Adopting the coy style of turn of the century writers, a good friend R., who lives in S., sent me a piece he wrote called “…Backpack”. R’s style is to choose a subject for each of his short essays. The essay is structured in a few short paragraphs, which all end with an ellipsis and the title of the essay (thus, in the piece he sent me, each para ended with …Backpack).
This piece
set me on a long train of thought, which I’m going to detail here, just to
unpack my backpack obsession.
Growing up in
India in the 60's all the way to the mid 70's, neither I nor anybody I knew had
a backpack. We schlepped our stuff to school in clunky box-like cases or jholas.
The latter could be slung nonchalantly over your shoulder or clamped between
your feet in a crowded bus. In fact, public transport was so crowded that you
couldn't think of getting on a bus or tram with a backpack taking up extra
space behind you. As an undergraduate on a campus in the countryside, bicycles
were the main mode of transport, and jholas were still the mainstay of
most students, and no backpacks were to be seen anywhere in the early 80's. In
graduate school in the US in the mid 80's, I was introduced to backpacks and
immediately became addicted to them. Not just for their practicality (for
cyclists, like me), but also because of the feeling that your newly acquired
detachable hunch contains everything you can possibly need for an impossibly
nomadic life, within easy reach.
But then the
whole thing escalates. You start to cram more stuff into your backpack, because
you’ve convinced yourself to believe that you need all of it. Eventually, in my
case, coupled with a difficulty in defining one area of work for the day, I
ended up carrying almost 15 kilos of books and paper, usually using only the
right shoulder strap. This led to a weakening and finally a rupture of the
rotator cuff ligament in my right shoulder. After getting this fixed, I started
using a lighter backpack, organizing myself better and eventually recalling a
passage in Jared Diamond’s preface to Guns, Germs and Steel, now well known as Yali’s
question: “Why is it that you (white) people developed so much cargo and
brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
This led me to question the cargo in my backpack, and in my life, in general.
My earliest
memory of a minimalist experience is secondhand, related to me by an uncle who
received an unexpected visitor in his small, joint family home in Bombay. The
visitor expected to stay with him for a few days and his mantra was that he
needed “Only a mat and pillow” – enough for him to get a comfortable sleep,
causing the least possible impact on the household. And of course, the
background narrative of sannayasa or the fourth ashrama or stage of
life, a state of disinterest and detachment from material life, generally
without any meaningful property or home always appealed to me. There was also the legend of Erdös
Pál, the famous Hungarian nomadic mathematician, who traveled around the world posing
and solving problems. “Erdös traveled with two suitcases, each half-full. One
had a few clothes, the other mathematical papers. He owned nothing else.
Nothing.” (From his Washington Post obituary by Charles Krauthammer, posted at https://www.fmf.uni-lj.si/~mohar/Erdos.html). Then,
more recently, I became aware of the Japanese minimarisuto (minimalist)
movement, through Fumio Sasaki’s book, “Goodbye, Things” in which he delineates
his minimalist manifesto to give his solution to a version of Yali’s question: “Why
do we own so much stuff?”
Finally, as
noted by the minimarisutos of Japan, convergent technology is the
big minimalism driver in the arc that leads from jholas to backpacks to
laptops to airbooks to tablets to (plus size) cellphones, which are now the one
stop substitute for watches, agendas, alarm clocks, timers, calculators, yellow
pads, mirrors, cameras, libraries, bookshelves, gossip sessions, banks, TVs,
GPS, interpreters, photo albums. Just think of the weight of all the stuff that
I no longer need to carry around in my backpack, assuming that I still feel the
need to have one.
Notes:
- By "cargo," Diamond writes, Yali meant material goods, the trappings of technology, "ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas." As Diamond perceived it, this very simple question "went to the heart of life as Yali experienced it," and it raised very significant questions
- The transcript of the Yali episode in the PBS version of Guns, Germs and Steel is available at: http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/show/transcript1.html
- Another view on Yali’s question can be summarized as: “No offense to Yali, but his question should be: Why is cargo distributed so unequally both within and between our societies?” see: https://savageminds.org/2005/07/25/whats-wrong-with-yalis-question/
- Yet another view: In Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture and History, anthropologists Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz tackle the crucial issue of how we think about inequalities of wealth and power worldwide. In contrast to deterministic narratives of human history, like the geography-is-destiny explanation offered in Jared Diamond’s widely read Guns, Germs and Steel, Errington and Gewertz argue that historical outcomes must be understood as the result of the actions of actual people. To understand these actions—and to enable an evaluation of accountability for harms done—we must take seriously the historical and cultural contexts from which these people come and what it is that they desire and think of as feasible to do. Like Diamond, they use Yali’s question as a jumping-off place for a larger discussion but drawing on their more than 30 years of experience working in Papua New Guinea, Errington and Gewertz argue that Diamond fundamentally misunderstood Yali’s question. It was not actually about Western goods, or “cargo,” at all, they argue, but rather about the nature of colonial relationships between white and black people. An influential cargo-cult leader in his day, Yali actively protested such colonial power dynamics, engaging in ritual practices that focused symbolically on Western things, but did so to effect social parity with Westerners. In their own effort to respond to Yali’s question, Errington and Gewertz explore a particular slice of Papua New Guinean history, one in which the struggle for social status and equality on the global stage has been a paramount concern from the outset. Their analysis focuses—perhaps somewhat surprisingly—on a sugar plantation, Ramu Sugar Limited, or RSL, a large-scale national development project created in order to free Papua New Guinea from dependence on sugar imports. Source: https://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/issues/2005_spring/amherst_creates/yali
- On Erdös, also see: https://www.privatdozent.co/p/the-mathematical-nomad-paul-erdos
- For a review of Sasaki’s book by the sloww movement people see: https://www.sloww.co/goodbye-things-fumio-sasaki-book-summary/
- For more on minimarisuto “interiors” (Minimarisuto implements the Zen philosophy & culture into the aesthetic, design and aroma of candles) see https://www.instagram.com/minimarisuto_official/
