The Daily Salty

Happy birthday Choti - how to be happy :)

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 08 Nov 2020 05:32:00 +0000

Sorry about the delayed email, Choti. I wrote this part way and then got occupied with my review and finishing the chapters. Anyway, so here’s wishing you the most wonderful birthday, Choti.

I keep seeing the timehop photos and see you growing up from that cute chubby happy girl to the lovely poised beautiful young lady you have become. And I want to squish you till you squeak! J We are so happy with what you have become, Choti. You have even started to cook. I had given up hope of you making meals, but I am quite impressed, you are cooking well. I wonder if you do that in animal kingdom? Cook? Can you?

I don’t know. Maybe when I am up in London, you can show me how to play animal crossing and then we can have a fun time. Shall we have mamma to help dress up my island? I can just imagine Mamma snorting and telling me to go away as she has too much work to do.

Anyway, I think I have talked about this before. The Dalai Lama, one of the most amazing people on this world, basically said that my religion is kindness. That’s what I wanted to speak about. I had shared the Emerson quote with you about what is success,

“What is success?
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

But the Dalai Lama said it differently. He said, my religion is very simple, my religion is kindness. You are a happy girl and may you be happy all your life, darling. He wrote more about this here: https://www.dalailama.com/messages/compassion-and-human-values/compassion

It’s a lovely article and worth reading it. I keep on telling you to get into charity a bit, it really changes your life, love.

Anyway, much to do and get on with things. Cant wait to see you next month.

Love you

Baba

happy special day and what's the opposite of Deja Vu?

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 05:06:00 +0000

Dear Choti

Very late with your special day email, it has been manic. Its so nice to see you fit into the 6^th form life smoothly. And also studying so hard. And telling off mamma for bothering you. I am trying to ensure I can come to London, but with the bloody flights getting cancelled, don’t know L lets see and hope the covid19 stuff doesn’t get worse.

I hope we can go on holiday next summer J and this time we go to Italy or Greece, ok? So few things you will like

What’s the opposite of Déjà vu? At the opposite of déjà vu is a slightly rarer phenomenon — jamais vu, which translates to “never seen” in French. It takes place when you’re in a familiar situation but suddenly feel as if you’re experiencing it for the first time.

The second thing which I wanted to share was how to catch a fish with your bare hands.

Its quite an interesting way to do it, I didn’t know about the trick with the lowering the temperature of the hand by dipping in it, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? Maybe we can try to do this on one of our trips up in the north or in Wales where we can test this out J and then we can bbq it or bring it home to mamma to scare her. What do you think ?

Stay safe choti, schools are one of the biggest places to catch covid19 and other stuff. Did you take the flu vaccine?

Love

Baba

happy birthday son

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 09:41:00 +0000

My dear Kannu

It was so nice to speak to you so many times yesterday and see you cutting the cake and and and. I am missing you so much! L I posted this on FB yesterday with the photos

Its Eldest Cost Centre's birthday today. The photo is when we brought him home the next day. 25 years old now. I was younger than him when I had him.

Before he was born, I was a young lion, striding the world, not giving a shit about anything and having fun.

And then, the moment the nurse gave him to me to hold him, I experienced terror. Sheer unadulterated terror and fear.

For the first time in my life, I knew that I now have somebody for whom I am responsible for. I knew for the first time that from that moment on, a large part of my heart and mind will be existing outside my body, vulnerable and I will not be able to protect him fully.

Has the terror reduced? no. still worry about that little shit. Despite him having grown up to be a man - still worry about him. It has been amazing how dusty the room became when he was born, when he left for his first school trip, when he left for uni and when he got a first from Oxford. That's it, no more crying and throat choking up. Well, for now. Meh. Becoming soppy in my old age. And for the first time, wouldn't be there for his birthday. All credit of course goes to

Sangeeta Bhargava

for raising him. I was vaguely aware of a short person in the house.

The best way I can describe him is how I describe my father

Rabi Dasgupta

. He is a good man and he is a kind man.

Happy Birthday son. Love you.

I am so happy to see you become a man that any father will give his left arm and right eye to have as a son. Thank you son. And imagine that now I am thinking about your kids and how we can help (if needed, we would love to help of course!, I miss having kids around me) with baby sitting and other things. Can you send a photo of your living room now that it’s been setup?

Where do you work when you are at your flat? On the dining table? Do get a good ergonomic chair, beta, you don’t want to bugger up your back, best to invest in a good chair with lumbar support. I had a bad bad time when I worked for ABN 20 years back and had crap chairs. And that screwed up my back now.

I will leave you with a quote, “The experiences that matter are often the ones we never wanted to do, not the ones we decide to do” by Alberto Moravia. I found this quite interesting. And then we pay so much to get experiences which sometimes don’t matter that much. That said, our holidays have been good. Cant wait to go for one with you all

Love you

Baba

Happy Special Day and best of luck with your 6th form :)

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 07:00:00 +0000

My wonderfully cute, adorable, lovely, smart, beautiful, erudite, linguistically gifted, pukish sense of humour girl

I miss you so much L I want to squish you hugely and cuddle you. Hope you had a good special day. Sorry wasn’t able to write earlier, the temperature and pain wasn’t condusive to writing properly. I will be going to the urologist and internal medicine doctor tomorrow so hopefully he can give me some antibiotics for whatever infection I have picked up. Also dropped the car off for the 20,000 km service. Its amazing how much I drive here compared to London. Anyway, they will check everything from spark plugs to the oil, brake pads to AC. Machines need to be looked after religiously. Serviced, checked, maintained and looked after at regular intervals. If you don’t, then they break when you least expect it and then its trouble. I know I am sounding like sheldon with Penny here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMhp2ShPVQw.

I also had this great image which I keep on my desktop. It’s a great little cheatsheet for critical thinking. We have a problem these days with social media information and pretty much fake news all over the place. So you have two options, either you refuse to engage (which isnt possible mostly) or you do engage but at which level? Remember the Athenians who basically put forward the demos and democratic structures which we are still following in some shape or form. You may not like politics or public policy but politics and public policy is interested in you. So I always suggest engaging but you have to engage at two levels. First recognise that most news or even history is incomplete, disbalanced and biased (did you read the EH Carr book on “What is History?” which we have at home?). So that’s the first element and remember that most debates will be done at that level. People vote on that basis, people respond on that basis, etc. etc.

But when its you, a smart intelligent and erudite girl like you, you need to delve deeper into it. You cannot do that to all the stuff, especially when you have constant barrage of information on twitter, snapchat, youtube, etc. etc. but for substantive things, you have to have a filter, a methodology, something that allows you to check major developments. This can potentially help you, darling. Print it off and stick it on your wall in front of you. and on your desktop.

Anyway, I am so missing you. please take photos of your 6^th form class/lounge and have a wonderful time. You are going to step over another huge milestone in your life, going to 6^th form. Much will change, not least your uniform! Ask Dada for his advice, even though he didn’t do his 6^th form at Nower Hill, he knows what worked and what didn’t. Anyway, take selfies and mamma will give you dahi chini before you leave.

Love you, Choti, best of luck

Yours lovingly

Baba

FW: NYTimes: Some Polynesians Carry DNA of Ancient Native Americans, New Study Finds

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 07:03:00 +0000

Good morning, Kannu

Happy special day, son. Hope your tummy is good. And that youre additional work gets finished soon today so that you can get a bit of relaxation done this weekend. It is your special day! I still remember the day Mamma and I took you to take your photos when you were maybe 6 months? I think so but mamma will tell you exactly. You were such a cute baby, with your teethless smile and then the photographer would say, you are a little cheeky monkey. Adorable! Still are :) lovely.

I thought of sharing this link with you.

Some Polynesians Carry DNA of Ancient Native Americans, New Study Finds https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/science/polynesian-ancestry.html?referringSource=articleShare=

=======================================================

And want to talk to you about Thor Heyerdahl. I first came across his book on the Kon Tiki expedition when I was a bit younger than you in Bhopal. It was a moth eaten book, hugely battered, paperback with torn pages and faded covers. I picked it up in a second hand book shop and it was seriously old, I think I paid 2 rupees out of my 5 rupees allowance. And it was worth it. I devoured it completely in one day, staying awake at night and doing the torch thing below the blanket. And got scolded by Didu because I finished the batteries. It was published in 1948. The basic idea behind the expedition was that people from South America could have reached Polynesia. Till then, there was a prevalent idea that it was people from Asia who populated the Polynesian islands of the Pacific.

So he went to Peru, a bit near where we were in Ecuador and built a balsa wood raft with a little cabin and sails. It was build based on what the Spanish Conquistadors documented about the then extant boats, rafts and ships. The knotted twine or codex's literature of the Incas and Aztecs did not store any information and in any case, the Spanish totally destroyed the literature anyway (ok, ok, that gets me excited and angry so best leave it). It was so fascinating to read how they built the boat out of balsa wood. Balsa wood is a very very light airy wood, son, and it floats beautifully and doesn’t become waterlogged easily. Building a ship is tremendously difficult son, without modern tools, and they did that with what they thought technology existed 6000 years before. So they built a raft. Balsa wood logs tied together with hemp ropes, and then cross pieces to give lateral support. Remember that when you are on the sea, you have to make your ship flexible otherwise it will break apart (lesson to be learnt in your career and for your companies). There was no metal in the construction at all, and they build the masts out of mangrove wood, spars out of wood and reeds and bamboo was used to deck the top.

They took modern provisions but also used sealed bamboo rods to keep water in. It worked after a fashion although there was a problem with the water. This is a reason why coastal trade was so vital for so long. You and Choti have read the Odyssey, there was a good reason why the old storyteller would pull into a bay every night. That was because of the difficulty of storing fresh water on board. They carried food like coconuts, potatoes, fruit and caught loads of fish. They sailed over 6,900 kilometres over 101 days and then landed on an atoll with a crash.

We haven’t been to Easter Island but we have been to Galapagos, Thor's idea was that the monumental statues of Easter Island more resembled the Peruvian art than local designs, and for that they needed to have population exchange. Galapagos didn’t show any local art but Easter Island did. Fascinating. And now the study up there provides further evidence for that. Fascinating. But see if you can read up on Thor. A truly fascinating character, son. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl#Books

Also, if you can read this link: https://warontherocks.com/2020/08/when-youre-outnumbered-lessons-from-two-british-masters-of-irregular-warfare/

Two more fascinating characters. People who jump out of their skins and become larger than life and literally, by force of their character, make a huge difference in their surroundings! Yes, they make mistakes. They are flawed heros. They piss off people. They engender huge loyalty and change people's thinking. Amazing.

Anyway, have a good day son, happy special day to you again.

Love and miss you

Your loving Baba

Happy Special Day Choti - August - all about books and being happy

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 05:36:00 +0000

My dear Choti

Happy special day. Hope you had a wonderful day. What did Dada and Mamma do for your special day?

Mamma shared your ballet video with me, and you telling her off twice! Loved the telling off J and of course you looked so graceful and wonderful. I must have seen the video 100 times. But no haven’t shared it with anybody, so you can rest easy J that was really lovely, darling. I wish I can see you in your performance. Over the current few days, your previous history of performance videos and photos are popping up on the time hop app and its lovely to see you grow up from a tiny little pink butterfly who would dance so cutely in her tutu in the church to then you became like a little colt wearing those lovely outfits like the fedora or the tramp and then now wearing all growup outfits. I was looking forward to seeing you dance on the proper stage in London so that I can take my friends and praise you and bring you flowers and bask in reflected glory. Lovely dancing choti J And then your work on the brownies and icecream! Totally gobsmacking. SO impressed that you did that from scratch! Ice-cream from scratch and then brownies from scratch! And it was moisty! Perfect, loved it.

I came across this rather long form essay on how to make a daily habit of reading more books. It is long but worth reading, darling. Its just the bestest ever thing for me but then you know it given that everybody around you loves reading and you do too, but there’s nothing like reading somebody else’s view on reading as well. Its all about the habit and forming the habit to sit quietly and disappear into somebody’s words, where you find new dreams, new emotions, different landscapes, pain, joys and excitement. It’s the quietness, solitude but inside your mind you are in a different world completely. One trick I learnt was to haunt bookstores, where you force yourself to walk through the bookshelves running a finger along the spines and then listening to that little tug inside your head which says that you have connected with a book. And then you pull it out and see what it says and reads, flick through the pages, read the fore and back pages and many times you will put it back because it didn’t talk to you.

Listen to that little voice inside you, choti. That is a very rare thing which I don’t think many people have experienced. They rely so much on external stimuli that they forget that you are the best friend and companion you may ever have. That voice may come when you touch an old tree, or a book, or when you are watching a statue or are praying or whilst biking or listening to a song. You will have to come up with your own answer, darling, but it would be good to have it, it will really give you a glow and make you happy from inside.

Anyway, I have banged on enough, I am sure your global crossing island is calling you! But I wanted to share one more very interesting image that I came across. We are all trying to be happy and it’s a biochemical reaction inside anyway, right? So how can you hack yourself to become happy? Here are some fantastic ways you can do that.

Love you and missing you all terribly.

Love

Baba

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-make-a-daily-habit-of-reading-more-books

Need to know

I envy voracious book readers. They seem worldly and wise. Also, whatever is happening in their lives, they’re never completely on their own – they always have their books. My mother is one of these life-long devourers of literature, for whom books are a constant companion. She recalls contracting tuberculosis as an eight-year-old girl, before there was a vaccine, and being sent to spend six months at a convalescent home in Margate, more than 100 miles from her family. ‘Books saved me from what would have been unbearable, allowing me to escape from that bed to have adventures in other places and other lives,’ she says.

Avid readers often look back on their book-reading with fondness. ‘My first memories of reading are of my late mum taking me to our local library, and both of us taking out as many books as we could carry,’ says Clare Reynolds, author of the Years of Reading Selfishly blog. ‘We didn’t have a car so had to make sure we could manage them all on the bus.’

