Plane Language

Air travel is now unpleasant in so many ways that you can hardly list them. In economy class, the romance has been drained out of the experience by a couple of decades of cost-cutting. The horror has a precise starting date, according to The New York Times, and it’s earlier than you might think:

“Industry experts trace the problem back to 1987, when American Airlines removed a single olive from its salads to save a little money.”

I take the comedian Louis C.K.’s point that we complain too much about air travel, which is really a marvel if you think about it (“you’re sitting in a chair in the sky”). The one indignity that I’m becoming less and less tolerant of is the language of the airport and the skies. Lots of communication happens—from the fine print telling us whether our tickets are refundable to the flight attendant’s cheery “would you like a beverage, sir?”—but very little at a human level. The language used by airlines and the Transportation Security Administration is often distorted, plastic, unidiomatic, excessive and generally frustrating.

Perspective, Lego-men and skulls

In the early fifteenth century, the painter Masaccio did something amazing: He painted frescos that made use of linear and aerial perspective. (Regrettably he died at age 27, like the singer Jim Morrison--now that I am 28, I find myself keeping lists of "people who died younger than my current age who did important things" and that's probably not healthy.) Scientific perspective, which was perfected by painters in the later decades of the fifteenth century, changed the way art could represent the world. As if by magic--though really through a better understanding of optics--things on a two-dimensional surface could appear to be in three dimensions. I am not an art historian so I am not sure how this was received historically, but it was probably akin to when someone in our time sees a 3-D film for the first time. I vividly remember myself as a ten year old at my first IMAX film almost shrieking as a salmon seemed to swim through the head of someone seated a few rows in front of me.

The most amazing perspectival drawing I have come across recently is not a canvas at all but a painting on a road in Florida. It is (or "was" since it must be erased by now) the entry by Leon Keer, a Dutch artist, and his team in the Sarasota Chalk Festival. Inspired by the Qin-dynasty Terracotta Army, the drawing represents Lego-men marching in the pavement. It has to be seen to be believed. But there is a problem that I had never really considered but which must always be a problem with perspectival drawing to a greater or lesser degree: From another angle the Lego-men look strange and elongated. The deeper and richer the perspective, the more restricted the viewing angle for the 3-d effect to work. Even stranger than the lanky Lego soldiers is a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger called The Ambassadors. All looks well with the two elegantly dressed young men and their assortment of allegorical objects, but then one notices the highly distorted skull in the foreground. It looks like a crudely done Photoshop project and yet is actually an experiment in perspective. The skull only looks natural if you view the picture from far to the right. I was never able to get it to work on the computer screen but the next time I am in London I'll pay a visit to the National Gallery to approach the painting from awkward angles. 

The Scourge of Internet comments

Prof Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log (one of the blogs I read the most) has a fantastic explanation of why he usually disables comments on his posts. Vogon poetry is invoked. Passive voice is explained. And so on. I don't bother closing the comments on this blog because, luckily, not enough people read it to leave soul-sappingly stupid comments.

History Through a Glass, Darkly

On my grandfather, E. Jarosław Semianów 

[This is a true sketch of my grandfather's life, and a meditation on how hard it is to establish even the most basic facts in history. It's more than five thousand words--far too long for a blog post--but here it is.] 

One summer in the mid-1990s, I was standing in the closet-sized vestibule in my grandfather’s stuffy apartment in a village in southeastern Poland. His cheeks flushed and his breath slightly off, my grandfather grasped both my shoulders tightly and said something to me, something important. After this laying on of hands, the old soldier shuffled away, his rounded back receding into another dim and faded room.

He died in 2005 after a decade-long struggle with depression. I knew him less well than I should have, and the later memories—senility and deafness increasingly robbing him of his ability to perceive the world around him—have fogged happier recollections from childhood.

Like the dead in Hades in the ancient epics, our deceased forebears can be brought back but only as shadows of their living selves. In our time, they are not lured by the promise of sips from a bowl of sacrificial blood but by the rustling of papers in an archive or the whirr of data being retrieved electronically. I am looking at two pages of typescript, which draw the contour lines of a place in history but populate it very sparsely. It is factually detailed — dates, places and even sections of the Soviet-imposed penal code are cited precisely — but beyond the facts there is no self-reflection, no outward emotion. I am not sure whether this ritual will work. I feel guilty because the time to have done this research was years ago when interviews would have allowed me to capture these intangible details. Time flows swiftly in only one direction and swimming against the current is possible for just a little until you grow tired, having nothing to hold on to, and you are dragged downstream again. Most of history is written in the rushing water and the howling wind.

Courageous Syrian blogger abducted (updated)

 UPDATE: So it turns out that the "courageous Syrian blogger" was not a lesbian in Damascus but actually a married 40 year-old American man living in Scotland, reports The Guardian. Sadly, this kind of fiction is drained of its meaning once it is revealed to be fiction. This literary experiment probably set back the cause of gay rights in the Middle East or the West's being able to understand Syria, and that's unforgivable when things are so bad. I sincerely hope he doesn't get a book deal.

