Blissful Life

Year: 2020

  • What to Do with Privilege?

     I have had the privilege to think and write about privilege often. I have written about how privilege affects Indian software industry’s ability to innovate. I have written about why the privileged should think about how they’re part of the problem. I have looked at my privileges visible to me. I also felt guilty/responsbile and came up with a probably stupid idea of distributing my time to help others.

    Today morning I came across two interesting tweets.

    Your achievements reach far beyond your own benefits, they inspire others to excel. Keep rocking.

    — Venkat Subramaniam (@venkat_s) December 22, 2020

    The next tweet requires a bit of context. New York Times had published a very interesting story about pollution in Delhi by following two kids from different backgrounds and measuring their pollution exposure. You should absolutely read the story (the reality) if you haven’t.

    Something about this article is disturbing. Did the girl sign up to be portrayed as this symbol of “privilege” in this piece? To be fair they might have changed names or whatever. But still. Something off I feel.

    — Deepak Varughese, MD (@VarugheseDeepak) December 19, 2020

    This made me think about the book by Michael Sandel that I recently finished reading – The Tyranny of Merit. It is a book about privilege, inequities, affirmative action, and the idea of justice. 

    The book starts with examination of a US college admission corruption scandal. A few rich parents had paid some people to get their kids fake certificates that would make it easier to get college admission. This was seen as highly unfair and corrupt.

    But being born with privilege automatically gives people an edge. I didn’t have to fake any certificate, but I grew up in an environment where I could “earn” those certificates. Conversely, people who have lesser privileges start with a disadvantage.

    Affirmative action steps in there. The idea with affirmative action is to give those who didn’t have the background a chance to succeed. Reserved seats (or diversity quotas) “level” the playing ground.

    But affirmative action comes with lots of problems. See the replies on this tweet, for example.

    No. It’s an attempt towards balancing the scales so that the industry doesn’t remain so biased towards one gender.

    We’ve seen what the industry looks like without such interventions – a male dominated one. So can’t expect nature to just run its course and fix everything. https://t.co/enPEhdIZjI

    — Balasankar “Balu” C (@balasankarc) October 27, 2020

    Affirmative action makes those who do not benefit from affirmative action feel lots of resentment towards those who do benefit from it, especially if the former view themselves as disadvantaged in a way that is not considered as a disadvantage in the affirmative action program. For example, in this case, male candidates from rural/poor background feel that Google hiring female candidates exclusively is unfair.

    Michael Sandel then questions the very idea of merit. Is it possible to have an Utopia where everyone has equal privileges? Imagine a heavy autocracy where everyone is born in the same conditions. What happens when different human beings are born with different cognitive/physical capacities? Isn’t being born with better genes a privilege? Is it okay for people to use that privilege to get ahead of others?

    Affirmative action is an attempt at ensuring equality of opportunity. But no matter how hard we try there are certain opportunities which everyone cannot equally have. At the same time there is a large amount of wealth inequalities that arise. And also a lot of inequalities in terms of esteem. Those who are privileged feel guilty of their success. Those who benefit from affirmative action are shamed that they couldn’t “qualify” without the same.

    I have thought in the past specifically about college admissions. What if everyone could access high quality of education and nobody had to miss out on the opportunity? Then we wouldn’t need reservation and selection. But, we have created an artificial scarcity of seats. Why do we give universities the monopoly over knowledge like that? Why do we have professions like programming which anyone can enter and then professions like law which people are barred from entering?

    It might be my pet peeve that there are regulated professions. But Michael Sandel also calls for dismantling meritocracy and ensuring equality of condition. The book, like the Justice course, makes you think and rethink the idea of justice.

    Coming back to the tweets above. I think that looking at privilege as a shameful thing is useful for nobody. Giving up privileges is a waste of privilege. The right use of privilege, in my opinion, would be to use it for reducing inequities in the world. The rich family that agreed to be part of the NY Times article therefore need to be applauded. And those with privilege need to acknowledge their privileges and work towards making those privileges irrelevant.