Reynolds’s passion for reading continued through adolescence and led her to study English literature at the University of Leeds, but then the demands of work and family caught up with her, and for years she found herself in what she calls the ‘reading wilderness’. Anecdotally, many of us recognise this overwhelming sense of competing demands on our time. We hanker for the space to read more. We buy the books, they pile up, but we never get round to reading them – the Japanese even have a term for it, tsundoku.

Data back this up: a US survey found that more than one-third of adults report a desire to read more books, with book reading second only to exercise as the most wished-for activity. Similarly, in France, 65 per cent of people aged 15 years and over said they wished they read more books, rising to 77 per cent among those already reading at average levels.

If you’re one of these people, opening a book might have become something to do when you haven’t got anything else going on, which is almost never. It’s as if you decided at some point, likely without conscious thought, that even though you love books, book reading is effectively the least important thing in your life – you’ll squeeze it in, if you can. And if you are clinging to the remnants of a book reading habit, I’ll bet you save it for the end of the day, or perhaps only for when you’re on holiday.

To read more books, you need to make it a higher priority, which means changing your daily habits and routines to accommodate more reading. People who are ‘super readers’ by virtue of their profession – such as literary editors, agents and book award judges – show us just how much reading is possible if you are willing and able to give it a high enough priority. Consider Ed Needham, former editor at magazines such as FHM and Rolling Stone, who in 2018 launched his own magazine, Strong Words, which features more than 100 book reviews every month. Needham reads or listens to every one of the reviewed books. ‘I just have to find the time, there’s no way around it,’ he says. ‘I produce an issue of Strong Words every six weeks, and we worked out that for five of those six weeks I read the equivalent of War and Peace every week.’

When reading books is your livelihood or essential to fulfil your responsibilities, then it becomes the priority around which the rest of life must bend. You don’t need to go as far as Needham, of course, but to read more books you do need to take a hard look at whether, given the value you place on books, you are providing the activity with the attention and time it deserves in your life.

‘Sometimes, you just need the slightest encouragement to displace something that isn’t earning its keep in your routine,’ says Needham. ‘I remember [the US filmmaker and writer] John Waters saying he found it really easy to read every night because he never watched television. That made me realise it is really easy to stop watching television, because I get more from books than I do from the vast majority of television programmes.’

When there are so many options competing for our time, it’s worth reminding yourself of the unique rewards of book reading. I read the newspaper every morning and my day job involves reading countless essays and articles, but when I manage to find the time to immerse myself in a quality nonfiction book, it’s a wholly different experience – you can almost feel the presence of the author alongside you on a personal intellectual journey. By the end, you’re somehow changed, you see the world differently. And although TV and video games of course offer escapism, there’s nothing quite like devouring the pages of a beautiful novel, sitting quietly in one place while letting words transport you to another. Screens show you what’s happening; novels, by contrast, construct those fictions within your mind, allowing you to become anyone, and go anywhere.

What to do

It will take significant effort for you to read more books, at least at first. To succeed long-term, you need to develop new reading habits, so that reading is something you do without resorting to conscious effort and willpower. But before getting into details of how to do this, there are some preliminary steps to ease the way.

The first is to reflect on why you want to read more books. Benjamin Gardner is a social psychologist at King’s College, London and an expert on the psychology of habits. His theory of habit formation begins with the need for sufficient motivation. ‘Think about why is it exactly you want to do it? What would the benefits be? Answering these kinds of questions can make you more motivated,’ he says.

There’s little doubt that you will benefit from reading more books. People who read literary fiction in particular tend to be better at reading others’ emotions and have greater moral sensitivity, possibly due to their simulation of the lives of complex characters; and reading nonfiction will increase your knowledge and broaden your mind. In fact, reading books is considered a cognitive ‘reserve building’ activity that could help to protect you from Alzheimer’s and related illnesses. However, also relevant here is the distinction between intrinsic motivation, which means you find reward in doing something for its own sake, and extrinsic motivation, which is when you’re motivated by the promise of some kind of external pay-off. Note that, especially when starting out, you are more likely to prevail if you choose books to read that are inherently enjoyable for you, be that because you find them entertaining, calming, moving or intellectually stimulating and fascinating. This might require some trial and error until you find a genre and/or author that matches your tastes and priorities.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits (2018), agrees. He recalls the approach of the Indian-American entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant:

[Ravikant] says something along the lines of ‘Read whatever the hell you want to read in the beginning’ because the real thing that you’re focused on is building the habit of reading, not necessarily the knowledge. Like if you just want to read romance novels. Awesome. Read that. If you just want to read fantasy, read that. Read whatever helps you fall in love with the act of being a reader or the habit of reading. And once you fall in love with the habit, then it’s easy … Now you’ve got a lot of options because it’s part of your life.

A related point is giving yourself permission to quit books that you’re not enjoying. ‘I had spent so many years picking up books that people had told me I “should” read,’ says Reynolds. ‘I diligently ploughed my way through literature prize longlists and shortlists. I would try to push on until the end of every one, even when I really didn’t enjoy them. Then one day, I just put a book down I didn’t love, and picked up another one which I did. It was then the idea for my Reading Selfishly blog and ethos was born.’

‘A lot of people feel locked in from the start,’ adds Clear. ‘But the little phrase I try to keep in mind is start more books, quit most of them, read the great ones twice. I think that a lot of readers would be well-served if they did that.’

A next preliminary step is to look at your surroundings. How easy is it for you to grab a book – paper or digital – and start reading? ‘The more frictionless [a habit] is, the easier it is to pick it up,’ says Clear. He recommends making changes to your digital and physical environments so that reading is easy and effortless – including making reading apps especially prominent on your phone, and placing books in the physical places that you most often frequent. ‘Being around books makes it very easy to pick them up and check them out. If you want something to be a big part of your life, make it a big part of your environment.’ Of course, if you are prone to tsundoku, this is a lifestyle tip that you have already mastered – just try to remember to actually pick up those books.

A final preliminary step is to consider your goals. Clear recommends having modest goals for your new reading habit initially. If you try to achieve too much, too quickly, you’re more likely to fail. ‘I would say giving yourself the permission to just read one page per day or something like that,’ he says. Clear calls this ‘the two-minute rule’. By getting into the routine of just ‘showing up’, even for just 120 seconds, the new activity is more likely to become an entrenched part of your daily routine. ‘There is a deep truth about habits in general that people overlook,’ Clear says, ‘which is a habit must be established before it can be improved.’

Now, having laid the foundations for your new reading habit, then according to Gardner’s model, the next stage involves creating new ‘action associations’, which in the context of books means reading often enough in the same situation enough times until a strong, learned association is formed between being in that situation (or that time of day) and reading.

Gardner says that, the more specific you can be, the more likely you are to succeed. So, think about the specifics of when and where you are going to do the extra book reading, such as with your breakfast, on the train to work, with your midmorning coffee, when you’ve finished getting the kids ready for bed, or after dinner. This cue to read could be a set time, an event or a particular situation – Gardner says it doesn’t matter which, as long as this specific opportunity for reading happens consistently in your life.

You might even find it useful to keep a detailed diary for a week, of what you do and when, to see the patterns that currently exist in your daily routines. ‘Most of us are creatures of habit already,’ says Gardner. ‘Many of us commute to work. We’ll catch the same train. Or our evening and bedtime routines will be the same. So, in that respect, you can kind of piggyback your new habit onto what you already do habitually. It can be easy if you know what you’re aiming to do, and when and where you’re going to do it.’

Once you’ve found the moments in your daily life when you could conceivably begin a new book-reading habit, then keep reading in that same context as consistently as you can. ‘Action association is at the heart of a habit,’ says Gardner. ‘If you keep doing it, you keep reinforcing that association. And as that association is reinforced, so control over the behaviour passes from a kind of effortful reflective processing system to a much more automatic system. It becomes impulse driven. You go into the situation that triggers the association and you start doing it, without even thinking about what you’re going to be doing.’

As you build your new reading habit, be realistic about the challenge ahead, and try not to fret too much about any lapses. ‘I think people are often put off by the fact that they think it’s going to be really easy to do and then they can’t maintain it, so they just disengage,’ says Gardner. ‘But if you say to them, actually it is going to be difficult, but it will become easier. That can give some people the motivation to keep going, even if they do experience, you know, initial barriers on the way.’

Key points

Spend time thinking about why you want to read more books. The more motivation you have, the more likely you are to succeed. Start out reading books you enjoy, and don’t be afraid to quit books you don’t like.
Lay the groundwork for your new reading habit by making books salient in the physical and digital environments you encounter every day.
Set modest goals, at least at first. Aim to read just a little each day.
Look at your daily routines and your existing habits. Consider where you could build in a new habit of book reading, in effect piggybacking on your existing habits. The more specific you can be, the more likely you are to succeed.
Try as hard as you can to always read whenever you are in that situation, time or place. Eventually, you will form a new effortless reading habit.
Track your progress by recognising every day that you managed to read, rather than by ticking off completed books. After two weeks, you should start to feel that your new habit is deepening.
Consider whether your social world supports book reading. You could try joining a book group (see the Links and Books section below) to chat with like-minded readers.
Cultivate your identity as an avid reader of books. Write a sentence outlining the kind of person you want to be, and think about how book reading will serve that aim.

Learn more

As you work hard to find the time and space in your life to read more books, you might be wondering how long until it gets easier. In his own research, focused on building healthy eating and exercise habits, Gardner has asked people to begin performing a new behaviour once each day, and then report how it feels. ‘We find after a couple of weeks, they tend to say, yeah, this is starting to become part of my routine … they start to feel like it’s an ingrained part of what they do. So I would put the figure at around two weeks to start seeing a noticeable difference,’ he says.

You might also be thinking about what you’re going to have to give up to make space for more reading in your life. Unless you currently spend time each day sitting around doing nothing, it’s inevitable that, as you increase your book reading, other activities will have to fall by the wayside. You could confront this head-on by revisiting the audit of your everyday routines and identifying unwanted habits that you could give up. And just as it’s helpful to establish new cues to associate with reading, you could look to remove the cues to your unwanted habits, such as keeping the TV remote out of sight in a drawer, or setting a rule not to take your phone upstairs. ‘Recognising that [acquiring a new habit] it is a substitution process is quite useful,’ says Gardner. ‘But then you have to come up with your own strategies based on what the old behaviour is and what the cues are to think about how you can disrupt that old habit.’

Clear recommends a less direct approach to habit substitution. ‘I don’t know that it’s that productive to focus on what you’re giving up or what you’re sacrificing,’ he says. Build your new book-reading habit, he says, and other unimportant things will naturally fall away. ‘The act of building good habits is like a plant. One plant crowding out another. If you just focus on cultivating this new plant, a lot of bad habits kind of fall by the wayside anyway.’

If you’ve been putting the advice in this Guide into practice but you’re finding it difficult to keep going, an effective tool you could use to sustain your motivation is to monitor your progress. At least at first, Clear advises against ticking off each book you read or aiming for an overly ambitious goal, such as reading a certain number of books per month or per year. Far better, he says, is to apply his ‘two-minute rule’ and track a more modest attainment, such as recording each day that you manage to read just a page or just for five minutes. You can adjust according to your own levels (such as each time you finish a chapter or read for half an hour), the important thing is to choose a realistic, easily obtainable target in the early stages and track your success reaching that.

‘Visualising your progress is a powerful and fruitful thing to do,’ says Clear. ‘The feeling of progress is very motivating to the human brain. You want to feel like you’re moving forward, if possible, in that moment. That’s why tracking your daily reading is more productive than tracking when the book is finished, because the book might take you three weeks, but by tracking your reading every day, you get a little signal [of progress and success] along the way.’

A further idea to help you grow your reading habit is to think about your social world. Just as making books prominent in your physical and digital environments will help to lay the foundations for more reading, your social environment is also important, especially for deepening and sustaining the habit. Sharing a pleasure multiplies it. If none of your close family or friends reads books, then reading will only ever be a private activity, separate from your personal relationships and to be squeezed in around them. If this is your situation, I’m not suggesting you ditch all your buddies, but I’d recommend seeking out one or more friends who read, for instance by joining a book group – physical or virtual (see Links and Books below). ‘Reading was, and still is, a way for me to connect with people,’ says Reynolds.

Related to the notion of connecting with other readers is to think about cultivating your own sense of self and identity as a reader. For avid readers, their love of books is often central to who they are, and this shapes their attitude to reading and the priority they give it in life. ‘I say this a lot with habits and identity in general,’ says Clear. ‘Like the real goal is not to run a marathon. The goal is to become a runner. Right? The goal is not to do a silent meditation retreat, but to become a meditator. And that’s definitely true here. The real goal is not to read 30 books, it’s to become a reader.’

Clear recommends spending some time thinking about the kind of person you want to be and how reading more books will help you fulfil that aim. It might not be for everyone to make this too explicit, but if you think it might help, you could try writing out a sentence like ‘I am the type of person who loves reading books’ or ‘I am the type of person who loves reading about other cultures’ and reminding yourself of that identity frequently. This then provides a frame for the actions that you choose to take each day. Is switching on the TV straight after work something a book-lover does? No. Is picking up a book and reading for a few minutes? Yes. ‘What it does, like every action you take, is a vote for the type of person you want to become,’ says Clear. ‘And now suddenly you see reading in this more powerful light. It’s like every time I pick up a book and read a page, it becomes a vote for this, a new identity that I’m trying to build.’

Links & books

The online reading community Goodreads features hundreds of book groups and clubs. You’ll need to register (it’s free) and then click the ‘community’ tab.
The Rebel Book Club is one of the most popular non-fiction book clubs in the world, and features live physical and virtual events for members. Many newspapers and other organisations also offer virtual book clubs, such as The Guardian’s reading group (the writer Sam Jordison hosts online discussions on Tuesdays). There are also numerous celebrity book clubs you could try, if that’s to your taste. Popular ones include Oprah Winfrey’s book club and Reese Witherspoon’s book group, which is hosted on Instagram.
Five Books invites experts to recommend five books in their specialist area. To get a meta-take on your growing reading habit, you could check out their selection of five books on the history of reading.
In this article, Goodreads ‘super readers’, who read hundreds of books a year, share their top tips for reading more books.
If you’re constantly on the go, consider trying Amazon’s Whispersync for Voice – the company offers more than 30,000 titles that you can read as ebooks in parallel as you listen to them as audio books, with your progress tracked seamlessly between the two formats.
Finally, if you want to read more about reading, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018) by Maryanne Wolf takes a look at the psychology and neuroscience of deep reading in the age of so much digital distraction.

