Ashkenazi Jews And Sensitivity

The Secrets of Jewish Genius

The purpose of analysis and research is to come out with formulas that can be applied with accuracy elsewhere too. So long as the formulas pertain to things like relativity or gravity there seems to be no problem. The moment we mention a formula that pertains to people (whether Ashkenazi Jews or Women or Indians or blondes...) we seem to face a problem. We are told that we are racist, judgmental. Instances like the ex Dean of Harvard or the Google employee, (both of whom mentioned that women were generally not as fit as men for STEM discipline and both of whom had to leave their institutions) come to mind. Instead of looking at whether the data and conclusion are accurate we tend to look at whether the conclusion affects the sensitivities of people. The same thing happened with Darwin. His conclusion affected the sensibilities of religious people. 

Sensitivity to sentiments seems to come in the way of science and analysis.

If research has to be constantly mindful of how its conclusions may affect the sentiments of certain sections of the population we may as well start taking long strides forward to the 10th century.

Can emotions be conducive to understanding truth (formulas)?

Additional reading

1. The Jews and American Progress : Unbelievable! Letters to the editor re: the original article.
2. https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2015/09/intelligence-variation-with-religion.html

Recipe For Depression, CEO And Mischief

When one has a lot of emotions, and very little energy, one can go into depression because they cannot do much and things aren't happy.

People with a lot of emotions and some energy and lot of skills do something useful. They become CEO's of benign (or at times malefic) enterprises.

People with a lot of emotions and some energy and less skills turn  into mischief.

My Husband - Answer To The Puzzle

I had earlier written about something that puzzled me https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2019/01/my-husband.html

Why do wives and daughters think so differently about their husbands and fathers respectively, as human beings, so differently?

I finally figured out the answer.
Daughters love their fathers because they take care of their daughters, protect them and love them.
BUT because they love their fathers they ALSO think their fathers are great human beings (when they are not really great human beings). This is a mistake daughters make.

Wives dislike their husbands because they are too silly, insensitive, inattentive, unreliable etc BUT because they hate their husbands they ALSO think their husbands are awful human beings (when they are not really awful human beings). This is a mistake wives make.

Both daughters and wives exaggerate the nature of their fathers / husbands as human beings. This is a human tendency. When we like someone, we attend to think they are good at everything. And VICE VERSA.

Most sons think that their mothers are nice while most husbands think that their wives could do with some improvement. The difference in perception is not as much as in the case of daughters and wives, I think.

Men tend not to think too much about relationships while women focus primarily on them and exaggerate (in a benign way or malignant way depending on the object being evaluated) and hence create a whole lot of confusion in people like me. 

It took me almost a year to figure this one out.

Bhutan And Sasural

A woman I know lost her husband some time back. Her euphoria knew no bounds and she is now vacationing in Bhutan with her kids.

Another friend I know discarded her husband and she is now in Bhutan.

Why do they all go to Bhutan?

Now Bhutan is the land of happiness and it's no wonder women gravitate there when they lose or discard their husbands.

What then is the land of unhappiness? Sasural?

Rekha And Munna

I was discussing with a friend the film characters of Rekha in Khubsoorat and of Sanjay Dutt in Munna Bhai MBBS. After watching both the movies (I watched the 2nd one 2 decades after watching the first one), my initial reaction towards both the characters was positive and I felt more negative about Rekha's (future) mother in law in the movie and about Sanjay Dutt's (future) father in law in Munna Bhai.

Both the parents in law were J (as in MBTI) characters, rigid, insisting that things only be done one way, seemed as though they had piles, their lives full of Must, Should etc. Rekha and Munna, on the other hand, were P (as in MBTI) cheerful, flexible, nice to be with be, easygoing etc. Rekha was seen by her MIL as a person not disciplined enough and hence unfit to be her daughter in law. Munna was seen by his father in law as a person who was totally unfit to be his son in law because Munna was a gangster and uneducated unlike the father in law and the heroine who were both doctors. 

And the way Rekha took care of Ashok Kumar, her future father in law, when he had a heart attack and when she was alone with him and the way Munna created happiness in the patients (Jimmy Shergill) and brought life back to the Bengali person in coma (Anand) seemed to belie the poor opinions of their respective parents in law.

When we finished watching the movie we were left with the belief that Rekha and Munna were dependable and good people, perhaps much better than their respective uptight parents in law.

Now here comes the interesting part. 

Think back to the movie characters Rekha and Munna. Do we want our spouses or friends or daughter/son in law to be available in those rate instances when there is a crisis and generally unavailable most of the time for doing anything useful? Do we need Munna's "jaadu ki jhappi" more than his father in law's medical skills? Are we right in assuming that J people are unavailable or incapable of handling emergencies?

