Scenes from Brooklyn

The landlady, a Muslim from India, decides that she needs to give us a gift because our daughter and son-in-law have been good tenants. Besides, she and her husband were invited to our granddaughter party and treated just like all other friends.

Her idea of giving something back involves purchasing a Tulsi plant for us, because Hindus revere it. Her plan has two issues. First, we are both atheists and our daughter’s visiting mother-in-law is a Sikh.  None of us care for a Tulsi plant. However, it is the thought that counts. The other issue is that she has no clue what a Tulsi plant looks like. Her solution is simple. Get a few plants that may include a Tulsi plant and present them to us so we can choose. The Bengali shopkeeper down the street does not mind lending plants for trial. The problem is we too have no idea what the Tulsi plant looks like. Confusion ensues. In the end, one plant is arbitrarily anointed and honored. Everyone is happy.

By this time the landlady is distracted by an elderly Chinese woman who is making her daily rounds. She is pushing a cart filled with used bottles. “She knocks on people’s doors, but only the first floor,” says the landlady. “She can not climb stairs, so she will not bother you.” However, the mother-in-law sees a solution to the problem of disposing off bottles and cans from the granddaughter’s birthday party. So she shouts in Punjabi at the Chinese lady. Soon the elderly Sikh and Chinese ladies meet and makes a transaction of used bottles and cans. Everyone is happy.

It is time to go for a walk with our granddaughter and the mother-in-law. We encounter a group of Muslim girls wearing Hijabs. They are looking at a poster and giggling. It is a poster for Kool cigarettes. The girls take pictures of each other in front of the poster. Perhaps, this is the height of naughtiness permitted in their households.

At the playground, there are lots of kids and parents, grandparents and nannies. Our granddaughter is drawn to a couple of white skinned kids, with orange afro hair. They are a little older than our granddaughter, and most likely twins. An elderly black lady is in charge of them. “Are you their grandmother,” asks the mother-in-law, in proper English accent. Bad question to ask. She is their mother.

On the way back, we encounter a couple of Hasidic kids with their traditional dreadlock hair. “What happens to them when they get old and become bald?” asks the mother-in-law. I confess that I have no idea. Perhaps they get a wig, or they let go that part of their ritual. The mother-in-law seems satisfied by the answer.

Before getting back, the mother-in-law purchases a bunch of flowers for our daughter and son-in-law. However, her gift is not heartily accepted because our son-in-law suffers from severe allergies. The family discusses what the options are.

In front of the apartment, a couple of Chinese women are busy tending to their small garden. Perhaps the flowers can be re-gifted to them for being good neighbors. Perhaps they would be willing to take care of our newly acquired Tulsi plant as well. Everyone would be happy J

Beyond "pretty" pictures

I belong to a camera club that has a few professional photographers and some who are almost at that level. They create images, mostly in black and white that are meant to evoke emotional response or tell a story. However, to untrained eyes, many of them look disjointed, overexposed or ill composed. They are not “pretty” pictures by a standard definition of the term.

I know by now how to take “pretty” pictures, according to these photographers, and should move on to taking pictures like theirs. Bruce, the person who organizes the club, told me to select a poem or a sonnet and take pictures that evoke my selection.  This would be the way for me to slide into their fraternity.

I am not sure what to do next, as I am generally quite ignorant of poems and even less so of sonnets. Unlike music, stories, photographs or paintings, they don’t do anything for me. The only poem I could remember, when Bruce put me on a spot, was, the famous one by Robert Frost: “Woods are lovely dark and deep”. (There is a reason why most Indians know that poem---something to do with Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime minister of India). Bruce told me to disregard that poem as being too pedantic and not stretching my imagination to the extent he wants me to. After all, I am already taking pictures of dark and deep New England woods.

That has created an interesting challenge: If I am not at all into poetry how will I select one to convert into photography? Even more challenging, if their series of not-very-good photographs do not evoke a poem in my mind, how will I ever create them? In other words, how would I ever know if I have succeeded if I do not know what success is?

So, I have concluded that you cannot create art that you cannot appreciate yourself.

 Now, I am attempting to move beyond “pretty pictures” and the way forward I have discovered is creating digital art. Using Photoshop, I am able to create abstracts and other forms of artwork that I think is quite good. I have learned somehow to appreciate this type of artwork, while I cannot the poetic ones. Having passed that first hurdle, I have then figured out how to create it using various techniques.

