Songs From the Wood

Maya The Talker

2009-09-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

Maya cruised past her 19th month birthday last week. She is 34.5 inches tall and weighs 27.25 lbs, numbers that put her in the 97-98th percentile for height and 75-80th percentile for weight. The smile that lit up her face when she was a month old continues to be one of her prominent characteristics. She's still an exuberant child, delighting herself with the wonders that surround her and delighting us with her ebullience.

She was quite a talker, even as a two month old baby. Now, she is a riot. She speaks complete sentences, with intonations and pauses, question marks, commas and full stops. All in a language all her own. She has a vocabulary of about 10-13 words that we can understand. Words such as mama, papa, nana (for the nanny and banana), ajji, akka, ka ka (for crow), ana (for ane, elephant), ami (for turtle), anna (rice), bow-wow (for dog), car, amma, mum-mum (for food) and kaka (for poop). As a true Californian, the very first legible word she spoke which she used precisely and every time was agua (Spanish for water). It was not Kannada (our mother tongue) or English, but a Spanish word that she spoke first and no, it was not mama or papa.

But she doesn't let her limited vocabulary of the adult world limit her from expressing herself with words from her baby world. As someone who enjoys her silence, Shanthala is partly terrified that as Maya gets older, Maya and I will be talking so much that she will have to seek asylum from the constant chatter that will be a hallmark of this household.

A small taste of what our daily world is like with Maya is shown in this video where Maya proceeds to talk on the phone, sing a ditty, applauds her own efforts and say a few of the words that we understand such as ajji, nana and akka.

Neurological and Cultural Underpinnings of Being Plugged

2009-09-08T01:43:00.001-07:00

First, an apology to my readers. I've let trivia overwhelm me. That combined with a few other things have prevented me from updating my blog more promptly. I hope to rectify the situation this week.

Part 1: The Hardware (or Biology)

A day or two after I posted my article on the madness of speed in the modern culture, I read an entry on Frontal Cortex that shed some more neurological light on our pathological condition. I wrote a little about this in my earlier article, but this hopefully provides a more complete picture. I was indulging in speculation then, but it looks like I wasn't that far off.

Back in 1954, a psychologist at McGill University in Canada, James Olds, and his team accidentally discovered that if a probe is inserted into the lateral hypothalamus of a rat and the rat was allowed to stimulate its own probe, the rat would stimulate itself till it collapsed. This was hailed as the discovery of the brain's pleasure center. But neuroscientists were unhappy with this term. They found that far from producing pleasure, people who were stimulated in this area were more crazed than happy. Two researchers, Jaak Panskepp and Kent Berridge, independently concluded that this area was more concerned with seeking or searching than pleasure. Berridge concludes that mammals have two separate systems, one for seeking and the other for liking, which is the brain's real pleasure center. Emily Yoffe, the author of the Slate article that inspired the entry on Frontal Cortex, writes:

"But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. "The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire," Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one."

Dopamine, the well known neurotransmitter associated with the euphoric feeling and consistently tagged as being the reward drug, apparently has more effect in motivating us than in satisfying us. Rats that had their dopamine producing neurons destroyed, starved to death even when the food was right in front of them because they had lost the desire to reach for it. Berridge says that dopamine does not have satiety built into it. Rats who had dopamine flood their brains were quicker in navigating a maze to reach food than ordinary rats, but they were not any more satisfied than the ordinary rats once they found the food. Dopamine is also thought to be responsible for maintaining an internal sense of time. So, when an hour has gone by whilst surfing the web, you have dopamine to thank again. The neurotransmitter not only drives the seeking system in our brains, it also makes us lose time as we constantly stimulate ourselves following one hyperlink after the next. Novelty fuels dopamine and the next email has all the potential of being novel (it just might be the response from that gorgeous girl from the cafe agreeing to meet for dinner). Berridge says that like Pavlov's dogs, we salivate at the ding announcing new mail.

Jonah Lehrer adds an interesting twist to this. This endless desire for curiosity doesn't make us want to read Feynman's Lectures on Physics or learn a new language or a skill. He says: "..we don't treat all information equally. My salient fact is your irrelevant bit; your necessary detail is my triviality. Here's the paradox of curiosity: I only want to know more about that which I already know about." So, there we have it, a neurological explanation for why we develop a tic if we're unplugged even for an instant.

Part 2: Software (or Culture)

Driving back from the library yesterday, I heard a brief segment from a program called "The Cambridge Forum" on NPR. The speaker was Carl Honore, a leading evangelist of the so called "Slow Movement". He said something that I thought provided the cultural impetus for our behavior. Western culture (and thereby much of modern culture just about everywhere) has always thought of time as linear, of a line moving towards progress and betterment. Economics is a fundamental bedrock of modern culture. Everything we do, the way we want to be, who we want to be, is driven in part by a model of wanting more, of the philosophy that as homo economicus 'more is better, greed is good' (as quoted memorably by Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character in the movie Wall Street). With time being also a scarce quantity (limited by our lifetime), and the desire to make progress, we squeeze more and more into a given unit of time.

Carl Honore writes in his blog:
"...is unplugging now the ultimate luxury?

Of course, being online can be wonderful. We are hardwired to be curious and to connect and communicate. The problem is that in a world of limitless information and constant access to other people, we often don’t know when to stop.

Being “always on” is exhausting and superficial. It erodes our producitivity. It locks us into what one Microsoft research called a state of “continuous partial attention.”

Continuous partial attention. I found that a very apt description of how I find my state of mind, many times. The days I throw caution to the wind and just be completely with Maya, I feel invigorated. Her sense of wonder, her endless fascination with what we dismiss as ordinary, her complete lack of urgency (except when she's hungry) and purposelessness make it much more refreshing if I don't let trivia (sometimes work is trivia too) put me in a constant state of partial attention.

I ran into the slow movement via a book about Slow Food, the activity that unleashed the slow movement. I had nodded off reading the book (or so I remember) and didn't pay any further attention to it. By visiting Carl Honore's site and other sites associated with the Slow Movement, I see interesting insights and practices that maybe of benefit in helping fix this drug, the accelerating, unyielding desire for more.

"There is more to life than merely increasing its speed" - Mahatma Gandhi

Lying

2009-08-28T23:50:00.000-07:00

"All kids lie. Almost all kids will experiment with lying at least by the age of four. And if they start when they're younger, you might think, oh no, my kid's lacking morality. Actually, it's a sign of their nascent intelligence because it's more complicated to hold in your head, as a child, the truth and an alternative reality and then try to sustain that alternative reality."

Wouldn't it be parent heaven if the kids listened to us as they grew up ? That we didn't have to deal with the self-assertion and rebellion of the terrible twos ? That we didn't have to worry what are our children lying about ? That there were no sibling rivalry ? That we didn't have to deal with being alienated during the teenage angst ?

From an evolutionary perspective, each of these stages have a reason for their existence. Sometime between years 1 and 2, a child begins to understand that what she wants is not necessarily what her caregivers want her to have. She begins to learn that she is a different individual than her caregiver. Till then, usually the baby and the caregiver are one, with the caregiver tending to just about every thing the child demands.

With co-author Ashley Merryman, Po Bronson - whose article on praising kids I wrote about a few entries ago - explores some of these issues in a new book called "Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children".

Po Bronson says that teaching kids that telling the truth doesn't always have negative repercussions is better at curbing lying than telling them that they would be punished if they lied. He says in an interview on NPR (National Public Radio):

"Well, 78 percent of American parents think that their teenagers can tell them anything. But the teens completely disagree, because while the average teen might be lying to their parents about 12 of the 36 common topics, even the teens who lie the least are still lying. They're lying about five topics out of the 36.

Parents today imagine that there's a tradeoff between being strict and being permissive and that the benefit of some permissiveness is honesty, that you're going to hear the truth and not be kept in the dark. So you'll be able to help. The science says that those permissive parents do not hear more truth from their kids.

And the best way to hear truth from kids is to set a few rules, consistently enforce them and then this is one that's going to sound controversial, Robert, parents who negotiate occasionally with their teens. We need to see that some arguing with parents, a moderate amount of argument is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. That arguing is a sign of respect, not of disrespect.

Because to the teenager, they have two choices: telling the truth and leading to an argument or just outright lying. Arguing over the actual rules is a better alternative and very different thing than arguing over your authority as a parent to set rules at all."

White lies are a fundamental fabric of our contemporary society. Children, who learn so much by imitating, can't distinguish between the social white lie that we so casually utter and the lie that we get so upset with them about. What's worse is we initiate them into the habit of lying. "Don't ask for more even if you're hungry, it's not polite".

A recent book on lying called "The Liar In Your Life" by Robert Feldman delves into this habit of lying. The startling fact is how much we lie and are lied to and how difficult it is for us to separate fact from fiction. Based on his research, Feldman concludes that most people lie at least thrice in a 10 minute conversation (other studies which have concluded similarly). He also says that most people don't know that they're lying and that his participants had to watch the videotapes of their conversations to realize how much they were lying. "It's nice to meet you", "How are you", lies roll off our tongue thick and fast. And we're not alone. The animal kingdom is replete with deception. That most of us seem to gravitate almost naturally towards that right amount of lying that make us good spouses, good citizens without tipping overboard into sociopaths is a sign to me that deception has deep biological roots.

Lying has more beneficial advantages than just being a social grease. Studies have shown that depressed people are far more honest about themselves and what they can control than non-depressed people. "Fake it till you feel it" or "Fake it till you make it" are gospel among those who teach courses on succeeding, building self-confidence or building hard-to-build new habits such as exercising. Placebos have been known to work in place of real medicine.

Of course, this doesn't mean that we ought to lie all the time. Trust is a key element in any good relationship. Cry wolf too much and no one will believe you and you'll become somewhat of a social pariah. Feldman says that lying is much more easier and permissible in contemporary culture. For example, a study by Josephson Institute, a non-profit studying ethical issues, found that 64% of students cheated during a test, up from 60% in 2006. We live in a culture where the pressure to succeed, to be overachievers, is relentless and starts just about immediately after birth. We speak with awe everytime our little one reaches a milestone faster than the average. "Oh, my daughter started speaking when she was 10 months old", "She has the vocabulary of a five year old" and on and on and on. Lying is one way to blow off some of that pressure. Credit card debt is another lie, an illusion that we have more than we really do, driven by a desire to acquire material artifacts in larger numbers than ever before in history, with a view that with their acquisition, comes happiness. Dealing with honesty also requires time and commitment, two items in scarce quantity in our lives today. No wonder our culture encourages and eases deception.

As a parent, these questions and issues take on a larger relevance and urgency than when I was not a parent. Learning to encourage honesty by not shooting the messenger, actively encouraging debate and disagreement, but also promoting conflict resolution may benefit Maya. But books like Po Bronson's seem to raise doubts on folklore such as permissive parents will hear more of the truth from their kids.

Honesty, is such a lonely word
Everyone is so untrue
Honesty, is hardly ever heard
And mostly what I need from you - Billy Joel

Maya The Prankster

2009-08-28T23:23:00.001-07:00

Maya's imitating us has taken her into the prank zone. When Shanthala does not want to open a bottle that Maya presents to her (because it contains medicine or some spices, for example), she puts up the appearance of struggling to open the bottle for a while, before handing the bottle back to her saying she couldn't open it. We thought that Maya bought the story and seriously thought that Shanthala couldn't open the bottle.

A few days later, Maya came up to me with a bottle that she could open, and then pretended that she had difficulty opening the bottle. She laughed after feigning the struggle for a few seconds and ran away. Another time, after she finished chewing on her toothbrush (what passes for brushing), when I asked her for the brush, she put her hand to the brush, and pretended to struggle to pull it out of her mouth. She laughed as she gave up the struggle and shrugged her shoulders.

Another game she has taken to playing with me is to come at me with her toy stroller full tilt as if she's going to hit me. I step aside, at the last instant, like a matador playing a bull. Maya can't seem to get enough of this trick and she laughs so hard as we play this game. One day, as we played this game, she appeared to give up trying to touch me and started walking away as if she was done. I relaxed my guard thinking the game was over, when she turned suddenly touched me with the stroller and started laughing.

Maya has been an exuberant baby since she was a month or two old. She laughs easily and heartily as the video below shows as I play the matador to her bull.

Maya Clocks Past 18 Months

2009-08-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

Last week, Maya passed her year and a half mark. She commemorated the event by calling me "Papa" for the first time. Till then, Shanthala and I were both "Mama".

Maya's Musical Demands As a Riff on Modern Life

2009-08-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

I suppose it all began when I started getting tired of constantly changing CDs. Maya's love of music has only matured as she's aged. As an infant, she'd push off against me when she didn't like a track, and she'd hold me tight when she liked one. This expression of preference changed to a more verbal grunt when we were in India, around the time she turned one. And now, it is a series of "no, no, no" (pronounced cutely as "nyo, nyo, nyo" without emphasising the "y" much). If I don't heed to her displeasure, she begins to struggle and gesture emphatically at the CD player, commanding me to change the track. I suppose I helped the monster grow by heeding her request quite early on.

