A Boy’s Favorite Iron Horses

The domain of transportation often introduces us to dramatic, otherworldly creatures: the precision engineered soaring airliner, the majestic ship cleaving through oceans, the sleek automobile whizzing down highways. The steam locomotive was one of its most distinguished representatives; it quickly became, across country and culture and time, the vehicle–no pun intended–for a very particular romantic notion of travel.

And no aspect of that romance was more vivid than the first glimpse of the awesome, clanking, fire and brimstone behemoth, its pistons furiously pumping away, the hiss and sizzle of the steam it emanated from its every pore, the roaring flames of the combustion chamber, the grimy, soot-covered engine-men, the piercing whistle. A steam locomotive pulling into a station with a full load of passenger coaches, blasting through a countryside trailing a plume of smoke, taking a turn, or best of all, slowly, irresistibly grinding into motion, were all memorable sights that brought together power and beauty. A young boy, when confronted with such visions, could offer no resistance; his soul was putty.

The most common railroad journey in my childhood–that to my grandfather’s home in Central India– tracked the displacement of the steam locomotive quite well.  When my family began undertaking it, we caught the Upper India Express from New Delhi, a coach from which was attached to the Bombay Mail at Allahabad. The Mail then took us to our final destination. At first, a steam locomotive powered the entire trip. Later, a diesel locomotive took over for part of the journey. Still later, when portions of the railway lines had been electrified, an electric locomotive took over partway. That line is now fully electrified. The changes sometimes took place at night, sometimes at day, but I could feel the difference in the way the train first moved out of the station – the acceleration of the engines was quite distinct. At night, lying in my berth, still awake, I could hear the difference in the whistles.

When a train journey in the days of the steam locomotive was over, and I had reached my destination, one of my first tasks was to shower and wash my hair; the soot blowing back from the locomotive had swept in through the open windows of my coach and come to rest on my scalp. That washing out, that cleansing, was tinged with disappointment, not relief; it signaled the end of not just a holiday but a journey as well. And that is always cause for a peculiar melancholia all its own.

Note: The Wikipedia entry for steam locomotives has a disappointingly short section on their use in India:

In India, steam locomotives were built as late as 1972 and in use until 2000; they were replaced by a combination of diesel and electric locomotives. A steam locomotive celebration run was organised between Thane and Mumbai to commemorate the 150th year of railways in India.

The brevity of the passage above is partially compensated for by its seeming accuracy. Even though, as Wikipedia notes, worldwide, steam locomotives were, from ‘the early 1900s…gradually superseded by electric and diesel locomotives‘, in India, they were still being used extensively much later; I think the last time I might have seen a steam locomotive in action would have been in the mid-eighties.

Crossfit and the Military: A Way Forward

As a long-time member of Crossfit South Brooklyn, I have blogged here on Crossfit-related issues before (posts on Crossfit and the military, Crossfit and women, and of course, some training notes on weightlifting.) I’m not done yet writing about Crossfit, especially when it comes to issues of inclusiveness. On that note, I’m glad to welcome a guest post by Noah Barth, also a fellow Crossfitter, who has written a thoughtful post on the vexed relationship between Crossfit and military culture, a topic which I discussed–a while ago–in one of my most-read and discussed posts.

Noah offers a critique of Crossfit-military ties and goes on to suggest a possibly new orientation and focus for the community at large. It is his hope that by writing this post, he can spark a broader discussion about Crossfit–its past, present,and future.

Without further ado, here is Noah:

Continue reading “Crossfit and the Military: A Way Forward”

Concert at the Corner

The boy with the violin case came around the corner. On time, as always.  Head bowed, feet dragging on the sidewalk, the case drooping by his side, as always. He approached A__’s gang, scattered on the sidewalk, oblivious to their presence.

Till A__ spoke.

‘Hey!’

The boy looked up, alarm running through his body quickly and efficiently, flushing his cheeks and warming his ears, bringing him to attention. He had dreaded this confrontation, accepting its inevitability, and yet was no less stricken by fear when it finally arrived.

“What’s in that case?”

