#MyYearInReading2020
By: Vishnu Modur
Tags: Books, Year In Review, Articles, India, Politics

1) Journeys – A POET’S DIARY

“The journey moves from his first literary steps as a budding poet in the 1940s in Mysore; his years as a professor of English literature at various Indian universities in the 1950s, when he used to discuss poetry with fellow disillusioned modernist Kannada writers; to his landmark passage to America, as an insecure Fulbright scholar in 1959, discovering all that a new world could offer to a young ambitious writer and scholar from India. In the 1960s he begins his successful career as a Dravidian scholar at the University of Chicago – interacting with America’s intellectual elite. The environment nurtures his intellectual acumen and provides opportunities to publish his first poetry collection and book of translations. This period defines his creative life as a constant state of being in-between (he called himself ‘the hyphen’ in Indo-American studies), which turns into both an ongoing predicament and creative resource.”

One of his poems I adore —

2) Antifragile – Things That Gain From Disorder

“The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means – crucially – a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them – and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”

3) Skin in the Game – Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“Skin in the Game is about four topics in one: a) uncertainty and the reliability of knowledge (both practical and scientific, assuming there is a difference), or in less polite words bull***t detection, b) symmetry in human affairs, that is, fairness, justice, responsibility, and reciprocity, c) information sharing in transactions, and d) rationality in complex systems and in the real world. That these four cannot be disentangled is something that is obvious when one has…skin in the game. […] To emit a Yogiberrism, in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is.”

4) Fever of War – The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I

“Americans turned away from the influenza epidemic of 1918 – 1919 for several reasons. First of all, the influenza epidemic had to compete with a lot of other “history” during the war era. […] In a public vein, scientific medicine’s inability to conquer the influenza epidemic may have spurred a national amnesia. It was not a story that people of the Progressive Era and the Age of Modern Medicine wished to be reminded of. When journalist Terra Ziporyn examined the portrayal of three different diseases (diphtheria, typhoid, and syphilis) in popular scientific periodicals from 1870 to 1920, she found that reporters preferred covering success in combating disease to reporting failure.”

5) A New Idea of India – Individual Rights In A Civilizational State

“What is this Indian civilizational state about? Is it just a load of humbug intentionally or otherwise being used to distract Indians from more pressing everyday issues of economic existence? […] The fundamental flaw of modern India’s secularism as practiced today is that it embodies a confusion between the State and the Society. Nowhere is this confusion more evident than in the way secularism and communalism are routinely hailed as antonyms. The opposite of secularism is not communalism but theocracy, for secularism is a feature of the State; nation-states can be secular or theocratic. Communalism is a feature of all societies.[…] Identity politics, the principal driver behind the Partition of India in 1947, has only increased since Independence. Rather than placing primacy on the universal rights of individuals, successive governments divided the population into groups and arbitrarily allocated rights to these groups, forcing individuals to self-identify as members of this group or that. By law, a Hindu cannot be a member of the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions (NCMEI). […] While non-Hindu Supreme Court judges or a local district collector can be trusted to judge knotty theological issues pertaining to Hinduism and the government has the power to appoint non-Hindus as trustees of Hindu temple trusts, it considers it fit to explicitly exclude Hindus from a statutory public body such as NCMEI. A shift from identity-based to need-based welfare strikes at the roots of the Nehruvian paradigm. The defining feature of Narendra Modi’s move is that there has been an unambiguous assertion that a poor Brahmin, or a poor Ashraf Muslim, deserves affirmative action while a rich OBC does not.”

6) PANDEMICS WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW

“The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. —Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823), pioneer of the smallpox vaccine, sometimes called the “father of immunology” […] SARS greatly increased international awareness of the danger that respiratory virus infections pose as a potential cause of pandemics, and it caused many countries, particularly China, to put more effort into “notifiable disease” surveillance mechanisms. As will be discussed in greater detail later, it took the Singapore economy about two years to recover from the effects of SARS, and the same was true of Hong Kong and Toronto. Recognizing the problem as early as April 2003, the Singapore government supplied a bailout of over $230 million. A retrospective analysis in 2005 concluded that SARS had cost Singapore $8 billion. That seems a pretty good reason for maintaining both a high level of infectious disease research and first-class public health facilities.”

