How green was my Facebook

I read the book ‘How green was my valley’ three times. The first time, I was in school in Santiniketan. I was mesmerized by the warm hearted and bittersweet story about a Welsh coal mining village of the 1930s by Richard Llewellyn. I was not as familiar with English then. I did my schooling in my mother tongue. And yet, I liked that book a lot because it had made me think. I remember talking about it with my elder sister, who had not read it at the time. After I spoke about it, she too read it. I remember that I was impressed by the Welsh names in that book.

How green was my valley – the movie

I remember how the main character of the book, Huw, would go to his sister in law Bronwen for advise. He loved the gentle character of Bronwen. I used to play around with that name, rolling it in my tongue and imagining how the Welsh  pronounced that name, so it would sound feminine instead of masculine. She vaguely even reminded me of the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore, and his sister-in-law Kadambari devi. I was just catching up those days, about the early years of Rabi, in JoraSanko, and often drew parallels between sets of information that floated my way. So, I tried drawing a comparison, however absurd it might seem, between Bronwen of the novel, from a welsh coal mining village, and the real life character of Kadambari Devi of Jorasanko, Kolkata, before she committed suicide.

How green was my valley – the book

Apart from the Welsh names, I got a glimpse of the now vanished life and times in a coal mining village in the western hemisphere. As I grew up, I came to associate that atmosphere in rotation with other regions of the world. It related to the mining towns in Soviet Russia and then to China and on to Africa, particularly southern Africa. And, in the name of progress, a version of it has come to India, with typical Indian versions of the political, social and ecological nastiness.
But, do we have a writer of the same caliber as Richard Llewelyn – someone that can write a book that can be the ‘How green was my valley’ equivalent in India?

I remember reading ‘Gone with the wind’ in school, with its social upheaval relating to a civil war and end of slavery in the US, and immediately connecting it with “Saheb Bibi Golam’ of the vanishing days of Zamindary in eastern India, on the last decade of the 19th century. The Indian story lacked the civil war and the social upheaval. The transition did not perhaps affect the common man too much. But the lazy and oppulent, wasteful life of the fading Zamindars reminded me somehow, with the fast vanishing life of the vain and pompous Southern Plantation owners of the American south. In India, the old lifestyle of people being born into wealth because they agreed to tax the residents for the benefit of the Raja, the Nawab or the British, were soon to disappear. They were to be replaced by a new breed to people that got license to do business by greasing the right palms. Ultimately, the coin was replacing the sword. But then, the coin had always employed the sword.

Saheb Bibi Golam – by Bimal Mitra

But – I did not find a book comparable to ‘How green was my valley’ with regard to the life and times of miners in India and their families, and expanding that, the general degradation of the land that such mining invariably involved. Even Llewellyn’s book did not touch that issue. Ecological degradation of the landscape was not in people’s radar in the 1930s. It should have been. Had they been conscious about it then, we might not be in the state we are in now. But, I am digressing.

My time in Facebook is going to taper down. The first thing that came to mind while writing about it – was How green was my Facebook. Somehow, I subconsciously connected  my departure from Facebook with the main character’s departure from his mining village in that book I read first in my childhood days. And just like the valley, Facebook turned out to be full of fond memories as well as wasteful and sad. That similarity resulted in me rambling for a few pages about that book, about Welsh names, and about mining. And now, I have finally arrived at the root – Facebook and the fact that I need to move on.
Facebook had been a wonderful place when I first got used to it. It was novel, it was like a virtual Kalor Dokan, or a virtual tea stall. Folks from different parts of the world would sit down and yap a little, exchange views and even show off a bit. Every one has a laugh, and then we go home to deal with real life.
And what is real life ?

I have pondered that question, but have not found a reasonable definition. Some would think my real life should be the time spent in the working hours of weekdays, when I am an engineer working for my employer. But I don’t think of that as my real life at all.
Some might consider the time they spend at home with their family as real life. I am tempted to agree with them, but am not sure.
To some, real life is the weekends when they can go and do things that they really love to – such as skiing, or watching soccer, or playing badminton, or, for me, wandering about the foothills of mountains nearby, just watching the scenery, or focusing on birds and clicking their pictures. I just realized I take approximately five hundred times more pictures of landscapes, birds and animals, than I do of humans. This has been the case ever since I got my first good camera, thirty years ago.

So, what is real life? Is it about humans, or birds, or mountains and rivers, or what ?
Whatever it is – it is not Facebook. But, for a long time, it provided an interesting parallel. Man is after all, a social animal Thats what sets us apart. We socialize, we communicate, we exchange views – because we are human.

