Travel notes from Chiapas, Mexico -- Part 1

This isn't the first time I've written about my Mexico trip of last Dec-Jan. But I still feel there's plenty to write, and in this series, I hope to cover all that I have missed in previous posts (though there will be some overlap of course). Earlier posts, both short and long: A whirlwind summary of Mexico, Ganesha in Mayan country, Arqueologia and Cibersexo in Mexico City, Along the Usumacinta, Conversions and the Virgin of Guadalupe, San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan.

Please also bear while I figure out the typos in this post.

1.

I had expected Chiapas to be somewhat remote – at least, that’s what the guides and the travel articles had said about this small state at the southern end of Mexico. When my flight began its final approach to the airport in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state’s capital, I saw no lights below. We could have been landing in the middle of nowhere. But the busy-looking travelers on the flight – some of them spiffily dressed as if attending some business meeting even though it was Christmas Eve – suggested that there was more to Tuxtla. And this turned out to be the case.


The airport was quite some distance away from the city; the taxi to town cost me twenty two dollars. We drove through a desolate, winding road (the driving – a warning of what was to come for the duration of my stay -- was casually reckless). As the city got closer, a few single story car repair shops and houses came into view. Men in vests sat outside in plastic chairs. At an intersection that occurred at an elevation, the sprawl of Tuxtla became obvious: bright lights stretching far into the distance, along the slope of hills and in the valley they formed. The city, though provincial, was much larger than I’d thought. And perhaps it is the only city in Chiapas with visible American consumerist icons – I mention this because the state itself is poor and has been the center of an armed left wing movement.

I was staying at the Holiday Inn. The same street – Belisario Dominguez – also contained other American transplants: Wal-Mart and Sears. Attached to the sparkling red and white bus station nearby was a massive mall with the usual mix of expensive stores, eateries (Mexican-adapted), and a chic store where beautiful puppies – sorrowfully howling behind glass cases – were being sold. The mall’s swanky look owed a great to its many janitors who appeared out of nowhere to efface the slightest trace of a blemish on the gleaming floors.

The Holiday Inn restaurant was full that night; there was some live music, and it appeared you needed reservations to eat. I was surprised by the restaurant’s seeming prominence – was it simply because of its affiliation to an American hotel? Because the food was tasteless imitation Western fare – meat, boiled vegetables – and the waiters looked uncomfortable in their roles. The restaurant reverted, wisely, the next day to a Chiapanecan breakfast: frijoles or mashed pinto and black beans, tamales made the regional way, fresh squeezed juices and the ubiquitous assortment of Mexican salsas.

2.

In the afternoon, I took a bus to San Cristobal de Las Casas in the state’s central highlands. We ascended slowly; the dense mountain greenery – a feature of Chiapas -- was startling. Some of the steepest of slopes had plots of corn with yellowing shoots of the crop. An hour later, we were at our destination: narrow alleys; cheek-by-jowl houses with red roofs; walls painted in contrasting colors; beautiful churches; mountains all around. San Cristobal is a quaint place.

Picture of a street I took in San Cristobal

But the quaintness disappeared when I traveled a few days later to the state’s deep south – up to the Usumacinta River, which forms the border between Mexico and Guatemala. The eight hour ride took us to an elevation of 11,000 feet before setting us down in the humid plains close to the Lacandon Rainforest. The towns and villages became a lot more ragged and poorer the farther south we went. In the first millennium AD, the Mayans had built incredible structures in this overly fecund and difficult terrain, even as they fought brutally among themselves. Those ruins now survive, testament to their architectural and organizational skills, covered though they are in moss and shrouded by the all-consuming rainforest. The humbling twists of history have meant that the descendents of the same the same Mayans are now some of the poorest in the country.

Picture of moss-covered ruins at Yaxchilan

My fellow travelers were all from Mexico City. Chiapas was as novel and “exotic” to them as it was to me. In this sense they were like metropolitan Indians journeying through the country’s less visited parts – Orissa or Chhattisgarh, say.

The likeness does not end there. Maoist movements are strong in the forested and remote but resource-rich parts of India – along what is called the red corridor, a vast swathe that stretches along the eastern half of India, from the south, in Andhra Pradesh, all the way to Nepal (from “Pasupathy to Tirupathy” as Sudeep Chakravarti puts it in his book about India’s Maoist movements, Red Sun). Chiapas, too, is remote, forested and resource rich; and in the 1990s it was the center of a major leftist movement, the Zapatista Rebellion. In fact, the Zapatistas announced themselves the same day the neoliberal North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect on Jan 1st 1994. The poor of Chiapas – indigenous Mayan Indians with their own distinct languages – still sympathize with the Zapatistas, and this is evident from the graffiti that you see on billboards and walls. Muera El Sistema Capitalista, one of them read -- Death To The Capitalist System. And just as the Indian government is trying hard to fight the Maoists, so in Chiapas military checkpoints are everywhere along the main routes in the south of the state. The hunt for rebels is still on, though the situation -- for now -- is stable.

To be continued...

The story of our food

I've always wondered what Indian cuisine was like before the 16th century. A slew of now indispensable grains, nuts, vegetables, fruits, intoxicants -- corn, groundnuts, cashews, guavas, cheekus (sapotas), papaya, pineapple, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco -- from Mexico, Central and South America reached the Indian subcontinent via the Europeans in the late 1500s, but these delights had been missing until then. And in the list above, I've deliberately not mentioned that one ingredient absolutely essential to many Indian dishes now. Instead, let me quote KT Acharya, author of the short but informative book, The Story of Our Food:

We had a glimpse in the last chapter that chillis are not really Indian. These wonderful materials were brought to India from Mexico, perhaps in the late 16th century. They took a little while to catch on, but in about a hundred years, the use of chillis spread to every part of India. Before that it was [black] pepper that as used to give the pungency that is so characteristic of Indian food. In one of the sections of Ain-i-Akbari, written in 1590, there is a list of 50 dishes cooked in Akbar's court: all of them use only [black] pepper to impart spiciness. In most Indian languages, the name for chilli is simply a variation of the earlier name for [black] pepper in the same language. For example, in Hindi we say kalimirch for black pepper and harimirch for chili. In Tamil, the word for pepper is milagu and that for chili is milagai (=milagu-kai (pepper+fruit)). In Kannada, the words are karimenasu and menasinkayi. Try this exercise in your own language.

It is not difficult to understand why the chilli quickly replaced black pepper in our cooking. While the black pepper vine grows almost only in Kerala, chillis can be grown in almost every backyard, or cultivated in the fields, all over the country. Thus, they were easily available everywhere at a low price. All the many varieties that we know come to us from Mexico and none of them was developed afterwards in India. These include the green chili, red chili, long red chilli, very small and very hot green bird chilli, and the large mild capsicum. To make chilli-powder, the long bright-red variety with think skins can be dried in the sun, and ground either with its seeds to give more pungency, or without it to give a milder chilli-powder. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say the humble chilli from Mexico really revolutionized the food of India.

Indeed, we are thankful to Mexico for that. The story of food reveals a complex history of interconnections; it is really a history of globalization -- a globalization much older than the modern, accelerated version that is much talked about. What seems native now was once foreign. Think of it: Italian food before the 16th century was without tomatoes! No one in Africa, Europe, and Asia had tasted potatoes -- a staple now, worldwide-- before the Spanish conquest connected us with the Andes where it was originally cultivated, thousands of years ago, by the Indians there.

To, finish, here's another excerpt from the same book -- hat tip, Nitin Pai. All parts in italics are Acharya's quotes from original sources.

Many animal foods are described with great relish in the early Tamil literature.

Even Brahmins did not lack relish for the meat and toddy served to them at feasts held by the chieftains and princes of the land.

The meat dishes cooked with (black) pepper were called kari in Tamil, a word now used in English as curry. Fried spiced meat was called tallita-kari, fried meat was pori-kari, and meat with a source sauce made of tamarind was termed pulingari…

Beef was freely eaten: there are four names for this meat in the early Tamil language, showing that it was a common and well-liked food. In the north, as we have seen, the domestic fowl was not eaten, but there was no such taboo in the south. Other delicacies were the cooked aral fish served piping hot, and the meat of the tortoise, rabbit and hare. Wild boar was hunted using nets; it was then kept in a pit and fattened by feeding it with rice flour to yield pork of exceptional taste.

Here is a description from the Tamil literature of a feast given about 150 AD by a Chola ruler:

Goblets of gold with intoxicating liquor, soft-boiled legs of sheep fed on sweet grass, and hot meat, in large chops, cooked on the points of spits … fine cooked rice which, erect like fingers and with unbroken edges, resemble the buds of the mullai (jasmine) flower, together with curries sweetened with milk.

It is interesting to note the reference to wine and to roast kababs, and the beautiful comparison of shining white rice grains to jasmine buds. Tamil literature also describes the brisk trade with both the east and the west from the ports of south India; one commodity brought in was Italian wine for use by the royalty.

Maoist movements in India -- Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun

Sudeep Chakravarti is the author of the very revealing and disturbing Red Sun, a travelogue through the states in India affected by left wing extremism (Maoism, also interchangeably referred to as Naxalism). Rohit Chopra has an excellent interview with the author. Here's Chakravarti's long, thoughtful answer to Chopra's question:

What made you write this book? Why did you feel this story had to be told?

I have spent my career as a journalist, both as reporter and editor, tracking India’s economic development, meeting those on the “street”, as well as top ministers, entrepreneurs, and executives from India and abroad; and attending summits from Delhi to Davos. I am a direct beneficiary of India’s ongoing economic liberalization and freedom of expression that India’s urban middle classes have come to take for granted. But there is an issue I did not wish to keep quiet about. Except for perhaps a ‘unity’ based on the rupee, corruption, cinema, and cricket, there is a grave disconnect between urban and rural India and even within urban India. This disconnect is economic, social, and political. Seventy percent of India is away from the ‘growth party’. To imagine that India can be unstoppable with its gross poverty and numbing caste issues is to be in lunatic denial, a display of unstoppable ego.

Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country was a story waiting to be told. There is a fairly large and excellent body of non-fiction writing on the Naxal movement of the 1960s and early 1970s and on various subsequent extreme-Left incarnations through the 1980s, in several Indian languages and in English. But besides the occasional media coverage around the time of major skirmishing between rebels and security forces, there isn’t a book on the movements of today as driven by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) that attempts to demystify the Naxal movement.

The second reason for the book was that there is a great lack of telling the human story about and around the present play of Left-wing rebellion. Typically, one comes by statistics and glib sound bites. The dispossessed and the dead are not numbers; they were–and are–people. With Red Sun I have attempted to humanize a very tragic conflict, of a country at war with itself.

A third reason is that learned writing about Maoism in India (which continues to be interchangeably referred to as Naxalism) is generally restricted to academic journals and analyses by think-tanks. There is a crying need to mainstream it, tell the lay reader, as it were, about what is going on, shake ‘middle India’ out of its mall-stupor and diminish the delusions of grandeur of India’s lawmakers.

There was every reason to write Red Sun. The truth about this wrenching war has to be told.

Naipaul on writing

Am short on time, so here are some quick quotes by VS Naipaul from this superb essay on being a writer. Who else, I wonder, writes such great prose, such charged sentences? (The elegance of his writing is in sharp contrast to his obnoxiousness in real life -- read Patrick French's biography if you need to know more.)

All literary forms are artificial, and they are constantly changing, to match the new tone and mood of the culture. At one time, for instance, a person of serious literary inclination might have thought of writing for the theater; would have had somehow to do what I cannot do—arrange his material into scenes and acts; would not have written for the printed page, but would have written "parts" to tempt actors and—as someone who has written plays has told me—would have visualized himself (to facilitate the playwriting process) as sitting in a seat in the stalls.

At another period, in an age without radio or records, an age dominated by print, someone wishing to write would have had to shape a narrative that could have been serialized over many months, or fill three volumes. Before that, the writer might have attempted narratives in verse, or verse drama, rhymed or unrhymed; or verse epics.

All those forms, artificial as they seem to us today, would have appeared as natural and as right to their practitioners as the standard novel does today. Artificial though that novel form is, with its simplifications and distortions, its artificial scenes, and its idea of experience as a crisis that has to be resolved before life resumes its even course. I am describing, very roughly, the feeling of artificiality which was with me at the very beginning, when I was trying to write and wondering what part of my experience could be made to fit the form—wondering, in fact, in the most insidious way, how I could adapt or falsify my experience to make it fit the grand form.

Literary forms are necessary: experience has to be transmitted in some agreed or readily comprehensible way. But certain forms, like fashions in dress, can at times become extreme. And then these forms, far from crystallizing or sharpening experience, can falsify or be felt as a burden. The Trollope who is setting up a situation—the Trollope who is a social observer, with an immense knowledge both of society and the world of work, a knowledge far greater than that of Dickens—is enchanting. But I have trouble with the Trollope who, having set up a situation, settles down to unwinding his narrative—the social or philosophical gist of which I might have received in his opening pages. I feel the same with Thackeray: I can feel how the need for narrative and plot sat on his shoulders like a burden.

And the best bit, Naipaul's advice for those who aspire to write:

Every serious writer has to be original; he cannot be content to do or to offer a version of what has been done before. And every serious writer as a result becomes aware of this question of form; because he knows that however much he might have been educated and stimulated by the writers he has read or reads, the forms matched the experience of those writers, and do not strictly suit his own.

More pictures

All taken in Bangalore this July (from a moving car, hence the lack of sharpness; click for better views). I call the city home now since my family is there. First picture is of Bangalore's Jama Masjid; the second, a statue of Anjaneyar; and third, the famous Forum Mall, which I still haven't been to yet. These malls sprang up just around the time I left for the US, so it's natural that I should think of them as "exotic", even though I've been to plenty of fancy malls in the United States, including the mammoth Mall of America.

Blogging will be light the next week or so, since I'll be traveling and there is much work to do -- the semester is "heating up". On a different note, as the one year anniversary of Obama's election approaches, do check one of my favorite posts: How I helped Obama win in eight states.

Leveraging positive ethnic stereotypes

The first story of Ten Little Indians –a collection of Sherman Alexie’s stories – is about Corliss, a spunky, independent college-going Spokane Indian teenager. Unlike other sophomores Corliss lives alone. She does not want to share her place with another Indian because “she’d soon be taking in the roommate’s cousin, little brother, half uncle, and long-lost dog, and none of them would contribute anything toward the rent other than wispy apologies. Indians were used to sharing and called it tribalism, but Corliss suspected it was yet another failed form of communism.”

Corliss also does not want a white roommate. Why? Because Corliss is well aware of her native identity and the effect it has on mainstream society. She wants to retain the allure of her identity so she can benefit from it. Here’s a long -- and funny -- excerpt where Alexie takes us through Corliss' rationale:

White people, no matter how smart, were too romantic about Indians. White people looked at Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the full moon, newborn babies, and Indians with the same goofy sentimentalism. Being a smart Indian, Corliss had always taken advantage of this romanticism, but that didn’t mean she wanted to share the refrigerator with it. If white folks assumed she was serene and spiritual and wise simply because she was an Indian, and thought she was special based on those mistaken assumptions, then Corliss saw no reason to contradict them. The world is a competitive place, and a poor Indian girl needs all the advantages she can get. So if George Bush, a man possessed of no remarkable distinctions other than being the son of a former U.S. president, could also become president, then Corliss figured she could certainly benefit from positive ethnic stereotypes and not feel any guilt about it. For five centuries, Indians were slaughtered because they were Indians, so if Corliss received a free coffee now and again from the local free-range lesbian Indiophile, who could possibly find the wrong in that? In the twenty-first century, any Indian with a decent vocabulary wielded enormous social power, but only if she was a stoic who rarely spoke. If she lived with a white person, Corliss knew she’d quickly be seen as ordinary, because she was ordinary. It’s tough to share a bathroom with an Indian and continue to romanticize her. If word got around that Corliss was ordinary, even boring, she feared she’d lose her power and magic. She knew there would come a day when white folks finally understood that Indians are every bit as relentlessly boring, selfish, and smelly as they are, and that would be a wonderful day for human rights but a terrible day for Corliss.

Alexie is brilliant here: through Corliss’s character, he’s brought to fore a host of issues: identity, what it means at the individual level, the sense of entitlement it may bring; the stereotyping of minorities but also the reverse stereotyping of the majority (which is essentially what Corliss is doing); and -- though this is more subtle -- the touchy question of reparations.

Fall in Massachusetts

New England, as many of you may know, is famous for fall colors. When I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts in August last year, I hadn't given much thought to what was in store. But two Octobers later (October is when the leaves change) I consider myself very fortunate. All four pictures are of places in my immediate neighborhood -- they are all a minute's walk away.

The first picture is of Puffers Pond. The pond is where the Mill River drains before making its way to the more voluminous Connecticut River. The second picture is the road adjacent to the pond. The cars are parked close to hiking trails.

The third picture is of a stand of trees on my drive to the university -- this is where you typically see the best juxtaposition of colors. A half-decent photographer would have done a much better job. And the last picture is of the street I live in (the silver-gray car is mine). With leaves strewn all over, fall is indeed the perfect word to describe the season. The rustling of dry leaves is the dominant sound; the leaves conspire even to enter your home, traveling unobtrusively with your footwear.

Outline of the republic

Basharat Peer, author Curfewed Night, reports from Pakistan (via Amitava). Excerpt:

One mid-June afternoon, while walking in the heart of mainstream Pakistan, on the Mall Road in Lahore, I stopped briefly at a row of tables collecting relief for the Swat refugees. One of the largest was run by an organisation called Falah-i-Insaniyat – Benefit of Humanity. A young man was at the table; stacks of clothes, pulses, rice bags and utensils were piled in the tent behind him. He gave me a pamphlet with details of his organisation’s relief work. It proclaimed in Urdu: “Hundreds of thousands displaced by the Operation are waiting for your assistance! Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation is feeding 20,000 displaced people everyday. We have treated 15,000 in our medical camps across the frontier. We have distributed one month’s food to 1,100 families.” It ended with a call for monetary support and gave the number of a bank account in Lahore.

I told the young man I had never heard of Falah-i-Insaniyat.

“The name is a new one,” he replied. “We are the Lashkar-i-Taiba. Have to come up with new names because of the ban by America and our own government.”

Lashkar-i-Taiba has mostly attacked Indian targets, particularly in Kashmir, and India blames it for last year’s assault on Mumbai. A week earlier, the Lahore High Court had released their chief, Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed, from house arrest for lack of sufficient evidence. “Hafiz Sahib is free now despite the pressure from India and America,” the man behind the table said with a smile. “Thousands of people are coming to see him at the city office. You should go there.”

Streets of Kumbakonam

For those unaware, Kumbakonam is a south-Indian town renowned for its temples. All pictures below are from my July 2009 trip.

A bike stand facing a shop

I've always wondered the effort that must go into painting these checked patterns on trees.

The chariot of one of the temples in town

The tradition of making idols from metals goes well back in history. This picture is of a shop that continues that tradition -- it's likely they use the lost wax method for some of their work.