Sure I cannot imagine Boman Irani (Munna's FIL) solving problems through EQ. Has EQ become so much important than hard skills? Where will mankind be if all people had high EQ and no hard skills (or hard skills that only rarely emerged as in the case of Rekha)? 

I realized that I have a tendency to get conned by elegant communication as in the case of the two movies mentioned above. I need to be more careful. If I were an elderly lady lying in my death bed, would I be comfortable leaving my family in the hands of a Rekha? Or would I prefer someone like her MIL or like Mrs Soumitra in Bela Sheshe?

Is this the kind of of high EQ and mostly no hard skills or rarely exhibited hard skills that I should be clapping or clamoring for? How did we start allowing EQ to triumph discipline and dependability?

Note:
Indirectly I am equating P with EQ and J with its absence. 

Take To The Streets

Scroll.in: The Daily Fix: India has a loud message for Modi-Shah – we won’t let you turn us into a Hindu nation.

It's nice to see when non-Muslims come against the citizenship thing. It's nice to see women come against issues towards women. Or when men wake up to issues against women.

Makes me wonder if Imran Khan or other Muslims in pak will take to the streets when there are issues against minorities. No of course, it won't happen. It need not happen. Pak is not bound by secularism, it being a country with a single language (not English), single religion, single hatred (of Hindus and India). 

Sad.

I Am Grateful To You

This is the search results for the expression FEELING GRATEFUL.

https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-motorola-rev2&sxsrf=ACYBGNR8O0lRc5Nry96OtF97gQS1nu0G0g:1576591743753&q=being+grateful&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiGhN727bzmAhXzxzgGHQEJAGAQBSgAegQIChAC&biw=360&bih=512

We can see from the links how important it is to feel grateful. Being grateful or thankful to nature or to individuals is so nice. 

Recently when I heard a person tell another that she was grateful to the guy for all that he had done for her involuntarily my blood boiled. There were strong negative vibes in me.

I probed my feelings. And this is what my left brain came up with.

When we say we are grateful or thankful to a person for all that they have done for us we implicitly deny any indebtedness to them. The profound "thank you" squares all the debt or things that we received from another person. What we then feel is that should the other person ever have a problem we would be favorably inclined to do something for them. Being indebted to them, on the other hand, means that we would do something for the other person not just being favorably inclined.

This is a crucial difference. The feeling of gratefulness is nice - it does beat being an ingrate any time. But feeling grateful really is a very shallow behavior compared to feeling indebted to that person. It's surprising how gracefully we have camouflaged the ugly shallow behavior in the guise of a beautiful one. 

What really gets my goat is the tendency for an sweet person to say to a benefactor "You have already done so much good for me and for others. I don't know how to thank you for all that you have done. But I need one more favor from you..."

Only a horrible person can repay favors taken with request for one more and package it with gratitude towards the benefactor. 

In summary, "I am grateful to you" is usually a way of saying "I am not indebted to you". Thank you empaths.

Recent example:
"Actor-turned-politician Urmila Matondkar posted pictures with the legend, saying, "You shaped me as an actor. You saw the talent in a girl from a middle-class family and introduced me to the silver screen. I'll never be able to pay back what you have done for me. Will Miss you #ShreeramLagoo" from https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/eminent-theatre-and-film-actor-shriram-lagoo-91-dead/articleshow/72859320.cms

So nice.

Additional reading

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/when_guilt_stops_gratitude

Don't Judge A Book

https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/fashion/the-margazhi-dress-code/article30320310.ece

"Sushma Somasekaran is convinced that clothes have the power to convey what a person may, at times, struggle to convey in just words. Which is why she believes in the importance of curating a look “as it is the first thing people notice about you”." 

Is this why people show skin or cleavage? 

Another quote from the article:

"Is what you wear on the stage, a reflection of who you are? “Not really,” says Sumesh Narayanan, a mridangam artiste. “I’m not one to judge a book by its cover. And it is not about what you wear, it is more about how you wear it.”"

The entire article is littered with similar stuff. How the sari color is matched with the color of raga and the petticoat color with the color of husband's socks. 

It's amazing. So much focus on what one wears and how one wears it. 

What about that old saying that it's not the cover that a book should be judged by? Is this article saying the same thing?

What a world we seem to live in. So feminine.

Missing The Whole Point

I was watching this video that a friend sent me. 

I thought of the sculptor who made the deer so well that he had even sculpted the female sexual organ realistically. So much so that the male deer was actively engaged in it for a few seconds.

While we may think that the male deer was silly in having pursued sex with a sculpture (or whatever it was), I think the male was actually silly in aborting its mission when it realized that the female wasn't real.

The male was having a perfectly good time with the fake until the head feel off. How silly it is to stop an important activity because of the occurrence of an unimportant event (head falling off).

How many times in life we do such things - account something because of an issue with an unimportant part? 

This is because of our tendency to look at this holistically instead of being focused on what we need.