Six economics misconceptions of mine which I've resolved over the last few years

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 07:24:00 +0000

Kannu, my wonderful son

Happy Special Day Son.

I subscribed to this blog and have been finding absolute gems of insights in here. Spend today reading the blog in and out and figured I should share this one with you, which you may find of interest. These made me blink as many of these were also misconceptions I held and hold. The one thing which I keep on making a mistake about is to discount knowledge and specialisation. For example, I keep on going on thinking constantly that investing in IPO’s is a good idea. I should know better frankly. I have been beset with this misconception since I was in India and about 20 years old. One would have figured out something like this in 30 years but no. This surfaced frequently. Most recently when I saw the primary bid app. So was poking and worrying at it now for 2 months, remember I told you about it?

And then last week spent some time on investigating the firms which are being listed and offered for sale on the App. Over the last 2 months, I didn’t see a single investment which was close to being considered good. And most were flat over months. The issuance discount wasn’t good and the longer term behaviour was rubbish. Not worthy at all. And then when you look at some of the sectors, they are in real estate, consumables, etc. which will struggle over the next few weeks and months. I am not sure if this will be good at all. So, to avoid creating stress in my life, I have deleted the app and will continue with my strategy of long term investments via proper advisors in proper diversified funds. Better that way. J

We did speak about your flat, son, I think you should spend some time looking at flats. You will need to do that at some point. Paying rent for so long wouldn’t be good. Remember the mistake I made by insisting to rent for 3 years till Mamma did the right thing and purchased our house? Yes you will have an issue with spending time, money and energy but you should start thinking about getting a good asset. You don’t have to live in it, you can always rent it off and stay in your current flat, but at least your rental is offset by your received rent and the mortgage is covered. House prices are going up and down but you will need a place anyway, so do look at it, son.

Anyway, this was a good read, son, forced me to rethink my own conceptions and review. Good to check.

Hope your project is calming down a bit, let me know when we can speak to today, I am missing you L

Love

Baba,

Six economics misconceptions of mine which I've resolved over the last few years

by Buck

July 21, 2020 7:03 PM

Here are six cases where I was pretty confident in my understanding of the microeconomics of something, but then later found out I was missing an important consideration.
Thanks to Richard Ngo and Tristan Hume for helpful comments.
Here’s the list of mistakes:

I thought divesting from a company had no effect on the company.
I thought that the prices on a prediction market converged to the probabilities of the underlying event.
I thought that I shouldn’t expect to be able to make better investment decisions than buying index funds.
I had a bad understanding of externalities, which was improved by learning about Coase’s theorem.
I didn’t realize that regulations like minimum wages are analogous to taxes in that they disincentivize work.
I misunderstood the economics of price controls.

In each, I’m not talking about empirical situations at all—I’m just saying that I had a theoretical analysis which I think turned out to be wrong. It’s possible that in many real situations, the additional considerations I’ve learned about don’t actually affect the outcome very much. But it was still an error to not know that those considerations were potentially relevant.

1. Divestment

I used to believe that personally divesting in a company didn’t affect its share price, and therefore had no impact on the company. I guess my reasoning here was something like “If the share is worth $10 and you sell it, someone else will just buy it for $10, so the price won’t change”. I was treating shares as if they were worth some fixed amount of money.
The simplest explanation for why you can’t just model shares as being worth fixed amounts of money is that people are risk averse, and so the tenth Google share you buy is worth less to you than the first; and so as the price decreases, it becomes more worthwhile to take a bigger risk on the company.
As a result, divestment reduces the price of shares, in the same way that selling anything else reduces its price.
In the specific case of divestment, this means that when I sell some stocks, the price ends up lower than it was.
I first learned I was wrong about this from this Sideways View post, published May 2019.

2. Index funds

I used to think that it wasn’t possible for individuals like me to get higher returns than I’d get from just buying an index fund, because in an efficient market, every share is equally valuable.
This is wrong for a few reasons. One is that the prices of shares are determined by the risk aversion of other market participants; if your risk aversion is different from the average, some shares (specifically, risky ones) will be much better investments than others.
Secondly, because I’m risk averse, I prefer buying shares which are going to do relatively well in worlds where I’m relatively poorer. For example, if I’m a software engineer at a tech company, compared to a random shareholder I should invest more in companies which are as anticorrelated with software engineer salaries as possible. Or if I live in the US, I should consider investing in the markets of other countries.
I didn’t understand this fully until around April this year.

3. Prediction markets

Relatedly, I thought that the fair market price of a contract which pays out $1 if Trump gets elected is just the probability of Trump getting elected. This is wrong because Trump getting elected is correlated with how valuable other assets are. Suppose I thought that Trump has a 50% chance of getting reelected, and that if he gets re-elected, the stock market will crash. If I have a bunch of my money in the stock market, the contract is worth more than 50 cents, because it hedges against Trump winning.
(Here’s a maybe more intuitive way of seeing this: Suppose I could pick between getting $10 in the world where Trump won (in which we’re assuming the market would crash) and the world where Trump lost. Clearly the $10 would be more valuable to me in the world where he wins and my stocks are decimated. So the value of the “Trump wins” contract is higher than the value of the “Trump loses” contract, even though they correspond to events of equal probability.) And there is a potentially very high number of correlative outcomes that betters might be thinking about and hedging against, and the market computes these and reflects them in the price.
This is a more general version of the point that it’s hard to have a prediction market on whether the world will end. Paul Christiano has an old blog post on this topic which I first saw years ago but which I didn't understand properly at the time.
I first understood this fully around March this year.
All of these first three mistakes were the result of me not really understanding basic portfolio theory; thanks to spending a bunch of time talking to traders over the last few years, I now understand it better.

4. Coase’s arguments about externalities

I used to have an overly simplistic picture of externalities—I believed the Econ 101 story: normally markets are efficient, but when a good has an externality the wrong amount will be produced, and this is resolved by putting a tax or subsidy on the good to internalize the externality.
I changed my mind about this after reading David Friedman’s essay. I’ll just quote a few paragraphs:

The first step is to realize that an external cost is not simply a cost produced by the pollutor and born by the victim. In almost all cases, the cost is a result of decisions by both parties. I would not be coughing if your steel mill were not pouring out sulfur dioxide. But your steel mill would do no damage to me if I did not happen to live down wind from it. It is the joint decision—yours to pollute and mine to live where you are polluting—that produces the cost.

Suppose that, in a particular case, the pollution does $100,000 a year worth of damage and can be eliminated at a cost of only $80,000 a year (from here on, all costs are per year). Further assume that the cost of shifting all of the land down wind to a new use unaffected by the pollution—growing timber instead of renting out summer resorts, say—is only $50,000. If we impose an emission fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, the steel mill stops polluting and the damage is eliminated—at a cost of $80,000. If we impose no emission fee the mill keeps polluting, the owners of the land stop advertising for tenants and plant trees instead, and the problem is again solved—at a cost of $50,000. In this case the result without Pigouvian taxes is efficient—the problem is eliminated at the lowest possible cost—and the result with Pigouvian taxes in inefficient.

Moving the victims may not be a very plausible solution in the case of air pollution; it seems fairly certain that even the most draconian limitations on emissions in southern California would be less expensive than evacuating that end of the state. But the problem of externalities applies to a wide range of different situations, in many of which it is far from obvious which party can avoid the problem at lower cost and in some of which it is not even obvious which one we should call the victim.

My previous position was missing this nuance. I first read that David Friedman essay midway through last year.

5. Non-tax regulations that increase equality have disincentive effects on work

I used to think that the way to decide whether a minimum wage was good was to look at the effect on unemployment and the effect on total income for minimum wage workers, and then figure out whether I thought that the increase in unemployment was worth the increase in income. I think this was wrong in two pretty different ways.
The first mistake is that I was neglecting the fact that policies aimed at transferring wealth from rich people to poor people disincentivize making money. Taxes are just a special case of this, and can be seen as part of a category of wealth-transferal policies that includes minimum wage. So when you’re arguing that a minimum wage would be part of the optimal policy portfolio, you have to argue that it would be better than a tax. I did not understand that this was part of the calculation.
I first learned this from a post by Paul Christiano which I think he incorporated into Objection 2 here; that blog post was published March 2019.

6. Price and quality controls

The second of the ways I was wrong about the minimum wage comes from a misunderstanding of the economics of price controls; in hindsight I think that my high school economics curriculum was just wrong about this. I think that I realized my misconception after reading The Dark Lord’s Answer, published in 2016.
In high school economics, I was taught that when the government imposes a price floor (e.g., a minimum wage), you’ll end up with more supply than demand for the good. This is beneficial to suppliers who still succeed at selling the good, it’s harmful to suppliers who can no longer sell the good, and it’s harmful to buyers.
I now think that that understanding was overly simplistic. Here’s my current understanding.
In a market, the supply and demand of a good must equilibrate somehow—for every loaf of bread that someone buys, someone had to sell a loaf of bread. One way that the market can equilibrate is that the price can change—if the price is higher, selling is more attractive and buying is less attractive. So if more people want to buy than sell at the current price, we might expect the price to rise until things are in equilibrium.
But there are other variables than price which can change in a way that allow the market to equilibrate. One obvious example is product quality—if you decrease the quality of a product, consumers are less enthusiastic about buying but suppliers are more enthusiastic about selling (because they can presumably make it for cheaper).
Often, fluctuations in quality rather than price are what cause markets to equilibrate. For example, restaurants often don’t have price hikes at busy times, they just have long waits. Customers like it less when they have to wait more, and restaurants like having customers waiting (because it helps them ensure that their restaurant is constantly full).
So when we talk about the equilibrium state of a market, we can’t just talk about price, we also need to talk about all the other variables which can change.
In the case where we only consider price and quantity, there’s always only one equilibrium, because as price increases, supply rises and demand falls. (Actually, supply and demand could be constant over some range of prices, in which case there is an interval of equilibrium prices. I’m going to ignore this.)
But if we’re allowed to vary quality too, there are now many possible settings of price and quality where supply equals demand. E.g., for any fixed quality level, there’s going to be one equilibrium price, for the same reason as before.
In a competitive market, the equilibrium will be the point on the supply-equals-demand curve which maximizes efficiency. E.g., if there’s a way that producers could increase quality that would make production cost $1 more, producers will only do that if it makes the product worth more than $1 more valuable to consumers. This is optimal.
(In real life, you usually have producers selling a variety of different similar goods at different price/quality points; I’m talking about this restricted case because it’s simpler.)
Now, suppose that the government imposes a restriction on price or quality. For example, they might set a maximum or minimum price, or they might make safety restrictions which restrict quality in certain ways. The market will reequilibriate by using whatever degrees of freedom it has left. Specifically, it will reequilibriate to the optimal point within the newly restricted space of points at which supply equals demand. In general, this will lead to a less efficient outcome.
For example, if the price of bread is $2 at equilibrium, and the government sets a maximum price of $1.50, then the equilibrium will move along the quality curve until it gets to the point where the equilibrium price is $1.50.
This analysis gets more realistic if you allow there to be more dimensions than price and quantity along which bread can vary. For example, I’d expect to see the following phenomena:

Producers trying to figure out ways to get paid under the table, e.g., by demanding favors in return for selling to people. This reduces efficiency inasmuch as producers weren’t already being compensated by miscellaneous favors.
Sellers changing in ways that are mildly more convenient for them but much more inconvenient for consumers. For example, having long lines outside stores, or treating customers worse.
Producers indulging weak preferences of theirs in who they sell to (e.g., nepotism).

In the case of minimum wages, I’d expect to see employers do things like engaging in wage theft which the employees tolerate (which is inefficient because it increases variance for employees) or being inflexible and unpleasant. This analysis would predict that wage theft is much more common among minimum wage employees than employees at higher wages.
One way of thinking about the efficiency of this is to think from the perspective of the producers. They have to pick some change that makes the price of the bread $1.50. There are many ways they could reduce the price to $1.50. They’re going to pick the way that is best for them.
In some cases, this leads to almost no value being destroyed at all. For example, in the bread case, sellers might sell smaller loaves, which might be almost as efficient if you dubiously assume that the main cost of bread is flour. The worst case is that there’s no way for the seller to change the product to keep it profitable which benefits them, and so they end up changing it in a way which makes them very little better off.
The welfare impact of this kind of regulation is also affected by redistributive effects. For example, if bakers decide to only sell bread to their friends and family, this has a positive redistributive effect if the friends and family of bakers are poorer than average.
An example where the redistributive effect might make the world much better: Suppose that there’s demand for 100 loaves of bread, where half of that comes from poor people who want to feed their children and the other half comes from a tech billionaire who wants to make a giant bread sculpture. If the baker ends up selling to people who are most willing to stand in lines, then this might lead to a better outcome. (Getting this result requires making some pretty strong assumptions about the shape of the relevant curves.)
Another example is that you might expect that in a world where the minimum wage causes low-paid jobs to be more unpleasant, teenagers will be less inclined to take the jobs and poor adults will end up having relatively more of the jobs. It’s possible to set things up such that this ends up increasing total welfare.