Embracing science but reliquishing the soul

Jerome Groopman writes in the New York Review of Books that our fascination with technology and the commodifying of the practice of medicine may be stripping it of its human element:

At the conference, an animated discussion followed, and I heard how changes in the culture of medicine were altering the ways that the young doctors interacted with their patients. One woman said that she spent less and less time conversing with her patients. Instead, she felt glued to a computer screen, checking off boxes on an electronic medical record to document a voluminous set of required "quality of care" measures, many of them not clearly relevant to her patient's problems. Another resident talked about how so-called "work rounds" were frequently conducted in a closed conference room with a computer rather than at the patient's bedside.

During my training three decades ago, the team of interns and residents would move from bedside to bedside, engaging the sick person in discussion, looking for new symptoms; the medical chart was available to review the progress to date and new tests were often ordered in search of the diagnosis. By contrast, each patient now had his or her relevant data on the screen, and the team sat around clicking the computer keyboard. It took concerted effort for the group to leave the conference room and visit the actual people in need.

Still another trainee talked about the work schedule. Because chronic sleep deprivation can lead to medical mistakes, strict regulations have been implemented across the country to limit the amount of time any one resident can attend to patient care. While well intentioned and clearly addressing an important problem with patient safety, the unintended consequence was that care became more fragmented; patients now were "handed off" in shifts, and with such handoffs the trainee often failed to learn how an illness evolved over time, and important information was sometimes lost in the transition.

[...]

But only recently has medical care been recast in our society as if it took place in a factory, with doctors and nurses as shift workers, laboring on an assembly line of the ill. The new people in charge, many with degrees in management economics, believe that care should be configured as a commodity, its contents reduced to equations, all of its dimensions measured and priced, all patient choices formulated as retail purchases. The experience of illness is being stripped of its symbolism and meaning, emptied of feeling and conflict. The new era rightly embraces science but wrongly relinquishes the soul.

More here. Indeed, the "management economics" people that Groopman mentions are the operations researchers I wrote about in my last post -- these practitioners continuously focus on "costs", "throughput", "bottom line". They are trained that way, and sometimes the constant use of a particular type of language -- despite the best of intentions -- can in fact change one's worldview.

Other healthcare pieces: Reforming Healthcare in the United States; Healthcare Costs: The Atul Gawande New Yorker essay. And Pauline Chen writes about mindfulness in medicine.

Introducing: Operations Research

At heart, I am a humanities person; that is why this blog has existed for as long it has. But I do lead another, very different life that consumes most of my waking time. I am an academic in a field called “operations research” – a baffling term for those unaware of its existence. Briefly, operations research can be described as “the science of efficiency”, or “the science of planning well”; the most popular version, though, is the glib-sounding “the science of better”.

Still puzzled? Well, let me try again, this time with an analogy.

We are surrounded by technological marvels. It seems magical – to me at least – that a plane carrying hundreds of passengers and tons of luggage, actually manages to take flight; that there are such things as wireless phones; that there is a large, scattered yet miraculously unified network called the “Internet”. Amazing right? Each of these applications is possible because of engineering, which makes clever use of the underlying science, be it fluid dynamics, signal processing, or fiber optics. Such engineering is not always obvious, but the lay person is aware that there are specialists -- aerospace engineers, computer scientists, electrical engineers to name just a few -- who make these things work.

In the same way, do you wonder how your FedEx package from the Philippines arrived without delay to the small Midwestern town you live in; how the Netflix movie you ordered gets to your address exactly on the day their email claimed; how large airports, such as Heathrow and JFK, manage their flights, schedules, and air traffic? We take these systems for granted, but they work because they are engineered. This type of systems level engineering – the science of allocation and scheduling in the face of uncertainties and the fluctuating dynamics of supply and demand – is called operations research. In business schools it is called management science. Since it is a less tangible kind of engineering, the lay person is generally unaware of it.

You might argue that many systems are rarely well managed. What’s in a science that produces long lines and sapping delays? True, systems may be dysfunctional because of bad planning but this is not unique to operations research. A mechanical problem – arguably caused by the traditional “nuts and bolts” engineer – can stop a flight from taking off as well. In fact, an operationally conscious airline will have a contingency schedule that minimizes the traveler’s disruption in case of a cancellation. Think of all the flight groundings and cancellations that happened on and post 9/11. Have we given close thought to what it took to bring everything back to normal?

Operations research is a mongrel field. Like other engineers, the operations researcher uses mathematical methods, but she also may dabble in statistics, economics, and computer science. She will also need knowledge of the domain she is working in; and importantly, if her domain involves people, she will need to know that people do not behave as rigidly or rationally as her math models assume. This mongrel quality of the field makes it breathtakingly versatile – applications have advanced well beyond the “operations” realm and have entered even areas such as designing beam angles for radiation therapy. The flip side of the coin, however, is that some think of it as an “anything-goes” field with no real identity.

My work is in healthcare operations research. I look at how medical practices can provide timely care while trying to rein in costs. This coincides with the ongoing upheaval in the US healthcare system. Cost and coverage are major issues and they have the power throw askew the balance of supply and demand and influence the quality and timeliness of care. For example, emergency departments in the United States – one setting which I study in my research – experienced a 32% increase in demand over the last decade. The number annual ED visits in the US went up from 90 million in 1996 to 119 million in 2006. This has led to crowded conditions, especially during late afternoons and evenings. Can better staffing, improved coordination of processes alleviate the long wait times of patients? Perhaps -- at least that is what my hypothesis is.

I have also recently discovered – to my great delight – the many ways in which operations research can intersect with the humanities. Let me list a few examples. The resettlement of refugee farmers in India after the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was a difficult problem in every sense. Nearly a million people had to be allotted new land, and the partition had been extremely violent. Yet it was successfully done, without computers: a classic example of hands-on operations research in which people management and administrative organization are the main skills. The person who led it was Sardar Tarlok Singh of the Indian Civil Service, a graduate of the London School of Economics.

More recently a Markov model (in more plain terms, a probability model) was used to identify syntactic patterns in the as yet undeciphered Indus script of nearly 3000-3500 years ago -- another unconventional application that has nothing to do with “operations”. I am also fascinated by how humanitarian organizations – the UN World Food Program (WFP), Medicines Sans Frontiers – deliver their services in resource constrained settings; understanding why FEMA messed up post-Katrina; and how the dreaded LTTE efficiently coordinated rescue operations post-Tsunami in Sri Lanka.

In short, there’s plenty to learn and explore.

This post comes as I travel to San Diego for the annual meeting of the Institute of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS09). Nearly 4000 people will attend the conference; it’s a great way to catch up with friends from graduate school and make new friends. I was also invited to be one of their twelve official bloggers (that gives me an excuse to point to this post there).

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned operations research. Here are a few earlier posts: My Adventures During a Queuing Study; Queues and Illegal Immigration; A Visit to an Emergency Room; The Mathematics of Matching Kidneys.

The temple at Tirvuannamalai and a Kaval Deivam shrine

A little busy with work these days, so I have only pictures to offer. The first is of the gopuram (tower) of the temple in the town of Tiruvannamalai, in Tamil Nadu. Notice how the style and color of the gopuram differs from that of the Brihadishwara temple of Thanjavur. Behind the temple is the sacred Arunachala hill which has drawn many saints over the years, the most recent of them, Ramana Maharishi. During the Tamil month of Kartigai (Oct-Nov), a light is lit atop the hill and it is visible for miles around.



The second picture is an informal shrine for kaval deivam -- guardian spirits. I came across it in the countryside between Krishnagiri and Tiruvanamalai. If my understanding is right, these gods are specific to villages in Tamil Nadu -- that is, they are not pan-Indian like say Shiva or Vishnu. More information here and here.

Climate change cuts both ways

Jared Diamond surveys the impact of climate change research on three roughly contemporaneous civilizations in the most recent issue of Nature (subscription needed): Maya, Khmer, and Inca. The first two might have declined because of environmental changes, but the Incas, who built their empire in high altitudes, benefited from it. We are talking of the period between the 9th and 12th centuries CE. Excerpts:

From time to time, separate archaeological projects on different societies end up by suggesting common themes to events in the ancient world. Thus, two new studies point to parallels between the collapse of cities on opposite sides of the globe — the southern lowland Maya cities in Central America, and Angkor, the centre of the Khmer empire in what is now Cambodia. These parallels include the effects of climate change, which hurt both the Maya and the Khmer. By contrast, as a third report indicates, climate change seems to have benefited another ancient civilization, the Incas of South America.

[...]

This reminds us that climate can change in either direction, and that in the past such change has variously helped or hurt human societies. But human overexploitation of environmental resources never helps. As Lentz and Hockaday note, "Tikal's inhabitants became trapped in a positive feedback loop wherein increasing demands on a shrinking resource base ultimately exceeded the carrying capacity of their immediate environs. The ecological lessons learned from the Late Classic Maya, with their meteoric population increase accompanied by environmental overstretch, serve as a distant mirror for our own cultural trajectory." Amen.

The same Nature issue also has articles on the genetic history of Indians -- a loaded issue, no doubt. For an abstract of the study, see here.

I'll try to avoid subscription only links in the future -- my apologies to readers.

At the Brihadishwara

For non-Indian readers (or non-Tamil readers for that matter), I hope the explanations of unfamiliar terms (or the links provided) are sufficient for a basic understanding.

1.

The Brihadishwara Temple in the south Indian city of Thanjavur is one of India’s most impressive. Built in the 11th century during the reign of the Cholas and dedicated to Lord Shiva, its 66-meter-tall granite gopuram (tower) and the smaller gopurams in its precincts make for a striking view. The temple is an hour’s drive from the village of Thuvakudi, where I was an college student in the late nineties. But I was completely averse to history and religion then, and not once did I visit. What’s more I did not even know that Thanjavur had this famous attraction that drew visitors from far.

A year after college, while a graduate student in the United States -- and now more interested in history -- I saw the temple mentioned in an essay about Marco Polo in the National Geographic magazine. The medieval Italian traveler had apparently visited the Brihadishwara and been impressed – it had been one stop in his grand, continent-spanning itinerary.

