Blissful Life

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Notice: after planning it for years, I moved this blog out of blogger/blogspot (which google has abandoned long ago) to wordpress on a fine evening in Dec 2024. This notice will stay here to warn that things might be broken. Let me know if you find anything.

  • All the world’s a stage

    I have this weird issue. I tend to be non-conformist. I notice the performance of societal roles. I am more painfully conscious when I have to perform societal roles myself.

    The first time it became a real problem was when I started practicing medicine. You just can’t be yourself in the consultation room. Doctors have to be chameleons. They have to adapt themselves to the patient and “perform” a dance that contributes to healing. And I couldn’t get myself to do that.

    I had this peculiar philosophy. I didn’t want to answer things with confidence when the science itself was uncertain. I didn’t want to act like I’m caring when I didn’t really care. I didn’t like wearing the white coat. I didn’t like playing the doctor role. It felt like a lie.

    Why is this performance necessary? Because human beings are irrational. We don’t use logic to operate. We use social cues and emotions and biases to operate.

    A doctor has to appear smart, because otherwise the patient will assume the doctor is incompetent. And so on.

    I changed myself. I rationalized the performance in ways that made sense to me. The consultation room is a special place where you have to prioritize healing and no other philosophy matters. So, some “lying” was okay.

    It didn’t stop there, though. Leadership needed performance too. You’ve to be chatty when you’re really tired, you’ve to lead with vision when you’re lost, and you’ve to inspire even the people you are angry at.

    And I rationalized that too.

    The world really needs leaders so that we can change it for the good. And we can’t let philosophy come in between.

    What’s this philosophy, you might ask. It is a form of anarchist thought. Anarchists want every human being to operate through their own agency, as capable and rational beings. The performance of leaders and doctors could be seen as “manipulation” by anarchists. At least that’s what I used to think about these.

    That this philosophy is utterly impractical, is the strongest argument I have discovered against anarchism.

    Human beings are human beings. They’re not perfectly capable beings. They like being led. They rely on a shoulder to cry on.

    Yet, the anarchist dream is too deep in my mind that I’m not been able to get rid of it.

    I work closely with a person who does plenty of successful activism. He was telling me how when he goes to meet decision makers he carries a box of chocolates or some gift like that. To me this was unacceptable bribery. These were dark tactics to get what we want. But his logic was undeniable — the world needs to change and that was more important than any purist philosophy.

    That is the difference between an anarchist and a socialist or a pragmatist. An anarchist cares deeply about the means to the end. The socialist cares only about the end and wouldn’t mind a bloody revolution. The pragmatist would be okay with some shortcuts.

    Let me make it more clear. I want the world to be more rational, egalitarian, honest, and so on, and I don’t like using the tools of today’s oppressors to reach there. And psychological manipulation (power games, etc included) are part of those tools.

    Inside my mind it is the same that I apply to consultation room and management positions. I want people to get better without me having to employ the wrong tools.

    The places where this creates problems are infinite.

    I can’t stand my extended family members and their routine patriarchal performances.

    I can’t stand companies/organizations and their bullshit capitalistic policies.

    I can’t stand academicians. Not a bit. Their jargon and their credentials and their ways of claiming exclusive rights to discuss what they’re discussing. Their hypocrisy and their exclusive focus on their careers and publications. But more irritatingly, the reverence with which others look at academicians. The way people go “Oh, wow! This person is from IIT! (/Harvard/Oxford/blah blah blah)”

    In my first visit to JNU, I was fuming about the opulent waste of resources that it was and Swathi had to put a lot of effort into shutting me up.

    When people say “OMG! This was published in Nature (or Lancet or whatever)” my blood boils.

    There could be other emotions contributing to this too. Envy, superiority complex, know-it-all complex, all of that.

    But if you believe me, the biggest problem for me is the societal roles and the unquestioning conformity by everyone to those.

    I realized this today when I was attending a public health writing workshop by Nivarana. I was listening to people talk about how to write a story, how to write in simple language, how to pitch, etc. And I was struggling with the “performance” that journalism was.

    There is a particular societal role for a journalist. They’re supposed to be arbiters of truth. They are supposed to write in a particular tone, one that conveys a sense of reporting of the truth. The reader, on the other side, is expected to play the role of taking in the truth without question.

    In light of the shit-show that Indian journalism today is, I’m particularly disillusioned by the performance of the journalist role.

    There is a rigid script that journalists follow. You start out with an uninformed audience, you introduce certain hooks, you establish authority through some expert testimonial, and you conclude the narrative in a particular direction you want the reader to go in.

    My philosophical discord is with how everyone buys this shit. Truth isn’t packaged as neatly as journalism makes it out to be. And behind every piece of journalism there is a human playing the role.

    Like judges in courts. They’re performing too. Acting like some wise ass.

    Yet human beings are like “this is how it has to be!”

    No. This is just a particular social order created in a particular space and time.

    Why am I writing all this?

    Because I am tired with my philosophy. I want to go beyond and be like regular humans. Earn some brownie points in the human world. And even though I am deciding to do that I think my philosophy and my pain is valid. What I write may not be meaningful to everyone or be added to the anarchist library. But I hope that there will be at least a few people who resonate with this particular sub-niche of agony.

    How will I rationalize journalism then?

    One way is to think of it as mass education. Like teaching, but at a larger scale. As an intermediate strategy till people are able to educate themselves.

