Gandhiana

Sunday evening is shutters down at the Gym. So, random browsing at the library seemed like a good timepass idea. I took a “shared auto” to reach closer to the destination. “shared autos” run between important bus stop’s in the city, picking up passengers waiting for the bus. Its almost cost competitive with the bus, maybe one or two rupees extra, for which you get an immediate ride (need not wait for the bus) and a guaranteed seat (may have to stand in the bus). I like these shared economy solutions ! For a lot of people though, going in a bus or a shared auto seems to be a “prestige” issue. But i have no such reservations, and i try to spare ourselves of more fumes and traffic, as much as possible. On the walk to the library, i stopped over at the Shravan cafe, to enjoy a cup of filter coffee.

“Gandhiana” is a section of our local library devoted to Gandhian studies. I picked up at random, “Economics of the spinning wheel: Development without destruction” by Nandini Joshi (impressive background). After reading the first few pages, i realized that Charkha (the spinning wheel) is not a just about an instrument of production, but has an a lot of philosophy behind it, touching the topics of village economics, self-reliance, local markets, local production etc. In Nandini Joshi’s own words:

“The charkha is an economic concept, being an instrument of production; nonetheless it is the only instrument of production — except for its counterpart, the spinning machine — which has profound political, social, psychological, cultural, environmental and, above all, ethical implications. Gandhi conceived it in its entirety and therefore far more intensively, which had a vital bearing on the various aspects of an individual’s as well as a society’s growth.”

Photo by Margaret Bourke-White for Life Magazine, 1946.

Now, that’s interesting ! Iam curious to find out how Charkha could symbolize so many aspects. It seems to me, Charkha could be an emblem for distributed, localized, “small is beautiful” type of economy. I have checked out the book to take home, and will keep you all posted if i learn anything interesting.

While at Gandhiana, i remembered out of the blue that i read a book long time back, which had a passage on implications of Gandhi’s philosophy for environment. I searched out the book “Gandhi — A sublime failure” by S.S.Gill, and looked for relevant passages, and jotted them down on a paper. By the way, iam neither a Gandhian nor a non-Gandhian. I haven’t read enough about his philosophy nor thought through the full implications of his philosophy. But the passages below are about Gandhi’s views on ecology, and i have no problem relating to these views. I think he saw through the problems of hyper-industrialization decades ago. Here are the relevant passages from the book:

Gandhi was the first great ecologist of the twentieth century. His instinctive preference for an austere way of life and limitation of wants had an important ecological dimension. Then there was his innate reverence for life in all its manifestations. His strict adherence to vegetarianism owed, its origin to this view. Explaining his rationale for ‘cow worship’ he wrote, “Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives .. [it meant] protection of the whole dumb creation of God”.

Here again it was a question of clash of civilizations. (..) The western man treated the earth as his personal estate, and plundered and ravaged it for his pleasure. How far ahead of his times Gandhi was may be seen from the fact that it was only in 1962 that the publication of Rachel Carson’s ’silent spring’ and the club of Rome’s ‘The limits to growth’ ten years later, shocked the western world about the horrendous consequences of poisoning the earth’s environment and depleting its non-renewable resources in its blind pursuit of affluence. (..)

When people criticized Gandhi for his ‘villagism’, he said, “It is not an attempt to return to the ignorant dark ages but it is an attempt to see beauty in voluntary simplicity, poverty and slowness”. In 1927 he told Saklatwala, the communist MP from Britain, that he “detested the multiplication of wants and machinery, the mad desire to destroy distance and time, to increase animal appetites, and go to the end of the Earth for their satisfaction”. For him, the sole object of production was to satisfy needs and not wants. In a remarkably perceptive statement he said “The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every mans greed“. This should serve as a motto for all ecologists. It is well known that he just would not allow any waste. He scribbled notes on the vacant space of used post cards, incoming letters, undistributed leaflets, and any other scrap of paper. He used his pencils down to the stumps. Whereas every country is racing madly to raise the living standards of its people through sustained economic growth, Gandhi said in 1928,

“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If the entire nation of three hundred million people took to similar economic exploitation it would strip the world bare like locust”.

This is a striking insight, and it shows how well Gandhi understood the dynamics of modern industrial civilization and its prognosis.

Back to the basics

Here’s Tim Flannery talking about climate change, from earlier this year (mp3 audio). Towards the end of the talk, he said something that caught my attention:

“.. and as we approach these treaties, that are going to deal with the [climate] problem, you think about the longer history of time .. think about four billion years of our planet. Does anyone ever wonder how the atmosphere stays clean and how the oceans stay clean. That’s a result of evolution by natural selection. This Gaia organism as James lovelock has called our planet, has evolved to be a self cleansing and self regulating entity. And for four billion years, the blind watchmaker, you know, the evolution by natural selection, has regulated that process. Sometime this century, for the first time in four billion years, some of the regulation is going to be ceded to our species, and we will regulate some aspects, such as the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, through our intelligence. It is an incredible moment to be alive on our planet, i believe, a moment of great significance”.