The title of Amina A.'s blog says it all: "A Gay Girl in Damascus" The four-month old blog is easily one of the bravest on the Internet. It agitates both for gay rights and against the government in one of the most repressive societies on earth, Bashar al-Assad's Syria. There is little expectation of anonymity since the Assad regime monitors Internet communication. But that does not stop Amina from saying what she thinks so boldly that even those of us who live in societies where freedom of speech is a given might pause before posting such opinions.


It seems that repression--in the form of one of the eighteen different state-run police forces or some militia--has caught up with her. She was abducted two days ago and remains missing, according to two posts on her blog by her cousin. According to The Guardian, which profiled her in early May, she is a dual citizen of Syria and the United States. (Ironically, the Guardian gives Amina's full name but the bylines of several articles about her are pseudonyms.) The question is what the US State Department will do now. Will Amina be another dual-citizen sacrificed to serve some larger strategic calculus?


I first learned of Amina when someone sent me a link to her post "My Father the Hero". She describes, in an account that manages to be both harrowing and uplifting, how her father spoke with the militiamen who came to take her away in the middle of the night and shamed them into leaving. It turns out only to have been a temporary victory.


The sort of people who come to take you in the middle of the night are trained to be impervious to reason and human emotion--my parents' descriptions of the precisely inflicted brutality of the Polish riot police, the spine-chillingly-named ZOMO, towards the end of Communist rule in Poland made wonder as a child whether the ZOMO-men had been Terminator-like robots. Even so, the brain-washed functionaries that prop up dictators can sometimes be reminded of their humanity. It seems Amina never got the chance to reason with the three young men who bundled her into a car.


Nothing remotely as dramatic happens on my blog--and I hope to keep it that way. My thoughts are with Amina.

Indian Higher Education follow up

As I write this, there are forty-six online comments on my Outlook article on education and it’s time to reply. The comment I expected above all was a variation of what commentor Varun Garde declares,

Liberal arts education is about people who dont want to work hard or who dont have intelligence required to do real work. many of these lazy low IQ people become Politicians, Journalists, lawyers and even worst civil servants.

I think this is the greatest fallacy in the debate and I’ll refute that general claim in a moment. But let me discuss India specifically and put my cards on the table. I am asserting that what I would define as a “liberal arts education” does not exist in India today. This is not just my argument but one that I have heard echoed by dozens of friends and colleagues. The “Arts” stream in Indian higher education does not provide a liberal education but rather a narrow humanities education, which I am not advocating. It is a huge mistake to conflate the humanities and the liberal arts. Therefore, claims such as that stupid people in India get a liberal education while clever people become engineers cannot be sustained, because these so-called stupid people are not getting a liberal education in the first place.

One critical passage that I had to cut from the final article—as it went from 2,500 words to 1,700 words—was to define what a liberal education is and isn’t. It is “broad-based”, as I wrote in the article, but that does not mean unstructured. Let’s take as an example my alma mater, Princeton University. At Princeton all undergraduate students studying for an A.B. (bachelor of arts, what most universities call a B.A.) must take a writing seminar and a foreign language as well as classes chosen from seven categories. (Students in the sciences have a similar list.) This is the chart from Princeton’s website, which is worth visiting to read in full:

General Education Requirements for A.B. Students

• Writing Seminar—one course
• Foreign Language—one to four terms to complete, depending on the language students study and the level at which they start
• Epistemology and Cognition (EC)—one course
• Ethical Thought and Moral Values (EM)—one course
• Historical Analysis (HA)—one course
• Literature and the Arts (LA)—two courses
• Quantitative Reasoning (QR)—one course
• Science and Technology, with laboratory (ST)—two courses
• Social Analysis (SA)—two courses

Now the names are misleadingly complicated (why did they have to choose a name like “epistemology and cognition”?), but the philosophy is clear: all students need to take a wide range of courses. Some of these count towards the requirements set down by a student’s department but others are for general knowledge. I got a degree from a literature department but I ended up taking Multivariate Calculus and two chemistry classes to satisfy the QR and ST requirements. These were challenging classes that tested my limits, and they changed my outlook on the world. One major success of the system is that I was able to take them and not fear for my marks: We were allowed to designate a certain number of classes as “pass/fail” courses, meaning that the course would appear on our transcripts but without a final mark. (I turned out to be a terrible mathematician so this was very good for me.) In India I’ve never come across a similar system to allow students to study things that they cannot be confident about mastering.

