Raghav Rao's Blog, page 5

My Gateway Bird

We have hit May in Chicago. This is bird-watching season in my household as millions of migrating warblers, miraculous tiny, colorful pieces of sky, hunker down here for a while, before continuing on to Canada.

This is the time of year when my friends are surprised to learn that Tatum and I enjoy bird-watching and confess to me that they only know crows and pigeons. That’s perfectly normal. It just tells me that they have not yet encountered their gateway bird. Tatum’s gateway bird was a scarlet tanager, for example.

Scarlet Tanager - Tatum’s gateway bird.

Let me explain in altogether overcomplicated fashion:

Categories are heuristics — shorthand cognition derived from experience. We use heuristics to zap everything into previously-formed categories. I think heuristically about fish. To me, fish constitute a recognizable category with a complicated taxonomy. I don’t know this taxonomy so I’ve subdivided fish for my own purposes. Big fish. Small fish. Sharks. Edible fish. Frightening fish. Bizarre fish like deep-sea-bioluminescent fish. But, ultimately a fish is still this:

O<

I’m sure divers (my brother and sister both enjoy scuba diving) must think, ‘Raghav, you are missing out.’

I suspect many people think heuristically about birds. A small flying form. Attack drone? No. Bird. Probably a pigeon, crow, or sparrow. Is it flying towards me? No? Good.

To see a bird as if for the first time, engaging the fullness of sight, not simply to deposit it into a category and move on with life, takes a gateway bird.

I encountered my gateway bird in sixth grade in a residential school in India — Rishi Valley School.

At 6 A.M. one morning, I was on my way to mridangam (an Indian percussion instrument) class. I took a shortcut down a rough, muddy trail through a vacant patch — part parking lot, part forest. I saw something I had never seen before, that belonged to no category.

A white blur zipped from branch to branch. No discernible features. No clue if it had a head or a tail. There was a jet stream trailing it. I thought it was a sprite (I was reading a lot of fantasy). It occurred to me that it might be a species of arboreal animal that no one had discovered before. Clearly, people needed to know about this thing. It was astounding.

I ran back to the dormitory and woke up Hariprasad. His dad was a farmer and, for us, Hari represented all practical knowledge. He knew how cement was mixed and how pulleys worked. Surely, he would know.

I described it. White blur. Zipping. Jet stream. Patiently (he was always patient with me), he heard me out. And then consulted Salim Ali’s ‘Book of Indian Birds’, India’s equivalent of Peterson’s Guide to North American Birds.

“Is this what you saw?”

The Asian Paradise Flycatcher. As breathtaking a bird as you’ll ever see. Some call it a tail. I call it a jet stream.

Asian Paradise Flycatcher. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

I never made it to another mridangam class. But I did join Hari and the birdwatching club on their Sunday morning walks sometimes led by S. Rangaswami, one of India’s leading ornithologists, who once told a gathering of us, ”Bird-watching … is the art … of watching birds.”

For me, birding is a mazy, long walk with friends occasionally punctuated with exhilarating moments. And if you don’t see many birds, you still had a lovely walk.

My gateway bird smashed open the category of birds for me. I looked with wonder, aheuristically. I felt that it wasn’t just one item of a category or taxonomy; it was a node of life force.

Still, categorization can create barriers to experience in birding as well. You’re looking at a bird. Someone supplies the name. And it’s like you’ve stopped looking at it. Your senses deactivate because it’s been added to the catalog.

What can I say? Just as there is a joy to exploding a category. There is a delight in fitting something into one.

If you haven’t encountered it yet, I hope you chance upon an unforgettable gateway bird this May. Perhaps today or some other day.

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Our Core Needs

What if I told you that wonderful minds have compiled a short list of things we need? And they are startlingly obvious and fewer, perhaps, than we suspected. Yes, “resources”, however broadly defined, factor into wellbeing. But to go on stockpiling indefinitely is perhaps to neglect other categories.