The whole thing reached a crescendo where I was constantly ejecting and inserting CDs. To top that, I've packed the CDs so tightly together in the CD rack - to prevent her from removing them and using the CDs to wipe the floor among other things - that I cannot pull out a CD without employing both hands, which means I have to put her down and pick her up (listening to music nestled in my arms seems to be her preference) each time I change CDs. I turned to playing the songs off my laptop where I can satisfy her musical tastes without feeling like a disc changer. However, we recently moved my laptop to a less accessed room to reduce the amount of time I spent sitting in front of it, and Maya doesn't like to listen to music in this new room. She also prefers to listen to the music through my hifi system.

I gave up the fight and decided to buy a Roku Soundbridge. Two years ago, a good friend of mine had purchased one of the first units to come out and has been very satisfied. The Soundbridge is a device which channels music streamed over a wireless network (or a wired one) to a music system. Many applications such as the popular music player, iTunes, can stream music to a Soundbridge. About 40-50% of my music collection is ripped and on my laptop. I can now stream all this music, including playlists, via a Soundbridge to my hifi. The Soundbridge comes with a remote using which I can browse the music collection and select what I want to play. I constructed playlists of songs Maya enjoys listening to, grouped by mood, style and time of day (morning, afternoon and night) and voila ! No more frustrations, no more interruptions for me or Maya in listening to music.

If it all stopped here, this would be a simple story instead of a riff on the modern life, a tale of how the acquisition of one gadget led to a whole new set of wishes and desires, setting off a chain reaction of consumption.

Living The Well Connected Modern Life

Maya and I were happy, enjoying our new found freedom, listening to music uninterrupted. The Soundbridge seems a neutral sound source, transmitting the streamed music to my music system without distortions. Then, the phone rang. The music stopped. Maya and I opened our eyes, annoyed at what had caused the music to stop. The display on the Soundbridge said "Rebuffering....". The phone stopped ringing and the music resumed. We were still resettling down when the phone rang again. The music stopped again. What was going on ?

Was it some interference from the phone and the DSL line, I wondered. We had the DSL filter on the phone jack already and so, that shouldn't be the cause of any interference. Moreover, the Internet connection never seemed to suffer so far. Was the problem with the Soundbridge then ? Back to the net, scouring for information.

Disconnected from much of the hooks of the modern connected life so far, I had dozed past the problems in the coexistence of cordless phones and wireless LANs. I had a cordless phone which used the same frequency as the wireless network and so interfered with the network when the phone was in use. Now, Shanthala couldn't make any calls if Maya and I were listening to music. If somebody called, I was snappy. I took to using the cell phone more. But the cell phone is paid for by the company and I didn't want to use it for my personal calls during the peak hours.

We have to buy a new phone, I announced to Shanthala. And so we kicked out (we gave it somebody else who needed one) a perfectly good phone just because we had acquired a new gadget. All modern cordless phones apparently come designed to coexist with a wireless network.

The next problem came as I was listening to the music, a few nights ago. The music collection on my laptop has been built up over many years. Consequently, many of the older tracks were ripped with a poor sound quality (they made for smaller mp3 files, a big benefit for the older laptops with rather small hard disks). Now that I was listening to the music on a hi-fidelity system , I wanted to rerip those tracks with the higher sound quality. But what format to use that provided this higher quality ? mp3 is known as a lossy encoder which means that some information is lost when the track is encoded from a CD. And a CD is already somewhat lossy compared to an analog signal. Soundbridge doesn't support FLAC, the lossless audio encoding format that is free. So, I decided to stick with mp3. After some searching, I found that a bit rate of anything over 128Kbps was pretty good and anything like 192Kbps or 256Kbps was more than sufficient even for a hifi.

A decent portion of my CD collection remains unripped because of the limited space on my laptop, space that is ever thinning given that I'm downloading videos and photos of Maya. The external hard disk that I use for backup, purchased over 5 years ago, is filling up too. Time to upgrade that too. Hard disk prices today are low enough that a 1TB disk costs about $149. But is that the right choice ? Ah! All the distracting choices we have now.

The same friend who bought the Roku Soundbridge a few years back also had just acquired a NAS (network-attached storage) box. A NAS box makes it's storage available to all computers in a network. A NAS box would ease Shanthala's problems in taking regular backups, I thought. The cheapest NAS box was only a few tens of dollars costlier than the external hard disk. But as I started researching, I found that many of the new NAS devices can also serve as a music server to Soundbridge, act as a print server and a photo/video server. This meant Shanthala and I wouldn't have trudge up to connect our laptops to the printer to take a printout. Further, all our pictures today reside on my laptop, and a selected few on the website. Shanthala's only access to the pictures, if I'm not around, is what is on the website. Lately, I've been tardy in updating the pictures on the website and she has no access to the pictures and movies that I've taken recently. The NAS as a photo server would allow her to view all the pictures as soon as I uploaded them from the camera. No sooner than I explained this to Shanthala, she approved purchasing a NAS box.

But the NAS boxes that do all this cost a little more, but still within striking distance of a simple external hard disk. By now the demon had possessed me. I started checking what protection the solution offered in the face of a hard disk failure, what additional features the different boxes provided, the performance, the quality of the build, what upteen different reviewers had to say about each box. On and on and on I went. I eventually settled on a mirrored 2TB DS209 Synology NAS box.

The next problem came when I realized that the most common NAS boxes came only with a wired ethernet port, no wireless. This meant that I'd have to place the device where I have the wireless router. A bad choice of a place for something like a NAS box because Maya has easy access to the device. The lack of support for wireless network also meant that for the NAS box to be a print server, the printer had to be moved close to the wireless router. So, I now had to buy a device that acts as a bridge between the wired and wireless world.

Searching all this information, figuring out which NAS box to buy, which store to buy it from, troubleshooting all the problems in setting up the Soundbridge took an inordinate amount of time, time I had not planned at all. But here I was, analysing all the information, shopping for the lowest price, making sure it all worked with the equipment we have etc. etc. It took a good part of last week to finalize all this. And then when the equipment arrives, more work to set that up and then ripping the music. Sigh. All this consumption will hopefully make us a happier family ?

Many years ago, I read a book on time management that said a fundamental axiom of time management is that no stuff comes without requiring some time devoted to it. Not planning for that time is a surefire way to miss a whole bunch of deadlines.

This then is the price of modern life. Choices galore, many useless, and even the useful in such vast quantities that "analysis paralysis" seems a natural state. Barry Schwartz wrote a brilliant book called the "Paradox of Choice", a book I've mentioned in my column before. He mentions how a fundamental tenet of American culture is that more choices implies more freedom is false. Many tests conducted by psychologists and cognitive scientists have shown that people are paralyzed and forego decision making when faced with too many choices. Schwartz suggests that there are two kinds of people (aren't there always): people who want the most optimum solution (called optimizers) and those who're satisfied with what's good enough (called satisficers). He says that modern America is a stress inducer for the optimizers because what's optimal is changing every second. Think you got a great deal on an iPod ? A week later Apple announces a higher capacity iPod at a lower price than what you paid, and this one comes with a cool touch screen and can run iPhone apps! All the advertising is hell on optimizers, So many new products, to solve illusory problems, though the problems seem real enough to an optimizer. (Here is a link to a TED talk by Barry Schwartz on the subject, if you don't have time for the book).

As I sit here writing all this, I feel almost frivolous and petty. A billion or more people are hungry, a hundred million or so children die each year for lack of food and proper health care, a significant portion of the world is engulfed by war and on and on. And here I am, consumed by my consumption.

The Hassles of Running A Non-Mainstream OS

For those of you who're uninterested in computers, this section maybe boring.

I run the GNU/Linux operating system as my main OS on my laptop. This means no iTunes, but tons of free, alternative applications. I had already verified that the Soundbridge would work well with a Linux box (the Soundbridge itself runs Linux). The first problem turned out to be that none of those applications interacted well with the Soundbridge. The Soundbridge let me browse the tracks, but wouldn't play them. A quick look yielded a pointer to another application called Firefly media server that did an excellent job. It was a trivial download and setup. Alas! The Soundbridge couldn't even see the tracks now. Another search yielded the necessary fixes to overcome this hurdle. Et voila! Not only could I browse the tracks now, I could also play them. I was thrilled.

My not-so-20/20 eyes then spotted that my music player counted my library having about 1800 tracks, but Firefly counted only about 1600. I tracked the difference down to incorrect file permissions and fixed them. The numbers were now right, but some of the recently ripped tracks didn't show up under the specific artists or albums. The files seemed to be present correctly on my laptop and my music player had no problems accessing them, but not the Soundbridge. A check of one of the files showed the problem. The ripped music tracks contain information about each track such as the artist, the song title, the album it is from, the year of release etc. This information is called metadata. For some strange reason, the music player that I used had an option to not write this metadata into the ripped track. So, now I had about 100 or so songs that did not have the relevant information about them. How would I go about fixing this ?

One option was to rerip the affected tracks and make sure that the metadata got written this time. I thought that this was tedious (don't ask me why, but maybe I was just bored about doing the simple, obvious thing) and started searching for an alternate solution. A bunch of volunteers had created a voluminous database called musicbrainz that used the acoustic signature of a music track to associate a bunch of information about the track including the metadata of the track. A freeware program called Picard consulted this database to analyze a track and generate the correct metadata. What's more, Picard also moved the tracks such that I had a coherent folder structure and naming. For example, I had Mark Knopfler under three different directories: mark_knopfler, Mark Knopfler and mark knopfler. I wanted them all under the single Mark Knopfler. Happy, I set about cleaning up my music database with Picard. The program was fast and accurate.

Now I had a cleaner music database, no more tracks not visible to the Soundbridge. But, now the playlists were all messed up because they were based on the tracks' old location, not the new cleaned up location. So, I recreated the playlists. Finally, all was well in Soundbridge land.

Animal Minds

2009-08-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

There are many books that address animal behavior and attempt to explain them. I was disappointed by many of them, because they didn't seem rigorous in their approach to the explanation and many other explanations seemed possible. Some others were not as well written and easy to put down. The one book that illuminated the landscape brilliantly, was well written and consequently is the one that I highly recommend to anyone interested in animal minds (and baby minds) is Marc Hauser's "Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think". While I think the book seems a tad too certain about the results analyzed and I remain skeptical of some of the conclusions drawn, it nevertheless remains a book I deem worthy of curling up with.

I had read the book a while back and I remembered it again when I was writing the entry "Birdbrain" on my blog. I stopped at the local library to jot these few passages from the book that will hopefully be tantalizing enough for a reader of this blog to get the book. If nothing else, the few passages I've selected will hopefully illuminate the kind of thinking that is required to attempt an answer to what animals think.

"I will show how insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive science have begun to revolutionize our understanding of animal minds. Animals do have thoughts and emotions. To understand what animals think and feel (italics are the authors), however, we must look at the environments in which they evolved. All animals are equipped with a set of mental tools for solving ecological and social problems. Some of the tools for thinking are universal, shared by insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, including humans. The universal toolkit provides animals with a basic capacity to recognize objects, count and navigate. Divergence from the universal toolkit occurs when species confront unique ecological or social problems".
...
The only way to understand how and what animals think is to evaluate their behavior in light of both universal and specialized toolkits, mechanisms of the mind designed to solve problems. And the only way to evaluate the validity of this approach is to test our intuitions about animal minds with systematic observations and well-controlled experiments".

Later in the book, he provides an example of such evaluation. He mentions an observation that he made back in 1987, in a forest in Uganda, while observing three chimps, a mother, a son and her one year old infant daughter. The son departed after feeding on a tree, leaping onto a tree some distance away. The mother followed, but the daughter did not, staying back, screaming. After waiting a while, the mother went back to the daughter and swinging the tree back and forth, managed to reach the tree the son had jumped on to. She then made herself a bridge between the tree where her daughter was and the one where her son was. The daughter felt safe crawling on her mother to reach the other tree. Hauser writes after describing this scene:

"What I witnessed was magical and immediately invoked a suite of questions concerning maternal care. How often do chimpanzees create natural bridges ? Do they create a mental image of their body bridging a gap in the trees before actually stretching across the canopy ? Do they create bridges for any yearling, juvenile, or adult in need ? How does an individual recognize another in need ? Does a mother empathize with her daughter when she is stuck behind, screaming ? Would she empathize with an unrelated yearling frozen in the same position ? To address these questions, we would need to make additional observations. The insistence on replication is not a silly scientific ritual, performed by priests in white lab coats. It is a tool for understanding whether an event is common or rare, and why it occurred."

