General Semantics in India

So, I was pleased to have received a new volume in the mail, all the way from Delhi, an anthology edited by Deepa Mishra, a professor of English at the University of Mumbai, entitled General Semantics: A Critical Companion. I'd give you the link for Amazon, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available there, but you can order the book from the Kaveri Book Service, where it seems to be very reasonably priced ($13.95 list, discounted to $12.56, as of today, but I don't know what they're charging for shipping and handling).

So, I had the sudden urge to use the "Add a Photo" function on Twitter. Yeah, I know it's old hat, but I've generally avoided that sort of thing. But since there wasn't an Amazon page with the book cover, I figured, let me do one of those twitpics for once.  So here it is:

So like, yeah, ummm, what's wrong with this picture? I took it via Mac's Photo Booth application, and I should have remembered that it does mirror images from the last time I used it:

Well, just another reminder that the map is not the territory, and maybe I'll have better luck (or memory) next time. In any event, with a little help from Mac's Preview application, let's straighten things out:

Yes, that's much better, don't you think? So let me share a little more, but now via my iPhone's TurboScan app. First, here's the front inside cover book flap, or whatever you call it:

And let's get the back cover inside book flap thing as well:

Not too shabby, eh? And let's include the title page while we're at it:

And let's flip over from the recto to the verso side:

Now that you have the basic information, I want to share the fact that I was very touched by the dedication page:

 

I met Balvant back in 2009, when I was his guest, and gave an address and a workshop at the Balvant Parekh Centre in Baroda (see my previous posts, A Workshop in Baroda and Just a Few More Images From India). Here's a photo from then, with Balvant on the left, and his brother NK on the right:

I was saddened to learn of his passing last year. One of the amazing things I learned when I met with him was that he first learned about general semantics and became interested in the subject by reading the journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics back when Neil Postman was editor (which ties us back in to my earlier reverso photo of Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited). Anyway, there is a nice write-up about the book over on the Balvant Parekh Centre website, where it says,

As a tribute to Late Balvant K. Parekh who believed in sharing the wealth of knowledge, Deepa Mishra, Associate Professor of English at CHM College has collected and edited articles from scholars who have been studying and doing general semantics for many decades, significant academicians from humanities and social sciences, students, researchers and new entrants to the discipline/ method of general semantics.

There's a picture of Dr. Mishra on the site as well:

And the page also included her own write-up about the book:

General Semantics should not be confused as any particular philosophy or discipline; it can be best regarded as a way of life, which if practiced, can truly open up the latent, but enormous human potential. Breaking away from the Aristotelian tradition which is believed to have casted human thinking in a particular mould, General Semantics does not ground itself in any metaphysical or religious contemplation. It rather draws its conclusions from the rich human experience over the last few thousand years and defines a unique way of engaging with the world around us. This engagement is not only non-conflicting, but also complementary in nature, promising to bind time in an inclusive and forward looking manner; generation after generation. These concepts were initiated by Alfred Korzybski in Manhood of Humanity and subsequently elaborated in much greater detail in his magnum opus, Science and Sanity. However, over the last 90 years, more particularly in the 64 years after Korzybski’s death, his ideas have got limited scholarly and empirical attention, restricted, by and large, only to the United States of America.

The efforts of Balvant Parekh Center for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences can be best regarded as “work-in-progress,” as it is trying to create a new kind of intensity around this early twentieth century thought-innovation. This book is an attempt to capture and showcase some of the recent discussions. While a few of the essays provide a short and precise detour, many of them try to see these thoughts through the prism of the contemporary times. In summary, it is an effective grouping of the old and the new, refreshing to the reader and more importantly, it attempts to create a familiarizing orientation for any new reader.

Of course, no doubt what you would really want to know is, what's in the book, and who the contributors are. Well, depending on your background, you should find at least one familiar name, and maybe a few others. Here are the Contents pages:

So, all in all a very nice volume indeed! Congratulations, Professor Mishra, on a great contribution to humanity's time-binding efforts, and a job well done!

Acronym Acrimony

So, my last post, Filler Up!, was on an area of nonverbal communication, and it's only fair that I follow it up with a post on verbal communication. In this case, it's on abbreviations, and especially acronyms, which are abbreviations that form a word—for example SNAFU is pronounced as one word, and therefore an acronym, as opposed to vocalizing it as ess-en-ay-eff-yu. And in case you don't know what it stands for, and I hope you will excuse the profanity, it's, Situation Normal, All Fucked Up, and like FUBAR, Fucked Up Beyond All Repair (or Reason or Recognition), is an example of military slang.

But note that while slang traditionally refers to a form of speech that has not been legitimized by appearing in print, acronyms and abbreviations are by-products of written communication, and the alphabet. (By the way, it seems that the story that the curse word spelled eff-yu-cee-kay is an acronym, something I recall hearing about in schoolyard back when I was in elementary school, is just an urban legend, at least according to Wikipedia.)

So, if the abbreviation can't be pronounced, it can't become an acronym. For example, HTML lacks any vowels, and it would be awkward and not very compelling to pronounce it as something like hitmul, so we just say aych-tee-em-el. If it is pronounceable, then it may be turned into an acronym, but it's not inevitable that it will be. For example, the abbreviation USA could be pronounced as oossa or youza, but it isn't, its you-ess-ay (repeated ad nauseum as a cheer if you like).

