Crazyfinger

Tammy Duckworth: "A Really Beautiful Green Grass"

Most of us, when overcome by those unmistakable feelings of disconnectedness from our surroundings, experience a sense of inner agitation of a peculiar kind.  When human affairs are pressed beyond the ordinary, such as when at war, these moments of disconnectedness steer us to identify things that are “right” or “wrong.”   Soon these moments turn into beliefs.  Then we become emphatic about these beliefs.  Then we suddenly find it easy to relate our normal day-to-day occurrences to these beliefs. 

But this disconnect, the inner agitation, doesn't go away.  It seems to persist despite our emphatic beliefs of right and wrong.  This feeling, instead of getting resolved, dissolved, disappear and reassure us in the staunch positions we take on the issues of political importance, seems to go right past our ordinary day-to-day beliefs and is still left dangling, in search of home.

Where is the home for this feeling, for this disconnect? 

Those who saw “Conversations with Soldiers Wounded in Iraq” on C-SPAN (originally aired March 10, 2005, with subsequent repeat broadcasts) would likely have experienced a glimpse of the very such home.  When this happens, when that metaphysical home is found for this disconnected feeling, one can't help but feel how pallid the exhortations of globalization, and of the "world citizen" are, compared to the experience of this home. 

You don't have to see that C-SPAN show to relate to what I write here.  I am writing here of what I saw: a celebration of life at its most intense and its most fullest reach.  There you watch how the soldiers have very nearly died in the mess and blood of war, but who brought a renewal of life into our experience without the ugly melodrama and narcissism that a more self-conscious narrator of the drama, for example a modern day blogger, would bring.

To see what I mean, let's start with a simple question: “Where were we on Nov 12, 2004?”

Because on that day Major Tammy Duckworth, of Illinois Army National Guard, was on a free fall, her Blackhawk helicopter shot over the skies of Iraq.  From her own narrative of the events of that day, “It was actually end of the day, we've been flying missions across Baghdad, mostly transportation of equipment.  Had a great lunch, bought some christmas ornaments from the post exchange (it was middle of November).  We were ten minutes from getting back to the base when an RPG shot by the insurgents hit the chin bubble (a Plexiglas window under the pilot seat of the Blackhawk.)”

She sat next to her husband with the C-SPAN interviewer.  Her infectious smile, dark beautiful eyes and a gentle face would have you believe she may have just escaped with minor bruises, what's the big deal and wouldn’t "those army folks" be prepared for these sorts of things anyway?

Initial charge exploded between her knees and nicked one of the Blackhawk's blades.  Instantly they lost the electronics, and the Blackhawk started to descent.  Tammy immediately attempted to land the aircraft, little realizing that she lost the foot pedals and her legs.  The control panels were gone.  When she woke up in the emergency room the right hand was broken.  The last thing she remembered was that she saw that the grass on the fields, coming through the chin bubble as they landed, was about 6 ft tall and she remembered thinking, "Wow, that's really beautiful green grass" before she passed out.  Tammy lost her right leg.  Lost her left leg below the knee to amputation.  Her right arm bones were crushed and broken the moment the Blackhawk hit the ground.  Doctors at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where this C-SPAN interview was taped, rebuilt the arm using metal pins and screws and grafted the tissue taken from her stomach.

In the show she said the only thing she wants is to go back to flying.  Her hope is she can start with the civilian sector and eventually gain flight status with the army.  She is doing more than that.   In March 2006 she announced her entry into politics, as a Democratic nominee for a House seat.

And then there is Cpl. Michael Oreskovic - US Army, 23 years’ of age at the time of this interview.  Lost his left arm from shoulder on: "Flopping around somewhere like a chewed up hamburger."  He went through eleven surgeries and now uses a bio-electric arm. 

This is a group of people who describe things that happen to them such as ripped arms, detonations in front of their faces, warm blood pouring down their faces, soaking their clothes, with a gentle smile on their faces.  Not a hint of self-pity, not a hint of a loss, just a strange serenity in their faces, a jaded tiredness but a permanent light in their eyes: "Tough situations brings you closer.”  He waits until the question is asked: "Was anybody else injured at all?" "Yeah, my squad leader died instantly"

When Oreskovic says: "You have to put mission first" it really needs us laymen to think before we understand what he really means.  It means that there is another life that is directly in the line of danger and putting mission first means protecting this next life is the immediate priority.  It is a mistaken perception that putting mission first means forgetting the life that just left us, in some kind of war-mongering fashion.

