Raghav Rao's Blog, page 4

A Tribute to Lala the Guinea Pig

This is a very short video of Lala in her final days. She was too thin and not eating well. She was struggling to poop and there was a little blood whenever she peed. But she was also alert, energized, and curious. You can see her stepping all over the plastic syringes that I was using to feed her a nutrient-rich slurry. She loved being placed on top of our table where she would sniff at the fruit basket, napkin holder, books, tea cups, and other miscellaneous objects. Her little nose knocked over a cup with water, nearly spilling on Raghav’s laptop. She persistently chewed on a woven basket that looked as though it should be chewable but was actually quite tough against her teeth. It was adorable to watch her.

Lala and Dot, my parents’ two guinea pigs, stayed with Raghav and me for three weeks this month while my parents traveled to Australia. At the time, Lala was just coming out of a period of rapid deterioration of her health and appeared to have narrowly dodged death for the moment. She required special care, including feeding by syringe on a nightly basis.

When confronted with health issues, there are not always a lot of interventions that make sense for guinea pigs. Their systems are not very complex and so when one thing goes wrong, a rapid cascade of effects can lead to death before you know it. Their issues are hard to diagnose because anything exploratory requires high-cost testing, like an MRI, which still may not get to the root of the issue. Even if the issue is diagnosed, half the time there is not really a “cure”. It’s heartbreaking to want to intervene but to have no meaningful interventions.

My mom often shares a gruesome story of a close friend who opted for surgery for her little guinea pig. Because they are such small creatures, the surgery effectively sliced into half of the guinea pig’s body and the poor thing never recovered and died after surgery. It was a cautionary tale of what to do and not do when your beloved guinea pig falls ill.

A Younger Lala

Here is Lala with her offspring Dot in younger days. My mom had lost her first, two-pair of guinea pigs Kahlua and Tiramisu about 6-8 months before. She would regularly comb the humane society online page for news of guinea pigs to adopt. That was when she came across notice of Lala and Dot.

Lala enjoyed being gently pet on the crown of her head. She was quiet, squeaking occasionally when she really wanted a treat. Sometimes she would run over to gaze at me, seemingly asking to be pet or fed. Seeing her want a treat so sweetly was irresistible. She would stretch up on her hind legs and sniff inquisitively with her delicate little nose.

The life of a guinea pig is one of eating and basking in the sun, or hinatabokko suru as my mom affectionately describes it. In addition to the food staples of timothy hay and food pellets, Lala and Dot are fed any of the following: organic spring mix and romaine lettuce; fresh cilantro, parsley, and carrot top greens; chilled and nicely sliced celery, baby cucumber, and red or green pepper; and the very occasional blueberry, apple, or grape.

Apparently the sugar content of fruit is very high for guinea pigs and so really they should not eat more than a blueberry or two a week. Lala and Dot both love blueberries. In her final days, Lala was eating less and less and I ultimately indulged her with 2-3 blueberries a day, which she would always eat. I’m glad that I did looking back and knowing now how little time she had left.

Guinea Pigs in the Wild

I have come to learn just how helpless guinea pigs are. So it is near impossible for me to imagine these animals in the wild. They are very soft and mild-mannered. They are perpetually in fight or flight. They don’t even run all that fast (certainly not compared to a hawk ready to snatch them up). One of my friends once came over while we were caring for the guinea pigs. Upon seeing them, she gently prodded at one of their plump little legs and commented, “they are literally pure prey.” My dad says that really their rapid reproduction is all that keeps them around as a species. God knows the individual guinea pig just isn’t going to be around for long.

There are many notices that warn people not to release domesticated guinea pigs into the wild with the misplaced good intentions of setting them free. These are not animals that will “enjoy” their freedom in the way we may hope for. Truthfully, I imagine that this same disclaimer could probably be true for wild guinea pigs, do not release into the wild.

My mom has built up a pen for her guinea pigs that is about the size of Raghav and my dining table. She generously feeds them. She takes daily walks to cut grasses for them from around the neighborhood. She scoops their poop 2-3 times per day. She changes their flannel bedding every few days. She recently bought flannel blankets with designs of guinea pigs. It is adorable to see guinea pigs scampering over flannels with guinea pigs. It is so clearly not something that Lala nor Dot can appreciate, which makes the whole concept of it cuter.

RIP Lala

Lala eventually passed away around six in the evening on Monday, July 8th. I noticed she was unmoving and unable to eat or drink water when I went to feed her and Dot around 5:30pm after returning home from work. I lifted her onto my lap and she seemed soothed by my gentle petting of the crown of her head until she died. My parents were flying into LAX right around that hour and were able to say goodbye to her over FaceTime. Unfortunately she was not able to make it one more day when my parents could have been with her in-person. Her decline was rapid and to a degree customary for guinea pigs. One moment they seem okay and then within hours they are at death’s door.

It was moving and humbling to be a source of comfort for such a small little thing in her final hours. I will never forget those last moments.

RIP Lala, we will love you always.

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Anger at Ruth Bader Ginsburg

This might be a polarizing post but I’ve felt this way for a while and I don’t see it discussed enough.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg let us all down.

