Growing old as an immigrant

I wrote a Blog Post a few months ago (February 2017) on the challenges that an immigrant faces related to taking care of the parents left behind in their homeland. I got several responses to that Post, many of them quite different from what I expected. I wrote that Post primarily from my (immigrant's) perspective, not parents who are in India. However, the responses I got from my colleagues in India were from parent’s perspective because many of them have their children in US and are in the process of deciding what to do. Very interesting.

To put it in perspective, we are talking about three generations here: We, our parents and our children. Complexity arises when two generations reside in different continents.For us, living in US, the challenge was taking care of parent in India. For colleagues in India, the issue is how to make sure you enjoy your children and grand children who in many cases reside in the US. For their children, the issue will be similar to what we face--how to look after parents (my colleagues) in India. It is as if the whole thing is shifted by one generation.

For those of us in the US, the remaining years could be challenging or may not be. It depends on what you are used to and what you expect. Some folks are comfortable spending the remaining time here. We have a well-established system for elders who go from a big house to a small-one floor one, to an assisted living facility and then to nursing home and finally a hospice before passing on. There are enough things to do and learn to keep you busy. We would not depend on our children to look after us, but they are nearby, at least in the same country, if we need to. 

For many Indian immigrants, this is not good enough. They would rather go back to India and spend the remaining years there. However, then they will be in the same situation as our parents were---children would visit them one or two times a year, or you would come to US to occasionally spend time with them. That would be it. 

Also, I am not sure how easy it would be for us to adjust back there. Indeed, we have wonderful friends and family in India, but the day-to-day living has too many hassles. Traffic, noise, pollution, bureaucracy, corruption, and such things can get to you when you live there, not just visit. Further, not having a well-developed assisted living/nursing home/hospice system could make the end of life difficult. 

May be the continued presidency of Mr. Trump will push us into that direction :-) Until then, we are happy plotting our future based on living here for the rest of our lives.

End of location

While growing up in India, I have a distinct memory of what my grandfather used to do every morning. After his morning tea, and snorting powdered tobacco (called “bajar” in Gujarati), he used to head off to see Magankaka, an elderly cousin of his. At Magankaka’s auto parts store a mile away, he and his elderly friends used to gather and gossip. That was the highlight of his day.

Remove the common locationaspect of the gathering in the morning, and that is what I, a modern grandfather, do almost every morning. I flip open my laptop and see what my fellow elderly folks are doing. We gossip and brag on Facebook, carry out serious discussions using the Yahoo group email, and catch up thanks to WhatsApp. Where we are located is not important any more.

Take it to the next level; from individual to a community, we now have several virtual villages coming up. This is in response to the basic needs of elders that were being satisfied by physical villages in the past…. camaraderie and helping each other out.

As mentioned in a story in NY Times on this topic, “Virtual village members stay in touch through village websites and email, or by calling local village offices. Many villages also turn to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to stay in touch,” according to Ms. Willett who was director of Village to Village Network, a national organization devoted to strengthening the Village Movement.

“This socializing gives people a greater sense of purpose and increases well-being, said Dr. Marc Agronin, a geriatric psychiatrist in Miami and author of a book called 'How we age.'" “As people get older, they face the major dilemma of isolation,” Dr. Agronin said in the NY Times story. “Having a local network of people to engage with opens up whole new worlds. It’s about discovering your strengths and the joy of living.”

The whole concept of the need to share a physical location with other human beings in order to derive certain benefits is undergoing a change. 

So, what is next? It appears that the concept of what constitutes a “country” is also going to change. A pioneer is the little country of Estonia. According to an article in The New Yorker (Dec 18 & 25, 2017), titled “The Digital Republic,” Estonia’s challenge was to expand its population. It is after all a home to only 1.3 million people, and if one thinks of countries as enterprises, growth brings prosperity. Taavi Kotka, Estonia’s CIO, decided that it is possible to increase the population just by changing how you think about what is meant by a country’s population. “If everything is digital, and location independent, you can run a borderless country,” says Kotka according to the New Yorker article.

So, Estonia has launched a digital “residency” program, “which allows registered foreigners to partake in some Estonian services, such as banking, as if they were living in the country.” 

