The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel appears within sight. Someday, sooner than later, we will look upon the pandemic in the past sense.We will look upon it with distance, sadness, even some regret, and relief. We will try to unravel ourselves to see how isolation changed us. Did I make lemonade when handed lemons? Did I make the most of it? Did we enjoy the time spent with our families? Did a break from non-stop commercialism free us even a tad bit from its seductive compulsions? Did it paralyze and weaken our muscles and memories? Did it free our minds?

As I look ahead to a post-pandemic life, I must confess to a bit of whiplash and mixed emotions. The pandemic gave me the greatest excuse to indulge in a personality defect – that I like to isolate. Outside of my professional work, I tend to disengage from society. I thrive at home. A meeting at a coffee shop or attending an event can cause mild resentment in me for having to break the continuity of self immersion with a dose of real life. Of course, it is real life that informs my awareness and fills my consciousness. You can’t exist in a vacuum, except, of course, at the times when you can. Before the pandemic, I had agency in deciding when and how much to isolate. The pandemic took that away. I have taken some advantage of it, for sure. Finishing some reading, starting new writing and so on. But, I am now isolating away from illness, rather than towards wellness as the case used to be. That can make all the difference.

I have wondered what it is about writing that makes me enjoy it. At one level, I like that it is shorn of the usual adornments of life. You know, things like “a firm place to be at eight AM on a weekday,” or, “a boss who wants you to do some things.” Writing is life served neat without distraction or superstructure. It is freedom from artificial limits. Artificial limits, of course, shape and contour our lives in the sands of time and fill it with meaning. When we enter into the time warp of a pandemic, or even perhaps into that of private grief, something stops us short and we face up to their ultimate absurdity.

At some level, I write because it is a quirk of mine developed in response to personal failings. It is something to do, and it fills up time. I can’t rid myself of the need to do something or the other, at least not yet. We can’t all be like the Buddhists, sitting cross legged and meditating on ultimate matters all the time. In my case, it is an old habit that refuses to go gently into the night. Out of the vast expanse of time, I carve a little bit, which no one asked me to carve, and I do “something” with it. The difference between writing and my other work that pays the bills is that the former brings no moral anxiety with it. It bears, at best, a tenuous relationship with necessity and time. Labor is work done by the clock, and paid by it too. Writing takes time and divides it up as it sees fit. It is something to do.

But, it can’t ever meaningfully fill up time. There is really no difference between writing and baking cookies, I have realized. They are both things to do but neither is a substitute for love. By love, I don’t mean romantic love, or parental love or a familial one. I mean the Platonic version with a capital L. It exists in creation like Beauty or the color Blue. Its terms cannot be predetermined, prescheduled or preplanned by me. Love is not something to do. It is everything to be experienced. The most powerful expressions of creativity have been experiences of Love and Connection, enacted and expressed through the work itself. That must be why it frightens most of us and we resort to indirection when expressing Love. “Here are some cookies, made with love,” or, “Here is this letter, written with love.” Without an element of Love in our lives, present somewhere in some form, there really is only time and too much of it.

A woman in India has accused a distant relative of stalking and repeatedly raping her when she was a minor. The case came up for appeal in front of India’s Supreme Court, following a petition filed by the accused man after a lower court sentenced him to jail time. Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde, the Chief Justice of India’s Supreme Court, asked the man, “Will you marry her?” as an alternative to jail time. There are no reports if the Justice asked the woman for her opinion on this arrangement. I can imagine how hard it must be for a judge to avoid personal bias in decisions. Even so, the learned judge’s approach to this case reveals a clear lack of competence, and signals a deeper rot in the judicial system.

Spiritual narcissism, Self and Bitcoin

I think it’s safe to assume that all of us know or have noticed at least one spiritually intense person who worships at the temple of woo-woo. If you don’t, you’re likely not on Instagram. They wear yoga pants made from recycled bamboo and hashtag #gratitude despite wanting to sell more stuff. They used to be vegan but have newly discovered the “Jain diet.” Nope, I am not judging them. Not at all. These are all very people doing very fine things. But, the quest to understand the self, at some point, can veer into a weird narcissism, and create a consciousness scene that puts “Self” above everything else and cover it with fluff.

