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!

Halloween is the Christianized bastardization of the wonderful Celtic harvest festival called Samhain. One of the more relatively recent bastardization is called ‘Trick-or-treating’ (it started circa 1930s). Trick-or-treating typically involves children going from house to house asking for candy with the question ‘Trick or treat?’ (Leaving all the pedophiles salivating in the process). The ‘treat’ part being a ritualized begging for candy, and the ‘trick’ part referring to the threat of playing a trick on the owner of house, or on the property itself.

So yeah, we have trick-or-treating during Halloween. There is a name for this whole process of asking for candy or threatening with not-so-pleasant consequences – back where I come from, its called Extortion.

Coming back to my original claim, have you noticed how US likes to talk to other nations? — “Give us your oil, or we’ll invade you country under a false pretext”, “Surrender you nuclear technology to us, only we should have nuclear weapons, not you. Or else, we’ll impose sanctions on you”, “Remove your subsidies agriculture (but we’ll keep ours) so that we can dump our surplus in your market, or else we will ban import of your goods into the US”, and so on.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like trick-or-treat to me! Like I said, Bush, Cheny,and co. must have loved trick-or-treating during Halloween, coz’ they are doing it with the rest of the world today; only this time thousands end up dying for their (Bush and Cheny’s) amusement.

Consider the beauty ideal from any time, at any place, in any civilization. It is not hard to notice that the most affluent people (historical or fictional) at that time and place were considered to be beautiful. Be it Helen of Troy, or Nefertiti of Egypt, or Desdemona in Othello, Sita in Ramayana etc. This correlation, IMHO is not coincidental. In fact, I think its causal; the physical characteristics and appearance that denote affluence (and/or power) become the beauty ideal of that age and place.

Lets consider a few examples to illustrate my assertion:

Europe – Middle Ages

In the middle ages, in Europe, the gender roles were rigid and strict among the affluent. Men were supposed to be the knightly type, and the women, the homely type. The women therefore, seldom went out in hot sun. They almost never exerted themselves physically. Most of the work around the house was done by the orderlies. Consequently, the women were pale, physically weaker than men, delicate in the way they carried themselves to accentuate that perception of weakness, demure in their behavior towards men (acknowledging/submitting to superiority of the man), and so on. Interestingly, those features are actually a good description of the feminine beauty ideal of those times.

America – The 50s

The America in the 50s was a booming place. They had just won the war, and the economy was busting at the seams. Everyone was happy, and the money was flowing. The affluent got their hands on most of the money while a tiny trickle went down to the rest of the society (the middle class was a very thin social class). The affluent had all the money to buy food, healthy and lots of it. They didn’t have travel far to get anything, others did it for them. On the other hand, the poor had to fight for a decent meal, and had to walk quite some distances. Consequently, the poor looked thin and frail, and sun-tanned for most part. The affluent women on the other hand had little tan (because they didn’t need to go out in the sun), and were ‘pudgy’ by today’s standards; a sign of good healthy food: hence affluence). Not surprisingly, this was the feminine beauty ideal personified by Marylin Monroe. In today’s scales, Monroe would be considered ‘fat’ in the fashion industry.

America – 21st century

The economic boom in the second half of 20th century made basic living expenses affordable in America. Importantly, food become ridiculously cheap with the influx of fast food into America. Fast food was the cheapest food you could get, and was hence the poor man stable diet. Fast food, unfortunately, has this side-effect of being high in Sodium, MSG, and hydrogenated, saturated fat. Not exactly the healthiest, but filling nevertheless. Thus came about the obesity epidemic in the US. The rich and affluent, however, didn’t have to eat the unhealthy fast food. They would afford healthy food, and so long as they maintained a healthy life style, their weren’t likely to grow obese.

The trend was reversed. The poor were no longer thin and frail, and the rich no longer on the heavier side. Interestingly, the beauty ideal for this time was thin, almost anorexic. Coincidence? I think not!