Virtual elderly gossip groups, virtual villages, and virtual countries. 

It might be the end of the importance of location. 

Lessons my father taught us

A few days ago my father passed away after leading a long and remarkable life. The end was peaceful and I was at his bedside.

As one does in these situations, I have been reflecting on his life and the lessons he taught us, or at least, tried to teach us. Most were from the examples he set, because it was rare for him to sit down and give us advice. Of many, here are the most important ones:

Treat everyone with respect:  In the interactions he had with the outside world, it did not matter what religion you belonged to or what social standing you had. In the highly stratified society of India, this was not normal. Hindus treated Muslims badly, and I am sure it was true the other way round. It was considered beneath your dignity to talk to a street sweeper, or a kitchen maid. Not so in our household. We had a staff of three people running our house (“servants” as they are called in India---a term I dislike now). They were all Muslims. We treated them with full respect, as if they were members of our family. When an elderly aunt of my father came visiting, she refused to eat food cooked by a Muslim. “There is a restaurant in the next block, perhaps you can eat there,” was the unexpected response she got.

Be curious: Our house was full of books on all types of subjects, and we got a pile of Indian and Western magazines. Among what we got were Time, Life, National Geographic, and Readers Digest. Even the magazines were treated with respect…the National Geographic magazines were so highly revered that they ended up being bound in leather jackets. Through them, we grew up dreaming of visiting places displayed in these magazines and becoming aware of what was going on in the world, not just in India.

Do the best you can: This is one advice I remember him telling me when I was heading to Mumbai for studies. He, of course, exemplified it. This was not just about his medical knowledge and skills, but also hobbies. My parents decided to take up bird watching as a hobby and pretty soon excelled at it. So much so that my mother was credited with finding a rare bird in our area and her name appeared in the local newspaper.

Be totally honest: In a country where underreporting your income income—generating “black money”--- is a common practice, my father accounted for every penny he earned. In one instance, when buying an apartment, the seller wanted a large portion of price in the form of black money. My father mentioned that he had none. The seller was astonished and taken aback. He asked my father to create some by underreporting his income to the tax authority.

Find joy in everything: This is what kept him going in his final years. He did not find a place he had been to a thousand-time grow stale. Everything was “aarey wah!” ---how splendid! Every sunset, every piece of music, or every cardinal who came to sit on our bird feeder. “Aarey wah!” A corollary to this attitude was that he never complained about anything. Even a ten percent full glass was considered to be totally full.

Never give up: My father had iron determination as displayed in his habit of walking. (See my Blog Post dated 9/1/2014, titled “Keeps on Walking”). He walked two times every day irrespective of weather. This was feasible because he went to California to live with my sister during our winter. He used to participate in a charity walk of 20 miles well into his 80s. When he could not walk unaided, he walked with walking stick. When that was not enough, he walked with increasingly complex walkers. When he could not walk around our neighborhood, he walked on our driveway. When dementia began eating into his reason, he started opening locked doors in our absence to get out of the house and satisfy the urge to walk. After being committed to a nursing home during the last year of his life, he insisted on walking with the aid of two staff members and a walker. Even in the last week of his existence, he wanted me to pull him out of his wheelchair and go for a walk, although his feeble legs had lost all muscle power and he could not even stand up.

One gets to choose friends but not the family member. It was by sheer luck that we had him as a part of our family and for me, as father.

Now if I can implement even a portion of what he taught me. ;-)

State of the Union

“Mr. Vice President. Mr. Speaker of the House. The members of the Congress. My fellow American citizens.

The state of the union is terrible…and I have managed to do that in just one year. Single handedly. Just look around you.

To begin with, I have by now managed to offend people living in almost every country. I started with Mexico, as you may remember. Then I went after China. However, my masterstroke was calling the entire continent of Africa as a “shithole”.  No president in history has done such a good job in such a short time. This is what you get when you elect a stable genius to run the country.

It gets even better. Those who I have not offended are laughing at us. By my idiotic positions on issues, total ignorance of how the world runs, and a compulsive need to insult anyone who does not agree with me, even the folks in white countries…the good countries…are wondering who is running the great United States of America.

