I Have Ghosted the Ghost of Spirituality!

                                                   I Have Ghosted the Ghost of Spirituality!

First things first; to prove spirituality is a ghost.

I Googled to find the meaning of apparition: “a ghost or ghost like image of a person”. Given below are the meanings of apparition from other sources.

Cambridge dictionary: “the spirit of a dead person appearing in a form that can be seen”; Webster’s Dictionary (not Merriam Webster) Third College Edition: “anything that appears unexpectedly or in an extraordinary way; ...thought to be a ghost”; Merriam Webster: “a ghostly figure; an unusual or unexpected sight”.

What I got from the above collection of meanings is that a ghost is not a material thing. And, if it is not a material thing, its meaning is as slimy as the ghost in the original Ghostbusters.

In current lingo, if one has been ghosted, it means she has become a ghost to others who were previously in her circle; she has been thrown out of the circle. The still in-people won’t respond. 

This has happened to me among my friends from both the remote and immediate past. It could be, at least among some of them, because I told them that I have ghosted the supreme ghost, God, or His/Her/Its earthly (or, is it “earthy?”) apparition.

All said, before I dive into the substance of this write-up, apparition is a ghost and a ghost is an apparition (I have checked). God is an apparition and an apparition can be, for those who are inclined to seeing ghosts where there are none, God!

This act of mine is different from the mundane ghosting. Spirituality is obviously not a material thing. Even being non-material it is still distinctly different between different people and peoples. What is spiritual to one group would be tagged nonsense by others. It can, at best, be an apparition and could easily be attributed to one’s mental state. Call that a ghost, a synonym of apparition.

It is this non-mundane ghost that I have ghosted from my life. Should God appear before me during one of my evening walks, I would merely step aside and keep walking. 

No. Check that. I would walk through that ghost. Naseeruddin Shah walks through, as a ghost, material things in the 1990s movie Chamatkar. I would do the reverse−as a material object, I would walk through the non-material ghost that is God, something spiritual.

Gotcha! I hear you go, thumping your chest and all. If I tried going through the sculpted stones (and not non-material stuff) in Hindu temples, I would be gushing blood. You are missing a crucial point. 

If I looked in the direction opposite to Mecca while praying, Allah will smite me. If a Jew cooked food on the Sabbath (Saturday or Sunday when God rests!), Yahweh will rain brimstones and fire on me. It is said in the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) that when Moses led Israelites out of Egypt, God is a Heaven to earth pillar of cloud in the day, and a similar cloud of fire by night, offering shade and light respectively. And, so on. Just check history to see who tortured whom during the Spanish Inquisition, and likewise who went to war against whom during the Crusades.

It is you, if you are a Hindu, who claims that God resides in the stone idol in temples (almost always made by man) offering no proof; you are not−and, none of your religious cohorts are−Bhakt Prahlad to make true his claim, God appears in a pillar as a man-animal (Nara-Simha). I am not so egotistic as to claim that none exists above, below or beyond me. As an aside, this isn’t that what Lord Krishna claims in a slightly modified version that everything inhered in him, did he not?

As of yet, no one who claims to be a spiritualist has explained why they needed the God prop in their life. And, I believe even the spiritual masters are not up to the task. Courtesy the women folks in my household, I am subjected to a four to five hour session of spiritual brain washing every morning; check that something spiritual cannot wash the material brain. Rather, it is mind washing they expose me to. The spiritual teachers contort themselves into pretzels, not in teaching spirituality, but in not stepping on the toes of the other teachers.

There is a benefit in being mind washed. You can’t consume too many pretzels before your stomach rebels. In the spiritual mind washing, it is not the mind but the brain that rebels.

It is my brain aided and abetted by my mind, not me per se, who ghosted spirituality as a true ghost.

Raghuram Ekambaram  

Some Government Minister could Well Ask for Non-factual Report

                                       Some Government Minister could Well Ask for Non-factual Report

Seeking a non-factual report was not a revelation to me. I have seen my bosses in a private company frequently demand that, and I was quite adept at that. That is how I survived. Yet, a ministry of the Union Government in Delhi (Tribal Affairs) desired a “factual report” from the Chief Secretary of the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands administration fell on me like a ton of bricks (I do not understand how I could have survived had a ton of steel had fallen on me!). The episode is described, if not in vivid detail−hedging by the paper−in The Hindu of 10th September, 2025.

