It begins before the city wakes up. At 4:47 AM, and I’m already lacing my shoes in the dark corner of the room. From here, the kettles glow is the only warmth. The streets outside are in the colour of old photographs — amber and grey. When I push open the door, the hush silence greets me with the way truth always does, without ceremony, without apology.
The streets around the beach are empty except for stray dogs, and the occasional tea vendor preparing his first mix of tea for the day. The air carries a sense of salt, and the sky above the ocean looks like an extremely carefully unfinished painting.
I begin my run the way I always do, slowly.
To run at these hours every day has become more of a private ritual. The world has not yet started asking for anything. Messages have not arrived, notifications are empty, and no one expects you to be anyone yet.
It is on these runs that the strange things happen, not strange as in unusual, but strange as in true.
For a brief stretch of time, you are simply a human body moving through space in a physical form. On mornings like this, I often look up to the sky and sometimes, something stranger happens. The stars appear closer than usual. Not physically closer, but perpetually, like distant observers leaning slightly forward, curious about what a single human like me might be doing running along a shoreline of a small rotating planet.
I imagine them watching me, not judging but just observing. The way we observe ants building a colony on the edge of a pavement.
There are roughly eight billion humans alive on Earth today. Each of us, convinced secretly that our lives matter in ways the universe must somehow acknowledge. Yet our species is only one among roughly ten million species to exist on Earth. From the view of a galaxy, we can assume that our home is just a small planet orbiting an ordinary star inside the Milky Way, which could contain around a hundred billion planets. Our galaxy is only one among approximately two trillion galaxies scattered across the observable universe.
Sometimes while running, I try to hold all of this in my mind at once, and when I do something peculiar happens. My problems shrink so quickly that they almost disappear.
Deadlines lose their urgency, career anxieties dissolve into footprints on the wet sand. Even ambition, the most powerful and core engine of the growing human life, suddenly feels like a small flame flickering in an unimaginably large room. Through my own eyes, I am the protagonist of a vast and sophisticated story. When I run, it feels as though the city recreates itself around my movement. My life as I experience it from inside is the whole universe.
From the perspective of nature, the calculation is clear — we are insignificant. Each of our lifetimes is roughly eighty years, which is barely one-thousandth of the time humanity has existed. Humanity itself occupies only about one-twenty thousandth of Earth’s history. The universe did not design itself around our arrival. And despite all of this, we wake up each morning with the strongest conviction that we must do something extraordinary with our lives.
Perhaps, human significance works the same way, one life alone may barely record the size of a rich cosmic history. One person writes a poem, another discovers a mathematical principle, and another teaches a child how to ask better questions. And yet another simply shows the value of kindness in a moment when cruelty would have been easier.
Each act is small, yet individually they look like waves dissolving into the sand one after the other. Because, across generations these small acts compounded into something larger. Our very civilisation itself is nothing more than a tiny speck in the ocean of time.
From kings to democracies, cars, airplanes, bulb, technology, computer, mobile, and now, AI — none of these appeared suddenly. They emerged slowly, through billions of lives adding to their tiny additions to our human existence. When viewed from far away, our universe doesn’t seem indifferent to this process. It almost appears curious about it as we are.
Halfway through my runs the horizon on my right begins to glow, the sun starts to rise slowly. The thing about sunrise is that it doesn’t appear all at once. To me, I see the sun negotiating with the darkness. At first, the sun didn’t brighten all at once. It’s ages into light like a slow burning ember. Then, the ocean begins to reflect the light like a sheet of moving glass. The universe rarely moves in spectacle. It is built in the dark silence while the particles lean into one another, matter learning structures, atoms organising into life, life learning to think, and thoughts becoming curiosity.
And curiosity, quietly yet stubbornly, pushes the boundaries of what existence understands of itself.
By the time my run ends, the city begins to wake up. Motorbikes hum along the road. Fishermen return to the docks with their captures. Old men on the corner of the road sit on benches while turning the pages of their newspaper and sipping their morning coffee. It feels like the universe has resumed its rhythm. By the end of my run, I realise that no star has acknowledged, or no galaxy shift has taken place because of anything I did this morning. And yet oddly enough, this realisation felt comforting rather than depressing. Because if no single life is of cosmic importance, then the weight of greatness fades.
What remains is truly simpler: to remain your tiny self ; to write a thought that might travel further than our existence; to raise a child who will see the world more clearly than we do, and to ask questions that makes the universe slightly more aware of itself.
In the eyes of nature, we may be unimaginably small. But perhaps, evolution has always worked this way — not through grand singular gestures, but through the billions of tiny lives, each briefly conscious, adding to their quiet momentum to the long unfolding story of our universe. And somewhere far beyond today’s morning sky, the stars might still be watching us.
Not because any of us matters individually, but because all of us together just might.
Sai Abhinay Penna is a professional cricketeer, investment banker and writer based out of Chennai.
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Like many people, I have complicated feelings about AI. On a recent trip to the United States, my daughter, who is deaf and has never learned English, was able to keep up with dinner table conversations with the help of an app which transcribed and translated spoken words, almost in real time. However, as one who teaches English as a foreign language, I am dismayed by the extent to which students outsource their learning.
As a writer, I was both flattered to find that my writing had been used to train Large Language Models, and angry that it had been done without my consent. Meanwhile, just the other day I enjoyed a movie featuring a computer-generated octopus, but I also worry that moviemakers will substitute human actors with AI ones. Apparently, this is already happening in China and other places.
I am also alarmed by how often my husband consults ChatGPT in his decision-making. For example, we recently decided to purchase new curtains for our living/dining room. Previously, the three windows in question had been hung with floral curtains in coordinating but different patterns. How nice it would be to finally have matching curtains on all three windows! We went curtain-shopping and fell for a beautiful set of drapes with deep crimson roses that would go well with our deep red cabinets. We didn’t buy them right away, however.
