The Joys of Observing Feisty and Playful Hummingbirds

I make it a point to keep the hummingbird feeder in my porch filled with bright-red nectar. I am not sure how much it helps the intended recipients who nest in the shrubs around my home. There are plenty of myrtles, oleanders and honeysuckles to offer an unending source of energy to these hyper avians.

No, the reason I frequently replenish the feeder springs from a selfish motive: I find the hummingbirds an unending source of joy. Never a dull moment when they are around.

In this time of house arrest forced by the coronavirus, I find more time than usual to observe Anna’s hummingbirds. These birds are a common sight in the Bay Area, particularly during Spring and Summer.

And what I find during the hours of the day surprises me. Pleasantly, I must add. These little bundles of energy are fierce, feisty, and territorial, ready to go to war at a moment’s notice when others intrude into what they think belongs rightfully to them. Opinionated, unpredictable birds are clearly more fun to watch than the meek and predictable kind.

There is this one male Anna that seems to dominate the brood. I see its iridescent pink throat patch (a “gorget” for purists) as it looks up and around stretching its neck. It sits on a perch next to the feeder and looks for intruders tempted to alight on the feeder for a quick sip. There is no mistaking its intention, in the way this neighborhood bully surveys its domain with a glare: “Thou Shalt Not Drink From My Well!” It makes high-frequency chirps – chik, chik, chik - designed to strike terror into the hearts of other Annas. The perch is a loop I wove from wires stringing together decorative holiday lights from the past.

So this is what I see as the sun climbs the sky and then slowly, languorously, begins to descend in the lingering summer days.

The aggressive (but with a benign side as well, as I was to find out later) Anna surveys its surrounding from its perch. Suddenly it takes off in a blur and attacks two Annas hovering near the feeder. Its “do or die” aggression is too much and the two beat a hasty retreat.

Just as suddenly and inexplicably, there is peace and three, sometimes even four, hummingbirds sip nectar from their slots, their long sword-like bills deep inside the feeder.

Within seconds the truce is broken, and a war erupts, with astounding acrobatics and aerial assaults and piercing sounds livening the show.

And so it continues throughout the day, friendship and enmity alternating between Anna’s hummingbirds for reasons hidden from me, and I suspect, from bona fide ornithologists as well.

Why do birds do what they do? It is a profound question to ask, even though the answer will always remain elusive. It is perhaps wiser to observe birds for the sheer pleasure of them, to listen to them, whether singing their hearts out or warning interlopers with high-frequency threats.

In time, some patterns will emerge – some avian variation of Fibonacci Numbers, perhaps - and we will experience a thrilling sense of discovery. 

I can see a pattern emerging for the Anna’s hummingbirds that I am lucky to observe, although I cannot articulate it yet.

No matter. Birds make the earth more hospitable and life more livable. That’s a gift that’s a source of gratitude and grace.

We Must Be Free of Fear and Full of Hope

A pandemic more lethal than Covid-19 is convulsing America now. It is the pandemic of weaponized racism. 

We have all been traumatized by the video of life seeping out of George Floyd in real time as a Minneapolis policeman pressed his knee on his neck and cuts off his air supply. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd pleaded in his dying moments. In response, the white police office casually put his left hand in his pocket, adjusted his knee for maximum force, and kept the pressure on until George Floyd literally breathed his last.

In just the last few years we have seen several African-Americans paying the ultimate price at the hands of police and vigilantes for no fault other than having the ‘wrong’ shade of skin. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Botham Jean, Amadou Diallo, Freddie Gray, Sam Dubose, Terence Crutcher, Jamar Clark ... the list goes on and on.

Tommie Smith (won the gold medal in the 200-meter sprint finals in 19.83 seconds, first time the 20-seconds barrier was broken) and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists during the medal ceremony in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as symbols of Black Power and Human Dignity.

Statues of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the Campus of
San Jose State University, their alma mater. Photo by Hasan Z Rahim

Fifty two years later, not only has nothing changed, it has become worse for African-Americans, particularly after Trump's rise to power.