Firstly, I know that in the public discourse, ageism is often overlooked and downplayed as not as ‘bad’ as other forms of discrimination. I want to make it clear that I’m not doubting the capacity for contribution of those advanced in years. I’m merely looking at her decision from an actuarial standpoint, from a risk of death.

In 2013, Ruth Bader Ginsburg turned 80. By then, she had already survived two serious bouts of cancer. In May of that year, she fell in her bathroom and cracked two ribs. But she refused to entertain thoughts of stepping down, insisting that she was lifting her weights again and had good bone density.

Harvard Law Professor, Randall Kennedy, urged her in the pages of New Republic magazine to step down so that Obama could confirm her successor, not because anyone doubted the state of her legal mind, but from pure political calculus.

"It seems to me that a justice should take into account the politics surrounding confirmation and not allow (an) opportunity to fall to a Republican," said Kennedy. (Reuters)

Her rebuttals were rooted in two non-relevant arguments:

She was still capable of doing the job.

She, personally, felt that she might regret any ‘early retirement’

Here are the quotes from her:

“It really has to be, ‘Am I equipped to do the job?' ”

"I wonder if Sandra regrets stepping down when she did?"

(Referring to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor who retired at age 75 to take care of her husband, John, who had Alzheimer's disease). Day O’Connor, a moderate, was appointed by Reagan and resigned during Bush II, and was replaced by Alito Jr, a man who is as close to the second coming as Revivalists are likely to get).

RBG stubbornly clung on, feeling that she was capable, not ready to retire. And IGNORING actuarial tables. Here is the actuarial life table from the Social Service Administration. The key word is ‘feeling’ here. She felt good. But what do the numbers say?

According to these numbers, for each year of the Trump administration, these were her % chances of dying.

Age 84, 7%

Age 85, 7.9%

Age 86, 8.9%

Age 87, 9.9%

Calculating the probability of her dying in that four year period, I get 29.6%.

I had written a draft of this piece last week before BIden’s announcement and, in case you’re curious, here’s the calculation for Biden.

First year: 7.7834%

Second year: 8.5686%

Third year: 9.4809%

Fourth year: 10.5090%

Which means that there was a 31.7% chance that Biden would not have made it through his full second term.

Actuarial Tables

I understand that this is in bad taste, calculating the probability of someone’s death. But it is the fear of bad taste that has cost so many people so much with the current composition of the court. Someone needed to show her that if the Trump beats Clinton, there is nearly a 1/3 chance your seat ends up filled by a Republican.

But RBG did the unthinkable. She gambled with her legacy and with our collective futures. She lost. Now she’s checked out of Atlantic City and we’re left holding the bag.

P.S. Not much discourse on this but there is one Politico piece on it, in case you’re interested - LINK - ‘Extraordinarily Self-Centered’: As a Roe Reversal Looms, RBG Admirers Wrestle with Her Legacy

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

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Answering Machine in Japanese

To date, I have learned about 667 Kanji. I am enjoying my journey and doing it マイペー (maipēsu), at my own pace. When I first posted about this (August of last year), I had learned about 375 of these logographs. My motivation remains strong. It’s just that sometimes I get busy and need to defer my practice. But overall, it’s been steady progress.

There are two important thresholds that I’m chasing:

1,006 —- this is the number of kanji taught in the first 9 grades of Japanese schooling. The majority of everyday Japanese is covered by these.

2136 — advanced Japanese literacy

Today, I want to share with you an unusual word. It is made up of 5 kanji and does not have any hiragana or katakana (the phonetic alphabets). Usually, the phonetic alphabets help mobilize kanji into speech. For example, a kanji ending in a ‘ru’ hiragana (る) is the verb form of a kanji and words ending in ‘i’ hiragana (い) tend to be its adjective form.

But today’s word is a noun and nouns often are made up of only kanji.

I should say that ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’, and ‘adjectives’ are not exactly perfect descriptors for words in Japanese. It’s more helpful to think of the kanji, as logographs that carry meaning, as ‘stems’ and then you learn, with phonetics, how to manipulate those stems. But let’s put that on a shelf for now.

The word I want to analyze is:

Does it look intimidating and complicated? Well, when you go step by step and component by component, it reveals its meaning. Let’s start right to left.

話 is composed of the radicals 言 ‘say’  and 舌 ‘tongue’ — it means ‘talk’

Mnemonic: It’s pronounced ‘wa’; who is talking? The Walrus! He’s saying, “I am the walrus!”

電 is composed of the radicals 雨 ‘rain’  and 田 ‘rice paddy’ and 乚 ‘umbrella’ — it means ‘electricity’

Imagine Ben Franklin running around a rice paddy holding an umbrella and hoping to be struck my lightning. I no longer need this mnemonic since it’s used in ‘densha’ 電車 (electric train) which is a very common word.