My beef here is not about the ton of what would hurt me more, but about demanding a factual report. A factual report exists only if a non-factual report could exist. Otherwise the adjective is redundant. This is an implicit admission that the government could indeed demand a non-factual report. Ouch! That was more than a ton of bricks.

I know from personal experience and for a fact that an IAS officer would never allow a word to be modified from anything that issues from their office bereft the minister’s OK, written or oral. Therefore, the word “factual”, no matter how low down the official was under whose signature the missive was issued, would have had the imprimatur of an official at or near the very top.

The rest of the newspaper item ran along the usual lines of, “he said that,” and, “no, I did not,” rebutting and counter rebutting. That did not interest me; hence I end this post with my advice to people receiving anything from any government: Don’t get into this Lord Hanuman’s Tail unless you have acceptable and admissible evidence, a factual report. Where do I get such a report? From the appropriate ministry. Who do I approach to find out whether the report that I may have in my possession is appropriate and admissible? Of course the appropriate court, at the appropriate level. How do I know which is the appropriate court and what is the appropriate level? 

Well, book a room in Hilbert’s Hotel, preferably opposite to the building housing the appropriate ministry. Oops, I am back to the end of the line.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

Would Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph E. Stiglitz Feel the Same about Donald Trump and Maria Corina Machado?

            Would Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph E. Stiglitz Feel the Same about Donald Trump and Maria Corina Machado?

For those who have been hiding from the world, Maria Corina Machado has been named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2025.

There are two questions in the heading. Would the two gentlemen, Sachs and Stiglitz, have and assess Mr. Trump and Ms. Machado individually applying the same set of parameters? Would the two, instead, apply a distinct and different set of parameters to each and come to their conclusions? I believe the second would be more valid as Ms. Machado has a master’s degree in finance, after all! Need I say anything about Mr. Trump? I thought not.

Jeffery Sachs feels unadulterated bitterness about Donald J. Trump. He has his reasons that I do not disagree with. I have not heard anything from Stiglitz about Trump in the latter’s second term. Would they both feel the same about the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Ms. Maria Corina Machado?

The above attempted comparison demands some background. 

Jeffrey Sachs is now a voice in the wilderness for his advocacy of left-liberal policy tuned towards the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the native populations and other people considered as beyond the pale (though I do not think he has said anything about the upcoming state elections in Bihar), and is also a strong player in the environmental movement. 

He argued if not exactly in favour of Evo Morales, the first president of and from the community of the natives of Bolivia, but for the necessity of giving his government a chance to survive, though he was part of the group advocating Washington Consensus, IMF Conditionalities and such. This was quite a few years earlier. 

Coming to the present times, Professor Sachs has turned seriously towards the left and away from fleet-footed global capital. He was also vigorously opposed to Donald J. Trump’s effort to overthrow the leftist leader of Venezuela, Mr. Nicola Maduro, during his first term as the POTUS. Trump is in the second innings of this game during his current term, his second. He is trying to push Mr. Maduro out of power−it is happening on the high seas even as I am typing this out.

Now, coming to the other name mentioned in the heading, Ms. Machado. She has been named winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, for her position against Maduro, who is now an authoritarian, they say. This is the playbook of neoliberals. 

Should a populist leader come to power, neoliberals, beholden to global capital, banks and finance, say and do everything to make that leader an authoritarian merely to have some control over his government and nation. On this platform, with the backing of the monied, theneoliberals oppose all his policies under the cloak of liberalization, let unrestricted capital transfers, allow no imports of essentials (medical supplies included), try to establish permanent Intellectual Property Rights not necessarily created by their intellect (think of Basmati Rice), creating conditions of desperation for common people. It is then people pour out on to the streets to protest against inflation hitting the roof, way beyond 100%. 

This is shown as people’s dissatisfaction against the policies of the government. Neoliberals created the compulsive conditions for Maduro and his government to become authoritarian merely to do the job of governing, and then turn around and accuse him of becoming one! This, I am convinced, is how Ms. Machado is being felicitated. 