A little bit of narcissism isn’t the worst sin. It is even prescribed by the science people as essential to self preservation and survival. I think the key is to be alert. Eternal vigilance is the price of many a good thing. If you’re thumbing your nose at your friends because their consumer-obsessed shallowness raises an offensive smell, you just might have taken a hard left into spiritual narcissism. Mindfulness can end in spiritual smugness. Meditation can lead to a lot of things – compassion, empathy, peace – and yes, a sense of superiority. While we evolve our personal religion, it can’t come at the cost of being uncaring about the world around us and the people in it. Spiritual insights become another means to enhance the ego, just like attractiveness, status, money or Facebook likes. The world is what it is. It calls upon us to seat ourselves comfortably at the table, each of us drinking our cup of tea.

In reality, there are only atoms and void, or so they say. The Self is something we create in our minds. This thing here is a part of me, and that thing there isn’t and so on. Identity and Self are useful concepts to the extent they help us make good predictions. At some point, they fail to make good predictions and we get stuck. Who really am I? I’m not who I once thought I was. It is at the level of thought where the model of a “unified self” begins to break down. On introspection, we find that the constituents of the Self don’t add up to the whole. This letter was written by a conscious model of my Self. In what sense is it really mine? Once we notice the breakdown of the Self, we see it in other contexts as well.

Roles, recognition, personalities, we notice, are merely conventions. We see how identity comes into play in relationships. There was a time when marriage was about what you did – produced children, fed and clothed them, or what you got – an alliance with the Hapsburgs. Modern romance is about being loved for who you really are, and not your utilitarian virtues as a hunter or a gatherer. This has led to an identity of specialness – a soulmate, the only one and so on. Corporations have jumped into this game as well. Jobs were once described as “the guy who strung 24 widgets together.” Now people describe themselves as “leaders” and “domain experts” and so on. You no longer work for Acme Inc. You’re an Amazonian or a Googler or a Microsoftie. These manufactured labels lack predictive powers. How much can you really tell about a person who is a soul mate or a Googler or “an inspiring leader in the AI space”?

None of this means that drawing a circle around a bunch of things and calling it the Self is necessarily bad or wrong. It’s just that there is no Self that matches reality in all its contexts. It just means that the Self is a construct to be simultaneously discovered, shaped, and played with, only to be ultimately discarded at death or enlightenment, whichever comes first.

Speaking of things that get parted from us when we die, i.e. wealth – If you really want to get rich, don’t become a software engineer or study STEM. As David Brooks writes in the New York Times, less than 2% of STEM majors end up in the top 1% of wealthy Americans. If you become a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer, you’ve got a much better shot at joining the ranks of yacht owners. Mr. Brooks, normally thorough, missed a couple of key factors. Maybe he was being satirical and I missed the whole point. Those who become rich are usually born to well to do parents who live in good neighborhoods. Your parents income and zip code, according to several studies, are the primary determinants of your destiny and chances of achieving the cherished American dream of owning a mansion and a senator or two.

In 2014, a man who called himself the Joker started a website on which people traded stolen credit cards for cash, and eventually laundered bitcoins. The Feds estimate that he might be worth two billion dollars. Last week, the Joker shut down the website and ceased operations forever. Ironically, his parting advice to stranded customers who were unpaid was, “all the money in the world will never make you happy,” and that “the most valuable things in life are free.” No kidding.

Speaking of bitcoin, its ship may have come in, literally. A group that advocates living on water instead of land took delivery of an idle cruise ship last November. They began to auction cabins off as “a gathering place for digital nomads, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, expats, researchers, and entrepreneurs.” Leading the effort was a bitcoin trader named Chad Elwartowski, who was listed as the group’s “First Seasteader.” The dream was to live on water and use only bitcoin to transact with the world. The ship was named MS Satoshi. The plan ran into rough weather once prospective buyers were told that they had to comply with maritime laws and buy insurance with fiat currency such as US dollars. “Unfortunately, we will not be able to proceed because of archaic big insurance companies that cannot adapt to innovative new ideas,” said an email to investors. MS Satoshi was sold for scrap and was last reported to be steaming to a yard in India to be broken up.

These are the stories of our times.

Stay safe. The Vaccine is at hand. And the other vaccine is right around the corner too.

The inevitable mediocrity of life

I turned 53 yesterday. (Thank you for your wishes). Unfortunately for you, this minor milestone has put me in the dangerous mood of doling out life advice. Aging is a fascinating phenomenon. With time, our willingness to apply cognitive energy and update worldviews declines and yet our energy to be “helpful” steadily rises. There’s an implicit assumption each of us makes, that goes, ‘Since I’ve lived to be X > N years of age, I must have seen all there is to the world and now must begin disseminating wisdom.’ Keep that in mind as you read on.