番 is composed of the radicals 釆 ‘sickle’  and 田 ‘rice paddy’ — it means ‘number in a serial’

You and your fellow agricultural laborers on this ghastly collective farm take turns harvesting with a sickle until you are banned from the activity. (Intense emotions help with memorization). The pronunciation is ‘ban’ but I no longer need the mnemonic as this kanji is used in 一番, ‘ichiban’, a very common Japanese word meaning ‘first’ or ‘number one’ or ‘best.’

守 is composed of the radicals 宀 ‘roof’  and 寸 ‘measurement’ — it means ‘protect’

In America, in the event that your contractor does a bad job with the roof and it fails to protect you from rain, you can ‘sue’ them. The pronunciation for this is ‘su’

留 is composed of the radicals ム ‘private’  and 刀 ‘sword’ and 田 ‘rice paddy’  — it means ‘detain’.

I imagine Tatum’s cousin Ryuichiro is part of a small rural militia that finds and detains a suspicious character. This makes sense to me because, in real life, in addition to his day job, Ryu is a volunteer firefighter. The pronunciation for this is ‘ryu’ or ‘ru’

So adding all these together, left to right, you get

Ru + Su + Ban + Den + Wa and the word is in fact Rusuban Denwa.

留守 = rusu = absence from home = detain & protect. This sort of makes sense if you think that you are detained away from the place that you are meant to protect.

So then, let’s add, 番 (ban), which is number in a serial, which can also be thought of as ‘turn’. So the person whose turn it is to take care of home during your absence is a caretaker!

留守番 = rusuban = caretaker

電話 = denwa = electric talk = phone

Caretaker + Phone?

Answering Machine!

Yay! Rusuban Denwa. 留守番電話. It means ‘Answering Machine’

Great job those of you who made it this far!

Hope you enjoyed this diversion.

Warmly,

Raghav

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Creation & Direct Perception

I started The Last Stop On The Late Train in July of last year!

62 posts! Hundreds of subscribers! I’ve connected with new readers and old friends.

Today’s post will be a little different. It’s a single quote without too much analysis. There is some connective tissue between J. Krishnamurti and the overall purpose of this newsletter, charting a course through the sea of information that we find ourselves in today.

First — here’s an extended quote from J. Krishnamurti on creation:

You know what creation is? Not the expression, that's fairly simple to understand - as a writer, as a poet, as an artist you want to express, that is not creation. Creation is something entirely different. You know, creation can only come about when there is energy. Energy that is not... that has never been contaminated, that is not the result of effort, will, but that energy which action itself brings. And now all our activities, more or less, are self-centered, centred upon ourselves in relation to various things; and that self-centered activity, which is of the thinker, invariably breeds contradictions; and being in a state of contradiction demands expression - I must escape, I must write, I must do. The man who is in a state of self-contradiction and in a state of self-centered activity, what he does as painter, as an artist, as a musician, he may call that creation but it is not. Creation must be something extraordinarily different. And it is.

Now, as I said, the mind when it is not touched or has understood the whole structure of contradiction, conscious as well as unconscious, it is completely still. Because any movement of energy is a dissipation. It's only when the mind is completely still, with tremendous energy, then there is an explosion, and that explosion is creation, which may or may not need expression.

Krishnamurti & Me

Me. Roughly 7th grade.

For 7 years, 6th grade to 12th grade, I attended Rishi Valley School, one of the KFI schools, a school founded by Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Krishnamurti, as many of my Indian readers doubtless already know, at the tender age of thirteen, was identified by the Theosophical Society as the future World Teacher, and was seen by the theosophists as a messianic figure.

The Theosophical Society established the Order of the Star in the East (OSE) and opened membership to those who accepted the doctrine of the Coming of the World Teacher.

Note the ‘swastika’ in the seal of the Theological Society. This predates the Nazi appropriation of the symbol.

In 1929, at the age of thirty-three, Krishnamurti dissolved the order and rejected the role of world teacher and in a lovely address, he declared that “truth is a pathless land” and asked everyone to eschew religions and sects and to cease to be followers. He dedicated his life to public discussions around the nature of truth and to education designed to develop questioning minds. He founded five schools in India, one in England, and one in the United States (in Ojai valley).

Though he died before I was born, I learned about Krishnamurti briefly at school. His ideas weren’t part of the curriculum. My Dad, who had attended his public lectures, always did a funny impression of his oratory style. In the last five years, I’ve listened closely to recordings of those lectures and discussions on Youtube and elsewhere, and, inspired by him, I try and live free and fearlessly.

What does that mean? It means thinking less. It means noticing that thought is rooted in time. It is always of the past or the future. Thought runs against the present, against the moment of creation.

Krishnamurti and Information Saturation

This is a newsletter about discernment in the age of information saturation. Krishnamurti urged us to not look externally, to the worlds of data, of authority, of doctrine, for truth.

Truth, the pathless land, is not somewhere out there on the endless internet. It is the direct comprehension of the precise moment, it is confronting oneself in the now.

“Truth cannot be given to you by somebody. You have to discover it; and to discover, there must be a state of mind in which there is direct perception.”

I urge you all to think less, to eschew doctrines, and to find moments of direct perception. It’s what I’m trying to do. To find stillness of the mind. And from that stillness, tremendous unthinking energy.