The book is filled with such interesting anecdotes, questions raised by these anecdotes, further studies designed to answer these questions and conclusions. He writes in the prologue:

"The following series of questions and answers will inform our discussion.

Do animals think ? Are animals conscious ? Are some animals more intelligent than others ?

I think these are unhelpful questions because they are vague, relying on general concepts that are often defined on the basis of what humans do. In this spirit, I will generally avoid using the words, "think", "conscious" and "intelligent". Instead, I will ask about mental phenomena that are more precisely specified.
......

Do animals have emotions ?
Do animals communicate ?
Are animals guided by instinct ?
Do animals have rules by which they abide, and sometimes break ?"

And finally, here is why this book may be of interest to people interested in baby minds:

"In contrast to most books on animal thought and emotion, the ideas I develop here depend critically on recent findings in the neurosciences and studies of human infant development. Studies of the brain, which can be explained without technical jargon, are critical for our exploration of the animal mind and its evolution. Several authors claim that animal thought is limited or nonexistent because animals lack language. ... I argue that language is not necessary for certain kinds of thought, and that the most profitable comparison among species is between animals and human infants."

The New Morning Rituals

2009-08-11T13:49:00.001-07:00

From an article in NYT two days ago:

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

Well, I'll admit. I suffer from this illness. After waking up with Maya and feeding her milk, I start the coffee machine and power up my laptop. I check my personal email and the news first. Maya likes music and since I can conjure up playlists on the fly, I start Maya's morning music on my laptop. She likes being held for a little while after she wakes and so I rock her gently to the music. Next, I fire up my work email. If a work email seems urgent, I'll respond even on a non-working day.

Reading this article, I wondered why this habit of checking email, Twitter and Facebook the moment we wake up ? In my case, I developed this habit of checking email and reading news as I read coffee because most days I was by myself. Shanthala was already at work and reading the email was a way to prepare for the coming day. Reading the news had taken the place of reading the paper newspaper. After I quit working every day, I continued in this habit partly because I was addicted and partly because nothing much had changed for me, Shanthala was still away at work when I awoke. I didn't do anything to change this habit once Maya was born.

And why do we become email, social media and cell phone junkies, checking them constantly ? Why do we want all these popup messages and sounds to tell us that we have mail or that a friend has logged on or logged off or that they posted a Twitter update ? I justified my behavior by rationalizing that I receive 100-200 emails a day, that trying to process them as they arrive seems a more manageable task than batch processing them. This is the main reason I like to download my email even when I'm on vacation. Trying to process 3000 emails after a week's vacation seems so exhausting that I'll need a vacation immediately after.

Many blogs and articles talk of the inability of people to keep up with their email load and so check it constantly to stay on top, failing to do anything else. It's a new treadmill, rigged to go so fast, there is not even the time to breathe. It's fall off or keep sprinting. Most of us think it impolite or unmanly to not respond to every email that is addressed to us (excluding spam, of course). As one article puts it:

Welcome to the future. E-mail was going to make our lives heaven on earth and provide easy communication that would bring us closer to our loved ones. It did. Mom now sends us “funny” jokes daily. Ha ha. And she forwards chain letters from little boys dying of cancer who just need one more postcard to break the world record(*). Then the business world got e-mail. Spam was a problem for a while, but now it's our well-intentioned colleagues, clients, and customers filling our inbox, quietly selling us into e-mail slavery.

In the past few weeks, starting with when we stayed with our friends in Palo Alto, I checked my email far less frequently, about three times a day and it didn't seem as hard to deal with. A majority of them could be deleted right away. Only a handful required me to respond. I also turned off email notifications by accident one day, and haven't missed it. Lawrence Lessig, a key figure in the online community, tells of his radio silence for a month every year: no emails, no cell phone, no social media, nothing. During this time, his automatic vacation response asks the sender to email back in a month's time if the issue is important and needs his attention, otherwise the email goes into a dead letterbox.

I'm reminded of how we deal with telephones in India, or at least used to when I was growing up. Telephones started off as a luxury item, an expensive item, used when there was something important to discuss, not to be used frivolously. In the absence of an answering machine, we dropped everything we were in the middle of and rushed to silence the insistent ring. As the telephone became more ubiquitous, the ring could be a friend calling to save us from the ennui of the day or maybe something had happened to some dear. How could we not answer the phone when it called ?

A part of me also wonders how people reacted once receiving daily newspapers became a common habit. Now, instead of sitting outside and enjoying the sunshine or saying "good morning" to our neighbours or watching people go by, people were sitting inside reading a piece of paper, carrying stories from far away, much farther than our front porch in any case. The grass was always greener, the lives more interesting, the farther away they were.

A friend told me the other day that some of his friends who are college grads are hard to make time with. "They're in the BBD zone", he told me, "Bigger, Better Deal. Not willing to commit to any time right now because they might lose out on something better showing up between now and then". So, they check their email, cell phone, social media updates constantly, looking for a BBD.

So I wonder if at the heart of all these complaints is the question of engagement with people we're with instead of the people we want to be with, a question of being here now instead of constantly planning on being somewhere at 8 tonight, a question of using some time to reflect rather than passively absorb, a question of wisdom instead of just a firehose of information.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? - T. S. Eliot

Birdbrain

2009-08-09T16:36:00.000-07:00

Countless stories I heard growing up, involved animals as the main characters. In Indian mythology such as Ramayana and Mahabharata, animals played a key role, be it as the trustworthy and loyal Hanuman, the brave Jatayu who dies trying to protect Sita from Ravana or Garuda, the ride of gods. They were even the god themselves, as in Ganesha, the god with an elephant's head. And who can forget the stories from the Jataka tales, Hitopadesha and Panchatantra with their wondrous, imaginative and moral stories in many of which animals were the only characters. When my eyes turned to the west, I ran into the cute, cuddly Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, the ever grumpy Donald Duck, Elmer Fudd and the dumb, but with a heart of gold, Goofy.

The animals led lives not unlike humans in many of these tales, possessed of speech, likes and dislikes and full of intelligence and spirit. Monkeys played pranks, laughed heartily, shed tears of remorse, mice fell in love, snakes conspired and birds sang and gossiped. I knew fairly early that dogs can't talk no matter how much Goofy does and when I saw the monkeys, realized that their lives were different from humans.

Though revered and a part of the child's landscape across cultures, just about every culture considered them to be less than humans. In Hinduism, if you commit enough grave sins, you are reborn as an animal such as a dog or a pig. If you do good as a dog, such as give your life for your masters, you can be reborn as a human. In the west, where Christianty played (and continues to play) the central role in attitudes to animals, man ruled over the world and animals, considering it fit to use the animals as he saw fit, making it perfectly acceptable to treat them as badly as one wanted to, either by killing cats in the hundreds of thousands or rendering hundreds of thousands of animal species extinct in our path to modernity.

And animals could never be intelligent, for any definition of intelligence you could conjuncture. And could not love or mourn. If they shed tears, they were only the fake tears of a crocodile. As time elapsed and people began to study the animal life more closely, the broad generalizations of their inferiority began to fall apart. So, we constructed narrower and narrower definitions of intelligence, love and mourning to keep our superiority intact. And we showed our contempt for their minds with terms such as birdbrain. Three pieces of recent research call into question whether that is even derogatory.

Using Tools

Tools, making them and using them, were long considered the dominion of humans alone. Then people like Jane Goodall brought us observations of chimps using long leaves to tease out ants through the tiny openings in ant hills. So we grudgingly allowed some tool making capabilities to the greater apes, the primates, the ones closest to us. And though we remembered the stories of crows using stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher to a reachable level, we didn't think they were true.

A story I came across on Yahoo news yesterday concerned new research that showed rooks, a cousin of crows, that used stones to raise the water level in a narrow pitcher to reach a worm floating in the water. The study states that the rooks seemed to understand instinctly that dropping stones would rise the level of water. Further, they also seemed to know how many to drop and learnt quickly that the bigger stones got the worm early. When presented with a bowl containing sawdust instead of water, the rooks learned that using the stones didn't help.

The accompanying commentary to the article professes some skepticism that the rooks really understood the properties of water or that they were dropping stones instinctly rather than as a behavior learned during another experiment. I found the skepticism rather strange in trying to equate crow cognition with human cognition. I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of cognition and evolution. We, just like other animals, evolved in ways that were adaptive and advantageous to the environments we lived in. In other words, our intelligence is defined and limited by our bodies (mind is embodied) and the ecology in which we evolved. Birds such as crows occupy different ecological niches compared to us and so have evolved different strategies than us. Its as if the crows conducted experiments on humans ability to fly and decided that we couldn't do it as instinctively or as well or in a similar manner as they.

The Yahoo article also posts a link to a Youtube video showing the rooks using stones to reach the worm.

This is not the only experiment that shows birds can use tools. Many other tests done in the recent past show that birds, especially of the crow family, are quite adept at using tools to get what they want.

Recognizing Faces

I came across this article last year and noted it, but failed to blog it earlier. The article speaks of research conducted in the urban landscape of Seattle. The researcher, John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, used two face masks. His team of researchers always captured a bird and banded it using one of the guises before releasing them. In the months that followed, the researchers walked the neighborhood, sometimes wearing the mask in which they captured the birds and sometimes using one that was not used in capturing the birds. They found that the birds constantly harangued and scolded them when they wore the masks that was used to capture them. And more significantly, this information seemed to have been communicated to other crows in the neighborhood because they were scolded by 47 of the 53 crows in the neighborhood, far more than the number they trapped.

Dr. Marzluff extended his study now to many parts of Seattle, used a half-dozen new more realistic masks made by a professional mask maker and added volunteers who didn't know the history of the masks. Wearing some of the "dangerous" masks, Dr. Marzluff and his research team trapped and banded several crows in and around Seattle. Then, they asked volunteers to walk around the neighborhoods where the crows had been trapped. Unaware of the history behind the mask, some volunteers wore the "dangerous" mask and others wore a mask that had not been used to trap crows. As one of the volunteers reported:

The reaction to one of the dangerous masks was “quite spectacular,” said one volunteer, Bill Pochmerski, a retired telephone company manager who lives near Snohomish, Wash. “The birds were really raucous, screaming persistently,” he said, “and it was clear they weren’t upset about something in general. They were upset with me.”

The crows deliberately targeted only the volunteers wearing the dangerous mask even in the presence of other volunteers wearing the neutral masks. According to Dr. Bernd Heinrich, a well recognized authority in the study of ravens, this ability to recognize faces is an offshoot of the ability of crows to recognize each other even after several months of separation.

Why the mask, the more perceptive reader may ask. The researchers say they used the mask to test the recognition of faces specifically as compared to the clothing, the gait and other human traits.

Self Recognition

One of the last holdouts of our superiority over animals is self-recognition. When we look in the mirror, we know we're looking at a reflection of ourselves. We can use this information to indulge in all sorts of narcissitic things such as grooming ourselves. Even human babies are considered to not pass muster until they're at least a year or so old. We then grudgingly admitted that four primates, the elephant and the bottlenosed dolphin had the ability to self-recognize themselves in the mirror. But a bird, a non-mammalian life, one that doesn't even possess the same brain machinery as the mammals, machinery such as the neocortex, thought to be the seat of self-recognition ? Not a chance.

Last year, a study found that Magpies, another cousin of the crows, can recognize themselves in the mirror. The researchers in Frankfurt, West Germany, placed a red, yellow or black mark on a group of five magpies. The black mark couldn't be differentiated from the bird's own black feathers. The mark was only visible in a mirror. When presented with a mirror, the birds looked at themselves and the ones with a red or yellow mark, attempted to peck themselves in the spot where the mark was.

Says lead researcher Helmut Prior: “It shows that the line leading to humans is not as special as many thought…. After finding this kind of intelligence in apes, many people thought it had developed once in one evolutionary line with humans at the end. The bird studies show it has developed at least twice”[Reuters].

The popular science magazine, Discover, listed the discovery as one of the top 100 discoveries in science for the year 2008.

It was through Kitty that I grew closer to feeling a kinship with other animals. Life with him was a continuous process of growing closer. When he first came to be with us, he wouldn't let us touch his belly. As time passed, he allowed us to touch his belly, his front paws and finally, he sat on our laps and kneaded our chest with his paws, the ultimate act of being allowed into the feline world. The ways in which he acted with me, I wondered if he loved me. I remembered a line from Ayn Rand: "Love is making exceptions". In that sense, I can say Kitty loved me. He made exceptions with me.

One day, we might find that it is we who're being studied by the animals all this time, as Douglas Adams wrote tongue-in-cheek in the hilarious "trilogy in four parts", "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". The dolphins eventually leave Earth, having concluded their experiment on humans and in parting they say "So long, and thanks for all the fish".

