Right Back to Tradition

        Ashoke's death in chapter 7 of The Namesake has played a bigger role in Gogol's life (I will refer to the character as Gogol even though I prefer Nikhil) than he knows. His father's death was unexpected, to be honest, but Gogol's reaction was unexpected to me as well. Usually, I'd imagine someone sort of breaking down at the death of a family member as close as a father, but Gogol just seemed a little shocked and in slight dismay. Maybe it's because of that trip to the cemetery when he was little.
It didn't seem to achange him much at the time, but his father's death greatly affected outer-family relationships, such as Maxine.
          It is clear Ashoke's death has brought Gogol closer to his family and roots to say the least. That's really why he and Maxine ended it. Maxine was refreshing for Gogol; he felt less obliged (not sure if that's the right word) to his Indian culture and tradition. And when they broke up, unlike Gogol, I was not surprised to see that she was engaged with another guy after less than a year of ending it with Gogol. It seems like kind of the American thing to do.
        This sudden loneliness brought Gogol a lot closer to his family, and Ashima was repeatedly pushing for him to meet with this girl, Moushumi. Gogol has, in the past, been sort of rebellious towards his roots. At first, "...as much as he [wanted] to make his mother happy, he [refused] to let her set him up with someone." But finally, he gives in out of spite, and he finds himself hitting it off with Moushumi, the nerdy girl at the party from his child hood.
         And as much as Gogol seems to unconsciously detest arranged marriage, here he is, falling in an arranged love with Moushumi. It feels Ironic. He dates Maxine, surprised that she gets engaged with someone else so quickly. And now he's moving into this girl's house, only months into the relationship mind you, all because of an arrangement from his mom. He's taking a step back from being a 'rebellious American'.

An (more) American Identity

          In the Namesake, we see Gogol constantly struggling with the differences of American and Indian culture. It is quite evident that he and his sister are not really connected to his roots in Calcutta, shown by their discomfort and uneasiness on their eight month visit to India. I mean, for a ton of kids, this an understandably excruciating amount of time for a teenager to be stuck in a country where he feels like he doesn't belong.
          But Gogol does belong there; he should feel like he does at least. But he's really taken on an American identity that simply can't be replaced. I mean, he and sister just wanted "...hamburgers or a slice of pepperoni pizza or a cold glass of milk" (84). Admittedly, I can relate. When I visited the Philippines while I was in 5th grade for 2 weeks, it was an incredible adventure with amazing, hand-cooked food made by relatives my family visited around the archipelago. The deserts my Filipino relatives are amazing. But hell, did I want a pizza and some oreos while we were visiting. Actually, the first thing we did when we got back to California was go to In N Out at 1 in the morning. Probably the best burger I've ever had.
           Anyways, it is clear Gogol does not feel as connected to his Indian roots, and he learns to really hate his name. I'd be kind of embarrassed if my name was Gogol too... It's honestly an ugly name in my opinion. This part of Gogol's thought struck me most, when he finds out who he is named after:
           "Gogol isn't his first name. His first name is Nikolai. Not only does Gogol Ganguli have a pet name turned good name, but a last name turned first name. And so it occurs to him that no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America or anywhere, shares his name. Not even the source of his namesake" (78).
            Ouch...I can see why he changed his name to Nikhil later on. See, that name is unique, but it sounds cool. It has a nice ring to it. Gogol sounds like some crappy yogurt you would buy at a liquor store.

            I think Nikhil fits him more. Gogol really is American, so he should embrace his identity with a name that would survive in the cruelty that is American culture. If he wants to change it, then so be it. That's the beauty of American freedom, I guess.

