Ah to be young again ...

This email showed up in my mailbox:

We will be holding a MOLA (Meaning of Life Association - exploring the science/policy interface) meeting ...

and it was only when I saw the "science/policy interface" verbiage that I realized this was in earnest.

Mumbai and its micro-minorities

The Jews who were killed in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were not Indian citizens. They were in India to provide Jewish services to backpackers and visiting businessmen (Jews, like Hindus, do not proselytize).  But Mumbai is home to a small (4000 Jews in a city of 12 million), but influential Jewish community that claims:

to be descended from seven Jewish families who were shipwrecked on India's shore while fleeing persecution in the Galilee during the second century B.C. Over the centuries, they adopted Indian language, dress and cuisine.

The Jews in Mumbai are not the only small but influential religious minority in that city.  Parsis, followers of Zoroaster who had to flee Iran due to Muslim persecution, are probably better known.  Ratan Tata, the owner of the Taj Mahal hotel and chairman of the Tata group that recently bought Jaguar, is Parsi.

It's interesting that the world's great financial cities are often havens where groups marginalized elsewhere can thrive (think of London, Singapore or New York).  Or maybe it is, as Richard Florida argues, towns where marginalized groups can thrive are the ones that become megacities. Bombay will soon get past this short-term toll of lives, but more important for the long-term health of the city is that terrorist acts do not destroy its spirit of tolerance:

"This is the first time when a Jew has been targeted in India because he is a Jew," said Jonathon Solomon, a Mumbai lawyer and president of the Indian Jewish Federation. "The tradition of the last thousand years has been breached."

Preventing war

Responsibility for the Bombay attack was claimed initially by an unknown group called the "Deccan Mujahideen".  This is a pretty ridiculous cover story -- the Deccan plateau is inland and east of Bombay whereas the terrorists landed by sea from the west.  To remove all doubt, the terrorists spoke Punjabi (typical of east Pakistan) rather than Kannada which would be typical of the Deccan plateau. The sheer ridiculousness of the cover story is proof that the terrorists wanted it known that the attack emanated from Pakistan. 

Why would there be a terrorist attack on Bombay, in a manner sure to increase media exposure (last year's attack on the Indian parliament didn't garner a fifth of this coverage)? Why would the attacks appear so clearly orchestrated by terrorist groups financed by the Pakistani military?  Because the Pakistani military is afraid of losing power.  They need the low-intensity conflict with India going on perpetually; the thawing relationships are a threat to the survival of the military.

The Indian government is in a bind.  The reaction in India is similar now to the mood in the US after 9/11.  "Attack the terrorist training camps in Pakistan", the public screams.  Except that is sure to bring about full-scale war.  The Pakistani government may be unable to control its territory, but it is prickly about its sovereignty all the same.  School children in Pakistan put on dramas where they kill invading Indian infidels in rivers of blood.  The Pakistani public would want to go down with their nuclear weapons, taking the world down with them. The results would be catastrophic.

Bob Kagan has an idea worth pursuing:

Rather than simply begging the Indians to show restraint, a better option could be to internationalize the response. Have the international community declare that parts of Pakistan have become ungovernable and a menace to international security. Establish an international force to work with the Pakistanis to root out terrorist camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas. This would have the advantage of preventing a direct military confrontation between India and Pakistan. It might also save face for the Pakistani government, since the international community would be helping the central government reestablish its authority in areas where it has lost it. But whether or not Islamabad is happy, don't the international community and the United States, at the end of the day, have some obligation to demonstrate to the Indian people that we take attacks on them as seriously as we take attacks on ourselves?

Would such an action violate Pakistan's sovereignty? Yes, but nations should not be able to claim sovereign rights when they cannot control territory from which terrorist attacks are launched. If there is such a thing as a "responsibility to protect," which justifies international intervention to prevent humanitarian catastrophe either caused or allowed by a nation's government, there must also be a responsibility to protect one's neighbors from attacks from one's own territory, even when the attacks are carried out by "non-state actors."

In Pakistan's case, the continuing complicity of the military and intelligence services with terrorist groups pretty much shreds any claim to sovereign protection.

The exploded mailbox

I ended up talking to as many of my neighbors today as I did all of summer.

At 7.15pm, I got a phone call.  "Are you guys home?," the neighbor to our right asked.  "We are," I replied, "we're just in the back having dinner."  "Do you know what happened to your mailbox?," he asked.

"No ... what happened?"

"The mailbox looks like it's exploded," he said, "that's what it looks like."

"Maybe someone in a pickup truck hit it," I thought.  The wife said the mailbox had been fine when she came in (around 6pm).  I relayed that to our neighbor.

He replied that there didn't seem to be anything unusual at 6.30 when he'd left the house.  So between 6.30 and 7.15, someone had run over our mailbox.  I decided that it could wait until we'd had our dinner.  An exploded mailbox wasn't going anywhere.

A few minutes later, someone rang our doorbell.  This was another neighbor, maybe 20 years old.  I hadn't met her before. 

"Did you see your mailbox?," she asked with a cringe, "I'm awfully sorry."

"Was that you?," I asked.

"No, not me.  It was my mom actually.  My mom and my brother were in the car.  But my brother has to go to the hospital to get looked at."

"Is everyone ok?," I asked.

Apparently they were.  Because the brother showed up a few minutes later and introduced himself.  He was holding a pad to his neck but seemed alert and mobile.

"I was fiddling with the A/C and my mom looked down," he explained, "and she ran over the mailbox."

The two kids gave me their mom's address and phone number, promised to clean up the mess the next morning and said that they would be calling the insurance company. 

