People..idiocy..moods

My blogs typically contain a modified and rather edited version of my thoughts and opinions. Today, I wish to discuss people, their idiosyncrasies and the fluctuating moods.

Personally and professionally, I have interacted with many people, and as a species, we tend to let our emotions (moods and idiosyncrasies) rule our life - how we speak, what we say, who we talk to, our topics, friends, families, everyhting is dependent predominantly on our emotions. With that being said, it's a strange balance we maintain in our lives.

As a socio-cultural anthropology student, I've studied and discussed how culture affects our thoughts, actions, life structure and even our words. However, as a student of linguistic anthropology, I've always been fascinated with and impressed by how our language shapes our lives and choices. Earlier, I said that our emotions rule our life and various aspects of it. But language is a very intricate part of that balance, and without culture and language, we will be unable to express our emotions.

For example, let's imagine, a professor has an unruly student in his course, for purpose of maturity, let's assume this is a graduate course. In such a case, the unruliness would mean disruptiveness, questioning the instructor's knowledge/authority, and other such stupid actions. Now let's talk about how this instructor would phrase an order/request to the student about submitting his assignment on time - CASE 1, wherein the emotional distance between the speaker and the audience is great, and the 'request/act' is 'threatening' the audience's 'face'.

Now, let's look at another situation, let's imagine, a husband asks his wife to remind him about an upcoming friends birthday, and when the wife calls him at work to remind him, he doesn't answer her calls. Further, he tells her that he is chatting with friends, and can't talk to her. Now let's talk about how the wife would respond to her husband - CASE 2, wherein the emotional distance between the speaker and the audience is very small, but the 'request/act' is 'threatening' the speaker's 'face' and may also 'threaten' the audience's 'face'.

There are millions of other situations which can be imagined or real, where we encounter these items - emotional distance, threatening acts, and faces. These terms might be alien to most audiences, however a lingusitic athropologist/student, would immediately recognize what I am leading to - it's a very interesting and highly debated topic - Face Threatening Acts. To simplify, it tells us that people, use acts of politeness (a.k.a. be nice to other people) based on some criteria (distance, threatening acts and faces). The faces they refer to are not the physical form, rather the socio-cultural face we present to each other.

In our daily life, we use these FTAs quite often, without ever recognizing it. However, when you recognize them, you are now capable of deciding whether the FTA you originally intended to use was appropriate or not. Of course, every situation has multiple variables which tend to influence our acts, and any subject/text can never correctly reflect all these variations. For example, I find that one of the biggest variables that affect the FTA we perform, is the time factor. Based on the incidence time (when the situation occured) to the performance time (when the FTA will occur) and the reaction time (when the audience will react to the FTA), the actual FTA gets modified quite often.

In the above situations, it's very easy to imagine the instructor being quite stern with the student about the assignment submission (FTA), immediately after the unruliness. Similarly, in case 2, the wife may be quite vocal with her disapproval(FTA) immediately after the phone call. However, in both situations, if the FTA occurs after an elapsed period of time (2 hours to 2 days or even 2 weeks), then the level of FTA would be minor compared to it's original effect. Still, I should point out, that in each of those cases, whenever the FTA occurs, the level of FTA would never be the same in both the cases, because the distance between the audience and the speaker is different in each case.

Can you see why I love and am quite intrigued with exploring culture, society, language, words and most importantly, how they affect our behavior? Everything in our lives, from health care policies, hospital administration, university educational systems, politics, families and patriotism, is underlined by this interacting and quite complicated system of words and behaviour.

Street children..butterflies or businesspeople?

I wonder, if we ever think about those children we see on the streets - whether it's in India, Nigeria or here in Canada. When I was growing up in India, I've seen kids barely older than me, with tattered clothing and dirty faces along the streets or begging in traffic. In Lagos, I've seen babies begging in heavy traffic or selling water in the go-slow. Even in Toronto, I've seen homeless teenagers on the streets downtown.


As a child in India, my reaction was typically to ignore them and see through them. In Lagos, I use to notice them only in passing, I was too busy with my life. Now in Toronto, I look at them and I wonder what could have brought them to such a situation. In all those scenarios, I have felt guilty about not helping them. With the huge hue and cry today's celebrities have raised about third-world children and charities, the world seems to be overflowing with NGOs and Christian missionaries hell bent on working with the poor. I've always been quite sceptical about this - maybe it comes from growing up in middle-class India, where you're taught to doubt people's motives, especially when they tell you they are trying to help you purely out of the goodness of their heart.