In the interim, my husband asked ChatGPT what colour curtains would go best with our décor. “Greige,” came the reply. A neutral colour, such as a cross between gray and beige, would go with everything. We would easily tire of a busy print, and loud colors would overwhelm.
We went curtain-shopping again. This time, we considered more subdued designs. I still thought that a floral print would be nice, but I was willing to go in for a change. We wound up selecting curtains in an elegant gray ombre. They are fine, but not quite as cheerful as the ones we had before.
Next, my husband and I began painting the cement wall that separated our lot from the neighbour’s. Surprisingly, he agreed to a mint green. It reminded me of the lovely pastel houses on Rainbow Row in Charleston, South Carolina, or San Francisco, California. A few houses down, some other neighbours had painted their house yellow. I supported this trend.
When we had finished the wall, my husband said that he was going to paint the gate. “What colour do you think would be best?” he asked.
“How about blue?” Sky blue would be uplifting. A darker blue would be a nod to the indigo for which our town was named.
My husband went to ChatGPT for confirmation. “He says that we should paint it greige.”
I rolled my eyes. First of all, it was not a “he,” not a sentient being. Secondly, it was becoming clear that if we always relied on AI’s advice, the whole world would soon be bland and inoffensive – in other words, greige.
This time, I refused to go along with the verdict. My husband asked again, apparently with different wording. He read the reply out loud to me: “Your wife is not wrong…”
Another thing about AI is that it aims to please.
Ultimately, my husband painted the gate blue.
From Public Domain
Suzanne Kamatawas born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.
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Pongal Pot. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan
On the 15th of January 2026, while much of the modern world was busy checking notifications, updating calendars, and worrying about quarterly outcomes, traditional Tamil households across the globe were doing something far more radical, watching milk boil. “Pongal”, the harvest festival, is one of those ancient cultural practices that stubbornly refuses to modernise. It does not arrive as an app update, cannot be streamed, and has no subscription model.
Milk is poured into a pot, heated patiently, and allowed, indeed encouraged, to overflow. This overflow is not considered inefficiency or waste, but it is the very point. It signifies abundance, wellbeing, and prosperity not merely for humans but for the entire ecosystem that made the meal possible, the sun, the rain, the soil, the cow, and the quiet, unseen labour of nature itself. Rice, lentils, jaggery, nuts, legumes, and raisins follow, and the resulting sweet dish is shared freely among family and friends, because prosperity that is not shared is considered incomplete.
This is an economy based not on accumulation but on circulation, not on profit but on participation. Something I believe is deeply unsettling to modern sensibilities.
Into this defiantly non-consumerist ritual wandered a chickpea with an extraordinarily well travelled past. This was no humble backyard legume, nor had it been picked up at the nearest market. It had sprouted in Mexico, been packed in Lebanon, purchased in Sierra Leone, and generously gifted by my wife Greeja’s friend, Saras, and her husband Pieter, a Belgian whose kindness, like the chickpea itself, clearly knows no borders. The chickpea’s journey to Malaysia, where, after crossing more continents than most humans manage in a lifetime, it finally fulfilled its destiny, being cooked into a traditional Tamil Pongal.
By then this chickpea had crossed more borders than most people ever will, navigated more currencies than a multinational executive, and yet arrived without a single stamp of self-importance. If globalization were ever to seek a spokesperson, it would do well to choose this chickpea, which achieved in silence what conferences and treaties have struggled to explain. The chickpea does not attend Davos, does not publish white papers, does not tweet about resilience or sustainability, and yet it embodies globalisation with a calm confidence that makes economists look unnecessarily stressed.
We often speak of globalisation as though it were invented sometime in the late twentieth century by economists with impressive haircuts and Power Point skills. But the chickpea, unimpressed by timelines, has been global for at least nine thousand years. Its origins lie in the “Fertile Crescent”, that much abused cradle of early civilisations covering modern day Turkey and Syria, where early cultivation was recorded between 7500 and 6800 BCE. The wild ancestor, “cicer reticulatum”, still grows in southeastern Turkey, quietly ignoring the fact that humans have spent millennia fighting over the land around it. From this region, chickpeas spread naturally to the Middle East, the Mediterranean basin, and India by around 3000 to 2000 BCE, becoming a staple across cultures, religions, and cuisines. This was globalisation without shipping containers, trade sanctions, or consultants, just humans carrying seeds because hunger is wonderfully non-ideological.
India, once it encountered the chickpea, embraced it with characteristic enthusiasm and then proceeded to dominate its production. Today, India accounts for more than 70 percent of global chickpea output, a statistic that has made the chickpea an unlikely participant in modern trade wars. Protectionist policies, tariffs, reciprocal duties, and import bans imposed by major players such as India, the United States, and Mexico have transformed this humble legume into a politically sensitive commodity. It turns out that even the simplest food becomes controversial once spreadsheets get involved.
Thiruvalluvar (an ancient philosopher), writing two thousand years ago, anticipated this uncomfortable truth with brutal clarity:
“Only those who live by agriculture truly live; all others merely follow and feed upon them.” - Kural 1033
The verse throws stylish shade at modern life, while we sip lattes under perfect air conditioning and call it “work”, farmers are out there negotiating with the sun, rain, and stubborn soil to keep humanity fed. Our sleek jobs, fancy titles, and glowing screens? Well, they are merely luxury addons. Strip away agriculture and civilisation collapses into a very well-dressed famine. Turns out, all our progress still runs on dirt, with attitude.