How many of us can really feel in our guts the existential threat African-Americans experience every time they venture out to go the grocery store, to the local Starbucks, or to watch birds in a park, wondering, "Will I return alive from this outing?"

We have regressed to the extent that we keep asking ourselves, Is this America?

Police and vigilante brutality against minorities, particularly African-Americans, has reached par with the Apartheid at its worst in South Africa six decades or so ago, even though white supremacy was written into the South African constitution, not in the U.S. Constitution.

But words are cheap. What happens on the ground is reality; hallowed words are not.

Will Gandhi's non-violence work in America? Will Martin Luther King's? Will Thoreau be our guide?

That we are forced to raise these questions show the depth to which America has fallen under Trump and his enablers. The status quo has got to change.

The knee against the neck, against the jugular veins of an entire race, cutting off oxygen, surely cannot continue indefinitely. Something's gotta give. George Floyd was not an anomaly. He was the normal.

Fear has gripped us all. But fear can only create flimsy institutions. If whites band together for Trump because they fear "others" will become majority and take over everything, well, almost everything, that was "rightfully" theirs, then we will end up with a fractured country so stark that it will consist of nothing but bits and pieces, shards that are easily weaponized.

I am brown and Muslim and I say, along with millions of my fellow-Americans irrespective of color or faith, that we must be free of fear and full of hope for America not just to survive but thrive.

If we can aspire to that, we can say George Floyd did not die in vain.

May we all wake up to the light of decency and good governance on 4^th November, 2020. 

Trees and Birds are Antidotes to the Pandemic

Yes: No doubt confinement can lead to a renewal in our relationship with nature. Covid-19 has brought the world to its knee, true, but bright people are working night and day to unlock the killer’s secret, to strip it of its corona, to defang and defeat it.

In the meantime, what do we do? Social distancing is the norm but we can go out to bask in the spring sunshine alone or in pairs, walk the edge of wilderness to, as Thoreau put it, revive ourselves with “the tonic of wildness … at the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

Suddenly we are rediscovering our primal origin simply by putting one foot in front of the other and … walking. And seeing. And observing. And wondering how we could have overlooked the wonders just beyond our doorsteps!

Well, there’s an obvious answer: For far too long we have been living by keeping our nose on the grindstone, day in and day out. Even the change of seasons did not register on our senses. Work, work, work, money, money, money. Muddle through life with blinders on.

The coronavirus pandemic has enforced isolation but it has also taken down the barrier we erected between ourselves and nature. Whether absorbing sunlight in car-free roads and pathways or simply sitting and letting nature’s pageantry pass by in slow time, we are discovering that, as Shakespeare put it, “One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin."

With the shelter-in-place, I go out walking twice daily. There are plenty of quiet trails, empty roads and acres of rolling greens near where I live. Golfers used to dominate this pastoral slice of the earth, but their swings have fallen silent and now walkers have taken over.

Lyrical Oak - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

For the first time in years, I find myself soaking in plentiful sunshine filtered by oaks, maples, willows and eucalyptuses. I lie in their seductive shadows, looking up at the clouds moving ever so slowly and the lyrical limbs of the trees creating a forest of myth and songs. By and by I become aware of the grass I am lying on and the earth beneath it. I feel my veins and nerves growing into the ground and communicating with the roots beneath me. I am woven into the roots and the leaves. I am one with the universe.

Eventually I get up and enter the realm of birds.

Robin in action - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

A robin – rotund, well-fed - lands in front of me. It begins pecking at the earth with purpose and lo and behold! a worm is wriggling in its bill. One gulp and the worm is history! I observe it from a respectful distance. Soon I realize that it has not wasted a single peck at the earth: Every time it probes, it brings out a worm. It’s as if it knows exactly where the insect is crawling underneath the ground, invisible to the human eye. How does the robin know its location with such precision, correct 100% of the time! Apparently, as I learned later from the Internet, it is mostly through its exceptional vision. A robin can see small changes in soil and grass as worms move just below the surface and locate it with pin-point precision. It also relies on its acute hearing. As worms move about, they disrupt the soil, causing small particles of dirt to rub together. While it is too faint for humans to hear, it is audible to migratory songbirds like robins. I kept thinking: If we could somehow harness the collective intelligence of the robins, we could banish or destroy this deadly coronavirus for good.