It is under this situation, Sachs and his partner in crime, Joseph E. Stiglitz who won the ersatz Nobel Prize (for economics), should be playing the role of two oxen yoked together to pull the cart of global economy leftward and layout the truth behind the prize for Ms. Machado.For that, I am sure Stiglitz would soon come out with his arguments why he is or not thrilled. Then, I would guess that Sachs must be doing the same.

One must understand that Ms. Machado was against Hugo Chavez, a hugely popular leader of Venezuela who came on when the wealth of its commons was auctioned off to global capital, and Maduro is his handpicked successor. I am not saying that Ms. Machado is the handmaiden of the reactionary far-right, but perhaps she is being played by them. 

Again getting to Trump (he lives rent-free in the minds of many), I find that he is not enamoured of the Nobel going to Machado. Why not? Please read further.

Both Trump and Machado are united in their vision for Venezuela. But the goals have been reckoned only partially. 

Ms. Machado would want to be the leader of the country, having taken tentative steps and failing. So, I should not be faulted for saying that Trump should have welcomed the awardgoing to Machado. More so as Ms. Machado dedicated a part of the award (?) to Trump. But, Trump is grumbling very loudly that he should have been the one to receive the award. Why? Because Obama has one!

Now, both Stiglitz and Sachs are sitting under Damocles Sword. The Nobel Peace Prize committee has chosen someone who is a rebel, against Chavez’s chosen follower, some two decades ago, though, Nicolas Maduro. Machado is considered a liberal conservative politician−what could this mean? A doctor diagnosing Machado gave a prescription for mental dysentery-cum-constipation! Any which way Stiglitz and/or Sachs sway, they have to swallow both pills. No choice. But, the sword will definitely fall on them and pierce their hearts.

Raghuram Ekambaram

When Would We Stop Talking and Start Doing?

                                                  When Would We Stop Talking and Start Doing?

Demographic Dividend was the topic among the talking heads in the early noughties (as I remember it) and has since been the same. That payout is at the risk of becoming a lapsed cheque. Within the last month or so, I read an analysis item in my daily newspaper bemoaning why it has been so. Nothing new.

But, the old still has some lessons to teach us. This is an effort to tease them out.”We are preparing students for jobs that are that are rapidly disappearing or evolving.” OK, are we to prepare them for the current requirements of the job market? If that were so, how does a parent know that the current set of highly absorbent fields would stay the same in four years hence?

Now, data science, Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the “in” fields. As a parent, I am entitled to get an answer posed to college administrators, “Can you give me assurance that four years from now, my ward would be able to get a job in the field that she had chosen, which is in great demand now?” 

Is there any college administrator who would dare to respond? In a movie, a doctor says to a patient’s relative that no doctor can give any type of guarantee that his relative would come out alive from the operation theatre. It is the same with the college administrator!

Emerging technologies are being led by AI, is the voice from the echo chamber. AI is so destructive it is reshaping how we think and work. My simple question: did you see AI when it was below the horizon? I suppose not. Then, how do you know that a new technology that does not have a name yet and which is currently below the horizon would not be the fashion four years from now when my ward graduates? You are betting on AI, but do not put your lifesavings on that horse that might break a leg in mid-stride.

“A plethora of new jobs related to AI development are being created even as we speak.” The writers meant, “as we are writing”, and, “as you are reading”! Just a low-level dig, but not below the belt.

“This technological shift via AI is already changing the world…”. That is a scary thought. Our brains would become dormant and we could be back to climbing trees to escape from the AI monster! Do the writers think that such creative destruction has no end date? So did those who created steam engines. Just a reminder.

Let us talk about demographic dividend, already more than two decades old. How long would it hold out? So, the writers want you to get onto the AI wagon to escape the storm of demographic deficit that they espy in the horizon. They do care, don’t they?

Who is causing this mismatch – not preparing students for the future. Of course, the educational institutions. I am not going to argue this point though there is much to argue about. But, what do the writers not claim? They do not claim that the “industries” (mainly software, banking, and finance – leveraged buyout anyone?) should also pitch in. No, not a word on this from the pulpit.