7) IN SERVICE OF THE REPUBLIC The Art and Science of Economic Policy

“The state has a monopoly of violence. All activities of the state are grounded in coercion: either directly (when the state demands that private persons behave in certain ways) or indirectly (when the state uses threats of violence to collect tax revenues, and then spends them in certain ways). Coercion of private persons is the unique thing that only the state can do. Coercion is an unpleasant thing and can easily go wrong. Building the republic is about creating ethical control systems that contain and channel state violence for the common good. […] The word ‘policy’ is often used loosely in India. The Indian government landscape is littered with documents such as a ‘National Map Policy’. These documents are written by officials in the executive branch. They lack legislative backing. In a constitutional democracy, only the legislature can authorize the coercion of private persons, through laws. What can government do? There is a limited menu of interventions which can be utilized in order to address a market failure. […] There are about 0.1 billion poor people in India, so when a government gives them Rs 100/day, this comes at a cost of Rs 3.65 trillion per year. As with all government activities, there is a state capacity challenge in translating such objectives (disaster relief or a subsidy program) into action. There is quite a management challenge in identifying the 0.1 billion poorest people, and accurately delivering Rs 100 to them every day.”

8) Soul of the Indian (Native American/First Nations People)

“The first missionaries, good men imbued with the narrowness of their age, branded us as pagans and devil-worshipers, and demanded of us that we abjure our false gods before bowing the knee at their sacred altar. They even told us that we were eternally lost, unless we adopted a tangible symbol and professed a particular form of their hydra-headed faith. […] The worship of the “Great Mystery” was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical. He would deem it sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky! He who enrobes Himself in filmy veils of cloud, there on the rim of the visible world where our Great-Grandfather Sun kindles his evening camp-fire, He who rides upon the rigorous wind of the north, or breathes forth His spirit upon aromatic southern airs, whose war-canoe is launched upon majestic rivers and inland seas – He needs no lesser cathedral!”

9) Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment

“I think that it is possible to argue that critical reflection on the inhibiting effect of the defensive function of their contemporary commitment to Islam should lead Muslims to the conclusion that there is a simple but deep philosophical malaise at the heart of it; and that, in turn, should open a path to distinguishing between different aspects of their faith and practice in a way that allows for its internal transformation, and so eventually allows for the conflict they find themselves in to be resolved in favor of a more determined opposition to Islamic absolutism than they have been able to produce so far. What do I mean here by a philosophical malaise? I have already granted that the contemporary reassertion of Islamist sentiment in many countries as well as a good part of the ordinary Muslim’s commitment to Islam is the product of a certain history of subjugation and condescension, which continues today in revised but nevertheless recognizable forms. Why, then, am I not showing the appropriate sympathy toward these defensive stances? It is in answering this question that the specifically abstract character of the malaise is revealed. The answer is that Muslims themselves have taken the wrong attitude to this historical determination of their Islamist sentiments. Their own observation of the role of colonialism and the West in shaping their commitments and identity ought to – but alas, does not – have a strictly limited and circumscribed role in their own self-conception.”

10) ISLAM AND THE FUTURE OF TOLERANCE – A Dialogue

“Nawaz: I choose my words here deliberately. Grievances are not in themselves sufficient to radicalize somebody. They are half the truth. My meaning is best summarized this way:when we in the West failed to intervene in the Bosnian genocide, some Muslims became radicalized; when we did intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq, more Muslims became radicalized; when we failed to intervene in Syria, many more Muslims became radicalized. The grievance narrative that pins the blame on foreign policy is only half the story. It is insufficient as an explanation for radicalization. […] grievances are relevant is in priming young, vulnerable individuals who are experiencing a profound identity crisis to receive ideological dogma through charismatic recruiters. Once that dogma has been received, it frames one’s worldview, the lens through which others are perceived, the vehicle by which others are recruited; Other communities face them as well, but this particular ideological phenomenon has arisen only in certain contexts. For example, people often blame poverty or a lack of education for radicalization, whereas experts have long known that a disproportionate number of terrorists come from highly educated backgrounds.3 So at sixteen I adopted an ideological worldview that froze my sense of grievance and turned it instead into dogma. I then began recruiting heavily for Hizb ut-Tahrir; I bear my fair share of responsibility for promoting the notion of a theocratic caliphate.”