The chickpea’s journey to South America, especially Mexico, is a reminder that globalisation has often travelled under less noble banners. Portuguese and Spanish explorers introduced chickpeas to the New World in the sixteenth century, carrying them across oceans as reliable, non-perishable protein sources. From these initial points of contact, chickpeas spread across Central and South America, embedding themselves into local agriculture and diets. In modern times, Mexico has emerged as a significant exporter, specialising in the Kabuli variety prized for its size and quality, with major production zones in Sonora and Sinaloa. Argentina and Chile also joined the club. Thus, a crop born in ancient Anatolia, nurtured in India, and sanctified by ritual, found itself repackaged for global markets, complete with branding, logistics, and regulatory oversight. The chickpea, once again, remained silent.
Silence, however, does not mean insignificance. Homer knew this. In TheIliad (Book 13) he famously compares arrows ricocheting off Menelaus’s armour to chickpeas and dark-fleshed beans flying off a threshing floor in the wind. The metaphor works only because the audience knew exactly how dried chickpeas behave, hard, resilient, and oddly bouncy. By likening lethal weapons to pulses, Homer not only emphasises the strength of the armour but also performs a subtle act of cultural grounding. The epic world of gods and heroes is momentarily tethered to the everyday agricultural reality of farmers winnowing grain. War, Homer seems to say, may be glorious, but it is ultimately sustained by food. Chickpeas, by 800 BCE, were so deeply embedded in Greek life that their sound and movement were universally recognisable. Even epic poetry depended on legumes.
Indian tradition offers an equally revealing, if more logistical, narrative. In South Indian tale associated with the Mahabharata, an Udupi King is said to have managed catering for the massive armies at Kurukshetra. Legend holds that he could predict daily casualties by observing leftover food. In some versions, the king visits Krishna at night, who eats a handful of roasted chickpeas, the number consumed corresponding mysteriously to the thousands who would fall the next day. This allowed precise meal planning and zero waste on an industrial scale of destruction. These divine data analytics allowed the king to cook exactly the right amount of food, avoiding waste on a genocidal scale. It is perhaps the earliest example of just-in-time inventory management, achieved without software, powered entirely by chickpeas and divine omniscience.
If you have ever wondered why Udupi cuisine is famous for efficiency and planning, this story offers a clue. Here, chickpeas function not just as food but as instruments of cosmic accounting.
Interestingly, while early Vedic texts sometimes viewed certain pulses as unsuitable for sacrifice, the Mahabharata period saw chickpeas elevated into sraddha rites (funeral rituals) and daily offerings. They transitioned from questionable to sacred, a promotion many humans would envy.
Thiruvalluvar’s ethical framework accommodates this evolution effortlessly:
“Sharing food and caring for all life is the highest of virtues.”-- Kural 322
A noble idea, until chickpeas quietly steal the spotlight. Modest, beige, and absurdly cooperative, they divide endlessly without complaint and nourish everyone from monks to gym bros. While humans argue ethics in panels and podcasts, chickpeas get on with the job, feeding the masses without ego. In the moral economy of virtue, they don’t preach but they simply multiply and sustain, humbling us one hummus bowl at a time.
Across civilisations, chickpeas became the dependable fuel of endurance. Roman soldiers consumed them as part of their standard rations, boiling them into thick porridge known as “puls” when meat was scarce. Gladiators relied on pulses for strength, earning nicknames that emphasised grain and legume consumption rather than heroism. Spanish and Portuguese sailors trusted chickpeas on long sea voyages because they did not rot, sulk, or demand refrigeration. During World War II, Allied researchers turned again to pulses to address vitamin deficiencies among troops, while the modern Indian Army continues to include chickpea flour and whole chickpeas in field rations due to their high caloric density and reliability. Empires rise and fall, but soldiers keep eating chickpeas.
Modern science, arriving fashionably late as usual, now confirms what ancient armies, monks, and farmers already knew. Chickpeas are celebrated as “brain food,” dense with nutrients that support cognitive function, mood regulation, and neurological health. Nutritional psychiatry highlights their role in reducing inflammation and stabilising the gut brain axis, making them valuable in alleviating anxiety and depression. Unlike the sugar-fuelled spikes and crashes of contemporary diets, chickpeas offer slow-release energy, the kind required for sustained thought, emotional regulation, empathy, and decision making. In a world addicted to instant gratification, caffeine dependence, and burnout worn as a badge of honour, the chickpea is almost offensively patient. That patience makes it profoundly incompatible with modern lifestyles, and incompatibility, in our times, is the surest mark of subversion.
If this sounds like ancient wisdom romanticised through hindsight, it is worth noting that modern civilisation has recently spent billions of dollars rediscovering precisely the same conclusion, often during lunch breaks. Sometime in the post-Covid era, somewhere between a glass walled co-working space and an overbranded café serving ethically sourced air, a young startup founder sat staring at his laptop, attempting to optimise a problem modern life seems uniquely skilled at inventing, how to eat “mindfully” without actually having time to eat. His company was building an AI-driven wellness platform designed to “personalise nutrition using real time biometric feedback.” Investors liked it. The pitch deck had the correct fonts. The valuation was impressive for something that had not yet solved hunger, distraction, or exhaustion.
Lunch arrived in recyclable packaging engineered to survive a nuclear winter. Inside was a bowl labelled Ancient Protein Medley. It contained quinoa flown in from the Andes, kale grown in a vertical farm two kilometres away, avocado sourced from somewhere geopolitically awkward, and, almost as an afterthought, roasted chickpeas. The chickpeas were rebranded as “plant-based protein spheres,” presumably because “chickpea” did not sound sufficiently disruptive, scalable, or fundable.
As the founder ate mechanically between Slack notifications, his smartwatch vibrated with updates. Blood sugar stable. Cortisol marginally elevated. Cognitive focus acceptable. The AI recommended breathing exercises and fewer screens. The founder ignored both and continued eating. The irony was complete. A system powered by cloud computing, global capital, and predictive algorithms had concluded, after millions in funding, that roasted chickpeas were ideal for sustained energy and mental clarity.