The reality gap, the writers say is the“…worrying gap between academic institutions and industry requirements.” This is a self-own, brightly lit. Has industry done anything in this regard, even lift a finger? No. Therefore, the sole purpose of an educational institution is to prepare a student for the software, banking, and finance industries.  

“Over the past decade, data show that 40%-50% of engineering graduates from Indian universities have not been placed in jobs.” While parents demanding an immediate RoI could be taken up elsewhere, here let me ask, is there anything else that could be achieved through education. Here, the contrast between how the piece started with Rabindranath Tagore and what the writers focus on further is glaring.

“Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for she was born in another time.” The political correctness (“she” where the original quote says, “he”) grates here. For Tagore, in his time, the focus was not employment, but here it is. This is about a quote being used in a most inappropriate setting. Tagore was most probably talking about all round development, which, of course, would include employment.

The writers take a wrecking ball to how syllabuses are changed, the procedure being uncoordinated with industry demands that is so fluid, besides being archaic. The only solution to this, in my humble opinion, is to let industry prepare the syllabus, not in a three year cycle, but every semester, speeded up by a factor of six! Such courses in a dynamic syllabus could be taught only by industry experts. And, no Ph.Ds!

The Delphic Oracle, as delivered by the writers is the following: “What India needs is a cohesive strategy that aligns education and skill demand with industry demands (my emphasis).” Let the industry roll in its wealth, underwritten by high school and college education.

Yes, we should stop talking and start deciding what should be talked about and how. The statistics of demography, let everyone recognize, spans, going beyond all large cities, be they Tier I, II, or III, all the towns and villages; indeed rural population in India is 63.13% and not a word was written on how to tap that resource. Without that, the demographic dividend is a mirage and the country will be beyond the hot sands of the desert that creates the mirage and it soon would be the dark chilly night.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

The Only Fair Entrance Examination

                                                        The Only Fair Entrance Examination

A few days ago I was reading an opinion piece in a newspaper about “Detoxifying” the Indian entrance examination system. What is the result of ingesting the system as is? The writers are immediately forthcoming: intense competition (dog-eat-dog, my understanding). Students, as a result, suffer from stressed life, depression and alienation. I found the article well argued; yet, some of the solutions offered are not without negatives. I will get to them later.

If students suffer from alienation, the writers do not specify from what. Bring in the undefined, formulaic and almost meaningless term, holistic development of students. In my opinion, people develop holistic perspectives only as they mature and spend time on looking at society; definitely not in their student days (there could be exceptions, though). The lack of even a wide-angle view by students was mentioned in the newspaper article as an unintended and unidentified sacrifice by students and their parents

The “intense competition” is a ratchet wheel. How does the wheel work? Every year and year-on-year, students have to be tested more and more severely and on more and more difficult questions that they would hardly ever meet in their UG syllabi. I agree with the writers.

I wrote the IIT Joint Entrance Examination (when it must not have gained the acronym, IIT JEE) and I remembered a few questions, wholly conceptual (in geometry and physics), and reasonably simple for me, who was about to pass, not with any high marks/grades, the Madras University Pre-University Course. So, readers, when I joined IIT, I was bottom crawling! I sought and got asylum in Civil Engineering.

During my teaching the first year course on mechanics at a private university I threw in a few of these questions and the students, who failed to get into any of the IITs, could not answer.Then, why demand higher standards? This is why the writers bemoan students trying to solve, “complex problems from …Irodov (?) and Krotov (?), which go far beyond B.Tech requirements.” I am with the writers on this.

Next comes reification to the second/third decimal place. I have heard that parents are not beyond asking, “Where did you lose that 0.05? The cut-off mark was 97.73 and you got 97.68. You lost the opportunity for a good college education. Go hide your face in the garbage dump outside.”   

The above is nothing but mistaking precision for accuracy. In assessing suitability to learn, both these are irrelevant. It can be truthfully measured only through, let me say it, holistic assessment. The writers mention this; I wish they had given a lot more stress to the issue, as it has to reach the parents. They need to be detoxified, or their brains dewormed! Yet, I am thankful.