Conclusion

It’s embarrassing that I was confidently wrong about my understanding of so many things in the same domain. I’ve updated towards thinking that microeconomics is trickier than most other similarly straightforward-seeming subjects like physics, math, or computer science. I think that the above misconceptions are more serious than any misconceptions about other technical fields which I’ve discovered over the last few years (except maybe the aestivation hypothesis thing).
In three of these cases (4, 5, and 6), I had incorrect beliefs that came from my high school economics class. In those three cases, the correct understanding makes government intervention look worse. I think that this is not a coincidence—I think that the people who wrote the IB economics curriculum are probably leftist and this colored their perception.
On the other hand, in the other cases, I assumed that the equilibria of markets had a variety of intuitive properties that they turn out not to have.
One obvious question is: how many more of these am I going to discover over the next year or two?
I think my median guess is that over the next year I will learn two more items that I think deserve to go on this list. Of course, I’m now a lot more cautious about being confident about microeconomics arguments, so I don’t expect to be as confidently wrong as I was about some of these.
In most of these cases, there was a phase where I no longer believed the false thing but didn’t properly understand the true thing. During this phase, I wouldn’t have made bets. Currently I’m in the “not making bets” phase with regard to a few other topics in economics; hopefully in a year I’ll understand them.

Discuss

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Date a girl who reads

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 05:02:00 +0000

Kannu / Choti

I loved this writeup. Look at Mamma – who reads J

Love

Baba

“You should date a girl who reads.

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”

Luck and happy special day Choti - July 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 06:24:00 +0000

My dear Choti

I saw that video of yours where you were 3 years old and were telling me how you tidied up your room. You were and are so cute and adorable and I missed you so much L squish squish.

Well, your special day is coming up and I had a few moments free so decided to send you a regular special day email J some days early even. Baba is always last in wishing you guys with a special day wish. Mamma specially is up past midnight and she regularly wishes all of us happy special day and happy birthday and stuff.

Anyway, I am missing you, so there. But I wanted to talk to you about luck because I read this fascinating quote, “Luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature” by Michael Chabon, Moonglow. Luck is a funny thing, Choti. You may have heard it as “you are lucky” or in the new parlance, you are privileged. Or check your privilege. Yes, you are born with quite a lot of huge advantages, Choti. You are born in a developed country. To educated parents. In a good house. Studying in a good school. With great friends. In a safe locality. With greenery around. With loads of books. With people with high expectations. with parents who are married (despite Mamma’s daily threats to kill me). With good food and nutrition. Without problems much with pollution or environmental disasters. Your baba tells you dad jokes. With fantastic access to information. With a good brother (he is a gadha and libre sometimes..but generally is a good brother). You have good clothes. You have access to great healthcare and orthodontists. You look absolutely like a lovely young lady and know dancing. You are able to do athletics. You are a head girl. You are hugely intelligent and smart and hard working. You have a great future ahead of you. you are loved and cared for. You have a set of circumstances which to many other people, is being very very lucky (well, maybe not so much on the Baba jokes) but you get what I mean?

But darling, you cannot rely on it and coast on it. You have to build on what you have. There’s nothing wrong in having the above advantages but it will be a shame if you don’t build on it. That’s where I loved the quote, it doesn’t talk about what you have got but what you do with it. So the reason why I liked the Michael quote was the forward look, the active development of the luck factor. Its more your personality. Take a look at each of the factors, sweetheart. Stubbornness. Another word for dedicated. But its more than that. It goes beyond dedication. It means you are stubborn and keep at it for much longer than what others may have done and have given up. That’s the key thing, Choti. You have to be stubborn about a few things. Principles perhaps, a mission, a vision. A dream, push on and do it. Second element is observation. I have spoken to you about Einstein’s quote, children and genius’s share one quality, they are curious. You need to keep looking and observing things. Look at the skies, look at the quirk of the eyebrow. Look at the earthworm in the ground. Observe patterns in newspaper articles. Look at data and think about the drum beats in the songs which you like. Observe. Be curious. Keep asking why, where, who, when what. As Kipling says,

I Keep Six Honest
Serving Men

I KEEP six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five,
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men.
But different folk have different views;
I know a person small—
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!

She sends'em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes—
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!

The Elephant's Child

The second stanza is the key, never let them rest. Adults, specially become less curious. They stop asking questions. Thinking that asking questions makes them look illiterate. NO! asking questions is how you become curious, darling. You know shit and stuff.

The next one is the fluid sense of the truth. Life isn’t black and white and as a budding historian and classicist, you will know that history or truth is a mist. Its vague. It depends on who is telling and when. It shifts and turns and what is accepted truth can no longer be the same. If the truth is that a brown girl cannot succeed in the corporate or academic or political world, well, its not true because you can and will overcome it. Never take these so-called truths on face value, question them, darling. Same one for lies, flip side, question everything, they are just statements. And the final one is also related, a deeply suspicious nature. Always query, ask and specially of yourself. Are you taking yourself for granted? Constantly challenge yourself and prepare yourself. 1 year back you were saying you were rubbish at food. And now? You are making gourmet Italian pasta meals!. Which is extraordinary and I am so proud of you. Still debating the turnip thing which you have a very unhealthy fascination with but…leave that alone J

So when you are talking about luck, Choti, be this, ask questions and challenge yourself. Here’s another quote, “Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation, while bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality.” – Eliyahu Goldratt

Anyway, I have banged on too much already, Choti. Have a lovely day, do call up Didu if you can this week, she has had a bad painful back and is really suffering at the moment.

Love you and missing you terribly, Choti.

Be well

Your loving Baba.

Happy Special Day Kannu June 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 06:33:00 +0000

My dear Kannu

So this time I am going to be sending you your special day letter a day or two earlier than normal instead of the usual delayed letter. It’s the weekend and I was missing you so much. Last time I went to Al Forsan Shooting club was with you where you shot off all those guns and then we had that huge sushi dinner.

Anyway, I shared the Economic Facts and Fallacies book by Thomas Sowell with you. If you need the epub/pdf, I can send that to you. I had read the first edition and then again read the second edition long time back. And then I was discussing economic fallacies with a bunch of friends on a mailing list. One of my friends wanted to know what are the common fallacies that Indians see and work on. I wrote these

1. it’s the government's job to create jobs rather than create the eco-system to create jobs

2. Sarkar ki sampatti apni sampatti hai, maine mera hissa le liya (basically that government assets or public commons are free for all and nobody cares about them)

3. doing business is grubby business

4. buy gold

5. buy real estate

6. tax evasion

7. queuing

8. foreign capital is bad

9. improving product quality is useless

10. you cannot compromise on development over environment

11. a high fx reserve is a good thing

12. exchange rates don't matter

13. the entire case of agricultural subsidies being good

14. state owned banking system is required for a developing country like India

Some of the above obviously needs to be expanded but then Amit shared the book reference and I read it again. Fascinating. I have now read the book 3 times and every time, I shake my head at the ridiculousness of so many public and private policies that are embedded in day to day life. At the beginning, I used to get upset and used to fulminate and moan and complain with a passion. Then I figured, I should take advantage of it and started to dis/invest in companies, markets and sectors which had issues. And now, whenever I see these and other economic fallacies being pushed around (and I was asked many questions during my recent lectures), I just laugh and walk away. No point, meh. But you are in a different stage, Kannu, in your line of work, you could think about how you can leverage your investments on these economic fallacies. It’s a nice short book and you can easily go through it in less than a day. People who work outside them or can recognise these fallacies are frankly very priviledged (there’s another issue that gets my goat, this stupidity called as “check my priviledge” but will talk about that another day).

More importantly, your own worldview changes. For example, Indians are boycotting Chinese goods which I find ridiculous. Its all a way to keep the hoi polloi occupied with miserably stupid things. It does not add a single additional Indian job, save an Indian Soldiers life or increases anybody’s earnings. I told the students who asked me, I said, sod that stupidity, you are smart. Instead of deleting the Chinese apps, learn how they have made those apps and make a better app. Add value to your country by establishing a company and building jobs. Fallacies, son, fallacies. It focuses your mind on important things, son. And when you start getting involved in charity or in proper business, you will do things that actually matter, which actually make a difference.

Let me know what you think after reading the book. It would be good to hear your fresh thoughts on how the world treats them.

By the way, the photos of you and Choti in the garden were so lovely, I must have seen them 200 times again and again. You two have turned out so well, that I am so happy. All credit to Mamma of course! And other than that regrettable tendency to purchase turnips. What is with that? Of all the things you two can do, you decide to mess about with turnips? Terrible.

Anyway, hope you have a lovely special day, Kannu. Love you and miss you terribly.

Baba

happy special day APril 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:04:00 +0000

My lovely chotisi

I am missing you so much, I would have squished you and loved you and cuddled you and combed your hair and told you dad jokes and and and! Not to mention make you faint!. Good to hear that you arent being bored and have much to do J

So, I thought of sharing few things which you might like

1. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/who-is-the-draco-in-draconian-measures/ quite an interesting background. I keep on telling people that my little girl will become Mary Beard, version 2.0, but so much better looking and better in communications J Its so amazing what the Athenians managed to get up to in so many forms of human civilisation. Its very obvious why Greek civilisation is considered to be the foundation of modern civilisation and how much it spread via colonisation, gutenberg’s press and and and. But we shouldn’t forget the work done by other civilisations but their contributions didn’t stick.

2. Second was this: I was discussing with a mate about discussing sieges in classical times where similar situations would happen. There would be an enemy at the gate and the city or town would be locked down. Fear and terror would stalk the streets. But people would still go out to fight. Thucydides was discussed. But I pointed her to somethings that come out well despite when sieges happen. We see the emergence of heroes. Like the doctors and nurses and ambulance drivers and the checkout assistants and the policemen who have to go out to work despite the dangers. I pointed her to what Homer wrote about Hector. Thanks to Brad Pitt and Homer, people admire and like Achilles but he was a demi-god. The man was a confirmed baersark and a nutter but he was good looking so he was given a hospital pass (pun intended). But Hector? ah! now there's a brave man. Who knew that Troy will fall. Who soothed his fearful wife Andromache after she begged him to stay back, saying, "“Hector, thus it is you are father to me, and my honored mother, you are my brother, and you it is who are my young husband. Please take pity upon me then, stay here on the rampart, that you may not leave your child an orphan, your wife a widow … “ He replied...Then tall Hector of the shining helm answered her: “All these things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments, if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting … for I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it: there will come a day when sacred Ilion will perish, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear. But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans that troubles me, not even of Priam the king nor Hecabe … as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured Achaian leads you off, taking away your day of liberty, in tears; and in Argos you must work at the loom of another, and carry water from the spring Messeis or Hypereia, all unwilling, but strong will be the necessity upon you; and some day seeing you shedding tears a man will say of you: ‘This is the wife of Hector, who was ever the bravest fighter of the Trojans, breakers of horses, in the days when they fought about Ilion.’ “So will one speak of you; and for you it will be yet a fresh grief, to be widowed of such a man who could fight off the day of your slavery. But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.” So speaking glorious Hector held out his arms to his baby, who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse’s bosom screaming, and frightened at the aspect of his own father, terrified as he saw the bronze and the crest with its horse-hair, nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet. Then his beloved father laughed out, and his honoured mother, and at once glorious Hector lifted from his head the helmet and laid it in all its shining upon the ground. Then taking up his dear son he tossed him about in his arms, and kissed him, and lifted his voice in prayer to Zeus and the other immortals: “Zeus, and you other immortals, grant that this boy, who is my son, may be as I am, pre-eminent among the Trojans, great in strength as I am, and rule strongly over Ilion; and some day let them say of him: ‘He is better by far than his father,’ as he comes in from the fighting; and let him kill his enemy and bring home the blooded spoils, and delight the heart of his mother.’ Pretty fascinating, isnt it?

3. Then I have mentioned Sappho to you earlier. Here’s an interesting link: https://greece.greekreporter.com/2020/03/21/bust-of-greek-poet-sappho-discovered-in-turkish-museum/?fbclid=IwAR2WzNlYWhFU64K9HUqtCwi8iQTmGLQDEOGKxDioHSaisyQscsq7AMAZde4

4. Well, i will reserve judgement till the paper comes out, but Sappho is seriously good. This is my favourite poem of her's.

He seems to me equal in good fortune to the
whatever man, who sits on the opposite side to you
and listens nearby to your
sweet replies
and desire-inducing laugh: indeed that
gets my heart pounding in my breast.
For just gazing at you for a second, it is impossible
for me even to talk;
my tongue is broken, all at once a soft
flame has stolen beneath my flesh,
my eyes see nothing at all,
my ears ring,
sweat pours down me, a tremor
shakes me, I am more greenish than
grass, and I believe I am at
the very point of death.

Hope you have a fantastic day, choti

Love you

Baba

Happy Special Day April 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:04:00 +0000

Good morning Kannu

Happy special day to you. I am missing you and Choti and Mamma, it’s been such a long time that I have been away from you. I know you are now all grown up and will soon move into your flat (btw, did you find out if you can get a rent holiday?) and you will soon form your own life and it has to happen that you will have your own family.

But as I speak to Dadu and Didu every day morning, I see both sides. They are so happy to hear from me and then I can see the happiness in their eyes which is how I feel when I see you. You make me so proud. You are all and more that a father would ever need or want. They are getting on in years. I was teasing Dadu after Didu and I were talking about Ira going to college. She and him were saying that they will be dead and buried by then. He used to say when he was 50 that he is going to die soon and then we will remember him or we will learn some random lesson. And I told him, you have been saying that now for so many decades, you are 86 now, so I think you can well live on for another 15 years till Ira gets into college. He didn’t know how to take it. But given his age, he is really spry, no medical issues, other than the usual squabbles with Didu. Good you two are speaking to them on a weekly basis, son.

It was funny to see the reactions of people who have been working from home, they really hate it. I didn’t have a problem and frankly my productivity has gone by at least by 25%! Huge work being done. I guess once you have worked in London managing global teams – you don’t have an issue for working from home that much. That said, besides productivity, weight is also going up…I am now up to 122 kilos!!! Despite exercising every day and trying to go for long walks when I can, it’s the sitting around snacking which is killing me.

On the longer term, this covid19 will change the operating model for the world hugely. I don’t know what will be the situation for the next 20-25 years. Those will be some of my final business years whilst they will be your first 2 decades at work. So I am thinking around on what I would have said for you and I to think and remember and do?

