Samir Chopra's Blog, page 120

On Being Mistaken for a ‘Worker’

Variants of the following situation have, I think, occurred in many people’s lives here in the US. (I have been on both the giving and receiving end, so to speak.)

You walk into a store (or perhaps a restaurant), perusing its offerings. You do not find what you need; you are confused; you need assistance. You see someone standing around, unoccupied; they are not wearing a uniform or anything like that. For whatever reason, you assume this person is a store employee, and ask for direction or assistance. You are mistaken. This person is not an employee.  Matters now get interesting.

Your respondent tells you, sometimes curtly, sometimes politely, ‘I don’t work here.’ You react as if poked with a cattle iron and electric prod combined, even as your hand flies up to cover your mouth in dismay: ‘I’m sorry!’ And you rush away, mortified, determined to never commit that particular faux pas again. The person you have dared assume was a store employee might also move away quickly from the locale of his embarrassment, wondering what accursed luck had led to this confusion, wondering what they had done wrong. Did they look slovenly or unwashed? Do they look servile?

(In my description of these kinds of encounters, I do not think I have exaggerated excessively. Some twenty or so years ago, I went with a girlfriend to an Indian restaurant for dinner; she was wearing a sari. As we waited for our table, a young man walked up to my girlfriend and asked her for a table; she politely, and with a grin on her face, replied she didn’t work there. You would have thought the lad had been shot, the way he almost doubled up with pain, flushed red, apologized and quickly walked away.)

This species of especially embarrassing social encounter has led to multiple safeguards to prevent its recurrence: in more established commercial enterprises, employees wear name tags or uniforms, and conversely, their customers have learned to be more cautious, prefixing their questions with a very (very!) tentative, ‘Excuse me, do you work here?’

No one it seems, likes being mistaken for a worker. And no one likes to be in the business of mistaking a non-worker for a worker. We worry that we might offend someone by mistaking them for a lowly employee of the business we are patronizing, and the targets of our putative scorn are offended that someone has dared confuse them with those who are there to serve them. The primary sin here is class confusion: our class has been mixed up with someone else’s.

We live in a society that ostensibly aspires to, and sometimes achieves in some limited domains, an egalitarianism of sorts; we supposedly ascribe ‘dignity’ to labor, to wage work; we supposedly recognize that today’s lowly are tomorrow’s esteemed. For isn’t the road to the top available to anyone and everyone? But, I think, these little run-ins show us we’ve got a long way to go till we are ready to accept being confused with a ‘worker.’

The Non-Existent Fourth Estate

In his review of W. Sydney Robinson‘s Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W. T. Stead (‘The Only True Throne’, London Review of Books, 19 July 2012), John Pemble writes

‘Nothing like being an editor for getting a swollen head,’ the Fleet Street veteran A.G. Gardiner wrote in his memoirs. He must have had W.T. Stead especially in mind, because no editorial head was bigger than Stead’s. In the 1880s, first as deputy editor then editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, he’d been able (he said) to ‘wreck cabinets [and] let loose a tide of war upon helpless populations’. He was responsible – in his own words – for ‘ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated, bills transformed, estimates remodelled, acts passed, generals nominated, governors appointed, armies sent hither and thither, war proclaimed and war averted’. It’s no wonder he had such a high opinion of himself: Victorian journalists were always being told how important and powerful they were. Bulwer-Lytton’s lines of 1838 – ‘Beneath the rule of men entirely great/The pen is mightier than the sword’ – coined a proverb, and by common consent no pen was mightier than that employed by ‘the press’. This 18th-century term, originally used to refer to periodical literature in general, by early Victorian times meant first and foremost the daily papers. In 1828 Macaulay identified the press as ‘a Fourth Estate of the Realm’; by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know it, or if we do not know it, we ought to know it.’

Does the ‘press’ still rule? Can editors still claim the powers that W. T. Stead claimed for himself? It depends, I think, on what we take the referent of ‘press’ to be. If by ‘press’ we are referring to the gigantic media conglomerates that are the result of a never-ending process of corporate mergers of television, newspaper, magazine, and now digital services, then the answer is perhaps still ‘yes.’ The presidential candidate most likely to be elected is the one who can buy himself the most television time; the legislation most likely to pass is that which has been hawked the most successfully by its proponents on that same medium; wars are more likely to be declared if the press can be counted on, as in the case of the Iraq war, to faithfully parrot the talking points of the warmongers; a media frenzy over a politicians scandalous behavior can still bring end an career; a press conference remains the obligatory performative ritual for a disgraced leader; and so on.

