Month: February 2023

Hindu supremacists of the diaspora cannot hide behind “model minority” status any more…

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The activators of an ordinance in Seattle just highlighted a powerful path to expose Hindu supremacists worldwide, with the city becoming the first in the US to ban caste-based discrimination.

Oh, what a beautiful day.

This is a welcome move to blow the lid open on the privileged caste diaspora from the Indian subcontinent – the so-called “model minority” of the West. Hindu nationalists will cry foul. The rest of the world should tell them to shove it where the proverbial sun don’t shine. Just as it should with religious nationalists and feudal scum of any ilk.

But for this post, let’s stick with privileged caste Hindus, who overwhelmingly dominate the wealthy Indian diaspora worldwide (apart from dominating the most privileged socioeconomic strata in the subcontinent itself, regardless of religion).

Like any semi-feudal, historically oppressive social setup, those outside the goings-on rarely know how deep the rot is.

Ranks close very tight, you see.

Ask your average diasporic South Asian about caste, and I guarantee you that the level of defensiveness is directly proportional to their privilege in the caste pecking order. If they live in the wealthy western world, especially in a well-paying position, you can bet your bottom dollar they are almost certainly from one of the privileged castes (priestly, princely, business, or landed). You will see them flail around trying to deny caste oppression, minimize it, even defend it. Hell, recently it was discovered that there was deep rooted caste discrimination in companies and projects dominated by Indians…in Silicon friggin Valley. Imagine how bad it might be in the subcontinent?

As a member of one of these privileged castes, I know this only too well from the other side; Even when dealing with seemingly intelligent people. For example, the university I got my masters from had many Indian students who hailed from the vaunted Indian Institutes of Technology. I tried speaking to them about caste oppression and the reservation system that India implemented many decades prior to correct historical injustices. Their takes made me shudder. It was white fragility on steroids emerging from skinny-fat brown bodies who were good at math and, apparently, nothing else. It was so bad that it caused me to break up with someone I was dating at the time and distance myself from former friends. It’s also one of the principle reasons why I avoid the Hindu community here in America. Most of them are just too damn religious and casteist. (Come to think of it, I avoid insular people in general, so this is just par for the course.)

Now, if you happen to run into a Dalit within the diaspora, then you’re going to get the real picture. A picture that might provide a glimpse into the medieval, generational barbarism they are subjected to en masse; A system that Dr. Suraj Yengde, former Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, describes as the “prison of caste” – a prison that can’t be avoided overseas either.

Even liberal Hindus in the subcontinent or diaspora will balk at acknowledging caste oppression. Barring the odd rationalist or progressive, this is a community that is willfully ignorant, refusing any meaningful self-reflection around caste privileges. Those who rock the prevailing order are effectively banished, like yours truly.

Mind you, this is not too dissimilar from imbeciles clinging on to any form of religious nationalism or feudalism in other parts of the world. No one wants to highlight the crap they grew up with because it involves self-reflection. Humans seem fundamentally inclined to be defensive about the social norms they grew up with. This hinders social progress, because covertly or overtly, they ultimately end up defending misogyny, slavery, racism, and child abuse; All found in spades in the religious books that provide codified legitimacy for brutal oppression. From the Manusmriti and Bhagavad Gita to the Quran, Bible, and Torah – we find many modern day humans defending the indefensible in these barbaric books that were written to control feudal peasants.

It’s batshit insane and can’t stop fast enough.

Time to acknowledge luck in our lives…

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Good. Bad. All.

Scale back enough, one realizes luck can be…well, everything really.

Realization of the same provides otherworldly strength.

Removing unnecessary, a priori agency from our experiences helps one heal, liberate, and rationalize the selves.

In ways I/we didn’t think possible.

Helping to focus on nothing but the now.

(*he mulled in cynical – yet pleasurable – acceptance*)

It’s at my weakest that I have hope (and gratitude) for our social species.

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I write this now in the knowledge that my beloved city is going to be engulfed in a winter storm of epic proportions.

Historic, the meteorologists say. The coming weather formation even has a name – the rather benign moniker of ‘Olive’.

Safe to say that Winter Storm Olive gives me hope in our species; And, perhaps more importantly, enormous gratitude for the same.

Gratitude…for society.

To not be grateful for our intricate social organization at times like this feels a little idiotic.

For I am unimaginably grateful right now, for those members of our society who clear the roads, keep the gas & electric on, ensure the food-shelves are stocked, and so much more. Without them, I would not survive very long. (Definitely not now with a badly busted right knee courtesy of an icy sidewalk while walking Molly yesterday.)

Philosophies of the “hardy individual” really wither away when we realize we are so very dependent on society.

Preppers start looking like anxiety-ridden, dangerous morons who just want to die alone, clutching their buckets of apocalypse gruel for final comfort.

All of a sudden, the public services we take so much for granted don’t get berated as “big government”. It’s only when the proverbial shit hits the fan that we realize we need each other.

I’m starting to now understand why the wealthier parts of our current age, like America and Europe, are obsessed with apocalyptic pop culture scenarios focusing on a few (inexplicably good-looking) survivors. It’s equal parts fear and fantasy, spawned from reckoning with generations of self-aggrandizement. Past wealthy nations and empires have all done the same. Having it so good, they have to imagine their own hellscapes.