I should add that some acronyms are back formations that take an actual word and work out a workable phrase that it can serve as an abbreviation of. For example, a simple computer programming language that was popular once upon a time was dubbed BASIC, which stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Similarly, Marvel Comics turned the word SHIELD into an acronym for its fictional spy agency, originally having it stand for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division, and then later changing it to Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate, and then in their films and television programs to Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

Speaking of which, I think they did a pretty good job on the new Agents of SHIELD television program on ABC, which recently completed its first season. And speaking of comics, one of the all-time great acronyms is SHAZAM, which stands for the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. Shazam was the name of the wizard who gave the superhero Captain Marvel his powers, or rather who gave young Billy Batson the ability to turn into Captain Marvel by shouting, Shazam! 

Captain Marvel had powers similar to Superman's, so DC (an abbreviation of Detective Comics, although it was then known as National Comics) sued Fawcett Publications, and Fawcett eventually agreed to stop publication of Captain Marvel. DC later bought the rights to publish Fawcett's superheroes, including Captain Marvel, but in the meantime Marvel Comics had introduced their own superhero with that name, naturally enough given the name of that company, and DC consequently has been using Shazam more and more over the past few decades in reference to the character instead of Captain Marvel, and recently renamed the hero Shazam, dropping Captain Marvel altogether. 

Anyway, the point here is that the exclamation, Shazam!, worked its way into popular speech, and while its meaning as an acronym is still present in the comics, in other contexts that meaning was lost (which is reflected by the fact that it's printed as Shazam and not SHAZAM). This compilation of clips from the 1960s CBS sitcom, Gomer Pyle, USMC (pronounced yu-ess-em-cee), starring Jim Nabors, while a bit obnoxious, demonstrates how he used shazam! as an exclamation alongside golly and gosh (slang words that are not abbreviations of anything), and utterly devoid of its acronmymic meaning. This, by the way, was the first I ever heard of the expression, as the original Captain Marvel comic ceased publication several years before I was born, and he wasn't resurrected by DC until I was a teenager. Anyway, through Gomer Pyle, Shazam! was transformed into a kind of military slang, at least on television. And also on record album, it appears:





But this winding and long-winded introduction is meant to introduce the topic of abbreviations and acronyms as a part of the public discourse of our culture, and following the same pattern as my last post, the fact that I have some comments on the topic began with a query from Palash Ghosh of the International Business Times, which I'll provide first, along with my response.  In this instance, Ghosh sent me the following query: 

can you make a comment on the use of acronyms and abbreviations in media.

I have noticed that media/newspapers/magazines in my native India use abbreviations and acronyms all the time–perhaps even excessively. I realize the acronyms and abbreviations are necessary as short-cuts and they are also used in western media–but do you such things are used too much in media? If so, do they serve to confuse the reader? Do most media have to use these things due to the urgency of instantaneous communications?

And here now is my reply:

Acronyms and abbreviations are quite common in American culture. For example, POTUS recently delivered the SOTU, many members of the SCOTUS were present, and it went off without a SNAFU, and most Americans who watched it on TV thought it was OK. It seems as if we never pass up an opportunity to shorten a word, either by cutting off syllables, which is why the head of a committee is called a chair now, rather than substituting chairperson as a non-sexist alternative to chairman, or by substituting initials for full names and terms. Sometimes I think us Americans would be happiest if we could only reduce our words down to a series of grunts.

Abbreviations and acronyms are an unintended consequences of the invention of the alphabet, and have their origins in antiquity. When words could only be written out by hand, or even more laboriously chiseled out of stone, abbreviations were welcome, sometimes necessary to make words fit into a limited space, and had the added utility of functioning as icons for the illiterate, who could recognize the look of the symbols and recall their meaning without actually reading, that is sounding out, the letters. For example, in ancient Israel, the name Maccabee, associated with the holiday of Hanukkah, is an acronym that stands for Mi Chamocha Ba'alim Adonai, the beginning of one of the oldest prayers in the Bible, translated as, "Who is like unto You among the gods (that are worshipped), O Lord?" In the early Christian church, abbreviations such as IHS were used as symbols for Jesus Christ--in this case IHS corresponds to the first three letters of the name Jesus in the Greek alphabet, iota, eta, and sigma, and is also said to stand for the Latin phrase, Iesus Hominum Salvator, which means Jesus, Savior of Men.

Gutenberg's invention of printing with moveable type made the need for abbreviations less pressing than before. While there still would be a degree of economy achieved in using initials and acronyms when typesetting a page, the investment made in spelling things out would be returned in the mass production of the document, as the mechanization of what was once written out by hand would yield economies of scale in the form of multiple, identical copies with increased legibility, clarity, and accessibility. The invention of the telegraph in the early 19th century restored the need for economy of expression, as pricing often was based on the number of words used. As this first of the electronic media made instantaneous communication possible, speed went hand in hand with brevity, and the use of abbreviations and acronyms was intensified as never before. Telegraphic discourse not only was seen in the exchange of messages among individuals via telegrams, but in the transmission of news reports over the wires, which led newspapers to adopt the pyramid structure for articles (beginning with the most important information in the first paragraph, and continuing in descending order, rather than in telling a story in linear fashion from beginning to middle to end), the mosaic look of the front page (again, nonlinear and anticipating the current hypertextual interface of the World-Wide Web), and the big, bold headline, where abbreviations and acronyms were visually trumpeted. This made telegraphic discourse, including the use of abbreviations and acronyms, a central part of the culture.