I managed to see the temple for the first time in July this year. The day I visited coincided with pradosham, a fortnightly event in the lunar calendar that marks a legend about Shiva. The story goes thus: Once, the devas and asuras (crudely, gods and demons) attempted to churn the ocean of milk using Vaasuki, a serpent, to extract divine nectar. But the effort went awry and Vaasuki’s poison contaminated the ocean. Shiva took it upon himself to consume the poison, which accumulated in his throat and turned it blue – that is why he is called Neelakantan, the blue-throated one.

Pradosham commemorates Shiva’s selfless act. A pradosham that falls on Saturday is called sani pradosham and is even more auspicious. For Saivites (worshippers of Shiva) this is a special day. I come from the Saivite tradition; my father observes the occasion without fail, and so did my paternal grandfather. This usually means a temple visit late in the afternoon during sani pradosham. For that is the time all gods and celestial beings congregate to revere Shiva. To be present is to be guaranteed divine goodwill.

2.

The Brihadishwara was teeming with worshippers when I arrived. It was 5:30 pm; sani pradosham was well underway. I was struck by the singular beige color of the gopurams – no other temples I know have that color. A continuous throng of people stretched from the main entrance well into the interior, up to the raised pavilion where a massive statue of Nandi, Shiva’s bull – the second largest in India, hewn from a single block of stone – was being bathed in milk and water in the prescribed manner. Even from where I was, a quarter of a kilometer away, I could see gallons of fluid splashing off the body of Nandi. It was a surreal sight.


There were perhaps two or three thousand people – that’s a modest estimate – packed within the temple precincts. A high wall, also beige colored, ran along the perimeter and gave the place the feel of a fortress. The densest concentration was around the Nandi pavilion. It was so crowded that I found it impossible to make my way to the main gopuram, the sanctum sanctorum of which houses Shiva. But it seemed – at least from where I was – that cynosure of all was Nandi and not Shiva. In the first picture above you see the main gopuram in background, but notice that people are facing away from it. They are actually looking at Nandi being garlanded by a priest perched on an elevated platform (second picture).

3.

I left at 6:30 along with most other worshippers. Outside, with large numbers of people milling onto the traffic-clogged street, I had difficulty navigating my way and finding an auto. When I did find one, the driver, visibly frustrated with the jam caused by the temple crowd, said: “People are saturated with faith these days!”

The remark suggested this was not always the case. Indeed, the elders I talked to only confirmed the fact: the religiosity on display that day had not existed during their time, twenty or thirty years ago.

What had changed? The explanation might lie in the societal changes brought about by the politics of Tamil Nadu.

In the early and mid 1900s, the upper caste Brahmins made up only 3 percent of the state's population, but they were dominant: they held all key administrative positions and controlled temples. But their hegemony and supremacist outlook irked an increasingly influential group of Tamil middle castes. The allegation was that Brahmins were “agents” of the Aryan, Hindi-speaking north bent on imposing their version of Hinduism on Dravidians of the south. From the Dravidian viewpoint, the primacy of Tamil and Tamil culture – which date back millennia – had to be reestablished and safeguarded. The movement was all about Tamil distinctness and Brahmin-bashing; later, leaders such as Annadurai infused it with an energetic grassroots populism. By the 1960s, the Dravidians had political power, which diminished the control of the Brahmins and gave upward mobility in the next decades to the middle and low castes who come under the OBC (other backward castes) designation (this does not include Dalits of Tamil Nadu -- known also as Adi Dravidars -- whose long due empowerment still remains a major issue in the state).

That upward mobility has in turn contributed to a growing religiosity. This is somewhat paradoxical, since the ideological roots of the Dravidian movement are atheist. The movement's founder, the firebrand atheist EV Ramaswamy Naicker, known more popularly as Periyar, was a smasher of Hindu idols. And the state’s current chief minister, the 85-year old Karunanidhi -- one of the movement's veterans -- is avowedly anti-Hindu. But godlessness as an ideology never ran deep among the masses. As Vaasanthi writes in Cut-Outs, Caste and Cine-Stars, the “people of Tamil Nadu…never took Periyar’s atheism very seriously. They took just what they wanted. They realized that his focus was more on demolishing the Brahmin’s hegemony over society and politics than demolishing the gods.”

Today, Brahmins are a non-issue in Tamil Nadu. But the newly empowered middle castes have adopted the mores of the upper castes. A new hierarchy, with echoes of the old, has developed -- and it has been strengthened, as elsewhere in India, by caste-driven electoral politics. The late sociologist MN Srinivas calls the phenomenon Sanskritisation. Being pious and following certain customs are ways of projecting one’s elevated caste status. This has resulted in a resurgence of local gods and goddesses -- Adi Parasakthi for example. And feature stories in Tamil weeklies are often about film stars and prominent personages visiting their villages to worship their family deities.

Cultural trends are too complex to be explained away by elegant-sounding theories; and faith is too multifaceted a sentiment to be tied merely to caste or status. And yet I couldn’t help but wonder: Was Sanskritisation largely the reason for the crowds at the Brihadishwara during Sani Pradosham that day?

A devastating denial of civilized instincts

Reading this essay on Torture and the War on Terror, a new book by Tzvetan Todorov, I was reminded of a passionately argued chapter on the same topic by Ahmed Rashid in Descent Into Chaos. This is how it begins:

If war has been mankind’s most powerful negative urge, then the universal agreements that limit the horrors of war and protect civilians have been the hallmark of progress and have reflected man’s deeper instincts for civilization. The Geneva Convention may not have halted the Jewish holocaust, Rwandan genocide, or terrorism but they have given us a code of conduct by which we can judge the actions of our leaders in the desperate times of war. That is why the decision by President Bush on February 7, 2002, to deny captured al Qaeda, Taliban and other terrorist suspects prisoner of war (POW) status or any access to justice was a step backward for the United States and for mankind – one that has haunted the United States, its allies and the international legal system ever since. Whereas in the West it created a furious debate about civil liberties, in the Muslim World it further entrenched dictatorship and abuse of civilians.

For the greatest power on earth to wage its “war on terrorism” by rejecting the very rules of war it is a signatory to, denying justice at home, undermining the U.S. Constitution, and then pressurizing its allies to do the same set in motion a devastating denial of civilized instincts. America's example had the most impact in Afghanistan, where no legal system existed; in Pakistan, ruled by a military regime; and in Central Asia, where the world's most repressive dictatorships flourished. By following America's lead in promoting or condoning disappearances, torture, and secret jails, these countries found their path to democracy and their struggle against Islamic extremism set back by decades. Western-led nation building had little credibility if it denied justice to the very people it was supposed to help. It could well be argued that over time Islamic extremists were emboldened rather than subdued by the travesty of justice the United States perpetrated. The people learned to hate America.

The name of the chapter is, aptly, America Shows the Way.

Digital Confession to an Ayatollah

In The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, the author Hooman Majd visits Qom, the religious center for Shia learning. He tries to talk to the Grand Ayatollah Hajj Sheikh Mohammad Fazel Lankarani but is dismissed rather brusquely. Instead, Majd is taken to the “library and nerve center of his Web operation”. This is what he finds:

At a nicely air-conditioned building, a pleasant and self-taught computer-literate young man gave me a tour of the library and explained how Lankarani’s website [Google says visiting it is "dangerous" for software reasons, so proceed at own risk] operated in seventeen languages, including Swahili and Burmese, for all of his followers. It was updated daily with the Ayatollah’s proclamations, fatwas, or religious commands, if he’d issued any recently, and general information, but, most important, it was a place to ask questions: e-mails poured in every day in all seventeen languages and were carefully printed out, one by one, and arranged according to language in mailboxes for Lankarani’s Iranian and foreign talibs (Arabic for “students”, and where the word “Taliban” comes from) to translate, so that they could be answered by one of his senior staff, such as his son, but always reviewed by the Ayatollah himself. I was shown e-mails in English, translated into Farsi, where the Ayatollah had crossed out an answer and written his own, to be retranslated and transmitted back electronically. Most of the questions in the emails I saw related to sex; for example, a sixteen-year-old boy from England had written about his friend who had had oral sex with a fourteen-year-old boy and was worried that his prayers would be nullified and that he might be punished by God. The Ayatollah’s answer was refreshingly short and simple: repent and don’t do it again. No mention of homosexuality, no judgments -- who said the conservative Ayatollahs weren’t compassionate? I read the same thing, “repent”, page after page, for almost without exception the questioner had committed some kind of sin, or at least thought he had, or claimed to have a “friend” who had. I looked around at the banks of computers and the dark, highly polished wooden mail slots filled with printed emails: Digital confession, I thought. The Vatican should get into this.

William Dalrymple on travel writing

"What happens to travel writing now that the world is smaller?" wonders the writer William Dalrymple:

The question remains: does travel writing have a future? The tales of Marco Polo, or the explorations of "Bokhara Burnes" may have contained valuable empirical information impossible to harvest elsewhere, but is there really any point to the genre in the age of the internet, when you can instantly gather reliable knowledge about anywhere in the globe?

Certainly, the sort of attitudes to "abroad" that characterised the writers of the 1930s, and which had a strange afterlife in the curmudgeonly prose of Theroux and his imitators, now appears dated and racist. Indeed, the globalised world has now become so complex that notions of national character and particularity - the essence of so many 20th-century travelogues - is becoming increasingly untenable, and even distasteful. So has the concept of the western observer coolly assessing eastern cultures with the detachment of a Victorian butterfly collector, dispassionately pinning his captives to the pages of his album. In an age when east to west migrations are so much more common than those from west to east, the "funny foreigners" who were once regarded as such amusing material by travel writers are now writing some of the best travel pieces themselves. Even just to take a few of those with roots in India - Vidia Naipaul, Pico Iyer, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Pankaj Mishra - is to list many of the most highly regarded writers currently at work.