  • Annihilation of Caste

    Jat-Pat Todak Mandal probably wanted to be the #DalitLivesMatter of their time. That’s how they invited Ambedkar to their annual conference in 1936 to deliver a speech. Organization of conferences in that time and today have at least one thing in common – communication gaps. JPTM wanted Ambedkar to talk about abolition of caste. Like many social reformers, they wanted reforms that do not disturb the status quo. Ambedkar’s speech pointed out how caste is strongly intertwined with Hinduism. If one were to agree with Ambedkar, abolishing caste would require shaking the fundamentals of Hinduism. JPTM did not let Ambedkar know that they would rather not speak logic to the Hindu elite who attend their conference. At least, not when they sent the invitation.

    When the organizers saw the print of the speech to be delivered they straightened the record. Either Ambedkar can stay clear of criticizing Hinduism or they will find a way to cancel the speech. Ambedkar had by then printed a few hundred copies of the speech and was neither interested in changing the text nor in speaking at JPTM’s conference. The speech, thence, became the book. Annihilation of Caste.

     

    *  *  *

     

    Reading this book drastically changed the way I look at Indian independence movement and contemporary Indian politics. Very little of that was brought about by the content of Ambedkar’s speech. The speech is a rather predictable compilation of reasons why Hinduism flares up casteism. It is well written and logical. The points Ambedkar put forward can be directly used in debates even today. The politics around the book, though, is eye-opening.

    It is the same politics that made this book slip under my radar. It is why I have never asked the questions “Did Ambedkar really draft the Constitution?” or “What else did Ambedkar write?”. It is the politics of caste.

    Having grown up as an Indian elite, I did not (and do not) know well the politics of caste. To compensate for this elite ignorance, the book is now prefixed by Arundhati Roy’s essay “The Doctor and the Saint”. This essay is the red pill. If you take it you go down the rabbit hole of Indian politics.

    After that it won’t really matter whether you read the speech or not. Yet you will read it. Like you reached an oasis in a large desert you were thrown abruptly into.

  • How Can I Be Useful For You?

    I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I haven’t still figured out how to execute this. But here’s the idea. I’m very privileged, purely by the accident of birth. There are millions of people less privileged than me in many ways. I think the right use of my privileges would be to help bridge the inequities in our society. And for that, I have to start somewhere. I’m doing various things, but I think I’m not doing all I can.

    Here’s the deal. I’ll list down a list of things that I think I can effectively help others in. I’ll also list down many of my privileges here. If you aren’t as privileged as I am in any one of these, you can feel free to reach out to me on any topic on the first list, and we can work out a way for you to take my time for your own benefit/growth/advantage.

    List of things I can work with you on

    1. Learning medicine, learning basic sciences.
    2. Learning programming, learning GNU/Linux system administration.
    3. Learning to use the internet.
    4. Contributing to free software projects.
    5. Writing essays/articles in English, learning English
    6. Conceptualizing research studies in health, academic writing, and publication.
    7. Public speech.

    I’m going to be a bit selfish and not list down everything that I can actually do for others. I’m sorry for that. But if you think there’s something related to the above but not exactly in the list, we can talk about it.

    List of my privileges you can use to compare

    By listing something down here, I don’t mean to imply that one is better than the other in any way. I just feel certain things have made things easier for me in my life, and I’ve listed those as privileges.

    1. Being male
    2. Being cisgender
    3. Being heterosexual
    4. Being born in a privileged caste
    5. Being born in an economically stable family
    6. Having my parents alive well into my adulthood
    7. Having young parents
    8. Being born to a doctor
    9. Being born to a teacher
    10. Being born to parents who are in government service
    11. Not having to support family
    12. Being the grandchild of three teachers
    13. Being born in a majority religion
    14. Having access to books from early childhood
    15. Having access to internet by 8th standard
    16. Having been to an English medium school
    17. Not having suffered psychological or physical trauma in childhood
    18. Not having physical disabilities
    19. Being tall
    20. Being fair skinned
    21. Having a lean body-nature
    22. Not having congenital or acquired illnesses that require medical care

    This is by no means a complete list. I haven’t added all the privileges that I accrued thanks to the above privileges. So have I not added the privileges that I am not aware of. Anyhow, if you think I am more privileged than you in any way, you should not hesitate to take this deal.