This was not new knowledge. Roman soldiers had marched on it. Tamil farmers had lived on it. Sailors had crossed oceans with it. But now it had a dashboard, a graph, and a subscription model.
Later that evening, the same founder attended a panel discussion on sustainability. Someone in the audience asked about regenerative agriculture. The panellists responded confidently, invoking carbon credits, blockchain traceability, lab-grown proteins, and the future of food. No one mentioned legumes fixing nitrogen. No one mentioned soil. No one mentioned that the chickpeas quietly sitting in the founder’s lunch bowl had already done more for planetary health than the entire panel combined. The chickpeas, true to form, offered no comment, no keynote, and no thought leadership, only nourishment.
The chickpea’s journey eastward is no less intriguing. It reached China via the Silk Road, settling primarily in Xinjiang, where evidence of cultivation dates back around two thousand years. There, it became part of Uighur medicinal traditions, prescribed for ailments ranging from hypertension to itchy skin. During the Tang and Yuan dynasties, chickpeas gained prominence as a “cosmopolitan” food, sometimes referred to as the “Muslim bean”. Yet in central China, the chickpea struggled for a distinct identity, often conflated with the common pea even by Li Shizhen[1], the famed Ming dynasty herbalist. Not all travellers are recognised for who they are, some spend centuries being mistaken for someone else.
And yet, through all this travel, confusion, commodification, and conflict, the chickpea remained quietly regenerative. Unlike extractive crops, it forms a symbiotic relationship with Rhizobium bacteria in its roots, fixing nitrogen from the air and enriching the soil. It takes and gives simultaneously, leaving the land better than it found it. This is perhaps the most radical aspect of the chickpea’s philosophy, one that stands in stark contrast to modern economic models based on extraction and exhaustion.
Thiruvalluvar warns us gently but firmly:
“Harm done to others inevitably returns to oneself.” – Kural 319
A warning humans hear, nod at, and immediately ignore. The chickpea takes a cooler approach. It survives by being outrageously generous, throwing itself into curries, salads, and hummus without a trace of resentment. No revenge arc, no ego. Just pure edible goodwill. While we stress over karma and consequences, the chickpea lives its truth, give everything away, become indispensable, and achieve immortality in every lunch bowl.
Humanity today resembles the ancient chickpea, hard, resilient, perpetually defensive. We pride ourselves on toughness, bouncing off crises with admirable persistence, yet rarely ask what we leave behind. Climate change, trade wars, and political upheavals are the shrill winds of Homer’s winnowing floor, tossing us about. The question is not whether we survive the tossing, but whether we enrich the soil when we land. Progress, the chickpea suggests, is not about becoming larger, louder, or more profitable. It is about being regenerative, ordinary, and useful.
In an age obsessed with luxury, consumption, and curated lifestyles, the chickpea offers a quietly subversive model. It is not elite food, but it is the food of soldiers, monks, labourers, and families. It does not advertise, rebrand, or reinvent itself. It simply nourishes.
Thiruvalluvar captures this understated wisdom perfectly:
“From seeds come harvests, and from giving comes abundance.” -- Kural 1030
A line politicians quote solemnly before approving tax breaks for themselves. The chickpea, deeply unimpressed, just does the math. One seed becomes many, then redistributes itself aggressively into every cuisine on earth. No gatekeeping, no merit tests, no ‘personal responsibility’ lecture. While humans weaponise scarcity and call it policy, the chickpea runs a ruthless experiment in abundance and wins, by being cheap, shared, and impossible to cancel. The chickpea has lived this truth for millennia.
So perhaps the real lesson of globalisation does not lie in trade agreements or consumer choices but in a small legume that has travelled from ancient Turkey to modern Mexico, survived Roman marches and mythic wars, endured misnaming and trade barriers, and still ends up quietly nourishing someone’s meal.
Even now, after dashboards have glowed, algorithms have pontificated, and every opinion has been optimised into a performance, the answer remains stubbornly ancient, from Roman roads to Tamil fields. The chickpea does not care about your ideology, your portfolio, or your meticulously curated identity. It will grow, fix nitrogen, feed someone, and move on without a press release.
In a world addicted to spectacle, branding, and moral pontification, this calm, beige indifference feels almost obscene. Quiet competence and unfashionable, the chick pea, turns out to be the rarest, and most outrageously extravagant, luxury left.
The travelled chickpea. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan
[1] Li Shizen(1518-1593), Ming acupuncturist, herbalist, naturalist, pharmacologist, physician.
Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.
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Bibliography
Pongal festival, milk boiling ritual, symbolism of abundance and ecology
Ramaswamy, N. (2004). Festivals of Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.
Origins of chickpea domestication in the Fertile Crescent; dates (7500–6800 BCE); wild ancestor Cicer reticulatum
Zohary, D., Hopf, M., & Weiss, E. (2012). Domestication of Plants in the Old World (4th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spread of chickpeas to India by 3000–2000 BCE
Fuller, D. Q. (2006). Agricultural origins and frontiers in South Asia. Journal of World Prehistory, 20(1), 1–86.
India producing ~70% of global chickpeas; modern trade disputes
FAO. (2023). FAOSTAT Statistical Database: Pulses Production and Trade. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Thiruvalluvar quotations, dating (~2nd century BCE–2nd century CE), agrarian ethics
Pope, G. U. (1886). The Tirukkural. London: Oxford University Press.
Introduction of chickpeas to the Americas by Spanish and Portuguese explorers
Smith, B. D. (2011). General patterns of niche construction and the management of ‘wild’ plant and animal resources. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366(1566), 836–848.
Modern chickpea cultivation in Mexico (Sonora, Sinaloa), Kabuli variety exports
Gaur, P. M., et al. (2012). Chickpea breeding and production. Plant Breeding Reviews, 36, 1–87.
Homer’s Iliad Book 13 chickpea/threshing-floor simile
Homer. (c. 8th century BCE). The Iliad, Book XIII. Trans. E. V. Rieu. London: Penguin Classics.
