The reaction to such recruitment has ranged from outrage to ambivalence to resignation. But the effect of recruiting felons into the military has not been sufficiently illuminated. The military has been accused of hiding any moral or pragmatic ill effects that may have been precipitated by such large numbers of felons in the military. Incidentally, the evidence of such ill effects and complacency of the military have traditionally been anecdotal.

We may finally be seeing the effect of such “moral waivers”. Recently, a court martial in Washington sentenced a US soldier to 24 years in prison for murdering Afghan civilians with intent.It looks like unlike with Abu Gharib and Iron Triangle murders, the US military has stopped protecting soldiers who commit crimes (while in active duty). While there is no evidence to say that the soldier was a “moral waiver” recruit, I don’t think that matters. As Dr. Stjepan Mestrovic argues in his book Rules of Engagement, certain events, behavior, or tolerance creates a social atmosphere which affects the moral compass to the individuals in that society so that acts that would otherwise been considered immoral or wrong suddenly becomes acceptable, is rationalized, and condoned. The murder of Afghan civilians by US soldiers could well point to the creation of such an unhealthy social environment that has metastasized the soldiers’ moral inclinations and driven them to misanthropic acts that have occurred almost beyond the individual’s volition.

I hope I am wrong. But I seriously doubt it.

After reading this exposition on the issue by Great Bong. I realized that if Park51 were actually an effort by terror-loving organizations, then it’s a master stroke indeed! I find it hard to believe that Soho Properties did not foresee any issues or controversies with announcing a major construction project to benefit Muslims so close to Ground Zero. Knowing the tea baggers, Fox News, Sarah Palin, and their ilk. It is preposterous to claim innocence to not having anticipated such a backlash. So what forced them to proceed ahead with the plan?

Consider this: let some radical Islamic terrorist organization X want to indulge in a negative PR campaign against the US. Specifically, create a propaganda that depicts US as an intolerant nation, thereby denying US its moral high-ground in the so called “war on terror”. All X has to do is create a political catch-22 situation for US by capitalizing on the severely polarized political atmosphere near an election season. The Park51 fits the bill perfectly. The Right and the republican party simply plays into X’s ploy and is vituperative in its opposition to the construction despite having no constitutional or legal basis for doing so, whereas the Left and Libertarians play their part by opposing the Right. The catch-22 here is that if Park51 does not come through, the the US is demonstrated as a bigoted nation with none of the freedoms that it is putatively defending through its “war on terror”: bad PR. On the other hand, if Park51 does come  through, then Islamic organizations like X can claim victory in Islamization of the US (again potentially bad PR if not handled well), which will further enrage the Right to act Islamophobic (definitely bad PR!).

So are the entities responsible for Park51 unfortunate victims of the far Right’s bigotry? It is entirely possible. But are we sure that there not more than what meets the eye here? That’s something to think about.

P.S.: Even if my conspiracy theory was true, IMHO pulling the curtains on Park51 is a far worse proposition then letting it go through and then engaging in a careful discourse and PR campaign to mitigate the damage from the far Right’s Islamophobia.

There are several arguments for why we are not just monkeys. We have the ability to transform our environment; we have an unprecedented level of cognition that has forced us to ask questions like “Why?” and “How?”; we have become the most dominant species on this planet and have established a unique signature on our world (global warming, anyone?); we are capable of generating and propagating information across space and time beyond the confines of an individual, group, or even temporal identity. The list is practically endless. But perhaps the most charming among them is our unique flaws.

Much like any other species, we are indeed flawed in many respects. Yet our intellect, while compensation for many of our flaws, introduces many more. Specifically, consider our cognitive biases which have propelled us into a seemingly unstoppable downward spiral both as individuals and as a species. Everything from the present economic crisis to the quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan can be tied back to these biases. This is often viewed as the burden of intellect, of intelligence. We are too smart for our own good. A plausible argument is that these flaws are symptomatic of the complexity of our environment. Thanks to our intelligence, we have succeeding in creating an environment (being it the stock market, or security backed mortgages, or the concept of nation states, or frameworks for morality and the accompanying dilemmas, or many more) so complex, that we fail to understand it, we fail to comprehend its complexity, and inevitably stretches the limits of cerebral tractability.

Or does it?