Independent India in the 20th century

India struggled for post part of the second half of the 20th century. After independence, the power structures that were established by the British were left intact as the model of governance for independent India. The people who replaced the British personnel in the various positions in this power structure were the educated elite. Since pre-independent India did not have an education system to speak of, all of the educated elite were educated in Briton. Due to their education background, they replicated the British value system back in India. Therefore, people being served by the power structure actually saw little change in the value system before, and after independence. Consequently, the perception that the Europeans were superior (and the affluent) which was established in colonial India, was propagated in independent India through the replication of the value system imbibed by the educated elite who operated the traditional power structure.

Consequently, the perception of Europeans being superior or affluent never really faded away. The economic acceleration of the west, coupled with the crippling poverty of India did not help change the perception. Consequently, the Europeans were the rich and the affluent. Power and affluence was associated with white skin, with fair skin.

This, in fact, can explain the Indians’ obsession with fair skin that has bled into the 21st century.

I understand that the illustrations I have elucidated above are indicative at best, and inadequate to draw a strong conclusion. But it does support my hypothesis that the beauty ideal is defined based on the lifestyle and appearance of the people who inhabit the higher rungs on the social ladder.

The statement on the website says:

Zeitgeist was created as a non-profit filmiac expression to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the population at large think they are. The information in Zeitgeist was established over a year long period of research and the current Source page on this site lists the basic sources used / referenced. Soon, an Interactive Transcript will be online with detailed footnotes and links so exact sources and further research can be relayed.

…

Here’s the movie for your viewing. Note that the movie is 2 hours long, so make sure you have enough time to watch it. But I guarantee that you will have strong opinions about it one way or the other.
Don’t forget to check out the Clarifications (which dented my confidence in the authenticity of the ‘facts’ in the movie), and the Sources sections.

Without further ado, here’s the movie :)

We need to take steps to eliminate poverty, there is no two ways about it. But the question is, what exactly does it mean to eliminate poverty? If we were to take all the money from the wealthiest and give it to the poor, would we have succeeded in the mission? Is elimination of poverty the same as more money to the poor? I think not. It goes much beyond that. We are talking about establishment of a system that ensures the economic independence of the poor, and a sustainance, if not promotion, of their socio-economic position. That makes the whole Robin Hood sytle scheme of wealth distribution a sure recipe for disaster.

I am not saying that aid doesnt help. It most definitely does, but it is not a solution in itself. This is obvious from the fact that despite heavy aid being given to nations in africa and other third world countries, world poverty continues to be a major concern. One of the primary reason for this the reliance on the top-down style of aid distribution. Money is poured into the institutions at the highest level and mechanisms have been developed to let those funds trickle down to the poor and needy. This, obviously, hasnt worked well. There are a many reasons why it hasnt. One being that of corruption, another being that of inaccurate economic models that world well on macro scale but when scaled to microlevels, it simply breaks down and doesnt deliver.

One of the solutions to the problem of diminishing retruns down the bureaucratic model is to start from the bottom itself, i.e. instead of channeling money through large upper level financial institutions, setup shops to deliver the money to the end recipients themselves and eliminate the middleman. Microcredit has been one of the most successful efforts in this direction.

The most amazing thing about microcredit is that it has historically seen one of the highest repayment rates by any standards. Microcredit, as the term implies, involves giving very small amounts of money as loans to the poor and unemployed who are refused loans by the established financial institutions because they are considered ‘unbankable’. These loans are used to generate self-employment and income. Theoretically, this income is to be used to repay the loan; the repayment risk is coupled with the failure rick of the self-employment itself. In order to ensure repayment, the microcredit bank forms ‘solidarity groups’; they are small informal groups (mostly of women from the same village) who meet with the bank representatives weekly to conduct business. Each group takes collective reponsibility for loan repayment that distributes the risk over more than one individual and has resulted in a very high repayment rate.