    Another is to imagine it as fiction. I mean, I don’t have a problem with fiction because it comes with a label that it is a performance art. Perhaps journalism can be seen as a performance art. The sentences and the style can give joy to the readers. Make it about creating art.

    A third way is to think of it as reclaiming spaces. But of course this makes sense only if we put under-represented ideas and thoughts into those spaces. We can’t play by their rules and call it reclaiming. It maybe possible to cleverly subvert the rules and reclaim the spaces.

    tl;dr is that I’m struggling to practice anarchist philosophy and forced to rationalize the performances of societal roles to be able to thrive.

  • Nirbhau Nirvair Niramaya

    Nirbhau Nirvair Niramaya

    Ajay (AN) introduced to me the above words at Kozhikode during the mid-annual mfc meet last year. It means without fear, without hate, with love. The last one was added to the Sikh saying by AN themself.

    When I met AN at the meet, I was brimming with negative energy (likely hatred) at the institutions AN represented and their politics. I projected all of those at AN too.

    But we had long chats. And we ended up hugging. And it was the most useful for me.

    I don’t like hating people. But I hate it when people are perpetuating and reinforcing systems of injustice. And countless experiences have taught me to be sceptical of privileged caste men who are progressing in their career without explicitly addressing these injustices.

    In the larger society, there’s internalized misogyny. Where there’s an inherent hatred towards women. In the smaller society of social justice work, there is an internalized hatred towards savarna men. I have that internalized hatred. (Also towards doctors, academicians, and so on, but that’s a different post).

    Except I don’t like hating people. I’ve been trying to adopt a love ethic. And this was a contradiction.

    It is probably a contradiction that cannot be avoided. The world sees a lot of suffering. And the suffering doesn’t happen on its own. There are people propelling systems of oppression. And those people deserve intolerance. (Paradox of intolerance).

    So to completely eliminate hate, we would need complete elimination of suffering.

    Yet, my hate was sometimes being directed at the wrong people. People who were trying their best.

    For example, AN above has a life story very similar to mine. Hating the violence of medical colleges, going to work with very marginalized communities, using technology in transformative ways in some places, and being stuck in larger economics of technology and health. The hatred was unjustified. And I turned to love.

    After that, it was Parth’s (PS) turn. There was this day on Twitter when Cyriac Abby Philips had retweeted a casteist video and blocked everyone who called it out. I had indirectly called PS an asshole for asking me to be patient with CPA that day. (2023-12-18).

    Then a few months later I apologized for calling PS an asshole. (2024-02-12)

    Hello Parth.
    I saw that you changed your name on Twitter. I assume that it is related to your introspection and growth on the topic of caste. I congratulate you for the same.
    And on the same note I apologize for being unnecessarily mean to you on Twitter in regards to the Abby Philips situation. There are indeed many of my own biases which led to me calling you an asshole. I should have shown better behavior. I also saw that nivarana is having technical issues. I have been working on wordpress for several organizations like tribalhealth.org and saakarnataka.org
    If you need technical assistance, let me know.

    Unfortunately, PS had blocked me on WhatsApp and didn’t receive that message. In the same mfc meeting at Kozhikode, I suggested that a bulletin made by younger folks at mfc should have just been released as articles on nivarana.org even though I disagree with certain politics of Parth. Sebin (SG) was in the audience and asked me later as to why I disagree with PS. I told the above story and SG told me how PS’ idea is not to become a Global Health expert, but to settle in Assam taking care of palliative care needs.

    So I sent that note on email. (2024-08-12)

    PS replied immediately appreciating it and looking forward to working together.

    Later that month, nivarana website broke down again. And this time Parth reached out to me to redeem my offer to help. I helped to get it back online. Then PS asked me to join the team.

    We had a long phone call where I grilled PS about every narrative I had built in my mind. About caste, about plagiarising, about appropriation, and so on. Turns out I was wrong with my narrative on all those. I was wrong on enough counts that even if I had found something to hold PS responsible for, it wouldn’t have mattered.

    I joined the nivarana team that day (2024-08-28).

    It is unlikely that my emotion in all these was purely hatred. There could possibly be elements of envy too. Swathi shared a therapy insight with me once about how we envy people who are doing things we wanted to do.

    There might also be frustration that society isn’t changing fast enough. I’m pretty sure I was also of the belief that “calling out” was an important aspect of social change.

    That last point has been crucial. How do you reconcile calling out with love? To call someone out you’ve to be convinced they’re wrong. You’ve to refuse to “understand” where they’re coming from. You’ve to invalidate their experiences and shout above their voice. That’s how calling out works. It’s incompatible with love.

    In parallel I had also been developing another way of demanding change. It involves framing every wrong as an education problem. To use the language of a loving teacher. (As I’m writing this I remember reading about “calling in” as opposed to “calling out”)

    But that mindset also can’t be applied for everyone. When people who are in positions of power and have many years of life and experience over me are being problematic, it is difficult to reframe the problem as an education one. I can’t be “mothering” these weirdos.

    I’ve found two more mindsets that can help in this situation.

    Don’t feed the troll mindset

    This one is where you consider those people as trolls, and then apply the sane advice of not feeding trolls. By engaging (even through calling out), you’re amplifying their ideas, giving them too much importance, and in general giving them fodder to continue.

    Just stop engaging. Ignore. Mute. Silence.

    If pen is mightier than sword, silence is mightier than pen.

    I’m too busy for this shit mindset

    In cancel culture debate, there’s this weird “nuance” argument made by some people (like Arundhati Roy) that it is okay to engage with the art of problematic artists. But my take has always been this:

    There are literally hundreds of other pieces of art.