Cellphone Ripoffs

2009-07-31T22:28:00.001-07:00

Multi-tasking in the Silicon Valley is as unusual as breathing. Texting and driving, emailing and chatting on the phone, multiple chats, reading email during a meeting, the list goes on and on. As a denizen of the valley, I've a moderate case of this illness. I started my day remembering that I had not provided the answer to a question that I was asked last Wednesday. A part of my brain realized that if the person had not pinged me again for an answer, the answer was probably not that important. But, as I have written before, a part of me starts reacting even as another part cooly meditates on my reactions.

A few phone calls later, the problem was discovered to not be a problem after all. I wanted to be done with this issue before I forgot about it. I started the last phone call of the matter as I walked to my first meeting. The call went to the answering machine by the time I got to the conference room. I had a simple message: "Ian, it's not a problem". But I had to wait for about 30 seconds or so while I heard the insanely long "If you wish to leave a message...." instruction that I've heard several times before. I wondered, with the entire room staring at me, if there was a way to bypass the message. I also wondered if this was a way for the cellphone providers to make easy money.

And tonight I ran into this article by David Pogue on NYT, State of the Art - Cellphone Gripes Worthy of Congress’s Time - NYTimes.com. And in it I found that the author had a similar gripe about those insanely long instructions to leave a voicemail and access voicemail. He also answered my question of the benefit of these instructions to cellphone carriers. Here is what he had to say:

"Is this really so evil? Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.And that’s just Verizon. Where’s the outrage, people?"

850 million dollars a year ! And just one carrier !

The rest of the gripes listed in the article are worth a read. And now with all my pent-up rage over the evil cellphone corporations, I can't sleep. Sigh.

Robert Sapolsky

2009-07-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

I was thirteen when I sank my teeth into my first science book, George Gamow's classic, "One, Two Three,...Infinity". A friend of my father, taking pity on my Erich Von Daniken collection, loaned the book to me. "Read real science, Dinesh", he said. "Why ? What is wrong with what Daniken says ?", I bristled. I had just discovered godlessness and thought that he wanted to brainwash me back into godliness. I picked up Gamow with some skepticism. Though a little hard to follow, the writing grabbed me like a thriller. Soon, I was poring over Isaac Asimov's non-fiction works. His book "The Collapsing Universe" made a lasting impression. Black holes and big bang and universes that collapsed only to be reborn again! Far more fascinating than those mythologies I was raised with, I thought, because the wonder was of the real kind, not the believing kind.

Till I turned 22, my existence was defined by the limits imposed by small provincial towns of the 70's and 80's India, towns that my father found himself transfered to. One such constraint was the complete lack of a decent bookstore. Pulp fiction for adults and some Enid Blyton for kids marked the boundaries of literacy. Once I graduated past Enid Blyton, I found nothing to bridge the chasm between her and James Hadley Chase. And forget about non-fiction works. In those backwaters, I couldn't even create a list of books that I wanted to read! The public libraries in most of these towns was filled with "classics", rows upon empty, dusty rows of books that hardly interested the general populace. Any denizens were usually older people finding ways to kill time or maybe some college students looking for textbooks to borrow or reference. Only when we went to Bangalore could I attempt to quench this hunger for books. Gangaram's Book Bureau, located conveniently on Bangalore's main thoroughfare, M.G. Road, became a favorite haunt. Once inside, I found myself so half-crazed from this hunger for books that the rows and rows of books only made me dizzy. Like a starving man who finds himself in front of a sumptuous buffet, I ran from row to row. Which one to pick, which one to reject. So many to read, so little money to buy, so little time to decide. The experience was simultaneously intensely exciting and painful.

Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and "Dragons of Eden", Bertrand Russell's "ABC of Relativity", Gary Zukav's "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters" and Fritjof Capra's "Tao of Physics" are the science books that I most remember from those days. Physics and cosmology were worthy of reading as I moved swiftly past the biology titles.

As I grew older, I moved away from these works into reading more about history and politics. My political awakening came rather late in my life, well past my thirties. The lack of political discussions in my house (The emergency Indira Gandhi declared unconstitutionally barely got mentioned) probably contributed to this singular lack of interest in politics. As I grew older still, my interest swung back to science, but this time to biological sciences such as evolution and cognitive science, how we became who we are and what keeps us here. Melvin Konner's classic work, "The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit" got me started down this current road.

In this realm, I encountered several lucid expositors. Carl Zimmer, Matt Ridley, V.S. Ramachandran, Michael Ruse and Daniel Gilbert easily come to mind. To read just about anything written by these folks, I consider a worthy use of my time. Robert Sapolsky is the most recent addition to this pantheon. I had heard of Sapolsky's work "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" while helping prepare the coursework for the course at Stanford University taught by the non-profit organization I volunteer with, Magic. Being all the rage at the time, I never managed to get a copy from the local public library. A couple of years went by and a month or so ago, looking for some other book, I ran into Sapolsky's "Monkeyluv and Other Essays On Our Lives As Animals". Right from the start, the book reached out and grabbed me. Wonderfully witty writing, lucid explanations of complex subjects and a wonderful choice of subjects made him delectably unputdownable. While we stayed at our friend's place for a month, I ran into his other book, "The Trouble With Testosterone" which only solidified his reputation with me. Writing such as his, makes me envious, makes me want to stop writing in disgust. What's the point of writing when you have such talented people, I ask myself sometimes.

Here are some samples of his writing:

"As a scientist doing scads of important research, I am busy, very busy. What with all those midnight experiments in the lab, all that eureka-ing, I hardly have time to read the journals. Nonetheless, I stopped everything to thorougly study the May 10, 1999 issue of People magazine, the double special issue, "The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World". It was fabulous. In addition to full-color spreads and helpful grooming tips, the editors of People have gone after one of the central, pressing issues of our time. "Nature or Nurture ?"

"As most newlyweds quickly learn, intimate relationships, even the most blissful, can buzz with tension. Couples typically find themselves struggling over money, in-laws, ex-lovers, and how much the woman's placenta should grow when she is eventually pregnant. That last one's a killer."

"We all have encountered Reinhold Neibuhr's serenity prayer at some point: 'God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference'. Behavioral biology is often the scientific pursuit of that prayer."

Each essay starts with some mundane observation and then dives deeper to reveal some brilliant nugget of biological research.

In all of biology, evolution and instinct are top dog these days, taking over years of rule by behaviorism. A lot of science is reductionism, the attempt to understand large, complex systems by breaking them down into smaller, more understandable subcomponents. The attempt to define all physical laws using quantum mechanics is one example of such a method. In biology, sequencing the human genome is considered by many scientific and lay people to be the key to understanding human behavior. "Gene for happiness" found, reads one headline while another proclaims, "The God Gene found". We're nothing more than the sum of our genes. If a cause has a strong genetic component, there is squat the environment can do, so the proclamation goes. In both "Monkeyluv" and "The Trouble with Testosterone", Sapolsky eviscerates this mania and style of thinking (The New Scientist had a similar article about taking a more nuanced approach to Dawkins' Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype metaphors).

"One of the most important concepts in all of biology is that you can't really ever state what the effect is of a particular gene, or what the effect is of a particular environment. You can only consider how a particular gene and a particular environment interact. Gene/environment interactions are so important that you can't be taught the biologist secret handshake until you use the phrase in conversation at least once a day", he writes in Monkeyluv, in the introduction to one of the three threads than runs through the book. The second important thread that the book deals with is the "intertwining of our brains and bodies, their mutual capcity to regulate each other". The final subject addressed in the book is the intertwining effects of biology and culture on each other. Meaty subjects, but dispatched with wit, erudition and lucidity.

"The Trouble With Testosterone" is a collection of 17 essays on "the biology of the human predicament" dealing with some aspect or the other of human behavior and the roots of such behavior in the animal kingdom. Some of the essays such as "Beelzebub's SAT Score" and "The Dangers of Fallen Souffles in the Developing World" are more cultural and political than they are biological and except for Beelzebub, I found every one of the essays eye opening at some level.

Sapolsky teaches at Stanford University and is an active researcher unlike many other science popularizers. He continues to publish scientific papers while writing remarkably erudite works for laypeople. Talking about his writing style, he says that he never took a course in writing. He says that he honed his writing skills in Africa where he spent countless months of lonely existence studying the life of baboons. To counter the loneliness, he took to writing letters to his friends, family and colleagues back home, explaining the discoveries of the day. Writing the same thing, over and over again, helped him to whittle down the inessential and find ways to write the same thing differently each time. He commutes from San Francisco every day via public transport which takes up two hours of his day. He uses this time to spend writing, a time that is protected, regular and accessible.

I can't recommend his books enough.

And Then There Are Days...

2009-07-26T15:44:00.001-07:00

And then there are days like this past Friday. I had a miserable night, Shanthala was at work, we were back home from staying with our friends and the house felt so large and lonely. Maya woke up an hour before her usual time which meant that I got even less sleep than usual and I had a full day at work ahead of me. I had asked the nanny, Ginez, to come by after 9 thinking that my meeting wasn't till 10, but I had completely forgotten about a meeting from 9-10. So I had to send email to the folks hosting the 10 o'clock meeting that I'd be 15-20 minutes late. And I have to borrow my friend's car to make up the time.

My stomach disagrees with the quality/quantity of something I ate the night before and I feel crummy. My joints feel stiff. My upper back complains about my carrying Maya so much and my neck laments about having spent the night at an odd angle. I look outside to a gray, cloudy and cold world, like some late fall or winter morning. But we're in the middle of summer. Where is that California sunshine ?

Crabby, sleepless, sore, lonely, I start getting ready for work. I put Maya down and sit down on the potty. The only book around is William Stafford's collection of poems, "The Way It Is". I open a page at random and read:

It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how
people and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, its yours"

I turn another page and read:

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
and the meaning has to go find an author again.
But when we read, it's just print - deciphering,
like frost on a window: we learn the meaning
but lose what the frost is, and all that world
pressed so desperately behind.

My face begins to relax. Some of the tenseness goes out of my body. I begin to breathe slowly again, deeply. I turn another page.

Air crowds into my cell so considerately
that the jailer forgets this kind of gift
and thinks I'm alone. Such unnoticed largesse
smuggled by day floods over me,
or here come grass, turns in the road,
a branch or stone significantly strewn
where it wouldn't need to be.

I hear the soulful call of the mourning dove outside the window, the high notes of asolitary crow somewhere, the twitter of some birds that had no name. And I turn another page:

No leader is free; no follower is free -
the rest of us can often be free.
Most of the world are living by
creeds too odd, chancy and habit-forming
to be worth arguing about by reason.

And the re-enchantment with the world begins again.

Frenetic Existence

2009-07-19T22:31:00.001-07:00

Wednesday, July 15.

Went to bed early last night, woke up early this morning, had a half hour of solitude before Maya woke up. fed her and put a new diaper when she woke up and she fell asleep immediately, had an undisturbed shower and shave, checked email and got the first meeting canceled as the agenda was not clear. Maya woke up for good. She was in great spirits as she was not hungry and had a good full 10 hours of sleep. This is going to be a beautiful day, I thought to myself. And then the wheels started coming off.

When we had moved to our friend's house in Palo Alto, I offered Ginez a choice: to either come at 8:30 so that I could catch a bus to the train station or to come at 8:45 so that she could drop me at the station. She preferred to drop me off at the station as it gave her fifteen more minutes of sleep.

8:38. Ginez called to say that she was stuck in traffic. A car was on fire on the freeway and after getting off the highway, the internal expressway was also a giant parking lot. She was at least 15 minutes away. This set off a domino in my head. 15 minutes late meant that I'd probably not get to the train station on time which meant that I'd miss the company shuttle to work which meant taking the light rail. Taking the light rail meant changing trains to reach my office, which meant that I maybe at work only by 10:15 or so instead of 9:30. Was I glad that I had canceled my meeting at 9:30 ? Nay. I was a little anxious that I'd be late.

8:42: I called Ginez to ask her where she was. She had come up to Middlefield Road and said she'd take that exit to come home. I asked her to hurry.

8:47 I was getting a little nervous. I had no meeting till at least 11. Why was I in a tizzy ? I diapered Maya, picked up my backpack and went outside to wait for Ginez.

8:50. I called Ginez again. She was at Alma and Churchill. She said even these residential roads were choked. She asked if I could come to the corner of El Camino and Park Ave to make up for the lost time. I said yes and started hurriedly walking with Maya in my arms.

8:55 Got to the corner of El Camino and Park. No Ginez. Called her again. She said that she was getting onto El Camino and that she'd be there in a minute or so.

8:57 Ginez is at the light, waiting for the U turn. With no traffic on my side of the road, I hurry across the road, strap Maya in and get inside. Ginez is apologetic, saying that she starts early enough to avoid traffic delays, but that today was really bad. I tell her not to worry, that if I miss the train, I miss it, that it is not the end of the world.