But a great deal of what I’m describing above does not sound like what Macaulay had in mind in his ‘Fourth Estate’ formulation. All too often the media behemoth does not monitor the political process as watchdog, but rather manipulates it as active interested partner. How could it be otherwise given its monopolistic nature and corporate ownership?

Note: Pemble’s summation of the non-existence of the Fourth Estate, even in W. T. Stead’s time–unfortunately behind a behind a paywall at the LRB–makes for interesting reading: ‘the political weight of the press had declined as its circulation increased’ i.e., as it became subject to market forces.

Do Sancho Panzas Trump Don Quixotes?

In Stendhal‘s The Charterhouse of Parma, the Conte says to ‘our hero’ Fabrizio:

A half brainless individual, but one who keeps his eyes open and day in day out acts with prudence, will often enjoy the pleasure of triumphing over men of imagination. It was by a foolish error of imagination that Napoleon was led to surrender to the prudent John Bull instead of seeking to escape to America. John Bull, in his counting-house, had a good laugh over that letter of his in which he quotes Themistocles. In all ages, the base Sancho Panzas will, in the long run, triumph over the sublimely noble Don Quixotes.

The Conte’s opening claim is a familiar one: the practical, the grounded, the concrete, the earthy, trumps the idealistic, the wild and woolly, the speculative; the force of the practical can fill the sails of the sluggish and race them past the bold; the worker ant equipped with a superior work ethic will find greater rewards than a brilliant, but lazy, genius; the giant, like Napoleon, can be brought down by an army of determined and united midgets.  The Conte does not specify the domains to which his remarks apply but the open-ended way in which  he makes them suggests a generality extending across the political, the creative, and the artistic.

Sports fans, of course, are used to these sorts of judgments: the histories of many games are littered with stories of dazzling stars whose flashes of brilliance ensured several glorious moments in the sun, but no extended success, while journeymen weekday performers, persistent to the point of dullness, racked up numerically superior careers and thus dominated the recordbooks. Thus, the endless debates about whether statistics lie, whether the greatness of a sportsman should be judged by a cold table of numbers or by the pleasure brought to viewers. But sports at least offers a temptingly objective standard for comparison because of its statistics. (These have not ended debate however, but rather, sparked an efflorescence of ever more baroque statistics with which to wage these endless battles.)

Matters are perhaps more complicated elsewhere. How are we to assess the truth of the Conte’s remarks in  creative domains such as writing or the arts? Are the rewards for the worker ant to be measured in terms of monetary gains or recognition by peers or posterity? There are no objective statistics here to rely on. Might one dazzling, Supernova-like novella, featuring one display after another of verbal pyrotechnics and piercing insights into the human condition, written by a dissolute Quixote, outweigh an entire corpus of stolid prose written by a persistent Panza? Is the worth or the importance of the artist measured by a body of work–and its corresponding influence in its domain–or by an outstanding production that by virtue of being an outlier skews the scales in its favor? Answers to these questions are not easy for they often bring us into contact with one of the oldest and most intractable of all questions in the arts: What is it that makes a work a classic over and above its persistence and endurance through time?

Note: Excerpt from Penguin edition (1958); translated by Margaret R. B. Shaw

RIP Roger Ebert

I don’t read movie reviews before I see a movie; I read them afterwards. I don’t like running into spoilers and I dislike the idea of not making up my own mind about a movie. Once I’ve seen the movie, I’ve formed an opinion, which remains relatively impervious to the critiques of others. But still, just as I like to discuss a book with its other readers, reading what someone else thought about a movie I’ve seen remains an activity I often look forward to. But not with too many folks. (Like I said, I have strong opinions about movies.) Over the last dozen years or so, Andrew O’Hehir and Roger Ebert were among the movie critics I read on anything more than a sporadic basis; I used to read Matt Stoller Seitz back when he wrote for the New York Press but lost him along the way. (I’m not counting film theory here, of which I read a great deal a long time ago, and then gave up, frustrated by its inability to resonate with my movie-watching experience.)