Udupi King / Mahabharata legends involving chickpeas and casualty prediction
Hiltebeitel, A. (2001). Rethinking the Mahābhārata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma King. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chickpeas in sraddha rites and post-Vedic ritual elevation
Olivelle, P. (1993). The Āśrama System: The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roman soldiers, gladiators, and chickpea-based diets (“puls”)
Garnsey, P. (1999). Food and Society in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chickpeas in maritime rations and early modern naval diets
Braudel, F. (1981). The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, Vol. 1. New York: Harper & Row.
Use of pulses in World War II nutrition and modern military rations
Nestle, M. (2002). Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nutritional psychiatry: chickpeas, gut–brain axis, slow-release energy
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Modern “wellness tech,” quantified nutrition, and startup food culture
Lupton, D. (2016). The Quantified Self. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nitrogen fixation via Rhizobium in chickpeas; regenerative agriculture
Peoples, M. B., et al. (2009). The contributions of legumes to reducing the environmental risk of agricultural production. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 133(3–4), 223–234.
Chickpeas in China via Silk Road; Xinjiang cultivation; “Muslim bean”
Hansen, V. (2012). The Silk Road: A New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Unschuld, P. U. (1986). Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
There are many great cinematic representations of time such as the 1960 George Pal version of the Time Machine and from the same period the Time Travellers ( which was remade as the inferior Journey to the Centre of Time some years later) had some interesting juxtapositions near the end. But the sequence that has stuck in my head is from Kubrick’s 2001 a Space Odyssey, where a shattering glass is used to convey the passage of subjective time for Bowman. For the majority of living things, time is a subjective concern, a relative few spend most of their lives looking at the cosmic scheme of things — philosophers, scientists and writers.
Aristotle differed from Plato and over the centuries there were many unique interpretations ranging from bleak existential views to epic works comfortingly tied to Madeleines. Our concept of time is reinforced by popular culture. A 1960 film titled When the Clock Strikes, is about a criminal condemned to be executed at midnight. It’s a stormy night and an assortment of characters converge on Cady’s place not far from the prison where the convicted murderer will be hung. Cady’s is a convenient place to shelter from the storm for a juror who is wracked with guilt that he might have sent an innocent man to the gallows. He has an opportunity to convey his concerns when the warden calls on the way to prison. Also there is a woman pretending to be the wife of the condemned man and somehow a man struggles through the stormy night and arrives at Cady’s to announce that he is the guilty one but he is too late to stop the execution as the phone lines are down. The rest of the movie deals with a plan to somehow get the stolen money the deceased man had hidden. This is a good example of how time hangs over our existence, providing motivation and sometimes pushing us to the limits of endurance rather than be beaten by the relentless arrow of time.
Newton ‘s Universe served us well until the electron microscope focused attention on the underlying structure of the Universe. No longer could we accept that the Universe functioned like clockwork as in the languorous days gone by. Even Einstein knew that, for want of a better word, ‘spooky’ things were happening at a sub-atomic level. The Universe is essentially vast amounts of information. In the 20th century, devices were invented to record sound and visual information . These devices proved invaluable to scientific research as well as arts a and entertainment. Scientific and creative minds found ways of mixing, compressing and manipulating information in much the same way that information goes through various transformations in a cosmic setting such as event horizon of a black hole for instance. The Universe is composed of sequences of information , timelines branching in all directions. Some entities will follow one timeline while others will sample multiple timelines. On a quantum level, time foam can occur under the right conditions and elsewhere there are shards of time and no doubt there is time that resembles the contents of a document shredder.
This is the 21st century and we should have mastered time with all the technological marvels at our disposal. Modern transport can get us from A to B so much quicker, at least it would if only governments would spend enough on infrastructure so we did not spend so much time in traffic jams. AI should be facilitating a more a meaningful existence but algorithms can be time wasters when corporations use them to maximise profits. At a time when there are record numbers of lonely people someone comes up with the bright idea of creating a virtual reality where participants interact with avatars creating another wedge between people and the real world. Such virtual worlds can attract people predisposed to such immersion. Gambling addicts can spend days, weeks, years, gambling on poker machines. The tragedy is playing out right now as these individuals lose their partners, families and souls to the machines. It’s a limbo world where nothing meaningful happens. Lost time.
Scientists say the concept of time was invented by us to create a sense of order to our existence but is time not a thing? We should make the most of whatever devices are at our disposal to improve our lives and the lives of those around us. A meaningful existence is one that acknowledges that we are creatures like all other creatures on this planet and we are sustained by this planet and the complex ecosystems around us.
The answers to the mysteries of time might be solved by the collective wisdom of the world’s indigenous people. It might also come some time in the future in conversations with sperm whales at a depth of three thousand metres.
From Public Domain
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Mario Fenech is an artist, writer. His visual art is mainly sculptures and had many exhibitions around Melbourne over the years. His writing has been essentially science fiction ideas and most were short stories although he self-published a novella in 2013 titled, ‘The Rock in Room Ten’. He is currently two thirds into his latest science fiction story.
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Gower Bhat discusses the advent of coaching schools in Kashmir for competitive exams for University exams, which seem to be replacing real schools. Clickhere to read.
I cringe every time I hear this line, during those countless times during my calls, placed amidst the robotic, psychosis-inducing loop of hold music. Funny, this ‘muzak’[1] was meant to create calmness.
“All our agents are extremely busy right now; you’ll be attended to shortly. Your call is important to us.” The robotic voice would go, trying to sound like how a hangman would place a hood over your head before pulling the lever.
“You are the number 999,999,999th customer in line!”
This is nothing new. Even when an alien concept called customer service was introduced in the old days, people had to wait in line to have their issues resolved. At least, the saving grace at the end of this endless queue was a human voice, not a chatbot. Now, after a zillion years of human experience in crisis management, the problem of waiting persists, and we still have to wait in line, twiddling our fingers.