I am not sure why I am reasonably successful in doing so while failing the poetic taste. I have not received any formal training in modern or abstract art. I am reading a book that provides me some guidance on how to appreciate modern art, titled “Varieties of Visual Experience,” by Edmund Burke Feldman. It helps but that’s not it.

Perhaps our right brain has some preordained preferences on what we consider art and what we don’t. These “nature,” plus some “nurture” elements in the brain define whether we are able to move beyond pretty pictures and melodious music, and able to appreciate a work by Picasso or Arnold Schoenberg (a modern composer). They may also dictate what we will not be able to appreciate, even though we may say so to display our refined taste.

We all have urge to create something. Others can indicate various outlets, and guide us…but in the end, it is up to us how we satisfy it. This is especially true if one is pursuing art for its own sake and not as a commercial venture.

That is the way I plan to proceed.

What if we find life?

In my last Post, I talked about the existence of extraterrestrial life, and where and how we may find it. In this one, I speculate what may happen if we discover it.

To start out, what exactly is “life”? This itself is a hotly debated topic and there are lots of definitions and debates. A good source of information on this topic is a series of lectures titled “Origins of Life” by Robert Hazen, available through The Great Courses. According to him, here is the definition used by NASA: “Life is a self sustained chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution." So, a key question in research being done on origin of life is---How did a geochemical world with ocean, air and rocks containing organic molecules transfer itself into a biochemical world containing self-replicating chemical molecules that compete and evolve? At this point no one knows for sure how this happened but there are three scenarios, according to Professor Hazen: metabolism first scenario, genetic first scenario and a cooperative scenario (which combines the previous two). No need to go into details but the fact that we are down to just three possible scientific explanations is quite heartening.

There are two reasons why I mention all this. First, since we still have not found out exactly how life began on earth, there is still a possibility that life has emerged only once in the universe, just on earth, because the final step is so complex, and requires so many preconditions. I think this is highly unlikely, but it is possible. The second reason is that since we are so close to finding scientific theory of how life emerged from a bunch of chemicals; it is highly unlikely that there was a supreme being involved in creating us, “in his image.”

Finding life outside of earth will put an end to both these debates. Even though the exact transition from geochemical to biochemical may remain a mystery for a few more years, the fact that there is life elsewhere would prove that the final step is not that complex and the universe may be teeming with life. Also, the religious people may need to rethink some of their assumptions.

The most likely place where we would find evidence of primitive life would be Mars. It is likely to be microbes or their fossils, not Martians. If they look like our microbes, there are two possibilities. One is that the same process that created life on earth did so on Mars. Also, it is possible that life emerged on Mars and came to earth on a meteorite that originated on Mars. If that turns out to be the explanation, we would be back to square one on the question of life’s existence elsewhere, besides Mars. Of course, if we find similar life on, say Europa or Enceladus, the assertion of more than one origin of life would be quite conclusive.

As I had mentioned in my previous Post, it is highly unlikely that we would find life that is at the same stage of evolution as us. We separated from apes only seven million years ago, and Homo Sapiens have been around for only 200,000 years. In the same amount of time in the future, perhaps much less, we would be unrecognizable. A few million years are nothing in the life of our universe, so how can we expect to find a civilization to looks like ours at this narrow slot of time? Or communicates using electromagnetic signals?

That would explain why the SETI program---one that listens to signals coming from outer space as evidence of intelligent life---has yielded nothing thus far. A wonderful book written by Paul Davis, “The Eerie Silence” refers to that fact.

That means that if we don’t find microbes, we will find life at another extreme…so advanced and sophisticated that we cannot even imagine. Thosee are the stages that are not as transient as our current one.

In his above referenced book, Paul Davis cites three Types of civilization as defined by a Russian astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev. These Types, based simply on energy consumption are: Type I that uses all energy resources from its home planet, Type II which requires total energy output from its parent star, and Type III, from whole galaxy. One would be able to detect Type II and III civilizations based on the energy footprints they leave.

Of course, it is entirely possible, according to Davis that “biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe. If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature.” It is not clear what impact such intelligence would create on its physical surroundings and how we would be able to detect it.  In fact, it does not even fit the definition of life that NASA is using in its search.