Roger Ebert was not, I think, considered a high-brow movie critic by most. He did not, for instance, regularly invoke French new wave cinema, the hallmark of the critic who aspires to high-brow-ness. (The additional hyphen is necessary to distinguish that attitude from high-browness, which is a ranking that many Anglophone middle-class Indians aspire to.) But he still managed to write wisely, and most importantly, like a fan of the movies. He did not write from a distance, from the lofty perspective of someone interested more in auteurs and the grammar of the cinema, but rather as someone you could imagine lining up for tickets at the local multiplex and arthouse alike, infected by impatient passion and the lust for fantasy and good storytelling that is the hallmark of the movie-lover. (In my graduate school days, a roommate of mine once complained about a movie I wanted to rent that its kind were ‘too narrative’; I cannot imagine Ebert using this as a critical cudgel on any movie.) He wrote about movies with feeling, and was never shy about letting his readers know about the movies that emotionally resonated with him.

I sometimes found him too kind on movies I disliked, and over the years had started to develop an instinct for when we would disagree. I would find myself muttering under my breath, ‘I bet Ebert has given this three stars’ even as I clicked on the review link.  But I put it down to him being older and kinder than me. I’m not being patronizing when I say this; I still cannot describe the basis for these disagreements other than to say that I was more impatient than he was. Conversely, I did not dislike one movie that he absolutely, positively loathed: The Village. I remain mystified by why he hated it as much as he did. I could understand two stars, but one?

A critic is a writer, and Ebert had many good lines, some of them infused with rich wisdom. There is one that I am still fond of quoting to my students when they come to me for advice on writing papers: The muse only visits while you work. This one is for the ages; it’s true and it’s simple. Thanks.

RIP Roger.

Molière on the Modern Healthcare System

There are times, when overcome by irritation at our modern medical system, which is expensive, run by insurance companies and all too often, populated by doctors who seemingly aspire to ever greater heights of corporate efficiency even as they resolutely neglect their bedside manners and care little about outcomes while ordering an array of expensive and unnecessary diagnostic tests, I descend into bitterness, muttering dark imprecations about how far the two professions that I admired as a child–journalism and medicine–have fallen.

At moments like those it is best to comfort oneself with a little Molière on doctors; he seems to have anticipated the modern, insurance-company run medical system too.

From Love’s the Best Doctor, Scene Two:

LISETTE. What do you want with four doctors, master? Isn’t one enough to kill the girl off?

SGANARELLE. Be quiet. Four opinions are better than one.

LISETTE. Can’t your daughter be allowed to die without the help of all those fellows?

SGANARELLE. You don’t mean to suggest that doctors do people in?

LISETTE. Of course they do. I knew a man who used to maintain that you should never say such and such a person perished of a fever or pleurisy but that he died of four doctors and two apothecaries.

SGANARELLE. Be quiet! We mustn’t offend these gentlemen.

LISETTE. Upon my word, master, our cat fell from the housetop into the street a while back and yet he got better. He ate nothing for three days and never moved a muscle. It was lucky for him that there aren’t any cat doctors or they would have soon finished him off. They would have purged him and bled him and -

SGANARELLE. Oh, be quiet, I tell you! I never heard such nonsense. Here they come.

LISETTE. Now you will be well edified. They will tell you in Latin that there is nothing wrong with the girl.

Enter DOCTORS TOMÉS, DES-FONANDRÉS, MACROTIN, BAHYS

….

DR. TOMÉS. Well, while we are talking, what is your opinion of the controversy between Dr. Théopraste and Dr. Artimius? It seems to be dividing the whole faculty into opposing camps.

DR. DES-FONANDRÉS. I’m on Artimius’ side.

DR. TOMÉS. Yes, so am I. Of course his treatment, we know, killed the patient, and Théopraste’s ideas might have saved him, but Théopraste was in the wrong all the same. He shouldn’t have disputed the diagnosis of a senior colleague. Don’t you think so?

DR. DES-FONANDRÉS. No doubt about it! Stick to professional etiquette whatever happens.

DR. TOMÉS. Yes, I’m all for rules – except between friends. Only the other day three of us were called in for consultation with a man outside the faculty. I held up the whole business. I wouldn’t allow anyone to give an opinion at all unless things were done professionally. Of course the people of the house had to do what they could in the meantime, and the patient went from bad to worse, but I wouldn’t give way. The patient died bravely in the course of the argument.

DR. DES-FONANDRÉS. It’s a very good thing to teach people how to behave and make them aware of their ignorance.

DR. TOMÉS. When a man’s dead he’s dead and that’s all it amounts to, but a point of etiquette neglected may seriously prejudice the welfare of the entire medical profession.