I would argue that the best travel books do not even come under the travel label: they may thought of as books of history, anthropology or politics. In fact, my favorite books this year -- Pankaj Mishra's Butter Chicken in Ludhiana; Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night; Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos; Vaasanthi's Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars; Sumantra Bose's Contested Lands; Hooman Majd's The Ayatollah Begs to Differ -- are all travel books, even though their authors may not think of them in such a narrow way.

So Dalrymple's question, whether travel writing has a future, is a bit silly -- just small talk. Good nonfiction writing about a place or people -- whether it is history, a particular sociopolitical trend, or current affairs -- automatically qualifies as travel writing. And there's plenty of it going around.

Conversions, and the Virgin of Guadalupe

Conversions of the religious kind have always been controversial. Even in India – a country where you would think Hinduism is secure because of its sheer strength in numbers – the efforts of Christian missionaries cause a lot of consternation. But go to Mexico and the Indian complaint will seem a whine. Mexico in the early sixteenth century was bursting with its own beliefs but with the arrival of the Spaniards, it became the proselytizer’s paradise. Unlike India, which demonstrates an astonishing continuity in religious tradition dating back millennia, Mexico lost its old faiths and gave in to Catholicism.

It wasn’t easy in the beginning. The Spanish defeated the Aztecs in 1521, but the tipping point came only ten years later, when the brown-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe miraculously appeared to Juan Diego. Diego was Indian, and he saw the virgin on the slopes of the Hill of Tepeyac in Mexico City. News of the miracle spread rapidly and resulted in mass conversions.

But the story isn't that simple. Tepeyac is believed to have been the worship site for the pre-Columbian, Aztec mother goddess Tonantzin. So what seems Catholic actually has indigenous roots; indeed, that must have been part of the appeal. Today, the Virgin is the preeminent religious figure and icon in Mexico.

(Picture from my Dec 2008 trip.)

In December last year, I visited Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City -- probably the second most visited Catholic shrine in the world. The church is at the summit of Tepeyac Hill, the same place Juan Diego saw Guadalupe. The principal attraction is an image of the Virgin at the lower end of a massive gold cross. Draped below is the flag of Mexico: at its center is the aggressive image of an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus; a serpent wriggles in the clamp of its beak.

At first glance, the cross and the virgin suggest a common Christian theme. But when you learn that the virgin is not Mary but Guadalupe, and that the depiction on the flag captures the vision that inspired the “pagan” Aztecs to build the surreal lake city of Tenochtitlan – which the Spanish destroyed comprehensively and renamed as Mexico City – you realize that there is more to Mexico’s mass conversion than meets the eye.

On Chandrahas Choudhury's Arzee The Dwarf

Arzee, the endearing protagonist of Chandrahas Choudhury’s first novel, is twenty seven years old and lives in Bombay. He is a small: at three and half feet he is cursed to “smell the shit and dung on the streets and make talk with all the asses and crotches in the world”. But he can do nothing about it. Instead, he can only look ahead and the make the best of what he has. And there is something to look forward to. Soon, Arzee will be the head projectionist at Noor Cinema, a decaying theater in the old style that shows reruns of Hindi movies.

The promotion now means more money – five thousand more rupees. Arzee can now think of getting married, though the painful memory of an abruptly broken relationship still haunts him. All that is in the past, he reassures himself; a bright future now awaits him.

Arzee’s anticipation infects the early pages of the novel, but it is short-lived. The promotion will not materialize because Noor Cinema is closing. Arzee is devastated: his job at the Noor had anchored him in life. He had loved film projection ever since he had first visited the theater with his mother when only thirteen. He loved the large, black projector, Babur (a distortion of the original German name, Bauer), which “for thirty years had been standing in the same place in the same room, breathing out four shows a day”. But no more! It was as if the sun itself was blowing out, ending all life on earth.

For the next hundred pages, we accompany a disoriented Arzee as he drifts around Bombay, searching for new direction. The novel's third person narration remains faithful to the protagonist. Even the punctuation matches well: Choudhury uses exclamations liberally but they are there to convey Arzee’s childlike wonder and curiosity. And every thought, every description contributes to a complex, layered construction of Arzee’s inner world.

Arzee stands at the center of Arzee, but he is surrounded by a constellation of personalities. Only a few, though, play a major part. There is Deepak, a canny and very practical man, full of bluster and cynicism. But his toughness is only a facade; Deepak is quite capable of warmth and empathy. He hounds Arzee regarding a debt, but has an ear for Arzee’s travails even though he pretends not to care. There is Arzee’s mother, whose “soft tyranny” is felt throughout the book; there’s Monique, whose romance with Arzee unfolds beautifully -- before the abrupt end. And, to a lesser extent, there is Phiroz, the old Parsi head projectionist, who is preoccupied with his daughter Shireen’s wedding.

Shireen is in fact one of novel’s sparkling minor characters. Arzee’s conversation with her is one of the high points of the book --her vitality leaps through the pages. She makes such an impact that we fully expect her to reappear and play a bigger role – but that is not how the novel is structured. There are other, similarly striking one-scene characters.

No review of Arzee can be complete without a mention of its superb dialogues. Let’s a look at an exchange between Arzee and Deepak. Our little hero owes a debt to a syndicate, and Deepak, who works for the syndicate, has been set on the case. Arzee has been avoiding the bullying Deepak, but gets accosted one day. After they’ve settled on what should be done – Arzee is very much on the defensive – they get to bantering about movies. Deepak asks what’s playing at the Noor Cinema.

“Saathi. It’s a film from the early nineties….It’s got Mohsin Khan, who used to be Pakistani cricketer of the eighties. Made a double hundred in England once. It’s a hummer.”

“Is it as good as Satya?” asked Deepak. “In my opinion there isn’t any Indian gangster movie as good as Satya.”

“Good choice, Deepakbhai! That’s the best gangster movie you can hope to see if you also want songs and dancing in it.”

“I’ll tell you what I like about the movie. The hero hardly says a word in whole three hours. Talking’s not his thing, action is. Even when he falls in love, he can’t bring himself to say much to his girl. That’s why she finds him sweet.”

“That’s just it, Deepakbhai. Excellent analysis!”

“There’s no need to lay on the butter. I just have a clear point of view, that’s all. I know what I like and what I don’t like.”

“That’s the way to be.”

“And speaking of Pakistanis,” said Deepak, “they shouldn’t be allowed to work in our films until they return what they’ve taken of Kashmir. Make as many double hundreds in England as you want! But don’t come here and steal roles off our heroes and screw our girls. Kashmir first! Then, we’ll see.”

“But what’s Kashmir got to do with all this Deepakbhai?”

“It’s all connected. You can’t put all these things in different boxes. If the Pakistanis are going to come over to this side and eat up our jobs, then let them bring some land over as well! No give, no take.”

“It’s a thought, Deepakbhai. I hadn’t looked at it that way before.”

“You will now. Everything in the world is connected. If something goes up, something else has to go down.”

The funniest parts of the book can be found in the Arzee-Deepak and Arzee-Shireen conversations. In the above excerpt, notice the way ‘Deepakbhai’ is used – it creates a cadence or rhythm that punctuates the exchange. And because free-flowing conversations allow for spontaneity, Arzee’s earnestness (and intelligence, though that's not so evident in the above) are brought sharply into focus.

Choudhury is a prolific Bombay-based literary critic and writer whose best essays are featured in the blog The Middle Stage. With Arzee he has shown he is just as adept at creating his own fictional world as he is at interpreting others'. The beautifully spare prose of the novel, the memorable characters sketched within a short space, the dialogues – all point to a writer well in control of his reins. There is much to look forward from this author.

Finally, here are two more excerpts that occur in different parts of the novel but share the same theme: our perception of the loved one. Dashrath Tiwari, a taxi-driver friend of Arzee – another one-scene character – says this during the course of a long conversation:

“What is love? The loved one is a person just like you and me, a person with a hundred faults and failings. But briefly he or she is transformed into someone utterly beautiful, perfect – a being from the heavens! Love is the true home of the imagination. Requited love – that is the paradise raised from nothing but a pair of synchronized imaginations.”

Much later in the book, Arzee catches a glimpse of himself and Monique in the mirror and thinks:

The mirror made it seem as if there were two of each of them, and this was true in a way, for (Arzee thought about this carefully) she was both the Monique that she was and the Monique he took her to be, and these two were similar but not the same, and he was both himself and the Arzee who belonged to her. And in the gaps and linkages between these real and reflected beings, all kinds of meanings and suggestions seemed to be lurking.

It requires some skill to put so neatly into words that which we know instinctively but are unable to express easily. Pick up Arzee and you'll find plenty such observations scattered throughout.

The women scientists of India

Asha Gopinathan reviews Lilavati's Daughters: The Women Scientists of India in Nature (subscription may be required):

A collection of 98 short biographies, the book stems from a project initiated by the Women in Science panel of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, to provide young girls with inspiring role models (see http://www.ias.ac.in/womeninscience). The diverse personal stories span many disciplines and regions of India — and are inspiring.

The earliest chronological entry is for Anandibai Joshi, the first Indian woman to go abroad and study to become a doctor. From 1883 to 1886 she attended the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia and was awarded an MD degree for her thesis Obstetrics Among Aryan Hindoos. Unfortunately, she contracted tuberculosis and had to return to India. She received no treatment: Western doctors refused to treat a brown woman and Indian doctors would not help her because she had broken societal rules. Joshi died in 1887 at 22 years of age.

[...]

Many of those highlighted were the first to break into male-dominated professions: Asima Chatterjee was the first Indian woman to be awarded a DSc; E. K. Janaki Ammal was elected a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences the year it was founded; Kamala Sohonie was the first female director of the Institute of Science, Mumbai; and Bimla Buti is a former director of plasma physics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.