I pulled this list from the book, The Myth of Normal, by Gabor Maté, the eminent physician-author who, having spent years treating addicts in downtown Vancouver, wrote brilliantly about the connection between trauma and addiction, something we now take for granted. Maté was born in ‘44 in the Budapest Ghetto. He lost many family members to Auschwitz and the war. Last year, Tatum and I went to hear him speak and were amazed by the scope of his wisdom and kindness.

Gabor Maté’s “The Myth of Normal”

It’s difficult to write about BIG Things like the human condition and to avoid triteness. Maté succeeds because his writing pulls from his wide reading, his knowledge of the cutting-edge of scientific research, and his willingness to share his personal narrative of addiction. He’s also a close associate of Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist whose 2010 book ‘Born For Love’ changed my life.

But enough preamble. Here’s what our core needs are:

Among psychologists there is wide-ranging consensus about what our core needs consist of. These have been variously listed as:

belonging, relatedness, or connectedness;

autonomy: a sense of control in one's life;

mastery or competence;

genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others;

trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life; and

purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature.

In some ways, this is a refutation of Maszlow’s hierarchy of needs but I’m not getting into that here. Let me make a single observation. “Resources” filter into trust. We don’t “need” lots of stuff. But we do need to “trust” that we have enough.

I’m sure much of this list feels true to most you. Yet, there is a gulf between ‘knowing’ something and integrating it into our daily lives. In fact, in a world saturated with so much damn information, it feels as though we live perpetually in this gulf. Still, I hope this list offers something to ponder.

Sometimes, I take it for granted that I share a home with a trauma-therapist and that Gabor Maté is a daily reference point for us. When I shared this list with my students earlier this week, it sparked a lively discussion of what we need vs. what we think we need. I hope you have a similar reaction.

Also, I’m hoping to grow my substack so do forward this along to your friends and loved ones who you think might like to know what their core needs are as well.

For Chicago & London Folks —

Tatum and I went last night to Eddie-Izzard’s one-person performance of ‘Hamlet’ at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. I will write more about it but let me just say — WOW!

So good. Eddie Izzard’s Hamlet

I can’t believe the reviews of the New York show thought it middling. I was blown away by Izzard sustaining the illusion that one single body might be 23 separate consciousnesses. It’s a spare production, not much by way of costume or set, but it’s both an athletic achievement (2hrs and 20 mins + a fight scene!) and stellar drama.

Of course, familiarity with Hamlet helps. Comprehension might be compromised without it.

Chicago folks, it’s a very short run so try and see it before May 4th.

London (UK not Ontario) folks, it’s headed your way so don’t miss it.

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I Met An Extraordinary Man Re-Typing 100 Novels Word For Word

A few days ago I met an artist doing something extraordinary.

His name is Tim Youd. He is 11 years and 80 novels into an ambitious project. He is typing, word for word, 100 novels.

Upon hearing this, I was desperate to meet him. Luckily, my friend Claire Foussard, a NYC-based curator (incidentally, she’s also an impassioned advocate for Inuit art), introduced me to him.

He uses the same make and model typewriters the original authors used.

He tries to write either in the city the novel was based in or some place with a connection to the novel or author.

He types the entire novel onto two sheets of paper. So this is almost an ephemeral act. It produces nothing legible. Yet the output is strangely beautiful.

Credit: Cristin Tierney / Tim Youd

I spoke to him and he described his work as “devotional” and modestly said it made him a better reader. I don’t doubt that. But it’s hard to list the cascading implications. I had a series of thoughts in no particular order that I’m sharing below.

What are the neuroplastic implications of so deeply engaging with 80 works? How has his brain changed?

This newsletter is about information saturation. There is an overwhelming amount of data being generated. 328 terabytes daily, I read, but that seems like a low-end estimate. Everyday, MORE content. MORE original works. More. More. My book, too, when it comes out later this year, will be adding to this MORE. But Tim Youd’s project is not about “more”; it’s about “deeper”; I have been saying for a while that discernment and careful, almost hesitant consumption of media are increasingly important. I am happy for Tim that he has chosen to become intimate with his personal cannon. Is there an opportunity cost to his time? Could he have read more books? Of course. But this project negates the value of “ephemeral moreness.” That’s what I love about it. Its moreness is inward.

