John Steffen

Mehta grew up in Mumbai but he left after his formative years for the US (New York City, mostly, for 20 years). This book documents a homecoming of sorts. He brings his wife and two young kids back to Mumbai to live for a few years and documents his personal experiences. It’s deeper though than a personal story; he picks a few (semi) famous people and describes their lives in an effort to give the reader a better description of what Mumbai is really like.

Let me first throw out a caveat: I have not dug into the veracity of any of this stuff. Mehta spends time with murderers, gang leaders, strippers, cops, rich people, poor people, friends, foes; you name it. Many of whom he does not paint in a very positive light. In many cases he disguised his intentions. In many cases he was very up front. In all cases, he had access. Some of it is pretty unbelievable. But I’m assuming it was vetted properly because the book was up for a Pulitzer in 2005. Call me crazy.

It’s clear that Mehta has many, many wonderful memories of growing up in Mumbai. Those memories of a kid in the 1970’s give way to the perspective of a guy in his late thirties around the turn of the millennium. Who better to give you a feeling for the place? Mehta shows his Indian home great love, but it’s often tough love, so he doesn’t sugar-coat anything. I loved the book and it makes me want to find a similar style of book for Chicago.

It’s basically a book full of stories about people in Mumbai. He starts out with the story of his move back. He then moves on to a large section on Hindu and Muslim gangs, the police force trying to keep them in check, and the culture of corruption in Mumbai. He lightens things up and transitions to entertainment, discussing local food, strip clubs/dance bars, and Bollywood. He returns to his personal story and recounts his high school class reunion. Then he gives us the point of view of someone from a rural area coming to the big city to pursue their dreams followed by an account of a whole family becoming Jain monks. Finally, he finishes up with some more personal reflection.

They are all great stories. Early on I was riveted by the stories of the 1992-93 riots told to Mehta by people who were there. He even got to meet Bal Thackeray; Mehta has this thought upon shaking the man’s hand:

Then I shake the hand of the one man most directly responsible for ruining the city I grew up in. (pg 97)

That’s what I mean by access and it also highlights the emotional attachment Mehta has to his subject matter.

The Hindu and Muslim strife in Mumbai seems palpable, at least the way Mehta describes it, exacerbated by overcrowding, poverty, and general corruption. Talk about overcrowding:

The Greater Bombay region has an annual deficit of 45,000 houses a year. … Thus these 45,000 households every year add to the ranks of the slums. … The slum population doubles every decade. (pg 117)

Then a little further along:

Prahlad Kakkar, an ad filmmaker, has made a film called Bumbay, a film about shitting in the metropolis. … “Half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in, so they shit outside. That’s five million people…” (pg 127)

And about the gangs:

The gangs flourish because they form a parallel justice system in a country with the world’s largest backlog of court cases. Indicative of this judicial paralysis is the fact that as of 2003, a decade after the Bombay blasts, the trial of the plotters is still dragging on. (pg 144)

But it’s not all bad:

Bombay is still a city where I can travel pretty much anywhere at all hours of the day or night. Muggings are virtually unknown. Women aren’t molested like they are in Delhi. …

Bombay’s menace is not street crime. It’s bigger and more organized than that. (pg 145)

I guess you have to take the good with the bad. I think they just get used to it because they don’t have any choice.

The judge/population ratio in the United States is 107 judges per million people; in India it is 13 judges per million. Forty percent of the judgeships in the Bombay High Court are vacant; each judge has over three thousand cases pending. (pg 176)

So you do what you gotta do, according to Mehta:

You have to break the law to survive. I break the law often and casually. I dislike giving bribes, I dislike buying movie tickets in the black. But since the legal option is so ridiculously arduous – in getting a driver’s license, in buying a movie ticket – I take the easy way out. (pg 177)

Despite this, his heart is clearly in India. About half way through he talks about getting things figured out.

The kids stop getting sick all the time, and when they do we don’t worry so much. All the kids in Bombay are sick much of the time. It is the bad air, the bad water, the bad food – and the country still has 1 billion people. One billion thin, often sickly, but alive people, some of them magnificently alive. (pg 255)

I love that passage.