Phoebe - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

What symbol of freedom birds are! There are the phoebes snapping insects right out of the air. Sparrows and finches flit about with no cars and humans to disrupt their carefree flights. I catch a finch feeding its baby. An oak titmouse tilts its head, surrounded by dense clusters of pink trumpet flowers.

Finches feeding - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Oak Titmouse - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Suddenly my eye is drawn to a splash of bright red pecking away at the bark of a pine: an acorn woodpecker! It angles its bill precariously to probe a cavity in the pine, no doubt devouring whatever is crawling inside. It then rights itself and starts climbing up the tree in short bursts, circling around the trunk with a balance and an agility beyond world-class gymnasts. And then suddenly it’s a blur as it flies away.

Acorn woodpecker - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

And what about the pied-billed greb coolly appraising the strange humans at the edge of the pond gawking at it? Or the ducklings getting their first swimming lessons (alright, maybe the fourth or the fifth) from their parents?

Pied-billed Greb - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Ducklings get swimming lessons - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

For the Anna’s hummingbird nesting in the trees around my house, I only have to open my front door and there it is, sipping nectar from the pink flowers in the hedge directly across. Occasionally I see a pair and hear their high-pitched calls. These tiny fearless restless bundles of energy with metabolism that can put any human to shame are heavy drinkers, so I make sure my feeder is always brimming with nectar.

Anna's Hummingbird - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Northern flicker - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

On another day during my morning walk a bird alights in front of me literally out of the blue. I cannot believe the exotic nature of this bird, speckled with black dots on a pinkish body, with a dark, almost heart-shaped image on its chest, or is it a map of the United States, as if a graphics designer had imprinted it there. Before I could savor its beauty to my heart’s content, it flew away, but I was grateful for those few moments of wonder. I looked it up and learned that I had seen a northern flicker.

Thereafter, I began to see Northern flickers more and more. It’s like those words we sometimes look up in the dictionary and then we begin to see the words more frequently in everything we read. Flickers have long, sharp bills that allow them to dig deep into the earth for their meals.

Goslings - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Another day, I saw the last rays of the sun lighting up the fur finery of goslings, watched over by their serene mother. The goslings were gallantly trying to walk, stumbling, falling, regaining balance and moving on. We use the word ‘cute’ far too often and have diminished its meaning but if the word were to describe just one type of living being on earth, it has to be goslings.

Bluebird - (c) by Hasan Z Rahim

But the bird that takes my breath away is the blue bird, part sky, part sunrise and sunset, and all beauty. The blue of the male is so pure it glistens. The females are not as showy, while fledglings are grayish with spots on them. Two pairs of bluebirds that nest in maples, oaks and beech are just a few yards from my doorstep. Sometimes I see a bluebird on a pink trumpet tree, the flowers in gorgeous contrast to its blue. Sometimes I see one with a worm dangling from its bill. These birds are alone worth losing oneself in the outdoors, particularly during this enforced isolation.

Bluebirds - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

“All of humanity’s problems,” wrote Pascal, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Well, I have a perfect excuse for feeling restless sitting in a room. At a certain hour of the day, when the sun hasn’t crossed the meridian yet and a light breeze is blowing, the bluebird beauties beckon, and I no longer sit quietly in a room alone.