This finance model has been deployed sucessfully in rural india and has benefitted immensely from this scheme. One of the most widespread microfinancial institution in India, SKS, has till date provided over Rs. 240 crores ($52M) to over 220,000 women in the indian villages with a repayment rate of over 98%.

There is a reason why most of the microcredit schemes have mostly women as clients. The reason simply is that women are better at repaying their loans, and given the women an opportunity is the same as giving the entire family an opportunity. Especially in rural India, among the poor, the man of the household spends all of the money on liquor and gambling. It is exact opposite with the women. Women have been known to be more responsible and utilize the money to give their families a better life and create more opportunities.

One of the expectations of the microcredit scheme was to see the businesses created by the women to grow as their experience and income increase. But in most the places in rural India, this hasnt happened. It was seen that women use the microcredit given to them to start a sucessful busniness and take more loans to expand the business, but only to a certain extend. After that, they continued to borrow money from the microfinancial institution, but used the money to provide a better education for their children. In almost all the areas in India, this has been a consistent tendancy. All the women strive to provide the best education they can afford to their children. It was a side-effect that wasnt expected when the scheme was first introduced, but seems to have achieved a goal higher than expected. Microcredit was designed to alleviate the poor from poverty through opportunity, but it has inadvertedly provided a platform for the poor to empower their future generations in a manner that will provide them with more opportunites than could have been possible otherwise.

Its amazing how far a little help can go. To use the cliched expression, ‘ Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he’ll eat for ever’

The question resurfaced again, ‘Why was Gandhi not given the nobel peace prize?’. I did some searching, research, digging around and what I came up with surprised me! I am not sure how much of what I say is going to be news to you, but I think its something worth sharing, and so I will.

As a matter of fact Gandhi was nominated for the prize five times, in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and, finally, a few days before he was murdered in January 1948. The Nobel Foundation has recently made public some of the details surrounding Gandhi’s case for a Peace Nobel.

In 1937, Gandhi was nominated for the first time by “Friends of India” association. The committee advisor was, however, exteremly critical of Gandhi. In his evaluate he said…

“He is undoubtedly a good, noble and ascetic person – a prominent man who is deservedly honoured and loved by the masses of India…(But) sharp turns in his policies, which can hardly be satisfactorily explained by his followers. He is a freedom fighter and a dictator, an idealist and a nationalist. He is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician,”

Gandhi was nominated for the next two years but was denied the award each time. The critics blamed Gandhi for the bouts of violence is his non-violent movement for independance (all they wanted as an excuse anyway). And there have been charges of the British government having put pressure on the Norwegian goverenment. Das, in his book ‘Why the Nobel Peace Prize never went to Gandhiji’ says “Britain was highly perturbed when it learned that the doughty naked fakir was being considered for the prize. If he did get it, it would have meant severe political repercussions in Britain’s colonies.” and goes on to say “British government officials silently castigated the European zeal to award the peace prize to Gandhiji and termed their vigorous attempts as an over reaction to Nazism.” Although there is no factual evidence to back this claim, it is still plausible.

The next time Gandhi was nominated was in 1947. With the independance of India and Gandhi’s pivotal role in it, there was no opposition or criticism to his candidature. However, due to the communal riots, the slaughter and lawlessness thanks to the partition and the movement of indian troops in Kashmir (a move condoned by Gandhi) , he committee may have deemed it inappropriate to award the nobel peace prize to anyone in the subcontinent. Interestingly, The Times reported “Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimise it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. No one wanted war, but he could never advise anyone to put up with injustice. If all Hindus were annihilated for a just cause he would not mind. If there was war, the Hindus in Pakistan could not be fifth columnists. If their loyalty lay not with Pakistan they should leave it. Similarly Muslims whose loyalty was with Pakistan should not stay in the Indian Union.”