Shortly after this passage he dives into a few hundred pages on the club scene and forges and friendship with a bar dancer (not really a stripper). Here is how he starts things off:

I started going to beer bars because I was puzzled. I couldn’t figure out why men would want to spend colossal amounts of money there. On a good night a dancer in a Bombay bar can make twice as much as a high-class stripper in a New York bar. The difference is that the dancer in Bombay doesn’t have to sleep with the customers, is forbidden to touch them in the bar, and wears more clothes on her body than the average Bombay secretary does on the broad public street. (pg 269)

Hmm. Interesting. He’s still just a journalist though and stays detached, he says about his new friend:

… I haven’t told her about my wife and children. I remember that Monalisa is still under the protection of the don’s grandson. She is of the shadow world; I keep my family insulated from such people. Hit men, dancing girls, rioters: As far as they are concerned, I live alone in the apartment in Elco, which is actually my office. If there is a problem later, if they decide to take a violent dislike to me or what I write about them, it is only me they can hurt. (pg 295)

Then he starts talking Bollywood, a term that they hate in India.

India is one of the few territories in which Hollywood has been unable to make more than a dent; Hollywood films make up barely 5 percent of the country’s market. (pg 349)

I tell ya, it’s a different movie-going experience:

An Indian cinema hall is never the chamber of mass unconsciousness it is in the West. For one thing, you can never tell anyone to shut up. Everyone talks at will, often keeping up a running dialogue with the characters. If a god appears onscreen, people might throw coins or prostrate themselves in the aisles. Babies howl; during a song, a quarter of the audience might get up and procure refreshment in the lobby. Complex dialogue doesn’t work, because most of the time the audience doesn’t hear it. … (pg 366)

Fascinating, huh?

This book gives me a new perspective on the city. You really do need to adjust and pay more attention to your fellow man. We’re all packed into these confined spaces together so let’s just make the best of it. That’s what they’ve figured out in India. That’s why they thrive everywhere, because they can adapt:

Bombay is a fast-paced, even hectic city, but it is not, in the end, a competitive city.

Anyone who has a “reservation” on an Indian train is familiar with this word: Adjust. You might be sitting there on your seat, the prescribed three people along it, and a fourth and a fifth person will loom over you and say, “Psst…Adjust.” You move over. You adjust. (pg 491)

What a lesson, a great lesson for all of us. Most people in Bombay live in one room. According to Mehta, that’s the same room for “sleeping, cooking, eating.” You just make due. You make due not only for the people you love, by letting your extended family stay for months in your smallish place, but for your fellow man on the bus or train.

There’s a vibrancy in the city that I think Mehta sometimes doesn’t feel in the US. It’s like you have to try so hard to retain your individuality within the hugeness of at all, that you become an expert at being an individual.

The battle is Man against the Metropolis, which is only the infinite extension of Man and the demon against which he must constantly strive to establish himself or be annihilated. A city is an agglomeration of individual dreams, a mass dream of the crowd. In order for the dream life of a city to stay vital, each individual dream has to stay vital. (pg 539)

I’m inspired by Mehta, by India, and by the people of Mumbai. This book is a lot deeper than the soundbites I’ve chosen above. Mehta doesn’t gloss over stories or just give informed summaries, he throws his heart and soul at it and let’s it rip. I think I have to see Slumdog Millionaire now.

This book grabbed me when I read the synopsis, but I can’t remember where I saw it. I usually remember stuff like that. Oh well. This little article from Fast Company sums up some of this guy’s views. It’s interesting to me, this idea of the web actually adding value to our lives and to the economy in some form.

I’m a big fan of the web. I have an above average level of involvement in it, but I don’t feel that it’s an unhealthy level of involvement. Some of my most active involvement with the web is via this book blog and with my Flickr account. This blog really enhances my enjoyment of reading, for sure. And organizing all of my 6,700 photos (and counting) on Flickr enhances and will continue to enhance all of the memories captured by the pictures I’ve taken. What I’m doing, according to Cowen, is organizing all of the stories of my life. This mental ordering is not that weird (I’m comforted).