How do we teach writing in America? We get students to write original works. We workshop them. We read the masters, of course, and discuss them, but we don’t copy their passages word for word. I recall meeting a painter who had trained in a fine art school in China and she said to me, “For the first five years, I just learned to paint rocks.” While that’s one extreme, I think there is room in the curriculum to sit down and copy, word for word, the masters. We put a premium on originality. But sometimes we don’t lay the foundations for it.

I felt a desire to copy Tim. I’m going to though not quite as ambitiously. I’ll likely do short stories and simply type them into a word processor. But why did I feel this instant desire? I felt, deeply, wordlessly, that this was a good use of time, that I’d enjoy myself, that I’d find a tempo, enter a flow state, and experience loss of ego, and deep immersion in the mind of a master, all available at no extra cost except the cost of slowing down.

This week, inspired by Tim, I had my students bring an excerpt from one of their favorite books to class and rewrite it, word for word, anywhere between 2-4 times. These were substantial excerpts. I saw them type or write until their wrists hurt. But my obsession with squash has made me believe in the value of reps. Lots of reps. (Repetitions for the uninitiated). My students are gamecocks. At the end, all reported that the exercise had unintended value. I could see it cultivated “care” in them, “care” in the sense of “intimate regard”. In a world with too much information, we need “intimate regard.” In a massive convention hall at Navy Pier, amid the booths of 170 renowned galleries at EXPO 2024, Tim Youd’s work showcased “intimate regard.”

Very broadly, humans “consume” information. It shapes us. Changes us. Becomes us. It can radicalize us, humanize us. But unless we become intentional about our relationship to information, we’re doomed. Because a plague of locusts is upon us and we barely seem to realize. Tim’s project is a beacon of hope.

There’s many, many more cascading implications. But I’ll stop there. Here’s a link to Tim Youd’s website where you can see the list of books that he’s already completed.

Now — something completely different:

The Office of Modern Composition, an organization that I’m part of along with writers Sophie Lucido Johnson and Jill Riddell, has launched a substack newsletter organized around resources for writers or people interested in getting into writing - subscribe here.

For those of you in Chicago, Eddie Izzard is doing a one-person Hamlet show at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. It runs April 19th to May 4th. This is intimate immersion into one text similar to Tim Youd’s project. I’m going Wed 24th and am excited. If you go that same day, drop me a line.

And finally, this weekend, I am playing a squash fundraiser, the Metrosquash Cup. The MetroSquash program utilizes four components (sport, academics, social-emotional, and college & careers) to support students getting to-and-through high school and college.

Any contribution would be greatly appreciated.

No matter what, carve out some time this Spring/Summer and copy, word for word, some passage from a book you admire. When you do, please write me. I’m interested to hear if you find it valuable.

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A Sentence We May Never Hear Again

First, here’s the sentence that we may never hear again, pulled from Wikipedia:

“In college, Ramanujan majored in science in his freshman year, but his father persuaded him to change his major from science to English.”

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This sentence refers to AK Ramanujan, a brilliant polyglot who wrote, translated, and researched in English, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Sanskrit. He spent most of his career as a Professor of Linguistics at UChicago. He won India’s highest honors (Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi prize) as well as the Macarthur Prize Fellowship. In addition to his scholarly work, he was a prolific poet as well.

In 1993, he went into hospital to have a tumor removed from his upper spine. It was a benign tumor but had been causing pain in his legs. Surgery was expected to be routine. He hoped to travel to India the following month. But his heart failed under the effects of the anesthesia. He was only 64.

He left behind him a prodigious body of work that opened up South Indian literature, folklore, modes of thinking. His students went on to make major cultural contributions. Arshia Sattar’s translations from Sanskrit of the Ramayana and Mahabharata were recently published by Penguin.