Are our cognitive biases really an artefact of the complexity of our environment? This recent TED talk reveals that it might actually not be so! Experiments with monkeys have revealed that monkeys make surprisingly the same rational and (more importantly) irrational decisions as humans when it comes to certain cognitive tasks that involve economic transactions. So may be we really are just monkeys that figured out how to get down from trees, grow an opposable thumb, and speak. A humbling notion indeed!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUd8XA-5HEk

The it-is-how-you-choose-to-interpret-the-term answer to the foregoing question is (1) a cop-out, (2) an unsatisfying response, and (3) exposes an inherent flaw in the nature of the institution. Yes, marriage, much like other institutions created by humans is flawed, and the way I see it, it is flawed in a very interesting way. This flaw was not problematic for a very long time in the human society, but I think the cracks are beginning to widen right about now in the human history. But what do I mean by that? I have given you two (potentially provocative) sentences with no information in them. Although I would like to expand on my conjecture, I cannot do it without proving you with a background on what I view Marriage to be. So this post will focus on my view of the institution of Marriage, and a future post will defend my position that marriage itself is flawed (but not in an irredeemable fashion).

The institution of marriage, in my opinion, has conflated three different, but related, institutions: (1) a personal institution, denoted pMarriage, (2) a social institution, denoted sMarriage, and (3) a legal institution, denoted lMarriage. A lot of the hoopla about the disintegration of Marriage in the society is, I think, because we have not been able to understand how these three institutions interact to maintain Marriage. Let me define these three institutions before proceeding further.

• pMarriage: A personal institution.
  • In general terms, a personal institution is one that exists solely within the confines of the participating individuals. It can be viewed as a personal contract between the two people. pMarriage is a specific form of personal institution that has romantic and/or sexual component in the personal contract to which the participating individuals have affirmed. Note that many marriages carry pMarriage within them; and Marriages in which pMarriage has ceased to exist are often termed ‘loveless’ marriages. These are marriages that are ‘surviving’ on sMarriage (the social institution) and/or lMarriage (the legal institution) alone. Such Marriages are common in societies where divorce carries a social stigma.
  • But can pMarriage exists in isolation? If so, then can it still be called a marriage? The answers are ‘yes’, and ‘no’, respectively. We have many terms to describe pMarriage (in isolation) depending on the specifics of the contract within each instance. Popular examples of pMarriage are couples who are ‘just dating’ (Note that this does not include couples who are in a ‘committed ‘ relationship, because that includes the social institution sMarriage) and ‘friends with benefits‘. The more unpopular examples of pMarriage are extramarital affairs and emotional affairs. Note that in none of the foregoing examples would you consider the individuals ‘married’.
• sMarriage: A social institution.
  • In general terms, a social institution is one that plays a role in maintaining the stability of the society. There is tendency of equate Marriage and sMarriage simply because Marriage is often seen as a social institution with legal support for its perpetuity. sMarriage can be seen as a contract in which the individuals within the marriage (specifically, sMarriage) present themselves, and are seen by other members of the society as, a unified entity. Clearly, many Marriages embed sMarriage within them. But this may not be the case in all Marriages. A classic example of a Marriage devoid of sMarriage is couples who are ‘separated’. Note that couples who are separated often do not have pMarriage between them either (their Marriage is often just the legal institution of lMarriage, and for social purposes they are seen as divorced, but for legal purposes, they are still viewed as being married).
  • Now, can sMarriage exist without pMarriage? It seems very unlikely that individuals in the social institution would not be in a personal institution as well. However, there are cases where this could be true. For example, you could have individuals of opposite sex who are both gay (and still in the closet about it) and marry each other because they are tried of everyone in the family setting them up with ‘potential’ spouses. This placates the families because the families see the sMarriage (in conjunction with the legal institution of lMarriage) as Marriage, and it allows the individuals to pursue their own personal institutions of pMarriage with different individuals. I could give you a more common example of an individual marrying someone due to family pressure while having an affair with someone else, but in this case the status of pMarriage between the married couple is unclear and I’d rather not muddy the waters here. I am trying to get a concept across here, not the nuances.
  • We saw how sMarriage could exist without pMarriage, but in the example I gave, sMarriage was ‘propped’ up by the legal institution of lMarriage. A natural question is: can sMarriage exist in isolation then? I think it could, but I cannot substantiate it with hard evidence. One such situation could be the following: In orthodox and conservative societies, it is plausible for two individuals who are married, to has irreconcilable differences, get a divorce, but for the sake of the children and the extended family (i.e. the social stigma), continue to live together and be a ‘family’. Here is an example (albeit fictitious, at least to my knowledge) where pMarriage and lMarriage (the legal contract of Marriage dissolves with a divorce) no longer exists, but sMarriage continues to thrive in isolation.
• lMarriage: A legal institution.
  • lMarriage, is perhaps, the easiest one to understand. lMarriage is the legal marriage contract signed between two individual that grants them certain rights and responsibilities (unless explicitly forbidden under a prenuptial agreement). Such rights and responsibilities include inheritance, visitation rights, tax exemptions, alimony, entitlement as ‘next of kin‘, and such.
  • lMarriage is often used to recognize Marriage in the contrapositive. That is, you might not be necessarily perceived as ‘married’ if you are in an lMarriage (e.g. you are separated from your spouse), but are defined perceived as ‘NOT married’ if you are NOT in an lMarriage. Needless to say, an individual could be in an lMarriage with some person regardless of whether or not the individual is in a pMarriage or an sMarriage with that same person. In other words, lMarriage could exist in isolation, or in combination with pMarriage and/or sMarriage.