    You don’t need to engage with problematic artists. Because there are so many more artists on the planet! And they all need your attention too. Why waste it on a problematic person?

    I heard something similar from Bhumika Saraswati when I asked her about how she deals with the contradiction, she said “I don’t have the time for it.”

    By doing so much more in the time that it takes us to hate others, we will be able to avoid hatred.

  • ‘The Good Place’ is Good

    ‘The Good Place’ is Good

    Swathi and I started watching ‘The Good Place’ after we finished watching ‘A Man on the Inside’ (thanks to Pooja’s recommendation in the South Central podcast) and craving for more Ted Danson.

    There are 4 seasons and we finished it within a month!

    It was a whirlwind ride on philosophy. Although not as exciting as Matrix, The Good Place’s take on afterlife is much more relevant to our every day life.

    I have to include some spoilers ahead to speak about my favorite parts.

    While there are interesting episodes discussing philosophical concepts like trolley problem and free will, the parts I really loved are the satire on people.

    There is the good place committee. When the situation arises where they have to stand up and do something, they go into writing “strongly worded” letters and forming a selection committee for forming the committee that will deliberate on the issue. This is an apt description of much of the “progressive” society which keeps expressing their collective shock and disbelief in the same words and manner forever.

    Then there’s the character named Brent – a very accurate depiction of a savarna man. Completely delusional about his importance and contributions. Immune to feedback. Absolutely incorrigible. Total pain in the ass.

    There are so many characters which are possible only in The Good Place universe. Janet, the all knowing (not a) robot. The Judge. Michael. It is worth watching purely for the intellectual exercise of thinking about these characters.

    And then there are so many real world characters. Michael again, Eleanor, Vicky. The story, through these characters, weaves issues like love, friendship, sacrifice, workplace rivalry, jealousy, boredom, and purpose into the fictional world seamlessly.

    I liked The Good Place for its exposition of the philosophy around “doing good”. It is a must watch for activists.

  • Who’s the Default Cook in your Home?

    There’s plenty written by women about how unfair division of household chores is the classic symptom of patriarchy.

    They’ve written about how it is not just about cooking, but also about the mental burden of thinking about the house — about grocery shopping, about making a list for grocery shopping, about keeping a mental checklist of other household details.

    Socialized as a man, I’ve had to learn a lot of this the hard way in my house living with Swathi.

    I’ve written about how I hate cooking. The harder question for me is to figure out whether I would have hated cooking if I was brought up in a culture where I’m expected to cook. I can keep thinking about how I am not a foodie, how I eat most meal in a couple of minutes, how I love washing plates, and so on. Yet this question will never be resolved.

    But Swathi had some very difficult conversations with me where I’ve realized it doesn’t matter whether I like cooking or not. It is a household chore, and it has to be taken care of. Like if the pipe in the bathroom is broken, it’ll have to be fixed. Or the bulb will have to be replaced. Or the internet has to be recharged.

    Cooking, grocery shopping, and shopping list building are household chores that one has to do regardless of whether one likes them, or is good at them.

    If two people are living in a house, they’ve to divide the chore.

    You live in an unequal society where it is acceptable to take services of a domestic worker. But still talking to them and describing what to be made, and ensuring ingredients are available are all remaining chores. And they have to be shared by members of the household.

    If this sounds complicated, think of how difficult it is for Swathi. She likes cooking for joy. And if I’m even a tiny bit lazy, she will become the “default cook”. And then she will be wondering whether she’s suffering from patriarchy or just enjoying something she likes. These western ideas like feminism have ruined her ability to like cooking.

    Not just that. She now has the additional burden of having to do a PhD in figuring out whether my dislike for cooking is an “Akshay problem” or a “man problem”. Whether it is an unacceptable remnant of patriarchy, or whether it is an ignorable trade-off.

    So instead of torturing her, I try to handle the household an equal number of days. And like many other things I’ve had to learn (like not misgendering people, not making ableist assumptions, being aware of my biases, etc), this also becomes easier as I practice it. And I’m also trying to reframe cooking in my mind such that it becomes an enjoyable activity for me. I think of it as a break from work, as a time to listen to podcasts, and so on.

    It is an ongoing struggle where I fall back to my old patterns of starting with my phone and work every day morning, and it becoming too late, and then me suggesting “let’s go outside for breakfast”. But like exercise, I manage to do it on some days. And I hope to have more such days.

  • Read Everything

    In hindsight, this was the most important advice I got as a child. Read everything. Newspaper. Books. Textbook. Children’s magazines. Even the paper which the shopkeeper uses to wrap vegetables in.

    I followed it religiously for most of my life.

    I used to wake up and read the whole newspaper from first page to last. I would read every sentence in my textbooks. I would finish all the books I started. And I would subscribe to every blog I liked on Google Reader and read each post from them.

    One could argue whether this advice is sound. Even for myself it became impractical as the amount of text around me grew. I couldn’t read all sentences of the medical college textbooks (mostly because I was busy doing many other things). There was an explosion of blogs on the internet. While I used to read every message in every WhatsApp group I was in, I found this also to drain a lot of my time.

    But all the while, I’ve been noticing one pattern. There are people who do not read. And they land up in all kinds of trouble.

    This is starkly visible in navigating websites. You can put all the warnings and give people all kind of preparation on what to do on a website. But they’ll still go “I couldn’t figure out how to do this”.