8:58 The light changes and we hurry to Palo Alto Caltrain station. I'm quite confident now that I'll miss the train. We've only 3 minutes left. I imagine jumping into the waiting train just as the door are about to close, without validating my ticket. What will I tell the conductor if they ask for tickets, I wonder.

9:02 As we pull into the station, I see the train on the platform with the doors shut. I think, OK, I've missed it. As I get out, I realize that it's the northbound train. I leap for joy. I can still catch my train. I see the southbound train pulling in. I leap out, wish Ginez a good day, don't even kiss Maya goodbye and start running. Time enough to validate the ticket, I think.

9:03 I get into the train along with a horde of others. I hear an announcement that the train will not stop till Santa Clara. I'm surprised, then relieved that maybe this is the earlier train. I get out along with others, some looking confused as they check their watches. I hurry up to the conductor, who doesn't even look at me as he says "The Mountain View train is right behind". I guess a lot of folks have already asked him the question.

9:05 I call Ginez and tell her that the trains are all delayed, that the commute is messed up everywhere today. I wonder if the company shuttle will wait for me as I pace the platform. I call a friend in India to say hello. They're watching a thriller. I hang up. I notice that the northbound train hasn't yet moved. I look down the tracks and see another train, up ahead, stopped. Stuck due to engine trouble, I think. I pity the northbound commuters.

9:10 No sign of the train that is "right behind". People start pulling out their cell phones and start rescheduling their day.

9:20 A southbound train pulls in. I get in and seat myself. I hear an announcement that this train will stop at all stations between here and San Jose. I'm surprised. What train is this, I wonder. I hope that the company shuttle is still waiting for me. That the driver would've noticed the previous train zip by without stopping and realized that he had to wait some more. I hope their policy is to wait for the train, and not give up within a few minutes or so and depart.

9:30 I arrive at Mountain View station, am glad to see the company shuttle still waiting. Rush to it, get in, greet the driver and settle down, happy that I'll be at work before 10.

Why did I have to rush about like a headless chicken, when I knew that I had no meeting till 11 ? Habit ? Just the pace of modern life ? My own personality ? As I was doing this mindless jiggle, a part of me was observing me doing it and telling me, rather gently, that I had no reason to act this way. But the part that seemed in control, went about anyway.

A growing chorus of voice say that modern psychology is looking for the problem in the wrong place or in the wrong person. They evince that psychology asks people to learn to cope with the existing system rather than realizing that the existing system is broken and that is the reason so many people need psychological help. It is a continuation of the Western philosophy that elevates the individual and free will above that of the society that the individual is a part of.

The modern world is in a sense, a world gone mad. When the founding fathers of the US spoke of everyone's right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", I think they emphasized happiness, not the pursuit. But pursuit is what we've decided we're after, happiness be damned. Why do we indulge in such behavior ? It is as cliche as cliche can be that many on their deathbed say, "I wish I had spent more time with my family". We watch movies such as the brilliant American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, but never succeed to apply the lessons to our life. The Revolutionary Road is as good a movie about the madness of the American Dream as any I've seen. Despite a chance to get out of the humdrum of existence, an existence so boring that it kills all joy, the male protagonist allows himself to be sucked back into the rat race with devastating consequences. As I watched the movie, I recognized that given the right circumstances, I could be that character played so well by Leonardo di Caprio (and Kate Winslet deserved an Oscar for her performance in this movie, not The Reader). Yes, we've somewhat out of the rat race today, having opted to work part time, for less money and to stay at home caring for Maya. But still in experiences like the one that started off this entry, I betray the deeply ingrained habit.

As I was sitting in the train, my mind also went back to a book that I had recently read, Alan Lightman's "The Diagnosis". Not highly recommended, but the initial chapter was a riveting description of the madness that is modern life. A man on his way to work on a beautiful summer morning loses his memory. His memory returns a few days later, but his entire body starts to go numb. He is sucked into the medical establishment with its plethora of tests to determine the cause of his numbness. A scene in the waiting room at his doctor's room, I also consider brilliant. Almost the entire first chapter is available online at Random House's website.

Why do we do this ? The reasons are probably many and complex. But one factor that I had not considered occurred to me when I ran across an interesting article over at Mind Hacks, another neuroscience blog that I track every now and then. The article talks about a recent experiment concerning the reward circuit in our brains. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is commonly associated with pleasure, and with reward. We're animals seeking rewarding activities. Unlike the popular myth however, researchers are finding that as much dopamine is released on the expectation of a reward as on a real reward. The article described an experiment conducted on people involved in a gambling game. The study found that near misses (you almost hit jackpot) released about as much dopamine as real wins, but the overall experience was awful. In other words, dopamine was released even when the outcome was not pleasurable.

All this is fine, you say. What has this got to do with why we pursue modern life despite knowledge of its ills ? Let me quote directly from the article:

Interestingly, although near-misses were experienced as aversive they increased the desire to play the game but only when the person had some perception of control, by choosing what the 'lucky' picture would be.

Of course, like choosing 'heads or tails', it's only an illusion of control because the outcome is random anyway.

But because of reward expectancy the dopamine system is most active when we think we can control the outcome and modify our strategy next time, even if that sense of control is completely false.

In other words, we run the treadmill because we think we can change the outcome. Something special, something unique about us, our situation, our spouses, our children, our work that will change the typical outcome .

In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day. - W.H Auden

17 Month Bundle of Joy

2009-07-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

Maya is almost a year and half old. Some days it feels like time has passed by so quickly, other days it feels like the passage has been adequate. What doesn't change is the joy of waking up next to her everyday, of being thankful for this miracle that was seven years in the making, a bliss that almost didn't happen.

To say that she has been a delightful child is like saying that a gourmet chef's food is heavenly or that a melody is haunting. The words hardly capture the experience.

The Changed Geography Of Childhood

2009-07-09T23:40:00.001-07:00

Writing the entry on Maya's romps in the park, I pondered again about the nature of childhood of Maya's generation. Shanthala often reminisces of her carefree childhood when home was a revolving door from school to playground. I hear others speak similarly of their childhood, people growing up in countries far flung from India, countries like Spain, Italy and even the US.

My father likes to say that he is quite modern in his outlook. In some ways, he's probably ahead of his time. Unlike my peers, I spent most of my childhood alone, reading or playing by myself. We lived inside textile mill compounds, sometimes the only family. Even if there were other families living in the company quarters, other kids would not play as easily with me either because my father was the head honcho or because they were not my age. My time with my friends was controled by my parents to once a month outings at their place or ours usually for a few hours only. Similarly, my activities outside of school with peers were completely governed by my parents.

Left to my own devices, I hardly indulged in any form of physical activity, prefering instead to slouch in a corner with my books. Over time, I became quite fat, acquiring that brahmin belly. A friend's mother would often joke that my belly entered their house well before I did. Even at school, I prefered to cook up some excuse to get out of the P.T (physical training) class.

My childhood fits perfectly with how most kids are raised these days in the US. They are chaperoned from activity to activity, are rarely allowed any time without adult supervision and lead cloistered lives. A friend once commented that in this country, parents are more chaffeurs than parents, spending entire weekends driving kids from activity or birthday party to another. Shanthala often says how much she hates orchestrating time for kids to play with each other, those play dates. It is unusual to see kids playing out in the streets by themselves.

This article in Boston Globe, published in January 2008, is one of many articles that I found on the net when I searched for any data on how little kids played outside these days. Here is an excerpt from the article:

'Roger Hart knows this wistful territory better than anyone. In 1972, as a graduate student at Clark University, the young researcher set out to understand the geography of childhood. He journeyed to a not-so-exotic locale -- a village in Vermont -- and spent two years tracking the movements of a species that, remarkably, had never been closely studied in its natural environment: the human child. (At the time, says Hart, "we knew more about the ecology of baboons than the ecology of children.") Running, playing, and digging in the dirt with packs of kids from 5 to 12 years old, he discovered that virtually all of them had outdoor places they considered their own, where they went to hide, reflect, or commune with nature.

When Hart returned to the same town two years ago, to repeat his research and learn how childhood has changed in 36 years, he discovered a universe transformed in a single generation. The children had moved indoors, and the intricate, outdoor play-world they had once invented and inhabited on their own was gone. In the wake of the shift he found nagging questions about its effects on children's creativity and independence. Now 60 and a professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York, Hart is working on a film and a book about his research, tentatively titled "Childhood Revisited."'

The article goes on to say how his study indicates that kids these days have a hard time spending time on their own, inventing activities to keep themselves occupied. I remembered how a friend's child, raised in the US, had a hard time finding something to do on his own in the absence of a computer or TV. He kept saying how bored he was. An article in LA Times about this subject (from May 2008) states a University of Michigan finding that between 1981 and 1997, "3- to 5-year-olds lost an average of 501 minutes of unstructured playtime each week; 6- to 8-year-olds lost an average of 228 minutes. (On the other hand, kids now do more organized activities and have more homework, the lucky devils!) And forget about walking to school alone. Today's kids don't walk much at all (adding to the childhood obesity problem)."

There is no dearth of articles that bemoan this new geography of childhood, of time with computers and TV and almost complete lack of unstructured, adult-free time. For example, this article talks about a national movement called "No Child Left Inside", inspired by a book called "Last Child In The Woods" by a Richard Louv. An excerpt from the article:

'Louv tagged the term "nature deficit disorder," the physical, psychological and emotional conditions that result from society's increasing alienation from nature. Obesity, stress and attention disorders are just some of its manifestations. Louv's book has triggered a national conversation about the issue, even sparked federal legislation to help fund local programs and the development of school curriculums. It is the springboard for groups all over the country who are working to get youth outside more.'

The article speaks of how the latest edition of Oxford Junior Dictionary cut out terms such as: beaver, dandelion, heron, magpie, clover, otter and others, and substituted Blackberry, blog, MP3 player, voicemail and broadband. It is quite well-known that kids today can identify brands far better than they can identify flora and fauna.

Other articles speak of how kids in day care spend less time outdoors compared to kids not in day care. The causes vary from the personality of the day care supervisors (if they don't enjoy being outside, they tend to not take kids outside) to the nature of groups (if one kid comes ill-prepared to be outside, such as not having the appropriate clothing, the entire class doesn't go).

Why this massive shift in a single generation ? The factors are many. Fear is a large factor. Most parents are terrified that their kids will be abducted and/or killed by homicidal maniacs or pedophiles if left to play by themselves. Litigation is another factor according to this article published in 2006. The structure of our lives is another factor. We live in suburbs, in communities where neighbors hardly know each other and so parents prefer to drive their kids to their friends' houses or to common meeting points. Another issue is the increased urge to enroll kids into every possible activity, to not deprive the kids of possible benefits and to provide a competitive edge. It is also far easier to plonk kids in front of the TV or the computer compared to taking them out to a park.

Many articles speak of the effects of this retreat from the outside and the lack of unsupervised time. They speak of increased risk of obesity (physical activity is one factor, not the only factor of course), diabetes and heart diseases. Some articles also highlight that play and unsupervised time itself is critical. A representative for the American Academy of Pediatrics', Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg testified to Congress in 2006, "Play allows children to create and explore a world they can master, conquering their fears while practicing adult roles. ... Play helps children develop new competencies ... and the resiliency they will need to face future challenges." But here's the catch: Those benefits aren't realized when some helpful adult is hovering over kids the whole time." Then there is the possibility that all this alienation from nature will make kids immune to issues such as loss of biodiversity and open spaces.

People who look at me today may ask, "Well, it doesn't seem that your physical inactivity during your childhood has prevented you from becoming physically fit and healthy in your later ages. So why all this hoopla ? Let's give the parents a break". What they don't see is the struggle I grow through every time I have to lace up for a run. I have to fight with myself from giving all those excuses to not run each time. And as some of the articles state, the issue is more than just health. And I don't think I'm just blaming parents or the modern life. In our drive to acquire the trappings of a successful life, I fear that we're forgetting how to live, we're withdrawing or opting out of making decisions that may lead to greater benefits systemically, for us and our future generations.

Fun In The Park

2009-07-08T19:47:00.000-07:00

Maya enjoys being out in the park. The nanny takes her to a park near our house pretty much the entire day, returning home only for an afternoon nap. The park has so become a part of her day that she doesn't eat much solids if she hasn't had a few hours at the park.

Shanthala also takes Maya to the park when she's home and with her. I have been less park-friendly in the past. Since we moved to our friend's house for a short time, I've been taking her to the park a little more frequently. We typically go after she has her afternoon nap and return in time for dinner. Sometimes, we go back to the park after dinner. One of the pleasures of summer in the west is that we can enjoy sunlight late in the day, as late as 8:30 or 9:00 PM.