    You can find my contact details here.

     

     Post script: I have thought about how this can be considered virtue signalling. I am open to discuss ways of making this less about me and more about others. I’ve considered the idea of volunteering at NGOs. But I haven’t found a right fit at the moment. Neither is it feasible at the moment due to COVID. Also, I want to somehow be able to scale this idea and figuring out first hand what works and what doesn’t might be useful in that.

  • Why Wikipedia Is Evil

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of many things about Wikipedia. I have a small number of edits on Wikipedia too. But, I think democratizing knowledge creation is more important than Wikipedia. And that’s why the title.
    I have written with examples about how Wikipedia’s claims about it being “the sum of all human knowledge” is highly misplaced in my old article titled: “Don’t put all your eggs in one Wikipedia“. In that article I also talk about how Wikipedia could become the foundation for building a federated knowledge system. In this post I talk about why it is necessary to decentralize Wikipedia.
    Monopolies are bad
    It is not that there cannot be socially conscious and good natured monopolies. It is that the existence of monopolies in a society is bad. It stifles innovation by restricting it to only the monopoly. It gives great power to the people who control the monopoly. Arbitrary rules can be created by these people and everyone else is forced to follow suit.
    Healthy competition is the cornerstone of capitalism. Monopolies make competition tough. Worse, monopolies make competitors look bad even when they’re better. Monopolies make it look like the reason for the failure of competitors is incompetence whereas a large part of the reason could be the existence of a monopoly.
    Amazon, Uber, China, there are many examples.
    Monopolies don’t announce themselves
    That monopolies are bad is clear to many people. But recognizing monopolies is sometimes hard. A monopoly doesn’t always start out as a monopoly. And there usually isn’t an announcement when someone becomes a monopoly. In fact, monopolies always deny they have monopoly.
    Here is where Wikipedia becomes interesting.
    Wikipedia announces itself as wanting to compile the sum of all human knowledge (and sometimes even claims to be the sum of all human knowledge). I have ranted enough about this in the older post. But the fact that not enough people question this statement by Wikipedia founders and others should make us think: Have we accepted Wikipedia as the sum of all human knowledge?
    If we have, then we have laid the foundation for Wikipedia to become a monopoly. A monopoly over knowledge.
    We may be too late to act too.
    Wikipedia has prominent ranking on search results for many many terms. Often, people read only the Wikipedia result. These people linking back to Wikipedia creates a reinforcing feedback loop. (Of course, the role of Google’s monopoly over search and discovery of knowledge is also to be questioned).
    Because there is so much of knowledge already present in Wikipedia, many people think that what is not present on Wikipedia is not notable enough or is not important enough to know. Paid editing has existed on Wikipedia from a long time and the reason is that it is becoming increasingly impossible to build a brand without building it through Wikipedia also. And why is that so? Because a large number of people use Wikipedia to measure the relative relevance of knowledge. Wikipedia is becoming the trusted bank of knowledge. Wikipedia is gaining monopoly over knowledge.
    Not all of this is Wikipedia’s fault. There are many projects which try to become collaborative editing spots for various niche topics. Radiopaedia, for example tries to become a reference website for radiology. Yet, for many projects Wikipedia is a large competitor because it is the so-called “sum of all human knowledge”. Editors would rather write on Wikipedia than a smaller collaborative project.
    Because we give Wikipedia too much credit. We consider it the reference. We adore it. We are too scared to fork off. We make it a monopoly. Stop doing that.

  • Liberty vs Morality

    Liberty and morality can be seen as counter-balancing forces.
    Liberty applies to individuals.
    Morality is a social construct.
    Liberty is about what one can do.
    Morality is about what one cannot do.
    Liberty assumes each human is a rational being and respects them for that.
    Morality is enforced on humans by authority based on arbitrary consensus.
    Liberty allows a human being to achieve their maximum human potential.
    Morality can potentially prevent individuals from harming other individuals.
    Liberty and morality are not equally acting on everyone, though.
    Morality often sides with the more privileged. Because the authority to enforce morality rests with them too. In turn, liberty also accumulates with the privileged.
    Privilege may never get equally distributed. We must therefore constantly renegotiate the arbitrary rules of morality for the benefit of the less privileged.