1. Keep cash in hand, our investments need to be much better timed and sectors oriented

2. Family has become even more important. I am so lucky to have Mamma, you and Choti but you will need your own family as well son. The support you get in times of trouble is unbelievable. Not just times of trouble but also day to day. So do think about that. You need to approach it as scientifically as with everything else. Having a partner and kids – don’t rely on luck – that’s too vague and the damage from a bad choice can be too much.

3. Languages are good son. Spend a bit of time to learn one more language. Chinese might be too tough, but maybe an European language or Hindi – Mamma knows Hindi and speak to her and Choti at home and you will keep picking this up.

4. I am not sure if an MBA will help at the moment. It is too vague and generalist at the moment. But if you are thinking about future studies, then you have to only go for an Harvard MBA or Stanford or Yale. Just the top 2-3, and yes in the USA. You have coverage and knowledge of Europe and India is in your genes, but you need to spend some quality time in USA to build up your cv, son.

5. You can also think about a CIMA perhaps? But maybe later. Optional.

6. Another thing that will help will be to join a charity of some kind. Doesn’t matter which one but it will seriously enrich your life, son. Hugely. The thing is, you are in danger of being in a bubble. You spend your time with some very rich people on the phone and in meetings. Your spare time is with your friends, who are also quite comfortably well off, middle class, in London. So the issue is that you aren’t seeing the down, the poor, the dying, the sick, the distressed. That isn’t right because you run the risk of forming a world view which doesn’t include them. If you want to become a CEO or a Board Member, you need to be connected to more sections and sectors of society. Your decision making powers and capability will be hugely enhanced.

Anyway< I think this is long enough now, son. Have a lovely day, look after the girls

Love you

Baba

Happy Special Day son. May 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:03:00 +0000

Kannu

Happy Special Day to you. I was so happy to see you cook and cook well. I shared the photos of your dishes and our talk about my presentations on FB and boasted about how proud and happy I am with my adorable son who has turned out so well. Well, for most of the things, but he still goes out into the public without his mask. You will get a scolding for it. You don’t wear a mask for yourself but for others! And he doesn’t know how to put the compost bag back together properly. Now that you have been scolded, good work son on being well balanced with the lockdown, working and eating and looking after the girls. And not too many explosions at the internet quality. I love you and happy special day. I hope you are having your yogurt and vakult thingamabob? What happened to you visiting the doctor for your tummy?

Anyway, I thought of sharing this article, well more like an extended essay.

https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/#introduction

I have quite a lot to say about this but I think you and Diya should take some time to read this through. You know my concerns about national debt. USD 17 Trillion is the estimate that is being made for how much governments have spent over the past 2 months on trying to handle the corona virus. The Debt GDP ratio for OCED is now going to go beyond 100%. Whilst we are good to keep investing in the USA (I still think it’s the best investment opportunity), other countries, without the benefit of the USD as the reserve currency are going to suffer. As you mentioned, the UK has given up all the gains for the past 4 years and lord only knows where it will be going. Well, we do know where it will be going, it will be going into money printing like a nutter. That said, the negative interest rates are a puzzle and not quite sure why that is going on.

The interest payments on all that debt is also lower now so I think the British Government will load up more debt. Which will slowly mean that as they start cranking the money presses open, inflation will rise and then try to deflate away the debt. UK still has loads of good assets like good education, good infrastructure, good people, trust is there, etc. etc. so it’s not too bad a place. But for the next 30-50 years of your life and the remainder of your parents lives, it will be beset with major political and economic upheavals. So you have to be prepared hugely.

I know you are investing in equities and stocks, but you should start thinking about diversifying a bit as well. Especially into real estate and government bonds, and also in other countries to diversify your investments. Also investing in yourself, kids. Much much work to be done there over the coming many moons, but what I meant was that you need to think about diversifying your sources of income as well. Either by writing something or investing in other companies or starting your own, etc. etc.

This isn’t new as the author says, this has happened so many times. Every empire has over-extended itself and then fights break out. Which is terrible. I am sure Diya might have heard about the Thucydides trap, where a rising power (Athens) fights an older power (Sparta) and then both become weaker hugely. In that case, Sparta won but then dribbled away into insignificance. People tend to refer to China and USA as one of the Thucydides trap examples but I think that is needlessly limited, China has seen many an economic model, many political models, many different enemies and is still alive and rising. Not many empires can claim to do that. Think about it, which other empire has been up to that extent so many times? Not many, once an empire goes out, it goes out, very little is left of it. What’s the difference? The people, education, its inventiveness, its ability to create new things and buzz with energy. USA also has that so I wouldn’t bet against it either.

Anyway, take some time to read the article Kannu (and you too, Choti, you will need to know this. Don’t forget to setup the trading account, ok?

Love

Baba

happy special day - sculptures

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:03:00 +0000

Choti

I didn’t get a chance to send you the happy special day email J bit late but there you go. I thought of sending you something about sculptures. First, you should read this article

https://mymodernmet.com/donatello-david-bronze-sculpture/

You get to see amazing sculptures in museums and it has been a fascinating journey for me. It started with, of coruse, reading the agony and the ecstacy by irvine stone, the story of michelangelo. We have a copy at home and you should read it. It is not quite a biography but it reads very well indeed. Loved how his life was described. Anyway, you saw David when you went to Florence and you can read the story behind it in the book about how he managed to carve it. But before that, you need to see what Donatello did with his David. Michelangelo’s works are brilliant anyway and do take a look at his works. We have the Pieta hanging on our wall above your desk. Just gaze at it and think about how wonderfully he put that together.

The other most amazing sculptor that I love is Canova. He did some extraordinary work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Canova. His Psyche Revived by Cupid’s kiss is such an amazing piece of tender loving care. His three graces is also exquisite.

And then the final one for you to think about is the Veiled Christ by Giuseppe Sanmartino. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veiled_Christ

This is perhaps the most amazing piece of sculpture which exists in my mind. Mamma might be able to tell you about the veiled sculpture called as the Veiled Rebekah which was in Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad. One of the biggest and most amazing collections by one single person in that museum. We will go there one day. Similar in concept to the veiled Christ, you can see it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veiled_Rebecca

When I first saw Rebekah, I was taken aback but the Veiled Christ is absolutely amazing. The work which has been done is extraordinary. I am useless at art, so whenever I see this kind of work, I am stunned at the way somebody can literally convert stone to living flesh, show expressions and come up with emotions.

The next one that I really really love and adore is the bust of Nefertiti. We don’t know who made this but its one of the most famous Ancient Egyptian works of art, copied and painted and shared all over the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefertiti_Bust such an amazingly beautiful piece of art, look at that neck, that patrician nose, that regal expression. Amazing!

Another really really fascinating, at least to me, is Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_of_Saint_Teresa nothing other than her face. Just that religious ecstasy is mindbogglingly amazing, Choti. The quote is best: I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.

Still, I would say Canova wins for me hands down, Bernini and Michelangelo are also rans J but its just exquisite work. Once I grow up, I will learn how to sculpt but I doubt that I have that kind of an innate skill or even patience to do something like this. As for the modern sculptures, meh, bleah and puke!

Love you choti, missing you terribly.

Baba

What should be done with the magic bowls of Jewish Babylonia? – Samuel Thrope | Aeon Essays

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Choti is reading Harry Potter and by all counts she is loving it. Btw choti, mamma hasn't read the Harry Potter books either but you have and you loved them!
Do try to read the 20,000 leagues under the sea. The books by Jules Verne are amazing for their adventures, their imagination and they really get me excited. Even now. Life should be full of adventure.
And then think of how many times there were bowls in Harry Potter. That bowl which contained the memories. So many myths are connected to bowls. Like the goblet of fire. Or the mythical goblet which gives ever lasting life.
Here is the foundational myth behind those bowls.
Love
Baba

What should be done with the magic bowls of Jewish Babylonia? – Samuel Thrope | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/what-should-be-done-with-the-magic-bowls-of-jewish-babylonia
(via Instapaper)