Here I am, in 2024, 48 years after the publication of his translation of Samskara: A Rite for A Dead Man by U.R. Ananthamurthy, teaching it in my Newberry class.

AK Ramanujan, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago

But let’s return to the extraordinary sentence pulled from Wikipedia. Was there really a time in history where an Indian parent suggested their child abandon SCIENCE for English?

AK Ramanujan’s father was a professor of mathematics; this wasn’t the case of one humanities person trying to keep the family business going.

Categorically, this would not happen today. It wouldn’t happen in Mysore where AK Ramanujan was born and it probably wouldn’t happen in Chicago where he died. In fact, from 1971 to 2021, Americans majoring in English declined from 7.6% of all degrees to 2.8%.

I totally understand parents’ perspectives of course. I think a very compelling graph would show the lifetime earnings potential of a STEM major or someone with strong comp-sci skills against that of an English major.

However, life is long, and the pendulum often swings back. I write this newsletter on information-saturation because I believe that the core value/skill of discernment is crucial to managing our wellbeing in the information age. And perhaps the central value of the close study of literature is heightened discernment.

We are in a world where the sheer volume of AI-generated text and AI-generated images is proliferating rapidly. Parsing, separating, discerning, categorizing, applying value judgments may become value-adds again. The “useless” degrees may find a use again.

I’ve noticed in my corridor chats with other lecturers and instructors that English instructors are often the most adept at a) identifying AI-generated text and b) explaining why it lacks a human signature. We weren’t explicitly trained for it and yet it turns out we were trained for it.

Who knows? Maybe a parent in Mysore, under the shadow of a glass-plated technology hub, may exhort his sons and daughters to study hard in after-school tuition classes to get admission into a difficult, rigorous language-arts program.

Yours, only half in jest,

Raghav

Relevant Sources:

AK Ramanujan’s death - (Source)

AK Ramanujan’s bibliography - (Source)

Decline in degrees in English literature and letters - (Source)

AI-proliferation - (Source)

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A Quick Historical Dispatch Excised From My Novel

I recently re-submitted my manuscript to my editor. In the reshuffle, I had to cut out a neat little bit of history as it no longer fit the shifted timeline.

But instead of consigning this trivia to the graveyard of ships, I thought I’d share a little bit about this character, really a ship — the SS Rajula — and its wonderful career running a tidy little passenger route from Singapore to Madras from the 1920s until her demolition in 1970.

The SS Rajula had some real career highlights; this old lady saw some things:

Commissioned as a passenger-cargo liner for the British India Steam Navigation Company, she was built in Glasgow with her keel laid in 1925 and she was delivered as the Rajula the following year at a cost of £232,733.

She ran her tidy route, ferrying passengers (roughly 1,300 unberthed deck passengers, 425 berthed deck passengers, and a further ~150 first and second class passengers) between Singapore and Madras.

But in 1938, following the Munich crisis, she was called to service as a Personnel Ship and served in “Eastern Waters” until 1943; not much clarity here so perhaps she was involved in clandestine activities!

In 1943, she was transferred to Mediterranean waters, landing troops at Syracuse, Augusta and Anzio. The following year, she returned to familiar waters and was involved in Burmese coast operations as an ambulance transport. In June of 1945, she carried troops for the reoccupation of Rangoon.

In 1947, now in an independent India, she resumed her commercial service after nearly a decade serving the empire.

In 1962, she underwent a major refit at the Mitsubishi yard in Kobe, Japan.

Two years later, departing Penang, she fractured her starboard engine and had to return to Singapore for repairs with a tug escort.

In ’66, she ran through a tropical cyclone on her way from Negapatam to Madras. Seven ships floundered ashore but she “clawed her way stern-first off the coast, along which she had been driven 48km (30 miles) and finally berthed safely at Madras the following afternoon with little damage. The Indian passengers held an impromptu thanksgiving service to the stout old ship on the wharf as they disembarked.”