Telegraphic discourse was further intensified by the addition of wireless telegraph, radio, and television, but it is especially in communication via electronic text that it is most apparent. This begins with the use of email going back to the 70s, and is reinforced a little later by the addition of synchronous messaging, aka chat, which puts even more pressure on the participants communicating in real time to use the fast, most efficient means of sending messages. The further economy imposed by the 160 character limit of SMS or text messaging via cell phones, and Twitter's 140 character limit piggybacking on top of SMS, has led to an explosion of such textual devices as lol, brb, bff, not to mention the innovation of emoticons, the use of typographical symbols to convey facial expressions and emotional states.

There are times when speed and efficiency are necessary, and times when the available writing space is limited, so that economical use of abbreviations and acronyms can be helpful. Acronyms also can serve mnemonic functions, as for example students memorize the names of the Great Lakes through the acronym HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). But in American culture, and in technological societies in general, the extent to which telegraphic discourse has come to dominate contemporary communication is a symptom of what Jacques Ellul called "the humiliation of the word." It represents a loss of the richness of language, a disregard for poetics and rhetoric, for eloquence in human communication, and as well a loss of nuance and precision, and consequently an increase in the likelihood of misunderstanding. Our overuse of abbreviations and acronyms is one of several facets of the degraded form of discourse that constitutes communication in the 21st century.

So that was my take on the media ecology of acronyms, and how we may be abbreviating ourselves to death, as well as informing, amusing, and amazing ourselves to death as well. 

So now, on February 5, 2014, the International Business Times published Ghosh's article on the subject, which is entitled, Alphabet Soup: Why Is Indian Media So Obsessed With Acronyms And Abbreviations?  And while he did bring up India in his query, I will admit to being surprised that his article focused on India, which made for an interesting cross-cultural comparison:

Consider the following passage from a recent article published in The Hindu newspaper of India: “CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat on Monday expressed hope that the AIADMK-Left alliance would ensure success in Tamil Nadu.”

Or this paragraph from Indian Express: “The allegations against Jaitley and Modi came from AAP MLA from Kasturba Nagar, Madan Lal… Reports suggested that Lal was one of the MLAs who would support expelled AAP MLA Vinod Kumar Binny. Along with JD(U) MLA Shoaib Iqbal and Independent MLA Rambir Shokeen, Binny had threatened to pull down the AAP government.”

Or this ditty from India Today: “Final postmortem report from the medical board of the doctors of AIIMS is awaited. This final report will also take toxicology report from CFSL/CBI into consideration… On January 30 at around 5 pm, he was brought dead in AIIMS accordingly a case u/s 302 IPC & 3 of SC/ST Act was registered."

With respect to the first example, CPI(M) refers to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – to distinguish it from the regular Communist Party of India, which is usually labelled as just CPI.

The AIADMK refers to the extravagantly named All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the political party that currently runs the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

In reference to the second example, AAP refers to the Aam Aadmi Party, a new anti-corruption party that swept into power in the capital city of Delhi. MLA means Member of Legislative Assembly – an office that is just below MP (Member of Parliament). JD(U) refers to Janata Dal (United), a center-left Indian political party.

In the incomprehensible third example, AIIMS refers to the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (a group of public medical schools across the country), while CFSL is the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, a branch of the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs. Also, CBI stands for the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s principal police investigation agency. The last sentence in that paragraph simply may seem to defy translation – but 302 IPC refers to Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code, while SC/ST Act refers to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989, a law designed to prevent abuse and mistreatment of lower-caste Indians.

In any case, these three passages underline one of the fundamental realities of Indian media and communications – the obsession with acronyms and abbreviations. For the uninitiated, reading an Indian newspaper, magazine or government publication could become quite daunting.

At this point, we do get a connection to American culture, and perhaps to the English language in particular:

Of course, such devices are used to save space and time – and they are also widely used in Western media. For example, in the United States, John F. Kennedy has become the iconic “JFK,” while in Europe the notorious Dominique Strauss-Kahn has metamorphosed into the more familiar “DSK.”

Still, in the English-language media of the Indian subcontinent (which also includes Pakistan and Bangladesh) the use of acronyms and abbreviations in communications seems almost pathological. Within India itself, the plethora of political parties, political groups and titles for lawmakers, military personnel and educators has created an immense reservoir of acronyms and abbreviations that boggle the readers’ mind and threaten to drown the meaning behind the text of media pieces. The inundation of so many acronyms likely looks like gobbledygook to non-Indian readers.

Patralekha Chatterjee, a New Delhi-based journalist, admitted that Indian media rely too heavily on the use of acronyms, but explained the realities behind this practice. “Sometimes, it is also because of the constraints of space,” she said in an interview. “Space is at a massive premium because of [advertisements], etc.” In addition, the name of some Indian political parties and luminaries are so long, like the aforementioned All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, that abbreviations become necessary.

Indeed, English may be the lingua franca of Indian media, finance and politics, but it is a second language for hundreds of millions of people who speak hundreds of other different languages and thousands of dialects – rendering the use of an alien tongue a questionable and imperfect attempt to foster a kind of national unity.

But something has gotten lost in the translation.