Now that all transactions and dealings are conducted electronically, I wonder why the queue on the telephone line is never-ending. Is there a rush for something that I am unaware of? Are the customers so unimportant or irritating that the company believes it does not need to invest in more agents to handle the increasing demand? Whether it is a Monday or any other day of the week, you can tune in and listen to an hour or so of so-called soothing music, or until your patience runs out.
When you finally reach the end of the line and think it is all over, it is not. Here, you will be presented with a menu so extensive that you will be spoiled for choice. Press 1 for English, press 2 for …, press 1 for savings, press # to return to the main menu, yada yada. The fat lady never sings.
Along the way, you will be forewarned, “anything you say can be used against you in the court of law!”, but not in the exact words.
“Your call is important to us. It will be recorded and be used for training purposes!” Yeah, right.
For all you know, nobody is there at the other end. The single casual employee employed to man the line may be on sick leave with a sore throat or something. The customer line is just to hold a caring image. If a problem cannot be resolved online, how can it be sorted over the phone? The clients have to present themselves in person at the office anyway. Just give the callers some chill music and let them be zombified by the hold music. At a time when AI (artificial intelligence) is taking over mundane tasks, it is not cost-effective to hire dedicated staff for them. This is what the big companies seemingly offering call-in customer service seem to think.
They may have made a devilish deal with the telco companies. We hold the line while the telcos go laughing all the way to the bank on our account. That is why there are frequent dropped calls. It is not due to poor cellular network coverage or a system glitch. It is intentional.
Not to forget the flurry of self-aggrandising advertisements that get inserted while clients wait in anticipation or are doing their down-to-earth activities like cutting vegetables or watering the garden with the phone on speaker mode, realising the futility and wasted effort of holding the phone to the ear.
Customer service is a thing of the past. Now that there are so many online options to address the intended concerns, face-to-face interaction is quite dated. If the customer is too daft to use the services, they deserve to be taken for a ride. Increasingly, automation can handle most compelling transactional issues. If the customer’s problem is too big for the bots to handle, the customer still needs to go to the office.
The problem is that offices are virtual nowadays. Mailing addresses are in the cloud, and offices are shared by a zillion fly-by-night companies. There is a thin line between the modern way of doing business and being taken for a ride. Like the pleas of the stranded Nigerian princes and their stash of heirlooms, a legitimate transaction may turn out to be a scam, too.
From Public Domain
[1] Muzak- a brand of soft, instrumental, and smooth non-distracting music designed to create an atmosphere of calmness.
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
How often have we, as fully realised human beings, found ourselves in the ironic situation of proving our human status to a computer programme? We have ticked boxes to identify zebra crossings, traffic lights, and buses, only to be told we were wrong, as if we did not know what a bus was. It is as if our fingers were too stubby to press the right keys or too daft to understand. And now, we are deciphering distorted words, as only a human could read wavy or cursive writing.
Now we understand. The verification exercises did not just stop automatons from spying on our data. They were meant to aid computers in digitising old books[1]. Computers sometimes struggle with old pages when converting physical books into digital versions. Due to wear and tear and fading caused by oxidation, the text may appear distorted. Computers use this mundane verification process by making humans interpret these unreadable texts. We play a crucial role in this process, creating a training module to help identify issues and errors to improve digitisation.
While CAPTCHA[2] (acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) was initially designed to prevent bot attacks and spam, it is now used by computers to distinguish between humans and bots among users. Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science, proposed a test[3] which was later named after him to evaluate a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human. Although many machines and AI programmes have passed this test, humans now face a reverse Turing Test to prove our organic status.
The funny thing is, while all this is happening, with automation and the diminishing need for human interaction, humans are gradually losing their humanity. We have lost the ability to look into each other’s eyes and start a conversation just for fun. Suppose Alan Turing proposed the test to gauge machine intelligence, and modern computers give a reverse Turing Test[4] to exclude unwanted chatbots. In that case, humans perhaps need a Turing-like test to confirm they still have some grey cells. We are increasingly losing our capacity for idle chats. We are all just prisoners, best left to our own devices.
Talking about looking into each other’s eyes and melting into the passion of each other’s aura, the dating scene these days is no longer like that. Enter any dimly-lit romantic restaurant, couples are not lost looking at one another but lost in the abyss of cyberspace, looking at the digital restaurant menu or perhaps into each other’s social media or Tinder hits to see what the other half has been up to.
While it is true that automation is changing the job market, it’s also creating new opportunities. My son, for instance, worries about his job, but I remind him that the world has created jobs that were non-existent just half a century ago. Who has heard of social media managers, cloud architects, or veterinary psychologists? My mother told me that my grandfather worked in a printing press. He used to come back smelling of turpentine, which he used to clean off the ink that stuck on his body. Nowadays, printing is done at home with a button, a slight whirring and a whooshing, and out comes a printed document at one’s convenience.
My grandfather later became a chauffeur to a successful business magnate. Once we have sorted out the finer points of bringing self-driving cars to market, we may not need drivers in the future. Now, many self-proclaimed gig entrepreneurs give up their full-time paying jobs to become delivery boys. Do we have news for these boys? Drones are dying to get up and replace you.
If one were to think that only the blue-collar job is at risk, think again. Conveyancing jobs currently carried out by paralegals can be taken over by an AI programme to churn out beautiful Sales and Purchase Agreements[5].
These programmes have also learnt to say the appropriate words during grief and crises. Increasingly, call-in helplines are ‘manned’ by AIs. The field of psychiatry may be at risk of not needing doctors. Even as we speak, we may already be conversing with chatbots about our bank transactions without realising it. This raises ethical questions about the role of AI in sensitive areas of human life and the potential loss of human connection in these interactions.