    I used to assume this was a problem with “tech literacy”. That people were afraid of technology, and they didn’t bother to lovingly explore.

    But I’m beginning to form an alternate hypothesis. People are having difficulty with technology because they don’t read!

    They don’t read the description written under a checkbox. They don’t read the warning messages that they’re pressing “OK” to. They don’t read instructions in an email. They read nothing.

    And there could be many reasons why people don’t read. Some people don’t know how to read. Some people have not developed reading fluency to be able to quickly read a sentence or a paragraph. Walls of text are scary for some. This post is not about criticizing people.

    This post is about opening up a potential. If people could read, they could

    • learn about things on their own
    • verify facts by themselves
    • operate independently
    • gain wisdom from umpteen number of books

    There is so much written online about topics like gender and caste it genuinely surprises me how people are eager to “unlearn and relearn” in any online courses. Hello? Why did you not unlearn stuff till 2025?

    But now I think their problem could be that they are not used to reading.

  • No, You Don’t Understand Intersectionality

    Most people who use the word intersectionality understand it as “sum of various identities”.

    Ask them to explain what intersectionality means and they’ll go “Oh, so think about a Dalit woman, she’s doubly oppressed — through caste and through gender”

    This is a crude and problematic understanding of intersectionality.

    Firstly, it leads to what’s called “oppression Olympics”. You start looking at various identities that can be put on a person and then literally count the number of such identities. Then you call them “most oppressed”, “less oppressed”, etc. You compare oppression.

    Secondly, it frames oppression as something that’s static, mathematical, and homogenous. You make intersectionality all about “Dalit women”, “tribal women”, or “black women”.

    And thirdly, you lose the whole point of intersectionality.

    The idea of intersectionality is to not see everyone with a particular identity the same. It is to see whose realities are left out when speaking about a group. One early example is in a women’s right convention, Sojourner Truth standing up and saying “Ain’t I a Woman?“

    It is also about realising oppression isn’t a commodity item that adds up neatly when identities intersect. Say a company has a policy to hire 50% women and 50% from scheduled caste. If the company hires 100 people strictly following this policy, how many scheduled caste women will get hired? 50? 25? 0?

    If you think about intersectionality mathematically, the answer is 25. If you think about it with my preamble in mind, you’ll say 0. But the real answer is “closer to 0”. All women hires would be privileged caste individuals. And most scheduled caste hires would be men.

    Scheduled caste women will get left out from both categories, except the few with class privilege who might get selected. And there will be 0 people with visible disabilities among all the 100.

    You can’t ignore the intersections of “other” realities when you’re talking about intersectionality. It is those “other” factors that make intersectionality different from addition.

    When most maternal deaths in a state are indigenous/tribal women, it’s intersectionality at play. But it is also intersectionality when Dalit men and savarna women call each other out on twitter. And it is indeed intersectionality illustrated when all the CEOs are savarna men. And it is intersectionality which lets you look at things outside the larger identities of class, caste, race, gender and go look at the numerous smaller identities and situations that shape a person.

    One could say “we don’t need to understand intersectionality like this to be able to work for social justice”. And they would be limiting themselves. This understanding of intersectionality is what makes it possible to find solidarity and allyship across movements, to be nuanced when it comes to cancel culture, and to be not stereotyping people based on two or three of their identities.

    This understanding of intersectionality is also a starting point to examine how power operates differently in every moment, every interaction, and every relationship.

    And it’s also the foundation for a love ethic.

  • The Logic of Social Justice

    Today in a discussion at IPH, Meena said “we should all fight against discrimination”. And Prashanth asked “Isn’t that your personal politics? What if people don’t agree with it?” What Prashanth was really asking was “Is there any logic to the demand for social justice?” “Isn’t it just politics?”

    This is the same discussion I had over lunch with Viswanathan (CVN) at MFC’s mid-annual meet in Kozhikode. CVN is widely known for saying “Science is the only way of knowing” which I have wrote about in the past. In the meet also CVN made the same point (I have posted a transcript of the comment here). CVN told about the enlightenment project

    […]By the term “modern society”, I mean a society that upholds the values of “liberty, equality, fraternity and justice”. These values, which we call constitutional values, are really values of ‘Enlightenment’ – or ‘European Enlightenment’ if you insist.

    Enlightenment project is a sociopolitical project that nobody likes in today’s India. The right wing hates it, the left wing has only contempt for it. Of course, this was always a minority’s concern in our country, historically speaking. Unlike the ‘National movement’, this ‘movement’ – if you can call it that name – came up from the ‘depressed castes’. If I am to name a few ‘big names’ that would represent this camp, almost everyone comes from the Dalit-Bahujan background. Mahatma Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Thanthai Periyar, Mahatma Ayyankali, Sahodaran Ayyappan – all from the depressed castes. This is a movement that developed as a response to the day-to-day existential insults heaped upon the depressed caste people over millenia.[…]

    So while eating chicken and ghee rice, I asked CVN, “if you say science is the only way of knowing, how do you know that the values of enlightenment is what we need to work towards?” I was asking what’s the “logic” of working for social justice. 

    CVN initially said “This is outside the realm of science. It is a question for morality.”

    But I wouldn’t relent. I was like “We KNOW that social justice is the right thing. And ‘science’ is the only way of knowing. Then what’s the logic with which we say social justice is the right thing?” I said it was important for us to articulate that logic or if not we wouldn’t have any way to convince others that it was important to fight for social justice.*

    *I actually said that we do have a few other ways. One is to use guns. Another is to use love. And that I am exploring the latter. But the quest for a logic was so important.

