Kalliyam

Few of my very good friends or family have more than a passing interest in my passions.     I would worry about them if they did.     Or else I might be identifying with, say, a professional sports team and calling them “our” team.     Okay, no harm, no foul.     Maybe.     But what I’m talking about is  personal  stuff, the stuff that   you  want that makes up your  tastes .     If you have any tastes then it’s likely you also have conflicts of interest with yourself. I made sure that my children did not follow in my career footsteps and both gratefully found life-partners more sane, sober, and unlike me than I could have imagined.  They’re all very good people.  Your children grow up, if you let their mistakes be their own and not yours, then they leave and will get on with being human without you having made the matter of living harder.  Don't make anyone else's life harder, ...

Last night I was thinking about doing yoga---you know, Stretching in Sanskrit---but drank some tequila instead. This will, of course, getcha' to thinking about quails. A clear choice made to face a ruinous world in which the numbers never really add up or amount to enough to change the inevitable. I could either lament the absence of more tequila or I could read the Book of Numbers. I'm sure this choice also sounds familiar to those among you who have considered the consequences of too much God and too little tequila. For a brief moment I considered a healthier alternative, perhaps some asana washed down by kale smoothie? It always helps when I'm genuinely depressed to think about doing some yoga (insert ordinary meaning). Of course that's invariably where it ends too. Thinking is exhausting enough. So to insure I wasn't going to think anymore much less do "yoga," I got about gettin’ on my wrathful, angry, fuckedup OldTestament Almighty. The Lord...

If you are reading this then you're the Friend to whom this addressed.  It won't matter if you know the mentions.  Kabir called Friend those with whom he shared the world and his own conscience.  That is enough for me. It's Valentine's Day. And I say with all me heart that I love thee. And it is true. Thank you for you. Knowing you have such friends will sustain a life when there is so much distance and time to traverse. Is it my imagination but I see a world where even the thin veneers of civility have cracked. Beneath is a militancy, a kind of violence that seems like Hobbes' description of the war of all against all. I cannot participate. My sense of engagement and even my mildest "activism" has retreated behind Sadie's invisible fence. It's easy to cross into the yard and you are all so very welcome. But I shudder every time, every single time I step out. India feels stolen and how shall we return safely anytime soon? I find the id...

It’s not very adult of me to continue to be inspired by the original National Lampoon movie   Animal House .     Sorry.     ‘Can’t help it.     Plus, Belushi.     So there’s that.     I   need   to laugh at the tragic absurdity, the painful truth, the helplessly hoping that wonders if her harlequin still hovers. I am offended by almost everything but what's about that is new?  It's not like being "offended" is anything but smīva.   Smīva is the Sanskrit phrase used in the Gita for when Krsna "as if smiles" when Arjuna finally breaks down and asks for help.   It's what my mother used to call "that look on your face."  Well, that might be all I got: that look on my face. I refuse to make others bend to my tender feelings problems, so I'm not inclined to bend to theirs.  If you’re easily offended by this or that word or gesture or idea I might only appear to be nice about indulging that...

   I’m feeling helpless and I’d bet a lot of others feel the same way.  But in my case that helplessness, at least as far as this pandemic is concerned, doesn’t feel so bad. We’re going on two years of a deadly, sometimes debilitating disease.  I feel for those who have suffered, whether that be from the disease or its consequences.  If your livelihood has depended on being in the world and the world you need has “gone away,” I am genuinely sorry. Those who think that being a college professor is about engaging young people and talking in public usually don’t realize that getting this job involves a solitary, deeply private obsession and a lifestyle that is, at least quantitatively, more isolating than social.  At least this is the way it is in the humanities.  Ironic, no? The humanist writes his books and papers usually without collaboration, with little need or recourse to socializing events.  There are conferences,...

The evidence is in.  The facts seem incontrovertible.  I mean, we have the evidence and let us for a moment suspend if we might the legalities, fraud, evasion, and bullshit.  Can we?  Not rhetorical.  'Cause if we can't, we're in trouble.  Are we in trouble?  You betcha.  Can we agree on what the evidence before us is telling us?  To be able to read the evidence is to able to make an argument.  Most people are not very skilled at this process.  Who are we kidding?   It's about to get worse.  You see, whe n people tell you who they are and then they  do what they say they are going to do , what more does it take to believe what we need to do?  Is it not plain to the meanest mind?  Not always.  People say all sorts of stuff that they mean but don't do and stuff that they do but don't mean.  People are nothing like perfectly predictable but nothing else is either.  Those ...

      It’s almost two years since the Covid pandemic shut down life as we’d known it and changed lives in ways we weren’t predicting and surely didn’t anticipate.  There's really no end in sight.  We know that because a significant portion of our population refuses to do what's right.   Kant thought that when we understood rationally what the right thing to do is, we'd do it and that we have a moral obligation to do it.  In other words, Kant thought that there was an imperative to good when reason presents a case with which we must concur.  Bless his Vulcan heart but that bird don't fly.   People don't do what's right because it's right anymore than they will change their minds because the argument is sound.  Nah.  They will do whatever they want so far as they can.  I don't oppose rewarding or incentivizing those who can't be reasoned with and I don't care if they change their minds or come to the right...