Chatterjee also noted that most Indian journalists try to squeeze in some context and write the full name of an organization (or political party or branch of government, etc.) at the start of an article and then follow with acronyms. “But it ultimately depends on the readership,” she said. “If the [editorial] desk thinks [that] most of your readers would be familiar with a certain acronym, then it is used. But if you are referring to something which would be unfamiliar to the average reader of the newspaper/magazine, then it is the full name.”

Since Chatterjee writes for the international and national media, she tries to minimize the use of acronyms in her works. “I can imagine all this being extremely confusing to a foreigner or someone who is not familiar with what is going on in India and picks up a newspaper/magazine,” she conceded.

It's an interesting question. Certainly, the use of acronyms is a general function of the alphabet, and in some ways amplified by typography. And it does seem as if the English language in its written form makes greater use of abbreviations than other languages, perhaps because of the idiosyncrasies of English spelling? But its overuse does strike me as an effect of electronic communications, and the technological drive towards greater and greater efficiency. Those factors, I would think, are what have pushed this usage over the edge.)

The practice has also become epidemic in the United States. On a blog for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, John McIntyre called for a limitation on the use of abbreviations, amidst concern that their presence may compromise readability. “Professional publications embrace abbreviations and acronyms much more readily as a kind of lodge handshake identifying who is in the club,” McIntyre wrote. “Lawyers and civil servants are particularly addicted to the practice.” McIntyre suggested that his personal preference is to minimize abbreviations and acronyms “because they distract me and quickly convey a leaden bureaucratic tone to articles.”

As in India, documents produced by the U.S. government, medical, military and scientific organizations are typically overwhelmed with acronyms. As a blogger on the Baltimore Sun complained: “As one who has spent many hours editing Defense Department documents, I have seen too many pages reduced to incomprehensible alphabet soup by acronyms. Their use should be minimized; that's not even a question.”

What about my response, you may be wondering at this point. Or probably not, but I'll remind you anyway, and here it comes:

It seems as if we never pass up an opportunity to shorten a word, either by cutting off syllables, which is why the head of a committee is called a chair now, rather than substituting chairperson as a non-sexist alternative to chairman, or by substituting initials for full names and terms, commented Dr. Lance Strate, professor of communication and media studies and associate ‘chair’ for undergraduate studies at Fordham University in New York. “Sometimes I think us Americans would be happiest if we could only reduce our words down to a series of grunts.”

And that's all, at least for now, as we get a second opinion on the inhospitality of the practice:

No less a figure than J.W. “Bill” Marriott, the executive chairman and chairman of the board of the hotel chain Marriott International Inc. (NASDAQ:MAR,) has spoken out against the excessive use of abbreviations. In a witty blog he titled “T.M.A. – Too Many Acronyms!,” Marriott bemoaned the infiltration of acronyms and abbreviations in daily communications. “We have far too many acronyms,” he lamented. “It started with government agencies (GOV), and it has invaded corporate (CORP) headquarters (HQ). Like an invasive species, it’s threatening to choke off innovation.”

As a native of Washington, D.C., he noted, acronyms are part of his very blood. “There’s DC [District of Columbia], DOD [Department of Defense], DOT [Department of Transportation] and DOJ [Department of Justice],” he quipped. “Don’t confuse the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] with the FEC [Federal Election Commission] or the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] and FDA [Food & Drug Administration]. We all know the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NIH [National Institutes of Health] and EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. In the corporate world, we tremble when we hear SEC [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission], IRS [Internal Revenue Service] or FTC [Federal Trade Commission].”

Marriott noted that the three-letter acronyms seem to have a “prestige and status” over the four- or five-letter ones, citing that the longer acronym usually salutes the shorter one – i.e., NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] to DOT or DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]to DOD. “I’ll leave you with my favorite acronym: STML – short-term memory loss,” Marriott concluded. “Let’s forget these useless acronyms. Chances are we already have. We don’t understand them.”

Now the emergence (and seeming omnipresence) of social media will likely give acronyms an even higher place in our daily lives – and that’s nothing to LOL about.

Ghosh does give me the last word, however:

But Strate cautions than acronyms have a long history and are likely to remain as long as humans communicate.

“Abbreviations and acronyms are an unintended consequences of the invention of the alphabet, and have their origins in antiquity,” he noted. “When words could only be written out by hand, or even more laboriously chiseled out of stone, abbreviations were welcome, sometimes necessary to make words fit into a limited space, and had the added utility of functioning as icons for the illiterate, who could recognize the look of the symbols and recall their meaning without actually reading, that is sounding out, the letters.”

Still, as a scholar and one who wishes to preserve the beauty of language, Strate laments: “Our overuse of abbreviations and acronyms is one of several facets of the degraded form of discourse that constitutes communication in the 21st century.”

And there you have it! Acronyms are, in moderation, a bit of a SHAZAM!-like magic transformation. But used too frequently and it's SNAFU, with language and culture threatening to go entirely FUBAR. At least, that's my abbreviated take on the matter.


 

Musings on the Muse in Exile

A while back I received a review copy of a 42-page chapbook entitled Muse in Exile, a collection of about a dozen poems (depending on how you count them) by Dilip Bharati, and published in India by Roman Books (and available through all of the major online booksellers).  On their website, they provide the following blurb about the poet:

Dilip Bharati was born in the undivided Bengal in 1934. His profound mastery over philosophy, science and advocacy culminates in his literary talent. His first book in Bengali, published in 1975, was an instant critical success and the novels published thereafter acclaimed him as a noted literary figure. Bharati used to live in a small town near the Bay of Bengal with his wife, children and grandchildren until his sudden death on 9th January 2010.

