Samir Chopra's Blog, page 128

The Deadliness of Humorlessness

In the climactic scenes of Umberto Eco‘s , Adso of Melk and William of Baskerville confront the old, blind, and malignant librarian Jorge, sworn, no matter the price to be paid in lives, to keeping  Aristotle‘s Poetics a perennial secret because of its subversive doctrines that not only analyze and permit laughter, but speak of it approvingly. Jorge senses the dangers that lurk were such a revelation come to pass, for laughter would bring in its wake gaiety that would disdain solemnity, the fear of the unknown, and the punctiliousness of church doctrine. In sum, it would bring about, and elevate to the status of desirable and necessary, a subversive, corrosive, irreverence:

But if one day–and no longer as plebeian exception, but as ascesis of the learned, devoted to the indestructible testimony of Scripture–the art of mockery were to be made acceptable, and to seem noble and liberal and no longer mechanical; if one day someone could say (and be heard), ‘I laugh at the Incarnation, ‘ then we would have no weapon to combat that blasphemy, because it would summon the dark powers of corporeal matter, those that are affirmed in the fart and the belch, and the fart and the belch would claim the right that is only of the spirit, to breath where they list! [Warner Books, New York, 1980, pp. 580]

In his humorless, grim apprehension of the power of the message of the Poetics, Jorge is not alone, and such fulminations are not unknown to contemporary readers.  Eco’s purpose in bringing this character to life, in populating him with such bombast and self-importance, seems to be that of  reminding readers of the Jorge-archetypes that even today, dog our every step in every walk of life, but do so most perniciously in the public, political sphere.

Most prominently, Jorge’s refusal to get the joke, to throw his head back and allow himself a chuckle or two, reminds us of the idiotic knee-jerk reactions of the pompously pious who are easily offended, hurt or otherwise insulted by satire, ridicule, parody, or indeed, the merest descent into something less than the unquestioningly reverential.  Sometimes they are priests, sometimes the lay devotee, sometimes they are politicians, sometimes they are their acolytes, sometimes they are academics. No matter their exact identity, there is always some doctrine out there, defended to the end by a band of the faithful, diverse in all manners, but yet united by a deep and fundamental, almost existential, insecurity, a frightening suspicion that the object of their firm and committed belief might not be all its cracked up to be, for whom even the miseries of hell pale into comparison with the uncertainties that might be induced by any attitude toward their devotional object that does not rise to the level of worship.

The protestations of these Jorges would be merely amusing irritants if they did not, like the suicidal, sightless character in Eco’s novel, also insist on adding other, more deadly, arrows to the quivers of their reprisals. It is then that the humorless reveal themselves to be the most dangerous of all.

Hail to the Mighty Nurse

When I was a mere nine years old, I underwent a tonsillectomy, a minor operation that surprisingly enough, in those days, required general anesthesia. My mother spent as much time as she could with me in the hospital, but my constant companions otherwise were the military hospital’s nurses. I might not have been a teenager, but I was still, mysteriously enough, old enough to develop crushes on many of the nurses who did the rounds and attended to my many needs. They wore impossibly starchy uniforms, as befitting those serving in the armed forces; they were prim and proper; they were firm, kind and efficient. I wasn’t sorry to say goodbye to the hospital ward but I did feel more than just the passing pang on waving goodbye to my merry band of temperature-taking, brow-stroking, bedsheet-smoothing caretakers.

Some thirty-five years on, nurses don’t cease to impress. My daughter’s entry into this world was most proximally brought about by the deft handiwork of an obstetric surgeon, but it was considerably and significantly facilitated by a hardworking and attentive group of nurses. From initial admission to prep work to recovery, a nurse was always there, providing expert, experienced care, offering words of advice, caution, and sometimes gentle reprimand too.

My wife and I spent two nights in a maternity ward after the birth of our daughter, and from the time we entered its rooms to the time we left, we were in the care of its nursing staff. I described my anticipation of my firstborn as a mixture of excitement and terror, and the most active factor in the mitigation of that terror was the maternity ward nurse. I always expected fatherhood to involve a great deal of on the job training; I didn’t realize that my first and most visibly accomplished teachers would be a group of nurses.