Parks here typically host a few slides, see-saw, swings and large sections of sandy areas. The park near our house is a lot more crowded than the one near our friend's place. Nannies, mothers sometimes nursing a baby and keeping a watchful eye on their toddler, grandparents and occasionally dads bring the kids to the park. The mothers usually hang together as do the nannies, most of them Hispanic. We end up chatting with some of these people as we stand side-by-side pushing our kids in the swing or when Maya picks up one of the other kids' toys (usually a shovel or a rake).

How old is she, is usually the conversation starter. Most are surprised that Maya is only 16 months old. She's tall enough to look at least two years old. They next comment on her exuberance and her big eyes. Maya takes all this in with a cheerful smile, knowing that we're talking about her. These days she even raises her hand high above her head in greeting.

Initially, Maya just enjoyed playing in the sand, digging with a shovel or shoveling the sand into a bucket. She also enjoys pushing tricycles and strollers around the park. At this age, she doesn't play with any other kid, though she's happy to go greet kids that she takes a fancy to.

Swing was something she enjoyed right off the bat, but the rest she seemed to not fancy much. The slide she completely avoided. Two days ago, something clicked and she hasn't been able to get over the slide. She runs up the steps to the slide, positions herself and slides down to make a perfect landing, usually. Sometimes she shot off the edge into the sand to land on her butt or her face. She didn't seem to mind that, laughing as she picked herself up, racing around to the steps to start all over again.

She's tried several times to climb up the slide. But with her footwear, she never managed to get a good grip and always slid down after the first two or three steps. Yesterday evening, I took off her footwear and she decided to tackle a swing in the bigger kids section of the park. The video shows her try a few times before she succeeds in climbing all the way to the top. Now that she's got the hang of it, she tries climbing up all the slides, one of which is very steep. She hasn't managed to climb to the top of that one yet, but it sure is fun watching her try it.

Two Little Changes

2009-07-02T22:59:00.000-07:00

Shanthala commented a few months ago that I spent all my time in front of my laptop. I pooh-pooh'ed her observation with a defensive "I do a lot of things on my computer: write, work, read the news etc". I didn't fail to notice that my defense merely bore her observation out. So, I tried to reduce the time I spent in front of the computer. I tried to space the time I spent checking email; I'll check mail only every hour, I declared to myself. I tried to limit the time I spent surfing the web. Having lived most of my life by Oscar Wilde's credo that the best way to fight temptation is to yield to it, I failed in my efforts.

Another time, Shanthala suggested that we move the round table that passes for a work desk to another room, out of the family room where we spent most of our time. I disagreed with that suggestion, finding no point in it. I told her how I enjoyed listening to music while I worked, a habit from a time when I was still in school. The subject was closed.

This past weekend, we moved temporarily to a friend's house. They own two adjoining houses, one of which they rent out. They were between renters and expressed an interest in our moving in for a little while. They have three children who dote on Maya, we have a wonderful time hanging out with these friends and so we decided to take them up on their offer.

Maya is lulled to sleep by music. It's our nightly ritual. In our bedroom, we have a boombox that I use specifically for this purpose. When we travel, rather than carry the boombox and a large collection of CDs, I use the laptop that has most of my music. So, I setup the laptop in our bedroom.

Five days into our stay, I noticed that I don't spend as much time in front of the computer. It's not that I have more on my hands here than in our house. It's not that there is a lull in the work. Puzzled, I thought about the reason. I realized that with the laptop in the bedroom, a place I only went to sleep, I was never in the same room as the laptop much. This automatically reduced the time I spent in front of the computer. Hey Oscar, a great way to fight temptation is to keep it out of sight. We're moving that table that Shanthala wanted moved when we return. Sigh. It hurts to have her be right. Again.

The Company You Keep

I don't do any other exercise besides running. I do a few weight lifting exercises for my upper body, but those are mostly very short. Running has been the mainstay of my physical regimen. Till I found running, especially long distance running, I found it very hard to stay physically fit. Running three or four days a week, running a half marathon every weekend was something I did quite consistently for three years. Then, something happened. I began to lose interest and had to work hard to get out of the house. Once I was out, it was not difficult to go the distance. But, oh! The reasons I gave for not getting out. The drop in motivation began just a short while before Kitty died. Grief over his passing was soon followed by the relentlessness of parenting and running began to look like another chore to be completed when I just wanted a little time to breathe.

Once I could push Maya in the jog stroller, I began to run a little more consistently, initially. Over the last few weeks, I began to find myself looking for excuses to not run. One problem is that there is only decent running track near our house, the Stevens Creek Trail. Other paths lead me along roads with car traffic and I'm nervous about running with Maya on such roads, even if they're residential streets. I don't care to run on the sidewalk (foot path for you non-Americans) because running long distances on concrete surfaces can damage the knee and hips over time. Ego played a little role too. I didn't want to run if I couldn't maintain my level of fitness, but each time I didn't run, it became harder to maintain my fitness. Another reason is that running was self-motivated and lonely. I ran alone all the time.

Since we moved into our friend's house, I've run four times this week and hope to run at least one more day. Each time has been about an hour with one of them being a hard workout on a day the temperature closed in on triple digits (it was 36 degree Celsius). While novelty is a possibility, I attritbute this sudden change primarily to the availability of partners who wanted to run. I ran with Jeff on Sunday, with David on Monday, Hilary on Tuesday and David again today. I'll probably run solo tomorrow. Less than a week into our stay at the new place, I have made two small, but significant changes.

Two Years

2009-06-26T23:24:00.000-07:00

from what we cannot hold the stars are made - W.S. Merwin

Dear Kitty,

It is two years now since that gorgeous summer day that you died. Two years that I've seen and you have not. Two years that you could have shared with me and could not. Shared the joy of Maya, the frustrations, the relentlessness, the exhaustion of parenting. Two years and not a day has gone by that I haven't thought of you or missed you. And you will remain mine in the ways that I miss you.

Over these two years I've written about what you meant to me. What your loss felt like. What your loss taught me. I've written about your time with us. I've marked time in this blog, with an entry each month on that fateful day. A reader may comment that I've been more faithful in writing about you than I have been in writing about Maya. With Maya, I'm making new memories. With you, I've been a Don Quixote for two years, wrestling not just your death, but the onset of the inevitable death of much of your memories. But, I have managed cheat this other death a little by recording much of your life. Some day, Maya may read these entries and in them, find some measure of who you were.

And now, Kitty, I'm spent. All the tears, the hurt, the grief, the stories have exhausted themselves. Maybe they're only resting a while. But your memories bring a smile to my face now, are no longer only a reminder of the wretched hole in my heart.

For the past three weeks, every morning when she wakes up, Maya points to your picture on the wall, smiles and looks at me. I say "Sweetheart, that's Kitty" and she smiles some more and points at your picture again. In these new rituals, I take some comfort.

All day the stars watch from long ago
Kitty said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know - W.S. Merwin

That fateful evening, on your last ride home, you crawled to the front seat of the car, laid a paw on my hand and rested it there till we reached home. Now I know you meant to say "when you are alone you will be all right". Yes, Kitty, I am all right. But, if you were here ...

I love you my Sirius,

Dini

Maya The Helper

2009-06-18T22:39:00.000-07:00

Maya and I have always had a morning ritual. We toss around a little bit till we're awake enough to tumble out of bed. These past two weeks, we've been feeding her her first bottle of milk in bed itself, giving us a little more time to sleep. After she's done feeding, she gets out of bed and picks up my glasses and opening them, hands them to me. That's my sign to get out of bed. If it's a weekday, Shanthala has usually left for work. If it's a weekend, she tends to sleep in a little longer.

I carry Maya down and start my coffee. While the coffee is brewing, I power up the music system. Maya has the ritual very precisely recorded. The moment I start the coffee machine, she starts gesticulating towards the music system. Maya has always been particular about what music she hears at what time of the day. She has a very clear idea of music that is enjoyed only in the morning, songs such as Gordon Lightfoot's Minstrel of the Dawn, Beatles Here Comes The Sun, Mark Knopfler's soundtracks to Cal and Local Hero and Call Of The Valley. I've burnt a CD of such songs and I usually start playing that. For an hour or so after she wakes up, she's still a little sleepy and likes to be held. So, I savor my morning coffee, holding her, listening to the music together. After I finish drinking my two cups of coffee, I usually check email and look at the morning news. By this time, Maya is more awake and she's off running around the house.

In the past two weeks, we've added a new ritual. Maya helps me unload the dishwasher. Initially, she'd just toss out the spoons any which way, making it impossible to unload the dishwasher while she was around. But after a while, she began to respond to my calls to place the spoon in my hand. And then, one day I decided to seek her help in unloading the entire dishwasher and was successful. Here she is, just past 16 months, already a help around the house.

Asperatus: A New Cloud

2009-06-12T21:26:00.000-07:00

It was a gray morning as I set out to work today. The whole week has been like that, gray and cloud covered till the sun finally burns the cloud cover by afternoon. It is great weather to go running with Maya. No sunscreen, no shades. She can enjoy the scenery unhindered by the shades. But this gray weather in summer is a little gloomy. The temperatures have hovered in the low sixties to low seventies too. As I stared at the clouds and surfed the web as the company shuttle made its way to the campus, I was drawn to an article titled "Iowa woman's photo sparks push for new cloud type". It was accompanied by a beautiful photograph of rather unusual looking clouds.

Jane Wiggins had stood by her office window watching these clouds form. An amateur photographer, she snapped this picture. She said, "It looked like Armageddon. The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change."

No new cloud type has been discovered since 1951. Searching for a better picture than the one in the AP review, I ran across a forum that carried some impressive looking cloud photos. One of the posts also carried a good description of cloud types. A poster called hypewaders wrote: "The basic cloud forms have been defined for centuries, and these are some common characterizations: flat, lumpy, rainy, lumpy-rainy, curly, and high. To standardize (and sound more impressive) it's common to use latin words for these descriptors: Stratus, cumulus, nimbus, cumulonimbus, cirrus, and alto, respectively. There are various compound words made up of these descriptors, like "cumulonimbus" (lumpy raining cloud) for example. Some less common cloud types haven't ever gotten latin names- for example, roll clouds, which are tubular indicators of rather violent rotors."

On that forum, I also read about an unusual, annual cloud formation called Morning Glory in a remote corner of Australia thata attracts glider pilots for the unbeatable gliding experience that it provides. Here is a picture of Morning Glory from the Wikipedia and a story to go with it on Cloud Appreciation Society's webpage.

Reading all this made my morning commute so much more intense. The gray clouds no longer looked gray and dull and undifferentiated. The shades of white that peppered the clouds of gray, the muted colors of the marsh by Baylands Park added beauty to what was otherwise a mundane weekday commute.

Are Parents Irrelevant ?

2009-06-02T20:35:00.001-07:00

"Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child's personality ? This article examines the evidence and concludes that the answer is no".

Thus began an article published in 1995 in the eminent psychology journal, Psychological Review. In 1997, the American Psychological Association awarded the author of the article the George A. Miller Award for "outstanding recent article in psychology". A book based on the article titled "Nurture Assumption" was declared a NYT Notable Book and went on to become a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Steven Pinker wrote a glowing foreword for the book calling her work "truly rare" and said "I predict that it will come to be seen as a turning point in psychology".

The iconclastic author was a former writer of college psychology textbooks. Many years 'ere, she had been rejected from pursuing her doctorate in Psychology at Harvard University by George A. Miller, of the very same George A. Miller award. Described as an "elfin, fragile grandmother", the author's story of rise from obscurity to fame was itself eye-catching.

I ran across a reference to "Nurture Assumption" via the usual, often visited Frontal Cortex. I was struck by the fact that someone was arguing that parents are not particularly important in determining a child's behavior (and it's usually added as an afterthought that "parents are not important in determining the child's behavior outside of the home"). Are these just a "cherished cultural myth" as Harris puts it ?

Even at a very superficial level, the statement that parents don't matter much seems so wrong. Just take genes. Many disorders are genetic i.e. passed from parents to their offspring. Parents with blond hair and blue eyes pass on their "in vogue beauty" to their offspring. To discount parents seemed quite ridiculous to me. But, I like to think I'm open minded and give every idea some measure of my consideration before discarding it. Of course, being a parent and thinking that this was one of my greatest responsibilities in life made my curiosity more than academic. So, I checked out the book from the local library.

Harris writes lucidly and cogently. She wastes no time in getting to the bone of her contention: "'Heredity and environment' - that's what we called them back then. Nowdays, they're more often referred to as 'nature and nuture'.... Nature and nurture rule. Nature gives parents a baby; the end result depends on how they nurture it. Good nurturing can make up for many of nature's mistakes; lack of nurturing can trash nature's best efforts. .... Nurture is not a neutral word: it carries baggage. ... The use of nurture as a synonym for environment is based on the assumption that what influences children's development, apart from their genes, is the way parents bring them up. I call this the nurture assumption. ... My first job is to show that the nurture assumption is nothing more than that: simply an assumption".