While I admit that I may not be completely accurate in my characterization of Marriage, I think this is yet a useful tool to understanding the institution. However, this does raise many questions. For instance, when you say that you are ‘married’, which institution(s) are you referring to? All three? Only a subset? A more nuanced and difficult question to answer is: when would you consider a marriage to have failed? Often, the success or failure of a marriage is determined solely bases on the integrity of the lMarriage within the Marriage. In fact, this forms the basis for the argument that Indian marriages (often arranged) are more successful than marriages in the west. What about the role of Marriage towards fostering a healthier individual and a healthier society? How successful are today’s marriages in this regard?

On more question to end this post. Has our conflation of multiple institutions into a single institution of Marriage contributed to the continual failure of Marriage as perceived by many [here, here, and here], and if so, then does treating Marriage as a combination of multiple institutions enable it to be adapted and morphed according to changing needs of the society and thereby continue to be successful and relevant?

Last month, we lost 6 Aggies. The second Tuesday of this month, they will be honored in the ceremony of the Silver Taps (a solemn ritual that is to be experienced, not explained). This is the first Silver Taps of the year.

The Aggie college newspaper, The Battalion, decided to run an article paying their tribute to the six deceased Aggies. They talked to the students’ friends, family, and compiled a eulogy of all the six students; or did they? The oddest thing was that each student’s eulogy ran from anywhere between 25 lines to 50 lines, except one. Olanrewaju (Lanre) Olusola Sanu’s eulogy was 2 lines long and it read [link]:

The senior chemical engineering major from Houston died on Aug. 2. The Battalion was unable to reach his family for information to compile a story.

Really?!? You couldn’t find out anything about Lanre. Nothing from friends, nothing from Facebook, nothing from his lecturers and professors? Nothing at all? Not even a photograph! Everyone else had their photographs in the article, except Lanre.

This enraged quite a few Aggies. Some of them complained about this on the comments section of the article on the Battalion website. In response to that, the Editors simple disabled comments on the post. Check it out for yourselves, all other articles on www.thebatt.com have comments enabled except for this one!

I wonder why? Does it have anything to do with the fact that he happens to be the only person of color among the six and has an African sounding name? Maybe its ok not to try too hard to find out more about Lanre, and simply ignore when people protest. Maybe this is what politically-correct racism looks like.

For all of you who think I may be over-reacting to the whole thing, Texas A&M (and the surrounding areas) have history of racism. In the past people have attacked international students, charged higher cover charge for non-whites in bars, and made racist videos and posted them online. In fact, multiple assessments have concluded that Texas A&M practices institutional racism [link1, link2].

The world may be changing, but Aggie Racism marches on!

To the left, is a picture of students of DAV College in Chandigargh protesting St. Valentine’s Day and the public display of affection by, well, people. And to the right is a group of people in Manhattan protesting the war in Iraq.