They knew how to handle newborns with just the right mix of firmness and gentleness; they were champion swaddlers and they knew how to teach its moves to an utter novice like me (I still haven’t mastered the really, really snug wrap, but I’m getting there, keeping their finished product as an aspirational goal); they knew how to change diapers with ease and minimal fuss (and they expertly shepherded me through my first diaper change disaster too); they were, in all the important ways, my hand-holders through my first trepidatious steps through the valley of fathering.

After we left the hospital to return home (but possibly even before) I wondered about how many families the experienced nurses had seen entering their wards with their newborns in tow, how many lives they had kicked off, how many anxious parents’ queries they had answered, how many anxieties they had smoothed over, how many bumblers they had turned into quasi-competents, able to approach the task of rearing a child with just a little confidence.

The world of medicine has often not taken adequate care of these indispensable components of the medical system; doctors have often not acknowledged how their work would be impossible without their assistance; and more than one reformer of the medical system has sought to underwrite their vision via a diminution of their role. They are often invisible, unacknowledged, and unappreciated. Be nice to one the next time you see one or need one.

Note: Support nurses unionizing!

Better Living Through Chemistry: The Decaffeinated Life

Five weeks or so ago, I quit caffeine. Cold turkey. Strictly speaking, that isn’t true: I have consumed a fair amount of decaffeinated coffee since then; there are trace amounts of caffeine in that beverage; I have also eaten many bars of chocolate, dark and otherwise. But never mind. I think my efforts count as ‘quitting caffeine.’ Five weeks on, I do not feel that terrible pre-caffeinated feeling in the morning anymore, one that could only be relieved by strong coffee or tea. My sleep is better; I think I sleep deeper; and I feel more rested.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Why did I quit caffeine? Bizarrely enough, it was because I anticipated sleeplessness, the kind that would be created by the arrival of my first-born child. Dreading a state of existence in which sleepy, catatonic, incoherent, and delirious, I stumbled from one interrupted sleep session to the next, all the while fueling myself with stronger and stronger coffee, I resolved to steer clear of the dark brew altogether. I wouldn’t drink coffee and I wouldn’t drink tea. My wife had successfully mastered the non-or-de-caffeinated state quite well during pregnancy, making a seamless transition to herbal tea in the mornings and the occasional decaffeinated coffee thereafter. Her success at what seemed like a very difficult abstinence was inspiring. Still, there didn’t seem any particular reason to do so myself.

But coffee can be a dark master. I had noticed I was seeking refuge in coffee too many times during the day. Sometimes to ease distraction, sometimes to relieve anxiety, sometimes to get over the mid-afternoon blahs. And always, always, at meetings. It still did its bit in the morning, ushering me from the land of somnambulism to that of the wide-awake, inducing in a dullard a sliver of euphoria so intense that it made waking up worthwhile, but it was increasingly being called on to do perform all sorts of duties through the day.  The net effect of that constant fueling was, strangely enough, a more drowsy mode of existence, but frustratingly, only during the day, and not at night, when I really needed to fall asleep. The constant caffeination wasn’t working. Facing this inescapable fact, and the looming birth of my firstborn, my choice seemed clear.

So I did it, replacing my morning cuppa with a mug of rooibos chai (a South African herbal tea) with milk. On the first two days, I suffered the dreaded caffeine withdrawal headaches. Petrified by their intensity, I sought relief in decaffeinated coffee for the next three days. The trace amounts of caffeine there helped me get through the first week of abstinence. Thereafter, the headaches disappeared. Now, I still drink rooibos in the mornings (and the occasional decaf latte as a treat). I do not crave coffee or tea in the mornings, even as I cannot imagine a morning without some kind of hot beverage. And pleasingly, though my sleep patterns have been disturbed quite extensively by my baby girl, I find it easy enough to fall back to sleep after each nocturnal disturbance.

The body. it’s a wonderful thing; chemistry lets you play with it.