Srinivasa Ramanujan and Lessons for Today's India

Today, April 26, 2020, marks the centennial death anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the self-taught math genius born into a poor family in Southern India in 1887 under British colonial rule, who conjured theorems and formulas in his short 32 years of life that continue to intrigue and challenge mathematicians to this day.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

The anniversary comes at a tragic time for India. Sectarian and police violence have claimed many lives, mostly Muslim, following the passing of a discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 aggressively promoted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indians of all faiths have been demonstrating against the law, although the coronavirus contagion has halted it for now. (But the pandemic has added its own macabre twist to the story. Reports are now emerging that right-wing fanatics are attacking and killing Indian Muslims for spreading the virus!) The original Citizenship Act of 1955 guaranteed citizenship to every Indian irrespective of religion, reflecting the aspirations of a secular, democratic nation. The amended bill favors all major religions of South Asia except Islam, a blatant discrimination against India’s 200-million Muslim community.

Remembering Ramanujan against today’s India offers lessons about the insidious ways by which bigotry and injustice can erode the soul of a nation and stifle the flowering of its geniuses.

Ramanujan would have withered away as a shipping clerk in Madras (now Chennai) had it not been for the patronage of an Englishman. In 1913, the same year that Rabindranath Tagore, another son of India, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ramanujan wrote a letter to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy to rescue him from oblivion. Trying to digest the 50 or so theorems included in the letter, Hardy realized he was dealing with a rare phenomenon. The mathematics seemed so sublime that Hardy was convinced “the results must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.”

Ramanujan's Letter to Hardy

G.H. Hardy

Hardy managed to bring Ramanujan to England through a grant, giving him an intellectual home at Cambridge where he flourished for five years, producing pioneering work in such branches as number theory and partition function that secured his reputation as among the greats of mathematics. The serendipitous discovery of Ramanujan’s “Lost Notebook” by Wisconsin University Mathematics professor George Andrew in 1976 that included calculations involving “mock theta functions,” 56 years after he worked them out in India, has added to the enigma and the otherworldly genius of Ramanujan. The late physicist Freeman Dyson (1923-2020) aptly summed up Ramanujan’s achievement: “That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover … I have intermittently been coming back to Ramanujan’s garden. Every time I come back, I find fresh flowers blooming.”

From Ramanujan's Notebooks

Ramanujan’s theorems are now applied in fields ranging from particle physics and statistics to cryptology and computer science. His approximation for pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, finds use in today’s fastest algorithms in computing the irrational number to trillion decimal places.

Ramanujan was lucky. (So was Tagore. Had not the Irish poet Yeats championed his work in the West, the Bengali poet would unlikely to have won the Nobel.) But for every Ramanujan who succeeded, how many Ramanujans must have died on the vine when the British ruled the Subcontinent for over a century? Colonial powers by their nature subjugate, exploit and massacre. But when the oppressors are one’s own leaders, what’s the excuse? Modi and his BJP passed the Citizenship Act to marginalize Muslims or drive them out of India. Such overt discrimination affects not only the target population but the entire nation, preventing potential Tagores and Ramanujans from ever seeing the light of day.

The human potential of India is incalculable. We get a sense of it by the disproportionate number of Indian American engineers and CEOs keeping hi-tech companies humming right here in Silicon Valley. Brain drain from India and other countries will continue so long as the West offers better opportunities to immigrants. While India cannot provide such opportunities for all, passing discriminatory laws against a segment of its population diminishes the nation and shackles its geniuses, be they Hindu, Sikh, Christian or Muslim. When a government becomes tyrannical, the creative vitality of its people seeps away as from cut flowers in a vase.

Ramadan in the Time of Pandemic

You can read a slightly different version of this in the San Jose Mercury News

This year’s Ramadan (April 24 to May 23) comes at perhaps the most challenging time of our lives. A killer virus is advancing like wildfire across the globe, leaving heartbreak and death in its wake. Confined to our homes, we are stressed and uncertain of the present and the future.