But today I read about an organization, the Butterflies, who were responsible for creating and supporting this, a bank run by children, streetchildren to be very specific. The bank is called Children's Development Bank, and operates only after 6pm in the night, when these children can get away from their menial day jobs as rag-pickers, utensil cleaners and other odd-end tasks. To me the best thing about this initiative was the independence and confidence, it would give these kids. I had parents, family and friends who loved me, supported me and believed in. These children probably did not have too many supporters or believers, until they came into this project. For that, I am grateful to the organization and to the initiative.

I'm sure there are many obscure groups and similar intiatives, but being ignorant about those other groups, does not necessitate or provide justification, if I ignored this wonderful initiative.


Excellent work!

A 15 yr old surgeon and his crazy parents

I thought fat farms in Africa, and women only beaches in Italy were rather interesting news items, until I read this article. Will miracles never cease? I guess not, as long as idiots like them exist in the world, we will always witness these 'miracles' of pure unadultered stupidity and mindless idiocy.

In this piece of very refreshing and mind-numbing lunacy, we find a 15 year old boy in Tamil Nadu, South India, performing a C-section under the very watchful eyes of his parents, who are both physicians (see image on the left). The reason for this bit of lunacy, well, which parent can resist the though that their son could possibly enter the Guiness Book of World Records.

Alas, the poor souls never imagined that they would end up in prison for such a noble thought. Idiots.

Another article, on the same issue, ends with a quote from a spokesperson at Guiness Records:

Guinness does not endorse such attempts because they encourage "bad medicine."

Finally, someone makes sense, in a remote indirect way, but this is better than letting a 15 year old practise C-sections on poor, unsuspecting women!

Oh, and for those anxious to know the fate of the baby (see the attached image of the mother Nyla, 27 with her child), apparently the child was born with a lump on the spinal cord, but the birth defect had nothing to do with the surgery.

Oh Joy!

Fat is beautiful..but do we need 'fat-farms'??

I've always known that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so on. However, I've also seen people take their concern for beauty to some pretty weird extremes. This article, on BBC, caught my eye today and I couldn't believe the tripe I was reading.

Apparently, in this African country, fat women are considered beautiful, and so they force-feed their children - girls as young as 7 years old are force-fed so that they become fat and beautiful. Fatematou, a lady who runs a fat-farm in Mauritania, had this to say about force-feeding the girls:

"I make them eat and eat and eat. And then drink lots and lots of water," she explained. "I make them do this all morning. Then they have a rest. In the afternoon we start again. We do this three times a day - the morning, the afternoon and the evening."

Fatematou said that it was rare for a girl to refuse to eat, and that if they did, she was helped by the child's parents. "They punish the girls and in the end the girls eat," she said. "If a girl refuses we start nicely, saying 'come on, come on' sweetly, until she agrees to eat." Fatematou admitted that sometimes the girls cried at the treatment. "Of course they cry - they scream," she said. "We grab them and we force them to eat. If they cry a lot we leave them sometimes for a day or two and then we come back to start again. "They get used to it in the end."

In the present day's context, especially in North America, where we witness anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders, it's not astonishing to notice something this idiotic in another part of the world. However, I am astounded by this kind of idiocy, moral hypocrisy and the cultural value we accord to outdated traditions and physical appearances. How can parents be willing to abuse their children to such extremes. On the similar vein, I have neve understood how parents in North America can accept their 13 - 16 year daughters getting breast implants, botox injections and so on. I guess, I'm not someone who believes in following 'generally accepted ideas/outlooks'. Oh well, woe betide me! :)

I'll end today's tirade with Fatematou's very 'wise' words:

"Once they are fat and beautiful they can serve their men well, once they are fat they can be married."

What bulls***!

Words are never enough..

When I followed the link from Amit Varma's blog to this collection of images that changed the world, I could not ignore them. I felt the need to reclaim those moments of horror and achievements..

The picture shows three dead American soldiers on the beach of P. N. Guinea during WWII. It ends with the tagline..'we need pictures, because words are never enough'....