MindSpinner

There’s something keenly ironic about locking the story of Usha Narayane away for Times Select subscribers only. That’s because Usha’s story is about women finding the power to end abuse, rape, and murder in a slum in Nagpur, India, where nobody would have $50 for an online subscription, anyway. Seems to me that lots of the people who most need Usha for a heroine might just not be in the Times Select subscriber demographic. The story ends in gruesome violence, but, as far as I can see, the women of Nagpur had no one but themselves to protect them from a detestable predator. (A quick Google search reveals that Usha’s story has been around for some time, and I’m running across it here in Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed column only belatedly.)

Today I’m weighing crimes in my head - murder as the only recourse to justice (would I have participated? to save myself? to save my daughter?), copyright infringement…. Sigh.

After thinking about it all day, I’m posting Nicholas Kristof’s column here because Usha’s is a story that rightfully belongs to women everywhere, and, indeed, to everyone, regardless of gender.

In India, One Woman’s Stand Says ‘Enough’
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

NAGPUR, India

The central moral challenge we will face in this century will be to address gender inequality in the developing world. Here in India, for example, among children ages 1 to 5, girls are 50 percent more likely to die than boys. That means that every four minutes, a little girl here is discriminated against to death.

One reason for such injustice is that many women docilely accept it - even enforce it. But that may be changing, as I found in a slum here in the central Indian city of Nagpur.

For more than 15 years, the mud alleys of the slum were ruled by a local thug named Akku Yadav. A higher-caste man, he killed, raped and robbed in this community of Dalits - those at the bottom of the caste ladder - and the police paid no attention. One woman, according to people here, went to the police station to report that she had been gang-raped by Akku Yadav and his goons, and the police raped her.

Neighbors tell how Akku Yadav forced a man to dance naked in front of his teenage daughter. They say that he chopped one woman into pieces in front of her daughter, and that another woman burned herself to death after he and his men gang-raped her.

There was only one family that Akku Yadav’s gang didn’t torment - that of Madhukar and Alka Narayane - because from this squalor they sent all five of their children through college. In a neighborhood where many are illiterate and no one had ever gone to college, that was a heroic achievement, and it made gangsters wary about preying on them.

A daughter, Usha Narayane, now 27, studied hotel management and seemed destined to become a hotel manager. But one day in 2004 while she was on vacation back in the slum, Akku Yadav attacked the next-door neighbors. The gang warned Usha not to go to the police - and that’s when she went to the police.

Akku Yadav returned with 40 men and surrounded the Narayane shack. He waved a bottle of acid and threatened to disfigure Usha’s face, and to rape and kill her. She barricaded the door, shouted insults at him and telephoned the police, who didn’t immediately come.

Finally, Usha turned on the gas, grabbed a match and threatened to blow up everyone if the gang broke into the house. The gangsters backed off.

The neighbors, seeing somebody finally stand up to Akku Yadav, gathered in the street. Soon a mob burned down Akku Yadav’s house, and he turned himself over to the police for protection.

A bail hearing for him was set for Aug. 13, 2004, and word spread through the slum that he would be released. Hundreds of women marched from the slum to the courthouse. When Akku Yadav showed up, he spotted a woman he had raped and shouted that he would rape her again. She began beating him with her slipper.

Other women pulled out chili powder from their clothes and threw it in the faces of Akku Yadav and the police. As the police fled, scores of women pulled out knives and apparently took turns stabbing Akku Yadav and cutting off his penis. He ended up as mincemeat, and the courtroom walls are still spattered with blood.

The police arrested a handful of women, including Usha, for the murder, but she conveniently could prove that she was not at the courtroom that day. And then the hundreds of women in the slum jointly declared that they had all joined in the killing, on the theory that if they all claimed responsibility, no single person could be punished.

“We all did it,” affirms Rajashri Rangdale, a young mother. “We all take responsibility for what happened.”

“I’m proud of what we did,” agrees Jija More, a housewife. “We were all involved.”

As for Usha, she is out on bail, but the police harass her and her career as a hotel manager seems over. She is sure that other members of Akku Yadav’s gang will try to seek revenge by raping and killing her. But, undaunted, she is beginning a new life as a social activist, and she is now helping the slum dwellers make foods and clothing that they can sell together to raise their incomes.

I don’t want to condone a lynching. But in a land where police are utterly corrupt, and where so much misery arises from people passively accepting their lot, I’m proud to know Usha Narayane. She is a reminder of the difference that education makes, and I hope that she is a vision of the new Indian woman.

A couple of weeks ago, I prefaced this post with another (Scop talk - I), but between those introductory notes and this continuation, holiday travel intervened, along with the beginning of a new semester at school. That’s life, no?