It is interesting that many of these women scientists came from ordinary middle-class families. Most grew up not in the nation's big cities but in rural areas, where getting an education in any discipline, let alone in science, is difficult. In rural Punjab, mathematician R. J. Hans-Gill had to pretend to be a boy and wear a turban to attend school — a secret that was kept between her family and the headmaster. Biologist Chitra Mandal was accompanied to school in rural Bengal by her grandmother because the teacher would not let the four-year-old in without someone to look after her.

Reforming healthcare in the United States

I've reproduced the content below from a page that I recently created on my website. Some of the links here have been discussed in earlier posts. Feel free to voice your opinion.

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By all accounts, the United States healthcare system is in crisis. We hear this every day: some 45 million people are uninsured; hundreds of thousands go bankrupt every year because of medical bills. Everybody agrees the current system is dysfunctional. But the solutions are contentious and divisive. Should government play a greater role by introducing a public insurance option in addition to Medicare and Medicaid to cover the uninsured? If everyone is going to be insured, where will the money come from? These questions elicit shrill noises from both extremes of the political spectrum. And there's the question of culture, culture of the nation -- that ambiguous but all-too-influential presence in the background. Mention 'government' in connection with US healthcare and the term 'socialized medicine' will follow like a stigma.

My intent in creating this page was to aggregate content from the internet pertaining to policy issues in US healthcare. This is a daunting task of course, and I am no expert. But in the process of teaching a healthcare class last spring, I came across essays, documentaries, radio clips that I'd like to share. Email me if you think there is material that should be added.

I.

The PBS Frontline documentary Sick Around the World compares the health systems of developed countries -- Britain, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Switzerland -- and reveals the glaring flaws in the US healthcare system. Three key shortcomings emerge. In the countries listed above 1) No one with a pre-existing condition is denied insurance 2) Everyone is covered one way or another 3) Pricing mechanisms are transparent and nobody goes bankrupt because of medical bills. Are these basic things too much to ask in the United States? Sick Around America, another PBS Frontline documentary, focuses on the shortcomings of the American health insurance industry.

II.

It is true that European nations have a much better universal care record. But history played an important role in shaping the insurance structure of these countries. The national health systems of Britain and France emerged as a result of the devastation wrecked by the Second World War. Switzerland, because of its wartime neutrality, took the private insurance route before opting for reform in the last decade. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande says in Getting There From Here that the experience of the United States is different and that difference must be acknowledged. Hence piece wise reform of healthcare, by building on what currently exists currently in the US, is better than a radical overhaul based on models elsewhere.

III.

Healthcare insurance reform is not healthcare reform, although the two are related of course. True healthcare reform is possible only if costs are brought under control. Atul Gawande explains why healthcare costs are ridiculously high in the United States. Technology can collude with strange monetary incentives to increase health care costs and reduce the quality of care. Physicians are leaning towards more tests, more scans, more surgeries -- all of which generate revenue -- when simpler wait-and-watch alternatives would have been preferable. And there is no conspiracy here: the system in the United States seems to have subconsciously evolved this way because of the incentives in place. Gawande travels to the city of McAllen, Texas and finds that the over utilization of medical resources has sent costs skyrocketing. Only by trimming the fat from the system will Obama be able to finance healthcare reform.

IV.

David Ignautius argues that Denise Cortese, CEO of the famous Mayo Clinic, should be made "medical commander" of Obama's health reform initiative. Cortese's message is similar to Atul Gawande's: Health insurance reform is necessary, but true reform is possible only if medical practices are paid for value (outcomes, safety and service) rather than for the number of services provided. Peter Ubel, a primary care physician, says yes, we must change how we pay physicians, but we must also change how much they are paid in the United States. Certain types of specialty physicians have disproportionately high incomes. Unfortunately, this is an issue no one is willing to tackle politically.

V.

Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt talks with Terry Gross (NPR) about the lack of transparency in healthcare pricing. Each hospital may negotiate a different rate with a different insurance company for the same service; and the prices are kept secret. Indeed, there may be a tenfold difference in prices because of this secrecy. Hospitals have to hire an army of hagglers to negotiate and keep track of prices. This hikes up administrative costs. In other developed countries, pricing is not this opaque.

Reinhardt also discusses the feasibility of a public, Medicare-like insurance option for the uninsured. The private insurance companies don't like this, because they fear they will no longer be able to complete with a government run option that enrolls millions and sets its own prices. Paul Starr, author of the famous 1984 book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, weighs in with pieces in the American Prospect: Sacrificing the Public Option and Perils of the Public Plan. Finally, this essay in The New York Review of Books discusses the messy political process underlying healthcare reform; and Bill Moyers of PBS interviews scholars and policy experts on various aspects of reform.

The genius of Norman Rockwell

Painting is not my thing. But yesterday, at the museum dedicated to the famous American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), I was stunned. Stunned by Rockwell's eye for detail; his ability to deliver an incredible array of expressions, many of them comic; and the stories that Rockwell conveys in his illustrations. Two examples -- my favorites -- are below. Both appeared as covers for the Saturday Evening Post. The theme of the first (March 16th 1948 issue) is gossip . Look closely at it and you’ll know what I mean by "incredible array of expressions". Not to mention the details – hairstyles, hats, skin tones, gloves – and the funny story that unfolds.




The second (August 30th 1947 issue) is about a family going to and returning from a picnic (click to see a much better version). Look how expectant and eager everyone is while leaving. And how everyone fatigued everyone is while returning late in the evening. What a contrast!

But then there's Granny in the backseat, with a stoic, humorless expression that does not change one bit.

A border is not an end in itself

Sumantra Bose writes in Contested Lands:

In Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Sri Lanka, borders forged by war have become, or will have to become, the basis of peace settlements. But making a fetish of such borders is neither practicable nor desirable. Recognition of those borders is an essential part of the compromise, driven by pragmatism, and not an end in itself. It is extremely important to construct an architecture of peace that enables systematic cooperation across the borders drawn in blood.

This is important partly because those borders – the Green Lines of Israel-Palestine and Cyprus, the Line of Control in Kashmir, the Inter-Entity Boundary Line in Bosnia, and the border between northeastern Sri Lanka and the rest of the country – are a focal point of contention, where one or more of the parties to the conflict do not agree with the trajectory or even the very legitimacy of those lines as political boundaries. It is also important because in the early twenty-first century, an era defined by globalization and its subphenomenon, regional integration and cooperation, it is simply impossible for communities to live in hermetic segregation from one another in ethnonational ghettos. Soft frontiers and the gradual development of ties of cross-border cooperation are the longer-term anchor for the stability of peace agreements, a vital part of the safety net that must be assured to minorities caught on the “wrong” side of the line, and the path to building a culture of coexistence in the world’s most troubled and turbulent lands. The poet Robert Frost famously wrote that “good fences make good neighbors.” But he also wrote:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

When the majority feel they are the minority

Read this recent piece by Robert Kaplan on Sri Lanka. I don't agree with all of his points -- the closing bit about the historically inclusive nature of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and the lesson it holds for the the country's current politicians seemed a little forced, a little pat -- but I liked the essay overall. Kaplan makes two main points. The first is that Buddhism, despite its remarkable worldwide appeal as a religion of peace, is just as likely as any other faith to be distorted by its followers:

Buddhism holds an exalted place in the half-informed Western mind. Whereas Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism are each associated, in addition to their thought, with a rich material culture and a defended territory, Buddhism, despite its great monuments and architectural tradition throughout the Far East, is somehow considered purer, more abstract, and almost dematerialized: the most peaceful, austere, and uncorrupted of faiths, even as it appeals to the deeply aesthetic among us. Hollywood stars seeking to find themselves—famously Richard Gere—become Buddhists, not, say, orthodox Jews.

Yet Buddhism, as Kandy demonstrates, is deeply materialistic and demands worship of solid objects, in a secure and sacred landscape that has required the protection of a military. There have been Buddhist military kingdoms—notably Kandy’s—just as there have been Christian and Islamic kingdoms of the sword. Buddhism can be, under the right circumstances, a blood-and-soil faith.

The second point is that "there is nothing crueler than a majority that feels itself a minority". Kaplan is referring to the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. And this is why they feel that way:

The Sinhalese...see their historical destiny in preserving Theravada Buddhism from a Hindu revivalist assault, with southern India the source of these invasions. As they see it, they are a lonely people, with few ethnic compatriots anywhere, who have been pushed to their final sanctuary, the southern two-thirds of Sri Lanka, by the demographic immensity of majority-Hindu India. The history of the repeated European attacks on their sacred city, Kandy, the last independent bastion of the Sinhalese in that southern two-thirds of the island, has only accentuated the sense of loneliness.

The Sinhalese must, therefore, fight for every kilometer of their ethnic homeland, Bradman Weerakoon, an adviser to former Sri Lankan presidents and prime ministers, told me. As a result, like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, the Jews in Israel, and the Shiites in Iran, the Sinhalese are a demographic majority with a dangerous minority complex of persecution.

The Hindu Tamils, for their part, have been labeled a minority with a majority complex, owing to the triumph of Hinduism over Buddhism in southern India in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the subsequent invasions from India’s south against the rich and thriving Buddhist city-state of Anuradhapura in north-central Sri Lanka. These invasions resulted in the creation, by the 14th century, of a Tamil kingdom that, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for Tamil majorities in the north and east of the island.

Sri Lanka’s post-independence experience, including its civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils, has borne out the worst fears of both communities. The Sinhalese have had to deal with a guerrilla insurgency every bit as vicious and suicidal as the better-known ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tamils, for their part, have had to deal with coercion, discrimination, and the utter failure of Sinhalese government institutions to protect their communal rights. There is nothing crueler than a majority that feels itself a minority.