    CVN sought more time to think about it.

    And that brings me to an important fight with the postmodernists. In mfc group, I’ve had several sleepless days debating with a bunch of people who think that we have no way of knowing whether homeopathy, ayurveda, etc could be bullshit. That there’s a “possibility” that these are true. That our ability to know the “truth” will always be influenced by where we’re coming from. They think we’re living in some crazy world where we can never know anything, and just everything could be true.

    In that fight, it became clear to me that there is some sort of “logic” which I was looking for in everything. That it is this “logic” or rationality that I was calling science. In another discussion with Prashanth we decided to not call it ‘science’ because it was confused by several people to mean the establishment, but to call it ‘jnana’ or so.

    So, science (broadly construed), or rationality, or ‘jnana’ whatever you call it, is how we tend to get answers to everything.

    Then what’s the science of social justice? What’s the logic of social justice? 

    How do we ‘know’ that social justice is necessary?

    That’s the crux of the challenge.

    One way to answer this would be that this is beyond the realm of science. That it is politics. Or morality.

    If you’ve gone through Michael Sandel’s famous course or book on “Justice”, you’ll notice that MS gives many different “logics” – utilitarianism, libertarianism, Kant, Aristotle, etc. But again, the choice is left to us. So we’re again left with the question of “what’s the logic of our choice to work for social justice and how do we objectively describe it to a skeptic?”

    Let’s do the 2024 thing, and ask Claude.ai what it thinks.

    You’ve raised a profound and challenging question that gets to the heart of moral philosophy. You’re correct that there’s no universally agreed-upon, objective foundation for pursuing justice or any other moral goal. This leads us to the realm of metaethics – the study of the nature of ethical statements and judgments.
    There are several perspectives on this:

    • Moral Realism: Some philosophers argue that objective moral truths exist independently of what any individual or culture believes. Under this view, pursuing justice could be objectively right, even if we can’t always discern what justice entails.
    • Moral Relativism: This view holds that moral truths are relative to cultures or individuals. From this perspective, justice is indeed optional, as it’s just one of many possible value systems.
    • Moral Non-Cognitivism: This approach suggests that moral statements aren’t truth-apt (capable of being true or false) but are expressions of emotion or prescriptions for action.
    • Evolutionary Ethics: Some argue that our sense of justice and morality evolved because it was beneficial for group survival, but this doesn’t necessarily make it objectively “true.”
    • Pragmatism: This view suggests we should pursue justice because it leads to better outcomes for societies, even if we can’t prove it’s objectively correct.

    You’re right that, in a sense, all moral frameworks are “optional.” There’s no physical law of the universe that compels us to be just or moral. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that morality is arbitrary or unimportant.
    Many philosophers argue that even without an objective foundation, we can still have robust, rational discussions about ethics and justice. They suggest that we can use reason, empathy, and shared human experiences to build ethical frameworks that, while not objectively provable, are defensible and beneficial.
    Moreover, from a practical standpoint, societies need some shared ethical framework to function. While the specifics of what constitutes justice may vary, the concept of justice itself seems to be a near-universal feature of human societies.
    In the end, whether to pursue justice (or any moral goal) is a choice we make as individuals and societies. But it’s a choice with profound implications for how we live and interact with others. The lack of an objective foundation doesn’t negate the importance of these choices; if anything, it makes our moral deliberations even more crucial.

    That should settle it. If generations of philosophers haven’t found an answer, can we really find a logic to social justice?

    But there’s an alluring charm to the search for a logic. If only we had an objective way to say justice is right, we could go about our lives much more easily. We just have to tell everyone the logic and abracadabra they are now working for social justice too. The whole world could just be transformed.

    Yet there’s no logic. And therefore the fight for social justice is hard. It is an illogical choice. It is something we enter into through our own free will. And so all the methods of how we transfer “knowledge” comes of no use for us. Because it is not “knowledge”. Social justice is a choice. How do we convey our choice to someone else? That’s the question we actually need to answer. 

    As I’ve written before, after exploring power and realizing it doesn’t work I’ve been exploring love as a framework for this. I’ll write soon about how this has been working out for me in the last two years.

  • How the World Should Be and How the World Is

    There are two modes of thinking in society and social work. “How The World Should Be” mode, and “How The World Is” mode. There is a constant friction between these two. This friction explains hundreds of debates I’ve been in and many of my own moral dilemmas. Understanding this friction and being able to categorize arguments/politics into these categories helps in navigating the human world.

    Let’s start with simple examples.

    Examples

    Example 1

    Situation: Let’s say you’re driving on the road. You drive at a reasonable speed using indicators and avoiding sudden movements of your vehicle. Suddenly someone cuts lanes and jumps in front of you forcing you to break and swerve to a side. Another vehicle behind you hits your back.

    How the world should be: “Nobody should be cutting lanes all of a sudden. That’s dangerous. People who do that should face consequences.”

    How the world is: “People cut lanes. People drive unsafe. You can try to drive defensively, yet you can get involved in an accident. And you will face some or the other consequences.”

    Example 2

    Situation: You’re taking a sick patient to a hospital. You dialed 108 emergency ambulance service which is supposed to be free. After reaching the hospital, the ambulance team wants ₹₹₹ from you.