As for the book itself, they also provide the blurb that appears on the back cover:

The appearance of Dilip Bharati in the Indian literary scene presages new vistas in world literature itself. After writing in his native language for about four decades, Bharati, with this collection, turns to English. Muse in Exile accommodates some of Bharati’s best English poems which question the contemporary mode of writing poetry. The onslaught of faux naïf poets was too much for the inspirer of poetic imagination—the Muse. And she left disconsolate. Out of flux the poet gropes for the Muse in exile. The pen scratches out words that remain a frantic search for a foothold that is mercurial, and the poetic voices are scattered here and there like scraps of paper. The poems on despair, love and beauty are marked off by an exotic approach. In short, Muse in Exile is a soul-searcher’s tour-de-force—an indispensable read for a contemporary reader.

Now, I have to confess to a fondness for the English language poetry of the past, with its formal qualities, as opposed to much of what passes as poetry today.  Not that it's possible today to produce the same kind of poetry that was written, say, in the 18th and 19th centuries without it looking forced and phony, and perhaps that's something of a tragedy, but somehow in the rush to create a new idiom, we've lost the beauty and majesty that  English language poetry is capable of producing.

Maybe many of our contemporary poets have just become too self-conscious, and too infected by postmodern irony, and the informal style of electronically-mediated secondary orality, to find a way to build on the poetry of the past, rather than renege on its promise.  So perhaps, it is only by crossing cultural divides that such traditions can find new life.

My trip to India last October was a revelation, as I didn't expect the level of interest and devotion to the English language and literature that I encountered there (I was also surprised at the affection for and lack of resentment felt towards their former colonial overlords).  Because of that experience, I was not surprised to fine a wonderful merging of traditional British literary sensibility with something fresh and different, both contemporary and cross-cultural, in this little collection of posthumously published poems.

So, for example, the book opens with one of many love poems, "To my Tutan," which begins

How long abreast were we
In weal and woe, still
Never did I go well nigh,
Lest browbeaten be.
More feared I, should ye
Be looking at me!

This is traditional, and yet somehow does not seem out of place, and time, to me.  A second poem, "Re-living You," reflects a synthesis of styles.  Here is the 3rd stanza:

Do you remember the days of
Those 'debatable topics'
'Are the Indian girls going astray?
Singing the song of wilderness
In bikinis gay?'
No.  I mist myself in sandal dew
Of their slender waists!

The 8th stanza employs a metaphor that I can't help but enjoy:

  I had no hard luck though.
My words were written down on your page.
Recorded the re-recorded . . .
  The copy-right of yours
Is surviving still!

The poems in this collection deal with love and loss, with mortality and finality.  A stanza from "Unuttered Melody" is a sample of the poignancy of Bharati's writing:

The silence now is charming more.
The deep roaring of the waves
                                                   broken of the sea,
The great panoramic sound of the universe,
And the unheard sound of the formless cosmos--
Remain latent all
In the elemental physique of human beings.

And indeed, it is the humanity of this poetry that appeals to me, that it speaks to the essence of what makes us human, the sad truth that life is short.  The title poem of this collections speaks eloquently to this--here is how it ends:

  You took your sad flight
Beyond the elegiac country churchyard.
Only a wasteland remained--
And dusty muggy nuclear heat.
A grinding machine extricated you
               from the soul of men.

Now that Muse in exile--
Upholds a theatrical glory . . .  merely
That speaks no more.

The new-age rules; not love.
Now that Muse . . .  is in Exile.

Tagore lent me a sleep
I shall close my weary eye-lids
                                        without a word!

These selections are representative of the first ten poems in the collection.  Following them comes a section called "Journey" that consists of three parts (or separate poems) entitled "Intelligence," "Knowledge," and "Wisdom," and are written in a more familiar, conversational style, and also quite engaging.  And the book ends with a section called "Queer Table Talk," which consists of ten untitled parts (or short poems) that are amusing, and include references to Lear, Helen, Cleopatra, Eve, Pearl Harbor, Clinton, the Berlin Wall, Virginia Woolf, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and Lara Croft.  Perhaps the last one in this series is worth closing this review with:

We are one in love
One in hate
One in pleasure and pain
Sun and Rain
We are no man and woman
But only Human.

Indeed, in my opinion, Dilip Bharati's Muse in Exile is one of the most human collections of poetry to be published in a long time.

Learning to See

In my previous post, Perception and Reception, I noted that the concept of information reception in communication and information theory, along with the process of abstracting in general semantics, are closely related to the biological and psychological process of perception.  Perception is not a matter of simply taking in information passively from our environment, but rather it is an active process of probing the environment, selecting what we will attend to, interpreting what we take in, and essentially constructing our view of the world. 

In War and Peace in the Global Village, Marshall McLuhan's 1968 follow-up to his bestselling collaboration, The Medium is the Massage (both books listing Quentin Fiore, who supplied the graphics, as the co-author, and both produced by Jerome Agel), he explains that patients who are born blind and later receive an operation enabling them to see cannot at first make sense of the visual data that their eyes take in.  All that they "see" are patches of light and dark and colors, and it is only through actively engaging with their environment that they learn how to make sense out of their visual sense.