Ahh! I said to myself, she's already modified her eye-catching start. She's replaced "parents" with "parenting". But even that seems a little too far-fetched. Here I am, struggling to this day with neuroses caused partly, I think, by attitudes instilled in me by my parents. I see my sister struggle with her share of them and Shanthala too. And we're not the only ones. You read (and hear) about abused kids becoming absuive in their later lives, of the culture of fathers abandoning their responsibility begetting generations with such behavior. So, is "any parenting" good enough ? Everything I've read makes me think that parenting is part biology, part culture. I wondered if Harris was addressing aspects of culture that have to do with middle class, white America ?

As I continued to read (the book is quite easy to read), I saw that her focus was on the field of developmental psychology and it's practitioners whom she terms "socialization researchers". She writes: "Socialization research is the scientific study of the effects of the environment - in particluar, the effects of the parents' child-rearing methods or their behavior toward their children - on the children's psychological development. It is a science because it uses some of the methods of science, but it is not, by and large, an experimental science. ... Since socialization researchers do not, as a rule, have any control over the way parents rear their children, they cannot do experiments. Instead, they take advantage of existing variations in parental behavior. ... In other words, they do correlational studies."

She goes on to write a withering criticism of socialization research as a science because, wait for it, correlation is not causation. She talks of how these folks also completely ignore genetic effects. She also, quite validly, talks of the "effects of the effects of genes". She says:"A child's timidity causes his mother to reassure him, his sister to make fun of him, and his peers to pick on him. A child's beauty causes her parents to dote on her and wins her a wide circle of admiring friends." In other words, parents respond to children based on the personality of the children such as happy or crying all the time, obedient or stubborn etc.

Her theory is that genes and "peer groups" account for how children turn out a lot more than how parents rear their children. In a nuclear family where parents seem to spend more and more time at work and children are increasingly fending for themselves or at day care (or in shopping malls as they age), the effect of peer groups seems quite logical. In small tribal groups where the shared values of the group are much higher than in modern urban neighborhoods, the effect of peers and parents is probably identical because the shared values are so much more. The same can be said of traditional societies like the one I grew up in, where people from a common caste share a ritual and tend to spend time together. Even at school, kids tend to mix with others "like them", are encouraged to do so by their parents and elders.

The history of parenting in America makes for interesting reading. Ann Hulbert's "Raising America" is an excellent, well-written and detailed guide on this subject. In the Introduction, she writes: "Raising children has rated very near to sex - and to success - as an American fixation, especially since the start of the twentieth century and particularly among the middle class. 'In no other country,', one historian noted in the 1950s, 'has there been so pervasive a cultural anxiety about rearing of children". Among the books I browsed soon after Maya was born, I recall one of the authors commenting on how strange it is, this modern tradition of pregnant women going to hospitals to deliver armed with books rather than with mothers and grandmothers. This is not unusual for a country based entirely on immigrants, people who uproot themselves from their home and make a new home here. In most such cases, the immigrants arrive without their elders, without relatives who've already raised children. Seeking wisdom from experts in the field seemed the right approach to a country driven increasingly by the industrial revolution.

Ann Hulbert writes that national conferences on parenting with support coming from no less than the White House peppered the past century: The National Congress of Mothers in 1899, Conference on Modern Parenthood in 1925, Midcentury White House Conference on Youth and Children in 1950, White House Conference on Families in 1980 and White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning in 1997. The goal was to find the scientific underpinning of parenting and use them to guide a new generation of parents. Ann Hulbert writes: "At the successive meetings, each marking a new generation of parents and of expertise, the verdicts grew more mixed and alarmed: scientific lore was spreading, yet hand in hand with rising expectations of parents' and children's performance went rising apprehensions of failure as the American family, everyone agreed, fought for survival in a society rapidly encroaching on its hallowed terrain. ... As the new millenium approached, 'raising a scientifically correct child', ... risked becoming a 'neurotic national pastime'". Books such as Parenting Inc. document the continuing neuroses.

Much of American psychology was dominated by behaviorism and empiricism, based on the assumption was that we're all born blank slates, that who we become is largely (if not solely) based on environment (or nurture as the word became more commonly used). Proponents of this school such as James Broadus Watson proclaimed that given a dozen children and complete control of raising them, he could make any of them turn out to be whoever he wanted them to be: engineer, doctor, beggar-man, thief. They decried mothers for kissing and cuddling their babies warning them that this would rear adults ill-suited to the demands of an impersonal, urban, modern world and then turned around and charged that autism was caused by "frigid", emotionally aloof mothers. What a mess! Behaviorism is in severe decline, but by no means completely dead. In many fields such as socialization research, it seemed to go on. People continued to believe that if their children turned out to be bad, it must be because they had bad parents or more precisely, were parented badly.

Parenting has largely been the domain of women with men acting as interested bystanders and more interested in "bread winning". All this neuroses of parenting affects the mother a lot more than it does the father and all the experts make it sound "scientific". With the rise of feminism, women began to fight back. In the process, they sometimes threw the baby out with the bath water, it seems. Rejecting attachment theory, aspects of evolutionary parenting traits, the benefits of breast milk etc.

Judith Rich Harris stepped into this climate to relieve parents of their burden by pointing out that many of these so-called sciences, had really no basis in science, were more about correlations than causes, did statistical mumbo-jumbo to reach inconclusive conclusions, ignored many other aspects such as genes and other environmental factors such as interaction with peers. In the true style of an American, she went entirely in the opposite direction and proclaimed that parents hardly matter in the final psychological development of a child and that peers were "everything", a theory which she admits doesn't have much evidence for either. Ann Hulbert writes that Harris' theory confirmed to the Western faith in personal responsibility and in an unbroken continuity between past and present.

The pendulum seems to be swinging in the opposite direction today. Newspapers and blogs proclaim on a regular basis how a gene has been found that is considered responsible for some behavior such as alcoholism and even novelty-seeking behavior. People who emphasize genetics more than environment are called psychological nativists. Steven Pinker is a prominent nativist. For a fascinating insight into the debate of nature vs nurture and how meaningless that debate is, two wonderfully erudite and readable books are Matt Ridley's "Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human" and Robert Sapolsky's "Monkeyluv: And other essays on our lives as animals". In one particularly brilliant chapter, "The Madness of Causes", Ridley picks the topic of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and manic-depression and whipsawing back and forth between genetic causes and environmental causes, shows how impossible it is to separate the effects of genes and environment. Sapolsky's first section is similarly illuminating, and with much more humor. Sapolsky says that we must use the term "gene/environment" to refer to their combined effect. He writes: "Genes don't cause behaviors. Sometimes, they influence them. ... What that means is that the effects of a gene on an organism will usually vary with changes in the environment, and the effects of the environment will vary with changes in the genetic makeup of the organism."

Getting back to Harris, does she think parents are completely insignificant ? In a chapter titled "What Parents Can Do", Harris writes: ".. it wouldn't be fair - and it wouldn't be accurate - to leave you with the impression that parents are wallpaper". She talks of treating kids well because that's what you do to sustain a good relationship. She ends the chapter with: "Don't worry about what the advice-givers tell you. Love your kids because kids are lovable, not because you think they need it. ... Relax. How they turn out is not a reflection of the care you have given them."

Many years ago, when we first began to try conceiving, a friend advised me that "children are not like algorithms. You cannot expect predictable output based on specific input". A common joke goes "Before I had kids, I had three theories on parenting. Now, I have three kids and no theories". Given the modern world and its demands, the nuclear family and its after-effects, parenting is hard. Why should I spend time with Maya when I can be busy at work, seeking the next promotion, the next patent, the next accolade ? I'll certainly be more acknowledged for that rather than caring for Maya (a friend pointed out that even Buddha abandoned his responsibility as a parent). Why should I bother spending time with Maya instead of setting her in front of a TV and writing this entry at 6 PM instead of 2 AM ? Not only because I hope that in the process, I can teach her something about valuing people more than objects, about how I valued her and my time with her. I can only hope that all this will lead to us being close twenty, thirty years from now, that she can cherish this relationship and use it as a guide for her future relationships. Beyond hoping, what more can we do ?

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you." - Kahlil Gibran

Take Me Back

2009-05-26T21:25:00.001-07:00

One of the advantages of upgrading to the latest version of the Ubuntu distribution (I've run Linux on my laptop forever) is that the photo management software comes with support for scanning photos. I've struggled to get decent quality photo scans but never succeeded to my satisfaction.

I scanned these pictures of Kitty, taken when he was still young. He could clear seven foot fences in one bound and climb trees (he had difficulty descending sometimes, however). We were renting one unit of a duplex then, not far from where we are now. A close friend was renting the other unit of the duplex. His backyard was accessible from ours and had a tree. One summer evening, Kitty ventured into his yard and climbed the tree. My friend who was enjoying the evening spied Kitty and quickly snapped these pictures of him.

Seeing the picture took me back to those happy times. How long ago it seems. Our friend and we shared a duplex, eating together many nights. He moved far away from here 18 months or so later and now, he has returned to India. And Kitty. He's moved even farther away. But, at least in my memories and dreams, he's never that far.

Shanthala's Madeleine

2009-05-21T22:24:00.001-07:00

For Proust, it was a madeleine. For Shanthala, it is a mango.

Returning home from work two weeks back, a little earlier than expected, she decided to stop by a baby store. Maya needed some sundry items. As she drove home from the store, down the road that housed the local public library, standing at one of the street corners was a guy selling strawberries. During this time of the year, I've often seen Hispanics selling strawberries on some residential street corners. I've often wondered who they are. Daily farm workers or farmers themselves ? People with relatives in the farming industry trying to eke out an existence ? We've never bought anything from them because we get all our fruits from the local farmer's market and we're not big fans of strawberry. But Shanthala spied that this guy had something more than strawberries. She eyes were drawn by a flash of orange color, though the fruit was not shaped like an orange. The corner had a STOP sign and so she used the opportunity to pause. He was selling mangoes.

Summers in India are indelibly linked with the mango. The hot, sweaty days made sweet with the succulent and aromatic fruit. From about March till about the end of May, mangoes are very much the craze. Even for a household like mine where fruits were never in much demand, mangoes were the exception. I remember my father bringing in a crate or two of the most loved mango variety, Alphonso, each layer of mangoes separated from the next with hay. My mother would sift through them, picking out the ripest and those almost ready to spoil to be eaten first. The sweet aroma of mangoes permeated the house.

In season, the mango finds its way into so many foods. "Aam ras", a thick paste of mango pulp that is sometimes sweetened with jaggery or sugar and eaten with hot pooris or chapati. My mother would make mango rice made from slightly unripe mangoes. There is even a popular mango-based soft drink, Maaza. When I had tonsillectomy, unable to eat any regular food, I had stayed on a diet of ice cream and Maaza. The painful experience was enough to turn me off from Maaza for the rest of my life. In the US, mango lassi is a perennial favorite. Available only in summer, people take to mango pickles and mango chutney to get through the rest of the year. Maharashtrians and Goans make a spice, amchur, made from dried unripe mangoes, that is added to various dishes such as dal. Shanthala like many others, also enjoyed eating a slightly unripe mango mixed with chilli powder. Besides the fruit, mango leaves adorn the doorways of Hindu houses during religious festivals or on propitious occasions such as a marriage.

Indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, mango belies its roots in being a difficult fruit to tame with a fork and a knife. As you suck the very marrow around the core seed, juices drip down your arms. Eating a mango with your hands is the only way to get a full measure of the fruit. I was raised to eat with a spoon, never cultivating the Indian habit of eating with my hands. When I had to mix pickles or chutney powder with rice and ghee, I turned to my mother to help me mix the combo, a spoon hardly upto the task of mixing the ingredients well. My mother sliced the two sides of the mango providing an easily scoopable cross-section of the fruit. But the heart of the fruit lay inaccessible. I never knew what my mother did with the core of the fruit. Did she eat it ? Did she throw it away ?

Our first mango season together after our marriage was in Mumbai where Shanthala pursued her residency and I was chased by my demons, trying to quell the voices that said that abandoning higher studies in the US for a job in a small company in Mumbai foretold the end of my computing life. The evening we got our first batch of mangoes home, she watched in amazement as I sliced the mango the way I had seen my mom do. I finished eating the scoops and not having known what my mom did with the rest of the fruit, I dumped it in the trashcan. Shanthala had a apoplexy. "You won't eat any more mangoes, not if I can help it, how can you waste so much", she said, snatching the box of mangoes out of my reach. Taken aback, I suggested that she could eat the middle if she liked, but I would not sully my hands.