    How the world should be: “Ambulance service should be free. Healthcare should be free. People shouldn’t have to suffer from lack of money in accessing healthcare”

    How the world is: “There is a lot of corruption. People demand bribe in healthcare in many different ways.”

    Example 3

    Situation: It is election time. Politicians are using religion to swing votes. Issues like healthcare, education are being neglected.

    How the world should be: “People should hold politicians accountable and not let them get away with corrupted politics”

    How the world is: “People are voting for the corrupt politicians (for whatever reasons they may have).”

    Differences

    As might be obvious from the examples, there are several differences between how the world should be and how the world is.

    It is easy to see how the world is. One just has to live in it. Every day is a lesson in “the world as it is”. It doesn’t take much effort to understand and study it. It is accessible to everyone at all times. It is, in fact, unavoidable.

    The world that should be is an imaginary world. It requires us to think of something that doesn’t exist already.  It is set in the future. It is described using values, morality, and philosophy. It is harder to envision.

    The world that should be is controversial too. Different people believe in different futures. There is often mutually exclusive worlds that come up. You can’t have hyper-industrialized cities and clean air together. You can’t have an authoritarian state and a democratic state together. You can’t have religion and science together. Sometimes the imaginations aren’t that starkly different, but they’re still different in nuanced ways. It is those nuanced differences that leads to very many debates and fights within progressive groups.

    Implication

    The differences between the two ways of looking at the world immediately leads to the following important points.

    There is a vast amount of things to know about how the world is

    What’s happening in the world? How do human beings behave? What guides their actions? Is there any predictability? Why is there corruption? Why is there caste? Why is there religion? Why are people violent? Why is there inequity? Why is there gender? Why is there sickness? Why is there hate? Why is there love? Why is there harmony? Why is there peace? What is it that makes human beings tick? How do humans survive? What is the human spirit?

    There is a vast amount of things to know about how the world should be

    How might the world be? How would it be organized? What will be the weaknesses of that world? What would the strengths be? What challenges will we face? What human potential will we unlock in that world?

    There is a vast amount of things to know about how we can reach the world that should be from the world that is

    Knowing how the world should be is one thing. Knowing how to get from here to there is another thing. Any action we need to take towards the world that should be should start from the world that is. Firstly because that is the only world we have access to (by the laws of physics). But more importantly because it is the same people we are talking about. It is the same human beings. It is the same world that we want to transform.

    We need theories of change. We need experiments and examples. We need strategies, intermediary states/goals, milestones, checkpoints, and so on.

    Many dilemmas are manifestation of the friction between these stages of change

    I have struggled thinking about power. I hate hierarchy. And I see power as the core of hierarchy. In my “how the world should be” thinking, I used to constantly do things to give up power. But then, I discovered that without power it is very hard to do anything useful. This was very hard to accept though. I found even more reasons to not gain power. I said “Love is Enough“. But love wasn’t enough. “Love without power is sentimental and anemic” says Martin Luther King. 

    Here’s how the above framework helps in my dilemma.

    How the world is: Power centered and hierarchic.
    How the world should be: Love centered and anarchic/anti-hierarchy.
    How do we go from here to there: Power and love applied as needed for the change.

    There is another dilemma that’s been with me since my childhood. That of religion. I am a rationalist. I do not even use the word “atheist” to describe myself because I don’t want to discuss the idea of god even for saying that there is no such thing. For a long time I stayed with the idea that religions should be rejected en masse. Then I realized that a very huge number of human beings are deeply religious. So as per the framework this is how it should be resolved.

    How the world is: Religious and intolerant.
    How the world should be: Rational and secular.
    How do we go from here to there: Infuse rationalism into and through religion.

    This is very much in line of how Gandhi uses Gita and Rama to make Hindus become better. Or how Ambedkar uses Buddha to make life better for many people. Religion has been used by them creatively. They infused modernity into religion.

    Conclusion

    If you find yourself in the middle of a heated debate with people who are politically aligned, or with yourself (dilemmas), see if you can categorize the sides into “How the World Is” and “How the World Should Be”. Then think about how you would strategize for going from here to there.

  • Imaginary Heroes and Why A Radical Commitment to Truth is the Only Solution to Inequity

    Imaginary Heroes and Why A Radical Commitment to Truth is the Only Solution to Inequity

    In my post about truth and Gandhi, I wrote about how a radical commitment to truth is the missing ingredient in the world today. In this post I will elaborate on that. To do this, I’ll first recap what it means, then talk about the “inverted iceberg” model of savarna mediocrity, and finally illustrate what a radical commitment to truth would look like in practice.

    Truth: a recap

    To know how powerful is truth one just needs to walk the path of a truthful person for a while. It is an incredibly powerful philosophy that’s accessible to everyone. A radical commitment to truth as I described with examples earlier, has three components.

    1) Being in touch with your emotions and feelings, and showing commitment to try to label them accurately.
    2) A commitment to yourself to not invalidate your own feelings. To not act in ways that go against your feelings.
    3) A commitment to follow-up on things that you are uncertain of – so that you can arrive at the truth.

    This requires conviction and courage. And it provides immense strength.

    It is easier to explain why this is “radical” by looking at the society as we have it today. A great example is provided in Ravikant Kisana’s article “Saving the World Like a Savarna”:

    In the first few weeks of my doctoral studies at MICA, Ahmedabad, the professor was teaching us about Paulo Freire and the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” waxing eloquent about how the modern education system dehumanizes students and erodes their confidence daily. My cohort, though overwhelmingly Savarna, nonetheless had a few scholars from small towns. They didn’t have “good English” or “cultural polish” and struggled to follow the ornate vocabulary of our Brahmin professor. By this point in my life, I had mastered enough of the Savarna culture to pass off as “polished” and wealthy to their casual gaze.