Thank you for a year’s worth of support for this newsletter. Please continue to share it widely. If you have your own thoughts on the act of creation, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

The Last Stop on The Late Train will remain forever free, forever un-paywalled. If you’d like to support this work, you can buy me a monthly coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/raghavrao. ☕☕☕

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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The Computer Is the Enemy

I’ve known for a while that the computer, while undoubtedly an invention of great consequence, is also an impingement. Often, I’m at my best when I avoid the computer, when I work exclusively in notebooks and only sporadically go to the computer to execute a specific task. I was grateful then for an excellent article in the most recent issue of Psychology Today, where a neuroscientist summarized learnings from Sweden’s experiments with digital tools in its education system. Long story short: They found that digital tools impair rather than enhance learning. They are reverting, in many cases, to more analog tools.

The insight I enjoyed the most had to do with attention.

People say ‘time’ is our most valuable resource. But attention, the ability of our brain to filter out certain stimuli, and only concentrate on stimuli relevant to the task at hand, dictates our use of time. Attention is what advertisers want from us. Everyday, managing and deploying our available focusing power is perhaps the most important set of decisions we make. So what did this neuroscientist have to say?

Multitasking is terrible for learning and memory.

Computers are multitasking machines.

You see where I’m going with this? We have designed the most powerful tool of our own psychic oppression. Computers are great. But we use them incorrectly. We use them to consume media. Worse, we hop from stimulus to stimulus. We should instead use them to search for relevant information and then return to our analog materials!

Okay, let me slow down and take you through what’s happening in our brains.

I quote now from Jared Horvath, the neuroscientist who wrote the article I’m referencing, “How The Brain Learns Best” in the August 2024 issue of Psychology Today. (How can they call it an August issue when it comes out in June; I don’t know!)

My copy of Psychology Today. I read it cover to cover on the day it arrives.

“Whenever we engage with a task, the relevant rule set must be loaded into a small area of the brain called the lateral prefrontal cortext, LatPFC. Whatever rule set is being held within this part of the brain will ultimately determine what the attentional filter deems relevant or irrelevant.

The LatPFC can hold onto only one rule set a time. This is why it’s impossible for human beings to multitask; the best we can do is quickly jump back and forth between tasks, swapping out the rule set within the LatPFC.”

Quickly jumping back and forth between tasks. Does that sound familiar? Hopping between tabs. Or flitting between apps. Or scrolling through a feed and having to re-attune to new stimuli.

In detail, Horvath takes us through loss in three areas — time, accuracy, memory — from quick LatPFC shifts. In conclusion, rapidly shifting attention between tasks is disastrous for learning and memory in students and presumably not good for adults either.

In that same article, Horvath shares that when students use a computer for homework, they typically last fewer than 6 minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends, and engaging with other digital distractions. I know adults for whom that’s probably far less than six minutes!

I can hear you saying, “I’ve got this. I know how to use my computer!”

Horvath ends this segment with a caution against trying to “beat the computer” —- “in order to effectively learn while using a computer, people must expend an incredible amount of cognitive effort battling impulses that they’ve spent years honing, a battle they lose more often than not.”

So, hear me out. Don’t fight the computer. Ditch the computer. You can still go to the computer as a resource, briefly, like a heavy dictionary. You can still use it for some functions: storage, communication (though probably less than you think), computation (its original use), but when it comes to doing long, hard, deep work, look for opportunities to go analog. Do a slide deck in rough draft on paper, for example. They always turn out better anyway. Do your long correspondence in a notebook and then type it up.

I hear you fighting me on this. Computers are our reality, you say. Raghav, you are advocating something unrealistic. I’m not. Recall a few weeks ago, my post on Solomon Golomb, the man who used shift register sequences to encode data for transmission. He didn’t even have a computer at home!

Let’s try (when possible) to not use our computers as a work surface. Let’s see if we can get somewhere together!

Quick Note: The article I’m referencing is “How The Brain Learns Best” by Jared Cooney Horvath in the August 2024 print issue of Psychology Today.

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Odisha - India in Translation: Reading Through Each of India’s 28 States

I’m returning now to one of my favorite series — Indian Novels in Translation, State by State. Other posts in this series. Tamil Nadu |Karnataka | Andhra Pradesh | Kerala | Telangana | Goa

Basanti: Writing The New Woman by (Nine Authors i.e. a collaborative novel)

STATE: Odisha

Original Language: Odia

Publisher in English — Oxford University Press (2019) - LINK

Translated by Prof. Himansu S. Mohapatra (Author), Prof. Paul St-Pierre (Author)

Basanti cover (OUP) and a cover of an old (1912) issue of Utkala Sahitya (Credit: Odiabibhaba.com)

So far in this series, I have looked at novels written by a single author. Novels are often synonymous with the expression of a single mind. I’d estimate that co-written novels probably make up less than 1% of the overall market. But in the early 20th century, at least in some parts of India (notably in the East, Bengal, Assam, and Orissa), collaborative novels became popular and were serialized in magazines.