There are some other misconceptions about the liberal arts. Someone brought up the Sokal Hoax, in which physics professor Alan Sokal sent a completely nonsensical article to a well-known humanities journal and it got published. That is not an argument for why the humanities are useless, but why a liberal education is important: If I were a journal editor, rest assured that I would not have printed that article because I’ve studied science and know its limits. Similarly, Santosh Gairola wonders “If I am correct now, ‘liberal education’ means, art and artistic subjects.” NO. This is “arts” in the old sense of "skills" rather than in the sense of “fine arts”.

And let us return to the assumption that liberal arts courses attract stupid people and engineering attracts clever people. Anshul writes

As someone else has commented it is very much necessary to liberate our civil services, politics, media and civil society from liberal arts type wallas who enjoy sprouting this or that ism and while living as parasite on public money castigate others for trying to make a decent living.

Let's pause to recognise the irony that engineers don’t feel the need to use evidence when discussing a question like this. The recent civil service examination results are out and engineers did very well. But do they make better civil service officers? Where is the evidence? One commenter went so far as to claim that when too many IIT students succeeded in the exam in 1995-6, the next year the marking system was doctored to favour humanities students. Let me call that what it is, a crazy conspiracy theory. Likewise, an MBA is not a liberal arts degree. One successful consultant recently wrote an article his thoughts on why a philosophy PhD was more useful for him than an MBA. Vivek Wadhwa's thoughts on the matter are also useful.

One commenter, Sunil, wrote something that inadvertently helped prove my point and was also very moving:

Our vernacular literature is alive, active advanced and beyond compare - and is generally inaccessible to non-native language speakers like Dudney.

First of all, I do have access to Hindi and Urdu vernacular performance because I can read and understand both. I enjoy Rabindra Sangeet but because I don’t know Bengali except for the alphabet and Hindi/Urdu cognates, I depend on translations. The vibrance of India’s vernacular literary scenes is unquestionable but where does it find a place in the classroom? Indeed, my original title for the piece—before the editors replaced it with the pithier and more controversial “Beyond Techno-Coolies”—was “The Liberal Arts in India, Everywhere but in the University”. Many of the people who are arguing for opening the curriculum up to the liberal arts are just as keen on having the vernacular represented. This is what I hinted at in the last paragraph of my article.

Some people were far less nice than Sunil about my supposedly not getting India because I’m a foreigner, but it’s not an argument to point a finger at someone with a reasoned opinion and say “foreigner!” as if that settles it. Actually, I’ve been educated in the US system, the UK system and the Indian system so I can compare the three. In any case, complaining about the US is irrelevant. One commenter wrote,

also the assumption here is that the liberal American colleges have got it right. They may have good in the past, but average graduate of a liberal arts college in the USA is very poorly educated. And for this the colleges charge $40,000/yr. Its a money making racket just like India

But, respectfully, that is not the assumption. You can get a good education in America or a bad one. However, if you compare the best American institutions with the best Indian ones, it is clear that they are using very different educational models. In the U.S., there have been years of debate over whether liberal education works while in India there has not been any such a debate and top institutions don’t provide a liberal education. Nor do the economic arguments that a U.S. education is bad value for money really hold. In fact, because of the private education model (which incidentally India is rapidly adopting), the best universities in the U.S. tend to have the most money to give for scholarships and so it is often less expensive to attend one of the top universities than a middle-ranked university. Every year universities like Princeton and Harvard provide needy students with a free education, and on average more than half the undergraduate students receive some kind of scholarships. The question of whether it is fair that donations can influence admissions decisions is too complicated to get into here, but I can say that it is not particularly common.

Debotosh Chatterjee takes umbrage at my sentence "Liberal education is not some fusty notion about reading good books, but is rather an important investment in the future" which made him “wonder whether the writer is himself really convinced. There is nothing 'fusty' about reading good books.” This again leads us to the question of what a liberal arts education is. There is nothing wrong with reading good books but opponents of the liberal arts say that it’s just wasting time reading or “talking”. But the goal is to increase people's general knowledge and intellectual capabilities, which involves a lot of reading, writing and discussion. Part of it is learning the indispensable skill of expressing yourself well. It is true that every corner of the Internet is full of bad writing but one commenter deserves special mention: He pulls off the astonishing feat of misspelling “coolies” three different ways (“collies” which are fluffy dogs, “collis” which is an English surname or a hill on another planet, and “colles” which is a kind of wrist fracture). I don't know what kind of education can explain that.

Indian higher education

I haven't posted since January for all sorts of reasons. Anyway, I'm back, and an essay I wrote about the state of Indian higher education (and the role of the liberal arts) has been carried in Outlook, an Indian newsweekly. The editors chose the title "Beyond Techno-Coolies" (which is definitely not what I, as a White foreigner, would have called it) but I'm pleased that it will generate some controversy and hopefully some useful debate. I did get some flak for the title I didn't choose, and of course from the people for whom "Liberal Arts = Useless Nonsense" while "Engineering = All That is Good in the World". And so it goes...