“We will regulate some aspects such as gaseous composition of the atmosphere, through our intelligence”. That prompted me to ask myself “What else are we consciously regulating and controlling ?”. The answer ofcourse is that we change, regulate and control lot of processes on this planet. How about our food system, through a meticulously engineered process called Agriculture. How about our health system ? We are hardly leaving all the defense mechanisms to “nature” isn’t it ? We have vaccines, we have anti-biotics. Regulate the flow of rivers for electricity. Dig up mountains to get necessary material to drive our economies. Air condition homes. Use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides to increase agricultural productivity. Inject growth hormones and anti-biotics into cows for more milk. Engineer at the gene level with an aim to further gain control over nature. Change .. manage .. engineer .. regulate .. control. We do it a LOT. Just look around your shoulders .. we live in highly highly engineered environments. (Unless you are reading this from an old growth forest ). Welcome to the anthropocene. We have been engineering on a large scale ever since we came out of pure hunter-gatherer mode of living, and started clearing forests for agriculture thousands of years back. So change is nothing new. It has been happening for thousands of years. The more we change complex systems, more is the likelihood of repercussions of that change. What we call “environmental problems”. The history of environmental problems is the history of unintended consequences of our mucking around with systems at various levels. The systems we’re dealing with are so complex, we are caught off-guard on countless occasions.

The above train of thought allowed me yet again to see our “environmental issues” from the most basic angle — As an inevitable result of the mindset of engineering-the-world. From this view point, its clear that what we call “environmental problems” are not some new phenomenon of the last two hundred years. We are simply continuing an old paradigm into the present days. But what is troubling in the present times is that we are doing it on increasingly complex scale. From gross to subtle. From the grosser physical land use level — the cities, the suburbs, industries, roads, deforestation, dams, mines, desertification etc; To the subtler chemical level — pesticides, herbicides, co2’s, cfc’s, plastics, you know the whole slew of industrial chemicals and products; To still subtler level — genetically engineered plants, organisms, nanopollutants etc. The deeper we go, the riskier it is. Its like in a software system. If you muck around at the application level, you may be ok. At the most, the application might crash. But when you go and muck around at the operating system level, beware !

Only recently, genetic engineering caught my attention. Looked from the point of view of ever-increasing-engineering, its clear why its an important environmental issue. Its mucking around with nature at operating system level. The speed with which we are deploying genetically engineered products into the market, gives a hint of how we as a society will approach the environmental crisis — with same old paradigm. More technology and more engineering. Take climate change. There is so much talk about cutting green house gas emissions, only because there is no reliable engineering solution yet. Its not that we have suddenly become responsible about our actions and decided to backoff. Its simply because there is no good engineering muckup solution available. But i wouldn’t be surprised if we end up paying lip service to voluntary co2 cuts, and tilt towards Geo-engineering solutions like cultivating phytoplankton in oceans, installing giant sunlight reflectors in space, and adding sulphate particles to stratosphere.

Nature has evolved systems over millions of years. Our puny intellect is trying to wrest control of and manage more and more of these complex systems. Can we do it ? (Hey, we haven’t even managed to construct or widely deploy a good bug-free virus-proof commercial desktop operating system, yet).

Brilliant-to-the-power-of-n

‘Ecological conversation’ by Stephen Talbott

I normally try to have original content, and not simple link ups. But this one is exceptional.

what’s that energy ?!

As usual, I took a power nap of twenty minutes this afternoon. I make it a point to setup an alarm everyday. It was totally refreshing ! Almost everyday, iam surprised that i had slept for only twenty minutes. It always feels like hours ! I read somewhere that some Japanese companies have quiet and comfortable power nap rooms to refresh the employees. By the way, i think the trick is to make it short like twenty minutes or so. Anything longer might make you feel dull. If you have any research info on this, dear reader, please pass it on. Not in a mood to do anything productive, i then made some coffee and settled down to watch India-Srilanka test match for half an hour. Quite an interesting test series this has been. I then headed off to my music class. I have been trying my hand at keyboard for the last six months, just as a hobby .. and to exercise the “creative” right brain a bit .. and to prevent some of those neurons from rusting off . Part of the inspiration to do music has come from reading the book “Mind and Brain” by Jeff Shwartz. “Use ‘em or Lose ‘em”, “Survival of the busiest” seem to be good rules of thumb about preserving neurons. Iam at a stage where i can play some filmi tunes on keyboard . I’ve never been a music buff, never owned an ipod .. but enjoying playing first hand. Its an interesting experience. After the class, walked back home, and fixed up a quick snack, and headed off to the gym. Had a very good workout, with some fast desi tunes playing in the background. Now, what are those chemicals released when you have a good workout ? Adrenalin , endorphins ? Whatever they are, they seem to have been released more than a fair proportion, because i was sort of on a high much longer after the exercise. Came back home and took a cool shower, and sat down for daily meditation. Iam currently just practicing the most basic concentration exercise, to focus on in-out breath. Its meant to focus the mind, and prepare for further meditation. Anyway, i just couldn’t do it today ! There was too much energy .. too much enthusiasm about life and its possibilities .. too much positivity. I don’t know where it came from .. maybe those endorphin’s from exercise. I decided not to fight it too much, and just called the meditation off for the day.