  • The Connection Between Curiosity and Knowledge

    Last week, 7½ years after Aaron Swartz death, I was thinking about what made Aaron smart. There is this quote:

    “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.”

    Curiosity. It keeps popping up here and there.
    I was read Anand Philip‘s blog today. The “about” page is just three lines:

    Generalist.

    Superpower: Curiosity.

    Probably not a cat

    Can curiosity be a superpower?

    One of the answers was about The Oxford Electric Bell:
    There wasn’t much detail about the bell in the answer. Intuitively I was thinking it could be something like a clock that would require winding every now and then. But I wasn’t sure. So I went to the wikipedia page on it.
    That’s where I learned that it is an actual bell that rings about twice a second and holds “the Guinness World Record as “the world’s most durable battery [delivering] ceaseless tintinnabulation””
    Now there are many things to learn on this page. We might want to see the bell ringing on Youtube. We might want to read about perpetual motion. We might even want to read about the word tintinnabulation.
    Which reminded me of an old friend Akashnil Dutta who according to LinkedIn is now a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI. It was about 9 years ago in a camp that I met Akashnil where he told me about magnetotactic bacteria. I asked him how he had come across this rather uncommon piece of information.
    He said he would use the “Random Article” feature of wikipedia to find new stuff.
    Curiosity is a super power.
    Read. Notice. Be curious. Question. Read more. Repeat.

  • Is Feminism Brahmanism?

    This post is an analysis on the points made in the transcript of a talk titled “Feminism is Brahmanism” (FiB) and the counter-points raised to it. I know that it is difficult to separate points made by a person from that person themselves. It is difficult to separate generalizations and personal attacks from solid arguments. But nevertheless, I will make an attempt, for my own sake. Because I call myself a feminist and I want my flavour of feminism to be the best flavour of feminism possible.
    Firstly, I have to state my own biases here. I have been pondering over the question “Is Reverse Sexism Possible?” for about an year now. I’ve not had a conclusive answer yet. The first time I read the FiB article I thought I had an answer. Maybe the answer will take another year to be clear. Anyhow, I believe in intersectional feminism as of now. The kind that is being talked about in Data Feminism. And I believe that gender equality is not the only thing that feminism is about or should be about.
    Let’s now move to the original: “Feminism is Brahmanism“
    We have to realize that this is the transcript of a talk and therefore a lot of meaning may have been lost in the transcription process. Also I have no idea on the context in which this talk was given, nor have I been following the speaker to know their background.
    In the beginning of the talk Anu Ramdas makes this point:

    That all these women produced this vast amount of knowledge and some of
    it has been responsible to make my rights possible. They have all
    worked for it. And I should just find it and I am going to find it. But
    in real life that was not the story. The person who worked to make
    education possible for my family was my paternal grandaunt. It was my
    paternal grandaunt who took decisions about her children having to go to
    college and through her effort and clarity of thought the family begins
    to have education as a benchmark we need to get. She is the person that
    I associate, in my life, with education. But feminism is telling me it
    is not her, it’s all these other women. So, either my grandmother (aunt)
    is a feminist and her role is documented in that feminist literature or
    they are disconnected. This reality and the materialized feminist
    knowledge and my real life have no connection. That is the first part of
    the journey.

    And later this idea is revisited

    What have these feminists clarified for me to stop women from spending
    so much of their time searching, fetching, storing water [in most parts
    of the world]? Or about having safe childcare, when their occupations
    are not white-collared jobs. The majority of the women of the world are
    working in agriculture. So how does childcare look for agricultural
    workers and what has feminism articulated about it? In all these
    hundreds and hundreds of books […]
    […]
    So, my conclusion is that this is about ruling class women, 99% of which
    is white women’s struggle. Their struggle of becoming equal to who? Are
    they struggling to become equal to the black man or the Asian man? No!
    They are struggling to become equal to the white man. Their struggle, in
    one sentence, if I have to say: feminism is about the white women’s
    struggle to become equal to white men. While white men are the
    oppressors of the entire world, men and women together. Feminism demands
    all women to help white women win their battle to become equal to white
    men who oppress the rest of the world. And this is repeated in every
    society. Elites of that society adopt this ideology, saying we are
    fighting for all women but all they are doing is fighting to be equal to
    their class men. But all women are recruited to perform this duty. And
    hence I cannot see their achievements, their success as being warriors
    of rights for all women because the water problem has not changed. It is
    not even there in their orbit. Therefore, I have started to see
    feminism as being oppositional to all the historical struggles of
    marginalized people, where men and women, are engaged in. For example,
    anti-caste battles and struggles.