But hope is native to our nature. The Quran, the Islamic Book of Divine Guidance, instructs us never to give in to despair. Certainly no one despairs of God’s Mercy … (12:87)

When we become complacent and think that we can dictate our destiny, God warns us: And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient, who, when disaster strikes, say, “Indeed we belong to God, and indeed to Him we will return.” (2:155-156)

But God also assures us that Surely with hardship comes ease. Indeed, with hardship comes ease. (94:5-6) 

In this trying time, Ramadan reminds us to slow down, to pause and reflect on life’s big questions of meaning and purpose. So, where are you going? (81:26) asks the Quran. We must ask ourselves: Where, indeed, am I going with my life? Is it aligned with God’s expectations of me as defined by God, or am I going astray from a combination of ego, ingratitude, impatience, forgetfulness and other assorted flaws?

As we Muslims welcome Ramadan into our lives, we must remember the many in our community who have lost their jobs - cabdrivers, office assistants, caregivers, domestic help, daily wage earners, and others. They are among the more than 22 million of our jobless fellow-Americans facing a frightening future. We are traditionally most generous during Ramadan, and we pray that we can be even more generous during this Ramadan. Charity, the Quran tells us, is for the neediest, regardless of religion, particularly those who do not ask for help due to modesty or embarrassment. We must find and help them without in any way hurting their sense of dignity and self-respect

The doors of our mosques are closed, as are the doors of churches, synagogues, and temples. But thanking God for His blessings, mercy and forgiveness in the sacred days and nights of Ramadan can open windows in our hearts. Never for a moment should we forget that repentance can lead to redemption and remembrance of God to renewal. The dark shadow of life’s pain will, God Willing, be dispelled soon by the bright sunshine of life’s promises.

As it happens, today, Wednesday, April 22, 2020, is Earth Day. Fifty years ago, it dawned on us that there was no Planet B, that the Earth was the only home we had, and unless we cared for her, we were doomed. The forced isolation of the coronavirus has done one good thing: with little pollution defiling Mother Earth, the sky looks clearer and the vegetation pristine. Covid-19 pandemic has taught that we are not really the masters of the universe that we think we are. We know very little and our capacity is extremely limited. We have been committing crimes against nature, against animals, against all the sentient beings that we share the earth with. A single novel virus has collectively brought us to our knees. To survive, we must replace our hubris with humility. Repentance can lead to redemption and responsibility to renewal. That is also the lesson of Ramadan.

Uncertainty of the Coronavirus Pandemic: Humility Before Nature

William Goldman, the talented Hollywood screenwriter (1931-2018), summed up the impossibility of predicting which movie will be a hit and which not, with this pithy perspective: “Nobody knows anything.” (He qualified his statement with “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.” But no one quotes the long qualifier when three words do a far better job than thirty.)

William Goldman - "Nobody knows anything"

Goldman’s 3-word phrase springs to mind when we hear all the punditry and stupidity (the latter emanating mostly from the clueless, ignorant liar-in-chief narcissist in the White House) surrounding the coronavirus pandemic. Nobody knows anything. Well, some experts in the field, mostly researchers who have studied pandemics all their lives in the field or in the lab, probably know something but what they do not know - and they will be the first one to tell you - is so much more than what they do that, even for them, the ratio of the known to the unknown is practically zero.

What is worth reflecting on is the rate at which the killer virus is leaving death in its wake. One word that sums it up is “exponential,” a mathematical concept many of us are familiar with from such media phrases as “CEO compensations are increasing exponentially” or “Many species of the world are decaying exponentially.”

If the coronavirus infects 1 person today, who in turn infects 2 tomorrow, each of whom infects 2 the following day to make it 4, and so on, it is an exponentially increasing (doubling) function. It is base 2 raised to d, the number of days since the 1^st infection, that is, 2^d. What if the 1^st person infects 3 rather than 2, and those 3 each infect 3 the following day, and so on. In that case, it is 3^d, the base being 3 (tripling) rather than 2.

You can see what we need to do to make the infection rate decay: Make the base less than 1, until the number of infections “asymptotically” (that is, very close to but not exactly equal to) approach 0.

But that decay rate is nowhere in sight.

For example, on Tuesday, March 17, it was reported that there were just more than 5,700 confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States. That number climbed above 11,500 on Thursday, March 19, and officials indicated the number will continue to rise sharply as more test results become available.