It was nice to get back in touch with long lost acquaintances. Those were the heady days. At the back of my mind, there was also the wish that we needed to do something with our spare time that related to some form of community work – to give back to the system from which we have taken so much. This ‘system’ could be the school we studied in, the region or the people that we develop an attachment for, or the neighborhood where we live, the wider world, the nature, wildlife – whatever we feel obligated to for making us what we are. Its a token of appreciation and an effort to see that the ‘system’ will survive and thrive after we ourselves are gone. Humans developed not only communication skills, but also the notion of altruism. No?

It came from the general and fundamental understanding that systems need support, and the best support is one that comes from bottom up, rather than top down from the Government or politicians. It may be a wrong perception – but that was my perception and it stayed with me over the years.

Anyhow, Facebook, along with bulletin boards, blogs and such, became also an avenue to see if we could do something to support the vision of Tagore. Subconsciously, FB became a vehicle of sorts. But that was then, and I was more hopeful than wise.
It also became a vehicle of creative outlet. I doubt I would have penned as many cranky verses, “ছড়া”, as I eventually wrote, had it not been for Facebook. But, that was then, too.
Somewhere down the line, Facebook became just a thing one gets used to, and perhaps a bit hooked too as well – like a cup of coffee in the morning. It gets addictive.
We made many good friends through FB. But, along with that, we also accumulated junk. We saw more junk, we processed more junk, and we created more junk. By junk, I mean instantaneous flash in the pan that lasts a day, two days, or a week, but after that becomes part of the rising tide of background noise. This background tide of noise can, eventually, become deafening. I needed to get away, and look at it from another perspective. I needed to turn the volume down. I needed social ear plugs.

I had too many acquaintances on Facebook – way more than my brain or my time could reasonably deal with on a personal one to one level. So the question came, do I need the notion of having so many friends that I shall perhaps never exchange anything personal with? Do I need five or six people to like what I write so much, that I must advertise my thoughts and deeds to hundreds of people?
Our past is a great thing to remember. But there is one thing about the past – it is in the past. Not all things from the past will survive. I shall always have close and dear ones from the past – but, I should not need five hundred silent friends on Facebook just to keep in touch with a half dozen. There surely should be a better way.

Facebook is less green today. It is turning brown at the edges. Its details are beginning to fade. Also, as I get older, I find this platform more for the youngsters that have the time in their hand, and the interest in small items of their daily life. For them, it is perhaps the essence of catching up with the community. For me, it increasingly looks like a barrage of trivia that I do not want to know.

But, I cannot leave Facebook completely, just like Richard Llewellyn the writer could not quite leave his Welsh homeland, even as the main character prepared to leave that land for good.
Facebook, like the google forum on Santiniketan, like the “Santiniketaner Khata” blog I used to run, or the Uttarayan bulletin board, just like the podcast – they will remain fond memories and we shall retain contact with it, albeit from a distance. Distance is not bad per se. It shows us perspective. Distance is three dimensional.

I am not leaving it completely also because there are folks on this platform that I value, and who I would like to continue interacting with in future.

Somnath Mukherjee – for his sheer dedication and selflessness in community service towards the downtrodden Indians, and for being such an inspirational person.
Madhusree Mukherjee – for reminding me that taking up science as a profession should not make one uncaring about civic society and ecology.
Felix Padel – for reminding me that even trained economists can be caring ecologists.
Tathagata Sengupta – for being a smaller version of Somnath and growing up to equal him.

Edward Lee Durgan – for joining up with us for “Free Binayak Sen” March, after listening to me just for a half hour about Sen, and for his world view and firm commitment to principles that are so rare to find these days.

Ashley Zarbatany of Social Justice Group of the University of British Columbia – the second person that joined up on the Free Binayak Sen March in Vancvouer, who took the mike and spoke to the crowd. Although I have not had much interaction with her, I have watched her involvement with more issues of social justice. Folks like her help keep my faith in humanity alive.

Susan Bibbs of downtown Vancouver. She showed me what it meant to be a bleeding heart liberal of British Columbia – ha ha.

Ashie Hirji, the Ismaili rebel that read the Veda and practiced yoga, the entrepreneur, feminist, social reformer, secular and whacky, of downtown Vancouver of the past  and of Europe of present – for just being herself.

Subin Das – because I was once with him in college, because he know and spent time with my father when I was half a world away, and because of his perception of the world.

Pradip Malhotra – as the only person I know and spoke with on phone while he spent months on the Antarctic, not to mention being a great guy.