The life arc of a standard edition human being can be summed up simply as a matrix of life-stages and polarity. By this, I mean that we go through various life stages, and in each stage we gravitate towards a certain disposition. The life stages are childhood (0-12 years), adolescence (13-17), young adulthood(18-29), adulthood (30-60) and the post-60 adulthood. The polarities are positive and negative.

Childhood (0-12 years)

All of us always start with a positive polarity in life when we are born, no matter what our karmic baggage is. Every birth is a chance at redemption, and Mother Nature is anxious to give us the best start possible. There are no such things as evil babies.

If polarity stays positive, here’s what we do: Play, explore, learn life-positive attitudes (eg delaying gratification, pacifying oneself, etc) and get set up for positive polarity through to the next stage.

If things go bad early, the polarity turns negative. We endure abuse and develop anxiety and fearful attitudes. Our development is arrested and we develop unstable tendencies that derail our ability to function, a lifelong PTSD that sets us up for a downward spiral. This is no fault of the child’s and yet it is the way it is.

Adolescence (13-17 years)

In the positive version: We learn to trust, make friends, build our first social network, develop basic skills and learn to self-regulate (emotions, attitudes, etc.).

In the dark version: The PTSD of childhood continues. Or, there is new abuse. We get alienated, develop distrust, isolate ourselves, latch on to coping mechanisms and the downward spiral continues.

Young adulthood (18-29 years)

In the positive version: For the first time, we develop a relationship with ourselves. “I’m not a kid anymore. I got this.” We learn who to trust, and navigate the path between optimism and cynicism. We learn the value of values like kindness, honesty and empathy by noticing what happens in their absence.

In the negative version: We lose sight of ourselves. We become “clueless” and confused in a bad way, and vulnerable to manipulation. We become egotistically attached to versions of ourselves that place a disproportionate premium on our skills and talents.

Most of us dip into the negative side at this stage in life. This is to a large extent the fault of the world. The world doesn’t value blandness. It encourages us to stake out unique brands and identities by dangling rewards in front of us. You can’t be just another kid anymore. You need to be a math whiz or a debater or a tik-toker. College applications are all about “what makes you special.” They are never about “How lost do you think you are” or “how do you really feel about the way things have gone so far” or “Tell us how we can help you.” The possibility of developing a relationship with ourselves is quickly snuffed out by burgeoning pressures, demands on our time, survival instincts, and the Pavlovian learning from the world experimenting on us. We acquire and juggle labels, anxious to not drop any of them.

Adulthood (30-70 years)

30-45 years of age

If all is going well, it is here we start getting worldly, picking our battles, choosing our foes, tracking our win-loss ratios, and collecting scars. If the polarity stays negative, we fail to launch. We continually optimize starting points, rationalize delays, and get stuck in waiting rooms. Resentment gradually builds up, we dig in and put up shields.

46-60 years of age

Here we begin to make peace with the past, decide who or what we want to forgive and forget, or not. We begin examining our scars to decipher what keys the universe has handed to us and what locks they open. The process of self-discovery begins here.

In the negative version, we put ourselves in the penalty box, from which we don’t expect to ever escape. Our physical, mental and other problems define us. “This is who I am. This is who I will ever be. I can’t and won’t do much about it,” sets in.

Beyond 60 years of age

I don’t know much about what happens from here on, but I can guess. Here we figure out how to play the game of life in the most mature form we possibly can. We step aside. We beat a retreat and cede agency to younger people. We begin to see the possibility of a personal greatness that no longer ties itself to the external world.

In the dark version, we fail to see the future and who it belongs to. We hold on to our fears and to identity and agency for as long as we breathe. We age gracelessly, end up wearing out our welcomes, and get in young people’s ways. We fail to pass on the batons. We fight ourselves and others till the bitter end. We descend to the lowest levels of our frailties before the lights go out.

Note: This is the McDonalds menu version of the life arc. It’s the standard, cookie cutter version; the narrative of a normal life. It’s not to be taken as “this is how life must be lived or not.” There’s obviously more to life than what this simplistic summary captures.

A couple of things stand out.

