deals with the effect on democracy because of the relentless one sided conversation which TV provides (you cannot talk back to a TV and question it or its opinions, nor can you, as a non-celebrity citizen just choose to appear on TV and give an alternate point of view). It causes people to disengage from active participation in democracy by being part of the conversation. Made a lot of sense to me.

The other was a spiritual talk I went to, where someone said something deeper. When you see and hear, you do not just do them with your eyes and ears. Your experience is a combination of the basic data your eyes/ears provide and your mind which processes this data to make sense from it. It distinguishes a real object from an illusory one. So what you are doing is getting input from the outside world and then using your logic to process the input before you decide whether you should believe it, react to it, etc.

When you watch TV (especially ads), you are essentially given an information overload, so that the logical part of the brain does not have time to process all the incoming data to make decisions on the believability of that data. So you get the feeling that it is true. If you had more time to think about an ad, you would be able to realize a few things:

1. It was created by the manufacturer for the sole intention of making a profit for themselves.
2. All the people looking/feeling good on the screen are all actors doing their job.
3. All the spontaniety you see on the screen is staged, there have been multiple rounds of market research and focus groups by the advertiser to figure out what will appeal to you before the ad was created.
4. There are a few keywords which cannot be used without proof (like Organic), pretty much everything else is open to interpretation.
5. Do you really need that new thing to make your life happier? Is its absence the only thing keeping you from being happy?

The list could go on, but I guess the general point is made.

Cartoons, insults and hypocrisy

Been reading about the huge protests against the cartoons, had a few thoughts:

The majority of the protests are in places where there is very little freedom of expression. I mean, Syria would not allow huge street protests against corruption in its own govt, which probably happens to be more relevant to the peoples' day to day life than those cartoons.

Arab media has people calling for destruction of the Jews and Israel, why are such calls for genocide not "objectionable"? No protests? So saying you will kill a few million men,women and children is OK, but insulting a prophet is really bad?

Friend in Mumbai

Three friends

Late nights...

Up until 2.30 AM, trying to finish some office stuff. After not sleeping for a while, you enter this sort of zombie-like zone where you seem to be on auto mode. Not the time when you want to do something new or creative, but a great time to finally finish that thing which failed N times for N different reasons and needs yet another try.

Made a month long trip to India a month back, had a hectic but great time. Multiple trips between 3 different cities made the whole vacation pretty interesting. Threw in a visit to Tirupati in that mix as well. Did not get a spiritual experience in Tirupati, my abiding memories will be of a very crowded place, a 2-3 hour wait in a queue and of a multi-second glimpse of the main idol at the end of it. My taste for religious places runs to quiet places where you can look inward and contemplate. Met some close friends from school and college days, felt really good. Put up a few of those snaps. Should upload more of them later.

A friend of mine is moving to Japan, I imagine the culture shock will be greater for an Indian in Japan than in the US. Just my thought, do not have any strong supporting evidence. Language would be an issue, I guess.