What do coaching institutes do to be successful? First, they favour city students (more resourceful?) over town students and much more so over down-market places, such as villages. Then, life is like that in an army, such strict regimens. The enemy is sitting just in the next bench in the class! 

A shadow of caste must be falling on this issue. But, the writers have not gone there and so I too would not. I know a student who spent two years in Kota, the Indian capital of IIT JEE coaching institutes, got into an IIT, doing, you would not guess, Civil Engineering, that most loathed discipline among the aspirants. Intensive coaching such as I have discussed create “illusory meritocracy”. The writers hit the nail on the head and hard!

Yet, that fellow went to the US, to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (one of the top universities in the world in Civil Engineering), and finished his doctorate in the much-in-demand transportation engineering and is enjoying life. He sure must have worked very hard. How did that happen? His father knew how to do things, like making his son miss regular growing-up. The son lapped up the opportunity, and skipped normal growing up. I am not blaming anyone. The system of entrance exams reaches deep into the psyche of the aspirants, and more importantly, their parents.

The obsession with the perceived individual superiority through IIT JEE and other such examinations leads to obfuscating lives of the aspiring candidates at home, monetary capabilities, luck, and the in-built biases of society.  This is not something a rational human would approve. 

Now, to a brief discussion on where the writers had gone wrong. The first example they offer for emulation is The Netherlands. Yes, ratio of the area of India to The Netherlands is about 78, and the ratio between the populations of the two countries is about 81. These ratios are comparable, so, OK. Or, are they?

Mathematically OK, but mathematical ratios should not be the metric in comparisons relating to education. Look at their per capita incomes. The Netherlands beats India by a whopping factor of 29! Does the comparison look OK? NO! The writers tried to pull the wool over eyes of their readers, but failed with me. 

The Netherlands uses a weighted lottery system for medical school admissions. What I understand is if your body weight is high, your odds for success in the lottery are high.

Just kidding. Do the writers think that such lotteries could not be corrupted, when corruption has been woven into the fabric of Indian society? Don’t answer that. Even Gods are corrupt/corruptible in India

Next up in the comparison with China. Adopt its methods that could help check “excessive and disorderly growth of coaching centres and their impact on youth”. To my mind, we already have rules and regulations regarding many things in our lives including education, but they are followed more in the breach. Compared to China, The Netherlands looks doable!

The writers state that if authorities trusted the school system, everything would be hunky dory. Dream on.

They advocate 50% of IIT seats to rural students from government schools. Please, someone, pinch me hard to wake up from an afternoon reverie. This suggestion dovetails nicely when the government is getting out of social governance in a hurry!

Well, whereas the diagnosis was good, the prescription would kill the patients.

There can never be a holistic solution in a nation that boasts of Gini coefficient hovering around 61-62 (World Inequality Database, 2023). It was found that based on income, the top 1% of the adult Indian population holds over 40% of the total national wealth.

To be fair, if the metric is Consumption expenditure, the coefficient is 25.5. As a casual observer of society, this number is hard to digest for me. The point is, the richer one is, more would be their savings and further investments (for profits), abroad. That is, the rich are likely to find opportunities for splurging flatten out in India; explains the low coefficient. Tell me, isn’t this why Elon Musk is spending on Mars instead of on the earth?

Coming to education, it is a public good and cannot be tied down to how rich one’s parents are. The threshold level of quality education is a right of every child. If government schools are not providing the required quality, the corrective measures have to be taken there. This applies to rural schools and education also.

Any entrance examination can be only as fair as students and their parents want it to be.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Claude Shannon and AI

                                                               Claude Shannon and AI

The reason I am so suspicious of Artificial Intelligence is what I heard from one of my friend who was doing a course on Electronic Communication at IIT Kanpur in 1976-1977. He was taking a course on probability which underpinned what he was being taught in his discipline.Do students of AI learn even the fundamentals of probability? I don’t know. If they do, more power to them. From what I remember, after more than four decades, is that the slower one transmits a message, more is the fidelity that can be achieved, but never less than significant. 