Sometime around 650 AD, Mahdukh, daughter of Newandukh, had a headache. I first read about Mahdukh's migraines – excruciating and debilitating – on the inside of a bowl. Her name is written in black ink among spiralling, partially faded lines of Jewish Aramaic, the language of late antique Mesopotamia's Jews, on an unglazed clay vessel's inside surface.
Just beneath the lip of the bowl, a black circle surrounds the 15 lines of text. 'By your name, I act, great holy one,' the scribe, who was also the magical practitioner, begins in the first person. 'May there be healing from heaven for Mahdukh daughter of Newandukh.' The incantation calls powerful intercessors to her aid: divine names, magical words, angels and spirits and biblical verses.
Surprising though it might seem, Mahdukh's headaches have changed how scholars understand a crucial period in Jewish history. At the same time, her migraines have become entangled in debates over ethics, ownership and our responsibility to the past.
Thousands of similar incantation bowls, also known as magic bowls, were produced in the area of today's Iraq between the fifth and eighth centuries. Like Mahdukh – who commissioned dozens of bowls – clients used incantation bowls to protect and heal, to frighten off demons and evil spirits, and, in a few cases, to enlist demons to help secure love or money, or to harm adversaries.
In addition to the magical texts, scribes sketched drawings of bound and chained demons – pictorial representations of the spells' desired effect – on the bottom of about a quarter of the bowls.
Late-antique Mesopotamia was religiously and linguistically diverse. Most of the population, including Christians, Manichaeans and those who still followed the ancient Babylonian religion, used a dialect of Aramaic known as Syriac. The Mandaeans, a small, Gnostic religious community whose members have now mostly fled Iraq, had their own, closely related Aramaic dialect. So did the Jews, a longstanding minority whose presence, the Bible tells us, goes back to the Judean exiles first deported to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century BC. The region, an important province of the Iranian Sasanian empire, whose capital was located near present-day Baghdad, was also home to Persian-speaking Zoroastrians.
The bowls reflect this diversity, though not in the way we might expect. The largest number of known incantation bowls are written not in Syriac, but in Jewish Aramaic by Jewish scribes (though not necessarily for Jewish clients). Mandaean bowls are the second most numerous, only then followed by bowls in Syriac. A handful of bowls in Arabic and Persian are also known, in addition to bowls – perhaps 10 per cent – that can only be called ancient forgeries. These latter are filled with scribbles that mimic cursive writing but are not, in fact, in any language at all; perhaps they were made by illiterate scribes preying on equally illiterate clients.
The prevalence of Jewish Aramaic bowls are what makes these artefacts so important for Jewish history. They provide the sole piece of epigraphic evidence documenting Jewish language and religion at one of the most important times in Jewish history: the period of the composition of the Babylonian Talmud.
The Babylonian Talmud is a massive collection of law, commentary, exegesis, legend and myth. Passed down and expanded orally by generations of rabbis, the Talmud, committed to writing only in the early Middle Ages, became the ultimate arbiter of Jewish life and practice for communities from Spain to India. Today, almost without exception, Judaism is Talmudic Judaism. Even Jews who reject Judaism are in effect rejecting a religion cast in the Talmud's mould.
The Talmud itself contains a number of stories about demonic encounters and rabbis using magic to heal and harm (though it never refers to incantation bowls specifically). Scholars once dismissed these passages as anomalies meant to placate the rabbis' unsophisticated flock. But the incantation bowls unequivocally show that there was much rabbinic culture shared with such magical traditions. Demons mentioned in the Talmud, such as Ashmedai and Lilith, also appear in the bowls, as do stories about rabbinic sages and wonderworkers. Mahdukh's bowl contains just such a story, similar, though not identical, to others found in the Talmud, about the Jewish sage Hanina ben Dosa vanquishing a demon by reciting a biblical verse. Rabbis are even named in a few cases as the bowls' clients.
However, the incantation bowls do not simply confirm the picture of Babylonian Jewish life that the Talmud presents. The Talmud, like other late-antique theological works, is concerned with protecting the boundaries of the faith from outside influence. Magicians adhered to a different standard.
Though written by Jewish scribes, many of the clients of the Jewish Aramaic bowls were not themselves Jews. Mahdukh, daughter of Newandukh, for instance, has a typically Zoroastrian name: Mahdukh means 'daughter of the Moon', a Zoroastrian deity, and Newandukh is Persian for 'daughter of the brave'. Other bowls were made for clients with similar names, including Ispendarmed, the Zoroastrian goddess of the Earth; Burznai, meaning 'high' or 'elevated'; and Gushnasp, the name of a sacred Zoroastrian fire.
But the interest in foreign magic went in more than one direction; Jews, including rabbis, purchased bowls from non-Jewish scribes. 'Everyone goes to everyone,' said Gideon Bohak, an expert on ancient religion at Tel Aviv University. 'You visit healers and magicians who are from different religious and social traditions. It's something that happens all the time, partially because the neighbour's grass is always greener; the neighbour's magic is always more powerful.'
Magicians of all stripes also incorporated foreign influences in their work. Though written in different dialects, the Jewish, Mandaean and Syriac incantation texts often share extended passages and use the same spells. One striking example is found on an otherwise unexceptional Jewish Aramaic bowl that invokes, among other protective spirits, 'Jesus, who conquered the height and the depth with his Cross, and in the name of the Exalted Father, and in the name of the Holy Spirits, forever and ever, Amen Amen Selah.' Bohak noted that the client might have been a Christian for whom the Jewish scribe included a special paean to the Trinity.
This openness to influence, said Siam Bhayro, professor of theology at the University of Exeter, was probably a function of the market. 'If Christian practitioners have the latest fad, of course Jewish practitioners or pagan practitioners are going to want it as well, to make themselves more marketable. You can see this being driven by economic imperatives.'
We don't know where or when Mahdukh's bowl was discovered. This recent history, while fragmentary and contentious, is as much a part of the artefact's story as the rabbis and magicians of late antiquity. For incantation bowls are, of course, not just texts. They are artefacts of considerable interest – and value – to collectors and dealers in the global antiquities trade.
Nearly every museum in the world contains such unprovenanced antiquities. This abundance can partially be explained by the fact that scientific archaeology, with its emphasis on artefacts' context, is so new. Current archaeological methods began to be widely employed in Iraq only in the 1920s,and museums are full of Assyrian statues, Babylonian tablets and Sasanian seals amassed by earlier collectors. The first published reference to the incantation bowls, Austen Henry Layard's Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853), reads more like an Orientalist adventure than an academic tome. The description and translation of the bowls he discovered is sandwiched between accounts of a precocious 12-year-old Arab sheikh and the Ottoman governor's tame lion.
'The tragedy is that these bowls would have contributed so much to knowledge if their context had been known'
But is also because of looting. The practice of swiping valuables from tombs and ancient sites is nothing new, but in recent decades the looting and smuggling of antiquities has grown into a major problem worldwide. Advances in technology, communications and transportation have made it possible for objects from illicit excavations to reach dealers and collectors abroad within days. This is especially true in antiquities-rich but governance-poor places such as Iraq, where the authorities that could protect sites and prosecute smugglers are weak or nonexistent. Iraqi antiquities began entering the market on a massive scale in 1991, in the political chaos and economic collapse that followed the first Gulf War and, as the 2003 looting of the National Museum of Iraq demonstrated, the looting only increased after the US-led invasion that year.
For archaeologists, unprovenanced antiquities have little to tell us. 'It's not just the objects that are interesting, it's the detailed circumstances of the discovery,' explained Colin Renfrew, now senior fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. 'The tragedy is that all these incantation bowls would have contributed so much to knowledge and understanding if [the details of] their context and discovery had been known.'
However, Renfrew and others say that not only are these bowls not worth studying, but that they shouldn't be studied. They argue that the study of these incantations, innocent as it might seem, is the last link in a chain of lawbreaking that begins with looting, theft and cultural destruction.
Mahdukh's bowl, catalogued as MS 1927/45, is now owned by the Norwegian collector Martin Schøyen. He has amassed the world's largest private collection of manuscripts, from cuneiform tablets to Scandinavian seals and Mayan vases. His collection includes 654 incantation bowls, the most in private hands.
In 1996, Schøyen invited Shaul Shaked, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a leading expert in the field, to work on the incantation bowls. For Shaked's convenience, the Norwegian collector arranged with University College London's department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies for the bowls to be kept at a university warehouse. For nearly a decade, Shaked worked on the bowls and published the fruits of his research.
Meanwhile, Norwegian journalists and academics were becoming suspicious about the origins of Schøyen's collection. In September 2004, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation aired the documentary The Manuscript Collector. It alleged that Schøyen's incantation bowls had been looted from Iraq in 1992 in violation of international sanctions and British law. In the wake of the documentary, in October that year, UCL officials announced that they had contacted London's Metropolitan Police, who informed them that they saw 'no reason to take the matter further' and that there was 'no objection to the return of the material to Schøyen'.
However, acknowledging a UNESCO treaty banning the sale of antiquities whose ownership history before 1970 could not be demonstrated (a treaty that the UK had ratified in 2002), UCL appointed an independent inquiry tasked with establishing the provenance of the bowls. The committee was made up of London lawyer David Freeman; Sally MacDonald, then director of UCL Museums and Collections; and Renfrew. It delivered its report in July 2006. Though suppressed as part of the settlement of Schøyen's 2007 lawsuit against UCL for return of the bowls, Renfrew deposited a copy in the House of Lords Library in 2009, and it became available on WikiLeaks that same year.
According to the report, Schøyen began buying incantation bowls from various London antiquities dealers in the early 1990s. All these dealers, in turn, had bought their bowls from a Jordanian named Ghassan Rihani.
Rihani, who died in 2001, was well-known in the antiquities community. He'd been head of the Jordanian Antiquities Association, and in 2003 The New York Times described him as a middleman dealing in looted Iraqi antiquities. A knowledgeable Jerusalem dealer also told me that Rihani was perhaps the main conduit in bringing stolen Iraqi artefacts to market.
For his part, Schøyen told the inquiry that the bowls came, not from Iraq, but from Rihani's family collection, in existence since 1965, with origins going back to 1935. The report discusses at length two Jordanian documents presented as evidence of Schøyen's claim. These documents are so vague that they could refer to any number of antiquities, or almost anything at all. Alone, they do fall far short of establishing a provenance for the bowls, though a London dealer told me that other documents, not mentioned in the report, paint a more complicated picture.
Nonetheless, the UCL report concluded that 'on the balance of probabilities' the bowls were removed from Iraq after 1990, in violation of Iraqi law and international sanctions. It cites Iraq's first antiquities law, from 1924, granting the Iraqi state primary ownership over all antiquities and prohibiting unauthorised export, and recommends that UCL return the 654 incantation bowls to the department of antiquities of the state of Iraq.
The report also calls on UCL to follow 'not merely the dictates of legal doctrine, but the demands of ethical principle and public decency'. But, in fact, what do ethics and decency demand? While Renfrew and others are adamant that the incantation bowls should be returned to Iraq, other scholars argue that Jewish Aramaic bowls are part of Jewish history, not of the modern Iraqi state. Considering Iraq's treatment of its own Jewish citizens, they say, returning the bowls would be foolhardy and unjust.
If the bowls were in Iraq, many of the leading scholars in the field, including Shaked in Jerusalem, would no longer have access to them. Jewish scholars, Israeli or otherwise, have never been given permission to study the National Museum of Iraq's 600 incantation bowls, the largest publicly owned collection in the world. Under Saddam, Jewish archaeologists were specifically excluded from working in Iraq. The attitude among some Iraqi archaeologists, it seems, remains unchanged. In September, Ali al-Nashmi, professor of history at Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, said that an international Jewish conspiracy 'reinforced following the 1897 Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland' was plotting to steal the Middle East's antiquities and destroy its Arab heritage. 'That,' he said in an interview with Al Mayadeen TV network, 'is why the most prominent archaeologists in the world are Jews.'
'A British person doesn't feel it very much,' Shaked said. 'But Jews aren't allowed to enter certain parts of the world. And sometimes the things are connected to them personally – to their history and their tradition.' The bowls, he continued 'can be anywhere, as long as they allow access to the material'.
Neil Brodie, one of the foremost researchers on the illicit antiquities trade, was sympathetic to this point. 'We recognise the realities of the situation on the ground at the moment,' he said. 'We realise that this body of material is unusual: it's Jewish, not cuneiform tablets. There are questions hanging over its fate if it is returned to Iraq.'
Brodie also argued that the situation is not as stark as Shaked implied. Returning the bowls to Iraqi ownership, he said, does not necessarily mean returning them to Iraqi territory. They could be housed in an institution outside the country until the political situation improves – the British Museum, the Louvre and other institutions have offered to serve as safe havens for material from war zones – and until all researchers are granted access to them. 'People could accuse me of being a bit idealistic and naive,' he added, 'but it's actually a very pragmatic approach.'
Brodie cautioned, however, that there are even more serious ethical issues. When scholars publish unprovenanced antiquities, or museums exhibit them, the market value of the objects increases – 10 times, he has written, in the case of the incantation bowls. There is a common-sense logic to this: Mahdukh's bowl, which has been translated, published and deemed important to Jewish history, will command a higher price than a bowl no one has read about and that might well be covered with meaningless scribbles. As the value of these objects rises, so does the demand for more, similar antiquities. The increase in demand is met with an increased supply: more looting on the ground.
I asked Brodie how this could apply to the particular bowls owned by Schøyen, which – assuming they were looted – were removed from Iraq so long ago.
'There might be an equivalent site or a better site and we don't want the same thing to happen to that,' he answered. 'If we keep falling back and saying: "Well, that's already happened so we might as well carry on with business as usual," in 10 or 20 years we might be dealing with another similar or worse situation. So to stop it happening in the future we have to deter people from buying this material now.'
'If you destroy the market entirely, then someone will come and just blow up all the bowls'
But the London dealer I spoke with said that, in the particular case of the incantation bowls, scholarly activity did not cause more looting. 'That's not an unrealistic thought, but it's not reality,' he said. 'There was no secondary market for them. There wasn't a third collector or a fourth collector. There was only these two collectors' – referring to Schøyen and the recently deceased Shlomo Moussaieff. 'By the time that both of them had stopped buying, there were enough problems with magic bowls that nobody would buy them anyway.'
As stricter guidelines make it harder to buy and sell unprovenanced antiquities in London – once a centre of the trade – the market is moving east. Singapore has become a transit point for looted artefacts from Iraq and elsewhere, and others mentioned collectors in the Gulf, China and Japan. In Brodie's eyes, this is a success. 'In the end, there will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide,' he said. As the market for antiquities moves, attention and pressure has to shift to those new environments.
In the meantime, though, until trading unprovenanced antiquities becomes inviable everywhere, scholars say that important discoveries will simply disappear, and that the looting continues on the ground regardless of how strictly ethical policies are enforced in the UK. 'The crimes are happening in any case,' said Bohak. 'It's happening whether you like it or not and whether you're collaborating or not. Then the question is: are your steps helping at all, or is it only a way of clearing one's conscience: the crimes are happening but not with British pounds so we don't care.
'In some cases, it seems that they've caused more damage than not,' he continued. If recognised institutions are unable to purchase unprovenanced antiquities, it means that they will be traded only among private collectors. Access to material in private hands depends on the owner's good will, and that of his or her heirs. 'And if you destroy the market entirely, then someone will come and just blow up all the bowls.'
For Brodie, though he did not describe it as dramatically, the sacrifice of a certain number of antiquities would be a small price to pay in exchange for many more remaining underground, unexcavated and not looted. 'Imagine if strong action had been taken in 1990, how much heritage would have been saved,' he wrote to me after we spoke. 'It would include, perhaps, a unique incantation bowl site.'
Shaked, for his part, is adamant that he will continue studying and publishing the bowls. 'As a researcher, I won't allow anything that has historical meaning and importance to rot someplace and not touch it, or be destroyed because someone can't sell it,' he said. 'I think that it is a crime against humanity to allow this material to be lost.'

Stories & Literature Art Anthropology All topics →

what did religions do to Economic Development?

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 08:00:00 +0000

this was a fascinating read...how religions actually helped in the literacy and development in Europe but when we take the argument to Africa, the message is much more complicated.

read the full thing

Throughout history, religious change is known to have brought about significant economic change in many countries. This column, taken from a recent Vox eBook, looks at the effects of the Christian missionary activity that expanded throughout African countries from the middle of the 19th century. It shows how the diversity of investments brought by Christian missionaries to the region had different, and sometimes conflicting, effects on long-term development.

Why does the Vatican accept the Big Bang but not evolution? – John Farrell | Aeon Essays

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 08:14:00 +0000

Here's something that you'd not find usually kids. An exposition why religions co-exist uneasily with science. All religions have foundational myths and when you have scientific ideas and facts coming through, they cannot handle it. Hinduism is also similar before you think it doesn't have the issues faced by the Abhrahamic religions. For example the idea of beef eating is very clearly established in ancient times and has been mentioned in many books but then over time, somehow the idea of vegetarianism and in particular cow worship reached into a state that some people get violently upset if you claim to eat beef. It's all rubbish of course.
In this particular case, this is a brilliant essay on why the church cannot accept evolution and the price it pays for not doing so. Good arguments.
Love
Baba