    I think these paragraphs summarize the premise on which the speaker is making the assertion. The premise is that lots of feminism is just about gender equality. If we assume that is true, then I can easily draw the line from there to how feminism suppresses conversation about caste and how it allows continuation of class structures like brahmanism. (Tangential question: Why should the B of brahmanism be capital? Isn’t brahmanism a concept like feminism? Won’t it be a common noun then?)
    Now let us take the response by Anannya G Madonna – “Ambedkarism is Feminism – A Response to ‘Feminism is Brahminism’“
    The author here looks at various waves of feminism. If I read it correctly, the first wave is equated to white feminism – of equal right to vote between genders.
    Then “womanists/black feminists” gets introduced and in the same vein “Dalit feminism”.
    They then go ahead and give various examples of Dalit feminists who have independent existence and aren’t just agents of white feminists. Later, also, they justify the point that being influenced by white feminism is not a bad thing per se. That the idea of human rights in Europe will apply to India as well, even if the context changes.
    Essentially, I think, the point they are making is that Indian feminism is/should be Dalit/intersectional feminism.
    Another point worth mentioning is that the fourth wave feminism is
    predominantly run by womxn of colour and various ethnicities and
    sexualities where they are taking the reins into their hands.
    Of course they also talk on a different point about Anu Ramdas’ agenda and question their integrity. But perhaps we don’t have to worry about that to answer the question whether feminism is brahmanism.
    We will come back to what Indian feminism is after looking at a few twitter threads.

    As a Dalit woman who has been critical of savarna feminism and savarna feminists, I just want to be absolutely clear that I do not agree with this BS. I’m Dalit, I’m feminist. I subscribe to the politics of Babasaheb Ambedkar, bell hooks, and my Dalit sisters/queer friends.

    — Malarăsculat 🌸 (@caselchris1) May 28, 2020

    NEW THREAD: The ‘Feminism is Brahmanism’ transcript published on Savari is a regressive, reductionist piece of garbage, the likes of which I haven’t come across in a long time. This post is not about refuting it. Dalit womxn and Dalit queer people have put forward their responses

    — Malarăsculat 🌸 (@caselchris1) June 19, 2020

    I just read Anu Ramdas article and I had a few thoughts:
    1. You can’t use google image search results as proof of any sort of point
    2. You just cannot say “feminism is brahminism” when so many bahujans identify as feminists.

    — (((Dominique Fisherwoman))) 💙 (@AbbakkaHypatia) May 29, 2020

    No. I don’t suggest that, i only said the Dalit Feminism is brainchild of Brahmanism. As The Dalit Feminist Standpoint is written by a Brahmin – and the Dalit feminism is a academic, NGO project of Brahmins Savarnas.

    — Dr.B.Karthik Navayan (@Navayan) May 24, 2020

    Every now and then, a significant number of Dalit womxn raise their voice against patriarchy and misogyny within their circles, and every now and then, they are shushed by ‘passionate’ savarna allies, Dalit-Bahujan men, and other Dalit-Bahujan women. https://t.co/u26QZ9GfTy

    — Malarăsculat 🌸 (@caselchris1) May 26, 2020

    @Navayan the whole feminism is against the Brahmanism. And people who are against feminism are themselves slaves of Brahmanism. or probably they have zero understanding of what Feminism is all about. Which eventually means they are oppressors of women.