In 1971, she rescued the fifteen survivors of the Japanese fishing vessel Ohzuru Maru No.1, which had burnt out 485km (300 miles) west of the Nicobar Islands.

In 1973, she was sold to The Shipping Corporation of India and had her name changed to ‘Rangat’ and was used for service to the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

But in August of the following year, she earned her reprieve and was sold to Maharashtra Shipbreaking Co Ltd and, in December, her demolition commenced in the Bombay, the city of my birth.

Farewell, SS Rajula. I’m sorry I couldn’t fit you into my book. But at least, you’re memorialized here.

Ever since visiting our friends Dingo and Janel in Singapore, I’ve been trying to imagine the many currents of maritime trade and travel — places like Penang and Malacca — have started to take on a magical quality for me. Perhaps, it’ll be something I can explore at a later date.

Hope you enjoyed this whimsical departure.

Warmly,

Raghav

P.S. - You can see a lovely painting of the SS Rajula here - LINK

Source: P & O Heritage. Preserving Maritime History.

URL - https://www.poheritage.com/Upload/Mimsy/Media/factsheet/94338RAJULA-1926pdf.pdf

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Water and wholeness of being

Floating in the Mediterranean

In 2016 Raghav and I visited my childhood friend in Europe. While visiting Napoli, we took a ferry to the island of Procida, a day trip off the coast. From the ferry station, we took a local bus to a gorgeous beachside area that I will never forget. Black volcanic sands and beautiful blues and greens of the water that changed color as the sun went across the sky. The water moved with gentle waves. The temperature was a warmth that wrapped around you.

As I entered the waters, they were exquisitely clear and remained so as I waded in deeper. I dove in to touch the bottom, skimming my fingers and hands across the dark umber sands. The small, weighty grains floated gently as they were disturbed. My eyes were open and I saw glittering rays of sunlight spear through the water. I slowly released a bubble at a time to sink further down. There was perfect silence. I closed my eyes and for a moment could imagine that I was in a state of floating suspension and not in water at all. And as I gently let my body float up to the surface, I looked up towards the sun and sky through the water. It was magical and unearthly. A couple of seconds before I broke the surface and returned to the world.

That fleeting moment of both disembodiment and connection to something bigger is hard to describe in words. I think it’s a sensation that may be familiar to many of us though, whatever language we may use to refer to this experience. It is a moment of deep contentment without a thought, a suspension of time. To a degree, it is an experience that I associate with being in water.

I did something similar as a child during swim practice. At the end of practice, I floated along the dirty and dusty bottom of the pool. (I found many treasures this way). I followed the pool bottom into the 12-foot deep end and stayed under for as long as I could. I also think back to countless memories of summertimes spent up north in Michigan at the beach. Unlike the sands of Procida, Lake Michigan sands are incredibly fine and diamond bright. The water is not warm, even in the middle of summer. It is stunningly clear. I would swim fifty yards in and look down at what must have been fifteen feet below me, but it looked like the sandy bottom was right there to touch with my toe. Underwater I would open my eyes and float peacefully in the shimmering sunlight and turquoise waters.

Undivided wholeness

In November of 2022, I went to Columbus, Ohio to complete a weeklong training in yoga nidra through a company called iRest. As a disclaimer, I am not familiar with how yoga nidra was originated. It uses Sanskrit language. It has references to Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. It is a style of meditation and my original interest in it was related to work. It was reported to have positive impacts for veterans with PTSD, reducing trauma-related symptoms and supporting better sleep. So I thought it would be a useful practice to know, even if just conceptually, as part of my work with trauma survivors.

It is a more comfortable kind of meditation practice compared others. You lie down on your back on the floor. The set-up is a bolster for under the knees, a blanket for beneath the head to cushion against the floor, and a blanket to pull over the body. You close your eyes as if to sleep. A facilitator reads a 45-minute guided meditation that you follow along with. I completed this training about a month and a half after leaving my previous job and it was very restorative for me.