American Horror Story’s Asylum: Site of Nightmares

American Horror Story‘s second season always promised to be creepier and more effective than the disappointing first season, which began well, but had devolved into a terrible mess by the time its end rolled around. The second season’s ending had its share of disappointments, but it had many fine moments that came before, the episodic impact of which ensured that despite some incoherence along the way, it managed to deliver a healthy dose of the heebie-jeebies to its viewers.

The key to American Horror Story‘s success in the second season, lies, of course, in its setting: an asylum, which doubles as locale for Mengele-like experimentation on human beings. This ensured that the invocation of standard horror movie tropes, American Horror Story‘s fundamental technique, would work particularly well. In particular the asylum becomes a distinctive site of horror because of the utter helplessness of its inmates: demented human beings, lost to the world and themselves, cast aside into a refuse heap to be prodded, poked and tormented till death mercifully intervenes. The asylum is yet another place where helpless humans can be made the targets of sadistic violence.

The asylum is also home to a classic nightmare: the mentally competent, locked up against their will, and slowly turned into docile vegetables or raving lunatics. The second season invokes this trope without fail: there are straitjackets, the struggles of the innocent, the forced administration of unwanted treatment. And so unsurprisingly, the two most horrifying and disturbing scenes of the second season–for me, at least–were the forced, brutal electroshock treatments administered to Lana Winters and Sister Jude. The horror of these scenes lies not just in the overriding of the patient’s will, or the terrifying convulsions of the victim, but indeed, in our knowledge that this treatment must have been administered to too many, too soon and too often.

Mention of these treatments brings us to the t-word: torture. Too much contemporary horror is rightly described as ‘torture-porn’: painful, systematic, degrading, mutilation being the most favored device to induce terror in viewers. American Horror Story‘s second season flirts with torture too; these moments are terrifying to witness. I had wondered whether the avoidance of torture was possible given the captive nature of asylum inmates’ existence, but the show went even further as its inclusion of a serial killer allowed even greater utilization of torture themes.

Like the first season the second season had its weaknesses: there were too many story lines and too much plot confusion (the invocation of extraterrestrial aliens was particularly pointless and silly). What enabled the second season to transcend them partially in a way the first season was simply unable to do was its atmosphere, which remained unrelentingly grim throughout. (Indeed, the introduction of a jukebox in the later episodes was jarring precisely because it seemed to provide a soundtrack that felt out of place and dispelled a carefully constructed mood.) Lastly, Kyle Cooper’s title sequence was brilliant: it retained the original music and drew upon a new montage of graphic and disturbing images.

Those thirteen episodes went by quickly; I look forward to the third season.

Land, Ownership, Property, and Nationalism

A few days ago, a dinner-time conversation with some friends turned to the matter of property disputes within families. Both my wife and I spoke with some feeling about the fierce passions they evoked, their seeming intractability, and of course, in the context of modern real estate pressures, their ever-increasing ferocity. It reminded me, yet again, of the fascination that ownership, especially that of land, seemingly exerts on the human imagination.

In Thirst for Love (Berkley Publishing, New York, 1969), Yukio Mishima, in introducing Etsuko’s father-in-law Yakichi Sugimoto, writes:

It was as if Yakichi were owning land for the first time. Before this he had been able to own building sites. This farm, in fact, had seemed to him only another such piece of property. But now it had come to be land. The instinct which held that the concept of ownership has no meaning unless the object owned is land came to live again in him. It seemed as if for the first time the achievements of this life were firm and palpable to hand and heart. It now seemed that the disdain in which he as a rising young man held his father and his grandfather was entirely attributable to their failure to possess so much as one acre of land.

What is the ‘instinct’ that Mishima speaks of above? It is a heightening of the sense that ownership and property are best understood in terms of relationships to tangible and concrete objects, that the concreteness of the objects owned makes the tenuous nature of the property relationship–an intangible one created and propped up by law and convention–more substantial, and thus, that among those things that might be considered viable objects of ownership the most concrete of them all, the ground beneath our feet, terra firma itself, is the bedrock, the ideal, the paradigm of the owned object. Other objects come to be and pass away; only the land endures, only it can serve as adequate underwriter for systems of property. All other property relations find themselves assessed in comparison to the ur-land-owning relationship.The ideologue of the property relationship reassures himself with the solidity of land. To really own something you must own land.