Why does the Vatican accept the Big Bang but not evolution? – John Farrell | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/why-does-the-vatican-accept-the-big-bang-but-not-evolution
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There was a moment in the recent history of the Roman Catholic Church when an influential Jesuit tried to forge a deep synthesis between religion and modern science. But he was muzzled by the Vatican, and Catholics have been paying for it ever since.
Sunday 10 April was the 60th anniversary of the death of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the priest-paleontologist who struggled to reconcile his beloved Catholic faith with evolution, but failed. Though born and educated in France, Teilhard was exiled for most of his adult life from his native country, and neither his Jesuit superiors nor the officials at the Vatican ever allowed him to publish a single word of his theological reflections on the challenge of Darwinian evolution and what it meant for Christian beliefs: letting go of the majestic but static medieval cosmos of Dante, where Earth was poised perilously between the timeless vault of Heaven above and the abyss of Hell below.
Teilhard laid out the most ambitious synthesis of Christianity and evolution by a Catholic scholar up to that time. His view was truly cosmic, embedding humanity in a dynamic universe whose evolutionary direction from the very beginning of life on Earth was groping its way towards consciousness. In his view, the evolution of consciousness in humanity was but a first step toward the entire cosmos achieving its own universal consciousness, or what he termed an Omega Point.
This optimistic vision hardly inspired Teilhard's fellow scientists. In a brutal assessment in 1961 , the British Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Sir Peter Medawar wrote that the greater part of Teilhard's ideas were nonsense, 'tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself'.
Many in the Roman Catholic hierarchy agreed, but for different reasons. Teilhard incurred the particular displeasure of Rome because he suggested that the Bible's account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and their Fall from grace as the ultimate origin and explanation for evil in the world, needed to be reinterpreted. Once you adopted an evolutionary perspective, Teilhard argued, evil can be considered a natural feature of the world – a sort of inevitable secondary effect of the creation process itself. As for the age-old belief in a founding couple and an act of disobedience that universally brought sin and death into the world? It was no longer necessary, or even credible, in his view.
In 1950, five years before Teilhard's death, Pope Pius XII issued the Vatican's first – and to date, only – official comments on evolution. Here the pope reiterated the Church's commitment to belief in a historical Adam as the unique father all of humanity, and the man responsible for transmitting sin to the entire species. He did accept, in a provisional sense, the legitimacy of scientific research into the material origins of the human body, but he rejected explicitly the 'opinion' that modern humans could have descended from a founding population rather than a single pair.
For as long as he lived, Teilhard's work was suppressed by the Congregation of the Index, the Vatican office that collaborated with the Holy Office (formerly known as the Inquisition) in monitoring books. After he died, his friends and students began publishing his work – but the Church's position on evolution remained grudging and reserved.
Indeed, when it comes to human evolution, the Vatican of 2015 is stuck in a time warp, unable to integrate the explosion of new knowledge about humanity's origins and its potential future into a meaningful narrative for the Catholic Church, whose 1.2 billion members worldwide look to it for guidance in a changing world.
The inability to adapt to basic knowledge is a monumental failure on the part of Rome and its theologians, one that, in the prophetic words of the late Pope John Paul II, can only lead to the continuing fragmentation of human culture – not to mention the fragmentation of the Church itself. In fact, refusal to accept the findings of science threatens the Church and its membership not just in Europe and the US (where one in 10 of every Americans is already an ex-Catholic), but in Latin America, Asia and Africa, in almost every populated part of the Earth.
If the Vatican were not a powerhouse, it wouldn't mean much. But without a more rigorous integration of science into theology, the Church is hobbling its ability to serve as a voice of clarity in worldwide debates about climate change, genetically modified crops, vaccinating children, and the controversial nature of assisted reproductive technologies, including human cloning.
It's true that rhetoric from the Vatican often paints a more congenial picture when it comes to the compatibility of faith and evolution. Pope Francis recently declared that: 'Evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.' But this is really an obfuscation, fooling some optimists into thinking that the Vatican has genuinely moved forward.
ironically, Darwin's own book never made it to the Church's Index of Prohibited Books
In reality, the Church has been on the wrong side of history ever since the 17th century when Galileo was brought up on charges by the Inquisition for defying the pope and sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life.
After Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), some bold theologians sought to reconcile those ideas with Christianity, arguing that, as long as Catholics retained the notion of humanity's exalted status as a special creation of God, there was nothing wrong with accepting the notion of the world having been created through a gradual process of evolution, as Darwin had outlined. Their efforts were quickly muzzled, although the Church was careful not to repeat its highly publicised mistreatment of Galileo. Between the years 1878 and 1899, books on evolution and Christianity by Father Raffaello Caverni in Italy, Father Dalmace Leroy in France and Father John Zahm in the US were censured. Caverni's book was placed on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books. (Ironically, Darwin's own book never made it onto the list.) Leroy and Zahm's books escaped the Index, but they were both forced to retract them.
A decade after de Chardin's death almost a century later, the Dominican priest and scientist Raymond J Nogar in the US reflected ruefully on the damage done to the Church by the silencing of the priest-scientist. 'The matter would simply be pitiful or laughable,' Nogar wrote in Lord of the Absurd, 'if it were not for the fact that censorship within the Christian theological tradition… still has the power of cutting off a man's life work and delivering his final years to the melancholy of failure.'
Today, popular attitudes toward evolution and religion take three forms, and the Vatican sits uneasily between two of them. The first, and most widely touted in recent years by prominent atheists, is that science in general and evolution in particular have completely debunked the claims of the major monotheistic religions.
The second, what might be called the deist alternative, acknowledges that Darwinian evolution undermines key beliefs of Christianity but is completely compatible with a generally theistic view of the cosmos, one that owes its creation to a God who is content to wind up the clock, as it were, launch the Big Bang, and let the Universe run by itself. This view does not embrace the traditional understanding of a benevolent deity who takes a personal interest in human history and answers people's prayers. But it's a middle ground between atheism and theism – and it tends to annoy atheists as much as it does religious traditionalists.
The third position, one embraced by many fundamentalist Christians and more conservative adherents of both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, is the frank rejection of science where and when it directly contradicts Christian doctrine or scripture, such as the belief that God created the world in six days, the story of Noah and the flood, or that Adam and Eve were the first parents of the entire human race.
For ample reasons, the Vatican is unwilling to embrace this third option. It has long had a proud tradition of balancing faith with reason, as in the classic works of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. It is clear, however, that when it comes to evolution, Rome is not sure how to find a way to balance a continued support for the Catholic tradition and the consensus of science.
But such a way must be found. In 1988, Pope John Paul II wrote a remarkable letter to the head of the Vatican Observatory. It was a document later made public and can still be found on the Vatican's website, though few really appreciate its audacity. The late pontiff not only found evolution to be compatible with Christianity, he directly challenged Catholic theologians to mine the science of evolution for deeper insights into the human condition.
'Do we dare to risk the honesty and the courage that this task demands?' he wrote. 'We must ask ourselves whether both science and religion will contribute to the integration of human culture or to its fragmentation. It is a single choice and it confronts us all.'
He wondered whether an evolutionary perspective could bring new light to bear upon what the Church has always taught to be the special status of the human person, made, as the Bible states, in the image and likeness of God. A few years later, the Pope made worldwide headlines – and also irked many Catholic conservatives – when he publicly declared that evolution was more than just a hypothesis. 'It is indeed remarkable,' he said, 'that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favour of this theory.'
how should people in the pews harmonise their faith with the modern evolutionary view of the world?
Blander acknowledgements of evolution's importance have come from the mouths of both Pope Benedict XVI and more recently Pope Francis. The media often has a field day with such utterances, but they have little impact on official Church doctrine. There's the rub: the Church's official manual of Catholic beliefs, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, simply does not discuss evolution. Where the Catechism does mention science, it's usually to affirm in bland terms how scientific discoveries can inspire people to appreciate 'the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers'.
But that's the extent of engagement. The Catechism has nothing to say on questions such as: What are Catholics today to make of genomics? Of the recent discovery that humans interbred with more than one vanished lineage of early hominins such as the Neanderthals? And where do Adam and Eve fit in this picture? It makes no acknowledgment of what genetics and paleoanthropology have determined about the physical origins of the earliest populations of modern humans and how this squares with belief in a single founding couple.
And there are members of the Church hierarchy who simply don't want to address these questions, including one of the leading co-editors of the Catechism. Not long after John Paul II died in 2005, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Austria wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times Magazine that the pontiff's endorsement of evolution was 'vague and unimportant', and he explicitly denied that evolution occurred according to Darwinian theory. Many Catholics in the US seem to be following his lead: according to a 2013 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey taken within the US, 26 per cent of white Catholics and 31 per cent of Hispanic Catholics believe humans have existed in their present state since the beginning of time.
What is more, several leading proponents of the 'intelligent design' pseudo-science movement in the US are Catholics. This includes Bruce Chapman who heads the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based think tank that not only promotes intelligent design as a supposedly credible alternative to evolution, but repeatedly denigrates the scientific consensus in self-published books, articles and videos – and attacks the very methodology of modern science itself. Their writings are often cited and picked up by parish bulletins throughout the US (including churches in my home town, Newton, MA).
Monsignor Tomasz Trafny, director of the Vatican's Science and Faith Foundation, is all too familiar with this creationist strain within the ranks of believers. In our discussion, he dismissed intelligent design as a sad hybrid of bad science, philosophy and theology. But he could not tell me whether Pope Francis might soon weigh in with a more official acceptance of evolution.
'We provide the cultural analysis of the development of the natural sciences,' he said. 'My job is to look for those discoveries or for research – whatever is made in the scientific environment – that can be relevant for philosophical or theological or simply the cultural dimension.' This pertains primarily to biotechnology and bioethics. The same goes for the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, whose president Werner Arber told me that it arranges meetings but plays no role in advising the pontiff on how the Church should treat evolutionary theory.
Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, an astrophysicist teaching theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, has expressed far more concern. In addition to his teaching duties and his own research, Tanzella-Nitti edits an online database called The Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science. If his team's efforts are to be judged purely on the basis of the extensive entry on evolution, the site is first-rate. Not only is its historical account of the development of Darwin's ideas excellent, but also its attention to the mechanisms other than natural selection.
Over the past decade and more, Tanzella-Nitti has been a rather lonely voice, arguing in lectures and books that Catholic theology must incorporate more scientific insight if it's to have any lasting impact.
'To be convinced of how relevant this issue is,' he writes, 'it would suffice to think how deep is the need to propose a language on God that may sound more meaningful to today's people, whose culture is shaped by scientific rationality. The implications in the pastoral domain are obvious to all.'
how can the continuity of evolution be reconciled with God's creation of human beings in one miraculous event?
It is a real challenge, according to William Carroll, a theology professor at Oxford: 'How do we then speak of man being created in the image and likeness of God, if man is simply a biological and chemical continuity with all the rest of nature?' he asked me.
Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun and director of Catholic Studies at Georgetown University, suggests that the notion of an immortal soul, in its classical formulation at least, is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary theory. 'Teilhard de Chardin described evolution as a "biological ascent" from matter to spirit, a movement toward more complex life forms,' she writes in The Emergent Christ (2011). But from the beginning, Teilhard insisted that spirit is present, even in lifeless matter. There's no absolute separation between the two.
With doctorates in pharmacology and historical theology, Delio has written several books on the interface between science and religion, most recently editing the collection From Teilhard to Omega: Co‑creating an Unfinished Universe (2014). In her view, theologians need to forge a deeper synthesis between the science and the faith, but almost all of them tacitly accept the old cosmos of the medieval church, the old view of spirit and matter as completely distinct.
'When I ask theologians,' she told me, 'many of them say to me: "Oh… I don't have time to read on science. I'm not a trained scientist, I would have to take a sabbatical and read up."' Few want to venture outside of their comfort zone. An exception is one of her colleagues at Georgetown: the theologist John Haught, author of Deeper Than Darwin (2003), and Making Sense of Evolution (2010).
If Catholic theologians took seriously the Universe as a drama still unfolding, they could rekindle people's sense of hope for the future
Haught sees himself as picking up where Teilhard left off. In his view, the problem of the immortal soul and the physical body being distinct entities is a holdover from old theology, which tends to divide reality between the eternity of Heaven and the time-bound vicissitudes of life on Earth. Such a view, Haught told me, is almost destined to see the human being as a lonely exile.
'It's a beautiful story,' he admitted. 'The problem is it leaves out the dramatic history of the development of humans from the Big Bang up until today.' And that story is not over, he said. Not by a long shot. If Catholic theologians would take seriously the fact that the Universe is a drama still unfolding, and that we are a key part of the drama, they could rekindle people's sense of hope for the future.
There has to be hope, Haught says, or theology is meaningless. In a universe that is still evolving, still not finished, there is a real sense of an open-ended future – and with that comes hope, and freedom. That has to be part of theology if it's going to be relevant to people today.
None of Haught's or Delio's work is getting any official encouragement from the Church hierarchy. But neither are they being censured. Indeed, Delio believes that the Vatican is making a greater effort to listen, and she appreciates the work of Trafny's office. 'It will listen to all the latest scientific insights. It will bring in quantum physicists and astronomers; it's done some wonderful publications.'
But more is needed than academic discussions and publishing, she said. 'We need a new way to actually implement some of these things.' In Delio's view, the Church is still too much of a closed system, unable to evolve and adapt to its environment. But she feels optimistic that Pope Francis is trying to steer it in this direction, at least in terms of making the Vatican's operations more transparent.
Since the Galileo debacle, the Church has been more accepting when it comes to physics and the other hard sciences. These are 'safe' areas. What happens in the Universe outside of Earth has little impact on doctrinal questions. The science behind the Big Bang is largely congenial to the religious view that the world had a beginning in time. And the successive stages of cosmological development suggest a goal-directedness about the Universe that fits comfortably with Catholic doctrine.
Evolution is different: biology is messy. The lines between species in the long extinction-ridden, trial-and-error aeons of evolution are much fuzzier than textbook diagrams of the 'tree of life' suggest. And the more we learn about the contingencies involved in the evolution of life, the less and less privileged the human species seems to be.
How are such facts to be incorporated into the faith? How are they to be treated? A new papal encyclical? Pope Francis has already got conservatives worried about his upcoming encyclical on the environment. Is he the pope to finally write a new Letter on Darwin and the Church? Would the Vatican officially mothball its vague and embarrassing disclaimer on Teilhard's work? Would it consider whether the French Jesuit is a candidate for sainthood?
Perhaps in the end, the Vatican cannot integrate evolutionary science because it really is too threatening. It would require a thoughtful reinterpretation of the Church's understanding of the doctrine of original sin – the fundamental idea that Adam and Eve's epic act of disobedience wounded human nature for all who came after. Theologians from St Paul and St Augustine down to the present day have viewed the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as God's ultimate response – the redemption for this sin.
Can such a theology be maintained within an evolutionary understanding of human origins? The few, scattered Catholic theologians exploring the issue largely believe that it can. But the Vatican's long silence on the question suggests that it doesn't agree.
And there's a price to be paid for stalling. Millions of people are walking away from the Church. Not just because of the clerical abuse scandal, and not just because of disagreement over points of morality such as gay marriage or abortion. But because the Church no longer speaks to people in a way that is meaningful to humanity in this scientific age.
The result is a slow but steady implosion. The Church is slowly collapsing from within, in a sort of progressive diminution. 'Instead of evolving, it is devolving,' Delio writes, 'its very presence is thinning out to the extent that in some areas of the world, such as parts of western Europe, it is dissolving into history.'
The Church has accepted the Big Bang, the start of the world's evolutionary journey – but this isn't enough. It must follow in Teilhard's footsteps. Unless it embraces not just the evolution of the Universe, but the evolution of all life, including humans, and reclaims a truly cosmic view in which the faith makes sense, the Church is pulling the wool over its own eyes as its people continue to file out the door.

Evolution Philosophy of Religion Religion Values & Beliefs All topics →

curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 06:28:00 +0000

Now isn't this a lovely little quote? It reminds me of the famous Einstein saying, 'genius and children share one attribute, curiosity. Always be asking is my motto. This is the sad thing about growing up. People stop being curious. They don't like asking questions. Why? Because they think that it's below their dignity. Because it's going to make them feel small. Because it might diminish them. Utter rubbish. Total bollocks.

Asking and being curious makes you grow. Makes you stretch. Makes you happy. See people who are unhappy. One thing you'll notice about them is that they aren't curious. They aren't interested in what's going on in and around them. Weird people. But they are worthy of curiosity :)

Happy questioning children. Today I'm off to see the Greenwich international maritime museum. It's been on my bucket list for years. A place so awesomely filled with history of people who were curious.