A bit like T.V. today where a series might swap directors for episodes to impart a different aesthetic to a familiar set of characters. Take this world. Let’s see what you can do with them.

Context

In the case of Basanti, let’s set the stage a bit:

The year is 1924. We are in Cuttack, the center for a burgeoning Odia culture, irrigated by the feverish learning of young minds at Ravenshaw College. At this point, Odisha is part of the Bihar and Orissa province of British India. Today, that encompasses Bihar, Jharkhand, and parts of Odisha. It is governed by the Bengal Presidency and Calcutta is obviously the dominant cultural force.

Odisha and Cuttack, relative to Bengal and Calcutta, are the provincial cousins. Conservatism and “backwards” ways of superstition and discrimination are the norm. Upper-class Hindu women, the wives of zamindars and barristers, are expected to be indoors at all times, unless accompanied by their husbands. They are expected to cook and to do embroidery and to exist in a state of comfortable languor.

However, some writers, many of whom attend or are recent alumni of Ravenshaw College, come together to form the Sabuja movement in Odia literature. They are influenced by Rabindranath Tagore and the reformist visions of the literary magazines of Calcutta. The Sabuja writers have a vision for “a new woman”, someone who fuses the traditional with the modern. To that end, they decide to write ‘Basanti’, a story about this new woman.

The story was decided upon ahead of time. Writers couldn’t change major aspects of the plot or the overall characterization of Basanti and her beau, Debabrata. So, really, writers had to bring their aesthetic to the prose rather than to the story. Together, nine writers, 6 men and 3 women, wrote ‘Basanti’ and the story began to appear in serialized fashion in Utkala Sahitya.

The goal was noble and large — to reform Odisha, to free women from captivity and liberate them to continue attending school instead of simply being married off at puberty and sequestered in the home for eternity. To invite men to see their wives as intellectual companions. To reject the idea that modernity necessarily meant compromised morals.

Summary & Literary Values:

Now, a century later, I was intrigued to read ‘Basanti’. My book is also about a woman, Missy. It is eponymous, i.e., named for the main character. And it is also, in some ways, about the tensions between modernity and traditional forms of self-understanding. What book about India/Indians isn’t?

The plot is effectively a romantic dramedy whose central conflict arises from an epistolary misunderstanding. Debabrata reads a fragment of a letter. Makes a huge erroneous inference. Casts Basanti out of the house. He realizes his mistake. Later, her honor is restored.

The first act is their courtship and it’s very sweet and quite good. It’s centered around their mutual love of learning and the way they support each other after Basanti loses her mother. After their marriage, domestic strife is well portrayed, relying on the tensions of moving from a vibrant city like Cuttack to a gossipy backwater. The animosity sparked in the mother-in-law dead against her new “love-marriage” daughter-in-law is captured in rich detail by the women authors.

But in the second half, the central problem of collaborative writing undermines the book. The characterization doesn’t hold up. People react out of character. Their reactions are outsized to events. Debabrata goes from noble to puerile. The mother-in-law goes from vicious to saintly. The book ceases to make sense.

And? So What?

Frankly, though, it’s okay if the book isn’t an outright literary success. After all, it was meant as a didactic exercise — to teach and preach a better, more just, less discriminatory way of life.

I found that it touched on something deeper in not just Indian culture but globally. Please pardon the half-thought here but hear me out:

In this book, the “mother-in-law” figure is successful in her way of life. That is domestic management. It is protecting her family’s honor in a hierarchy-obsessed rural community. She resents Basanti who is educated in the ways of the city. The conflict is not about the actual ideas themselves. Acceding to Basanti’s ways becomes an indictment of how the mother-in-law has spent her own life. I sensed here some of the same tensions that are playing out globally. Let me try to explain:

Non-Western countries resent the West for their patronizing attitude.

Many Americans resent coastal elites for lecturing them

Too often, those of us who are educated in a certain way of thinking, believe that the self-evident rightness of a thing is all that matters. But when we ask people to change, we are attacking their historical identity, their social standing, and, in some cases, their integrity. The content of the message in insufficient. People will only be won over if you can offer them some way to also retain their standing. How can we do that? That’s the question we need to be asking. I understand this a half-thought but it’s interesting to see that one hundred years ago, similar tensions were being wrestled with in magazines and in cultural production.

3/5. Is Basanti a great book today? No. I wouldn’t say so. The nine-authors approach failed to sufficiently cohere. But it clearly was a book of its time. I’m glad to have read it.

Read the other posts in this series.

Tamil Nadu - Pyre - LINK | Karnataka - Samskara: Rites for a Dead Man - LINK | Andhra Pradesh - Yashodhara - LINK | Kerala - The Legends of Khasak - LINK | Telangana - Sin - LINK | Goa - Tsunami Simon - LINK

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

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The Three Things I Learned From Janet Desaulniers

Point At The Shipwreck || Embrace The Obscure and The Erratic || Metaphor Is Dead

A wonderful mentor of mine, Janet Desaulniers, is retiring from the faculty of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago this year. Janet was brought in twenty-one (maybe twenty-two?) years ago to be the first chair of the writing program, recruiting many of the department’s outstanding writing faculty — Rosellen Brown and Jesse Ball among others. But I want to make this post about Janet and I also want to make it short, and to do both is difficult.