The ‘instinct’ that Mishima speaks of might find modern expression in the incredulity that some direct at the notion of ideas, creative and artistic techniques, stories, and the like being ‘owned’ by anyone. Far more problematically, It might have found expression in the historical anti-Semitic distrust directed at the roving Jewish diaspora; those that did not own land lacked the appropriate allegiance and grounding in concrete affiliations to the nations they made their homes in (and thus lacked loyalty towards). This suggests too, that nationalisms that stress permanent, written-in-blood relationships to the soil as the basis for their viability share a great deal with the discourse of property: they both seek to render their own ideological roots, their tendency to vanish into the thin air, invisible by pointing to the substantiality of the thing related to.

Lohocla, The Killer Drug

An  extended discussion on Twitter this morning reminded me of a post I once wrote on the Usenet newsgroup alt.drugs. Back in 1990. It’s pretty weak stuff, but I was just having fun then. Here you go:

US Government officials are gearing up for might be this country’s worst drug epidemic, rivaling the devastation caused by crack in its inner cities. Officials at the Federal Drug Administration announced today that a new drug ‘LOHOCLA’ is gaining widespread popularity across the nation and that emergency measures are currently being evaluated.

Lohocla is a clear liquid with a distinct aroma to it. It is consumed either in its concentrate form or is mixed in with slightly more pleasant tasting beverages so as to diminish the bitterness of its taste. Its immediate effects are to introduce a lessening of inhibitions in the user, slight loss in motor skills and a gradual dizziness often referred to in street terms as being a “buzz”. when consumed in large quantities it brings about varying reactions. Some users report feelings of hostility, others a greater sense of content and some users have reported a tendency to become embarrassingly verbose. Whatever its effect on human behavior, there is no disputing the damage caused to human physiology. Cirrhosis of the liver, increased ALT levels, exacerbation of viral hepatitis are some of the damaging effects reported by the National Institute of Health. When consumed in excess quantities, it has caused vomiting, blindness, nausea, blackouts and death.

Drug Czar William Bennett was quoted as saying today:” Lohocla users need to be shown that their usage of this extremely dangerous drug will not be tolerated in a society like ours. We are currently evaluating measures to punish those users caught in the possession of more than 16 oz of any lohocla derivative, since it is obvious that larger quantities can only be intended for distribution” Officials at the FDA say that they might have underestimated the dangers of Lohocla when its availability first became apparent.

Russ Hill’s case is a graphic reminder of the dangers created by lohocla. A 23 year old computer science major at Cordobia University, Russ started using lohocla more than 6 years ago when still in high school. When senior year pressure coupled with unsympathetic stepfather got to be too much, Russ turned to lohocla as a means of forgetting about his problems. ‘It was great, I used to come home and have about four or five hits of akdov (a derivative of lohocla) mixed with orange juice and forget all about my hassles in life.’ Soon, Russ was consuming upto ten hits a day of reeb, the most popular derivative of lohocla. This coupled with his consumption of akdov in the evenings led to a steadily worsening of his health. On March 23rd, Russ stepped out on the street in front of his house, intoxicated on akdov and stepped right into the path of a car going by. He was taken to the local hospital where doctors amputated his right leg. To this day, Russ cannot remember the events of that evening: ‘It’s like a blackout, nothing comes back to me now.’

As this frightening menace sweeps across American cities, parents, educators and health administration officials have combined in an effort to encourage the government to take harsher measures against lohocla dealers and users. As a lone voice, The National Organization for the Reform of Lohocla Laws (NORLL) has called upon the government to legalize the possession and use of lohocla, saying that its continuing illegality is unlikely to reduce consumption in any manner and could only lead to steady deterioration in the current law and order situation. William Bennett calls their approach ‘ridiculous’ saying that,  ’Its only too clear to me that they have no idea of the dangers associated with the drug. We have cases daily of people dying from this drug and they want to legalize it?’

Woody Allen’s Guide to Civil Disobedience and Revolution

Today is Easter Sunday. Jesus was a Jew and a rebel. So, on this great day in Jewish history, and in honor of Jewish rebellion, here is Woody Allen on civil disobedience and revolutions.

In perpetrating a revolution, there are two requirements: someone or something to revolt against and someone to actually show up and do the revolting. Dress is usually casual and both parties may be flexible about time and place but if either faction fails to attend, the whole enterprise is likely to come off badly. In the Chinese Revolution of 1650 neither party showed up and the deposit on the fall was forfeited.