“My violin.”

“Yeah? What’s it for?”

“I play music on it’.

“Yeah. Well, play it for us, maestro. Let’s see what you got.”

It wasn’t an invitation to play; it was a message indicating the penalties for refusing to play. An elementary inference.

The boy picked up the violin. Lessons for the day had ended a while ago; his performances hadn’t. And his taskmaster in the chambers he had left behind was, despite his gruffness, brusqueness and peremptory commands, an infinitely less demanding audience than this one.

He began to play, drawing the bow across the violin’s strings. He always wrapped himself around the strange new beast–violin plus bow–that emerged when horsehairs made contact with catgut, but today, he held on to its familiar shape just a little tighter. As if it could protect him from the beating that lay close by in his future.

He picked the longest composition he knew, the Spring Sonata that would go on and on for twenty-two minutes. He’d enjoy them while it lasted.

The notes rang out clearly and sharply; they moved down the street and around it; they floated up around the gang’s ears.

They reached A__ too. He had heard violins before. He had heard their sound. Sometimes his uncle, his mother’s brother, who lived crosstown and visited for dinner when his father didn’t mind, played the violin as accompaniment to a meal he had finished quicker than the others.

The sound was familiar but still novel. At home, his uncle often played over the sounds of dinner: plates and spoons clanking, babies crying, men shouting, women chattering. At home, the violin was background music, just one more component of an inchoate sound that filled their home in the evenings. It was never allowed to stand out, always relegated to a humble plebeian standing.

This was different.

A__’s gang stood on the street corner, not moving. The maestro stood next to them, playing, not daring to look up. Eye contact might break the spell, might dispel the mood. It was not a chance he was willing to take.

A__ was motionless. He wanted the music to stop. He wanted to get on with the rest of the act: the smashing of the violin on the sidewalk, the flinging of the bow across the street, the punch in the face and the kick in the pants that would propel that little whiner home.

He remained motionless.

The sonata ran out. The boy added a flourish or two and then stopped. The bow came off the strings; the violin dropped to his side.

A__’s boys stared at him, awaiting directives for their deployment.

A__ finally spoke.

“Go home.”

An Independence Day of Sorts: Beginning a Migration

15 August 1947 is Independence Day in India. It is also my father-in-law’s birthday, a midnight’s child. And it is the day I left India–in 1987, forty years later–to migrate to the US.

My ‘migration’–such as it was–consists of pretty standard fare: I began as a graduate student, armed with an admission letter to a graduate program in technology and engineering, headed for a small technical school on the US east coast; later, after obtaining full-time employment and a visa change to a ‘skilled worker in short supply’,  becoming a ‘permanent resident’ and after returning to graduate school to initiate a career change via a move to a different academic field, I would become a naturalized citizen.

But it all began with a one-way journey on a British Airways flight to London and then on to New York. My mother drove me to the airport after a sleepless night; my flight left at 6AM, which meant checking in at 3AM. I had never flown in an aircraft before. (Well, as an adult; apparently, I had accompanied my mother on a short flight in the Indian northeast when I was a six-week old baby.)

The flight to London felt long and tedious, its monotony only partially relieved by the awe-inspiring landscapes occasionally visible through our windows, and the beers we drank and the cigarettes we smoked. (I was accompanied by a pair of acquaintances also headed for graduate school in the US, and yes, in those days you could smoke, at high-altitude, inside the pressurized cabins of transcontinental airliners.)

After arrival at, and departure from, London’s bustling and intimidating Heathrow, I finally arrived, a little wide-eyed despite the exhaustion engendered by yet another eight-hour flight, at JFK airport.  The dreaded INS officers were little softies, and soon I was in the arrivals hall, waiting for an old high-school friend to pick me up.

Through the glass walls of the terminal all I could see was an airport. But I knew I was in a different land. Outside, it was America.

Later as I was driven back to my first night’s digs in Hicksville, Long Island, I marveled–like a good old-fashioned rube—at the cars, the crowded expressways, the gleaming supermarket–and the dazed and confused cash register clerk–where we stopped to pick up supplies. My first meal was microwaved pizza washed down with a Löwenbräu. It was not a particularly distinguished culinary kick-off and gave me some inkling of the nature of a very particular deprivation that awaited me.