Love

Baba

Ashokavadana

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 06:48:00 +0000

Btw son, if you get a chance, read the Charles Allan book on Ashoka which we have. It's a good, perhaps the best available book on this Indian emperor. I came across references to this particular text Ashokavandana while trying to track down a vicious rumour about him being pretty nasty to some folks after his conversion to Buddhism.

Ashoka is an amazing man. He lives on even now as his symbol of the four lions on a lotus flower is the national symbol of India. His works engraved in stone across India can still be seen. By all accounts, he was a good king, ruling justly for all of his reign. Yes of course he killed and raped and conquered but then we have to be careful not to judge the ancients by our standards.

It's interesting how religions try to control people and pitch the best. This book, written around 200 AD is a good example of trying to push the religious view.

But good fascinating read none the less.

Love

Baba

Ashokavadana - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashokavadana
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Ashokavadana

The Ashokavadana (Sanskrit: अशोकावदान, "Narrative of Ashoka") is a 2nd-century CE text that describes the birth and reign of the Maurya Emperor Ashoka the Great. It contains legends as well as historical narratives, and glorifies Ashoka as a Buddhist emperor whose only ambition was to spread Buddhism far and wide.^[1]

Ashokavadana is one of the avadana texts contained in the Divyavadana ("Divine Narrative"), an anthology of several Buddhist legends and narratives. According to Jean Przyluski, the text was composed by the Buddhist monks of the Mathura region, as it highly praises the city of Mathura, its monasteries and its monks.^[2]^[3] Also known as Ashokarajavadana, it was translated into Chinese by Fa Hien in 300 CE as A-yu wang chuan, and later as A-yu wang ching(zh:阿育王经) in 500 CE.^[4]^:16 It was translated into French by Jean Przyluski in 1923, and in English by John S. Strong in 1983.

Here's What Would Happen If You Asked Ayn Rand To Loan You Money

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 09:05:00 +0000

Here's an interesting letter son. You know AYn rand and have been reading her books regularly. Interestingly, just yesterday I had a long conversation with one of my girls at work. She's Russian and she brought some fascinating perspectives on how a person raised in an ex communist country sees objectivism. She's all for it. But I got the impression that it's a bit too tilted to individuality.

Second point. Lending. It's an interesting social behaviour son. Do you know that my record on lending is absolutely disgusting? Ive never managed to get any money back which I've lent. Ever. Curious eh? I'm supposed to be a banker and review lending and all that but I'm pathetic. I don't regret the lending. Or even the non return of the money. But I do regret that the relationship I had with the people who borrowed from me suffered. Always. So all I can advice is that never lend any money. Help them in non monetary ways. That's better. Another truism is that son, gratitude is the shortest lived human emotion. So what do you do?

You don't expect anything son. No expectations, no complaints, no explanations. As much as you can. You'll be happy. I've donated or given money to many people. And that makes me happier than lending. I value the relationship more than lending.

But as you can see, I tend to disagree with Ayn rand here.

Love

Baba

Here's What Would Happen If You Asked Ayn Rand To Loan You Money
http://io9.com/heres-what-happened-if-you-asked-ayn-rand-to-loan-you-m-1679740203?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
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In 1949, a 17-year-old girl named Connie Papurt wanted to buy a dress but needed $25. So she did what a lot of young women in her situation would do: asked a relative if she could borrow the money. The relative? Her aunt, author and economic philosopher Ayn Rand.
Papurt is the daughter of Agnes Papurt, sister of Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor. The Toast spotted this letter from Rand to her niece in the book Letters of Ayn Rand, and has shared it for our reading pleasure. Naturally, Rand couldn’t resist answer a request for a loan with a dissertation on fiscal responsibility. While there is some sensible stuff in here (and hey, at least she admits that Connie doesn’t have to agree with her personal philosophy), most communications with teenage girls don’t turn into a miniature version of Atlas Shrugged, paired with threats of viewing them as embezzlers. I suppose, though, young Connie knew — or at least should have known — what she was in for when she made the request:

May 22, 1949
Dear Connie:
You are very young, so I don’t know whether you realize the seriousness of your action in writing to me for money. Since I don’t know you at all, I am going to put you to a test.
If you really want to borrow $25 from me, I will take a chance on finding out what kind of person you are. You want to borrow the money until your graduation. I will do better than that. I will make it easier for you to repay the debt, but on condition that you understand and accept it as a strict and serious business deal. Before you borrow it, I want you to think it over very carefully.

Decoding leadership: What really matters

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 06:34:00 +0000

Kannu

Hope you had a great time at your spring ball. We are anxiously waiting to see your photographs in your tuxedo all dressed up. I made chicken stir fry yesterday and I was missing feeding you. Lol. That sounds like I'm an emperor penguin feeding his chick while his mate is off foraging for her meals. But you did cuddle into my lap like a penguin chick does :)

Anyway. Talking about leadership. Difficult decision son. And I've seen more papers and advice about leadership than I've seen leaders. I've had great leaders. I've had crap leaders. I've been an ok leader and have had serious leadership issues myself as well. It's a tough one. You have to have different leadership skills at different times with different people for different tasks.

Besides the below, I would say that the first thing is that you shouldn't be an asshole. In so many banks, I've seen leaders become assholes. Just because they have the power. Be nice to start with son. And then other elements come in.

Another thing is to talk. Leaders talk. And communicate. And communicate. Written. Spoken. All the time. Keep banging on about it.

Anyway. Looking forward to the photos son.

Love you

Baba

Decoding leadership: What really matters
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/leading_in_the_21st_century/decoding_leadership_what_really_matters
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Telling CEOs these days that leadership drives performance is a bit like saying that oxygen is necessary to breathe. Over 90 percent of CEOs are already planning to increase investment in leadership development because they see it as the single most important human-capital issue their organizations face.¹ And they’re right to do so: earlier McKinsey research has consistently shown that good leadership is a critical part of organizational health, which is an important driver of shareholder returns.²

A big, unresolved issue is what sort of leadership behavior organizations should encourage. Is leadership so contextual that it defies standard definitions or development approaches?³ Should companies now concentrate their efforts on priorities such as role modeling, making decisions quickly, defining visions, and shaping leaders who are good at adapting? Should they stress the virtues of enthusiastic communication? In the absence of any academic or practitioner consensus on the answers, leadership-development programs address an extraordinary range of issues, which may help explain why only 43 percent of CEOs are confident that their training investments will bear fruit.

Our most recent research, however, suggests that a small subset of leadership skills closely correlates with leadership success, particularly among frontline leaders. Using our own practical experience and searching the relevant academic literature, we came up with a comprehensive list of 20 distinct leadership traits. Next, we surveyed 189,000 people in 81 diverse organizations⁴ around the world to assess how frequently certain kinds of leadership behavior are applied within their organizations. Finally, we divided the sample into organizations whose leadership performance was strong (the top quartile of leadership effectiveness as measured by McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index) and those that were weak (bottom quartile).

Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute: A Fiscal History of Archaic Athens

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 06:16:00 +0000

So I'm hoping to start another Phd this fall at UCL son. Where this professor teaches. It's got a great history department. Completely new subject in history so let's see how that pans out.

But funny thing happened last week. I posted something about how Israel imposed price controls on books. And with the sad and completely predicable collapse of the book industry in Israel. Great idea, to increase prices so that authors can live but basic economics son, people would switch from books to toys or games. With the result that the authors are now in a worse situation. And I said that price controls usually end up fucking up the market place like rent controls.

One labour supporter took umbrage at it. And said that's not true. When I pointed out that we have been doing rent controls since 1915 and every time we did that, the availability of housing has gone down. And then he said, economists do not live in the real world.

Quite a curious statement. The economic illiteracy is about as expected in this election phase but to say I'm not going to learn from history or economics is not even illiteracy but seriously gobsmacking.

This book talks about how Athens used taxation for its wars. And that also gives you an indication why I hate wars. They raise taxes and lead to some of the most unproductive use of human capital. I'm reading about Athens 2500 years or so later and its fiscal situation and shaking my head.

History is a vast early warning system son and as you can see from the election, our politicians and our fellow citizens do not want to learn. We are going to be in a world of hurt now. Be prepared for the government to grab more of our money.

Love

Baba

H-Net Reviews
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41059
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Hans van Wees. Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute: A Fiscal History of Archaic Athens. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013. 240 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78076-686-7.

Reviewed by Nikolaus Overtoom (Louisiana State University)
Published on H-War (January, 2015)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

Institutional Power and Public Finance in Archaic Athens

Hans van Wees’s Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute: A Fiscal History of Archaic Athens argues that the financial and institutional advances associated with classical Athens were developments of the archaic period. The book charts the rise of institutional power in archaic Athens with a focus on public finance. Van Wees is at odds with many of the generally accepted historiographical traditions of the fiscal history of Athens. His revisionist history uses, as Paul Millett calls it, “new fiscal history.” Van Wees reconsiders literary evidence from authors, such as Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle, and supplements them with archaeological evidence. He concludes that the accounts of later authors either were biased toward making classical Athens seem more spectacular by overlooking the archaic period or were anachronistic. The scope of the work roughly ranges from the reforms of Solon in 594 BCE to the transfer of the war chest of the Delian League to Athens in 454 BCE. In seven chapters, he discusses the obstacles in studying archaic Greece, the background to public finance in archaic Greece, Athenian financial institutions, public spending, public revenue, and the media of public finance. A brief concluding chapter, a short appendix on Persian naval expansion, a sizable bibliography, and a helpful select index of passages accompany the work. Van Wees is Grote Professor of Ancient History at University College London and is the author of several works on ancient Greece.

Five research papers that revolutionised health

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 06:34:00 +0000

Kids

Some very interesting insights into how medical research was published and how pretty much every medical insight was thought to be stupid. I learnt this German term yesterday while doing the learning to learn course. It say that our previous learning can actually stop us from learning new things. So true. I need to constantly keep my mind open to new ideas and thoughts.

Saying no is too easy son. Stay away from people who reflexively say no. Listen to them but keep working away. It's not easy to fight. I'm struggling against some entrenched interests to get a pet subject launched. One year and I'm getting there. Fun times.

Anyway. Much interesting aspects in the story here.

Love

Baba

Five research papers that revolutionised health
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31869173
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15 March 2015 Last updated at 10:16 By Deborah Cohen BBC Health Check

The world’s first scientific journal with its founders Viscount Brouncker, King Charles II and Francis Bacon

You are unlikely to find The Lancet, Thorax or the Journal of the American Medical Association in your doctor’s waiting room, but their contents have more impact on your health than the usual lifestyle magazines.
Such journals, where papers are reviewed by other scientists in the same field - are where researchers set out their findings about how diseases occur, which drugs save lives or what surgical procedure is best.
The first scientific journal - Philosophical Transactions - was published 350 years ago this month. It is still produced now - along with thousands of others.
Here are five of the many papers that have transformed medical practice - and people’s lives - over the centuries.
JAMES JURIN AND INOCULATION - PREVENTING SMALLPOX

18 Quotes By The Dowager Countess That You Need To Start Using In Your Life

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 06:18:00 +0000

hese were very funny indeed Kannu. Some of them you can use to get into your conversations. The last one I liked. I'm reminded of what one of my bosses told me when I was trying to cut costs. He told me, BD, don't be a middle class with cost cutting. Basically meaning penny wise and pound foolish. But this quote from the dowager did make me think. Why is being defeatist a middle class problem? I'm not one and I guess I could be the archetypical middle class man. In terms of thinking anyway. Money wise we are way off.

Makes one think as to why the middle classes are so worried and bring defeatist. Is it because of their insecurity?

Love

Baba

18 Quotes By The Dowager Countess That You Need To Start Using In Your Life
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/03/08/downton-abbey-dowager-countess-quotes_n_6827466.html
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To paraphrase another great wit: rumours of her leaving appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

Which is a relief. Because 'Downton Abbey' without its marvellous matriarch - Dame Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess - would be a duller place indeed.

From quick-witted observations to sharp-tongued ripostes, here are some of the finest, funniest bon mots ever uttered by Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham.

Whether you're dealing with foreigners, friends or whining women, we highly recommend using them when the social occasion arises...

1 'At my age, one must ration one's excitement.'

‘Dastarkhwan’ revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 06:02:00 +0000

I first came across this word, dastarkhwan in Lucknow. It's a tiny street which is full of little eateries. And I tell you the food there is to die for kids. It's truly magical what they do. Every time I go there, nana gets me some food from there and I just pig out. Here's an article written by a friend of mine which goes a bit deeper into the history of food. I chuckled at the recipe where she mentions 'bhunao'. Brown. Take a peek at mamma's recipe book. It's so amusing to read. But that's what makes these recipes beautiful and lovely. They include the human touch. The emotion. Nigella Lawson does the same and that's why I love her as well. Food should be a passion and to make it or eat it, you should be passionate about it. And I further reiterate, the mark of quality for any restaurant is a biryani. Specially the meat biryani like goat or chicken. If that's good then the cook/restaurant is good.

Maybe one day I'll learn to make biryani. We've got that hyderabadi biryani book but those recipes are horribly hard. And the girls don't like that. So I guess I'll have to wait till you come kannu. And it was good to see you yesterday. I was happy to see you relaxed and looking good. And don't forget the deal! :)

Love

Baba

‘Dastarkhwan’ revisited
http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/q2CiWn0Zb7gdyCPWdEVbBI/Dastarkhwan-revisited.html
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Pritha Sen (left) with Manzilat Fatima. Photographs: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint

Manzilat Fatima, 47, is describing a Shia community speciality offered in prayer (haazri) on Muharram. “You take a mini paratha, place a kebab on it, add a piece of smoked paneer that you get in New Market here in Kolkata, plus julienned ginger, mint leaves, a slice of cucumber and a roundel of onion,” she says. “We call this a ghutwan kebab, because the meat is first marinated with papaya and then cooked till it assumes an almost paste-like consistency.”