I remember a time in mid-1990 when the Malaysian civil society expressed concern over Malaysia’s uncontrolled influx of foreigners and our overdependence on the foreign labour force[6]. Someone suggested automation and mechanisation as a possible way to avert this. Still, apparently, the financiers were not too keen to increase business expenses, which would possibly reduce foreign investment. The general acceptance was that third-world nations were not ready to fully automate. They had not been able to provide universal employment to their citizens. This historical perspective highlights the complex relationship between automation, economic development, and social equity.
Moving forward, we sometimes find ourselves in zombie states, clicking reel after reel on social media as if we have so much time. Examples of children turning violent against the hands that feed them when their demand to go online is denied are not uncommon. Have we not heard of spouses immersed in full-blown affairs living under the same roof with the other half with ease, with a bit of help from the need for data privacy? A husband does not know what the wife does behind his back because access to devices is guarded by passwords.
Rock bands once thought using synthesisers on their songs was sacrilegious. The legendary British rock band, Queen, proudly boasted that they never used synthesisers to maintain a traditional, raw, organic feel to their sounds. Now, we must be happy with the digital manipulation of music and voice. Even though AI can compose music at a philharmonic level, music connoisseurs are far from contented. They say it lacks emotion, probably because great music comes from lived experience[7].
What started as automation, where machines aided humans to ease work, has now evolved to something which can learn and mimic human actions. It has come to be called intelligence, albeit artificially developed by the human mind. Like a student surpassing his teacher, the real fear now is that AI is evolving consciousness. If AI is the future, the person who controls the future will be King. Does that not mean that tech entrepreneurs will be the world’s future leaders? The world will indeed be borderless, only determined by digital connectivity.
We already long for the good old days when talking to customer service did not start with, “press 1 for English and this conversation will be recorded for self-improvement.” What they mean is that it will be used against you. Dealing with a computer chatbot already feels Kafkaesque. It feels like talking to a wall without recourse to “talking to the manager!”
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
It is always refreshing when trust can be established online without any face-to-face interaction. Social media is filled with scammers, making it challenging to trust individuals based solely on their stories. This becomes even more complicated when the relationship starts at a time when the internet was not easily accessible. In these situations, you have to rely only on the person’s words. Sincerity is difficult to gauge, even with the use of emotive and abstract language in any physical correspondence.
Many years ago, I found myself in a situation where I met a woman through physical correspondence, as encouraged by a friend. He advised me to introduce myself to the lady and share about my work teaching at the seminary, providing English tutorials for Koreans, and assisting a church in a suburban foothill. As it turned out, she was part of a Christian NGO based in the US, along with a few other senior citizens. The organisation’s mission was to provide funds for seminary scholarships, livelihood support, books, conference fees, further studies, and toys.
Our relationship was purely based on trust as we did not know each other personally and yet for a number of years, she supported me financially as she learned of my journey. She preferred to write her letters on an electric typewriter and on blue-coloured stationery with a lovingly short note of affirmation. She took my every word at face-value although at times, I sent her photos of myself and church activities to support my stories that she sometimes quoted in her monthly newsletter.
When a missionary friend detoured to the US prior to her Colombian street kids’ programme, she visited the organisation’s garage cum office and brought my gift of a passenger jeep replica made from the ashes of a previous volcanic eruption, which she greatly appreciated. The organisation’s resources were donated to a graduate-level seminary in the US, that included her book, Pilgrims and Strangers Seek The City Not Made with Hands, upon her demise and all her colleagues.
Words only have meaning when they are used in a relational context; otherwise, they are simply meaningless.
Years before the internet became readily accessible, I used to write letters to two friends who worked as domestic helpers in Singapore. Despite having college degrees, they were unable to find relevant jobs in our country due to its political turmoil. I myself was jobless for two years, and like many new college graduates, I succumbed to depression and questioned my faith and self-worth. The struggles were compounded by stress from family and friends. I found a way to vent my issues to these Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), who also had their fair share of misery and homesickness. My letters were selfish. Over time, the correspondence gradually faded, along with the photos that sometimes accompanied their stories. One migrated to Canada and the other one is retired and lives with her sibling who has a physical disability in a suburban locality. All my letters from my benefactors and friends were washed away in an unexpected catastrophic flood that swept my residence. Up to this day, the loss is still palpable.
I lost two aunts during the pandemic, who were the last of my father’s siblings. The younger one passed away in her late 70s, while the older one died in her early 90s. Both were based in the US and worked as medical professionals. Every Christmas, I make sure to send them individual greeting cards through the mail, along with a few personal thoughts. They lived separately in the same village in the US, and I believe they appreciated these physical cards for their nostalgic value. They didn’t usually respond to emails or cards, as technology can be bothersome for the elderly.
My older aunt once told my eldest brother, who also lives in the US, that my emails were too long and tended to put her to sleep. I also send them thank you cards for the occasional holiday cash they send. My relationship with my aunts is mainly through written correspondence, with only a few rare occasions of meeting in Manila. Despite this, they never fail to remember me and my younger sibling, sending us thoughtful notes. My dad passed away at 60, and my aunts fondly told me that I look like my father. Perhaps this resemblance was one of the catalysts that kept our correspondence going, even in its irregularity. Stories, however trivial, matter to them.
Letter writing can be tedious, especially when done by hand. However, it is also tiring to write letters on computers and share both trivial and significant stories to send by post, as we are not certain if our experiences matter to our recipients. Nevertheless, physical personal correspondence brings about a certain degree of warmth that is often lacking online. It takes more effort to scribble than to type. It is also more spontaneous compared to digital writing, where you can effortlessly edit and revise through AI tools. Sometimes, the physical paper used says a lot about the sender and receiver. I am particularly fond of lined stationery with religious quotes and maxims on recycled paper. The envelope is of equal value as well because it must similarly match its properties.