When you look inside our country, there is almost no minority that is not pissed off. By not condemning the White Supremacists, ignoring the demands of the African Americans, and insulting Hispanics, I have covered a lot of ground. May be there are some minorities left out but I will get to them eventually.

Moving on, I have made sure that our country will not participate in any effort to fight climate change. I don’t believe in science and I am convinced that the whole thing is a hoax. If the sea level rises and drowns the liberal cities on the coasts, so be it. Good riddance. I will move to Norway before New York gets flooded.

As you must have noticed, I have managed to pass a tax bill that benefits me and other rich folks. The rest of the country, the poor and the middle class…they will get nothing. Still, I have managed to convince those idiots that I am doing everything for them. Ha ha. Also, let’s not forget what I have done to the next generation. They will get saddled with a huge deficit. What better job could I have done of wrecking their future?

I know, I could not repeal the Obamacare, but I have dealt it such a blow that it will fail. There is nothing to replace it, because I have no clue what healthcare is all about. I just wanted to go after the black president who was born in Kenya. You are right in observing that I have reversed the course on everything he put in place.

I am trying very hard to eliminate all who are involved with investigating me. I managed to get rid of Comey and have done my best to destroy FBI.  I would have fired Mueller if it were not for the weakling of a lawyer who works for me.  Worry not; the Justice Department will not dare to touch me. I am their boss. I will dissolve the whole department if it comes to that.

Finally, I am hard to work on destroying the free press. I have a simple formula: Just call everything most of them report “Fake News.” The only exception is the truth reported by Fox News. I wonder why no one else though of it. Simple. I am the best president you have ever elected.

Fellow citizens, I have achieved a lot in one year. There is more to come. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Good night and God bless you.”

Pleasure of art

In my retirement I end up spending a considerable amount of time pursuing art. This includes learning about art (paintings, music, photographs), admiring what the masters have created, and doing my own little art creation (in the form of photography and digital imaging). As I do that, I ask myself why is art such an important aspect of our existence? What makes it so?

I found that this is an active area of investigation by all types of people: Neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, behavioral economists. Here are some interesting nuggets I discovered.

According to a story in Huffington Post (5/18/2011), “New research by Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroesthetics at University College London demonstrates that viewing a beautiful work of art creates the same chemical response as love. Both experiences trigger the feel-good chemical dopamine.”  Aha, there you go. Good old domamine. “There is a reason why art has served as a means of soulful self-expression for centuries upon centuries. All forms of art, from painting to dancing to music, are very personal and emotional experiences — both for the artists and the viewers. While it is a common experience to fall in love with a certain artwork, scientists now have evidence that shows the brain reacts similarly when viewing artwork and when falling in love.”

A more scholarly explanation is found in a paper written by Mohan Matthen (“The Pleasure of Art” in Australasian Philosophical Review, 2017). He writes that art appreciation is a “facilitating pleasure”, or f-pleasure, that is learned. This is distinct from f-pleasures that nature provides, such as what you get out of drinking cold water when you are thirsty. He distinguishes f-pleasure from a more primitive relief or r-pleasure, which includes things like coughing, sneezing, defecation, relieving an itch or orgasm. (I am relieved to note that the pleasure of viewing art is different from what I get when I go potty J)

He further proposes that a necessary ingredient for deriving f-pleasure is a “nexus”--- a coordinated group of mental and bodily ‘preparations’ that encourage, ease, and optimize the physical act. The learned f-pleasure, which includes art or music appreciation, requires formation of its own nexus. He goes own to say, “Aesthetic pleasure arises from a difficult and costly mental engagement with an object and activates a learned nexus that seeks to maximize the pleasure of this mental engagement. We judge objects to have aesthetic merit when they are a good fit for our aesthetic psychology. Aesthetic pleasure comes from contemplating something intellectually and, in the case of visual and performing arts, perceptually as well—focusing on the object and its properties.” 

OK, so now I know why I like certain types of music and not others, or why I find appreciating the more recent Western Classical music difficult---because it does not fit with my aesthetic psychology.

Dr. Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University is author of a book titled "How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like." Ira Flatow, the host of Science Friday on NPR, interviewed him.