This is exactly what Pawan Sinha talks about in this TED Talk that I am embedding below.  The first 8 minutes of the talk provide a poignant overview of the problem of congenital blindness, and his work aiding blind children in India.  It is very moving, and worth viewing in my opinion, but it is only in the last 10 minutes that he gets into the nitty gritty of how the brain learns how to see.

The brief description accompanying the video is as follows:

Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

While the topic of autism is only briefly mentioned at the end, it is interesting to note the similarity between the temporary problem that the typical brain faces in making sense out of visual stimuli for the first time resemble the ongoing problem that autistic brains encounter in organizing and interpreting such data.

There is also a very interesting point made here about the importance of dynamic input, that is visual motion.  I have long understood that it was active engagement with the environment, which require motion on the viewer's part, that was essential to the process of learning how to see.  The idea that it is also vital to view objects characterized by change and motion makes perfect sense to me.  It also reminds me of the fact that animals that lack binocular vision have to rely on motion to a large extent in using their eyes--this was a plot point in Jurassic Park, you may remember.

Anyway, let me turn the stage over to Sinha, who is well worth 18 minutes of your time:

 

The TED Talk bio for Sinha simply reads, "Pawan Sinha researches how our brains interpret what our eyes see -- and uses that research to give blind children the gift of sight."  A link to the TED bio page for Sinha includes a longer blurb which I find worthy of quoting here:

At Pawan Sinha's MIT lab, he and his team spend their days trying to understand how the brain learns to recognize and use the patterns and scenes we see around us. To do this, they often use computers to model the processes of the human brain, but they also study human subjects, some of whom are seeing the world for the very first time and can tell them about the experience as it happens. They find these unusual subjects through the humanitarian branch of their research, Project Prakash.

Project Prakash sets up eye-care camps in some of the most habitually underserved regions of India, and gives free eye-health screenings to, since 2003, more than 700 functionally blind children. The children are then treated without charge, even if they do not fit the profile that would make them eligible for Sinha's research.

Sinha's eventual goal is to help 500 children each year; plans are under way for a center for visual rehabilitation in new Delhi. The special relationship that Sinha has created between research and humanitarianism promises to deliver on both fronts.

"The first thing that prompted me was seeing these numbers, the humanitarian goal was just so evident."

Pawan Sinha

It is not everyday that you come across someone doing groundbreaking scientific research and performing great humanitarian work at the same time.  In Pawan Sinha's case, I think we have someone who is very much cast in the mold of Albert Schweitzer.  I wish him the best of success in all of his efforts.

Just a Few More Images From India

So, I admit it, I'm not much of a photographer, and I didn't have time to do any sightseeing, so I only have a few pictures to share here.

First, here is a picture of me with Balvant Parekh on the left.  Balvant is the sponsor of the Centre (see previous post), and this picture was taken when I visited his office in Mumbai, before going to Baroda for the workshop.  His brother, Narendra (aka NK) Parekh is on the right.  I was delighted to learn that Balvant first learned about general semantics when he saw a copy of ETC: A Review of General Semantics, in 1980.  That has special significance for me because that was the year that I began the media ecology doctoral program at NYU with Neil Postman, who was editing ETC at that time (Neil required us all to join the International Society for General Semantics, the organization that published ETC up until it was merged with the Institute of General Semantics in 2004, and most of our assignments for classes were to write an article for ETC, not that he would necessarily publish them).

So, I felt a special connection to Balvant, and a kind of serendipity.  I only regret that we didn't have more time to talk, and that he was not able to make the trip to Baroda for the workshop, which I'm sure he would have enjoyed.  But it was indeed an honor to meet with one of India's leading industrialists, and his brother NK, a chemical engineer, attended the workshop in its entirety.

After our meeting, NK and I went to lunch at one of the hotels that has been bombed a year earlier, and it was right by the Gateway of India, a monument built by the British in the early 20th century.  Here are a few shots of it from the hotel entrance.

And now, just a few shots from Baroda.  Here's the entrance to my hotel, Hotel Harmony, which was part of something like a strip mall, connected to the building in which the Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences was housed:







And walking down to the Centre, here is one of the participants:

And a couple more, from Nepal:

And one more look at the participants at the workshop:

And that's all for now!  Namaste, as they say!

Wisdom From the Bhagavad Gita

So, on the long trip to India, I decided to read the Bhagavad Gita, or Song Celestial, the sacred poetic text of the Hindu religion (the 1885 translation by Sir Edwin Arnold; London:  Watkins Publishing, 2006).  For a little background, here's a link for the wikipedia article on the Gita, which is believed to date from the 1st century (though some estimates put it as far back as the 5th century BCE).  And I thought I would share some passages that I found particularly significant.

First of all, this is one that is positively McLuhanesque!  At my workshop in Baroda, I told them that I was going to read a poem about the internet, and then read the following lines (Chap. 11, p. 110):

Yea!  mightiest Lord!  I see
Thy thousand thousand arms, and breasts, and faces,
And eyes — on every side
Perfect, diversified;
And nowhere end of Thee, nowhere beginning,
Nowhere a centre!  Shifts —
Wherever soul's gaze lifts —
Thy central Self, all-wielding, and all-winning!