I have not read much about Sri Lanka, so I won't comment on whether this is a correct assessment. Readers are welcome to share their views. But the majority feeling like a minority -- that's a striking thought, isn't it? We see the same sentiment in other countries and regions.

Groundwater depleting rapidly in North India

From Science (subscription required):

Farming is a thirsty business on the Indian subcontinent. But how thirsty, exactly? Satellite remote sensing of a 2000-kilometer swath running from eastern Pakistan across northern India and into Bangladesh has for the first time put a solid number on how quickly the region is depleting its groundwater. The number "is big," says hydrologist James Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine—big as in 54 cubic kilometers of groundwater lost per year from the world's most intensively irrigated region hosting 600 million people. "I don't think anybody knew how quickly it was being depleted over that large an area," Famiglietti says.

A little busy

It's only my first year in academia, yet I've been lucky to have two students who will be defending their master's thesis on August 24th. The students work very hard. They are unaware that I am lazy -- that I am interested more in the humanities than going through the hundreds of graphs, tables and numbers they send me.

Yet, work is work, and it is this work that pays my bills, lets me travel to new places, have my own schedule for four long summer months. So, pardon the lack of posts -- especially long essays. All that shall come in due time. But now, I need to return to editing theses drafts.

By the way, did you know that an advisor feels as nervous about a student's defense as the student himself?

Four new blogs

These are discoveries I've made recently: the incredibly diverse and informative 3 Quarks Daily; Seriously Sandeep, an angry blog, but which also tells us of the nature of Indian philosophy and Sanātana Dharma; Nilanjana Roy's literary Akhond of Swat; and finally the erudite and well traveled Namit Arora's Shunya's Notes.

This blog, by the way, turned four on July 21st. And as of August 8th yours truly not only has thirty letters in his name, he is also thirty years old.

Syādvāda: The Jain concept of relativity of knowledge

Chandradhar Sharma writes in A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy about a central concept in Jainism, Syādvāda:

Syādvāda is the theory of Relativity of knowledge. Reality has infinite aspects which are all relative and we can know only some of these aspects. All our judgments, therefore, are necessarily relative, conditional and limited.

The Jainas are fond of quoting the old story of the six blind men and the elephant. The blind men put their hands on the different parts of the elephant and each tried to describe the whole animal from the part touched by him. Thus the man who caught the ear said the elephant was like a country-made fan; the person touching the led said the elephant was like a pillar; the holder of the trunk said it was like a python; the feeler of the tail said it was like a rope; the person who touched it on the side said the animal was like a wall; and man who touched the forehead said the elephant was like the breast. And all the six quarreled among themselves, each one asserting that his description alone was correct. But he who can see the whole elephant can easily know that each blind man feels only a part of the elephant which he mistakes to be the whole animal. Almost all philosophical, ideological and religious differences and disputes are mainly due to mistaking a partial truth for the whole truth. Our judgments represent different aspects of the manysided reality and can claim only partial truth. This view makes Jainism catholic, broad-minded and tolerant. It teaches respect for others’ point of view.

*
Why, you may wonder, this noticeable increase in posts to do with religion? Because I have never understood religion in any substantive way. The time has now come to fill that gap. And what better place to begin than with ancient Indian schools of thought. I grew up in the Hindu tradition but never was I told that there was more to practicing religion than rituals and boring visits to temples. I knew about Shankaracharya, but it was only last month that I learned that there is such a thing as Advaita Vedanta, which he preached; I was told Hinduism was polytheistic but only now am I beginning to learn that it is polytheistic only in manifestation, and that the Upanishads actually suggest the unity of all life, of everything in fact.

But let me not get carried away with details: all I wanted to say was that I need to catch up with reading of a different kind, and that there will be more posts to come on similar themes.

700,000 acres in Ethiopia

Rana Dasgupta writes of the profligacy of Delhi's affluent: their obsession for fancy foreign cars, diamonds, wasteful parties, bodyguards and the like. But what interested me most was this conversation with MC, the son of a billionaire, who has a major business plan:

‘We’ve just leased 700,000 acres for seventy-five years; we’re opening up food processing, sugar and flower plantations.’

He is so matter of fact that I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly. We have already discussed how laborious it is to acquire land in India, buying from farmers at five or ten acres a time. I can’t imagine where he could get hold of land on that scale.

‘Where?’ I ask.

‘Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian president for a cattle ranch there. The President told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for, let’s go for it. We’re going in there with [exiled Russian oligarch] Boris Berezovsky. Africa is amazing. That’s where it’s at. You’re talking about numbers that can’t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we’re still ahead of the curve. I’m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that’s what I’ve decided. I’m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It’s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.’

MC tells me how he has one hundred farmers from Punjab ready with their passports to set off for Ethiopia as soon as all the papers are signed.

‘Africans can’t do this work. Punjabi farmers are good because they’re used to farming big plots. They’re not scared of farming 5,000 acres. Meanwhile, I’ll go there and set up polytechnics to train the Africans so when the sugar mills start up they’ll be ready.’

Shipping farmers from Punjab to work on African plantations is a plan of imperial proportions. And there’s something imperial about the way he says Africans. I’m stunned. I tell him so.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

‘What is on that land right now?’ I ask, already knowing that his response, too, will be imperial.

‘Nothing.’

MC is excited to be talking about this. His spirits seem to be entirely unaffected by the recession that currently dominates the headlines. He orders another beer, though we have exceeded the time he allotted me. All of a sudden, I find him immensely charismatic. I can see why he makes things happen: he has made me believe, as he must have made others believe, that he can do anything. I ask him how he learned to think like this.

‘I’m only twenty-eight,’ he says. ‘Why not?’

He becomes flamboyant.

‘We’re going to be among the top five food processors in the world. You know the first company I’m going to buy? Heinz.’

I’m interested in his Why not? Is it on the strength of such a throwaway reason that nearly three-quarters of a million acres of Ethiopia are being cleared and hundreds of farmers shipped across the world? I wonder what the emotional register of this is for him. It seems as if, somewhere, it’s all a bit of a lark.

"Religion means...spiritual realization."

Do not care for doctrines, do not care for dogmas or sects or churches or temples. They count for little compared with the essence of existence in each man, which is spirituality, and the more this is developed in a man, the more powerful is he for good. Earn that first, acquire that, and criticize no one; for all doctrines and creeds have some good in them. Show by your lives that religion does not mean words or names or sects, but that it means spiritual realization. Only those can understand who have felt. Only those who have attained to spirituality can communicate it to others, can be great teachers of mankind. They alone are the powers of light.

That’s Swami Vivekananda telling us the message of his guru, the famous Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-1886). Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's search for God, the life of renunciation and austerity he led, are indeed remarkable. The Wikipedia link I've provided gives all the details, but the story is most poignant in the words of his disciple -- it is from one of Vivekananda's essays, Great Teachers of the World that I've excerpted the above.

Rape of the Congo: Adam Hochschild essay

Nowhere is the plight of women as poor as it is in the Congo -- Eastern Congo particularly. Rape is an epidemic there, and there are some heartbreaking stories in this piece by Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost. Congo seems never to have recovered after King Leopold brutalized it in the late nineteenth century. Further, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict of Rwanda has spilled over into the country and still smolders there . And the profusion of mineral wealth --" gold, tungsten, diamonds, coltan (a key ingredient of computer chips), copper, and more" -- has only worsened the situation.

Hochschild writes:

Where does such cruelty come from? Four problems, above all, drive Congo's unrelenting bloodshed. One is long-standing antagonism between certain ethnic groups. A second is the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the two million or so people who flowed across Congo's porous border in its aftermath: Hutu killers, innocent Hutu who feared retribution, and a mainly Tutsi army in pursuit, bent on vengeance. The third is a vast wealth in natural resources—gold, tungsten, diamonds, coltan (a key ingredient of computer chips), copper, and more—that gives ethnic warlords and their backers, especially Rwanda and Uganda, an additional incentive to fight. And, finally, this is the largest nation on earth—more than 65 million people in an area roughly as big as the United States east of the Mississippi—that has hardly any functioning national government. After Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001, his son Joseph took power in Kinshasa, and won an election in 2006, but his corrupt and disorganized regime provides few services, especially in the more distant parts of the country, such as Goma, which is more than one thousand miles east of the capital.

Evidence of the nation's riches is everywhere. Battered Soviet-era Antonov cargo planes continually descend into Goma airport filled with tin ore from a big mine at Walikale, in the interior, now controlled by Congolese army officers. On a country road, a truckload of timber, stacked high, passes by, heading out of the rain forest toward the Ugandan border. And then one day in Goma, while I am walking with Anneke, Ida, and another foreigner, a man approaches and asks: Would we like to buy some uranium?

[...]

After two weeks my notebooks overflow with such [horrifying] stories [of rape and cruelty]. But looking at people I meet, even an entire encampment of young gold miners who are almost all ex-combatants, do I see those who look capable of killing hospital patients in their beds, gang-raping a woman like Rebecca Kamate, jabbing a young man's eye with a bayonet? I do not. People are warm, friendly, their faces overflow with smiles; seeing a foreigner, everyone wants to stop, say " Bonjour!" and shake hands, whether on a small town's main street or on a forest path. I've never seen more enthusiastic hand-shakers. At night, when the electricity works, the warm air echoes with some of Africa's best music. There is no shortage of ordinary acts of human kindness. When our car's left front wheel goes sailing off to the side of a remote mountain road, leaving one end of the axle to gouge a long furrow in the dirt, the driver of a passing truck, piled teeteringly high with goods and then with people sitting on top, immediately stops and crawls under the car, using his jack in tandem with ours to solve the problem and get us on our way.

