by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

From the gatherings at Ashis Nandy’s home, and particularly from my numerous discussions with him I learned to think a bit more carefully about three major social concerns in India.

One was that whenever we economists faced a socio-economic problem that the standard processes of the private market forces did not resolve justly or efficiently, our immediate recourse was the state. We, of course, knew how inept or corrupt the state machinery often was. But the Gandhian in Ashis pointed to many problems where even the best-intentioned or efficient state is inherently incapable of solving. Take the shameful dowry problem in Indian marriage markets. The Indian state tried to solve it by the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961. But the problem is rampant to this day. One needs social movements and community-level reforms in norms and behavior, more than state legislation, to make a dent in this enormous social problem. In such debates I have, however, argued that while the state is not sufficient, isn’t it often necessary for social change? A law enacted by the state after a process of public deliberation can act as a guiding or catalytic or coordinating force for dispersed social movements. In the US the civil rights movement acted in unison with some landmark federal laws (Civil Rights Acts) in bringing about major (as yet unfinished) social changes.

Second, I always knew that caste was important in Indian society and polity, but I used to think that in leftist areas like Bengal class had significantly overshadowed caste. Talking to the sociologists in the group (including André Beteille, a consummate Bengali with a French father) I realized how limited this perception about Bengal was. Over time I came to understand that the cultural dominance of upper castes in Bengal is so totally hegemonic that it creates the illusion that caste is less important there. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

The philosopher Theodore Adorno, probably with activities such as reading serious literature and listening to classical music in mind, famously said about himself:

I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic who is incapable of doing anything with his free time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But as far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously.

Adorno in fact describes hobbies as preoccupations that one has “become mindlessly infatuated with in order to kill time.” Many people who engage in some pursuit avidly yet non-professionally might not share Adorno’s condescending attitude towards hobbies, but they often view what they do with something like the same seriousness. Hence they are more likely to describe themselves as “amateur” rather than “recreational” astronomers, geologists, ornithologists, musicians, arists, runners, swimmers, etc.. Mere recreations aim at little more than enjoyment. The very word suggests that the activity is not too demanding and the attitude towards it is fairly relaxed. But the serious amateur seeks or hopes for something more: to win prizes, gain glory, make a contribution to some field, or at least achieve a significant level of accomplishment. Read more »

“I don’t think I ever was a child.”
                    –Coleman Hawkins, top sax jazzman

Jazzman Said

I don’t think
I ever was a child

Was I a child?
I don’t think—

If I ever was a child
I’d know.  …..I don’t.

I don’t even know, jazzman said,
if a child ever was

Child, jazzman said,
I don’t just think,
I play jazz, man.

by Dick Edelstein

Namwali Serpell’s article in the New York Review of Books about the life of Sun Ra was aggregated here in 3 Quarks Daily in July 2020. It was a real treat to read it, and it led me to a chain of memories about Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra. In the early 1970s, on a visit to Seattle, where I had gone to high school and lived during my early adult years, a spacey hippie girl I barely knew stopped me on the street and presented me with a copy of The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, saying that I was just the person who would appreciate it. She was right. I was thrilled to make the acquaintance of Sun Ra and his Arkestra and of ESP Records, the small, cultish record company that had produced the LP. Later, in the mid-1970s, I crossed the Bay Bridge from Oakland to see Sun Ra’s band live at Minnie’s, a small San Francisco club on Fillmore Street, where the bandleader managed to pack in his entire Arkestra along with five or six dancers.

Sun Ra was a bandleader, composer, arranger and keyboard player who led an ensemble of crack musicians called the Solar Arkestra that played avant-garde jazz with great verve and precision. Their performances often featured dancers, chants and movement, and hip arrangements of jazz standards as well as theatrical pieces by Sun Ra based on his own philosophy, which was weird. He claimed that he had had a visionary experience which had a major quasi-religious influence on him and led to a lot of mumbo-jumbo about outer space.

You never knew what the Sun Ra Arkestra were going to play from their extensive and highly varied repertoire. They were masters of several entirely different styles, any of which might appear at any time. Even though I had been a fan of electronic music from an early age and had experimented with the early Buchla and other synthesizers, and even though Sun Ra was adept at synthesizer keyboard work, playing in his own highly original style, I listened patiently to his spacey keyboard numbers while eagerly anticipating the excitement I would feel when he regaled us with one of his ultra-hip arrangements of jazz standards that the band played with taut precision, usually in a post-bop style. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

This was supposed to be a fun and light-hearted post, filled with reflections on nature and shared spaces that had occurred to me while blissfully snowshoeing in an idyllic Canadian winter. Then a convoy of Brownshirts invaded my country’s capital and entrenched themselves in a lawless occupation, demanding the dissolution of our democratically elected government and the repeal of necessary public health measures. I tried to swear off writing about contemporary American politics last year, to safeguard my own happiness and mental health. But now that those American politics have, like the effluvia of an overfull septic tank, seeped and swelled up to my doorstep, I have to write about them again. I am not happy about this.