    One day, in the privacy of her cabin, the same professor ranted to me about my cohort-mates, saying she could not believe how some of them had been admitted to the program and was counting on me as a “bright light” to get her through the course. I was shocked and struck by the contrast between talking so passionately about marginalized students’ issues in the lecture hall and making mean-spirited jibes at the same students in her office. In an immature move, I told the professor off and walked out. It immediately soured our equation and she, along with her husband who later became the Director of MICA, proceeded to bring the might of institutional hostility upon me for years, the effects of which still follow my career.

    This, Ravikant Kisana explains, is what is called “switching”. RK defines it as “the social behavior where Savarnas can pose as extremely radical and culturally progressive and then, with the flip of a metaphorical switch, slip back into their privileged family lives without the slightest existential friction“. RK further goes on to describe this like this: “Such posturing that borders on social deception is a public role to be played, a curation, a “look,” an outfit of sorts to mask what is fundamentally a conservative social core that is extremely difficult to unlearn“

    We could explain this in terms of truth (or the lack of it). The savarnas who do switching are living a lie. They are out of touch with their “inner core”. They fail to label their own feelings (1), they fail to act according to their feelings (2), and consequently they have no need to look for the truth(3).

    The solution to this would be to invert this lie and switch to truth. Before I illustrate that, let us look at how this “switching” is internalized by the whole society and how that is damaging the way we do anything.

    The inverted iceberg model of savarna mediocrity

    When we look at an iceberg, what do we see? We see the tip of an iceberg. About 90% of an iceberg is underneath the water. 

    Here’s the artificial picture of a full iceberg. Created by Uwe Kils (iceberg) and User:Wiska Bodo (sky)., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. If you actually look at the physics, iceberg wouldn’t float this way as the stable orientation would be different.

    This iceberg model is applicable to human beings also. When we see a human being, we’re only seeing the tip of their unique lived experiences and life stories. Each person is at least 10x times more than what they are able to express. But, as is with icebergs, most people’s true worth goes unrecognized. We see the tip of the iceberg and we narrow the person down to that tip. But we can sometimes be reminded about what’s hidden behind the surface.

    This model accurately captures how most people get viewed by the society.

    But in the case of savarnas*, the iceberg is inverted!

     * Please note two things. One, I am using the word savarna as an umbrella to stand for elite selfish people. Two, in many ways I myself am a savarna.

    The savarnas are so loud, so much interested in talking, and hog up all the space. When this happens, rational people think “Oh, they must have a lot more to say and that’s why they’re speaking so much. Perhaps I’m only seeing the tip of the iceberg. I better see what more lies beneath the surface.” And this leads to them getting more and more space.

    Then, they repeat the obvious, they talk about the clichéd, they keep talking without saying anything.

    The savarna icebergs are inverted. What you see is all that is there. There’s nothing more than that.

    When savarnas do heroic things or give inspiring talk, they are at the end of their wits. When they make “deep” intellectual points, they’re talking from the maximum depth they can reach. There’s nothing more in them!

    But unfortunately we imagine that there is more. We create heroes out of them. We extrapolate their arguments and see them as bastions of hope and justice. We build imaginary heroes.

    I don’t want to name anyone, but if a savarna hero has ever shattered in front of you, you know who I’m speaking about. We thought they would do something because we built up a larger than life hero based on something they did/said in the past. And turns out we were wrong. We were too kind. Our hero was imaginary.

    How does a radical commitment to truth make things better?

    In a radical commitment to truth, we call out the mediocre as the mediocre. If there’s discrimination going on and ABC speaks against it but the discrimination still continues, we say “ABC spoke against it. Nothing changed.”. If there’s an organization that has worked 40 years in a sector and all they have managed to achieve is award after award and no justice, then we say “Well, this organization did work on this for 40 years and what they did is this much [only].” If there’s a savarna group which does the bare minimum, we say “Well, this group did the bare minimum”.

    We stop using the words “great work”, “admirable”, “amazing”, “super”. Let’s reserve the superlatives for the superlative. Let’s use mediocre adjectives to describe the mediocre.

    When an insanely privileged person does a PhD on something and comes up with a repetition of what’s already widely known, we call it “they have used their privilege to get a PhD by working on a topic and discovering nothing new”.

    When there’s a random new technology with no use coming out of an IIT, we say “these people with all the resources spent on them have come up with a technology that benefits nobody”.

    When a doctor treats their patient like a human being, we say “well, the doctor treated the patient like a human being as they should be”

    We start doing this and then we will be reversing a trend that has led to marginalization and oppression of a large majority. We will lead to a society where chasing (often fake) numbers instead of caring about people is questioned. We will challenge the capitalist assumptions of putting “efficiency” (read “profit”) above human welfare. We will challenge “merit”. We will destabilize the self-centered argument of “compromising for the sake of career”. We will put an end to the pragmatism vs idealism debate. (What’s preventing the ideal from being pragmatic?)

    We will stop being content with arbitrary measures of “impact” and we will settle only for equity and justice. We will stop glorifying the bare minimum. We will start demanding what’s right. We will rethink who we fall behind and whose voices we amplify. We will stop hero worship and rediscover the value of every individual in the community.