The last time he was nominated was in 1948, but Gandhi was assassinated two days before the nominations closed. Nobody had ever been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. But according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation in force at that time, the Nobel Prizes could, under certain circumstances, be awarded posthumously. However, Gandhi did not belong to an organisation, he left no property behind and no will; so the question was ‘Who should receive the prize money?’ After much deliberation On November 18, 1948, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to make no award that year on the grounds that “there was no suitable living candidate”.

In my personal opinion, Gandhi was too good for the prize. He never really cared for any accolades anyway. Awarding him the nobel peace prize would devalue his contributions and his impact on humanity. The best we can do is admire him. He will always be beyond our appreciation.

Fortunately for me, I am a computer science student, and I have the technical background to take a crack at this question. I know, a student of philsophy would be better equipped than I am, but when you are dealing with computational theory the lines get blurred, exteremly blurred. One of the assistant professors in computer science did his bachelors in philosophy and while pursuing his masters, specialized logic and stumbled upon computer science, going on to do a PhD in it. One of the best teachers I have taken a course under.

What is logic? Unfortunately we enounter a stumbling block at the very begining here. There no universally accepted definition for logic. The most general one I could come across was in MSN Encarta. It says “Logic is a science dealing with the principles of valid reasoning and argument. The study of logic is the effort to determine the conditions under which one is justified in passing from given statements, called premises, to a conclusion that is claimed to follow from them.” This is a fairly generic definition that includes most, but not all, of what logic is. This also gives me enough ammo to attack it with.

Traditionally, logic is bivariate. That is to say that there can be only two values to a statement, viz., ‘true’ and ‘false’. Logic also says all that is not false is true. It works well when you are dealing with the limited universe as defined by your premises. But the real question is, how valid can this be in reality? Not very. Consider the statement ‘It will rain tomorrow’, is it true? It is possible, but we cannot say it is true. This is not allowed in traditional logic. A statment can either be true or false, nothing else. How are we to try and understand the world, the natural, the supernatural or the divine with something as limited as this?

Granted, that we can do better than this. We do have multi-valued logic systems. But they fail too. They cant take you very far without stumbling on the rules that they created themselves. To illustrate one such example with bivariate logic, consider the statement ‘This statement is false’. Its simply a statement talking about itself. Can we assign a truth value to it? Just try and you will realize that it is not possible. You will run into contradictions either way. How useful is a tool that isnt powerful enough to talk about itself?

One might argue that is indeed the nature of all tools and intelligence. We havent been able to figure out how our own brain works, and logic is an invention of man, how can u expect logic to be able to explain itself? Going by that argument, our quest for Truth is an excercise in futility because the Truth is much bigger and more profound that ourselves, and if we arent powerful enough to understand how we work, then how can we be expected to understand Truth?

Going back to the definition, logic as a system can be employed only under the existance of premises, i.e., statements that are assumed to be true. In mathematics, they are refered to as axioms. What if we dont have any assumptions? What we seek is the ultimate truth, the truth above and beyond all truth. We wish to gain the knowledge that will explain the universe we live in, starting from nothing, void, no assumptions. Call it what you wish, enlightenment, nirvana, Truth, God. You choice of the name is your choice of the path that you wish to follow to get to the destination. How do you employ logic here? It isnt even valid anymore.

The natural question to ask is, how does logic work so well for science, if it fails miserably trying to explain nature? After all, isnt science a quest for understanding nature? Logic does remarkably well for science and engineering simply because the language and universe of science and engineering is mathematics. It is a severly limited universe, and one invented by man. My math professor said it best when he explained “What are numbers? Numbers are things you do arthmetic with. What is arthmetic? Arthmetic is what you do with numbers.” That’s how math starts off. Those are its assumptions – existance of numbers and arthmetic.