What I most took away was this concept of myself as part of an “undivided wholeness.” To say it another way: my interconnectedness with all things and the universe. Over the course of the week I was then able to experience that feeling of undivided wholeness for myself through the meditations. The trainers used a phrase “radiant sensation” to describe this state and it was an apt term. Prior to the training, I had always thought of experiencing connection to my spirit and to the universe as something out reach; it was for people very dedicated to meditation practice. Not to say that regular and consistent meditation doesn’t open up deeper experiences, but I did not need to devote hours on hours to receive a small sense of this kind of experience.

To experience and realize that those small, fleeting moments of wholeness are accessible to me, I could then identify when I had those moments of connection in other parts of my life.

Swimming and the act of counting

As my parents tell it, I have loved swimming since infancy. I swam competitively from age 7 through college. I did not have great competitive spirit, although I was adequately competitive to progress through college athletics. I don’t really swim now. I admire Raghav who is so dedicated and competitive in his squash practice. It is a sport he picked up as an adult, in which he has improved dramatically over the last 6+ years since starting. I think doing a competitive sport growing up as a kid is one kind of dedication, and taking up and learning competitive sport as an adult requires a quality that is more rare.

I cannot calculate how many hours I must’ve swum in practice time in my lifetime, certainly thousands of hours. Looking back on it, I understand it as an early meditative or mindfulness kind of practice. I moved through practice one stroke, one lap, one set at a time. To look too far ahead and I would become distracted and impatient to reach that future moment, and struggle to sustain the current efforts to swim towards that moment. Depending on the intensity of the set, I literally did not think past the next lap.

I counted every stroke of freestyle, breathing every three strokes: 1-2-3 breathe, 1-2-3 breathe, over and over and over, an easy litany in my brain. It had a rhythm that my lungs followed along with too, blow-blow- inhale. At the wall, I flipped and shot off, body streamlined, tense, and still. I counted 1-2-almost 3 in the stillness, then 1-2-3 dolphin kicks, then 1-2-3-4-5-6 rapid flutter kicks before breaking the surface with a stroke. Then I counted 1-2 gasping first breath off the wall.

Every moment required a precise movement. Through this progression of the counting of strokes, breaths, turns, kicks, lengths, and laps was how time was accounted for. It was how I moved through every practice. I am not physically very strong and so my edge was in my good technique. Like the counting, reinforcing technique had its own language. Swimming butterfly: Shoulders relaxed, pull, elbows high, pull, palms up, shrug, reach, chest forward, neck loose. It was language that was more intuitive rhythm carried out by the body than of words and conscious thought.

Nourishment and connection

In present day I practice Bikram yoga. It is a sequence of 26 postures. You go as deeply into the posture as you can and that’s that, no add-ons or frills. The first part is on your feet and the second part on the floor. The room temperature is cranked to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat is immense, literally, in part because humidity is cranked up too, so the heat carries weight. By the end of class, your hair, clothes, and mat towel are soaked through with sweat (water). The challenge is as much remaining in the room in the heat as it is moving through postures.

The act of sweating in Bikram yoga is a catharsis for me. It is a large part of why I have come to prefer it over other practices. The heat and sweat in tandem with the force of the workout wring the tension from my body. When I walk out of class, all thoughts are suspended. I enter back into the street life and open air with a new kind of gaze. My body is weightless. I can close my eyes and feel into that sensation of in-suspension. And as that sensation passes I reopen my eyes and feel a deep sense of ease.

My walk home takes me underneath the subway track that clatters deafeningly as trains go overhead. Behind that subway track is a building several stories high. Painted on this building is a huge mural of a man from the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike in 1968. He holds up a sign that reads, “I am a man.” Each time, as I walk beneath the tracks, I contemplate the man and his sign and feel a sense of synchronicity. It is a reminder to hold a spirit of openness and inquiry as I move through the world. That I have a spirit or existence in this universe that cannot be described in words. And that this spirit needs nourishment through connection to those things that are greater than me.

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