    And in that radical commitment to truth, we can be fully free. We can live our lives to our true selves. Often we will be forced to change. But there’s no reaching the truth without change. A radical commitment to truth is a radical commitment to change.

     

    Preemptively answering some questions

    How does this help?

    It forces us to improve. It forces everyone to improve. It creates an environment of growth.

    It also puts on display privileges and the contribution of those to people’s “achievements”.

    It creates a “level” discourse where the privileged doesn’t keep accumulating more privileges.

    Isn’t this discouraging for those who are doing work?

    If you really care about justice and equity, you know very well that what you’re doing is not enough. And you would be happy to agree with anyone who says how the world needs to improve.

    But shouldn’t we appreciate any step towards positive social change?

    We should. Our appreciation ought to be commensurate with how big the step is. It is the extrapolation and the superlatives that need to be avoided.

    By this standard, nobody will be doing good work

    Well, if we don’t apply these standards, we will keep getting the mediocre work that we have. Is that what you would like?

    Be comfortable with the idea that we can only be imperfect. Be comfortable with the idea of not having heroes.

  • Being Comfortable With the Non-Binary: A Code of Conduct Case Study

    Today morning I woke up to this message in FSCI‘s chat room:

    What happens here when a member reveals themselves to be a transphobe in another room? 🤔

    I immediately said “COC applies”. The FSCI code of conduct, which I have contributed to the making of, is very clear about keeping FSCI an inclusive space. It explicitly recognizes that gender identity and expression can be diverse. And someone gets called a “transphobe” typically when they go against this idea.

    But then there was this other question that came up in my mind. Would FSCI’s code of conduct apply to another room?

    My first instinct was to read through the actual code and look at the sections where it discusses the scope of the code: “all of this community’s spaces, including public channels, private channels and direct messages, both online and off.” There could be an argument on technicality as to whether another room could be considered as community’s space. There could even be a counter argument that the mere presence of another FSCI member in the other room makes it a private channel thus bringing it under the scope of the code.

    But I quickly realized where my “COC applies” comment came from. I wasn’t relying on technicality. I was relying on what I’ve internalized as the way a code of conduct works, and the way we influence others in the social organization.

    And that has got a lot to do with being comfortable with the non-binary mess.

    I was not like this earlier. I used to be very black and white, all or none about laws. I used to find comfort in the idea that anything human could be codified. Not just facts and information, but also implicit assumptions, emotions, social rules, and so on. So much so that I used to even think about building AGI with just symbolic AI through a comprehensive compilation of all these codified knowledge.

    But as I started learning more about the world and interacting with human beings in the “real” world, I started recognizing that many things about human society is much more complicated than what could be codified. I’m not talking about this being quantitatively so large that it is too difficult to codify. It is complexity on a whole different dimension that prevents codification.

    This complexity probably comes from free will. But what it practically amounts to is that there is no way to absolutely predict how human beings behave. (I leave it to the readers to draw parallels between this and quantum physics).

    This particular understanding manifests in two different ways in my thinking: intersectional and non-binary.

    I see the world in a heavily intersectional lens. Intersectionality is a framework that captures the many complexities of the world very well. It allows one to deconstruct (to use a word I used to hate) what’s happening without resorting to simplistic/reductionist explanations.

    But intersectionality without an understanding of the non-binary is a dangerous pitfall. Often what I see people doing is to think of intersectionality in a binary way, wherein instead of having a yes or no explanation, they would have a yes or no + yes or no + yes or no explanation. They would just superimpose multiple explanations. Easier to explain with an example. I had (more than) once heard a description of how a person who is queer and Dalit and Muslim suffer from “triple oppression”. This sounds a lot like someone trying to add up binary bits. That’s the antithesis of intersectionality.

    It is when you combine intersectional lens with a non-binary lens that you can see things more clearly and in more practical ways. In the non-binary lens not only do you see everything in shades of grey, you even see categories blurring. There’s no triple oppression when the very binary bits you are counting (Queer, Dalit, Muslim) cease to exist in well-defined boxes.

    Sounds like a mess? It is a mess. Maybe I’m struggling to explain this, and that’s okay. But non-binary is when you’re comfortable with the mess. (Hat-tip to Swathi who attended the Looking In Looking Out Workshop and gave me the word “mess”)

    Being comfortable with the non-binary mess is the key

    Incomplete information, inadequate resources, limited time. These are three things that make humans humans as opposed to Gods who are omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. We are doomed to live this way. And we might as well be comfortable with it.

    The Code of Conduct is a good case study here.

    There are some people who feel a code of conduct takes away freedom of speech. There are some who believe that it is best to leave the code of conduct very simple (“Be nice” folks). The FSCI code of conduct is rather long. It is a synthesis of many other similar codes.

    What makes me comfortable with a code of conduct like this is that I see it as a non-binary mess. The CoC is an essay on a social contract that we aim to uphold. It codifies certain nuanced understandings of the world and demands people to grow those understandings. That is a certain kind of politics. And that is exactly how the world works. It is a constant negotiation of politics. There’s no clear way to categorize what it is. It is a mess.

    The rules are rules. The rules aren’t rules. The rules apply to everyone equally. The rules don’t apply to everyone. The rules are clear. The rules are ambiguous. The rules ought to be respected. The rules can be changed. You can enforce the rules. You can’t enforce the rules. All of these things are true to various extent at various time in various contexts and situations. Everything is non-binary!

     So, does the CoC apply? It applies to the whole world!