Shanthala grew up in many ways that seem more Indian than my own upbringing. Nothing exemplified it more than how she ate mangoes as a kid. Her parents would take off her dress (as well as her brother's), seat them in their underclothes, put a plate in front of them, cut the top off the mango and offer the whole fruit to them. They'd suck on the fruit, peeling off the thin, easily removed skin as they devoured the fruit, their arms coated with the juices from the succulent fruit. They'd lick the juices off their arms. After they were done, they would wash up and get dressed. When time was limited, her parents would slice the fruit into thin slices for devouring. Another friend of ours remembers eating mangoes in a similar fashion. Here is a description from an article in New York Times:

"She first holds out a cupped hand, in which sits the imaginary
glistening orange oval of a whole peeled mango; she then deftly flicks
her hand at the wrist to propel the phantom mango against her mouth,
which gets busy sucking the flesh down to the seed; finally,
outrageously, she deploys the full length of her tongue to lick her
arm, elbow to wrist, to recapture an inevitable trickle of invisible
mango juice.

"That," she says after a long moment's rapture with
a fruit that's not even there, "is the best bit." She goes on to
speculate that there is something alchemical in the mingling of
sweetest mango juice with a salty sheen of sweat."

For Shanthala, mangoes smell of home, a home she misses all the more after Maya's birth. When we came to the US together in March 1996, she left home at the start of the mango season. With another friend of ours, as fanatic about mangoes, she searched for mangoes in Indian grocery stores without much success. Mangoes here are imported from Mexico and other Central American nations and lack the aroma, flavor and juice of what she had left behind. That they were expensive made the fruit even less palatable. They tried various stores and even tried tinned mangoes. At Thai restaurants, sweet sticky rice with mangoes is a staple dessert. We ate the sticky rice casting the mango, tasteless or sour, aside. Each year, Shanthala lamented the lack of mangoes.

US banned Indian mangoes starting in the 80s over fears that Indian farmers used harmful pesticides on the crop. Japan had imposed a similar ban. About the only thing that Shanthala will cheer about our ex-president, Dubya, is that he lifted the ban on Indian mangoes in the US (in return, the Indian government offered to open the Indian market to the Harley-Davidson bikes). The largest producer of mangoes in the world, India produces upto 50% of the world's mangoes. On April 27, 2007, the first batch of Indian mangoes arrived in the US after a hiatus of 18 years, made up of 150 boxes of the famous Alphonso and Kesari varieties.

A few weeks back, we encountered a stall at the farmer's market selling a few mangoes. Though pricey (each fruit cost $2 or $3), they were delicious. Unfortunately, they were exhausted in a couple of weeks. Shanthala's mango urge, latent all these years, had begun to itch and had not yet been satisfyingly scratched.

So, when Shanthala spied the fruit being hawked by a street vendor, she decided to give them a try. She bought a box of about 20 mangoes for about $13, a steal. Unaware of her find, I came home from work and as we headed out for dinner, Shanthala said, "Can we swing by the library for a second ?". Always a sucker to be at the library, I agreed. She explained what had happened on the way. We weren't going to the library, but only upto the corner. Shanthala had sampled the mangoes, found them to be excellent, remembered the guy had one more box and so she wanted to pick that up, hoping no one else would have already snapped it up.

He still had the box. Thirteen more dollars were coughed up for about 25 mangoes and we left with a big smile on Shanthala's face. Shanthala wanted to know if he had more mangoes and if he would be back. He spoke no English and we No Habla Espanol. We called Maya's nanny to provide us with the appropriate words, but she didn't pick up the phone. Shanthala and I continued to gesticulate, trying to get our question across. "I don't want to lose this opportunity to get such good mangoes", Shanthala kept saying. The guy finally understood what we were trying to say and said that he was all out of mangoes.

That night, I decided to give them a shot. I finished five of them in a row. Maybe not in the same class as an Alphonso, but these were still excellent: juicy, sweet and aromatic, just like we remembered mangoes. I made my favorite mango drink with milk a couple of times and have otherwise been devouring them along with Shanthala. I have since learned to use my hands to get all the meat off the fruit.

A week ago, Shanthala ran into another streetside vendor selling mangoes and she lightened his load of two boxes of mango. These are excellent too. Maya ate the fruit the first few times we bought the fruit. Since then however, she's steadfastly refused to eat it, though she continues to eat other fruits such as blueberries and cherries.

As she stands by the counter, diligently slicing the mango into thin strips and sucking the fruit off the skin, I sometimes feel she's sucking deep into the well of her memory as well. For us immigrants, such are the small mercies helping us remember what we've left behind.

P.S: Picture is courtesy of !ºrobodot, via Flickr

Dancing Maya

2009-05-17T17:37:00.000-07:00

In the video above, Maya is dancing to Van Morrison's "Bright Side Of the Road" while the one below was recorded as Lizz Wright's "Hit The Ground" was ending. Maya has tried to dance from the time she could walk, but it has been difficult to capture on film because she starts staring at the blinking red light of the camera once the recording starts. Waving her arms to the music is her own thing while the rest of the motion she seems to imitate what Shanthala or I do.

To Walk, To Perchance Be Human

2009-05-12T00:16:00.001-07:00

It was a beautiful spring evening, this past Thursday. Maya was just shy of her 15th month birthday that evening, when she walked a little over a half mile.

Shanthala was on call and so Maya and I set out for an evening stroll. A neighbor walking their dog, still a puppy and not easily controlled, pushed us off our usual path. I walk Maya on the sidewalk, almost never crossing the street. I expected Maya to continue the routine. But, as we reached a traffic light on this new path, Maya stopped and gesticulated at the pedestrian crossing button, insisting that I press it. I was flabbergasted, I hadn't realized how much she was imbuing when she was with us. I acted dumb and asked her what she wanted, to confirm that this was not a fluke. She pointed to the button and gesticulated again, this time more impatiently. After I pressed it, she gesticulated her desire to be picked up. Next, she pointed in the direction she wanted me to cross the street. I was even more surprised. This was the route when I took her running, but I didn't think she would recognize and register this much information.

She demanded to be put down once we crossed the main street. From there, she walked all the way upto a neighborhood park. Walking with her is never a surgical operation. She stops many times along the way, examining the neighborhood, the passing cars, the passersby. She is happy to greet people who smile at her. A resident of one of the houses emerged with her 4 or 5 year old son and Maya rushed up to her, smiling and indicating that she wanted to hug the boy. All along the way, people stopped to admire this little girl, walking with such happiness.

Since Maya started walking when she was about thirteen months old, every day I take her for a walk around the block of our neighborhood. We've taught her to not pluck flowers, but to just touch them or smell them. So she just touches a flower or two in each bush and says "Ta". When we get to a rosemary bush, she rubs the leaves and then rubs her face, her nose crinkling with pleasure. That spot is one of her two favorite stopping places on our walks.

Sometimes, Maya wakes up in the middle of the night and if I'm not around, starts whimpering before bellowing a full throated cry and starting her search for me. She realized that one of the spots I can be at is the toilet and so she checks there first. Before she could walk, she would crawl. Alerted by her quest by the baby monitor, I'd usually reach her before she had gone very far. Nowadays, she's already waiting by the gate at the top of the stairs before I reach her. Since she has started walking, she rarely crawls. It is as if a switch has been turned on.

Why do we take so long to walk ? Walking involves maturation of both the muscles required and the sections of the brain responsible for controlling and coordinating the motion. The motor skills develop from head to toe i.e. we learn to control our face and neck much before we learn to control our hands and legs. Which is why babies can smile, stick their tongue out and hold their head up before they can sit, stand and walk. The motor nervous system is an incredibly complex piece of neural circuitry relying on a feedback loop to control the movements till they eventually become smooth. Many parts of the brain including the cerebrum, cerebellum and basal ganglia have to all mature before something as complicated as walking can occur. The whole process is quite hardwired i.e. little can be done by parents to accelerate it. Motor milestones (when the infants achieve a motor skill such as walking) are about the same across cultures as different as the Hopi Indians where infants are kept strapped to their mother's back with little movement possible to modern middle class urban cultures where people attempt to give infants tummy time, kicking exercises and walkers.

Why did we start walking ? When did we start walking ?

The earliest known bipedal animal was a reptile whose fossil dates back to 290 million years. While dinosaurs and many birds (such as Ostrich) evolved to be bipedal, among primates, none are like humans in being exclusively bipedal; they're bipedal for only some of the time. We had to undergo several structural changes to be bipedal, changes that prevent us from becoming efficient quadrupeds. For example, our hip joint is larger, shorter and broader than that of our primate cousins. Our toes are smaller, meant for motion rather than grasping as is the case with our nearest primates. One of the traits for classifying a fossil as an ancestral human (called hominins) is evidence of bipedalism. Until the discovery of the fossils of a creature named Orrorin tugenensis in Kenya in 2000, bipedalism was thought to have evolved around two to three million years ago. But this discovery dates this development around six million years old (the discovery also pushed back the split between chimps and hominins to seven million years).

We still do not know with certainty why we stood up and stayed up. Wikipedia mentions the existence of as many as twelve hypothesis that attempt to explain the origins of bipedalism. This article on Nova, the popular science show from PBS lists the various hypotheses. The one that I knew from a long time ago is called the Savannah hypothesis. As thick evergreen forests gradually disappeared and made way for wide swaths of grassland (savannah), staying on all fours with organs developed to hang from trees became less advantageous than walking. Standing up also allowed us to see farther. Another popular hypothesis is that walking endowed us with reproductive advantages. With our hands freed, we were able to carry back more food, thereby making the bipedal men more attractive to women. Another theory suggests that being bipedal allowed us to more efficiently conserve and dissipate heat. A biped apparently has a 60 percent reduction in the heat load compared to a similarly sized quadruped which in turn meant less water requirement. While many of these theories have fallen out of favor, the story remains without an end. Our bipedal origins remain a mystery.

A humorous aside. A colleague at work has this cartoon by his desk. I found this image courtesy of infiniteuser.

This evolutionary adaptation is not without its side-effects. My grandmother and my mother both suffer from severe arthritis, especially of the knee. I don't remember my grandmother ever walking without limping, a sort of shitfing of weight to the outer side of the knee rather than directly on it, as she put one foot in front of the other. On days when her knee is tender, my mother walks like that now. Every once in a while, I take a gluosamine tablet because I'm afraid that with all my running and my mother's genes, I'll develop arthritis. Interestingly, arthritis has been discovered in the fossils of ancient hunter-gatherers. On Shanthala's side, her mother suffers from severe lower back problem, something that flares up occasionally in Shanthala too.

Bipedalism also put us in conflict with our other singular characteristic, our rather large brains. Long, narrow pelvis gave way to short, wide hips to provide for a stable bipedal locomotion. This also narrowed the birth canal through which the baby had to squeeze through, putting both the mother and the baby at greater risk during delivery. We went from being gorillas with a 20 minute easy, almost painless labor to twelve hour labors, epidurals and C-sections. The small, flexible brains required for our narrow passage to the world, also meant that the brains in human infants needs a lot more maturation. Our brains continue to grow at a rapid pace, even after birth, hardly slowing down till we're a year old.

So what came first ? The walking or the talking ? Lucy, possibly the most famous of all hominin fossils, along with much other evidence seems to indicate that bipedalism evolved before our larger brains. This is now generally accepted and some theories even argue that bipedalism may have spurred the evolution of larger brains.

Almost anything in our development can go wrong. Is there something that can make us become quadrupeds again ? In 2006, a Turkish professor, Uner Tan, reported the discovery of a family of 19 in which five individuals walked on all fours. Uner Tan dubbed the disorder, Unertan Syndrome. However, there is controversy over whether the behavior is caused by genetic defects or by the way in which they were raised. As Prof. Sean Carroll says on Nova: "The central question is not really whether a single mutation could lead some individuals to walking on all fours, but rather whether a single mutation could lead normal apes walking on all fours to walking upright. And this is completely invalid. From what we understand from both genetics and the fossil record, the process of becoming upright involved all sorts of changes in our ancestors, in our skeleton and in our musculature, in various parts of the body. And from what we understand about genetics of building those body parts and reshaping those body parts, it had to involve many genes and changes in those genes assimilated over a long period of time."

In March 2008, an article was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which the authors claimed: "Our data indicate that mutations in VLDLR impair cerebrocerebellar function, conferring in these families a dramatic influence on gait, and that hereditary disorders associated with quadrupedal gait in humans are genetically heterogeneous." But the conclusions of this study have been refuted and there is general agreement that a single gene cannot be responsible for bipedalism.

Having reached the end of her rather long walk that Thursday evening, Maya sat down on the sidewalk by the Stop sign that marked 0.53 miles. I picked her up and carried her back to the house. But she was not done yet. She didn't want to get back in and so we continued our walk around the block. Around the corner from our street, sprinklers came alive, spraying water onto the manicured lawns, spilling some onto the sidewalk. Maya ran towards the spray, stretching her hand out to feel the water. She looked at me and not seeing any sign of disapproval, waded into the middle of the lawn, screaming in delight at the water spraying her from all directions. I took her home a few minutes later. She was soaked, and deliriously happy.