If you’ve come so far in the post, great ! you are endowed with lot of patience ! If you’r wondering if there’s some point to this post, iam sorry to disappoint you . As the blog so far has been too serious, too many funda’s .. i felt it would be nice to put out some truly raw data out there ! The 1’s and 0’s of an evening in my life

Iam still around, Gang ..

.. but not much to say really. So, i’ll just leave a short note on what i’ve been upto recently. The flavor of the season is “vipassana meditation”. When you try to understand the rationale behind this form of meditation, you will inevitably come across at least the basics of Buddhist philosophy. Two books have really helped me understand the underlying philosophy, and a bit of the technique itself so that i can get started on my own before i learn it more formally — “Mindfulness in plain english“, by Henepola Gunaratana ; “Vipassana meditation as taught of S.N.Goenka” by William Hart. Iam very impressed by the Buddhist philosophy, because of its conciseness and as its intensely logical nature. But, as its often said, there’s only so much use reading “swimology”. For the actual swimming, iam devoting couple of hours per day for now. I definitely plan to make this a permanent fixture on the daily menu, rather than passing flavor of the season.

The horrendous space kablooie !

Now i know why i instinctively wander once in a while into popular science section of my local library. Because, a good popular science book is like a mind relaxation pill . In pure science, there is an element of certainty, orderliness and objectivity. Either something is proven or its not. Although, the brain needs to work a bit to understand the science, its not in a state of making decisions and judgments. I find that to be quite relaxing ! On the other hand, when iam dealing with topics like economics and environmental philosophy, there is a lot of speculation and subjective value calls to be made. There are a lot of normative questions to be handled .. how things should be, what is right or wrong, etc. In recent times, i had been dealing mostly with issues which require subjective opinion. Reading solid science has been a good antidote and a breath of fresh air. Perhaps, another strong reason i liked reading ‘Big Bang‘ by Simon Singh, is that the immensity and beauty of the universe has so floored me, that all our day-to-day “issues” seemed insignificant, and hence the high .

Anyway, the book ofcourse is all about the horrendous space kablooi. It was fun reading about the progression of science leading upto the eventual proving (well .. the most accepted theory currently) of Big Bang. In the beginning, ofcourse, there was the Earth at the center of the universe, and everything doing pradakshina around us. Then we realized we aren’t so special after all and its we who do the pradakshina. Maybe Sun is special ? Tough luck, there too. Suryanarayana is just another star among billions in the galaxy. We tried to comfort ourselves that the milky way, then, has surely gotta be special and the only galaxy in the universe. Oops. Those pesky nebulae turned out be full fledged galaxies in themselves ! Atleast, we hoped, there must be some stability in the universe ! Those galaxies must surely be floating around in space, forever. Then ofcourse, Hubble spoils our comfy view of the universe and says galaxies are moving away from us at thousands of kilometers a second ! The universe is expanding with every second ! And if its been expanding, the previous second or yesterday or last year, it must have been smaller than now. And if we run the clock backward enough, Bang ! Simon Singh walks us through this whole journey from flat-earth to big-bang, explaining all the science and peppering with anecdotes and behind-the-scenes events. Great job. Hats off, Simon !

Reading about the universe, as always, has been humbling too. There are so many places where our normal three-dimensional space / independent-time notion simply cannot get around some of the ideas. For example, the fact that the universe is still expanding at tremendous rate. Expanding into what ? Its not that galaxies are shooting out into existing space. How can space itself be created / stretched ? Can someone please explain this to me ! I can’t get my mind around it. Maybe it can be comprehended only as mathematical equations.

As if all this science is not exciting enough, it got me thinking about some stuff not discussed in the book per se, but kind of related — what about the elephant in the living room we have been conveniently taking for granted ? The nature of observer ! The person trying to understand the universe. The consciousness. We have been conveniently separating the two and studying the world in an observer independent fashion. I think the standard assumption is that this consciousness thingy is a secondary principle in the universe. That is, its derived from primary matter by some accidental combination of molecules. The big question — is consciousness really a secondary principle ? Or, is consciousness a “non-reductive primary” in the universe like space, time, matter. How cool would that be, if consciousness is somehow a permanent feature of the universe, instead of a random emergent property ! For which a yogi might say, “Permanent feature ?! Friend, you got it all backwards. Consciousness is the only primary feature in the universe. Everything else .. matter, time and space is secondary derivative”. But i digress .