According to Dr. Bloom, “The starting point for a lot of our pleasures is that they're biological adaptations. It's why we like food. It's why we like sex. It's why we like the company of other people. And it's also why we have a curiosity. It is very beneficial for an animal like we are to be motivated to explore the world and to get a flush of pleasure from discovering new things.” It is this curiosity that has brought art as a way of getting pleasure.

Dr. Bloom has an interesting taken on the importance of the “essence” of art in the degree of pleasure we get out of it. “We get pleasure from something, it's not merely based on what we see or what we hear or what we feel. Rather, it's based on what we believe that thing to be. So, in general when we look at a painting, you don't just look at the patterns of color and the shapes and the perceptual input. Rather, you try to reconstruct what went on its creation. What's its history? What's its real nature? And that determines how much you like it.” This is why an original work of art fetches a lot more money than a copy although they both look identical.

“If you think you are drinking an expensive wine, you get a far more pleasurable reaction, even at very low-level pleasure circuitry in the brain, than if you think you're drinking cheap swill. So another way of looking at it is you can enhance your pleasure simply by learning more about something, where it comes from, how it works.”

This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you can increase pleasure by knowing more about a work of art (or wine). On the other hand, your propensity to pay more for what you think to be an authentic item makes you susceptible to deception.

In summary, I can go on and enjoy a work of art because it will be just like falling in love. In doing so, I will get involved with difficult and costly mental engagement while further developing my learned f-pleasure nexus. Finally, I will increase my pleasure by learning that the painting I bought for $10 at the neighborhood pawnshop is an authentic Monet. J

Protesting in this day and age

In spring we went to a protest. We gathered in the Copley Square in Boston, shouted slogans, waved placards and listened to politicians. We were protesting against the Muslim Ban, something we felt deeply about as being unjust. After protesting for a couple of hours, we went to a neighboring restaurant for lunch with a friend we had bumped into. Then we went home and posted on the social media about our noble deed.

We felt good. We basked in the glow of having done our share to defend our nation against the onslaught of idiotic moves by a moron that we have elected as our president.  And, thanks to the social media, we burnished our image as patriots who stand up against injustice.   Some of us even claimed that we were following in the footsteps of our forefathers who participated in successful movements of their times.

All very positive for us, but did we produce any results? The Muslim Ban got snared in the judicial system as being unconstitutional, which probably would have happened even if we did not protest.

In a fine article in The New Yorker titled “Do Protests Work?” (August 21, 2017), Nathan Heller cites a number of recent situations where it did not. Two of the examples are Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. No US policies have changed because of the former, and only three police officers have been found guilty because of latter, with just one receiving a prison sentence. The largest single day demonstration in the US history, The Women’s March, was impressive, but did not do much to change the course of the new administration headed by a misogynistic president.

In finding the reasons why the protests have lately failed to produce results, Heller cites the Civil Rights Movement of the past as one where success was achieved. “It happened piece by piece under politically entrenched and physically threatening conditions.” “The keys to success were the structure and communication patterns that appear when a fixed group works together over time.” “Once, just getting people to show up required top-down coordination, but today anyone can gather crowds through tweets, and update, in seconds, thousands of strangers on the move.”

In other words, it required an organization and a leader to create a movement in the past. Neither is needed in today’s digital age. That seeming strength is also a weakness in terms of results achieved.

Another factor is the motivation in joining a protest. In the old days, success was defined as achieving the objectives of the movement. The participants in the Civil Rights movement, or India’s Freedom Struggle, would have felt like failures if the minorities were not given equal rights in US or, in the second instance, India did not become independent.

That is not the case today. One objective of protest, as per Heller, is to “make ourselves feel virtuous, useful, and in the right.” If we solidify our brand on the social media as a result of our action, we have achieved something. I admit this is a bit cynical, but I do believe that on a personal level our loyalty to the cause has become less important than it did in the past. As long as we get good FaceBook posts out of it, our efforts are not totally in vain, even if the objectives of the movement are not achieved. That lowering of the “commitment-bar” to enter a movement leads to a poor success rate.

So, the social media strikes again. Just as it has encouraged the dividing of our society into tribes, this modern way of communication has forever reduced the effectiveness of a popular way to bring about change.

What a Faustian bargain!