My initial and limited foray into brain science has netted an understanding that we human beings are, among animals, uniquely storytellers. Our ability to construct elaborate beliefs and stories - of how things work, mean, and come to be - offered survival advantages to us over the course of human history in our families, tribes, ethnic groups, religious faiths, and nations. Evolutionists would say that the edge our mindspinning brains gave to members of our species led to the refinement of those capabilities. Creationists would say that our creator endowed us with these capacities - that we were made in God’s image. (Into that argument I am not headed. Why? Because at this point I’m interested in a different argument with compelling significance for all of us, whatever our belief systems.)

The nature of our relationship to others and to our environment has changed in essential ways because of globalization and because of the unfolding impact of human activity on the planet. Consequently, the stories we use to shape our perceptions of self, group, relationship, economics, government and the whole of reality must also adapt - otherwise the stories that served us on a smaller scale may doom us on a larger one.

There’s no end to the damage flawed stories and beliefs have done in the course of human history or can do in future on an ever larger scale. Certain powerful stories that have worked for some of us some of the time aren’t going to work for all of us for the rest of time. As a species we’ve got to take inventory, to think together, and to embrace stories that will sustain us. Or, simply put, we’ll reap the consequences of our inadequate perceptions and prove that we were not up to the challenge of living sustainably together on this earth.

This is an intimidating thesis, actually - just huge - and I am only one small chronically sleep-deprived person with too many other jobs and a thimbleful of spare time, so I haven’t a prayer of unfolding it the way it should be unfolded. The old, now unworkable stories pile up like a granite mountain, and I know I cannot move them or even erode them much.

I’ve just told myself a story about how things are, and that story shuts down possibility and comes close to bringing tears, so I take a deep breath and start over. I’ll write a few paragraphs about one thing and let it loose to do whatever work in the world it can do, because that is what each of us is given to do. It is not stewardship of a life to be passive and to cave in, to fail to say what needs to be said. I can steward a few paragraphs into being today, a few more next week, and so forth.

Almost three weeks ago I flew to DC. I don’t fly often, but I always ask for a window seat, and I look and look at the cities, the clouds and the land through the window, all the way up and all the way down. I see what I cannot see from the ground – how much is still forest, how much is city, how much is a patchwork of fields bounded by thin seams of darker green or threads of roadway. My thesis about our stories is big like that. I can’t garden the land from the plane. I can’t change the world with an idea too big for one person to voice effectively and authoritatively or to bring the world to hear. But I can come home and pull up the blackberry briar that sprouted in a crevice of the stone path, and I can write what asks to be said, one bit at time.

Last fall there was an afternoon when tornado warnings were predicted. After-school activities were cancelled, and students were allowed to pull out those cell phones we teachers are never supposed to see and use them to tell mom or dad, or in some cases, grandma, that there would be no ball practices or club meetings or academic competitions that afternoon. The students were abuzz, excited, apprehensive and totally unfocused on their assignment for last period. They chattered and playfully wrote their wills, and said, “We are preparing to die.” After all, a tornado had come through their town in 2004 while they were huddled in the basement hallway and smelly locker rooms. It tore up great trees, cleaved houses in two and decapitated rooftops; it ripped up the football field across the street, narrowly missing the school itself. Who was I to say their anxiety and nervous energy was unreasonable, given their experience?

Some students, the exceptions, diligently did their work. “What are you doing?” the writers of wills asked the doers of the assignment. “Don’t you know we could die today?”

I joked in return, “You are preparing to die, and they are preparing to live. This assignment is due tomorrow.”

“Yes, we are preparing to live!” chimed in the diligent, delighting in the retort.

Sure enough, we lived, and those who had prepared to die instead of preparing to live didn’t have their work the next day.

When I think about our beliefs and our stories, it occurs to me that we must as a species focus on business of preparing to live. Apocalyptic thinking tends to undermine that project, so the notion of impending apocalypse is the first story that’s got to adjust to the possibility of future and the desirability of making what future we have livable for ourselves, our children, and grandchildren.

According to a Newsweek poll, fifteen percent of American Christians believe Jesus will return in their lifetimes. (Thank you, Tim LaHaye. For an interesting read on LaHaye’s Left Behind series, see Joe Bageant .) My own son assures me, “The prophecies have been fulfilled; the end is soon.” Explanations follow, courtesy of a local Baptist church he attends with his father.

But anyone who knows anything of history knows that people have been believing that the end is at hand for a very long time. Jesus’ disciples interpreted the words of Jesus as meaning that he would return within their lifetimes. A Brief History of the Apocalypse offers a timeline of apocalyptic thinking sure to suggest that those of us who are sure we know what scripture says no one will know have a record of being wrong. And we are all still here. (I’ll speak within the Christian perspective here. No one who speaks outside Christianity is going to be readily heard within it.)

Let’s just suppose, for the sake of argument, that we who believe that end times are upon us are a little off in our calculations, and that Jesus doesn’t show for a hundred or two hundred or a thousand years. What then? What about the lives of our children and grandchildren on this planet?