‘Write As If Your Parents Were Dead’

Phillip Roth is said to have tendered the following advice–on the art of writing–to Ian McEwan : ‘Write as if your parents were dead.’ By this, I take it that Roth meant for McEwan to write with a distinctive  fearlessness, one not courting parental approval, not apprehensive of parental disapproval of writerly indulgence, of liberties taken with characters appropriated from one’s lived life, of events drawn on and embellished, narcissistically, sometimes painfully. The writer then, who writes as if his ‘parents were dead’ is unencumbered by the parental superego, whether maternal or paternal, and is free to let loose his darkest self in the words he puts down on paper. Here, the live parent is a stalker, a deadweight on creativity. In writing as if ‘the parents were dead’ the writer writes without a net. He is no longer worried about whether the characters he creates may be viewed as wishful incarnations of himself, whether their words and deeds may be imputed back to him. The parents disappear six feet under, the writer rises above the ground, suddenly, miraculously, weightless. Three fingers still hold the pen, the body still aches, but it does so free of the backward glance, over the shoulder, at the looming intervention.

That’s certainly one way to think about writing as if ‘your parents were dead.’ There is another way to interpret that piece of advice.

In his feature article on George Saunders in this week’s New York Times Magazine (‘George Saunders Wrote the Best Book You’ll Read This Year‘, January 3rd 2013) , Joel Lovell writes,

A friend I loved very much died recently, and I was trying to describe the state I sometimes still found myself in — not quite of this world, but each day a little less removed — and how I knew it was a good thing, the re-entry, but I regretted it too, because it meant the dimming of a kind of awareness that doesn’t get lit up very much.

 In response to which Lovell notes,

“It would be so interesting if we could stay like that,” Saunders said, meaning: if we could conduct our lives with the kind of openness that sometimes comes with proximity to death.

So, ‘write as if your parents were dead’ can now be understood as: Write as if you are not quite of this world, write as if you are possessed  and lit up by a rare kind of awareness and openness that may be yours with proximity to death. Write as if the special vision given to those who find their deepest, most fundamental link to this world sundered is yours for the keeping. Make that into your muse. Write as if we, your readers, were to find in your writings dispatches from another world, one where by being confronted by death, we grow closer to life. Write as if you have suffered the deepest loss of all, so that you may in your struggles to give it written form, find many other things worth bringing forth. Write as if your parents were dead.

David Shulman on Asia’s Autonomous Discovery of Modernity

In his review (‘The Revenge of the East, New York Review of Books, October 11, 2012) of Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012),  David Shulman provides an interesting disputation of Mishra’s claim that Asia’s–as yet incomplete and flawed–encounter with modernity began via and through a series of interactions with the West and its intellectual and technical products. Taking as his starting point, Mishra’s claim in his epilogue, of an “an ambiguous revenge,” one suggested by the “the rise of Asia, and the assertiveness of Asian peoples, [which] consummates their revolt against the West that began more than a century ago; it is in many ways the revenge of the East.” This success is “ambiguous” because it,

[C]onceals an immense intellectual failure…. No convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy, even though those seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of the world.

Shulman rightly asks,

But why should we aspire to a universalist response? Something is wrong in the way the problem is formulated. Perhaps something interesting can be retrieved from intellectual failure after all.

One might begin by setting back the date of Asian modernizing in general and by distinguishing various meanings of the word “modern.” As Velcheru Narayana Rao has eloquently shown for southern India, a form of awareness that can be characterized as modern emerged naturally and organically in the Telugu- and Tamil-speaking parts of the subcontinent toward the end of the fifteenth century. It had nothing whatever to do with Western influence or the arrival of Vasco da Gama in Calicut in 1498. Highly original thinkers and poets, writing in all the languages of the south, discovered, or invented, a series of interlocking notions that together comprise a novel anthropology.

Thus we find, with particular prominence, the concept of an autonomous, subjective individual, responsible for his or her fate; a new theory of romantic love; the development of literary fiction as a privileged literary technique; a vogue for skepticism and realism, seen as informing the pragmatics of everyday life; the emergence of a cash economy and the conceptual revolution that rapid monetarization entails; the appearance of a bold, full-throated, unfettered female voice; and a new concept of nature as a rule-bound domain, separate from the human and amenable to disciplined observation and extrapolation. An innovative economic model of the mind, centered on the imaginative faculty, came to define the meaning of being human.

Shulman’s counterpoint is interesting for several reasons. First, it provides a refreshingly different historical perspective on our standard narratives of the Modern West modernizing the Not So Modern East. Second, on a personal note, it did so by introducing me, an Indian ignorant of the work of Rao and of South Asian studies in general, to Indian scholarship that by focusing its investigative lens on South India, took me outside conventional North Indian understandings of India. Third, it rightly disdains the need for a ‘universalist response’ – why not highly particularized ones? Lastly, and most importantly, in the last paragraph quoted above, Shulman provides a set of distinctive attributes of ‘modern.’  Some of these are familiar, yet others provide us a richly textured and articulated conception of a term often-used, but very rarely fully understood.