"Thanks for owning up to it," I told them, "I thought it was a hit-and-run.  Was it a pickup truck that your mom was driving?".  "No," said the daughter, "it was a brand-new Honda Accord."

The kids left.  I got my camera out and starting shooting pictures.  Another neighbor dropped by and asked what had happened.  I explained.  "Fiddling with her cell phone is more like it," he smirked, "I don't think it was the A/C that she was fiddling with."

Another neighbor walking her dog stopped to chat, inquired whether anyone was hurt and told me: "well, I hope your insurance company is nice to you."

"I hope that her insurance company is nice to me," I responded.  She chuckled and continued walking her dog.

Fifteen minutes later, the neighbor to our left knocked on the door. 

"Do you know who did it?," he asked.

"Yes, she hit it and left, but her kids were nice enough to come back and own up to it," I explained.

This neighbor backed up his car, shone a light on the scene and told me to take better pictures.  Then, we looked at the track of the car. 

"She was drunk and going way too fast," he said thoughtfully, "can you see how far she must have driven on the curb to hit the mailbox at that angle?  What if it had been a kid instead of just a mailbox?"

The mailbox had been hit sideways, not backed into as I initially thought.  And if it was a sedan and not a pickup truck, the impact must have to be substantial. 

"If I were you," he advised, "I would call the police and ask if I should file a report."

So, I called the police non-emergency number.  "Someone took out your mailbox?," asked the dispatcher nonchalantly, "do you want to file a vandalism complaint or do you know who it is?". Once she put it that way ... I explained that the person who hit the mailbox left the scene initially but that her family had come back and assured me that their insurance company would take care of it.  The dispatcher told me I could file a report tomorrow morning if it wasn't taken care of.

So, that's the story of our exploded mailbox.  As I said, one good thing that came out of all this is all the neighborliness.

The obedient spouse

Actually, I did go shopping on Black Friday.  With the kids.  As we came up to the counter to check out, I spied one of my colleagues and waved at him.

"You spend all your time at Hancock Fabrics, don't you?," he grinned.  His wife was ahead of him checking out, so he was probably doing the obedient-spouse thing. I was also being an obedient spouse, but the wife had simply sent me.  So, I had no proof. I had to nod and take it.

What the kids and I were doing was picking out fleece for blankets.  The kids got to each pick out two designs. My job was to make sure that they didn't overly clash.  Then, on Sunday, the wife, S1 and I made the two blankets.  S2, as is her wont, refused to pitch in.  Making the blankets was quite simple: lay out the pieces one over the other, cut fringes all around and tie them together.  This was the result:

The brown-yellow blanket is S1's -- it has an African motif on one side and an Indian motif on the other.  Wonder where S1 gets his tastes.  The pink/blue one is S2's.  Bugs, butterflies and clouds. Don't know where she gets her tastes from either. 

The two layers of fleece really make it nice and warm.  I may have to sneak over to Hancock's to buy me two more pieces of fleece.  A throw to huddle under when reading a book or watching TV ... make me warm just thinking about it!

And talking of watching TV,  a bunch of people came over on Saturday.  I made shrimp creole;  D., our guest, made ground turkey keema, grammy brought pecan pie and S1 made apple crisp. And we watched the OU-OSU game.  

It was a good game to watch with a bunch of screaming OU fans -- it didn't open up until the fourth quarter, but OU was ahead for most of the game. Unfortunately, we had to wait 12 more hours to find out if OU really did win -- the Big 12's rules for determining the winner of the division must have been designed by a Talmudic scholar. 

Now that we know that watching the game at our home doesn't jinx OU, maybe we can do the Big 12 party there too. Subject to spousal veto, of course.

Oklahoma as metaphor

Ask someone (even some one in this state) about cultural mentions of Oklahoma and if you are lucky enough to get three answers, you may get:

1. Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath
2. Rogers and Hammerstein's musical Oklahoma!
3. Woody Guthrie's This Land is My Land

But it takes an Estonian to point out that Kafka used Oklahoma as a metaphor for America. And to think that when I went to Estonia, all I did was snark ... (and as the comment on my post implies, I was just being ignorant when I wrote it).

A Black Friday visit to Fred Jones

Over Thanksgiving weekend, good friends of ours visited from Dallas.  He went to school at OU over a decade ago, so the Fred Jones Museum of Art (FJMA) was all new to him.   S1 loves fjma, so he tagged along too.  Some friends of ours (the kids call them grammy and granddad) also met us at the museum.  What else is there to do the day after Thanksgiving?

The new galleries look architecturally wierd, but they work surprisingly well.  Inside, you get an intimate view of an extraordinary collection of paintings:

The exhibit of Clara Weitzenhoffer's French impressionist paintings set in a replica of her Oklahoma City home is easily the most unique thing about the museum. How many of us would get invited to the home of a wealthy, private collector? This is the closest that we can get (that's a Monet right above the backgammon table):

S1 really got a kick when we explained what it was that Native American woman was holding. I explained what a paddle was used for, but he didn't quite believe me. He went to grammy to confirm it, and she had to own up to being old enough that it was used quite frequently in Western Oklahoma when she was a kid.  Not on her, she was careful to explain. Um-hum.

A Western painting of Mexican men standing outside a home reminded S1 of Indian temples.  It's mostly the paint work on the steps:

And his new favorite painting at the museum is one of mares in a circle.  Their rider are taking part in a prayer:

S1's favorite statue on campus is still the one on the grounds of the museum. It's of a farmhand relaxing in an open field:
It barely beats out the ones of the football players in Heisman park.