The casual approach, the self-effacing manner in which these soldiers speak is maddening: "Tying the shoes and pulling the zipper are the hardest things to do."

    Q: "What do you do when you get frustrated?"
    A: "Go work out"

"I wanted to go back to my unit, but everyone says no."  He describes the possibility of not being in the army in the words of, "They probably won't toss you out the window if you are a special force." 

This phrase, "toss you out the window,"  speaks volumes of the loyalty they feel towards their unit.  I cannot help but feel that this phrase is exactly that longing to find a home for that disconnected feeling, to find a home where a human being can experience a whole body of higher emotions such as love, sacrifice and looking out for each other, when you are in their company.  That's why a soldier wants to go back to serve.

There is not a hint of wasted thought, wasted emotion, in these soldiers' thinking.  Perhaps it comes from being so close to life and death. 

Here there is no room for thoughts that scrape the bottom of the "about-ness," no room for the worlds of you and I where we build protective edifices of opinions and ideas of what is right and what is wrong, protecting from the action-at-a-distance. 

After all, isn’t this distance, this disconnect, this tragedy-less tin-box of clutter in our minds, is what we are all searching to find a home for?

Note: I had originally written a variation of this essay as a blogpost for a now-defunct blog of mine.

(C) "Affordable drugs, please"

By far this is one of the best examples of a no-nonsense, getting right down to it enterprises I have ever come to know of.  I spent a few minutes browsing the site (didn't realize they were related to Asoka).  There is nothing abstract or gung-ho about LOCOST.  It is examples like these that positively stir me up.

(C) “India Rising — The Big Scare”

"First, we must not forget the measure by which we mete out the merit to any news coverage, and that is: all news is for local audience."

It’s the Law, Not the Economy, Stupid!

Update: See also the Comments section of "Be There or Be Square" post.

Those who champion the cause for “the other half” are unconvinced yet that this thing called the free-market economy is really the panacea that it is made out to be. When the “India Shining” blew up on our faces, an average person like me looking from outside toward India got the impression that it was all left vs. right politics that caused it. But now, with a bit more economic and private enterprise activity in play, it seems to me that a large variety of “free-market failures” are really failures of the law. But then, for many economists in India, including those who blog, this is old news.

Be that as it may, it appears to me that, while our eye is on the ball for the impressive economic growth in the years to come, nothing noteworthy is happening on the law front. I haven’t read a single article or a news report that seriously talked about legal reforms, commensurate with economic reforms. Why is that? We occasionally read business community (international) complaining about the legal impediments to establishing scale businesses in India, but no response is reported. How is it that we embrace with so much enthusiasm our own economic boom while riding on the coattails of U.S. business world, but show no interest in the supreme U.S. legal system? If push comes to shove, I’d take the boom in legal reform anyday, over the boom in the economic reform. Puzzling. So I wanted to dig into history and try to figure out what is our legal tradition, what is its status now, and why is it that legal professionals don’t seem to participate in the social commentary.

All that and more I found in a gem called “Professor Kingsfield Goes to Delhi: American Academics, the Ford Foundation, and the Development of Legal Education in India” by Professor Jayanth Krishnan of William Mitchell College of Law (free download). Once in a while, when you are looking for something, it feels like all the answers are hidden in plain view already, lurking and springing forward as soon as you form the right question in the right way. This paper feels like one of those springing forward answers, if you are looking to understand what is happening to the state of legal education in India.

Writing with simple clarity is a hard-earned skill - a long and arduous labor before it becomes “natural” (or “intuitive”) - and deserves a premium appreciation by itself. Not only this approximately 55-page document written with an illuminating clarity, but it also reads like a Dashiell Hammett page-turner.

Professor Krishnan sets it up well.  In the aftermath of 1950, when “the Constitution of India came into effect,”

“Many American observers, in particular, looked upon with awe as this economically poor, yet fiercely independent nation sought to embrace political and legal principles that had long been valued within the United States. The Ford Foundation – one of the world’s leading philanthropic institutions based in the U.S. – soon also became infatuated with the promise and overall “idea of India” and it “began to take a serious interest in India.”

“One area that Ford especially focused on involved the development of legal education. Policymakers at Ford Headquarters in New York as well as at Ford’s New Delhi office believed that for Indian democracy to succeed, the country needed to have well-established, rule-based institutions administered by those educated in the legal principles of equity, due process, and individual rights. These officials consulted with a number of Indian legal elites, several of whom had studied in the United States, and together these Americans and Indians concluded that law schools in India would be the ideal place to promote such legal principles. After all, having Indians educated in Western legal doctrine was critical for maintaining Weberian, democratic institutions; and the hope was that this in turn would lead to greater public respect for the rule of law.”