I do not believe that preparing spiritually for the second coming of Christ need preclude preparing practically to make the world a sustainable and livable place together generation upon generation until Jesus shows up. Even a belief that Jesus may come back soon shouldn’t prevent or excuse Christians from taking care of a creation God pronounced good or facilitating peace on earth or taking care of the poor or the sick or simply trying to understand each other instead of branding each other infidels and getting more of God’s children, Christian and otherwise, killed in the process. In fact, preparing spiritually for the coming of the kingdom of God involves taking care of what God made and loves. When we do this, a measure of the kingdom of God arrives in our midst. It has no other way of finding meaningful expression in our world.

My word to those who believe end times are upon us is simply this - we will do best to prepare for the possibility of earthly tomorrows as well as the possibility of imminent Rapture. Else God may say to us, “Where is your homework? You haven’t prepared. I placed this creation in your hands, and what have you done?”

In snatches of spare time, I’ve started to read here and there about how our brains work. This afternoon, I took time to peruse “The proper study of mankind,” an overview of human evolutionary development by The Economist’s science editor, Geoffrey Carr (certain sections viewable only to subscribers).

There was much to fascinate.

Our brains are 6% smaller than those of Neanderthals, though we like to think modern human brains are simultaneously more complex - not that we have Neanderthal brains to study to confirm that, of course. I, for one, am guessing that Neanderthals had a lot to think about, just in order to survive from day to day. Plopping down on the couch in front of the tube or flat panel at the end of the day is not half so intellectually demanding as outwitting one’s prey and one’s predators, figuring out how to make tools out of natural materials, and learning how to manage in an environment without heat and air conditioning.

One question broached is simply the matter of why our brains got to be a lot bigger in proportion to our size than the brains of other animals. Researcher Terrence Deacon posits that the development of language enabled a complex culture which in turn required complex thought demanding ever more complex language, in a feedback loop.

Evolutionary social psychologist Geoffrey Miller posits that mental prowess attracts members of the opposite sex, that our brains are analogous to the male peacock’s gorgeous tail because good minds make us better mates endowed with survival advantages (these days, presumably jobs with good salaries). Thus, in our evolutionary past, bigger brains became a trait more likely to be passed on to offspring.

On the one hand, I find this a reductive explanation of the creative impulse and intellectual aspiration. I suspect that, were I the last human being on earth, I’d still write and create in order to count myself alive, though very sadly for lack of others to relate to. I’d have to reject “mate attraction” as the driving force behind the actualization of mental and creative potential.

Minds constitute one of a number of variables that factor into attraction. It seems clear to me that different people prioritize those variables differently. Some prize intellect and creativity, and some don’t. We look for those who unfurl the peacock tails we want to see, and who best see our own peacock tails of one kind or another. When there is an affinity between smart creative people, no doubt minds work doubly hard to make the connection as rich as possible. That’s true whether or not mating is at issue.

And that’s enough of that, because I’m tired of thinking of my mind as a batch of tail feathers.

One of research findings I appreciate most is the fact that human beings seemed to be hard-wired to collaborate just as surely as they are hard-wired to compete. They are riddled with altruism, and not just directed at their immediate relatives, as is the case with most animals excepting vampire bats, who are, as human beings can be, generous with others - until they feel they have been cheated. Like vampire bats, people have a sense of mutual fairness and object to rules of fairness being violated. Geoffrey Carr outlines the evidence:

Trust, and the detection and punishment of injustice, lie at the heart of human society. They are so important that people will actually harm their own short-term interests to punish those they regard as behaving unfairly. Another game, for example, involves two people dividing a sum of money ($100, say). One makes the division and the other accepts or rejects it. If it is rejected, neither player gets any money. On the face of it, even a 99:1 division should be accepted, since the second player will be one dollar better off. In practice, though, few people will accept less than a 70:30 split. They will prefer to punish the divider’s greed rather than take a small benefit themselves.

(”The concrete savannah“)

I’m giving that 70:30 split some thought. The limit of what we will accept in terms of unbalanced returns on investments, especially in relationships, clarifies much. It clarifies why relationships that once worked eventually cease working. It clarifies the work of continual mutuality that has to be done to keep relationships viable.

I go through the same doors, in and out, day after day. It almost seems sometimes as if I go through the same days, in and out, again and again, too.

But sometimes I arrive at days and doors and know that these days lived or those doors opened - or closed behind - will change everything forever. I can feel their fatefulness. Other times, a fateful day or a fateful door will slip by without premonition, recognizable as such only in retrospect. What I love best is tracing how one door leads to the next and the next after that; failure to go through any one would have lost to me all that followed out of consequence, design, or serendipity.

This New Year’s, I bought a ticket and flew on a plane into the east at dawn. I walked through a new door, and nothing is the same. If I look back through life’s labyrinth of possibility at the doors that led one to another, one of them was nothing more or less than the simple act of writing a first entry in this blog and then deciding that I would write another and another just because writing made me happy.