One is the yin-yang-ness to things. Or, the matter-spirit principle, as the ancient Indian mystics called it. Life essentially comes down to choosing between positive and negative polarities at each stage. A life lived entirely within the positive column isn’t necessarily a good one. A straight As student aiming for a 4.0 in life sets herself up for a different kind of failure. The cost of wandering to the dark side shouldn’t be perceived as failing at life or likely to fail at life. Our life stages are largely in one column in any given stage, and they dip back and forth as we move through them. The goal isn’t to entirely avoid the spirals but to learn that spirals, up or down, are fundamentally unsustainable. And if we stay anywhere for too long, we lose the option to switch. The movie cliches about alcoholics, drug addicts, manic wall street brokers, scheming lawyers, and hard nosed businessmen are all unfortunately true.

The second is that life is largely ordinary and mediocre, for nearly all of us for most of our lives. This isn’t necessarily cause for angst. It takes a while before we realize that we were always reaching for mediocrity from the start. Whether our goals were to climb the corporate ladder, or accumulate wealth or power, or reach the heights of arts and academia, to leave some other mark on the world, or just be “another guy trying to make it,” the mediocrity of our ambitions became a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be sure, none of these goals are injurious unto themselves. They become injurious when accompanied by a certain type of ignorance about ourselves. We live entire lifetimes without getting even a brief glimpse into the nature of our own selves. This thing that we call “I,” which we carry around all our lives. Not knowing what that is. This is true mediocrity.

Hope you’re well. Stay safe. More next week.

Cancel culture

Most people have likely not heard of Gina Carano. She’s an actor who has risen to modest prominence after starring in The Mandalorian streaming on Disney+. Earlier this week, she was fired by Lucasfilm, the show producer, after she blitzed social media with a series of posts in which she likened the contemporary American political climate for Republicans to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust.

Per my reckoning, we are now at peak anti-woke-ism. If this were a book, we’d be in Chapter 5 or 6. Chapter 7 will be about the beginnings of an anti-anti-woke-ism phase of American culture wars. Is anti-anti-woke the same as woke? Stay tuned. I see ‘The Rise of a Twitter Thread,” a Hulu documentary in our future, premiering in 2022.

There is a lot of talk about cancel culture these days. It’s fair to start out by stating the ‘sincere conservative’ position, if there’s even such a thing anymore. It pivots around free speech as a cornerstone principle in democracies. It’s about how free speech is really an enlightened liberal value and how if liberals seek to win arguments by force, monopolizing of megaphones and tone policing, it will ultimately end in a society with very little free speech left in it. They describe cancel culture as liberal driven, which has conquered the arts, the corporate world and academia, and uses that power to cancel anyone who disagrees. I think I’ve done a good job of summing up their argument.

On the face of it, the sincere conservative position appears reasonable, even plausible. To tip my hand and reveal my bias, I find it hard to take classical positions seriously anymore. They may have worked in some ancient past in a narrow context, but more often than not they fail to grasp how facts and speech intersect in practice. My opinion is that the world has become a place where it is increasingly not important to agree about most things with other people. Consensus building has evolved into some form of weird role play, sought by some as a lifestyle choice. Those who seek debate are knights in a medieval era, who really seek jousts. At best, they offer entertainment. At worst, they create strife. When was the last time a sincere debate led to meaningful impact on the world, I wonder. Perhaps in the late 1940s when there were some persuasive arguments made for world peace, which led to the dismantling of the British empire, creation of NATO and the United Nations, etc? A skeptic might view even those dialogues as Russian and American machinations to replace the English as the new power brokers.

Also, classical arguments don’t consider the boundary conditions and the costs of their positions. They operate in theoretical vacuums. In a 100% White and Christian America, there are no costs to debating the merits of Caucasian exceptionalism or the place of Christianity in society. Introduce colored, non-Christians into the mix, and the costs to society escalate rapidly.

There’s a fairly wide divergence in the views of cancel culture. At one extreme, there are those who don’t even believe that it exists. Others look at it as a crude but necessary mechanism to rid the world of misogyny, racism, homophobia and privilege. Some regard it as working some of the time but prone to abuse. At the other extreme are folks like Carano who regard it as cancerous to society and civilization.

What is cancel culture? WIthout a proper definition, it’s near impossible to understand, let alone debate it. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. And I will offer my own. Cancel culture is when people whose power rests directly on public approval lose that power and associated benefits as a result of approval turning into disapproval. You have to be meaningfully rich or powerful to be cancel-able. It’s cancel as in a book or a TV show, not a dinner or a party. There has to be some sort of a rival mob led by rival elites. A relatively non-famous actor like Carano is not being canceled. She is simply being fired for creating a hostile work environment. A Mel Gibson can be canceled for anti-Semitism, but not the man who works on his set. An investor disinvited from speaking at a college commencement is not being canceled. He is simply being disliked. A small business owner boycotted for posting racist tweets is a corner case. A lot of what is being mislabeled as wokeism or cancel culture should really be analyzed for what it is – specific battles over power and institutions. Like board seats or committee control or business rivalry. These turf wars are not new. They have been around for a long, long time.