Lokendranath Roychowdhury – for being so intelligent, articulate and observant.
Chira, Barsan, Sujoy, Sandeep and others who, like Madhusree, live in the west, are from cutting edge Science and yet do such a wonderful job of maintaining social awareness, and compassion for the world. You may not know it, but you all have influenced my views on the balance between technological progression and regression, and the balancing acts between new versus old and good versus bad. I hope to find some of you in google + too.

Bhaiya, Kukul, Tukul, Moni and so many others – for being my relatives and friends – who I shared my past with, and hope to share part of my future with too.
Tapas da, Tukul, Piyali – the trio that, along with me, formed at one time the quadrangle of Santiniketan ex-students that existed on conference calls, on Facebook, on Uttarayan, and physically in Santiniketan as well as even here in Canada when some of them would come to visit. I shall always remember the great time we had, speaking with each other and rattling off. I even have recordings of most of it.

Then there are my many friends from Santiniketan – that I share a great memory with.
Ravi Dwivedi – because of the size of the lens on his avatar – ha ha.

And then there is Debal Deb, one of the few that stand tall in my view for wanting to buck the trend of globalized and corporatist food industry where indigenous strains of food are to be destroyed and replaced by genetically modified and patented food that will feed those that can afford to pay, and same time enrich the patent holder, and where the hungry will no more have the choice in selecting what kind of food he likes to eat. He, Vandana Shiva and others like them that defy the corporate Goliath and their cohorts in the Governments and decide to preserve indigenous seeds when no one else will – so a small slice of our biodiversity may still survive the onslaught of “economic progress”. But, he is moving out of Facebook and on to google+. So he did not really deserve a mention here. But then, I am a human and not a computer. I make mistakes.

All my local friends from Greater Vancouver area.
And many many others that I came across.
My thanks to you all .. You will see me here, but not that often.

I shall be more present in google+ as a social network site. Its easier for me to find folks and events that I like to keep track of. But even there, my presence may not be high. Any of you that have a gmail account can find me there. I am not even sure if it requires a gmail address. Anyhow, mine is tony.mitra@gmail.com

Other than that, any important message that is just for me – pls send an email. I tend to ignore mass emails since there are so many that come my way. An interesting statistics of the quality of our communication against quantity – out of 100 emails in my inbox, usually there are only two that are directly addressed to me by someone I know. The rest – are just floating debris.

Those that have an interest in catching up on my random thoughts and musings and creative writings, – well, there used to be bulletin boards, multiple blogs as well as podcasts, each carrying volumes of stuff written and talked over the past so many years. But I am winding them all down.

I shall only concentrate on one site, and write only what pleases me, irrespective of if it pleases readers. I do not aim to make money out of it and so I do not need to follow convention and formula. You can find that in www.tonu.org.

And so, here I am, starting with how I first read the book ‘How green was my valley’ and ending here, on a blog, writing how green my Facebook was.

Be good, everyone.

It was nice.

Living in a ten percent world

News should be a lot easier to get today from mass communication, multiple channels on the TV and endless sources on the internet. Right? Wrong.
It has never been more difficult.
TV is the last place I can find meaningful news these days. News channels are not exactly news channels – they are corporate owned TV channels designed to get a generation of potential couch potatoes hooked to it so the channel gets higher ratings, and therefore, higher revenue through advertisements of insignificant junk. The economic driving force – the prime mover – is junk goods that the industry aims to dump on the drugged public. That is what drives most channels including the news channels. They do not search out news that should be relevant for humans, or the planet. They manufacture news when needed, only to fuel “hot topics” of useless trivia.

The selfish gene – by Richard Dawkins

I stopped watching TV a long time ago. A movie, of whichever country, could be somewhat better. It does not pretend to give you news and it does not contain the irritating insertion of unwanted advertisements, and it provides a make belief feel good story.

But that is only for entertainment and not for acquiring news. Why do I need news in the first place? I need it because, at least to me, it feels important to be aware of what is going on around me in this universe. I feel connected when I can relate to the events that happens around, which may affect not just my life, but even the life of other humans, other vertebrates, other multi-cellular organisms, or the landscape or the biosphere. I am part of the whole. Therefore, I wish to know about the whole.

So, if one does not watch TV any more, what then?
Newspapers ? Forget it.
The days of independent newspapers are over. All the major papers across the nation and across the continents are owned by a handful of corporations. News through the newspaper is centrally controlled by profit generating market oriented thinking. News is not doled out to educate the reader. It is a commodity sold to make profit. If the news sells, it is printable. If it does not sell, it is not news.

Therefore, in Canada, the disenfranchisement of the African bushman tribe, and their decline, starvation and possible extinction is not a salable news. But, how fat an average American junk food eating woman is, is a salable news.