MFA Fiction, Poetry, and Non-Fiction programs are often maligned, fairly and unfairly, but an MFA program at an Art School must have different understanding of itself than one at Michigan or Brown. Janet gave our program its identity, its self-understanding.

I remember I walked in, wanting to write a commercial book, openly stating, like an idiot, that I’d love to see a book of mine in an airport someday. Meanwhile, a guy in our class was writing asemantically — this means writing without meaning i.e. mark-making. I thought Janet was insufficiently hard on him for his chicken-scratch on paper. Tell him to write! With meaning! But Janet understood that developing a truly original voice often requires rebuilding the meaning of words from the ground up, in this guy’s case, from even below the foundations of letters!

Under Janet’s tutelage, I came to understand that the art-teacher’s role extends past hierarchical dispensing of technical knowledge. The gift with the longest value is often exposure to a certain ‘quality of mind.’

At Iowa, Janet was initially savaged by a faculty that delighted in cruelty. “This is how talented writers waste their lives,” a professor said. (FNewsmagazine.)

But that was before the New Yorker put a stamp on a story. Everything changed, and Janet became a star. This is possibly why they’re always interested in the work itself, and aren’t unduly bothered with reception, insisting always that the culture will catch up. Janet’s wonderful collection of stories, What You’ve Been Missing, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and are amongst the best I’ve ever read and I often study them sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word. (Not quite at the asemantic, mark-making level though. I reserve that for Japanese.)

Janet writes stories that “land like a shovel to the face.”

Janet says more smart things per minute than any human being I’ve ever encountered. But I want to quickly (quickly!) write about Three Principles that I have tried to lay claim to:

1) Point At The Shipwreck

The full idea is captured in “All You Have To Do Is Point At The Shipwreck.”

Some writers, myself included, feel we can’t write about certain things because we don’t know enough. While a certain degree of humility is good, of course, this line of thinking can easily become solipsistic. Janet’s words here are intended as permission to free one’s self from “knowing anything” or “saying anything” — writing needn’t always be like a college paper; it doesn’t have to make an argument. It can be enough to see something and say, ‘Look!’

2) Embrace The Obscure and The Erratic —

The full idea is “Embrace The Obscure and The Erratic — they supply the dynamics of association”

Sometimes, there is a tendency in some writers (certainly in myself) to erase the truly offbeat things that the subconscious throws up. Why? Because I’m trying to appeal to an amorphous, large group of readers and I’m worried that some will be alienated? Constantly, writers vanillaize their own work. This is an injunction to not only resist the impulse but to see the obscure and erratic as doing powerful work for you.

3) Metaphor is Dead

This is too profound an insight for a quick paragraph. But suffice to say that a changing world calls for a changing literature. That’s not to say that Robert Burns saying, “My love is like a red, red rose” in 1794 is no longer true. But in a fragmented world, one-to-one mapping is insufficient. ‘A’ does not correspond only to ‘B’. There are multitudes. Perhaps one day I’ll go further into this.

I owe Janet an incalculable debt for their material support and quality of mind. I will forever be an acolyte. My entire writing pedagogy - Mess-making: The Fragmentary Model of Writing (which you can see here in video form if you like) is derived from Janet.

I never thought of myself as an acolyte. But I’ve heard the good word and now I travel and preach it. Enjoy your retirement, Janet. We’ll carry your ideas forward.

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

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The Most Influential Man You’ve Never Heard Of

This post is about a brilliant man you’ve likely not heard of but has a share of responsibility in creating our modern, information-rich world.

Sol Golomb. Photo Credit: The Franklin Institute

Solomon Golomb was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1932 to a Lithuanian-Jewish father and a Jewish mother of Russian descent. Like so many brilliant contributors to the world’s bank of knowledge, he came from a lineage of rabbis and scholars.

Before I continue his brief biography, let me share his two major bequeathments to mankind:

1) He is the reason that when you send a text message gossiping about someone, that message is received by your intended recipient and not by some other cellphone in the vicinity. Basically, how does one device identify that a message floating in the air is intended for it? How does one distinguish signal from noise?

Solomon Golomb, by studying Shift Register Sequences, determined how to construct the polynomials used to encode data sent by GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and numerous other telecommunications.

According to Stephen Wolfram, Golomb is, therefore, the man behind the world’s most-used algorithm idea of all time. Wolfram estimates that over an octillion bits (a billion billion billion) have been generated by humanity’s collection of electronic devices.

Golomb was also an avid game designer and linguist. He designed a chess-checkers combo game called ‘Cheskers’ and also described games where collections of shapes can be arranged to tile particular (finite or infinite) regions. He called these ‘polyominoes’ and these investigations and papers inspired games like Tetris and probably down to tiled games like Catan and Azul as well (though that’s speculation on my part).