I’m really just doing it for my own sake. Not many people read this blog and not that many people ever check out my golf pix and such on my Flickr account. It may seem strange to a lot of people, this need to organize things into lists, with tags, and often with commentary on the whats and wherefores of each experience. I’m just compelled to do it. I can’t really give much more of an explanation than that, but Cowen has helped me sort things out.

It’s kind of a rambling book if you ask me. At least that’s how I felt as I read it. And I’ve been putting off writing about it because I’m struggling to piece it all together. Of course, I could just be dumb, but I’m finding it difficult to encapsulate it in a few sentences. Here it goes.

Early on, Cowen says this:

Today culture is not just about buying and selling straightforward commodities such as books or compact discs. Each day more fun, more enjoyment, more social connection, and indeed more contemplation is produced on Facebook, blogs, YouTube, iPods, eBay, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com—among other services—than had been imagined twenty or even ten years ago. No matter what the medium, much of the actual value today comes from readers, viewers, students, and consumers, as an “add-on” to what they are sent by corporations. More and more, “production”—that word my fellow economists have been working over for generations—has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor. Even when a major media corporation produces the pixels, viewers and listeners use their mental ordering to create the meaning and the interpretations, and that is where most of the value lies.

This really speaks to me. I think about my consumption of books. I read fewer books than I could if I didn’t document them in such a detailed manner, but I enjoy them on a much deeper level because I do so. I’ve made reading richer and more fulfilling for me, and more economical in a certain sense (I don’t have to buy as many books). Or as Cowen says:

You have enhanced the meaning and the importance of the small cultural bits at your disposal and thus you want to grab more of them and organize more of them, and you are willing to work hard at that task, even if it means you sometimes feel harried.

Yeah, that’s right. Now some may differ that all of this reading or playing golf (another thing I like to sort, list and categorize) is worthy of being called “cultural bits.” How much culture is there in playing the local muni course or reading “Q” is for Quarry? To you, maybe not much. You may think I should be studying Nighthawks at the Art Institute or spending the day on a Frank Lloyd Wright tour. Well, okay. But, those aren’t for everybody. Can’t simple, everyday pursuits be deemed cultural, even if they don’t line up with your definition? Or as Cowen puts it:

In short, our contemporary culture has become more like marriage in the sense that we are trading in some peak experiences for a better daily state of mind. Culture has in some ways become uglier because that is how the self-assembly of small bits looks to the outside observer. But when it comes to the interior dimension, contemporary culture has become happier and more satisfying. And, ultimately, it has become nobler as well and more appreciative of the big-picture virtues of human life.

Interesting that he compares it to marriage, and I think he’s married. I’m not sure about the analogy, but this idea of being involved daily in simple cultural pursuits versus occasionally pursuing a peak experience may make the world travelers and art historians cringe. But it’s highly relevant in this day and age and represents how many people consume cultural pursuits right now.

Anyway, as the book goes on he develops these ideas by exploring the advanced mental ordering and cognitive skills of people with autism. He lauds their abilities as infovores and highlights how we can learn from them. I found this example interesting:

I have noticed that self-aware autistics are especially likely to be cosmopolitans in their thinking. That is, they tend to attach weaker moral importance to the boundaries of the nation state than do most other people.

…

Much of this cosmopolitan tendency is rooted in experience rather than cognition. Most autistics have lots of experience with being the “out group” when it comes to “in vs. out” confrontations or social settings. That makes them naturally suspicious of political persecutions, extreme forms of patriotism, and groupthink.

That’s a pretty cool way to look at things, and one of many ideas Cowen has to help us better our lives by borrowing from autistics. Autistics are expert at “ordering knowledge in preferred areas and perceiving small bits of information in perceived areas.” You can see how these skills could be valuable today as we are confronted with a huge amount of information at our fingertips. Figuring out how to situate ourselves so we are comfortable with what and how much we are consuming can be easier if we are game for experimenting with some of Cowen’s ideas.