A primer for those who don’t follow Canadian politics (which is to say, almost everyone): a convoy of truckers and hangers-on (figuratively; hanging on to a truck crossing the Canadian prairies in January requires more commitment than any movement can muster) headed out from Alberta last week, aiming to install themselves in front of Parliament in Ottawa, in order to protest vaccination mandates for truckers entering Canada and the United States. 90% of Canadian truckers are already vaccinated, and most do not support this movement. Even if Canada lifted its vaccine mandate, unvaccinated truckers would still be barred from entering the US. It gets stupider. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Bey Unvaan. Anza-Borrego Desert Park, Calfornia, 2017.

Digital photograph.

by Joseph Shieber

One of the most famous philosophical arguments is Pascal’s Wager, an attempt by the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal to provide ammunition for religious believers in their struggles against nonbelief.

The Wager works like this. First, there are two possible states of affairs that you’re to consider: either God exists or God doesn’t exist. Second, there are two possible attitudes you could adopt with respect to God’s existence: either you believe that God exists or you don’t believe that God exists (you either actively believe that God doesn’t exist or you withhold belief in God’s existence.

This gives us the following possible combinations, with their resultant outcomes:

1. You believe & God exists: eternal bliss in heaven
2. You believe & God doesn’t exist: one false belief
3. You don’t believe & God doesn’t exist: one true belief (at best)
4. You don’t believe & God exists: eternal torment in hell

This way of setting out the case for belief vs. nonbelief does not do the nonbeliever any favors. 

If you don’t believe, the optimal result would be that God doesn’t exist. Then you would have one more true belief than the rubes who falsely believe (assuming of course that you actively disbelieve, rather than merely withholding belief in God’s existence). The other possibility for non-believers, however, is truly horrible. If you don’t believe and God DOES exist, then you are damned to an eternity of suffering in hell.

Contrast this with the situation for believers. The worst case for them is that they believe, but God doesn’t exist. Still not so bad! Just one additional false belief! If, however, God DOES exist, then the believer can look forward to a reward of eternal life in heaven.

Now, there are a variety of ways to object to the set-up of the Wager. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Ruchira Paul

“Sewer designs… For me, it took about a year to exhaust my fascination with the underground maze of waste. That’s when I realized the single most important point to grasp about designing sewer lines is that the shit must flow downhill. That’s all one needs to know. Nothing else matters.” So muses Emma, a smart young sewer engineer and the protagonist of Sara Goudarzi’s debut novel The Almond in the Apricot. The book takes us through the convoluted maze of Emma’s own inner turmoil that begins to blur the boundaries between her physical world and her dreams.

Emma’s troubles begin shortly after the sudden accidental death of her best friend and confidante Spencer to whom she had felt more attracted physically and emotionally than she does to her kind and decent boyfriend Peter. The tragedy negatively affects both her personal and professional lives. Without the lively presence of Spencer as the third side of the triangle, Emma finds her romantic interest in Peter dwindling. Peter’s kindness and decency begin to strike Emma as bland attributes – “neither acidic nor alkaline, a perfect pH 7.0 of a human.”  She becomes careless and negligent at work. The most worrisome manifestation of Emma’s state of mind is the appearance of vivid, disturbing nightly dreams that encroach upon her waking hours. Emma begins to lose her footing in the real world, becoming exhausted, erratic and suspicious as also a bit of a schemer who no longer has too many qualms about betraying those close to her. Read more »

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos 

When I am not doing well in my own head, I turn to the tarot. While no substitute for therapy or psychiatry, the tarot has an ancient function that is symbiotic with these modern methods for coping with the wild unruliness of the mind. I know it sounds silly. But before there was psychology and medicine, there was magic, and that is not silly at all. People crave rituals and symbols; they crave narratives about themselves with which to play and to experiment. And the tarot is nothing if not an arcane form of play and experimentation with the idea of the self, packed with ritual and narrative and symbol. Magic, you see, is a very minor thing. It does not make great things happen, and, when it is practiced honestly and forthrightly, it does not claim to make great things happen. Instead, magic is meant to open up little moments, little apertures into self-understanding, that allow for the flourishing of subjects in an otherwise mean and obscure world. It is difficult to be a subject in the world; it is a task with no guidebook and with few obvious parameters. Little practices that seek after the integration of the self with the world, that seek to make distinct and clear not only who the self is but what the self means and is capable of accomplishing and being with the materials of the world at hand—these kinds of practices, which include both the tarot and psychotherapy (the latter being perhaps a practice of magic in our modern lives), make it feel immanently possible to exist and to grow and to change. And what feels possible becomes possible. 