Or, how Israel is being threatened by Iranian designs of possibly wanting to develop a nuclear deterrent of their own, and therefore why Iran is asking to be bombed – is salable news.

Why Canadians continue to go to Mexico for vacation, while there is so much of violence and illegal drug dealing, is salable news.

Try to find out an analysis of the plight of the blackfeet Indians straddling USA and Canada, or the rate at which first nation young women are being lured into substance abuse – you will have a hard time finding this news on local papers. More importantly, you will not find average Canadians getting excited and raising this topic to a major national level debate. A first nation teenage mother selling its baby in order to buy the next round of drug is not popular news. Therefore, this news does not sell. Therefore, it is absent from newspapers.

Take the current crop of news on the mainstream media. The list may go like this:

More hiring in USA but unemployed rate remains unchanged. This is typical junk news and irrelevant. There is no economic recovery. The root cause of the economic meltdown is never discussed seriously. Therefore, what constitutes a meaningful step towards correcting the economic downturn is left vague. And then this kind of snippet news is fed like daily snacks to a group of fish in an aquarium.
A to Z guide to March madness – all about college basketball. Hardly an earth shattering news – but the news outlet decides to call it March madness

A documentary detailing the brutality of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has gone viral on social media (independent or alternative news circles). It has 50 million hits in a few days. It has increased groundswell of public awareness and possible pressure for Government involvement in his capture. A month ago, nobody knew of Joseph Kony. Today, he may be among the most wanted man. This is a good example of news coming to mainstream through the back door – after everybody already knows about it and after it has already become a major public debate.

Europe welcomes huge Greek debt deal – another piece of junk news that does not tackle root issues, and only offers bogus surface views.

High profile attorney calls for prosecution of Rush Limbaugh – another example of junk news.

Jennifer Aniston wears leather leggings for Joe Leno – huh ?

So, where does one go?

Clearly, the choices, at the moment, seem to be what is known as alternate sources. Some call it counter-current. I suppose it means counter to the current trend.
Unfortunately, there may not be a single source that covers relevant topics of all kinds from all corners. One needs to keep track of a number of sources – web sites that cater to single items – for example the plight of some indigenous people somewhere, or one organization engaged in one social activity at one location.
There may be a million such small sources. They are not even listed properly in one location and circulated widely. One may never even know of the existence of one such source tucked away somewhere.
One way to describe the current state of affairs may be – information overload.
Our senses are dulled by repeated bombardment of junk news from all directions. The brain feels stuffed by it. We feel sated.  Our appetite for searching out new news is therefore kept perpetually at a reduced level. We are living not just on junk food, but also on junk news.

Geology of British Columbia

If a person is still desirous of finding independent real news, one can of course search through alternate channels, such as google search. Unfortunately, even that might be filtering some of the news out, due to pressure from one authority or another. Recently, even the Government of India summoned google and Facebook for example, to demand that they filter out what the Government perceives as undue criticism of its conduct. The Government probably calls them unfair and derogatory remarks by individuals. You might call them free speech. Add to all this the fact that ‘terrorism’ looms large in our collective psyche, thanks to incessant harping of this issue over the last decade, as if man only invented terrorism in the year 2002 and before that, only honey and milk was falling from the skyBut, going back to the topic – where can you search out proper news? There may not be any easy solution any more. But there are alternatives.
One could begin to search out like minded folks as a start, and try to hang out with them, in real life, as well as virtually. They might lead you to the water. There are hangouts around, and most are open to public. Some are simply blogs which you can read and comment on. Some are hangouts you create and invite like minded folks to join in. Then there are NGOs, or non-Government organizations that are engaged in good work.
I picked up Vandana Shiva’s case that way, and ended up speaking with her once on her work. I came to know Association of India’s Development that way. I came to know of Madhusree Mukherjee because her book on Churchill was available as an audio book. I spoke with her, and through her, I learned about Debal Deb and Felix Padel.
I searched out themes and subjects within google plus and begin to follow interesting people that post there on say, anthropology, climate change, or sustainability. Sometimes I comment on some of their posts. Sometimes, they add me to their circle. Gradually, you create an ambience around with content of your own choice. You create a newsfield that filters out junk and lets in the type of information you consider worthwhile.