Do you see any difference between the two? No? In that case, let us move to another example:

To the left is the office of dean in IIT Karaghpur (Please correct me if I am wrong), and to right is the engineering college in Stanford [more here]. Now, do you see what I am getting at? Or did I lose you further?

No, this is not a `US-is-better-than-India’ post, this is beyond that. It is about art and its influence on us. Just look at the pictures in the left column, and pictures in the right column. What you see in the left are the symptoms of the artless, while the right is just a glimpse of how art influences life.

It is unfortunate that we as a society are increasingly distancing ourselves from art. This can be seen in the falling quality of our movies (barring a refreshing few) over the decades. This can be seen in the increasing barbaric nature of our disagreements (from the Bombay riots to Godhara to Nandigram). This can be seen in the state of our public utility buildings (the red streaks for pan and tobacco in every corner). What does all of this have to do with art? Actually, quite a lot!

Art is a means of controlled expression. When you repress or discourage art, you lose the means of control, and its only a matter of time before society finds some means of expression. This new mean, unfortunately, has no control (because if it did, then it would be art). This manifests itself as an abomination which we refer to in different avenues as `movies’, or ‘protests’, or pretty much any form of expression you can think of.

But that’s just the half of it. When you lose art, you are not just losing pretty pictures, or soothing music, you are losing the ability to sympathize, the ability to empathize; you are losing emotion and feeling itself. Its all too common to hear a parent tell their kid “Don’t waste your time drawing pictures, its not going to put bread on the table tomorrow.”, or “What good is your acting going to do when you have struggle for your next morsel? Go pick up your textbooks and concentrate!”. And the child will listen, it will do well in school too, but when it actually comes down to having some happiness in life, the child would rather solve second degree partial differential equations than dance. It’s no joke: we are raising a generation devoid of art, a generation with no sympathy. A generation which sees injustice meted out to people, and yet doesn’t react because it cannot feel sympathy. A generation whose eyes don’t tear up to Taare Zameen Par because they ‘get it’ but they don’t ‘feel it’. A generation which looks puzzled if a stranger smiles at them. A generation which doesn’t understand how to express itself and vents itself through hysterical screams, violent mobs, and arson.

We, as Indians, are already building such a generation. We have taken away most of the playgrounds for high rise apartments and multinational corporations. We have already stifled our children’s creative spark for the rote of the textbooks and the multitude entrance examinations. We are replacing the people in our children’s lives with TVs, Computers, and a set of spare keys to the empty house.

There is only so much further down you can go before you hit rock bottom. What good is all the wealth in the world if you can’t shed a tear for it?

Fact: India is fast becoming the global epicenter for AIDS. Fact: HIV is sexually transmitted. Fact: India has a population exceeding 1 Billion. Fact: The rise is India’s population is due to lack to awareness about sex and family planning.

This simply means that an effective sex education component is essential to any solution that attempts to address the issue of population and the AIDS epidemic. But this component has now been rendered ineffective due to the dilution of the content in the proposed sex education manual.
For instance, they “deleted all images and learning modules that states had found too explicit and too graphic”, use of the phrase “sexual intercourse” has been drastically reduced, the flip charts used to explain about HIV/AIDS has been omitted because it was found to be culturally insensitive, and so on.

What surprises me is that no one bothered to ask the question: “What will this manual achieve?” One of biggest reasons for spread of HIV/AIDS is unprotected sex. If there is no focus on sex itself, then what good is this manual? Of course, lets not even talk about homosexuality. The manual cannot contain anything about homosexuality because Indians can never be gay. So much for trying to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS! Whether you like it or not, there is an increasing trend of younger people experimenting with sex, and even being promiscuous. This is trend is not going to change by simply wishing it. The effort has to be to educate the younger crowd about it. Bring the issue out in the open, and teach them to be responsible about it. But, of course, it is culturally insensitive to talk about sex. And so, what we have is a ticking time bomb in our hands.

There are many reasons why India needs an effective sex education programme. Yes, it will mean breaking tradition, it will mean forcing people out of their comfort zone, it will mean confronting some less than desirable truths about your children and your society. But if we do not do it now, we may never be able to! It has taken a lot of lobbying and effort to get the green signal for an sex ed. program. We now have a great opportunity at getting it right the first time. Making amendments later will be very difficult. I am afraid, that by the time the society realizes its folly, it may be too late.