Note: It has become all too common for me to write little promissory notes on this blog where I indicate my intention to return to explore a theme touched on only briefly in a post. I will have to do so again today: at some point in the future, I will attempt to explore Shulman’s conception of  ’modern.’

2012′s Top Five Posts (Here, Not Elsewhere)

2012, the year that was (or still is, for a few more hours), turned out to be a busy one for blogging at this site. I wrote three hundred and twenty-four new posts, bringing the total for this blog to three hundred and fifty-five. The blog finally crossed fifty thousand views. (A humbling figure, if you think that major blogs receive those many hits in a day.)

The five most popular posts in terms of views were the following. (I don’t think these are necessarily the best pieces I wrote, which is a judgment I find hard to make in any case, but they definitely attracted some attention.)

David Brooks Went to a Springsteen Concert, And All I Got Was A Stupid Op-Ed: I wrote this post in response to a typical display of asinine, pseudo-profound commentary by a columnist who is an integral component of the embarrassment that is the New York Times Op-Ed page.  It was a bit silly, and I suppose could be described as satire, but really, it was a pretty straightforward reaction to idiocy. Among others, Brian Leiter linked to it, as did Bradford DeLong, and Corey Robin, and that brought in many viewers. Many thanks to you all. (In particular, Leiter and Robin have brought many readers to this site, so I owe them multiple thanks.)


Bill Keller Needs to Drop the Snark and Do Serious Journalism: This was an angry reaction to a New York Times Op-Ed that I found profoundly politically offensive. I have grown increasingly depressed by the state of political journalism in the US and Bill Keller’s writing on WikiLeaks at the nation’s premier newspaper summed it up for me. As a public display of confusion about the responsibility of the journalist, and the relationship they should maintain with those in power, Keller’s piece has few parallels. Glenn Greenwald and Corey Robin linked to this post.


On The Lack of Women in Philosophy: The Dickhead Theory: This post grew out of a long-held concern of mine that the academic practice of philosophy often betrays what should be its guiding principles, among which should be the creation and maintenance of an atmosphere conducive to open and unfettered inquiry. I find the lack of women in philosophy appalling, and remain convinced that the way male philosophers run the profession has a great deal to do with it. This post was prompted by articles by Jennifer Saul and Helen Beebee.


Stenographers, Megaphones, or Journalists?: Here I return to a recurring obsession of mine: why don’t journalists question those in power more? Why are they so keen to become part of the establishment? Brian Leiter linked to this post, as did Corey Robin, and indeed, one of the New York Times journalists cited in the post showed up to contest my claims. (For that exchange, see Responding to Caitlin Kelly on Journalistic Standards, Writerly Solidarity, and Bloggers’ Responsibilities.)


Occupy Wall Street And The Police: Why So Estranged?: In this post, I wondered why the police, who should be on the side of those protesting the 1%, are instead, so committed to doing the bidding of those that would keep them in a state of economic and political deprivation. Again, Brian Leiter cited this post.

I wrote three hundred and nineteen other posts of course (check ‘em out!). Most of them sank into obscurity, but that’s quite all right. I’m still amazed that anyone bothers to read anything posted out here.

So there you have it folks. Another year awaits, and while I’m not quite sure that I will blog at the same rate as I did in 2012–primarily because I two new book projects planned (besides a newborn!)–I will continue to write as often as I can. Do stick around.

Note: I also owe thanks to all those folks on Facebook and Twitter who linked to, and shared my posts. Much appreciated.

No Country (or World) for Women, Old or Otherwise

While my wife was pregnant with our now-seven-day-old daughter, I was often asked, ‘Do know if it’s a boy or a girl?’ On hearing my confession of ignorance and confirmation of wanting to keep things that way i.e., declining a glance at the prenatal sonogram’s report, I was then asked, “Do you want a boy or a girl?’ On more than one occasion, after indicating my indifference to that choice and my desire for a healthy child, I gave voice to what always seemed to be an appalling sentiment, ‘I suppose a boy would be better because this is a bad world for women.’

