By Kollengode S Venkataraman, (September 2026)
People cherish friends whom they have known for a long time, or those who have interacted in domains outside their fields where they make their living. Here, people don’t have to wear masks of propriety or social and political correctness.
And when people get together over regional or international cuisine – “ethnic food” is a pejorative term these days – tasting unfamiliar food for the first time, they engage in “carefree, reckless” conversations. “Gay abandon” may be socially incorrect, particularly in NYC or SFO. Here, people engage in conversations jumping from work life, family life, personal life, travel, politics, arts, literature, without the need for neat segues when jumping from one topic to another. Any one phrase used by one person in the conversation can be the jumping-off point to go to another topic.
That is what happened when we went to dinner, taking a friend known for over 40 years, who was new to the Chinese Hot Pot type of cuisine. We went to a noisy small food joint in midtown Manhattan, not a fancy food spot. Wars between Russia and Ukraine, and the American aerial invasion of Iran have been dominating US newsrooms for quite sometime. So, it was inevitable that among the topics we meandered over dinner was the nature of wars. My friend raised the question for all to jump in on why nation-states continue to indulge in war in this day and age. This is a serious question that many other noble souls have raised and pondered over. We were in good company, after all.
During WW II, seeing the material devastation and the brutal deaths of people in the tens of millions, in Europe alone, the Pacifists Movement was reinvigorated and got a new lease of life. Great minds like Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell, well known in the English-knowing world, were active in this discussion. There were others in Germany and France too.
In my formative years, by happenstance, I read their works. One was a thin book, Science, Liberty and Peace by Huxley. I was in my late teens with limited grasp of the nuances of the English language — I started learning English only in the sixth grade in — and I was greatly impressed by his ideas.
What follows is my simple — maybe also simplistic — understanding of mass killing that goes on in modern wars aided by Science and Technology.
Individuals are always motivated by their insecurities (real or imagined), the need for power/control, greed, and profit.
Today, leaders of the geopolitical entities called nation-states, while preparing for war and in times of war, unleash a potent potion of the above ingredients on their citizens, amalgamating them around the idea of patriotism, nationhood, and/or ethnic survival (real or imagined) — often imagined. They also add a good dose of xenophobia, prompting their citizens to respond to their diktat, with disastrous consequences, often to themselves. And throughout history, all the manufacturing resources nation-states have been drafted into these war efforts in direct and indirect ways.
Man — the gender is important here — has always been aggressive by nature (physiology with testosterone and adrenalin…) and instinctively insecure with fear (psychology).
Society also rewards man’s aggression in various ways. In prehistoric times, a man returning from jungles with a lion’s head in hand earned the respect of elders, envy (and eventual admiration) of his peers, and the adoration of the female species in the tribe, for his courage. He became the de facto leader of the tribe – like an aggressive lion controlling the territory and leading the pride.
Today, the lion’s head in a prehistoric man’s hand is replaced by degrees from Ivy League schools, PhDs or MBAs from leading universities, fellowships from hospitals, partnerships in law and accounting firms, tenured professorships, and several million dollars in bank accounts in his 30s. Family pedigree could be the icing on the cake, so to speak. Among Desis in our young days, a US or Canadian Green Card was even better when compared with family pedigree in India.😀
Both in marriages “arranged” by parents and the “self-arranged” marriages by today’s men and women in dating and during prolonged courtship, this continues to be the case, even after Women’s Liberation 😀. It may be worth noticing that the social and economic liberation of women in the middle of the 20th century did not liberate them, it appears to me, in one fundamental way:
“Liberated women” today, even with their economic independence, continue to desire men equally powerful or more in their stressful pairing game, as in prehistoric times. They seem to be constrained by — and not yet liberated from — the compulsions of psychological dimorphism in the animal kingdom 😒.
And Successful women pair with other successful men. This has led to the unintended, but entirely predictable sharp economic polarization within one generation in every homogeneous/demographic/ethnic group. You may intellectually contest this assertion. Then, go beyond your narrow professional/ethnic/demographic group, and just look around. And count how many professional women have married nonprofessional men, and satisfy yourself.
To put this in everyman’s language, throughout history, successful men — however one defines success — have been more desirable, and therefore have had better picks in the cruel world of pairing among Homo sapiens. Those successful in this cruel social game are gleefully smug … at least temporarily 😆. Others who lose out are glum. 🤔
In any case, on war, the small book Science, Liberty and Peace by Huxley was a good starting point for me to plough through abstract ideas, written in long, clearly written paragraphs, with often compound-complex sentences. This book discusses, among other things, on the aggression and the compulsion in men to dominate and control.
Reading through this genre of books requires time and a temperament to read and re-read sentences to internalize their messages. In today’s digital world, where people are in great hurry chasing their individual Holy Grails, both are in short supply. It has become difficult for them to comprehend multifactorial nature of complex issues. They prefer to leave the complexity for analysis to apps downloaded, or AI-assisted programs. That is, they have surrendered — they would call it subcontracted — their discriminating instincts to AI-assisted programs.
This is how our totally unplanned dinner conversation ended. We left the restaurant, and walked around the block for a cup, of coffee. As we took leave, we said to each other, “Have a great day. We had a good time at the Hot-Pot joint, both in food for our palate and also for the food for thought..” END