The Long Awaited Ponniyin Selvan Spectacle

 I come from a family of readers and when I say that most people who know me think I am referring mainly to my dad. But my mom and my paternal grandmom were equally voracious, except they read Tamil literature whereas my dad read mainly in English. Growing up one of the hardest things I had to do in school was to learn Tamil all the way through till my 12th grade. With all the effort one was forced to put in one would barely scrape a 50% in the exam. So reading in Tamil was in my mind never a fun activity despite the fact that we had a writer (Sandilyan) in the family. Leaving TN behind and gaining a few years changes all that. About 20 years back a friend of mine told me he was engrossed in Kalki's Ponniyin Selvan. Now this is a guy I really respect and who I thought shared similar literary interests with me and not a regular Tamil reader. I rarely pass on anything he recommends and so I picked it up and as they say - the rest is history or in my case an obsession.

Since then I've read the books multiple times. I've read them aloud to my nursing daughter, read them over her shoulder when she was being kept upright for burping, even read them at work when I was taking a break. My mom would read them every time she came to the US and we would talk about it. We used to talk about how many people wanted to make a movie out of the novels but never succeeded. We wanted to see it as a a TV series and we would often say who would do it though. I always wished Manohar would have done a stage play out of it. I was also proposing to her that we should do a Ponniyin Selvan roadtrip when I came to India but I would come for such a short time and my daughter was still very young that I didn't want to subject her to it.

Ponniyin Selvan led me to other books by Kalki (Sivagamiyin Sabadam, Parthiban Kanavu) and then I finally picked up my own relative Sandilyan's Kadal Pura, Yavana Rani and Kanni Maadam. I was now hungry for the real history. So I turned to Nilakanta Sastri as I wanted to learn more about the Cholas. From there I became obsessed. Of late, I am devouring Kudavayil Balasubramiam's books and Youtube lectures. I watched a 6-part, 6 hour lecture by Vidya Dehejia on the Chola Bronzes and I am finding more things to read/watch.

So like millions of other fans across many generations I eagerly await the movie by Maniratnam tomorrow. He was the last person I imagined would bring this book to life. He is known for bringing modern, urban, contemporary topics to Tamil cinema and is famous for his (so-called) natural dialogues. I've enjoyed only a few movies of his - Mouna Ragam, Nayagan and Anjali are the only ones I like. I thought Roja and Bombay were too contrived. Agni Natchatram was a product of its time and could have used a great editor. Never saw any of his new movies after Alaipaayudhe. Didn't see Gitanjali, Thiruda Thiruda or Iruvar (I know I sound like Kanchan & Nirmal from Kadhalika Neramillai - "we don't see Tamil pictures, only English pictures") Anyway as you can tell, I am not a Maniratnam fangirl. My favorite Tamil Director was Mahendran. But I am definitely a Ponniyin Selvan devotee. 

Tomorrow's movie is as big as the release of Lord of the Rings or Dune or more accurately (because of the genre) Wolf Hall for me. So I am rooting for its success as I want this story to get the audience it deserves and I cannot deny that Maniratnam and ARR are the only two who can achieve that in this day and age. I know they insist that the majority of the people who come to the movie would have never read the book. But I hope they know that a significant chunk of the population are those who have read it multiple times. It is a Tamil classic that has never been out of print since the 1950s and is probably the only thing that unites many generations of readers. Maniratnam has said he himself is a huge fan of the book which he had first encountered in his teenage years and so I hope he will do justice to it.

I am beyond excited as my daughter who has only heard the story from me and who thinks it is one of the best plots ever is also going to be with me watching it. My husband (who is not a reader) has read only one novel in the 24 years we've been together and that was Ponniyin Selvan. So our family is going to be there tomorrow with my mom watching it in Chennai at the same time. 

Fingers crossed!

Longtermism - What We Owe the Future

 William MacAskill's book What We Owe the Future is a book to be savored and ruminated over. I can't claim to have fully done that, but am hoping that writing about it here will get me closer to digesting the philosophical concepts. As someone involved in climate change advocacy, thinking about future generations or having a hundred-year time horizon is not new to me, but MacAskill's definition of longtermism is not a roadmap till 2100. He wants us to think in terms of millennia. After all, most mammals survive for a million years and Homo Sapiens is not your run-of-the mill box standard mammal. So we can expect our species to last more than a million years provided those of us alive today plan for such a future.

Why Longtermism?

He makes a moral argument that future people matter and they will be more numerous than the current 8 billion of us. However, they are disenfranchised because they cannot vote/sue/plead/bargain with us and so it is imperative as moral beings that we keep them in mind and know that we can positively impact their future.