Pretty cool, huh?   It definitely fits, which goes to show that the internet has been around for a couple of millennia now.  Or something...

And now this from earlier in the poem (Chap. 4, p. 44);

Thou sayst, perplexed, It hath been asked before
By singers and by sages, "What is act,
And what inaction?"  I will teach thee this,
And, knowing, thou shalt learn which work doth save
Needs must one rightly meditate those three —
Doing — not doing — and undoing. Here
Thorny and dark the path is! He who sees
How action may be rest, rest action — he
Is wisest 'mid his kind; he hath the truth!

I love the way the binary opposition of action and inaction becomes the triad of doing, not doing, and undoing, the latter reminding me of Neil Postman's insistence that in response to all of the technology boosters going on about all that new technology will do for us, we also need to ask what technology will undo.

Aristotle is often credited with the notion of moderation in all things (or was that moderation in all things, including moderation?), and here is the Gita's take on the Doctrine of the Mean (Chap. 6, pp. 62-63):

But for earthly needs
Religion is not his who too much fasts
Or too much feasts, nor his who sleeps away
An idle mind; nor his who ears to waste
His strength in vigils. Nay, Arjuna! call
That the true piety which most removes
Earth-aches and ills, where one is moderate
In eating and resting, and in sport;
Measured in wish and act; sleeping betimes,
Waking betimes for duty.  When the man,
So living, centres on his soul the thought
Straitly restrained — untouched internally
By stress of sense — then is he Yûkta.  See!

The theme of time being of no small import to this blog, here's a passage on that topic (Chap. 11, pp. 117-118):

Thou seest Me as Time who kills, Time who brings all to doom,
The Slayer Time, Ancient of Days, come hither to consume;
Excepting thee, of all these hosts of hostile chiefs arrayed,
There stands not one shall leave alive the battlefield!  Dismayed
No longer be! Arise!  obtain renown!  Destroy thy foes!
Fight for the kingdom waiting thee when thou hast vanquished those.
By Me they fall — not thee!  the stroke of death is dealt them now,
Even as they show thus gallantly; My instrument art thou!
Strike, strong-armed Prince, at Drona!  At Bhishma strike!  deal death
On Karna, Jyadratha; stay all their warlike breath!
'Tis I who bid them perish!  Thou wilt but slay the slain;
Fight!  they must fall, and thou must live, victor upon this plain!

We find here an aggressive, violent image of time, coupled with a religious sense of predestination that absolves the warrior Prince Arjuna from blame for his actions in war as he is merely the instrument of Krishna's will, and fate.

This next passage brings to mind a basic tenet in general semantics and media ecology, that there is no knowledge without a knower (Chap. 13, pp. 136-137):

Only that knowledge knows which knows the known
By the knower!  What it is, that "field" of life,
What qualities it hath, and whence it is,
And why it changeth, and the faculty
That wotteth it, the mightiness of this,
And how it wotteth — hear these things from Me!
...
The elements, the conscious life, the mind,
The unseen vital force, the nine strange gates
Of the body, and the five domains of sense;
Desire, dislike, pleasure and pain, and thought
Deep-woven, and persistency of being;
These all are wrought on Matter by the Soul!

I also read The Principal Upanishads on the trip (translation by Alan Jacobs; London:  Watkins Publishing, 2007), another Hindu sacred text, drawn from preliterate oral tradition.  Once again, here's a link for the wikipedia entry on the Upanishads, if you want some more information about them.  And here's one last passage, taken from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Book 1, Part 2, Verse 4-5:

Death wished for a second body,
He embraced the notion of speech.
The time of pregnancy was one year,
So speech, the Master, carried
Him for twelve months,
Then Time gave him birth.
Death opened his mouth
As if to swallow him,
He shouted, "Bhan!"
And became speech.

Death pondered,
If I kill him I will have no food.
He therefore mothered this speech
And fathered it by the
Verses of all the Vedas,
The poetic meters,
Sacrifices,
Mankind,
The animal kingdoms.

The identification of speech with poetry and song is not unusual or unwarranted, but the association between speech and death is intriguing.  Speech in the form of epic poetry and song is a form of immortality (the sung hero), and speech as language is the necessary prerequisite for time-binding, the accumulation of knowledge through which we transcend death, and time.

So, maybe a few years ago, Death wanted another body, and gave birth to blogs?

Swine Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

So, it's been an insanely busy semester, making it very hard to maintain a consistent blogging regimen.  But things are finally starting to settle down, so maybe I can share a few things with you.

On the morning of October 25th, I left Ellenville, New York, up in the Catskills, where the New York State Communication Association's annual meeting had been held, after delivering a keynote address for them that Friday, and I drove back home, unpacked and then packed again, and headed over to Newark that evening, to catch a flight to India, via Lufthansa, with a stopover in Frankfurt.  I was asked to lead a workshop on general semantics and media ecology for the new Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences in the city of Baroda (aka Vadodara) in the state of Gujarat.  And I'll write more about all that another time.

For now, I just want to address the topic of sickness and health.  Frankly, I'm not a seasoned traveler, and it never occurred to me that I needed to make any medical preparations for the trip until someone else brought it up.  That led to a bit of a scramble, as I got several shots, a Tetanus booster, Hepatitis A, and a flu shot (regular flu, H1N1 not being available), and a prescription for Malorone, a drug used to prevent Malaria!  I had to start taking the Malorone before I left, and continue for 7 days after (and it really did a number on me for that last week).

