Last post it was the Jews in India, now it’s the Irish. Aren’t Slumdog Millionaire, yoga pants and Deepak Chopra enough for you? Let my people go!

D sent me a link to this Trinity College Dublin exhibition with the message, “Shoot! Ended yesterday!”

I’m all about the accumulation of historic knowledge, but it’s just as well that we miss it. Those who have read this blog for some time now know how I feel about colonialism and proselytism. Really, you want me to make a complete haymes of this trip and get kicked out of Ireland for starting the second mutiny in a Dublin museum?

“Friends, desis, countryfrieds, put down your navratan kurma …”

That will end well.

But this, glorious this, before the TCD website takes it down. (Big) Pimpin’ (came from India, apparently). All I need is this outfit (and a pint of Guinness) to be your Rebel Queen.

The next few posts center on my most recent visit to the Art Institute of Chicago. Twenty years I’ve been going to this museum and it has never let me down. There is always something new and walking by the same Renoir, Matta, Rodin and 12th-century religious art is like visiting old friends. I don’t want to leave.

If you are in Chicago right now or plan to visit in the near future, you should check out Jitish Kallat’s Public Notice 3 and the special exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photography.

 You may miss Kallat’s installation because it is, quite literally, underfoot and everyone is usually busy being lost or staring up at the skylights in the quest for Real High Art to realize that, hey, these shiny LED letters are not normally here. OF COURSE there was a part of me that wanted to run up and down the stairs to see if the lights would go off and on as I yelled “Billie Jean is not my lover!”

Remember those words? No, not Michael Jackson’s lyrics, but the ones on the steps. I had to rummage through my memory for a few seconds until it hit me. Pictured above is the first part of the speech with which Swami Vivekananda, the English-speaking, orange-clad monk who brought Hinduism to the west, opened The Parliament of World Religions at the Art Institute on September 11, 1893. As you walk up the stairs, the rest of his words unfold.

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.” Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

The weight and irony of that last paragraph are not lost on Kallat:

Drawing attention to the great chasm between this speech of tolerance and the very different events of September 11, 2001, the text of the speech will be displayed in the colors of the United States“ Department of Homeland Security alert system. Opening on September 11, Public Notice 3 explores the possibility of revisiting the historical speech as a site of contemplation, symbolically refracting it with threat codes devised by a government to deal with this terror-infected era of religious factionalism and fanaticism.

I fear all religions, even Hinduism, have disappointed Swami Vivekananda in the way they have allowed their hateful and tyrannical to speak most vocally and react, not act, on their behalf. It is then up to the rest of us to keep that vision alive by acting through reason and compassion. Wisdom comes when we understand that whatever we want to save in our respective faiths is not worth us turning into that which we hate the most.

But wait, did he say that India contains “the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny?” Hello, calling all HinJews. Come in, Liprap! I told you guys the lost tribe ended up in India. In Cochin, in fact, following “the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE.” And you didn’t believe me. Hmph.

A couple of weekends ago, I finally got to meet the famed dingos of the temple of Athenae. And there was much chaos.

A group of ferrets is called a “business” or busy-ness.

They’re not kidding about the business part. The Chicago mob ain’t got nothing on these critters. They get in everything. Everything. For instance, here’s Bucky looking at my cellphone to call a raccoon about a shipment. Or football bets. Or both.

 And here’s Riot right before he tries to rip my shoe off while Bucky negotiates his piece. Nothing is sacred.

They are truly adorable and warm and cuddly and squishable and whole lots more, especially gentle little Claire bug. Thanks, A, for sharing your squirrels and lovely home with me!

This month’s Accretionary Wedge geology blog carnival. Almost forgot about it. Topic: What is the most important geological experience you’ve had?

One would think it occurred on an outcrop. One would also think it happened on a field trip or at field camp, as it did to rock stars such as Brian Romans, Geotripper, Tuff Cookie and Callan Bentley. One would imagine it transpired while I stared longingly into a microscope at those mesmerizingly birefringent thin sections.

One would be wrong.

Admittedly, what led me to study the discipline was an outcrop which today I can locate only as being somewhere between Salt Lake City and Reno along I-80. I’m aware that is around 500 miles of Basin & Range to choose from. It’s on the north side of the highway, if that helps. I know also that the terrain, especially along the highway, doesn’t lend itself to great revelation as does say The Grand Canyon, the Himalayas, or even the Baraboo Hills of Wisconsin. Furthermore, I painfully admit that, many years later, discovering the photograph I took of said hill after the epiphany leads me to believe there was much sleep deprivation involved. It’s a sad, grey, talus-dripping pile of Unimportant and you don’t want me to scan that picture and post it here. Trust me on this one.

Also, my field camp sucked. Not the Wasatch-Uinta Summer Field Camp Experience® per se, but my crappy six weeks there. A persistent upper respiratory problem, an abraded and severely-dehydrated left cornea, and two professors acting up due to personal problems does not a positive field experience make, however liberating and interesting the field setting. S’il vous plait to leave me at Chateau Apres with le chicken soup.