Returning to Golomb’s wonderful biography:

1) A product of the Baltimore City Schools (along with Prop Joe and Thurgood Marshall. Incidentally, another Jewish-Baltimorean, Leon Uris, failed out of high school), Golomb went on to enroll at John Hopkins. According to Wolfram, Golomb “narrowly avoided a quota on Jewish students by promising he wouldn’t switch to medicine—and took twice the usual course load.”

He ended up graduating in 1951 from Johns Hopkins at 19 years old! He then went to Harvard for grad school in math. In 1955, he went to Scandinavia on a Fulbright and returned with a wife, Bo (Bodil Rygaard) from Denmark.

He then worked for the Jet Propulsion Lab where he set technicians to building electronic implementations of his shift registers. There were lots of military and satellite applications in radar and radiation detection. For example, shift registers could be used in designing jam-resistant radio-controlled missiles. In a major contribution to physics, Golomb led a team that bounced a radar signal off Venus and changed what we knew about Earth-Venus and Earth-Sun distances.

Golomb evidently had a great sense of humor in addition to immense erudition. With regard to extraterrestrial communication, he wrote the following:

“There are two questions involved in communication with Extraterrestrials. One is the mechanical issue of discovering a mutually acceptable channel. The other is the more philosophical problem (semantic, ethic, and metaphysical) of the proper subject matter for discourse. In simpler terms, we first require a common language, and then we must think of something clever to say.”

In his thirties, Golomb transitioned into academia, choosing USC despite offers from Caltech and UCLA. He stayed at USC for 53 years, raised a family, and wrote countless papers. More than 10,000 patents have drawn on his work.

Interestingly, this man responsible for octillion bits of information rarely used computers himself. In a newsletter about information-saturation, I feel compelled to speculate if his level of deep work was made possible by the sort of intense focus that devices, computers, emails, notifications, texts can often interrupt.

He and his wife died within two weeks of each other just short of their 60th wedding anniversary, survived by two daughters, Astrid and Beatrice.

I find Golomb’s story to be wonderful, magical, filled with the best of humanity. I particularly like that a man who worked with missiles, radar and cryptography at the height of the cold war also thought that games were a worthy subject of investigation.

On Legacy:

I’m sure I’m not the only one who wonders if, when I’m gone, I’ll leave an impact on this world. Hopefully, with loved ones, some collection of writings, and students, that will be the case. But, in the world of mass media, we often want MORE. How can I touch and change the lives of MORE people?

I doubt many of us will ever hit the dizzying numbers of Solomon Golomb. There’s a freedom in that. We all make our impacts in the world, big or small. Golomb’s impact was massive. But he went through life, applying deep focus to questions, exploring ‘play’ and ‘work’ and ‘language’ all with a sense of curiosity and wonder. He wasn’t bogged down with the practical and yet his discoveries ended up everywhere. Something sufficiently elegant and simple will always radiate outward.

Warmly,

Raghav

Most of the information for this post comes from the writings of the irrepressible Stephen Wolfram, who personally knew Solomon Golomb. Wolfram is obviously an unbelievably accomplished person in his own right. He’s the CEO of Wolfram Research, headquartered in Champaign, IL, and has done so much for the world of computing and mathematics. He’s also a great and prolific writer.

Wolfram’s article on Golomb: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-19322016/

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Value of Virtual Co-Writes

I have hosted 285 Virtual Co-Writes. Firstly, what is a virtual co-write?

Different groups adopt different structures but they are roughly the same:

Log into the virtual meeting

Each participant briefly shares their intention for the allotted time

Everyone goes on mute and, presumably, gets to work. (Mine run for 90 mins)

In the final few minutes, everyone shares how they did.

Simple format. Devastatingly effective. With my teaching load and life maintenance, I would not have been able to finish my novel without these virtual co-writes. That said, you don’t have to be a “creative writer” to use these spaces; we have people who use them to complete dissertations or simply to get through their to-do list.

At first, I thought their effectiveness stemmed from accountability. That is true in a narrow sense. But there is a subtler aspect to them.

The Office of Modern Composition Meetup Group for Virtual Co-Writes

Humans are alone, in our bodies and our consciousness, and yet we are social, in our networks and our shared memories and knowledge. In deep projects, it’s easy to feel lonely, like space shuttles drifting in endless blackness, light-years from each other. Modern modes of work — increasingly fragmented and refusing interchangeability - can deepen this isolation. Sometimes, it’s fun to be on our own, spinning a web that only we understand, but isolation can produce doubt, especially with a long project. Sometimes, doubt prevails, nudging me from my creative work to email, to my calendar — the maintenance of life. Those things are important, of course. But the whole point of allotting time to creative work is to NOT do those things.

The doubt is a consequence of an internal conflict that I will probably never fully shake. I fight the sense that writing is….selfish and pointless. There are countless books in the world. Do people really need another one? And who am I to write it?

But when I look up and on my screen I see five or ten people diligently working on their own projects, I think, “Well, if they value themselves enough to invest in their own endeavors — and I respect them; I don’t think they’re selfish —  then maybe I can keep at it for the next five minutes.”