At times, I also use plain paper to write letters. I remember writing letters of regards and sharing personal news with a college classmate and friend who was stationed on one of the most remote islands in the country for a kids’ mission. She replied to me, but her letters took a long time to reach me through the mail. Both her letters and mine were written in longhand. We were able to reconnect through letters because there were no mobile phones or internet at that time. The distance and physical absence made our words more meaningful and profound.
They say that the post office is in its dying stage, but time and again, it has proven itself to still be relevant in the internet age. Not everyone is connected, especially in areas where there is no access to electricity.
In one of the upland villages in my municipality, which is just about a two-hour drive from the city, they have not had electricity for years. This is because streetlights have to be paid for by the consumer. If the area has rugged terrain, it will require a good number of posts to be erected to bring electricity. This is a common scenario in agricultural and upland villages. While solar power is an option, procuring panels can be quite expensive as the government has not taken any measures yet to bring the cost down. To connect, villagers go to stores that offer WiFi for a minimal fee. Mobile signals are not available in many remote locations, so the gap is still widespread despite technological tools. We must accept the fact that technology is limited. Physical correspondence is here to stay.
From Public Domain
Manuel A. Alindogan, Jr., also known as Jun A. Alindogan, is the Academic Director of the Expanded Alternative Learning Program of Empowered East, a Rizal-province based NGO in the Philippines and is also the founder of Speechsmart Online that specialises in English test preparation courses. He is a freelance writer and a member of the Freelance Writers’ Guild of the Philippines (FWGP).
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Poems of Longing by Jibananada Das homes two of his poems translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Clickhereto read.
Four cantos from Ramakanta Rath’sSri Radha, translated from Odiya by the late poet himself, have been excerpted from his full length translation. Clickhere to read.
Naramsetti Umamaheswararao takes us back to school. Click here to read.
Conversation
Ratnottama Sengupta talks to filmmaker and author Leslie Carvalhoabout his old film, The Outhouse, that will be screened this month and his new book, Smoke on the Backwaters. Clickhere to read.
Offerings during Qing Ming Jie, a festival honouring ancestorsSongkran(Thai New Year) CelebrationsFestivals in April: From Public Domain
April is a month full of celebrations around the world. Asia hosts a spray of New Year festivities. Then there are festivals like Qing Ming Jie, Good Friday and Easter. All these are in a way reminders of our past. And yet, we critique things as old fashioned! So, where does tradition end and ‘outdated’ or ‘outmoded’ start? Meanwhile we continue to celebrate these festivals with joy but what happens to those who have lost their home, family and their living due to war or climate disasters? Can they too join in with the joie de vivre? Can we take our celebrations to them to give solace in some way?
In our April issue, we have stories from climate and conflict-ridden parts of the world. From Bangkok, Amy Sawitta Lefevre gives an eyewitness account of the March 28th Earthquake that originated in Myanmar. While in her city, the disaster was managed, she writes: “I’m also thinking of all the children in Myanmar who are sleeping in the open, who lost loved ones, who are feeling scared and alone, with no one to reassure them.” As news reels tell us, in Myanmar there have been thousands of casualties from the earthquake as well as shootings by the army.
From another troubled region, Pakistan, Zeeshan Nasir gives a heartrending narrative about climate change, which also dwells on the human suffering, including increase in underage marriages.
Human suffering can be generated by rituals and customs too. For instance, if festivals dwell on exclusivity, they can hurt those who are left out of the celebrations. Odbayar Dorje muses along those lines on Mongolian traditions and calls for inclusivity and the need to change norms. On the other hand, Devraj Singh Kalsi hums with humour as he reflects on social norms and niceties and hints at the need for change in a light-hearted manner. Farouk Gulsara makes us laugh with the antics of his spoilt pet cat. And Suzanne Kamata dwells on her animal sightings in Kruger National Park with her words and camera while Meredith Stephens takes us sailing on stormy seas… that too at night.
Art is brought into focus by Ratnottama Sengupta who introduces artist Haren Thakur with his adaptation of tribal styles that has been compared to that of Paul Klee (1879-1940). She also converses with filmmaker Leslie Carvalho, known for his film The Outhouse, and his new novel, Smoke on the Backwaters. Both of these have a focus on the Anglo-Indian community in India. Also writing on Indian film trends of the 1970s is Tamara Raza. Bhaskar Parichha pays tribute to the late Ramakanta Rath (1934-2025), whose powerful and touching poetry, translated from Odia by the poet himself, can be found in our translations section.
We have an excerpt from Professor Fakrul Alam’s unpublished translation of Tagore’sRed Oleanders. It’s a long play and truly relevant for our times. Somdatta Mandal shares with us her translation of Tagore’s essay called ‘The Classification in Society’, an essay where the writer dwells on the need for change in mindsets of individuals that make up a community to move forward. A transcreation of a poem by Tagore for his birthday in 1935 reflects the darkness he overcame in his own life. Two poems expressive of longings by Jibananada Das have been translated from Bengali by Professor Alam aswell. From Balochistan, we have an excerpt from the first Balochi novel, Nazuk, written by the late Syad Zahoor Shah Hashmi and rendered into English by Fazal Baloch. Among contemporaries, we have a short story by Bitan Chakraborty translated from Bengali by Kiriti Sengupta, a poignant story that reflects on gaps in our society. And a Korean poem by Ihlwha Choi rendered to English by the poet himself.
This issue has been made possible because of support from all of you. Huge thanks to the team, all our contributors and readers. Thanks to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork. Do pause by our contents page as all the content could not be covered here.
Perhaps, world events leave a sense of pensiveness in all of us and an aura of insecurity. But, as Scarlett O’ Hara of Gone with the Wind[2] fame says, “After all, tomorrow is another day.”
Looking forward to a new day with hope, let’s dream of happier times filled with sunshine and change.