It seems that this did not sit well with Claude Shannon of Bell Laboratories. This too came to me courtesy my friend. Shannon, working on his own time gave the world the bit, the fundamental unit of information that underlies all digital gizmos. I had heard this earlier, but a friend telling me this in a voice resembling authority made me feel small.

In the heading of this blog I did not couple Shannon and AI as a fancy. Shannon showed that “[I]nformation sent from Point A could be received with perfection at Point B, not just often but essentially always.” That “essentially” is the allowance for “arbitrarily small amount of error”; essentially, playing with Limits that we learn in calculus. This too I received at the feet of my friend!

Shannon showed through a demonstration (he worked on it in his house, with the help of his wife) that a mechanical mouse could “learn” from prior experience. If that is not intelligence, what is? If a mechanical mouse is not artificial, then is there anything that can be called artificial? Ergo, any behaviour that exhibits learning, and that too by a mechanical mouse, then artificial intelligence has dawned. This is what Claude E. Shannon did while he was at MIT as an endowment chair professor.

Every college in town, indeed in a village, boasts of courses in AI. Would any student be interested in learning what a humble beginning their field had? Is he or she as intelligent as a mouse scurrying to find morsels of food in hostel garbage cans? Yes, artificial intelligence demands humility as well as intelligence. Neither one is sufficient by itself.

Raghuram Ekambaram 

 

Why did Lord Shiva Let His Hair Become Matted?

                                            Why did Lord Shiva Let His Hair Become Matted?

Lord Shiva depicted anthropomorphically always has His hair matted and with a top knot.How to do a topr know with matted hair, I need to consult a hair stylist! No barette seen.

 

The almost invisible torrent descending from the top on to Lord Shiva’s head is the Akash Ganga that He catches in His matted hair. I trust this picture explains the myth sufficiently and leads you directly to understanding the question.

Did Lord Shiva refuse a haircut knowing a priori that He would be called on to stem the ferocity of Akash Ganga which He could do most effectively by catching the torrent in His matted hair tied into a layered top knot? Or, was He both lazy and a miser to spend the little cash He had on a haircut? His matted hair then merely became a handy coincidence in the myth.  

Which one of the above two scenarios is the mythical truth (?) is the question I am going to speculate on as an exercise in understanding evolution of life on earth. Let me begin. 

There are two distinctly different schools of thought. We may call one of them Lamarckian and the other Darwinian. Lamarck said, at the level I understand, that the reason a giraffe has a long neck was that was where it can find the food that is tasteful. It was perhaps purpose directed. 

In the state of Kentucky in the US, I visited the Mammoth Cave National Park. In there and in the natural water course that flows through it, the tour guide told us that the fish in those waters (called blind cave fish) do not have eyes. This is where Lamarck could be brought in. His idea was that for some reason (that he could not put his finger on) a fish lost its sight, but perhaps gained in acuity of its other senses that helped it find the prey in the pitch black caves and survived. It thus produced an offspring who also did not have sight but had the capability of survival in dark caves built into it – no eyes but could still hunt down its prey.

The above is pure Lamarckian. Its counterpart, the Darwinian, sets store by a random mutation (Darwin was not privy to the later discovery about genes) that provided the differential success that built up over generations to allow the blind cave fish to survive. Both these guys had no clue how the change they pegged their theories on happened. They just happened, by making a species suited to the environment, or by a random change that enabled it to survive.

It so happened that Darwin could tentatively explain under an overarching umbrella the variety of life found on the earth. Lamarck, on the other hand, needed to find an individual,and site and time specific modification in the species that enabled it to survive, like the neck of the giraffe.

Now, knowing the above, if I posed the two alternatives as regards how it came to be that Lord Shiva caught the raging torrent of Akash Ganga in his matted hair, their choices would be evident. Lamarck would choose that Lord Shiva deliberately put His hair in a fashion that could catch Akash Ganga.

Darwin? Lord Shiva wanted to save cash and was wandering in the Himalayas when AkashGanga fell into his hair and was tamed.

I go with, based on my comparison above, Lamarck. But, ignoring the myth, I am with Darwin.

On the one hand, and, on the other!