    — Vaishali paliyal (@VaishaliPaliyal) May 25, 2020

    What we see in these is that there are two view points and one political issue.
    The political issue appears to be that there is an attempt to cover-up patriarchy inside Dalit communities. I don’t know much about the background of this.
    But the differing view point is easy to figure out.
    One side (mostly consisting of Dalit feminists) believe that their kind of feminism is what “feminism” is (or should be). And that is reasonable.
    The mistake made by Anu Ramdas’ side seems to be that they don’t acknowledge these Dalit feminists at all. They say that all of Dalit feminism is brahmanism NGOs telling Dalits what to do.
    If they had said “Dalit feminists exist, but so do Savarna feminists and the latter is same as brahmanism”, I think both sides would have agreed.
    The question remains though. What kinds of feminism do we see around us? Are all of these feminists subscribed to the fourth wave of feminism? How much of them don’t oppose brahmanism? Perhaps there’s no way to systematically measure this. But I have a sense that intersectional feminism is slowly catching up in India.

  • How Not Having a Computer Science Degree Makes Me a Good Programmer

    I didn’t go to an engineering college. Looking back, I’m very glad that I didn’t. If I had gone to an engineering college in India, I would probably have dropped out very quickly.
    This post is not about how engineering colleges waste 880,350 years of India’s youth every year. But if anyone teaching in an engineering college is reading this post, I would urge them to read “Teaching Tech Together” and think about their pedagogical approach to teaching adults. These days, people become adults (at least in learning psychology) even more quickly than before.
    Being on my own has put me in a perpetual beginner’s mode. I’m always learning. I’m never sure about something. I often seek better ways of doing things. I keep reading the documentation. I keep reading tutorials. I keep building and rebuilding mental models.
    I do not learn from textbooks. While textbooks may make things easier in some way, they also remove a lot of details from you. A language might have introduced a new feature with an accompanying blog post that includes details about alternate approaches they tried and why they chose the final one they chose. A textbook might not go into such details. A lot of that meta information is lost. A lot of my learning has come from comparing different approaches and learning why the differences matter.
    I do not learn for a pen and paper exam. This is a universal mistake by higher education departments. Why on earth do we have pen and paper exams in professional fields like engineering and medicine? What good is being able to write 2 pages about a “wrapper class” or about “diabetic retinopathy” if I cannot use wrapper classes in my programs or prevent diabetic retinopathy in my patients, respectively? The way someone learns when they have to write about something is very different from the way they learn when they have to use something. It is the same as learning bicycling. In India, you can have a PhD in bicycling without knowing how to ride a bicycle. Because we do not evaluate tacit knowledge.
    In being self-taught I evaluate myself. And that puts the learner me in a very difficult spot. The evaluator me knows exactly how much the learner me knows. And therefore, the learner me is forced to continuously plug holes in the knowledge framework. It is also a real-time, continuous formative assessment that I go through every day. Even before I open the code editor I know that I don’t know how to do something. A lot of my learning happens on my mobile phone browser when I’m traveling or eating.
    —
    Last day I was faced with the question, what is a good learning resource to start programming as an adult learner?
    I thought about it for a while. As per teaching tech together, the mental models have to be built first. The problem with sending a learner with no background in programming to “learn x in y minutes” websites is that many of these courses do not approach it pedagogically either.
    Then I thought, perhaps a pedagogical approach that happens online would utilize the instant feedback that learning programming through javascript can give in the browser. So I searched “learn programming through javascript” and reached on a course by Google. Interestingly, in the prerequisites of the course is a brilliant course called “Think Like a computer: the logic of programming“. This is a good start. (Although it starts with object oriented programming and I would love to see a similar course for functional programming. But of late I’ve been thinking OOP and FP are the same at some level and so it doesn’t matter).

  • Do You Think All Human Beings Are Equal?