The number doubled in 2 days. The exponentially increasing function is now (5700)2^d/2, where 5,700 is the initial count and d is the number of days since the initial count.

If somehow we could replace that base 2 (doubling) with say, 0.7, then (5700)(0.7)^d/2 will rapidly “approach” 0.

One way to understand the numbers is to take this paragraph from a recent opinion piece by the NY Times columnist Tom Friedman:

“One of the hardest things for the human mind to grasp is the power of an exponential, something that just keeps relentlessly doubling and doubling, like a pandemic. The brain just can’t appreciate how quickly 5,000 cases of confirmed coronavirus infection in America can explode into one million if we don’t lock down now. Here’s a simple way to explain the exponential threat we face, in a way an oft-bankrupt real estate developer like Donald Trump might understand. It was also offered by Bill Joy: ‘The virus is like a loan shark who charges 25 percent a day interest. We borrowed $1 (the first coronavirus to appear here). We then fiddled for 40 days. Now we owe $7,500. If we wait three more weeks to pay, we’ll owe almost $1 million.’”

Let’s do the math.

A loan shark charges me $0.25 per day compounded on a $1 I borrowed from him (I am not aware that there has ever been a woman loan shark. It's always men!) So, at the end of the first day, I, the borrower, owe the shark $1.25. At the end of the 2nd day, I owe the shark interest on interest, which amounts to (1.25)² (1.25 raised to the power of 2.) So, at the end of 40 days, I will owe him (1.25)⁴⁰ = $7,523.16, which rounds off to $7,500. After 3 more weeks, that is, 61 days later, I owe the shark (1.25)⁶¹ = 815,663.05, which is close to 1 Million Dollars!

The way to win this battle, and also the war, is to make that 1.25 LESS than 1, say, 0.8, so we experience exponential decay. In that case, after 40 days of decay, the number reduces to (0.8)⁴⁰ = 0.0001329, which is one-hundredth of 1%! It's in the math. We need to make that number in the parenthesis less than 1 before we can resume normal life.

So how do we make the base of the exponential function less than 1? That’s the trillion-dollar question facing us today. Social distancing, better-equipped health workers and hospitals, proper hygiene, and a combination of many more yet unknown factors can perhaps force the killer virus to be on the decaying curve. But again, we just don’t know! No matter how much fancy statistics and solutions we weave and spin, we just don’t know!

While the mathematics of increasing and decaying exponential models are known with certainty, the nature and the destructive power of the coronoavirus pathogen is unknown. We only know that unchecked, it grows exponentially, but if somehow checked, will decay and eventually, for all practical purposes, disappear.

Consider Hemingway’s insight in this dialogue from his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises”: “How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

The initial increase from 1 to 2 to 4 seems gradual when suddenly, before we know it, the virus has infected over 65,000 and then more, and yet more, with its limitless, voracious appetite.

People who spout certainty when life is fundamentally uncertain are the real ignoramuses, no matter how powerful or wealthy or apparently smart they may appear be. In contrast, those with real knowledge are humble when confronted with the unknown. They know that nature’s imagination is superior to human imagination. To glimpse into the inner workings of nature, whether of physical laws or of pathogens, they know that first they must acknowledge, “I don’t know.” This is also true from a theodicy perspective. Priests, Rabbis and Imams afflicted with religious chauvinism who think they know how God’s mind works with certainty are as guilty as arrogant scientists and political leaders in misleading us.

“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition,” said Voltaire, “but certainty is a ridiculous one.”

In the next year or two, brilliant but humble researchers will undoubtedly have made slow but significant progress in deciphering the working of the killer coronavirus and ways of neutralizing it. The rate of their progress will be anything but exponential. Yet they offer us hope that one day this virus will have met its match in their ingenuity. If you were to ask one of them what the catalyst was for her breakthrough, she will unhesitatingly tell you, “I began by acknowledging that I didn’t know.”