15 August 1987 was a longer day than most. I traveled from summer to summer, traversing ten time zones and spent most of the day, ironically, at rest, cramped and uncomfortable, even as I traveled thousands of miles away from all that had been familiar and comprehensible for twenty years. I moved to a place I imagined I knew well but which was to prove, unsurprisingly, far more intractable to my understanding than I might have reckoned with.

Twenty-six years ago, I began the process of placing quotes around ‘home.’

Ridley Scott’s Promethean Stinker

I often disagreed with Roger Ebert‘s rating of movies. Sometimes, our disagreement would be a simple matter of Ebert being a little too kind, a little too forgiving. The latest instance of this discord may be found in our differing assessments of Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus. Ebert gives it four stars. I don’t.

I found Prometheus to be a failure as a horror film, a philosophical meditation, or an action movie.   A few visually striking images, some memorable set pieces and an interesting character–the android David–did not compensate for a movie that felt stale quite quickly.

My disappointments began early. Indeed, matters go rapidly downhill once the humans wake up from their hibernatory slumbers on the good ship Prometheus, Their motivations–despite the avowedly profound goal they declare themselves dedicated too–are not particularly interesting and neither are their resultant interactions. Try as I did, I found it hard to get worked up about their fates. So in a movie whose central characters frequently emphasize their soul-centric humanity to their android interlocutor, it is the latter is that is more emotionally affecting, a more compelling focus of our attention and interest. (I think I could have stood a version of Prometheus–shorter, of course–that features David navigating–by himself–the mysteries and attractions of  the LV-223 moon).

The central conceits of the movie–that it can simultaneously terrify, edify and entertain–are rendered false by its failure to address any of these goals with consistency and depth. The horror scenes strive, and fail, to put new spin on old, familiar tropes, sometimes drawn from close by in the director’s own oeuvre; the debates between science and religion–as ludicrously instantiated in human form in its characters– are sketchy; the central speculation–creation and design of humans by giant, really buff dudes who look like Olympians on ‘roids and live in a galaxy far, far away–isn’t particularly exciting; the action scenes suffer from a familiar modern failure: sound and fury with no heart. I am a little baffled by some of the critical acclaim the film has garnered; so impressed are the critics it seems by the overt claims of the film to profundity–the origin of man, the central epistemic and moral crisis of the science versus religion conflict–that they seem not to have examined the evidence presented to them.

Perhaps I’m being harsh. Perhaps. It might also be that when I am presented with glittering surfaces, I expect sublime depth will follow.  Prometheus fails because it seems to devote a great deal of energy in getting its stage to look good without bothering itself with the human-machine-creatures conflict supposed to play out on it. Strangely enough, by the end of the movie, so stricken had I become by the ennui dispensed by its central human characters, that I stopped caring about the human planet itself. I was curiously unaffected by any response approaching anxiety as the mighty Engineer’s spacecraft took off on its putatively Earth-destructive mission; and so, concomitantly, unafflicted by any pride or joy in Captain Janek’s Kamikaze-like ramming action.

Prometheus aspired, I think, to a kind of greatness; its failure is correspondingly larger.

Enrico Fermi, Abduction, and Slow Neutrons

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938, Enrico Fermi spoke briefly and thoughtfully about the theoretical and experimental work which had earned him this honor.  His talk, ‘Artificial Radioactivity Produced by Neutron Bombardment,’ is a little gem of scientific writing, which showcases not only descriptions of the results of the groundbreaking work in atomic and nuclear physics he had engaged in, but scientific explanation as well.

I provide here a little extract to show Fermi demonstrating abduction–inference to the best explanation–in his recounting of the phenomena of ‘slow neutrons’:

The intensity of the activation as a function of the distance from the neutron source shows in some cases anomalies apparently dependent on the objects that surround the source. A careful investigation of these effects led to the unexpected result that surrounding both source and body to be activated with masses of paraffin, increases in some cases the intensity of activation by a very large factor (up to 100). A similar effect is produced by water, and in general by substances containing a large concentration of hydrogen. Substances not containing hydrogen show sometimes similar features, though extremely less pronounced.