This makes me question science as a tool to understanding the unverse. It is such an adhoc, weak and approximate means. It isnt even consistent with itself. In fact Godel, one of the most influential logicians of the twentieth century, proved that any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe integer arithmetic will allow for “true” propositions about integers that can not be proven from the axioms. So science cannot be right about things simply because the logic system that it relies on is not consistent, is flawed. Science was always a quest for explainations, never the truth anyway.

I use the term ‘organized religion’ in the same tenor as ‘organized crime’. There is simply too much similarity in the way they operate for me to ignore it. Although, there’s where the comparision ends. Organized religion has a well defined purpose like organised crime. Organized crime wants to control was much area/domain as possible, and make as much money as it can, dodging authority and/or greasing its’ palm. Organized religion wants to spread its dominion in the community to the extend possible, and control as much of the people as possible through the vicious circle of ‘sin and repentance’, dodging reasoning, rationality and pursuit of true knowledge.

I have clarify at this point that I make a very clear distinction between god and religion. I guess I’ll write up a post on god sometime in the future, but for now its about religion.

If I were god (as most of the organized religions define god), then I’d make the world as a perfect place simply because its easier to manage and wonderful place to be, for your kids (i.e. humans) to live and die. Unless, of course, I want to raise the bar, I want a challenge. Since I am god, the all-powerful, nothing could be challenging, so I wouldnt really gain anything by creating an imperfect world and then getting a high out of managing it. Which means that I actually created a perfect world, but imprefection crept into it, thanks to the devil (garden of eden and the serpent). If I am god, and I created eveything, then I must have created devil as well… so devil should be perfect as well, and completely controllable by god, but obviously the devil isnt.. so there is some disconnect there. Even if it wasnt the devil, imperfection still crept in, like entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. But god should be able to set all that right.. after all he is god! At this point logic fails. So what’s really going on? I believe that this inherent inconsistency is because of the way religion conceptualizes god. I believe that the god that people know from religion is a far cry from truth, more on that in some future post :)

Lets consider the concept of sin. The 10 commandments. Were we so stupid that it took god to tell us what we need to do for a stable society? Any bloke will tell you that if you are busy murdering others, sleeping with ppl indiscriminately, stealing other people’s property etc. it will take no time for the society to disintegrate into anarchy! So to safeguard the interests of the people, some of the smarter folks came up with certain ‘rules’.

These ‘rules’ were written and passed on from generation to generation, and the keepers of the rules ensured that there was peace and stability in the society. At one point the keepers of the rules kinda realized that if everyone is following the rules, then the keepers arent really needed, and so they wont be as important as they’d like to be, after all they were the ones who historically controlled and stablized the community, they were under the threat of obselence! So they needed something else, something that was more powerful than human, an all-seeing, all-powerful entity. God was the ideal candidate, and so they chose god as the ultimate guardian. The best way to control people was to keep them under constant fear, and threat, almost Orwellian. So they went ahead and made all the most basic and natural human instincts a sin, including birth itself (the original sin)! The only way out for the people is thru the keepers themselves… that way they retain control. And that is the ultimate goal of any organized religion, control the society.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, there are people who have received enlightenment, who have genuinely figured out what it takes to lead a righteous and fulfilling life, and are sharing it with other people. When the man, in flesh and blood, perished, his idea lingered, and was the ideal platform for the keepers to comandeer his teachings and manipulate it to their end.

Every religion starts off with the best intensions and teachings, but will invariably degrade into a tool of mass control. It cannot be helped, its in the very nature of nature. Entropy of the world is always increasing….

They walk up to me and ask me if I would be interested in a ‘spritual’ survey. All my doubts were dispelled at that moment, and I said to myself ‘Boys, get ready to sit around for a long time. I have over an hour and half at my disposal I couldnt have asked for better entertainment’. They start with some harmless questions like do you believe in god, are u religious etc. But I knew it was coming, and so I waited. One of them asked me ‘Do you believe in Christ?’ I knew the gun was fired, and the kids were amatures. This was going to be a fun hour.