11) DARA SHIKOH Life & Poems

“It has been said that Adam was the first Sufi and Perfect Master (Qutub) and that he was also the first poet as he named everything and so through his ‘Adamic Alphabet’ (see the Hebraic Tongue Restored listed below) all languages were born and so… all poetry. Two of Arabia’s most highly regarded scholars of the poetic form also claim he was the father of the poetic form of the ghazal… the form most used by Sufi and Dervish poets up to the present day). Sufism is said by many Masters and authors to have always existed since Adam as the esoteric side of each faith that has begun by an appearance of that original Perfect Master coming back as the Rasool,Prophet, Messiah, Avatar, Buddha, etc., whatever that Divine One is called. […] Dara was brought to Delhi, placed on a filthy elephant and paraded through the streets of the capital in chains. Dara’s fate was decided by the political threat he posed as a prince popular with the common people – a convocation of nobles and clergy, called by Aurangzeb in response to the perceived danger of insurrection in Delhi, declared him a threat to the public peace and an apostate from Islam. He was murdered by assassins on the night of August 30, 1659. Dara Shikoh is widely renowned as an enlightened paragon of the harmonious coexistence of heterodox traditions on the Indian subcontinent. He was an erudite champion of mystical religious speculation and a poetic diviner of syncretic cultural interaction among people of all faiths. This made him a heretic in the eyes of his orthodox brother and a suspect eccentric in the view of many of the worldly power brokers swarming around the Mughal throne.”

Interesting links and articles I discovered this year:

Sex is real. Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other: https://tinyurl.com/y5tu39df

The Woke and the Un-Woke: https://tinyurl.com/y5yzzo7v

JNU and the historic hoax: https://tinyurl.com/ybflt89r

What would India look like, if states were created based on aerially closest capital city? https://tinyurl.com/y8hk4k9a

The Left is Now the Right: https://tinyurl.com/y68qlev6

Entering the Quagmire of Online Leftism: https://tinyurl.com/y7gzb55q

Which government closely matches your political views? https://tinyurl.com/hxd68ap

Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find Because of the Burden of Knowledge? https://tinyurl.com/yb3gmlkr

Understanding The New York Times’ Anti-Hindu Bias: https://tinyurl.com/y7umzy28

First hint that body’s ‘biological age’ can be reversed: https://tinyurl.com/y3ohgm8b

How much innate knowledge can the genome encode? https://tinyurl.com/ydtt38ed

How the west co-opted Ayurvedic medicine: https://tinyurl.com/yd72vyq8

Ayodhya, The City On The Banks Of Sarayu: https://tinyurl.com/ybffuwe3

Could a heartland VISA help struggling U.S. regions? https://tinyurl.com/y45ycz76

THE BUZZSAW AWARDS 2020 – awards for the worst jargon of 2020: https://tinyurl.com/ychxllc5

What the development of penicillin tells us about developing a coronavirus vaccine: https://tinyurl.com/y9xeeyn3

Rational Ignorance vs. Rational Irrationality: https://tinyurl.com/y8nurbf6

Wreck’s Identification 95 Years After Ship’s Disappearance Puts Theories To Rest: https://tinyurl.com/yagykqhu

Robert Caro Says Chartbeat Is ‘the Worst Thing’ He’s Ever Heard Of: https://tinyurl.com/y95xmpfc

We See Less Even Though We See More: https://tinyurl.com/y95gjw9u

How libraries help people in cold weather: https://tinyurl.com/y976a6nr