The interpretation of these results was the following: The neutron and the proton having approximately the same mass, any elastic impact of a fast neutron against a proton initially at rest, gives rise to a partition of the available kinetic energy between neutron and proton; it can be shown that a neutron having an initial energy of 10^6 volts after about 20 impacts against hydrogen atoms has its energy already reduced  to a value close to that corresponding to thermal agitation. It follows that, when neutrons of high energy are shot by a source inside a large mass of paraffin or water, they very rapidly lose most of their energy and are transformed into ‘slow neutrons.’ Both theory and experiment show that certain types of neutron reactions…occur with a much larger cross section for slow neutrons than fast neutrons , thus accounting for the larger intensities of activation, observed when irradiation is performed inside a large mass of paraffin or water.

This explanation of experimental data–or ‘interpretation’ as Fermi terms it–is, I think, a particularly elegant one. It is concise both in its form and content; it does justice to the observations with very few claims on our credulity; it integrates the new into the old with a minimum of effort. It is dazzling too–as many explanations of that heady time in atomic and nuclear physics were–in the seeming sleight of hand it performs: it takes the broad, chunky, mundane details of macroscopic phenomena and reduces them to the minute interactions of invisible particles. It pulls off that trick that is so distinctive of so many memorable scientific explanations: such sparse data, such elaborate theory.

I first read of the phenomena that Fermi describes in my eleventh-grade physics textbook; it is only recently that I have read of them in Fermi’s own words. The explanations seemed elegant then, but their style is even more acute in Fermi’s formulation.

Quotes from: Emilio Segrè, Enrico Fermi, Physicist, Appendix 2, University of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 217-218.

On Meeting a Veteran

I have lived in New York City through the ten years that the twin wars of our time, the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been waged. In that time, I’ve met a few members of the armed forces who have served in those operations. (Their willingness to talk about their experience has varied: some reticent, some garrulous.)

I met another war veteran last week. He had served in Afghanistan, done his time, come back home. Back to high school friends, a girlfriend that is now his wife, and perhaps even the life he left behind. The war hadn’t left him alone. It had extracted its very particular grim price. Both his feet were gone, blown off by an improvised explosive device that had sent him flying twenty feet away. The military doctors had removed one foot almost immediately; they had fought hard, for weeks, to save the second foot before eventually giving up and removing that one too. The feet–and the legs till halfway up to the knee–had been replaced by prosthetic limbs. They  looked new and high-tech, marvels of science and technology, the products of the latest materials science and bio-medical engineering. He was already comfortable in them; he drove a truck, and casually crossed his legs as anyone else might.

When you think of ‘veteran’, you think perhaps of old men, grizzled types with blazers, medals, regiment caps, fading memories, reunion dinners and back-slapping bonhomie about postings to far off lands and the now-memorable discomforts of barracks life. What you might not immediately associate with ‘veteran’ is young, barely-twenty men with missing limbs who are expected to carry their experiences lightly, who might attempt a studied nonchalance about their catastrophic encounters with fate.

When you think of the costs of war, you often think of the trillion-dollar budgets and cost overruns that threaten bankruptcy and the straightforward, now numbing, numbers of the dead. You tend, sometimes, to forget the injured, those who returned, altered forever by what the war did to them. They are back, traveling along the modified trajectories of their new lives, leaving ripples around them in their families and communities,

I had traveled to Ohio, to the American Midwest, to attend the celebration of Eid, the Feast of Breaking the Fast, with my wife’s family. During the day, as the eating progressed, her cousin decided to expand the celebration by inviting his high-school friend–the vet–to come and partake of the lavish spread of curries, rice, sweets, and salads that we were noshing on.  M___ showed up; he had always liked these slightly chaotic, well-fueled gatherings that his friend had called him to for years.