The most likely scenario is that we will find such advanced civilizations not the other way around. I do not believe in UFOs and curious aliens snooping around. Why would they? We are an insignificant planet of an insignificant star, virtually undetectable.  Sure, we have been emitting TV and radio signals for a few decades, but they have not reached far and are most likely undetectable from noise. That eliminates most of the science fiction type of close encounters.

After finding an advanced civilization, it may take forever to establish contact, given how far in the universe they are likely to be, and our ability to emit a powerful enough signal so they would detect us. There are eminent scientists, like Stephen Hawkins, who say that we should not try to contact them. Just stay silent. They may not be benevolent and wipe us out in an instance. He cites what happened to the Native Americans as an example of what can happen to us.

So, it may be that we will not have any interactions with aliens even if we detect them. So, we will not befit from their advanced technologies, and the only practical impact of such a monumental discovery will on our religious beliefs. That could be significant, but a more important effect such a discovery will be to give us confidence that we may survive our self-destructive tendencies.

That by itself would be great news.

Extraterrestrial life

I cannot imagine any news as exciting and profound as finding extraterrestrial life. If we find it---or should I say when we find it---we will finally have an undisputable proof that we are not alone and indeed our universe may be teeming with life.

In that context, the recent finding of a system of seven planets around a star called Trappist-1, which is “only” 40 light-years away, is quite significant. Three of these planets are orbiting in the so-called “Goldilocks” zone, not too far from the star they are circling to be frozen wasteland, and yet not too close that any water on it would boil and evaporate.  Like, earth, in other words. So, if we assume that water is necessary for any life to exist, and that is not too bad an assumption, there could be life on one or more of these planets. The problem is how can we know one way or another.

For many years, the plan was to listen to the electromagnetic signals coming form space and see if there is a pattern that would indicate that they are being sent by some intelligent creature. After listening for over 50 years (under a program called SETI---Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), we haven’t found any such signals. Also, many believe that this is not the way we will detect intelligence. Given how long universe has been around, it is highly unlikely that the extraterrestrial beings, if they exist, are at the same stage of civilization as us. They could be much more advanced, and don’t rely on electromagnetic signals for communications, or much more primitive.

So we need to find other methods. It would be great to send a probe to one of these exoplanets, but the distances are just too great. At 40 light years, it would take that many years for a probe travelling at the speed of light to reach there, and equal number of years to send back signal. That is absolutely minimum amount of time---the actual time would be much greater. We would all be dead by then.

There are stars that are not that far, and in fact a star only 4 light years away, Proxima Centauri, a companion of the more famous Alpha Centauri, has a planet worth examining. A very wealthy Russian entrepreneur is funding a project to investigate the feasibility of sending a series of probes to take a closer look at that planet. These probes would accelerate close to the speed of light using earth-based lasers and “light sails” that catch those beams and accelerate. Such an audacious endeavor is still considered an extremely challenging and expensive. Even for a billionaire.

Instead of going there, one can look at these candidate-for-harboring-life planets from here and see what is going on. Of course, one would need extremely powerful telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope currently under construction, and, besides, what would you look at? A very advanced civilization would construct something on a huge scale to, say, harvest energy from the star. Such a structure may be visible from great distances; otherwise we are out of luck. On the other hand, a spectroscopic analysis of these planets’ atmosphere may yield some tantalizing clues, in form of biosignature gases. That alone would not prove that life does exists, but indicate that life could exist.

My feeling is that in the short term, we are better off focusing on finding life closer by---on our fellow planets circling sun or one of their moons. Of the planets, Mars has the highest likelihood of harboring life. Even if nothing is alive now, finding evidence that life did exist in the past would be a great discovery.

Then there is the possibility of finding something currently alive on one of the moons circling Jupiter or Saturn. The two most likely candidates are Enceladus, circling Saturn, or Europa, which orbits Jupiter.

Europa has a crust of frozen water with a high probability of a liquid ocean underneath. Enceladus is similar but has become a more exciting target because Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn recently saw icy jets spewing from its surface, much like geysers. That indicates there may be liquid water underneath and hydrothermal vents. This is significant because on earth, hydrothermal vents are an important story in the emergence of life. At many locations in our ocean, scientists have found a whole new ecosystem that is based on energy from these vents and not sun. The same can be true on Enceladus.