Threats to Longtermism

So if you bought into the why, then you are now faced with potential threats to the future. How does he identify these threats or problems? He uses a three-pronged framework with significance, persistence, and contingency as the three parts. One of the examples he uses in the book is that of slavery. It was a significant problem affecting millions of people worldwide, it lasted for several hundred years demonstrating it was persistent, but was it contingent - could it have gone away on its own or did it depend on a particular event/ person in the abolitionist movement? Here he introduces us to Benjamin Lay, a person I had never heard of, who kickstarted the abolitionist beliefs amongst Quakers by being a demonstrative moral force. He makes a case that without that turning point in the western world it would have been much harder to get rid of slavery. With this background he goes on to identify the following threats.

1. Climate Change 

This is pretty obvious but it is not just the loss of biodiversity, coral reefs, ice sheets that he is concerned about. A bigger threat because of climate change would be the impact on economic growth rate which in turn can lead to the second threat

2. Civilizational Collapse

In the past many civilizations have collapsed (Rome being the obvious one) but it did not threaten humanity as a whole because at any given time there was a diversity of cultures and political systems around the world. However if the species as a whole is threatened to extinction then we reach a point of no return. What can cause an extinction event - pandemics, wars, and AGI are his potential candidates. To recover from a collapse we will need some foundational technologies and exhausting all the fossil fuel is not a great idea as we might have to rely on them for restarting civilization. Preserving seeds, preserving knowledge are all actions we can take now anticipating this threat.

3. Values Lock-In

Here he talks about the persistence of values in society. Some values get locked in and become harder to change over time. If certain values get locked in early then it becomes very hard to dislodge them in the future. On the cultural side he brings up values of colonialism, fascism and a number of extreme ideologies which appeared to lock up humanity's fate for good over many many years. A recent example of a value lock-in he provides is the global pandemic response. While some countries were a bit more authoritarian than the others and Sweden did its own thing, the rest of the world quickly locked onto one way of handling the pandemic and the vaccine trials. By adopting a more diverse set of approaches he believes that a vaccine would have arrived much earlier and we would have learned more about the disease.

In the sphere of technology he is worried that some lock-in is happening a bit too fast - AGI and synthetic biology are two areas where he is advocating for more ethical research to happen before the tech goes out of control. Although space travel is part of his larger vision he thinks it is too early to lock-in the tech now and believes we first need a framework for cosmos governance etc before billionaires start escaping into space. 

What kind of values are better for the future? He lists a few - cosmpolitanism, concern for non-human animals, liberalism, and consequentialism. Please read the book for more details on each value.

What Can We Do?

Given that our predictions for the future are so unreliable are there steps we can take today to produce a positive change hundreds or thousands of years from now? MacAskill provides a simple three rule guiding principle

1. Take steps that we can be comparatively confident that are good (e.g. invest in clean energy and leave fossil fuels in the ground)
   
2. Keep options open (e.g. encourage diverse cultures/ thoughts/ political systems)
3. Continue to learn more

How to choose the problems to work on?

• Use the significant, persistent, contingent framework
• Focus on neglected problems (he thinks there is a lot of momentum towards addressing climate change but not enough around AI/ Bioethics or even nuclear power)

Finally what is it that an individual can do?

Here he rightly argues that very often the focus quickly comes down to personal consumption - fly less, become vegetarian, recycle. While these are entry points and maybe are important to an individual's life as a moral being and can shield them from accusations of hypocrisy, they are insignificant compared to other things we can do

1. Donate to the right groups: For e.g. becoming vegetarian saves 6 tonnes of CO2 over a 80 year life span. However, he argues donating $3000 to Clean Air Task Force can reduce 3000 tonnes per year
2. Political activism
3. Spread good ideas - talk to friends, family and co-workers about longtermism and what's at stake
4. Have children - this needs a whole lot of discussion; he is not recommending that anyone dictate what a woman should/shouldn't do; but he is arguing against the idea proposed by some environmental activists that not having children reduces our carbon footprint. He makes some compelling arguments for why it is good for the species to have children. Read his book to learn more. He has a lot of info on population ethics.
   

This book has left me with so many questions and I am still thinking through all the points he has raised. I also finished Cixin Liu's Remembrances of the Earth's Past trilogy (Three Body Problem). This dystopia offers a very different view of longtermism. Spanning over hundreds of years this sci-fi trilogy allows us to grapple with many of the philosophical concepts that MacAskill raises but not in an optimistic way. I was so affected by this trilogy for many weeks after finishing it. But that's for another day.

MacAskill provides us with a right dose of optimism and I recommend this book to everyone. Am posting below a few resources

Resources

• Interview with William MacAskill
• Giving What We Can
• Global Priorities Institute
•  80,000 Hours