I write these words a day after receiving news that the now-famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons victim of a brutal gang-rape in India’s capital, New Delhi, had finally succumbed to her injuries in a Singapore hospital, two weeks after that horrific night. While protests still take place in India, and intemperate, misguided, calls for the death penalty continue to be made, and reams of perspicuous commentary indicting sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, Indian police, India’s judicial system, insensitive, tone-deaf  Indian politicians, have been written, I’d merely like to offer a few words written by the concerned parent of a tiny baby girl who has no idea she has been born into a world scarred by such ghastly acts of unspeakable violence.

What makes these acts truly frightening is that they are so commonplace. Rape is a mundane occurrence in most parts of the world; violence, in other forms, directed against women, is a ritual all over the world. With probability one, someone you know has been raped. They might not have told you, but the numbers indicate that fact, hidden though it might be. And what underwrites this relentless epidemic of subjugation is the seemingly congenital misogyny of men, one aided and abetted by the cultures that surround them, and one that  men facilitate at great peril to themselves. (On which more anon.) Bring a boy up to be a boy and there is a good chance you are bringing him up to be someone that will be disrespectful to women.  If the women he comes into contact with are lucky, he will merely deny them an equal share in this world’s spoils; if they are unlucky, they will suffer a far worse fate.

Perhaps the scariest part of the rape epidemic, and the greatest misunderstanding that might be perpetuated in the aftermath of the Delhi brutality is to imagine that that act was a singularity, one committed by outliers. Not at all. It took place in a culture, local and global, of sexual harassment, ogling, innuendo, of men who, when talking about sex, cannot drop the language of conquest and domination, of conflating sex and violence (‘Dude, I fucked the shit out of her’ or ‘I was banging her all night’), who imagine sex to be a variant of rough-and-tumble sport (‘scoring touchdowns’), who associate weakness with womanhood (‘Don’t be a pussy’ ‘Man up’ ‘Put your pants on’).

If you are a man, and you find yourself in the company of men who use language like that sampled above, consider speaking up. Otherwise, you are part of the problem.

Newsflash: Fatherhood Impedes Blogging

I became a father–for the first time–on Sunday, which has made blogging a little difficult. I hope to resume ‘normal service’ (well, an attenuated version thereof) sometime soon. Two nights in a maternity ward, four sleepless nights in total, a beautiful baby, an exhausted mother; it all adds up, if you catch my drift. On the bright side: a beautiful baby, ecstatic parents, the miracle of a new life and new person; it makes you want to write even more. A host of topics present themselves: the medical profession, midwives, the peculiar delirium of sleeplessness, hospital food, Brooklyn babies, the trials and travails of medical residencies, the nerve-wracking process of choosing a name (in our case, without knowing the baby’s sex), birth announcements on Facebook, it goes on. All in good time. For now, I must tear myself away reluctantly (not!) from the keyboard to see if I can find a horizontal surface on which to sleep. Laundry, dishes, cooking, and of course, diaper changes await. Oh, and yes, a beautiful baby. (I seem to dimly remember saying that before.)

Cheers all, see you soon.

Once More Into the Fray: Stepping Back From Suicide

In one of the opening scenes of Joe Carnahan‘s The Grey Ottway (Liam Neeson) considers committing suicide, sticks a  gun barrel in his mouth, and then decides against it. Later, in the movie’s final scene, after a harrowing journey through the Alaskan wilderness necessitated by an aircraft crash that has seen his band of fellow survivors slowly whittled away, and as an alpha male wolf closes in for the kill, Ottway repeats (for one last time?) his father’s poem: ‘Once more into the fray/Into the last good fight I’ll ever know/Live and die on this day/Live and die on this day‘ straps on broken bottles and a knife and prepares to fight. Fade to black.

That beginning and ending capture the movie’s narrative arc: a man driven to despair, to the point of killing himself, first stays his hand to continue among the living, and later, when presented with plentiful opportunities to just relax his guard and enjoy the most pleasant death possible in the circumstances i.e., a slow freeze to death (as one character does), Ottway declines again and again. Those that might have had stronger reasons to live did not survive; they found, in the wilderness, their will not strong enough to resist its relentless attack on their selves. It is not ever made clear why Ottway declines to kill himself the first time: Was it because he remembered his dying wife’s plea to not be ‘afraid’ and recognized his attempt at suicide as the act of a man who is very ‘afraid’? Or was the invocation of his father’s poem a post-facto rationalization of his fear of death? Ottway might have feared living, but perhaps he feared the void even more. Better the known misery than the unknown.