People, even large groups of people, who have it good in life tend to disavow the communitarian nature of our existence. Hardy individual types can’t get enough grey cells firing together to realize that everything they have or acquire is because of a larger society with mind-boggling human cooperation at various scales.

People who don’t have it as good in life tend to be much more cognizant of our intricately intertwined lives.

To be sure, I’m not dissing individual rights, liberties, or responsibilities. Far from it in fact. I believe those aspects of our social evolution need to be upheld for the precious ways of being that they are; But the very fact that they need upholding ipso facto indicates that society is an equally core part of our being; a collective that the idea of the individual must be necessarily juxtaposed against.

In short – there is no individual without society.

To think otherwise is foolhardy.

(*he quietly muttered to himself as he hobbled away looking for the Ibuprofen and knee brace his long-suffering wife bought for him*)

humanity’s ego needs some tempering…else we risk dying without honor

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While putting away the laundry a few days back, I listened to this pretty famous TED talk by Yuval Noah Harari entitled “Why humans run the world” (link below) – the TLDR of which is, humans run the world because we’re the only species capable of creative, flexible forms of social cooperation and simultaneously in large numbers.

I listened with intent, but with no small degree of antipathy towards the very ontological premise itself.

I mean, sure?

Within an extremely limited space and time, maybe.

I guess one could make the argument that we run the world utilizing these supposed distinctions that separate us from the rest of life on earth.

But we do this only by limiting one’s critical thinking faculties with rank anthropocentrism.

It’s hard to find this speciated thinking any more useful than it’s more abhorrent chauvinisms, such as religion or nationalism. It still reeks of an eerily familiar immortality complex when thinking about our species. This is simply ludicrous considering what we know of our world.

Because, if you scale up in any kind of temporal or spatial measure – even slightly – you’ll find that humans don’t run jack shit. It’s nothing more than mass delusion, something Harari himself tangentially alludes to when rationalizing that we “run the world” by “living in a dual reality” unlike other animals who live in only the one “objective reality.” We live in both, this objective reality and a more mythical one constructed via stories and fiction – needing gods, nations, money etc. to facilitate this flexible mass cooperation.

This attitude makes me feel like the only thing we “run” is an arrogant path to our own extinction in rather humiliating fashion.

We do this rather than carving out a more honorable path, one that is humble. Methinks our species needs to be made acutely self-aware that we are nothing more than temporarily reconfigured stardust in a temporal, spatial universe so large that it is literally impossible for our tiny minds to comprehend.

We’re not immortal.

We just are.

Random and wondrous.

on randomness, pride, and cowardice

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The vast majority of people, I’ve come to realize, are shy about the power of randomness in their lives. Why else would so many be proud about entities that are nothing more than the most random happenstances – like the country, religion or family one just happens to be born or adopted into?

This is likely because most people don’t want to attribute the enormous impact that luck – good or bad – has on their lived experiences. We find it hard to deal with the very limited agency we have over our lives, temporarily reconfigured stardust that we exist as.

A major part of leading a more resilient life is to focus only on what you can control (which is not much) and letting go of what you can’t (which is a lot). To feel pride, or lack thereof, in something as random as the particular social formation one happens to find oneself a part of is self-crippling in that regard.

One can argue about the very merits of pride itself, but then one gets called a curmudgeon.

In fairness (to those who call me a curmudgeon, that is), pride is not as abusive a sin as cowardice, but it’s not too far behind in terms of the damage it can impart. Pride often is the precursor to cowardice. I know it has been for yours truly during the more cowardly moments in my life.

Now, when I speak of cowardice I don’t mean it in the sense of martial fear or lack thereof. For instance, I absolutely don’t think backing out of some stupid fight in order to survive is a cowardly thing to do by any means. On the contrary, I’m of the opinion that martial violence is cowardly, though I have had to engage in fighting myself multiple times in my youth. None of those times felt valorous but rather acts of mere survival. The times that have felt valorous have been when I actually improved myself as a person. The times I’ve felt like a coward is when I fail in this endeavor.

Thus only when I work on myself is there fleeting pride; But fleeting it is, and should be. For we have to reproduce it on a daily basis lest we do something we’re not proud of. (As a parent, I feel this shame every time I lose my temper with my kids.)

A lifelong journey beckons to undo this fear of randomness, this avaricious pride, this ghastly cowardice.

Keep on trucking, we will; For there is nary a choice otherwise.

Doing what needs to be done. Not sweating the small stuff. Reveling in smallness.

Finitude, fear, and meaning.

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Our greatest loves are also the source of our greatest fears.

The finite aspect of our lives fuels our more crippling moments of morbid angst.

Meaning itself – even at our most essential nurturing selves – is fundamentally finite.

That’s a scary thing to comprehend.

Then again…

Isn’t that the point of it all?

Something, anything, in life is meaningful only because it has this brutal limit to it. It is finite. Nothing changes that.

Love is the beautiful tragedy that transforms random life into intentional living.

Fear is how how this manifests on a daily basis for dumb ones like myself.

Methinks it’s time to be ok with being afraid.

Nothing wrong with fear, I’m beginning to realize.

The real problem (for any of us really) is, and always will be, cowardice.