Raghuram Ekambaram

Responses to a Death

                                                                   Responses to a Death

Many years ago, at least two decades, I remember reading an opinion piece by a socialite-cum-celebrity-cum-writer (she became a celebrity because she was a socialite, and became a writer because she was a celebrity, and I read her piece because she was all three!) bemoaning that funeral processions in India of political leaders were so unseemly (her perspective); all that breast beating (as in Tamil Nadu) was not befitting the final send-off. It brings the dignity the dead deserves on his death down, way down. It must be a sombre and silent affair. She must have called it all faux emotions and compared it to the essentially anodyne process (she must have seen or heard of) in western countries, and cast her lot with the latter.

Basically, faux emotions or anodyne proceedings, which do you prefer?

I am giving my readers a few photographs of the death of two different leaders within five years of each other, one in the then Madras, India and the other in Washington D.C., USA. These show the manifestation of culture in two different societies, one Western and the other, in a significant corner of India, Tamil Nadu. The Western one is from 1963, and the other wasC N Annadurai’s in Chennai. Without further ado, I offer the pictures below.

 Take a look at the mere size of the crowds. Understand that in the 1960s, India’s population was at least three times that of US’s. The area of India is one third of that of the US (including Alaska and Hawaii). 

Now, try taking in a more reasoned look at the same photographs. The distance covered by the funeral procession of C N Annadurai was 6 km, and it was much greater than that of John F. Kennedy, 10 km.

The density of the crowd in Madras is definitely greater than ten times that in Washington D.C. Accounting for the factor of 5/3 for the distance, the total crowd estimated at the final resting place of C N Annadurai was (as per the caption on one of the photos) 15 million, and in Washington D.C., the total along the route was 800,000. I will bring one more fact to your attention. C N Annadurai was the Chief Minister of the state of Tamil Nadu and John F. Kennedy was the president of the whole country, the US.

Ignore all those numbers and facts that do nothing but lie. One must make informed judgements; in this case it would include social importance of observances, including that of at funerals.

I would like to ask why she did not compare one of the other western funeral observances with her standard candela of Anglo-American observances. Here, I have in mind the Irish Wake that is quite celebratory of a well-lived life. 

The lives of both C N Annadurai and John F. Kennedy were not fully lived. But, even as merely the chief minister of a state of India, he made a mark that has benefitted and continue to benefit everyone, millions more, including the subalterns. One cannot claim the same for John F. Kennedy. Indeed, he ignored Blacks as they received zero candela of light. It was left to Lyndon B. Johnson to direct the torch towards Blacks and the poor.

Does the socialite-cum-celebrity-cum-writer not know that one can compare only the comparables? C N Anandurai’s death brought forth such emotions in people, more than a dozen people (I am sure I remember it right) lost their lives travelling on train tops despite repeated attempts by the engine driver and the guard to get them off. They merely wanted to see their beloved Anna (elder brother) one last time. They were, instead, mashed/guillotined by the top steel members of the through-type truss bridge that crossed River Cauvery in Tiruchirappalli. Has the socialite-cum-celebrity-cum-writer hear of such gruesome incidents elsewhere during a Western funeral? This never happened for John F. Kennedy, James E. Carter, and even Ronald Reagan. I did not think so.

I am not going to claim that Americans did not feel for any of their presidents as much as what people of Tamil Nadu felt for their chief minister, C N Annadurai. But, Western societies seem to think that wearing your emotions on your sleeves makes you week. I have nothing to say on that.

I can give you one instance that could etch in your mind the indelible image of Anna. One of my former colleagues was named Kanchidurai, where “Kanchi” refers to the place of birth of C N Annadurai (Kanchipuram). It must have been one of his father’s ways of remembering his beloved late leader.

Another instance popped into my mind just as I was finalizing this write-up. One of my classmates in my Ph.D programme named his first born Ronald, after President Ronald Reagan. Such memorializing cuts across societies, maybe.

Yet, one cannot take incidences under different individual ethos and social mores and compare those using raw data, information, what have you. The writer is a socialite but is not competent enough to comment on the sociology of any particular society−which, by default is not the one in which she floats−that abrades her sense of the right response to a situationsteered by the unaffordable fashions of her mind.    

Raghuram Ekambaram