Those who step back from suicide rationalize their decisions in many ways: sometimes it’s because the utter irrevocability of that decision is frightening and paralytic, sometimes it’s because they let their minds turn to those they would leave behind and grieve for them, sometimes it’s because they realize that their cry for help has gone unheard, and disgusted and disappointed and weary, they turn once more to confront an indifferent world, looking for another gesture that will shake it from its torpor.

Those who explain their decision to stay their hand because of the pain of others have, of course, some explaining to do. Why should that matter once the deed is done? If the thought of the grieving is torment, then surely one way to bring that torment–and the others like it that have brought the despondent to this pass–to a close is to proceed with the self-annihilation? Once the darkness closes in, all will be forgotten, nothing will matter. But the hand still hesitates. Perhaps then, the second putative rationalization collapses into a variant of the first and third, and perhaps even more reductively, into the third.

A greater mystery persists. What prompts those who proceed to get past these barriers? What was it that made them transcend their fear of pain, of an irrevocable act,  and despair their cry for help would ever be heard?

Ode to a Beloved Clunker

MPA 4634 and DIA 8499. Those strings of alphanumeric characters, as might be surmised, are licence plate identifiers. More precisely, they were the licence plates for the same car, a Fiat 1100D that was our family car for over twenty years. Over those years, I graduated from the back of the car to the front, to riding in the back with my brother (a sometimes quarrelsome existence), to driving in the front. (Sadly, I never was able to use the car on a real date.) In it, we–my parents and my brother and I–drove distances as short as those to the local vegetable market, and as long as to the Kashmir Valley. It broke down many times: most terrifyingly, on a deserted stretch of the Grand Trunk Road, a mishap which sent my father hitchhiking looking for help, and brought two Good Samaritans to our rescue. But it also surprised me by making its way through long, winding, twisted roads in the Himalayas, with steep falls down to deep river gorges on one side. It had no air-conditioning, no power windows or steering, but it still managed to seem luxurious. When I missed its attainment of the 100,000 kilometer mark, I was heartbroken, and all attempts at consolation–’it just became zeroes all over again’–failed.

My father, of course, was its most skilled driver. He drove with aplomb, nowhere better exemplified than in his mysterious ability to open a pack of cigarettes and light up with a match even as he continued down the highway or around a bend. But he was never reckless; indeed, when I felt compelled to ask him to drive faster, his answer was a laconic ‘This is fast enough.’ Perhaps it was all the ‘ol Fiat could handle.

I was told, as I grew up, that the car had been purchased ‘for me on my birthday.’ That was an exaggeration, of course.  More likely, something significant in its history with my family had occurred close to my birthday, and my parents elevated that event to make me feel the car was somehow mine. It worked: I regarded it as a sibling of sorts, and couldn’t wait till the day would come when I would drive it myself. One night, during my early teen-aged years, as my mother drove us home from a family gathering, I asked her when I could start driving. She stopped the car, got out, came around to the passenger’s seat and told me to move over to the driver’s side. I received a quick two-minute lesson on changing gears and releasing clutches, and then, I was off. I did crash the car once in my learning career, but that was the only time I subjected it to such indignity. Thereafter, I grew to master Delhi’s traffic, and most awe-inspiringly of all, drive a non-airconditioned car in its 115-degree summer heat.

In 1987, when I left India for the US, my mother drove me to the airport in DIA 8499. When I returned to India in 1989, it was gone, traded in for a new car. The bills had piled up; maintenance had no longer been feasible; a new car was necessary. I didn’t grieve, but I did wish I had been around when the time came to bid it farewell.

I’ve owned a Toyota Corolla, a VW Jetta, and a Toyota pickup truck since then, and have now been car-free for almost twenty years. In those years, I’ve grown to disdain automobiles, and to hope that I never have to own a car. Still, that dislike won’t diminish my affection for that family jalopy, now transformed, perhaps via the junk-yard and scrap heap into some Chinese-manufactured items, pressed into service as household appliances or tools of convenience.

I never had a nickname for the car, so all I can say is: RIP MPA 4634 AKA DIA 8499.