“Given that many of India’s elite had routinely praised the American law school model, Ford worked under the reasonable assumption that U.S. academics would be in the best position to advise their Indian counterparts.”

But then, something unexpected happened. Not only was “this assumption proved at best to be questionable,” but, “To date, no work has presented the views of the academic consultants hired by Ford. For decades these reports were confidential and the consultants were equally reluctant to talk about their opinions.”

After reading this highly informative and thoroughly researched narrative, which culminates in a detailed account of the formation of the National Law School of India University one cannot but feel that legal reform is not just the we-need-to-do-it now but the most compellingly urgent requirement for the betterment of “the other half” in our Indian society.

What to do with Desi chikan (groper)?

This post is a way of participating in Blank Noise Project’s Blog-a-thon on the issue of street harassment.

In Japan, where the problem of groping in subway trains is a rampant one, these gropers are called  chikan.  I am using this term to refer broadly to perverts who harass girls, women on streets in India.  Among men who habitually and perversely commit these acts (and many more who merely think but have not yet acted in these perverse impluses):

1. Some respond (i.e., stop harassing/molesting) to just being confronted on a one-on-one basis,
2. Some others respond if they are convinced that their own family members will be divulged of the perversity,
3. Some others respond when outed publicly right then and there, the ensuing embarrassment may lead them to realize what they’ve been doing, and
4. Some others respond to fear, the plain old physical beating.

That means any effective combating strategy here would have to take into account all these different types of beasts - yes the devil is in the details as always. But here is the reality. Any solution that we come up with, against the above four groups, are still only tactical. Meaning, they will only lead to remedies after “that” happens, at the scene of the crime. Not only we need such tactical, on-the-spot solutions, but we also need to keep working in the background at a larger, social level. This I think is a type of problem which isn’t just amenable to a shotgun approach to solve it, unfortunately. Several strategies should be put in motion simultaneously.

Perhaps a few years ago we had no other recourse but to rely on the stale and ineffective government law enforcement to get us to nowhere. But now it is time to make use of some of the great tools the private multinational companies, in the IT, in advertizing, and in the consumer space, have developed over many tens of years for effective and real change in consumer behavior. Why can’t we take the same marketing, advertizing tools that companies like Proctor and Gamble, or a GE, employ to create a massive awareness and help solve this problem?

Here we have a real problem in the society that could’ve used effective law enforcement from the officials and they continue to fail miserably. I’d say it’s time to look to the superiority, to the effectiveness and the results-oriented approach of these corporate “mass communication” techniques and as a society we take the ownership of the problem.

Here’s one way. Companies, firms, that you work for can be a great tool and one just have to reel them into action to help. You can make a case, a strong corporate case, that helping to eradicate some of these ailments from the society can only help the business prospects of the company.

Create a massive advertizing campaign with a very careful selection of messaging. Messages (captions) saying it is wrong to harass girls or which appeal to the moralistic sense of right and wrong are too simplistic, are too preachy and fall on deaf ears (or tin ears). They don’t work.

What is needed is a combo type messaging, a point and shoot rifle shot approach, that takes into account the varieties of such perverse behavior. A lot of us do work in creative art, ad agencies, copywriting etc., so coming up with this sort of effective messaging should not be an issue.

Here’s one approach. For starters, start with the above 4 groups of perverse men as your “target market.” We know the desired end result. What we need is a messaging strategy and captions that evoke the specific feelings of shame, that equate harassment to impotency, that create and attach a strong stigma around this behaviour. Convince the companies to lend some of their tools, form session groups, figure out what are the embarrassment points of these perverse groups and push these buttons. It can be done. Over time we’ll see changes.

In Japan groping in trains is a big problem and one measure they’ve taken is to have a women-only cars in subway trains. But that was not really a “solution.” I’ve been on Japan subway trains many times and the problem is real and is as stark as you read in the news, just as bad as in India. Punch in the phrase, “groping problems in japan trains” on Google.com and you’ll read all about Japanese men reading sex comic strips openly on the trains, the women-only cars, how women/girls don’t speak out about the rampant groping they are subjected to etc. There’s not a one silver bullet that other societies found helpful to this problem.

More blogs about blog-a-thon 2006