Inevitably, those five minutes become the whole session.

This solidarity I call ‘round-the-fire energy.’ To me, it calls to mind ice-age nomads huddled around a fire. It’s the sense that we are not alone in this star-filled universe. Though the world out there is large and dark and impossible to know, you can surround yourself with like-minded tribespeople. You can draw on them for warmth and energy. And together, you will survive the ice-age.

That is the value of the single virtual co-write session. You can find, from others, the energy to stay focused when, by yourself, you might have succumbed to distraction.

But what is the value of several hundred co-writes?

“Community” is often talked about but the word can lose meaning through overuse. For me, it had become a buzzword that meant little. The virtual co-writes allowed me to rediscover its fuller meaning.

I have seen my fellow co-write members show up week in, week out, honoring their craft. I’ve seen their highs and lows (acceptances, rejections, book deals, completed dissertations). I have seen them put in the hard yards. Seen them have 4/10 sessions, 6/10 sessions, joyful 9/10 sessions. So, when good things come their way, you know how the sausage was made, and you get to celebrate their victory as though it were your own.

If you are at all inspired to give this modality a go, please don’t hesitate to join the co-writes that I host — Office of Modern Composition’s weekly co-write. It is held at 5-30pm CDT, Mondays and 10am, CDT Thursdays.

If you’re looking for a more frequent fix, Shut Up and Write hosts countless Meetup groups.

I hope you do give this modality a try.

Warmly,

Raghav

A Reminder to Pre-Order My Book:

Apologies if you have already done so. But they do say, it takes 7 reminders to actually prompt a decisive action.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again. If you ask me what my preferred retailer is, I’d probably say Waterstones just because it’s such a big retailer and a big pre-order number might make them more likely to stock my book in their stores.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Warmly,

Raghav

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Chicago Street Named After A Fascist

Not click-bait. Just a fact.

Balbo Drive is named for Italo Balbo.

Italo Balbo was a senior member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF, of Italy. He was the youngest (26) of the four organizers of the 1922 March on Rome that led to Mussolini’s ascension to power.

(Incidentally, I’m sure many of you know that I like to bike the lakefront trail. Balbo Drive goes across Lake Shore Drive to the lakefront trail and is the scene of some of the most egregiously criminal driving I’ve seen in the city. In 2022, Geraldo Marciales, a 41-year-old CISCO engineer and recreational biker, was killed at that intersection. He was due to be married later that year, I believe. In 2023, a driver then drove into the ghost bike set up in remembrance of Geraldo).

Back to Balbo Drive —

In 1933, Chicago hosted another World’s Fair (The Century of Progress), not to be confused with the more widely known World’s Columbian Exposition.

During the time the city held this fair, Italo Balbo arrived in dramatic fashion as the leader of the greatest mass flight in aviation history at the time, when 25 Savoia-Marchetti S.55X seaplanes crossed the Atlantic Ocean in formation, making stops in the Netherlands, Iceland, Canada, before hitting Chicago.

On July 15th, 100,000 Chicagoans cheered the arrival of the future Axis Air Marshal.

He brought with him a 2,000 year-old-column as a gift to the people of Chicago from Benito Mussolini. The column, which I have passed many times on my rides along the lakefront trail, bears an inscription in Italian which when translated into English says the following:

Changing The Name:

I have no qualms with the Chicago Park District keeping this monument as a historical quirk. It’s not the same as a hundred-foot Robert E. Lee statue. That said, why is Balbo Drive still named after Italo Balbo? Our street names connote value. They are commemorative gestures that carry meaning.

Yes, Balbo was a debonair airman. But he was a fascist, an Axis general, a brutal subjugator of anti-fascist clergy, labor unionists, and other non-fascist elements. Surely, we can keep the monument but find a better name for Balbo Drive?

I’m not the fist person to suggest this. Periodically, over the years, there have been calls to change the name. In 2018, people suggested having the street renamed for Ida B. Wells however she later got Congress Parkway and besides we already have a Wells St.

But it turns out that the Italian-American community, or at least some of its members, have vigorously protested the name change. Some people like Balbo, it seems.

In the past, it was suggested that it be renamed after Sister Frances Xavier Cabrini, another prominent Italian-American, and the first U.S. citizen to be canonized a saint by the Catholic Church. But she has enough stuff named after her and lacks the Chicago connection.

I have a suggestion though, an Italian American who actually lived in Chicago, who contributed to the city and the world. A Nobel Laureate who, in 1938, repudiated fascism. Someone who actually contributed to the war effort against fascism.

Enrico Fermi.

Surely, a Fermi Drive is as acceptable to the Italian-American community as Balbo drive, no?

There’s a lot more to say on the subject but I’ll stop there for now.

A Reminder to Pre-Order My Book:

Apologies if you have already done so. But they do say, it takes 7 reminders to actually prompt a decisive action.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again. If you ask me what my preferred retailer is, I’d probably say Waterstones just because it’s such a big retailer and a big pre-order number might make them more likely to stock my book in their stores.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Warmly,

Raghav

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.