Protesting and demanding justice for an actual crime isn’t cancel culture. It is a natural progression of things. I think it’s best to not get too hung up on definitions. Think ‘a large, less powerful group policing a small, more privileged and powerful group outside of the legal system through social influence and inflicting material losses to restore a balance of power.’ Everyone is always trying to rule the world. The goal is not to rule, but to be left alone by whoever is in power.

Few of us are consciously selfish. None of us gets out of bed in the morning wishing to wilfully harm others. When in doubt, we try to weigh kindness over inflicting pain. We differ only in self awareness about how we weigh and rank the pain of all involved, and in how hard we work to see hidden pain. We must, of course, prioritize our own pains. It is a basic tenet of survival. Once the basic survival needs are met, the marginal value of putting ourselves first rapidly diminishes. Those who continue prioritizing themselves well past the survival basics tend to be broken in fundamental ways.

Let’s say you came of age in an all-male misogynistic world, like I did, where we were used to participating, at least passively, in a no-cost misogynistic humor. Locker room talk. All men know what this is. It was a world in which guys self-censored crude jokes about women when they were present. Why did they self-censor? It was put down to “respect for women present” but that is obviously BS. Honestly, I wonder if we men now feel muzzled or have discovered new found shame. The difference between then and now is the difference between noblesse oblige type favor granted by the powerful to spare feelings, “Hey watch it bro. There are women present” and the fear of consequences imposed by actual victims for suffering actual harm. People who worry about cancel culture should ask themselves how they would behave in its absence. Would you make a racist joke in every context? Some contexts? No context? We are all still free, as in speech, just not as in lunch. A lot of the complaints about cancel culture while they pose as free speech arguments are actually complaints about the latter, i.e. they are complaining that there are no more free lunches. No one likes to pay for what was once free. Men used to paying no costs for bad behavior resent that there is now a cost. It’s a new world, boys. Giddy up.

It’s disappointing though that we have lost all interest in the underlying issues. The internet of beefs has taken over. It doesn’t mean that the issues have disappeared. It just means that they are evolving in less obvious and ungoverned ways. I suspect that somewhere in this debate about cancel culture, we have obscured, even forgotten, the enormous progress we have made towards demanding and practicing basic decency and respect for others, especially those who have not been treated with decency and respect for thousands of years. It’s an important debate nonetheless and we must continue it. More on this in the next letter.

As of this week, 50 million Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccine. No, not this Vaccine, but the other deal that keeps Covid-19 away. That’s great.

A Singapore professor realized, after a two hour lecture, that he had been speaking on mute all the time. Some students tried to let him know but to no avail. But, all of them stayed till the very end. This begs the questions: Am I the professor? Am I on mute? Are you the student hanging on in hope that this will become interesting at some point? Don’t be shy. Write back.

Stay safe. The next 100 million doses of the Vaccine are around the corner.

The Sultans of Swing

By the third century BCE, India was verily a hotbed of action. By this time, word had gotten around that India was El Dorado, a land of untold riches. Tales of the mysterious sub-continent where mystics roamed freely and people lived in shining cities along great rivers had reached a young Alexander in Greece. There is an apocryphal story of Alexander and an Indian mystic worth narrating just for the fun of it. On reaching the western borders of India, Alexander’s hordes were tired and mutinous. India was not the hedonistic and decadent Persian empire, which the Greeks had swatted aside in their march into Central Asia. India, they had heard, was a whole different ball game. 

It is said that Alexander ran into a strange, naked man with matted locks and an ash smeared body, standing under a tree. On seeing the Greek, the mystic simply stomped his foot once and showed no further interest. When asked to explain his odd behavior, he replied, “Every being needs only so much land. Two yards long and two yards deep for when he dies. You will soon be dead. Then you will own just as much of this earth as will suffice to bury you. You’re far from home, causing nuisance to the world by seeking to possess that which will never belong to you.” Alexander, a student of Aristotle, was no stranger to flights of philosophy. While he approved of the man’s words and admired his courage, Alexander remained a slave to ambition. He responded with the arrogance of a man who had scattered the Persian army and brought the mighty Darius to his knees. “Be aware of who you speak to. I am Alexander, the son of Zeus, the king of Gods.” To which the mystic replied, “You say that you are the son of God. But I am God itself. Death holds no fear for me.” Alexander came to realize that the Indians were made of sterner stuff. A few months later, he abandoned his expedition. He died on his way back, in Central Asia at the age of thirty two.