Overall, for me, Cowen’s most important point is that we should increase our respect for neurodiversity. He says:

In the meantime, awareness of human neurodiversity helps us see the diversity of beauty in modern society, even if we cannot perceive all of those beauties. As cultural production becomes more diverse, more and more art forms will be directed at pleasing people with unusual neurologies. More and more of the aesthetic beauty of the world will be hidden to most observers, or at least those who don’t invest in learning. The aesthetic lushness of the world will be increasingly distributed into baroque nooks and crannies, in a manner that would honor a Borges short story.

I’m continually amazed at the range of human skills, talents, attitudes, etc… I’ll never be able to figure out what makes certain people tick, which is alright. I liked this book so I think I’ll subscribe to a blog he contributes to regularly, Marginal Revolution, just to see what else this dude has to say.

When it was announced that Obama would receive an honorary degree and give the graduation speech at Notre Dame, some heated discourse ensued. I was asked early on by someone, “Why is your university so racist?” I was a little taken aback by this question. The backlash from the Catholic Church did not surprise me and I was ready to defend my university against the accusation that we were no longer a Catholic university. But the accusation that my university was racist made me mad, which was frustrating because I didn’t have any defense readily available besides anecdotal evidence from my experiences there.

I guess I could have rooted around in admission stats and looked at minority representation on the board, but stats may not make any difference to many asking the question. It got me thinking, what would constitute a racist university?

Early on in this book, Wilson describes racism as such:

At its core, racism is an ideology of racial domination with two key features: (1) beliefs that one race is either biologically or culturally inferior to another and (2) the use of such beliefs to rationalize or prescribe the way that the “inferior” race should be treated in this society, as well as to explain its social position as a group and its collective accomplishments.

That’s quite a hurdle put up by Wilson. To be a racist, it’s not enough to just think that one race is inferior to another, but you have to take the next step and act on that belief by either taking some action to exclude that “inferior” race from some aspect of society or use that belief to explain the “inferior” race’s position in society.

I don’t feel that Notre Dame complies with any part of this definition. It’s not a racist university and I hold out as examples Father Hesburgh standing hand-in-hand with Martin Luther King and Father Jenkins defying much negative sentiment to confer an honorary degree on Obama.

I’m not going to drag this out much more because I think it will water down Wilson’s point. Wilson probably would agree that Notre Dame is not a racist university, but I think his bigger point starts out with the point that there are certain “structural forces” that don’t reflect any explicit racial bias but continue to contribute to racial inequality. He says these subtle, structural forces need to be considered, along with explicit racism and certain cultural factors, when explaining racial inequality. Here is how Wilson starts to frame it:

Conservatives tend to emphasize cultural factors, while liberals pay more attention to structural conditions, with most of the attention devoted to racialist structural factors such as discrimination and segregation. I hope in this discussion, however, to encourage the development of a framework for understanding the formation and maintenance of racial inequality and racial group outcomes that integrates cultural factors with two types of structural forces: those that directly reflect explicit racial bias and those that do not.

And a little further on, he expands on this to set the table for his main point, which links structural issues and cultural issues to explain racial inequality today:

If social scientists are to effectively and comprehensively explain the experiences and social outcomes of inner-city residents to the larger public, they must consider not only how explicit racial structural forces directly contribute to inequality and concentrated poverty, but also how political actions and impersonal economic forces indirectly affect life in the inner city. Also important are the effects of national racial beliefs and cultural constraints that have emerged from years of racial isolation and chronic economic subordination.

This gets heavier as Wilson digs into the social science of it, but it never gets too scientific so I never lost focus. At times it reads like a dissertation rather than a book, but this is a good thing because it’s complicated stuff, so Wilson’s structured format, previews, and reviews  are helpful to keep it all straight. I hope I can do Wilson’s views justice; I apologize in advance for errors, omissions, and gross summarizing.