The Cultural Variety Complex of Shoes

(I made the Cultural Variety Complex up... but whatever I'll roll with it.) Simple enough. Wherever we go, cultural differences are so variably present and palpable. They can span from language, to religion, to diet, to rules, to government, to family, and even to clothing and hobbies. And in The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, the cultural differences clearly have an effect on Ashima's min
d and emotions.
        A part that really stood out to me was when Ashima stepped into American shoes, "...a pair of men's shoes that were not like any she'd seen on the streets and trams and buses of Calcutta, or even in the windows of Bata" (Lahiri 8). Just by stepping into shoes of a culture unfamiliar to her, her heart raced. It struck me how people are so used to their own lives and cultures that it's the little things that we tend to notice. Sure we know that people drive with the steering people on the right side of the car, and that doesn't really come as a surprise to us when we see it first-hand. But I have zero ideas as to the clothing, or cultures of physical appearance for that matter, of countries in Europe and Asia. Speaking of shoes, I find that the popularity of certain kinds of shoes kind of belongs to different areas in Southern California. Culture in general differs pretty greatly between nearby cities.

     It seems kind of wrong to stereotype, but it's shoes so who really cares? I've just kind of observed that kids at Newport Harbor tend to wear topsiders more than other school. Kids at CDM seem to wear blue or black authentic Vans (The ones above). I see a lot of kids at Sage with Converse or boots. I'm kind of going off a tangent here, but you get the point.
     I also found it interesting when Ashima thought to herself about how she "...thinks it's strange that her child will be born in a place most people enter either to suffer or die..." because in India, "...women go home to their parents to give birth, away from husbands and in-laws and household cares..." (Lahiri 4). It's clear that American culture varies wildly enough from India, or Calcutta, for her to notice.
    I myself find that I'm learning about Indian culture from this book. I (and I'm sure a lot of others too) had no idea about the annaprasan, and that the "...first formal ceremony of [the Bengali's] lives centers on the consumption of food" (6). I'm sure there's a lot more things to learn about Indian culture from this book, and a lot of things that Ashima will notice about American culture that I take for granted.

Bound by Numbers

So far, Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, has been an interesting, dare I say philosophical, read. I admit, I definitely had to stare at passages at about every other page to understand what the hell the underground man was talking about, but his views on mankind were captivating and...creative. His contradictory statements strewn about threw me off a bit, but I think I get where he's going. There's a lot of points the man covered, but I'll talk about one.

2 + 2 = 4, no it does not equal 5, and no it does not equal 3. It's a law of nature, in a sense, and it cannot be changed. All those dumb 'tricks' where people make 1 = 0 are wrong, because they're dividing by zero, and that's defying the laws. The underground man questions that; he asks himself: "...what sort of free will is left when we come to tables and arithmetic..." (Dostoevsky 29)?

He believes that "...laws of nature exist in this world, so that everything he does is not done by his will at all, but is done by itself, according to the laws of nature" (Dostoevsky 23).

Why can't 2 + 2 = 5, why does it have to be 4. That's why, according to him, we don't have absolute freedom. We're bound by laws that we cannot change. Yet, some of this is man-made; some of these laws are our own creation. We invented numbers, and time, and now our lives are basically controlled by those numbers. It seems the amount of money or time we have basically dictates our lives, so do we really have freedom? The underground man made me think of one of my favorite quotes.

           “Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. 
Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. 

Man alone measures time. 
Man alone chimes the hour. 
And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures.
A fear of time running out.” 
― Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper

It differs from the underground man's thoughts, but you get the point.

 But I disagree with the man, I think that, despite the laws of nature, we are free, and we have free will. We're free to simply ignore them if it comes to that. I mean, sure they'll still be true, but that doesn't mean we have to let them control us. There is a big difference in controlling and affecting.

 Freedom is relative, anyways.