The story of Alexander and the mystic is apocryphal. Fictional as it is, the narrative illustrates a point that has held true about the sub-continent’s peoples over thousands of years, which is that you cannot subjugate them by force. No conqueror has been able to bend India to his will or break its spirit. No delusions of grandeur have swayed their persuasion.

Fast forward to 14th century India, we find another strange story of another megalomaniac. This time, it’s a son of a Hindu mother and a Turkish king, and himself an Emperor of Delhi. When Mohammed Bin Tughluq passed into the great beyond on March 20th, 1351, his subjects heaved a sigh of relief. For twenty five years, they had suffered wild swings in policy along with brutal repression and breathtaking incompetence. To be sure, Tughluq was no fool like Trump. “He was perfect in the humanities of his day, a keen student of Persian poetry, a master of style, supremely eloquent in an age of rhetoric, a philosopher trained in Logic and Greek metaphysics, with whom scholars feared to argue, a mathematician and lover of science.” One time, he relocated his capital 300 miles south to keep away from the reach of invaders. He ordered citizens to move, laid broad roads and planted trees for shade to make it easy for them to travel. But, he forgot an essential aspect of governance. No matter who you are, king or god, you cannot hold the people at sword’s edge. Many refused to move even at the peril of death. Thousands died on the way. Delhi suffered huge losses, from which it took decades to recover. Eventually, Tughluq abandoned his project. The idea was not a bad one. But the mission was never about reform or doing good for the people. Instead, it was about exercise of power. Tughluq’s bright ideas were defeated by his own arrogance, incompetence, unwillingness to negotiate and inability to conduct a conversation. 

Speaking of arrogance, incompetence, unwillingness to negotiate and inability to conduct a conversation, there is a battle afoot in India between its farmers and government. If you’re not familiar with the details, here’s a gist: The Indian government is attempting reform of how farm products are distributed. From what I have read, the reforms are good and progressive. If successful, they will break the hegemony of the elite and improve an average farmer’s income. The elite which includes landholders, wealthy farmers and distributors are naturally up in arms. ‘If the fat cats are protesting then it must be a good idea’ is one way to look at it. So far so good. 

What has been objectionable has been the tactics of the government in handling dissent. They have arrested journalists and protestors, cut off the internet and created an environment in which any dissent of any form, peaceful or not, is equated to treason. Everyone has joined in the fight, from Meena Harris, Rihanna and Greta Thunberg on the farmers’ side to Indian cricketers and movie stars on the other. India is not easy to reform. No one envies Modi, India’s right wing Prime Minister. He has a difficult job. He has made it only harder for himself with a belligerent and divisive approach to people and politics. Like Alexander, he suffers from delusions of grandeur. Like Tughluq, he has tremendous capacity to botch good ideas.  

Backing divisive guys because they talk like reformers is bound to end in grief. We saw that with Trump. Incompetence and divisiveness tend to go hand in hand. In a sense, dividing people into warring factions is the very definition of incompetence. Even when “bad guys” try to do the “right thing,” people will instinctively rise up in opposition. It is not about reform. For the disenfranchised, it’s about resistance. For Tughluq or Modi or Trump, it is about power play, and breaking the other guy down into a weeping mess. Moral of the story: Try not to let the bad guys in.

It’s hard to pick a side in the farmer vs Modi fracas. But it’s becoming plain as day that Modi is a modern day Tughluq, arrogant, authoritarian and incompetent. What Indians do with this information remains to be seen. It’s scandalous that a country of a billion and half people does not have better ballot options. To be a voter in India, the world’s largest democracy, may be the hardest job there is today.

Trying to avoid a traffic jam, an Australian man took a detour and ended up lost in the Australian bush.  “It was bumper to bumper, so I’ll swing a right and go up the mountain and come down the other side,” he explained. He was rescued after 18 days, having survived on eating mushrooms. Taking detours, getting lost and surviving on mushrooms. Sounds a lot like the Republican party these days.

Super Bowl Sunday is here. It’s the Chiefs versus the Buccaneers. Yes, Tom Brady is the GOAT. I get that. But, I’m begging you, Mahomes. For the love of God, please beat this guy. 

As always, stay safe. Double mask if you need to. More doses of the Vaccine are on their way.