My most important geological experience happened in 1995 at the department of geology of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. What no outcrops, planely erratic through no fault of their own, subduct Illinois for popcorn, Flatland, your state’s so boring and flat you can put the car in cruise control and take a nap in back, etc. Yes.

Having told my Indian-immigrant parents what I thought of a future in medicine (not much), I embarked on the aforementioned road trip westward and promptly returned to Illinois a few months later, but not before almost losing my eyeballs to the high cost of California living. Back in C-U, I enrolled in accounting and science classes to see what would stick. I kicked Accounting’s rear so hard I could be Lord Comptroller of the known universe right now. Both professors, both semesters, gushed over my attention to detail, the excessive tidiness of my paper balance sheets (you down with OCD? yeah, you know me!), that I would wake up in the middle of the night with solutions to activity rates for cost pools, and that I cracked jokes in class and livened up their otherwise dull classrooms.

But, every once in a while, the little lab-coated girl in me who wanted to be a scientist when she grew up would rear up and say, “Accounting is really tidy and happy-making, but its rules are so arbitrary, sometimes silly and not as inherently open to inquiry as natural laws. What more, this is easy, memorizable stuff. Where’s the challenge?” During that second semester of accounting, well on my way to a corner cubicle at Deloitte & Touche, I was simultaneously enrolled in Geology 101. It was Rocks for Jocks through and through, with full-to-capacity stadium seats oozing out hungover frat boys there for those easy five credits, but taught by a highly intelligent and eager professor named Wang-Ping Chen. I didn’t know what this man was on about with his bright-eyed, impassioned lectures on everything from surficial mass wasting to deep mantle dynamics, but I was determined to see this class through even if it meant arriving early to catch a seat up front (didn’t have to try too hard for those) and staying late to ask real questions about geology and the curriculum, beyond the usual “My roommate peed on my assignment. Can I turn it in late?”

Of great importance to me and the point of this post is that, through the course of the semester, Professor Chen noticed this curiosity and indecision on my part, and went out of his way to convince me to enroll in UIUC’s geoscience program of study. During office hours, he would honestly and tirelessly list all of the degree’s challenges and, like every good Asian parent, none of its rewards. That mineralogy required chemistry and optics, being able to identify thousands of minerals and late hours in the lab. That the geology curriculum required geophysics which in turn needed linear algebra and differential equations and three physics classes including electricity & magnetism. That structural geology was difficult for many but I should take it the following semester when it was offered. That much field and lab work was required on weekends. That distinction and honors in the program (and he expected no less) came only with undergraduate research and a thesis. That beyond here were graduate school, more graduate school and, maybe some day, a postdoctoral position and then the tenure track. Was this man insane? All of this extra work was supposed to entice me into the world of Earth?

But it clicked, didn’t it? For three years, I did all that Professor Chen suggested and more (like the insane goat rodeo that was Sed-Strat, only because we were between decent instructors that semester), and went on to graduate school in structural geology and geophysics. It occurred to me recently that the science-rich life I have now is my reward. I would never have made it in the confines of an accounting firm, and I believe the professor saw that and talked me out in time. Again, he could have very easily told me to go to the department office and fill out a form, but it took the candid scientist and teacher in him to tell me what I was up against, should I choose to accept, and to offer me context and realistic goals. While I talk about my love for the University of Wisconsin as a great scholarly and research institution on par with Stanford, MIT and other global academies, these schools have a lot to learn with respect to the extra care given to those critical undergraduates. For simply read all of the entries in this Accretionary Wedge exercise and then look at the point in the stratigraphic column of each of our careers that we label “Important.”

I lie, Professor Chen did have a tangible and very cool reward for me at the end. After the Geology 101 grades were published and I had submitted my application materials to the geology department, he invited me back to his office. I was offered a brown paper bag (no, not a fifth of Wild Turkey; that comes in graduate school) which contained a hammer I’d never seen before. Its handle was blue with the word Estwing on it in bright yellow letters and in the place of its claw was a sharp pick. “This is a rock hammer, an essential tool for the geologist. You’re going to need it for your upcoming field trips. You will get a bigger version of it if you’re outstanding junior and a Brunton compass if you graduate from this department at the top of your undergraduate class.”

To this day, I count those two rock hammers and Brunton compass as some of my most prized possessions. They are very easily replaced if lost, but they wouldn’t be the ones I earned. They would not be symbols of their trade that were offered out of encouragement, pride, and these geoscientists’ faith in my abilities at a time when I couldn’t see past that Saturday. One of these weeks, I’ll have to email Professor Chen and let him know that I keep the rock hammer he gave me under the passenger’s seat of my car at all times (you never know when a rock sample needs liberating and a hammer is just more me than, say, a baseball bat) and how important and lasting his efforts as an instructor were.

It appears Professor Chen is head of the department now. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.