To determine if life truly exists on Europa or Enceladus, we may need to drill through the icy surface and peek inside, which is hard to do. However, the icy plumes of Enceladus provide a simpler way. Collecting samples from the plume and testing for building blocks of life may give a strong indication of whether this planet harbors something alive.  Such a test may happen in our lifetimes---NASA is thinking of sending a probe as soon as within the next five years.

So, it is quite likely that we may discover that we are not alone, as soon as in the next few years. How great would that be?

The biggest challenge

There is no dearth of challenges that an immigrant to US (or any country for that matter) faces. Getting trained to have a successful career in a new country, making a living in a new work environment, and raising children in a new culture are some of them. Add to that the biggest one of them all: What to do about the aging parents you left behind in the old country, say India.

How to take care of them and who takes care depends on a whole bunch of factors. The most important is where the children are located. If all of them are in US, it is one thing. If at least one is in India, a different set of issues needs to be dealt with.

Let us start with the scenario of all in US.

There are basically three options: bring the parents to this country, find someone (a relative, a friend) who will look after them in India, or have one of the siblings go back to India when parents age and need care. Each has its own set of benefits and difficulties.

Bringing parents to this country clearly has some benefits. The children can take turns at looking after them, and being close to their loved ones would definitely have a positive impact on the parents as they glide through their golden years. In addition, external factors such as the lack of pollution, noise, and maddening traffic would add to the quality of life. Finally, the medical system in US is better set up for the end phase of life; in terms of nursing homes, palliative care facilities and hospices. Such institutional options are lacking in India, where home care is the only way.

However, transition from India to US is a tough one for parents. They find themselves totally uprooted from the familiar surroundings. Not being able to drive, or walk anywhere, makes them prisoners in the gilded cages of their children. They have few friends and their children, busy in their lives, may not be able to provide comfort and company they had hoped for. If they do end up going to nursing homes, unfamiliar people and food makes that experience quite unpleasant.

It is equally hard on their children, the immigrants. As they struggle through the tough phase of their children growing up, there is an additional demand placed by their parents. Once the really old age sets in, and/or only one parent is left, life can become quite challenging. There are no servants to serve the needs of an old person, as would be the case in India. Hired help is available but at very high cost. If the parent cannot be left alone, the quality of life gets severely impacted. Placing the parents in a nursing home does provide relief but the guilt that accompanies that decision is deep and unrelenting. Finally, given how long people live, this phase of parent’s life may coincide with children’s early retirement stage, a time period that they had set aside to relax and explore the world. It is hard not to build resentment and self-pity under the circumstances.

So, may be the parents should stay in India instead of emigrating to US to be with their children. However, that too is not a great solution. There has to be someone…uncle, aunt, neighbor…who is willing to look after them. As the parents age, the burden on these friends and relatives may become too much, and at that stage bringing parents to US may not be a viable option. For the immigrants, leaving their parents back home not only brings enormous guilt but also requires asking the caretakers to provide support they may not be willing or able to. Further, from a very practical perspective, such an arrangement would mean seeing their annual vacations getting chewed up by the same two trips to India. Goodbye to any other travels or experiences.  

Some immigrants to US end up relocating to India just to make the later life of their parents enjoyable. This solution is fine for parents but it leads to complete dislocation in the life of immigrants, who now find themselves becoming immigrants again, with the same problems of adjustment in a society that is unrecognizable from what it used to be when they left. Further, the grandchildren, Americans by birth, find the adjustment very difficult and frequently go back to US. So, now instead of making the twice-a-year trips to India to see parents, the immigrants end up making similar trips to US!

One would think that having a sibling who decides not to emigrate to US would solve the problem. However, that too is not satisfactory because now the burden of taking care of aging parents falls squarely on that person. It would be difficult for that sibling not to harbor feeling of resentment toward the America based ones who escape the responsibility and have to make just a couple of trips per year to do their share. As I wrote in one of my earlier Blog Posts, unfair distribution of parental care is a major factor in relationships among siblings breaking down.

So, there you have it, dear fellow immigrants. If you are already in the middle of this phase of your life, I am sure you would agree with what I am saying.

If you haven’t yet faced this challenge, you are in for a big surprise.