Genome – by Matt Ridley

So, what are the results, in my particular lifeWell, on a scale of one to hundred, if I have a hundred persons in my virtual world as friends, I still have ninety that are acquaintances from personal contact. They include people I know from childhood or met up somewhere and stuck a friendship at that time. They include relatives. They moved from my real world, to my virtual one.
But this ninety percent do not supply me with news or activity that so attracts me. They do not really share my interest, nor my world view. This is where the remaining ten percent comes in.
In a way, my world of news could still be awash with people that do not stimulus to my crave for information. They are there to anchor me to my physical past and to send personal tidbits time to time – like news about a relative getting married.
It is the rest ten percent that provide the chemistry and the wavelength in the information that quenches my virtual thirst. As to inspiration, this ten percent is also a source, but not the only source. There are more sources of inspiration than just people on my social network. Writers that wrote books that enlighten and inspire me are one. People that speak on U tube or podcast, or  write blogs, or articles on magazines, and still others. People I might meet by chance somewhere who may not be well known, but whose perception, observation or comments profoundly affect me – are the random sources.
So, in a way, I live among the 90 but search out the 10. It is almost like what Tagore wrote a century ago – সব ঠাঁই মোর ঘর আছে আমি সেই ঘর মরি খুঁজিয়া।
But wait – I did mention eBooks, audio books and the Gutenberg project, did I not? Electronic publishing, bot on written format and spoken one, had exploded on us. Without it, I doubt I would have had the time to read, for example, Madhusree Mukherjee’s book on Churchill’s action and inaction during the Bengal famine of 1943. I would not have been able to reread the extensive writings of Charles Darwin on evolution of the animal kingdom and about the descent of man. I would have left Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Emil Zola, Mark Twain and a lot of others alone simply because I did not have the time.
With audio books, I found something constructive to engage in while driving to work and driving back home, five times a week. Turnover of book I read ( or listened to) every month increased dramatically. And since I was not particularly fond of fiction, my percentage of non-fiction reading shot up. These books, to me, were pure knowledge – or news at a different level.
Take the Indo-Aryan controversy. A very fat recent publication, covering both sides of the argument that Aryan people might not have invaded India four or five thousand years ago but instead might have been of indigenous stock. Covering more than a dozen world renowned experts on the topic, both for and against the Aryan invasion theory, both Indian born and non-Indian – is an exhaustive document meant for the scholars and professionals on the subject, but also for serious amateurs. I have an eBook version of it that takes no space other than my iPad, which also holds a hundred other such books. It is only about 8mm thick, or one third of an inch thick. It helps me refer to specific chapters and articles to it at almost any time, and it includes all the photographs, sketches and other tabulated data, apart form textual matter. I might not have been able to refer to it so often and so easily, had I not the eBook version along with the printed one.
My interest in human genome was perhaps first stoked by George Gamow and Isaac Asimov. But my reading of the book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins had a profound effect on my understanding of where I came from. It, along with further interaction with people involved on the subject resulted in me sending my tissue samples to an US Genetic lab for analysis of my own genes to trace paternal and maternal ancestry, which in turn further reshaped by idea of where I came from and how.
More recent audio books on the human genome, covering chapter by chapter explanation of each of the 23 pairs of chromosomes has enriched my understanding of the living blueprint of not just ourselves, but the entire history of the evolving design, from the simplest to the most complex, contained within ourselves.
Online publishing of books through electronic media has changed so much in the last decade that I am even reading a book circulated free of charge about how to publish your own book online without much of a cost and have the option of a potential reader simply buying the eBook by downloading it, or to have a print-on-demand function where the store will only print a book when order for same is received. The guide book that explains all this, in 143 pages – is free of charge. I only read it at lunch breaks in office, and have covered the first 18 pages of it.
I am also reading about the 10,000 year explosion, a book that explains how the advent of civilization and its complexity has reportedly accelerated the genetic code building in humans in the past 10,000 years. How blue eyes, or lactose tolerance, are both a very very recent development in humans, and how that might have come around.

10,000 year explosion, by Cochran & Harpending

Since I got interested in the genetics of the living and the extinct world, I started reading another eBook named The Molecule Hunt – Archaeology and the search for ancient DNA. On my iPad, it is a 723 page document and I am now on page 298.
Take the book on British Columbian Geology. It taught me why Burgess Shale is on top of a mountain in British Columbia and yet provides the worlds best fossil bed for the earliest of life forms that happened in shallow tropical seas at the equator in the Cambrian period, more than 500 million years ago.
All this information, to me, is variations of news. To me news is description of a combination of events that happen at the present and events that happened in the past, providing a connection and a trend. It proves the link between now and then. Projected properly, in could try to predict what might happen in the future.
So, my ten percent world is not quite empty, nor is it drab and uninteresting. It has texture, shape and colors. It is a kaleidoscope that covers the length and breadth of my interests and concerns. It keeps my brain ticking away. As a result of this ten percent, my outlook to life is forever shifting and turning and fine tuning itself. It connects me with the rest of the whole.

It balances out my other 90 percent.

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