I think an example is necessary. I decided to do a tarot spread specifically for this essay, to lay bare exactly what I mean when I say that the tarot offers an opportunity for playing with the notion of oneself in the world. Before I take you into that spread, though, I want to explain the tarot as best as I can. Read more »

I awoke yesterday morning to find these ice crystals which had formed on the glass of my window at Akola, near the town of Ii in northern Finland, which is pretty much on the arctic circle (65.3° North latitude). The temperature outside was around -21° C (or around -6° F). The wind chill factor? Don’t ask!

by Derek Neal

What to eat? A seemingly simple question, but one that has become increasingly difficult to answer. And why is that? My initial hypothesis is that as modern society becomes more and more distanced from traditional and local cuisines, people have less guidance as to what to eat; this puts increased pressure on individuals to make a conscious choice, but with unclear and often conflicting information about how to make this choice. In other words, people used to just eat whatever their grandparents had eaten, and this worked relatively well. Now, with an overabundance of choice and ignorance of one’s own past, we are lost, wandering through the supermarket aisles like a traveler lost in the woods. Thus, we see diets, meal plans, food delivery apps, and a myriad of other things jump in to fill the void that has been abdicated by family and community. But this story is perhaps so obvious that it does not need retelling. It is, after all, the story of the modern, global world. Nevertheless, it’s useful to pause, look around, and ask ourselves, “How did we get here? What is this place?” Let me sketch a few examples of people attempting to answer our initial question, “What to eat?” to help illustrate our general predicament.

Bill Murray in Lost in Translation calls home to his wife and says he wants to make a change: he wants to stop eating “all that pasta,” and instead wants to start eating healthy food, “like Japanese food.” Murray’s character, being an American, is already at a disadvantage when it comes to knowing what to eat, as he most likely does not have a culinary tradition to call his own. Thus, he insists not on a switch from American cuisine (whatever that would be) to something else, but a switch from Italian to Japanese cuisine. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Even though my ISI office was in the Planning Commission building in New Delhi I was living in an apartment complex far away in ‘Old’ Delhi, nearer Delhi University. The main attraction of staying there was the number of academic friends who lived in the same complex, apart from its being in a rather open, leafy, quieter part of the city (the hilly walkway at the back—called ‘the ridge’– was full of parrots and monkeys). My MIT friend, Mrinal, who stayed there arranged with the landlord for our accommodation.

Mrinal was then a popular teacher at Delhi School of Economics (DSE). His wife Eva was a feisty and resourceful Italian woman, coming from a political family—her father was an active anti-fascist, killed in Rome in 1944 by a Nazi ambush; her maternal uncle was the famous development economist Albert Hirschman (whom I admired and met a few times at Princeton). Eva coming for the first time to India quickly figured out the tricks of negotiating the daily complications of life in Delhi, and by the time we arrived she, a savvy foreigner, helped us settle in Delhi. It used to be quite a spectacle to see a sari-clad Eva haggling in street Hindi with the wily shopkeepers of Delhi and relishing it.

Hardly any day went without my long chats with Mrinal. We shared a great deal in our interests. His wacky sense of humor was combined with a serious thoughtfulness on many issues. On political issues in particular he was one of the wisest and shrewdest observers I have known. When Eva later left him and went with (and married) his best friend since their boyhood in Santiniketan, Amartya Sen, I saw a different side of Mrinal, that of pained dignity and graceful fortitude. Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the sixteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

Was it inevitable, this ongoing anthropogenic, global mass-extinction? Do mass destruction, carelessness, and hubris characterize the only way human societies know how to be in the world? It may seem true today but we know that it wasn’t always so. Early human societies in Africa—and many later ones around the world—lived without destroying their environments for long millennia. We tend to write off the vast period before modern humans left Africa as a time when “nothing much was happening” in the human story. But a great deal was actually happening: people explored, discovered, invented, and made decisions about how to live, what to eat, how to relate to each other; they observed and learned from the intricate and changing life around them. From this they fashioned sense and meaning, creative mythologies, art and humor, social institutions and traditions, tools and systems of knowledge. Yet it’s almost as though, if people aren’t busily depleting or destroying their local environments, we regard them as doing nothing.

Of course, it is a normal dynamic of evolution that one species occasionally will outcompete another and drive it toward extinction. But for most of their time on Earth, human beings were not having an outsized, annihilating effect on the life around them, rather than co-evolving with it. That evolution was at least as much cultural as it was a matter of flesh. What people consumed, how they obtained it, and how quickly they used it up has always played a role in the stability and evolution of any ecosystem of which humans were a part. How fast human populations grew, how they sheltered, what they trampled and destroyed or nourished and promoted—all of this affected their environment. Naturally, their interactions with the environment were always driven by what they wanted. And what people want is intimately driven by what they believe, as in the stories they tell themselves. One thing we can safely presume: those who understood their own social continuity as contingent upon that of their environment weren’t telling the same stories we tell today. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Inside Out, Boston, 2021.

Digital photograph.