    At the end of Srimathi Gopalakrishnan’s post titled “Sexism in Medicine : The Eternal Confusion and The Innocent Mistake” there is a link that goes to areyouafeminist.com
    *SPOILER ALERT*: Take the test, if you want to.
    There are only two questions on that site which tests whether you are a feminist.
    1. Do you think all human beings are equal?
    2. Do you think women are human beings?
    When you answer yes to both these, you are confirmed to be a feminist.
    It seems like everyone would pass this test. Where are we deceiving ourselves though? Why isn’t the world full of feminists when it is so easy to be one?
    It is the first question. “Do you think all human beings are equal?” We tend to think that we think all human beings are equal. But are all human beings equal?
    What would explain a wage gap between two people doing the same job? What would explain a wage gap between two people who spend the same number of hours on their respective jobs?
    One could say that the wage differs because the output of two people doing work for the same hours is not equal. If a smart programmer codes for an hour she might produce better, readable, and maintainable code than a not-so-smart programmer does in 4 hours.
    In the free market, all that matters is the market value of what one produces. If what you supply is a rare resource, you are paid more, and vice versa.
    If it isn’t market price, what is it that we mean when we say all human beings are equal?
    Is there an “intrinsic worth” of human beings that we consider to be equal in all human beings? “When there is a pandemic, every life will count the same“? I say bull shit to that. There is a pandemic right now. The measures adopted to tackle it are grossly inconsiderate of the needs of a large number of people in our society. Even during life or death situations, “intrinsic worth” of humans is nowhere counted. What use is an equality which has no role in reality?
    This is where the question “Do you think all human beings are equal?” fails to be useful.
    The right question to ask is “Do you think all human beings should be equal?” That is a progressive and a transformative question. It accounts for the inequities in our society and asks us “Are you willing to make amends?”
    It also paves way for a deeper discussion on the reasons for inequities. It makes us introspect on what we are willing to give up in the effort to make all human beings equal. It forces us to acknowledge privilege and to be inclusive. It makes us rethink social and political order. It makes us question what rights are and what rights should be. It makes us wonder what it means to be a human.
    Do you think all human beings should be equal?

  • How Many Genders Are There In Our Languages?

    I stumbled on Trans 101 website today. The videos in there are literally the best I have seen in the past few weeks.

    I’m embedding the first video, but there are 6.

    Head over to the Trans 101 website for the rest.

    I learned a lot of things while watching the videos. Reading them all in this post would take you longer than simply watching the video. So I’m not going to write about all that.

    In the second video Margot makes a point about how she felt incredibly happy when her mother introduced her to others as her “daughter”. That made me think about non-binary individuals. What word would they be happy about when their parent calls them that?

    What about a non-binary parent? What should their child call them?

    I soon realized that there are a lot of words, especially in the context of relationships, that are very much based on the (obsolete) binary concept of gender.

    A quick search revealed a Washington Post column where a parent is confused on how to introduce their child. What caught my attention is not just the answer to that question. The question also included a reference to the orientation of the child. That made me realize how very problematic our language’s poverty is when it comes to gender and sexuality. When a transgender male is attracted to females, are they called homosexual or heterosexual?*

    Perhaps it is better to not name anything anything and just call it all a spectrum.

    Perhaps it is useful to name a few things. I don’t know.

    Anyhow, there is this wiki on gender neutral English that’s useful. And this writing guide is helpful for bloggers like me who have in the past abused repeating names as a way to avoid pronouns.

    As an aside, while looking through the wiki I also remembered how I could never find a word to describe Swathi when filling out a form. Partner? Sounds like we’re directing a company. Beloved? Who writes that on a form? Significant other? Too colloquial. Our languages really need to grow with the growth of civilizations.

    Coming back to the point about written forms of communication. What happens when you want to write about someone and they are gender fluid and prefers to be referred by pronouns that match how they are feeling at any moment? I hope all fluid people are cool not to care about pronouns in such scenarios.

    *What does orientation actually mean? Is someone’s orientation determined by what gender expression they get aroused by? Is sexuality only about arousal?

    There seems to be some answers in The Genderbread Person which is a cool website. They have broken “attraction” into sexual attraction and romantic attraction. Perhaps the concept of orientation needs to be thrown away altogether?

    Now, there is one more unresolved thing in my head. It is about an umbrella term for all whose gender expression or gender identity are socially complicated by their anatomical sex and the societal expectations of whom they are attracted to based on that. LGBT doesn’t include everyone. Queer is derogatory for some. LGBTQIA+ is the term I am thinking of using these days. But, this wiki has some alternatives.

    What is pretty clear, though, is that our spoken language has to pick up a lot of these words.