The people or the parties revolted against are called the ‘oppressors’ and are easily recognized as they seem to be ones having all the fun. The ‘oppressors’ generally get to wear suits, own land, and play their radios late at night without being yelled at. Their job is to maintain the ‘status quo’, a condition where everything remains the same although they may be willing to paint every two years.

When the ‘oppressors’ become too strict, we have what is know as a police state, wherein all dissent is forbidden, as is chuckling, showing up in a bow tie, or referring to the mayor as ‘Fats.’ Civil liberties are greatly curtailed in a police state, and freedom of  speech is unheard of, although one is allowed to mime to a record. Opinions critical of the government are not tolerated, particularly about their dancing. Freedom of the press is also curtailed, and the ruling party ‘manages’ the news, permitting the citizens to hear only acceptable political ideas and ball scores that will not cause unrest.

The groups who revolt are called the ‘oppressed’ and can generally be seen milling about and grumbling or claiming to have headaches. (It should be noted that the oppressors never revolt and attempt to become the oppressed as that would entail a change of underwear.)

Some famous examples of revolutions are:

The French Revolution, in which the peasants seized power by force and quickly changed all the locks on the palace doors so that the nobles could not get back in. Then they had a large party and gorged themselves. When the nobles finally recaptured the palace they were forced to clean up and found many stains and cigarette burns.

The Russian Revolution, which simmered for years and suddenly erupted when the serfs finally realized that the Czar and the Tsar were one and the same person.

It should be noted that after a revolution is over, the ‘oppressed’ frequently take over and being acting like the ‘oppressors.’ Of course by then it is very hard to get them on the phone and money lent for cigarettes and gum during the fighting may as well be forgotten about.

As always, in the best comedy, there is enough truth make our laughter just ever so rueful.

Note: Excerpted from ‘A Brief, Yet Helpful, Guide to Civil Disobedience’ in Without Feathers (Warner Brothers, New York, 1975), pp 111-112.

The Twenties: A Rush to Judgment Would Be Premature

In ‘Semi-Charmed Life: The Twentysomethings Are Allright’, (The New Yorker, January 14 2013) Nathan Heller writes:

Recently, many books have been written about the state of people in their twenties….Few decades of experience command such dazzled interest (the teen-age years are usually written up in a spirit of damage control; the literature of fiftysomethings is a grim conspectus of temperate gatherings and winded adultery), and yet few comprise such varied kinds of life. Twentysomethings spend their days rearing children, living hand to mouth in Asia, and working sixty-hour weeks on Wall Street. They are moved by dreams of adult happiness, but the form of those dreams is as serendipitous as ripples in a dune of sand. Maybe your life gained its focus in college. Maybe a Wisconsin factory is where the route took shape. Or maybe your idea of adulthood got its polish on a feckless trip to Iceland. Where you start out—rich or poor, rustic or urbane—won’t determine where you end up, perhaps, but it will determine how you get there. The twenties are when we turn what Frank O’Hara called “sharp corners.”

A few months after I turned twenty, I left India and moved to the US for graduate school. Three years later, armed with a graduate degree in computer science, I began my first serious nine-to-five job. My place of employment was glamorous; my work was not. I grew bored and despondent; I wanted out. I left for graduate school again, changing majors from computer science to philosophy. I began my doctoral program at the age of twenty-six, and when my thirtieth birthday rolled around, I was in that curious no-man’s land that is situated between the written qualifiers and the oral examination. Thus ended my twenties.

So, one transcontinental move, one graduate degree, one full-time job, sixty credits of doctoral coursework. That’s one way of jotting up the twenties’ achievements. Or I could list travel: a few trips back to India, some brief visits to Europe. Perhaps girlfriends? That’d be too crass. Perhaps I could list some losses, but those would be too painful to recount here. Or I could talk about lessons learned, but to be painfully honest, I would have to talk about lessons that I started to learn in the twenties; I don’t think I’m done learning them. There was a journey in there somewhere, of course. I started my twenties in a place called ‘home’, left it, and ended them in a city I had started to call home; I started them with imagined focus, and ended them with no illusions of any.

It’s hard to know how to assess a decade, how to rank it among the decades that make up one’s life. Were the twenties more important, more formative, than the thirties or the still-ticking forties? Dunno. I don’t quite know how I could make that determination now. Susan Sontag once said the best way to write an autobiography was when life was complete, from beyond the grave. I doubt I’ll be able to pull that off, but at the very least, I’m going to resist the temptation to make any hasty judgments about the formativeness of a particular time-span  Especially as I’m not done becoming just quite yet.