Morality vs. Legality

The corner stone of Narayanan’s argument is the following: “The point is that drug consumption is NOT right”, and hence has to be illegal. My understanding of the argument is that recreational drugs are immoral, and hence have to be illegal, regardless of unfavorable economics. While that line of reasoning sound, its application for this case, in my opinion, is not. I question the premise that recreational drugs is immoral. I do not base this on the victimless crime argument, nor on the personal freedom argument. It is based on something entirely different.

During world war II, American farmers were encouraged to grow hemp for the war, and after world-war hemp was banned because it has the same psychoactive ingredient as marijuana (a fact which was known for a long time). So growing hemp was legal (and moral) before the end of world war II, and after it was made illegal, it has suddenly become immoral. This is just one example of how (im)morality of drugs actually follows its (il)legality, and is not the other way ’round.

Going back Narayanan’s post, it can be argued that drugs are considered ‘NOT right’ simply because they have been made illegal. That also explains why Hindu have been sadhus using marijuana for hundreds of years now, and that hasn’t been considered immoral (until now). In fact, the same argument holds for practices like sati. Up until the time sati was banned, only a minority considered it immoral. After it was banned, the immorality of sati was a universal opinion. So this opens up the possibility that legalizing drugs might make its use moral after all.

All drugs are not the same

Another argument Narayanan makes is that drugs are more injurious (than cigarette and alcohol), and hence should be illegal. The critical failure in this argument is that all recreation drugs are assumes to be equally harmful, and hence should be made illegal. Unfortunately, its far from the truth. Recreational drugs can be loosely categorized as hard drugs, and soft drugs. In general terms (at the risk of oversimplification), hard drugs are more harmful than soft drugs. In fact, soft drugs like Marijuana, Hashish, and opiates were found to be less harmful than cigarettes and alcohol. Even surprising that coffee was found to be more addictive than marijuana, hashish, and psychoactive mushrooms! So the argument that drugs all bad just doesn’t hold water. If we talking about hard drugs, then its a different debate altogether (so lets not go there, not in this post).

Economic Viability

Narayanan makes an argument that the economic viability of drug laws cannot be a reason for legalizing it. A legitimate statement, but a misapplied argument. This argument was supposed to be a rebuttal of Jug Suraiya’s argument that drugs are not a moral issue, but an economic issue. But Jug Suraiya’s point was that recreational drugs are illegal (despite its widespread use) is that the large demand for drugs has driven the trade into the hands of underworld mafia. The nexus among law enforcement personnel, politicians, and mafia makes it profitable for law enforcement and law making officials to maintain the status quo of criminalizing drugs. Note the subtlety in the argument. The argument does NOT say that drugs should be legalized because it is too expensive to enforce existing laws and that there is money to be paid. The argument is that the reason why drugs are still illegal is that law enforcement agencies and law makers have a lot to gain (economically) by keeping drugs illegal. An entirely different argument which hasn’t been rebutted at all!

So from what I can make of it, Narayanan’s arguments are more an attempt at justifying one’s prejudice against drugs, and not than an exercise in interrogating Jug Suraiya’s arguments.

One of the rights the US prides itself upon is freedom, the first amendment, right to free speech. Something we sorely lack, and often even fail to recognize in India. I didn’t feel the pinch until I read about how Taslima Nasreen was treated in India. What happened? India was supposed to be bastion of freedom for people around the sub-continent. We provided asylum for people like Dalai Lama and Taslima Nasreen. But now we seemed to have turned our backs on the very people we promised to protect.

Taslima Nasreen was forced out of India, and for what? Expression herself? For writing a book? For choosing to say ‘hey, lets stop and think about what we are doing’? What was her crime? I guess she wrote the wrong kind of book. Maybe, if she had written about the demise of the Mumbai thanks to those malignant north Indians, she would have been allowed to stay. Or maybe if she had written about how Tibetians are a terrorist organization undermining China’s sovereignty, she would have been received with open arms in New Delhi. Or maybe if she had written about M.F.Hussain’s attack on Hinduism for $1.6M, she would received an honorary ‘Hindu’ title. After all, isn’t that what free speech is about?

And here I was admonishing the US for all of its wrongdoings. As I wake up and smell of the coffee, I hang my head in shame.