To reiterate, he says that racial inequality and the discussion thereof should focus on three things in varying degrees:

1. Explicit/direct structural forces (exclusionary laws, racial profiling, segregation, discriminatory practices)
2. Political/economic/impersonal structural forces (declining federal support for inner cities, globalization, transportation trends, shifts to the service economy, elimination of low-skilled labor in certain industries)
3. Cultural forces (as Wilson puts it, “shared outlooks and modes of behavior”)

Wilson explores these further by devoting a chapter to three specific areas where the debate about racial inequality is the hottest: “changes in the inner-city ghetto, the predicament of low-skilled black males, and the weakening of the black family.” He looks at each through the lens of all three forces and sites countless studies and papers, all with the goal of giving us a new framework to think about racial inequality.

What did I learn? What was most enlightening?

Well, I have a new appreciation for how racially segregated Chicago was, how it continues today, and how it will probably continue for a long time. Take for instance this item about how something as innocuous as an expressway can have long and lasting effects on racial inequality:

In any case, the freeways had a devastating impact on the neighborhoods of black Americans. These developments not only spurred relocation from the cities to the suburbs among better-off residents, but the freeways themselves “created barriers between the sections of the cities, walling off poor and minority neighborhoods from central business districts.”(4) For instance, a number of studies revealed how Richard J. Daley, the former mayor of Chicago, used the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 to route expressways through impoverished African American neighborhoods, resulting in even greater segregation and isolation. (5) A lasting legacy of that policy is the fourteen-lane Dan Ryan Expressway, which created a barrier between black and white neighborhoods. (6)

Stuff like this can’t be undone. They are undoing “the projects” (high-rise buildings clustered together to house lower income families) here in Chicago, which are another legacy of the first Mayor Daley, but the structural effects of them won’t be rectified for a long time.

Also, I have a new appreciation for Obama’s view on race. Wilson references Obama’s March 18, 2008 race speech with great reverence. Obama is clear in that speech about how important it is to keep addressing structural forces with investment, enforcement, and education. But Wilson especially likes the speech because of Obama’s melding of structural and cultural factors, Wilson says:

… Obama did not restrict his speech to addressing structural inequities; he also focused on problematic cultural and behavioral responses to these inequities, including a cycle of violence among black men and a “legacy of defeat” that has been passed on to future generations. And he urged those in the African American community to take full responsibility for their lives by demanding more from their fathers, and by spending more time with their children “reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”

It’s this all-encompassing frame that Wilson likes. We can’t fix one aspect of the problem and expect everything to be alright. We have to fix it all and we all have to pitch in.

And finally, this book ties in nicely with my recent exploration of politics, of the disparity between the haves and the have-nots in this country, and the political issues wrapped up in this growing disparity. I think I need to take a break from these heavy topics.

My stint  started with The Given Day, was supplemented by Conscience of a Liberal, vetted and tested a little by Liberty and Tyranny, and even put in a different light by Netherland. Now I need to step away from the books and just think because so many problems, solutions, and differing views are running through my head that I can’t get them organized. Many aspects of liberal vs conservative, Democrat vs Republican, construct vs interpretation, and Statist vs Federalist are all wrapped in the issue of income equality. My mostly quantitative, linear brain is having trouble assimilating.

So friends, when I start postulating out loud, just know that I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just trying to figure it all out.

Well, where does this leave me on the question of whether my university is racist or not, whether it’s losing its Catholic identity or not, or whether it even matters? I really don’t care, actually. When religion is introduced into politics, you can’t reach any common ground and probably can’t even sway the opinions of moderates. Some laypeople in the Catholic Church feel that if a one were to prepare a list of issues to be considered when deciding who to vote for, preserving life in the womb should be more important than achieving racial (and income) equality. Others in the church feel differently. I figure that at least half of Catholics rank at least one issue higher than preserving life in the womb (I think around 53% of Catholics voted for Obama).

The argument will go on for friggin’ ever. One thing is for sure, we all need to pay attention.