We greeted him, we chatted; he ate a bit, and then stepped out on the porch to smoke a cigarette with his friend, my wife’s cousin. As I watched him from inside the living room, I was struck by how the weekday flirted with the dramatic: two friends sharing a quiet, utterly unremarkable moment together, one that could still be placed into a radically different context.

A Failure of Kindness

The George Saunders graduation speech currently making the rounds of the Internet reminds me of a failure of kindness of my own.  I have committed many, of course, too many to remember or recount; I pick on this one, because, quite frankly, besides being memorable in all the wrong ways, it is a little less painful to recount than others in my oeuvre.

In 2005, I traveled to India for a vacation and arrived to find New Delhi in the grip of its usual summer baking.  On my second day in the city, I hailed an auto-rickshaw and asked to be taken to a friend’s residence a few miles away. I knew where I was headed; I wasn’t lost; this was ‘my’ city after all, even though I hadn’t lived in it for eighteen years.

A few minutes later, I noticed we were driving away from the direction that I thought we should have been headed in. I held my tongue for a second, and then queried the driver–rather querulously if I may say so–‘Where are we going?’ The driver replied, briefly, ‘We need to go in this direction.’ I do not know why I did not bother to inquire further, to employ a principle of charity, and grant him the benefit of the doubt. For a second, I imagined myself ripped off, in my ‘hometown’, by someone who imagined me to be a hapless tourist.  Perhaps I was tired of being told that I was ‘out of touch’ in many dimensions, that I had lost the capacity to relate to the realities of what had once been the familiar, perhaps I was overly keen to assert my ‘authenticity.’ Insecurities, every one of them.

I snapped. And began a loud tirade, mercifully brief, of how I would not be made a fool of, how I knew what time it was.

The auto-rickshaw driver, now with a pained expression on his face, spoke again, softly and perhaps even a little apologetically, ‘We have to go in this direction. There’s no exit permitting us to reverse direction for another half a mile.’ I looked around. He was right. The road I had traveled on many times as a teenager and even on my previous visits to the city had changed: there were new dividers, new sidewalks, new intersections. I was a stranger to it; I needed help getting around. And I was being given some. I just hadn’t seen it.

My indignation subsided, quickly replaced by a scorching shame. I mumbled an apology and attempted rapprochement. I asked him where he was from, sensing from his accent he was not a Delhi local. He wasn’t. He was a migrant, one of those many thousands that flock to the city to escape their impoverished homes, perhaps leaving families behind, resigned to scraping out a day-to-day existence on the margins of an indifferent urban landscape.

We chatted; I told him I was on vacation, in town to meet family and friends.  He asked me where I was visiting from. I told him; he asked me a bit about my life elsewhere.

A few minutes later, I was at my destination. He had taken the quickest, most efficient route possible under the circumstances. I paid up, added a tip, apologized again.

There are times, even now, when I remember the tone of his voice, responding to me when I first accused him of ripping me off, and I cannot but feel just a little miserable.

Colin McGinn and the Exploitation of the Philosophy Job Market

La Affaire Colin McGinn AKA the Handjob That Might or Might Not Have Been, has roiled the philosophy world for some time now. (A couple of Chronicle of Higher Education articles might bring you up to speed; here and here. Because those articles are behind a pay-wall you might do better to google ‘Colin McGinn miami sexual harassment’. An indication of just how old this news is may be gauged from the fact that The New York Times has finally deigned to cover it.)

The most salutary effect of this sordid affair has been the spotlight it has shone on the status of women in academic philosophy: the environment the discipline provides, the levels of sexual harassment, and so on.

I’d like to make a brief note of a factor that I think contributes to the kind of situation McGinn and his student found themselves in.

Philosophy is–like many other humanities disciplines–notorious for its impoverished job market.  (I think I might have noted on this blog that in my two years of job hunting at philosophy departments, I sent 114 applications and received precisely zero calls for an interview.) An adviser’s letter of recommendation and his ability and willingness to go the extra mile in ‘promoting’ a graduate student’s job application still counts for a great deal. This results in a great deal of behavior that is ripe for exploitation by a less than conscientious faculty member: obsequious name-dropping, aggressive socializing–very often fueled by alcohol–and transparent networking. The annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association–where job interviews are conducted–is an unbridled schmooze-fest, as are most post-colloquia receptions. (I still appreciate the first-name informality that is encouraged in the discipline even as I am appalled by the stories or rumors I have heard of gropes, grabs and fumbles following a beer or wine session involving professors and students.)