So anyway, having gotten appropriately medicated, I was off to India, taking a Lufthansa flight of 8 hours to Frankfurt, a 5 hour layover there, and then another flight of 8 hours, arriving in Mumbai at 3:30 AM on Tuesday, October 27.  So, exhausted and totally out of sync, I was on the immigration line to get into India, holding my passport, complete with visa (another last minute scramble as no one told me I needed one until just before the trip), and a form I had to fill out.

The form asked if I was from an, get this, Infected Country!!!!  And it included a number of questions about swine flu/H1N1, asking if I was exposed to it and/or were exhibiting any symptoms.  This struck me as a bit odd, as here in the US it's pretty much accepted that the swine flu is with us, it's not seen as all that big of a deal by most of us (my elderly mother, on the other hand, is easily frightened by the hype that she hears on the news, which most of us are inured to I believe), there aren't all that many cases, the flu itself isn't all that severe, less so that the regular flu and all.

So how strange it was to think of the United States as an "Infected Country," after all, what an odd and paranoid sounding label to use!  It's a bit of a metaphor, if you think about it, as we generally recognize that a person who is infected with a disease is diseased, ill, sick, or at least a carrier.  But in what sense can a country be infected?  Is a country just like a person, a body?  Can a country be diseased, ill, sick, or a carrier, in the way that a person is?  If one person has the swine flu, is the entire country infected?  If not, how many does it take?  Does the size of the country and its population make a difference?

Clearly, the Indian authorities were guided by this metaphor, as they had a camera set up and aimed at the people in the immigration line at the airport.  Apparently, it was a thermal camera, and wouldn't you know it, after training it on me, they pulled me out of the line and told me to go sit on the side.  I was far from the only one, I should add, and I sat next to a fellow from France who had been pulled out right before me.

They explained that the camera registered me as hot.  And this was not hot in a good sense.  They said that it indicated that I had a fever, which is the first symptom of swine flu.  So they stuck thermometers under our arms to take our temperatures.  The French guy was ahead of me, and his reading was over a 100 Farenheit, hot but not necessarily a fever, but they said it was.  He asked what that meant, and they said they'd take his temperature again in 15 minutes, and if he was still hot, they have ambulances waiting to take him to the hospital for further tests, and to isolate and quarantine him if he has the swine flu.  He asked if he could just fly back to France instead.  They said no.

Did I mention the medic (not sure if the guy was a nurse or what, don't think he was a doctor) was wearing one of those masks to filter the air.  Weird, being treated like some kind of contagious leper.

So my temperature was 99.6, and they said that was a fever.  I said, WHAT!?!?!?!   COME ON!!!!!   That's just one degree above normal.  They said that the plane is cold, so the normal temperature coming off of it is 97 degrees, so that means I have a fever.  I had never heard of such a thing.  I was going to say that I wasn't at all cold on the plane, but I was afraid that they would take that as confirmation that I had a fever.

They gave me the same line about retaking my temperature in 15 minutes.  At this point I got very agitated.  I started to speak loudly about how walking through the terminal with a heavy carry-on at 3:30 in the morning, with a bum knee that I had, made me hot, and how I'm normally hotter than average.  And after all, I had absolutely no cold and flu symptoms, not a one (the medic said fever was the first one to show, and the others did not appear until later).  And who was going to get my baggage from the baggage claim?  And it was almost 4 in the morning and I had to meet someone for lunch at noon!  And then catch a flight that evening to Baroda!  To lead a 4-day workshop!  And I also told them that I had to get shots to come to India, and was taking antimalarial medication, and they're worried about me getting them sick????

I was, you might say, hot under the collar.  The medic advised me to calm down, as getting angry would raise my temperature, and wouldn't help when they took it again.  Grrrrrrrrrrr.  I couldn't help but wonder if this wasn't some payback for the way the United States (and western nations in general) treats people coming to us from abroad.  Maybe it wasn't arbitrary, but maybe they were taking advantage, latching on to the excuse to put us through the ringer.  I couldn't help but also think about what had happened at Ellis Island if, say tuberculosis was detected in an immigrant and they were sent back, but in that I always identified with the immigrants, as the child of immigrants, and not with the indigenous authorities.

So, I calmed myself down.  The chair I was sitting on had metal armrests, which were cool, so I placed my wrists against them.  The wall behind me was also cool, so I rested my bald spot against it (never thought there could be an advantage to hair loss).  I slowed my breathing, and relaxed.

The French guy got up and told the medic he was going to the restroom.  A little later, I did the same thing, and ran cold water over my wrists for 60 seconds, and then splashed cold water on my face.  When I came out, I mentioned it to my friend from France, and he said he had done the same thing.

Soon after, his temperature was down and they let him go, and soon after that mine was down below 99 and they let me go.

I finally got to my hotel room around 4:30 AM, and got a couple of hours of sleep before my luncheon.

Now for the ironic ending.  The day that I was leaving Baroda, there was a news report that Narendra Modi, the prime minister of the state of Gujarat, where Baroda is located you may recall, who had just returned from a visit to Russia, had the swine flu.  Here's the story:  Modi down with swine flu, Gujarat ministers fret.  Hah!  I said, Serves him right!

Instant karma's gonna get you...