Kids: ‘Are u a christian?’
Me: ‘No’
Kids: ‘Have you read the bible?’
Me: ‘Yes’
Kids: ‘I really respect you for having read the bible, even though you are not christian.’
Me: ‘I have read hindu, buddist, and some Baha’i scriptures as well. Have you?’
Kids, slightly confused: ‘uhhh… no. We have read the bible’
Kids: ‘Do you think Jesus Christ was sent by god?’
Me: ‘Yes, just like Moses, Abraham, Mohammad Prophet, Buddha, Bahaulla and many others’
This was definitely not going the way they expected it to. They try a different approach.
Kids: ‘Do you think bible is the word of god?’
Me: ‘Yes’
Kids: ‘What do you think it really means when Jesus says ‘I am god’ in the bible?’
Me: ‘It simply means that what he has to say are words of god, and not his as a human in flesh and blood.’
Kids: ‘So you dont think he is god?’
Me: ‘Its metaphorical, a lot of bible is. They are not to be taken literally.’

They were stumped at this point. I dont think it had ever occured to them that a lot of what is written in a scripture could be more than that meets the eye, and that it could carry a meaning other than the obvious. I had the luxury of having read Joseph Campbell. This was an uneven match. I guess the kids were even feeling intimidated by my rebuttal, so they decided to go for the juglar and fight it out… it was bad move.

Kids: ‘Let us tell you what we believe in. We believe that bible is the word of god, and Jesus Christ is god himself. The only way to heaven is through him, and no one else, no other religion’
I raised my eye brows.
Me: ‘Are you telling me that anyone who does follow christianity will go to hell?’
Kids: ‘Yes. We believe that christ in the only true god, and all other religions are misguiding’

That was it. This was not something I was going to tolerate. I have no qualms with people preaching their religion or their ideology, but to call other religions a sham, deceit is where I draw the line. No more defensive arguments. I went on the offensive.

Me: ‘Why so? What does bible say about it?’
Kids: ‘Jesus says that there will be people after him who will claim to be prophets, but we shouldnt be misled by them.’
Me: ‘True enough, but does he say anyone and everyone who claims to bring the word of god is fake? Or did he mean that there may be many heretics that one should be wary of?’

They are stumped again. Obviously they havent really tried to understand the bible, I almost feel sorry for them. Ego is a funny thing, it doesnt let you give in even when you know you have lost. They try to keep the fight, feebly so.

Kids: ‘Other religions like Islam are in direct conflict with Christianity. One cant be both.’

They fell straight into the trap. This was too easy.

Me: ‘Have u read Quoran?’
Kids: ‘No’
Me: ‘Then how can you denounce someting that u havent read, and how can you claim that it is in direct conflict with christianity?’
The kids then went on about how Mohammad’s life was mostly militaristic whereas jesus was all abt peace and preached the path of non violence and so on. This was check and mate.
Me: ‘Going by your arguement, the very people who protect you liberty, the american soldiers who are risking their life in Iraq are not following christianity, and so will have to go to hell. Does your religion abandon its own soldiers to damnation?’

They didnt expect this sort of attack, and were in way armed to defend it.

Kids: ‘It depends on the situation…’
Me: ‘Exactly… why is it so hard to believe that the situation Mohammad lived in, warrented one?’

Kids: ‘But look at osama bin laden…’
Me: ‘Look at the spanish inquisition’

It was game over. They knew it.
Kids: ‘I guess we dissagree on this one. Let us just tell you what we think. It is no way to say that you are wrong’
Me: ‘I think you have already told me what you think. Is there anything more?’
They kids said something more abt christianity and jesus being god and stuff, thanked me for their time and left.

There was also an argument about christianity being the sole truth, and I was arguing abt equality of religions and incompleteness of each of them in isolation and stuff, but I dont remember where they fit in the excerpt above.

I cant help but feel sorry for the kids. Illusion of enlightenment in their ignorance.