Things Fall Apart Analytic Essay: The Single Story of the Ibo people and Atheism

Article writer of “The arrogance of the atheists: They batter believers in religion with smug certainty,” S.E. Cupp, and author of Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, attempt to fulfill the incomplete story of atheism and the Ibo people that were written by the “hunters.” Achebe spends more than half of the book to explain the violent story, yet civilized culture, of the protagonist, Okonkwo. Similar to Achebe, Cupp explores the thoughts of “neoatheists” to show their arrogance and faults in representing the community of atheists. Achebe and Cupp both also describe people, such as Nwoye and Cupp’s father, that encompass open-mindedness and represent the incomplete side of their story. Cupp and Achebe challenge the stereotypes of atheism and Africa by creating and examining prominent and representative figures that highlight the dark sides of their stories; by analyzing these figures, both authors show us that they are outliers and do not properly embody their group as a whole.
Achebe and Cupp begin by diving into the worlds and thoughts of leading figures and using their flaws to exemplify the stereotypes of their story. Achebe describes his protagonist, Okonkwo, as a man “who knew how to kill a man’s spirit” (Achebe 26). Okonkwo so ferociously values masculinity that he feels that anybody who cannot live up to his standards is inferior. Similar to Okonkwo, the arrogance of popular and outspoken atheists has made Cupp question their intentions: “What spiritual quest are they on, except to put an abrupt end to those like [her] father’s” (Cupp, S.E.)? These popular atheists, such as Bill Maher or Christopher Hitchens, take atheism and turn it into the goal of “…nothing more than to spoil the believer’s spiritual journey” (Cupp, S.E.). Okonkwo’s firm belief of masculinity and use of violence to promote his alpha position causes him to “…never show any emotion openly,” as “…To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength” (Achebe 28).
Although Okonkwo’s tribe values masculine traits, they do not promote the senseless use of violence. When a man was accused of beating his wife needlessly, he was brought in front of the egwuwu, the effective judges of the tribe; they enforced a punishment and told him that “’It is not bravery when a man fights with a woman’” (Achebe 93). Like Okonkwo, militant Atheists like Cristopher Hitchens and Bill Maher, who use media and popularity to their advantage, are so devout to shredding other religions that people have begun to think of atheism more as antitheism.
To balance the single story represented by Okonkwo and the arrogant atheist, Achebe and Cupp provide an open-minded character that represents the other half of the story. Nwoye, the first son of Okonkwo, listens to the words of the white missionaries, and afterwards finds his “…callow mind was greatly puzzled” (Achebe 147). Despite being raised and beaten constantly in a house where masculinity and Ibo religion reigns supreme, Nwoye still finds himself interested in Christianity, even when he knew of the consequences. Nwoye represents the most of the Ibo people that are not single-minded and that are open to new cultures and religion, instead of being savage and uncivilized like the single story represents. In her article, Cupp describes her father, an open-minded equivalent to Nwoye, As “…[she] watched him pore over C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel, and even neoatheist thinkers such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, [she] thought it was amazing that he still wanted to learn something new” (Cupp, S.E.)
Often times, these open-minded people, such as Nwoye and Cupp’s father, are shadowed by their more outspoken and arrogant counterparts. When Okonkwo discovered that Nwoye had been visiting the church, he was furious and “…seized a heavy stick that lay on the dwarf wall and hit him two or three savage blows” (Achebe 152) It is the violence of Okonkwo attempting to stop his own son from learning about new religions that creates the uncivilized and barbaric stereotypes of the Ibo. In the modern world of religion, “God-hating comic Bill Maher shrugs [faith] off as a ‘neurological disorder’” (Cupp, S.E.).
Achebe finally represents the Ibo people as an evolving clan, as Cupp shows that the people of atheism learn to stray from the path of arrogance. After Okonkwo’s final act of savagery by killing the white messenger, “He knew that Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had broken into tumult instead of action” (Achebe 205). The clan’s resistance to following Okonkwo’s act of violence shows that they do not always resort to violence and that they have evolved and accepted the change of culture that the imperialists are bringing. Even Cupp herself realizes and admits her arrogance and strays away from being a militant atheist: “It wasn’t necessarily an acknowledgement of a higher power, but a realization that [she] knew little about the beliefs [she] had railed so arrogantly against” (Cupp, S.E.) Cupp still stays true to her own belief that a god does not exist, but she readily admits that it’s important to learn about other religions before degrading them. Besides Umuofia, other Ibo tribes exist that value different qualities, such as Mbante. Though they understand the importance of masculinity and the fatherland, they also acknowledge that “…when there is sorrow and bitterness [a man] finds refuge in his motherland” (Achebe 134). The Ibo people and atheists are constantly adapting to different cultures and religions, while the figures that Achebe and Cupp represent are too stubborn and arrogant to change.
By being fair and telling it as it is, Achebe and Cupp challenge the stereotypes and finish the incomplete stories of the savage Ibo people and the arrogant atheist. Achebe and Cupp create and explain figures that represent the cores of their stereotypes to show contrast between them and their cultures. Cupp herself believes that, “There’s still a lot to learn, but only if [we’re] not too busy being a know-it-all” (Cupp, S.E.)