This, to put it mildly, is a state of affairs primed perfectly for a variety of encounters that can go wrong. Professors are likely to imagine that they are God’s chosen creations, dispensing favors from on high, while graduate students might indulge in self-abnegation, regarding themselves as lowly creatures that need to grovel, wheedle and flatter in order to get by. (If you wanted to really get crude, you could say this was a buyer’s market.)

The McGinn affair shows off the professorial side of this: McGinn’s blog posts reveal a man who has conceived of himself as a suave intellectual combination of Svengali and Henry Higgins, ushering his simpering debutante ward across the threshold of philosophical maturity.  Conversely, his graduate student, conditioned by the behavior that was possibly visible to her, might have realized too late that the parameters of the relationship she was engaged in were inappropriate.

Little can be done about the job market and I do not think informality in interactions between professors and students should be discouraged.

But one simple change might help: it would be great to have more women in philosophy that could act as mentors to its female graduate students.

Note: My previous posts on women in philosophy touch on related topics.

Zoë Heller on the ‘Shocking’ Role of ‘Aesthetic Grounds’ in Moral Judgments:

I quite enjoyed reading Zoë Heller‘s review of Janet Malcolm‘s Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers but I’m not inclined to join her in all the hosannas she sends Malcolm’s way. Consider for instance, the assessment she makes of a judgement offered by Malcolm:

In the absence of moral certainty, Malcolm suggests, our sympathies are assigned on what are essentially aesthetic grounds—on the basis of who has the more attractive language, or the more engaging style. This is a rather shocking proposition and it is meant to be.

I am perplexed by why Heller finds this such a ‘shocking proposition.’ Even if no one has ever expressed the sentiments underlying this claim using precisely the same sequence and composition of words that Malcolm has,  it is underwritten by a host of observations about our sensibilities and judgments that almost tend to the commonplace.

For instance, the distinction between the formal structure of an argument and its rhetorical content, which goes back to Aristotle, has long made it clear humans are persuaded by much more than logic – no matter what the subject matter. This is why the trivium of old consisted of the study of grammar, logic and rhetoric. If not, the study of the first two might have been all that was required.

Or consider that in science, when empirically equivalent theories are candidates for adoption, the choice between them might be made on the basis of an assessment of their simplicity. (‘In the absence of empirical certainty, our theoretical sympathies are assigned on essentially aesthetic grounds, on the basis of which theory is phrased in the more readily comprehensible language,  presented in the more engaging style or makes fewer claims upon our pre-theoretic credulity.’)

For yet another example, note that we prefer the company of, and extend our moral sympathies more readily to, those creatures that remind us the most strongly of ourselves. (‘Lacking certainty over which creatures have inner mental and emotional lives like ours, we are more likely to extend kindness to those that more closely externally resemble us than others.’)

For a mind conditioned by these sorts of reminders that the formal, the empirical, and the moral by themselves do not give us conclusive reasons to pick one option over another, Malcolm’s claim that aesthetic sentiments color our moral judgments will not come as much of a surprise. Indeed, the history of literature, and the complexity of the moral judgments recounted therein should also have primed us to not be taken unawares by such a notion.

Most fundamentally, Heller assumes that moral certainty is more common than it is. But more often than not, we are confronted with moral perplexity; we seek guidance in religion, in popular nostrums and bromides, in teachers, ‘role models’ and punchy slogans. In short, we attempt to solve the problems of moral judgment with a grab-bag of shortcuts, tricks, and satisficing solutions.  The aesthetic dimension of a particular choice cannot but have a prominent role in our final selection.

Malcolm’s keen eye has merely pointed out the existence of such a desideratum in a very particular situation.