Say it like it is

After reading 19 chapters of Things Fall Apart, I've come to the conclusion that the people of Umuofia, or the Ibo people in general, are brutal people and servants to religion. But they are in no way stupid or uncivilized; they're extremely intelligent and skilled at what they do, and they have an unparalleled level of civilization and hierarchy that simply differs from the one that we are used to.

To be honest, and relating to the TED talk of how the people of Africa seem to have "one story," I really didn't think much of Africa before reading this. And of the little that I did know, I just knew about blood-diamonds, or the struggle to overcome anarchy, and just in general the dilapidated state of Africa that the media loves oh so much to cover.

And what I like about this book, is that it doesn't just shine light on the Ibo people and show them as a flawless, extremely civilized tribe. Chinua Achebe, the author of the book, really just tells it as it is. The world of the Ibo people is indeed civilized, but with it comes violence and an overwhelming amount of religion and superstition to back it up. Okonkwo himself is a perfect example for this violence; he beats his wife and children which is oddly accepted in his community, where in ours it would be an atrocity. Yet the violence is always justified; the man who beat his wife senselessly was brought before the egwugwu and put on some sort of trial to decide his punishment.

The author also doesn't portray the white men as people who go around killing others with darker skin. Although it was for religious purposes, Mr Kiaga, known as a harmless white man, even accepted the osu, or outcasts, telling the people that "We are all children of God and we must receive these our brothers" (Achebe 156). Not every white man was a ruthless conquerer.

Achebe shedding an equal amount of light and darkness on both the Ibo and the white people has opened my eyes to the reality of the situation.

Diana Nyad: Never, ever give up

I had the pleasure of watching Diana Nyad's TED talk, where she described her epic swim from the shores of Cuba to Florida. After previous failures and almost being killed by the dangers of the ocean, she accomplished her dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida. And she did it for herself, not for the ego or for the pride, but for the sake for her own, inspiring dream.

The part that really hit home for me what when Nyad said: "It wasn't so much about the athletic accomplishment; it wasn't the sort of ego of 'I want to be the first.' That's always there, and it's undeniable. But it was deeper, it was how much life is there left. let's face it, we're all on a one way street, aren't we?" She really emphasized the journey versus the destination; what are we going to do as we drive down that street before we hit the dead end? And I felt inspired by these words; it's 9 o'clock at night and I really want to just hop on my longboard and bomb down the hills of Laguna Beach, perfect my tricks, and go fast for the experience. Downhill longboarding seems like the perfect way to emphasize the journey, rather than the destination. I don't normally skate down a hill to reach the bottom, I do it for the exhilarating feeling of going up to 30 mph on a piece of wood and some wheels.

It's the journey we remember, not where we end up.

The second thing that Nyad really credited towards her accomplishment was her team. She believed her team was expert, and without them, she could not have possibly accomplished her dream. Where would I be without my own sort of 'team,' or my friends in this case? They're the ones that push me forward, provide me with the competition and will to improve in the social and athletic gauntlets of being a teenager.

And finally, the main point of the video: Never, ever give up. We hear it at every sappy, motivational speech, but we never really take it to heart. But sometimes you just have to fight your inner demons telling you to stop and push to the end.