What turns such people into rapists, sadists, killers? Greed, fear, demagogic leaders and their claim that such violence is necessary for self-defense, seeing everyone around you doing the same thing—and the fact that the rest of the world pays tragically little attention to one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of our time. But even the worst brutality can also draw out the good in people, as in the way Kamate has devoted her life to other raped women. In Goma, I saw people with pickaxes laboriously hewing the lava that had flooded their city into football-sized chunks with flattened sides, then using these, with mortar, to build the walls of new homes. Can this devastated country as a whole use the very experience of its suffering to build something new and durable? I hope so, but I fear it will be a long time in coming.

In a Chennai city bus

It was only six in the morning but the heat in Chennai was already oppressive. I was in a city bus headed to Perambur, where my grandmother lives. The journey was about forty minutes, yet there wasn’t a dull moment. When the bus started from the terminus in Koyambedu, an alighting old man was almost crushed by the crowd rushing in to grab seats. Many had staked their claim by hurling their bags or newspapers from the outside onto seats through the open windows.

Tempers were frayed: the old man, still unable to get off the bus, was quarreling with the teenager he had collided against. The fight threatened to escalate, but the two were blocking the entrance and a cessation of hostilities was in everyone's interest. Besides, nobody had the time.

I was lucky to get a seat; it was at the very back of the bus. Minutes later, two flower-vendors got in. Both were dressed plainly and their features were so similar, they could have been sisters. They carried capacious, sturdy-looking baskets. In pink and green polythene bags they carried the flowers they planned to sell for the day. One of them glared at me and said boldly, with a sense of entitlement, “Get up!” I obliged willingly. Later she made sure her sister – who was quieter, more soft-spoken – was seated next to her. The two began counting the money they had. The less assertive one said the numbers weren't adding up correctly, but her companion silenced her with a detailed, authoritative explanation. I wondered about their routine: how early they started their day, the markets they had to go to for bulk purchases, and how they chose the place to set up shop for the day. And they were selling perishable commodities -- how long would the flowers last? What prices would they set? So much to think about!

Just then a crowd boarded from the rear – all men except for a very frail old lady. She stood next to me. She was less than five feet tall. Her gray hair was thinning and she had a pony-tail that was no more than a centimeter long. When the conductor asked for her fare, she took offense: “Why do you ask me first? There are so many around you and yet you have to ask me! That’s because you think I am a vagrant woman of the streets, a beggar! You think I won’t pay for the ticket – that’s what it is.” In indignation, she searched her small pouch and took out a five rupee note. The conductor replied angrily that he was just doing his job.

The lady kept talking to herself in a low tone. I wasn’t able to hear clearly but the few words that I did catch suggested she was having a tough time, that nobody cared for her in this world, no one was willing to feed her a meal. Her hands were shriveled and dry – they had a peculiar, gray-white complexion, as if all life had been sucked out of them; and the same could be said about her face. She wore a checked red sari and a green blouse with a gold border. The dress was faded, but it added a hint of elegance to her bearing.

Laissez-faire in matters of the spirit

A little later, the old woman was at the window seat, next to the two flower-vendors. She continued mumbling incoherently as she looked out. Then she did something remarkable. If the bus passed by a temple, she would join her palms, close her eyes and pray. Nothing unusual in that. But if the bus passed by a mosque – and there were at least two on that route – she would pull the end of her sari over her head and cup her hands as if she was kneeling and praying to Allah. It was genuine and it was striking. Once the mosque or temple had passed, she would continue her recitation of complaints, oblivious to everything around her.

She had switched faiths so easily, so unselfconsciously! I was touched. It was a glimpse of faith at a very personal level; the comparison may not be apt, but the old lady's spontaneity contrasted sharply with the canniness and deliberation that goes with the political appeasement of religious groups in India.

A week later, in Kumbakonam, I was at the famous Guru Kovil – a temple dedicated to the planet Jupiter. I was lighting candles for the deity when I noticed four Muslim women next to me – they too were lighting candles.

The women showed no discomfort; they went freely around the temple, went to the main worship area, and prayed exactly as I did. Like the old lady in the bus, they saw no contradiction: faith was a personal thing and they could choose as they pleased. They were exhibiting “laissez faire in matters of the spirit”, to borrow a phrase M.G. Vassanji uses in his book A Place Within.

The picture above is of the four women enjoying a cup of tea outside the temple, after the morning’s worship. And let me make clear that I do not mean to infer anything broader about Tamilnadu or India based on what I have described in this post -- that would be too simplistic.

Namit Arora on Nalanda University

Namit Arora has a very informative essay on the splendors and historical context of the ancient Nalanda University. Exceprts:

Nalanda University arose in early 5th cent. CE during the reign of Kumara Gupta, though references to precursor sites associated with teaching and learning go back a thousand years to the time of the Buddha and Mahavira. Between Hiuen Tsang and I-Tsing, we have a compelling portrait of the university’s curriculum, the life of the monks, buildings, and other general features of the community.

Nalanda was more like a school of higher learning than an undergraduate college. Prospective students had to be at least 20 years old and submit to an oral exam at the university entrance. They had to demonstrate deep familiarity with a host of subjects and with old and new books in many fields. No more than two or three out of ten were admitted, and even they were promptly humbled by the caliber of their teachers and co-students.

When Hieun Tsang visited Nalanda, there were 8,500 students and 1,500 teachers in 108 residential monasteries, which often had two or more floors. Excavations thus far have revealed many exquisitely carved temples and a row of ten monasteries of oblong red bricks directly across a row of stupas in brick and plaster. Each monastery has rooms—either single or double occupancy, with wooden doors back then—lining four sides of a courtyard, a main entrance, and a shrine facing the entrance in the courtyard. Rooms typically had chairs, wood blocks, small mats, and utensils stored in niches cut out in the walls.

[...]

Buddhism began waning in India after 800 CE. By then, Hinduism had assimilated many of its features—vegetarianism, insider critiques of the caste system, ending animal sacrifices—and embraced the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Vishnu. A bigger factor was the rise of Bhakti, or devotional Hinduism, and its great appeal to the masses. One could say that the religious market was shifting to a more user-friendly product, and as a result, Buddhism lost much of its royal patronage. The Palas were the last major royals to support Nalanda as a center of learning and the arts (stone and bronze sculpture in particular). A museum on-site, which houses many finds from Nalanda and the nearby region, has many curious sculptures from this period: Buddhist deities trampling on Brahmanical ones, such as Shiva, Parvati, and Ganesh. A Buddhist goddess has mighty Hindu gods like Indra, Vishnu, and Shiva as her ‘vehicle bearers,’ while she carries the severed head of Brahma in one hand. A plausible explanation is that the Buddhists were on the defensive—they had to resort to more dramatic imagery to assert their religious superiority to the ambivalent.

In 1193 CE, Nalanda was put to a brutal and decisive end by Bakhtiyar Khilji, a Turkish Muslim invader on his way to conquer Bengal. He looted and burned the monastery, and beheaded or burned alive perhaps thousands of monks. The shock of this event lives on in local cultural memory; during my visit, I too heard the legend that the three libraries of Nalanda—with books like the ones Hieun Tsang and I-Tsing carried back to China—were so large that they smoldered for six long months.

The MGR phenomenon

I am referring to MG Ramachandran (1917-1987), one of the most important figures of Tamil politics, who, with help from other prominent leaders of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), including the crafty script-writer Karunanidhi, seamlessly moved between cinema and politics as if the two were one. In the process they created a politics that had all the drama of movies and movies that were overtly political. Later MGR broke with Karunanidhi, formed his own party, the AIADMK (All India Anna DMK), and used his power as a star to cast a kind of spell on Tamil Nadu. I would like to give you a flavor of the MGR phenomenon using excerpts from Vaasanthi’s Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars, which I wrote about briefly here.

1. Cinema with a pint of blood

Blood donations in Tamil Nadu and MGR movie premieres were strangely connected -- this is the sort of anecdote that just about proves that reality can be more bizarre than the wildest fiction:

It looked as if every young man in town was eager to donate blood. The hospitals noted a record number of donors. Young Sadanand Menon, who was just out of college and joined the Indian Express, as a reporter, was intrigued. And also deeply touched. The editor had asked him to look into the new phenomenon. It was strange indeed. But Sadanand found out that the crowd of donors peaked on Thursdays, declined on the following days and rose again from Wednesday. The donors were paid five rupees per pint of blood. The blood was sold to buy cinema tickets for the new releases on Fridays. He confirmed that whenever a new MGR movie was released, the queue for blood donation was the longest on the previous day.

2. Sipped juice is holy water

India Today -- as quoted in Vaasanthi's book -- on MGR:

For close to a decade, the matinee-idol-turned politician had monopolized the floodlights as only a man who has straddled Tamil Nadu's intertwined worlds of cinema and politics can. As a hero of scores of films, his name was a household word for more than twenty years. And his well-known acts of personal charity -- distributing food and clothes to the poor -- had earned him a special affection bordering on worship. If he merely sipped a glass of orange juice offered to him at a public meeting, the rest of the liquid would be diluted in buckets of water, which would then be passed around for his fans to drink as theertham -- holy water. Slumlords in the industrial town of Coimbatore used to pull down giant film hoardings of MGR and hire them out to slum women to sleep on at night.

3. Cultivating an image

The importance of image was not lost on MGR. These are his own words:

It is not enough if you are good man, you must create an image that you are a good man. Every man must have an image. Take Nagi Reddy or S.S. Vasan or myself. Each of us have a distinct image. The image is what immediately strikes you when you see a person or hear his name. You put forward an image of yourself if you want to get anywhere.

Vaasanthi writes:

MGR’s entire career can be termed as a synthesis between acting and politics. His fans and supporters were so carried away by the image that they could see no difference between the screen characters and the real person...it was believed that he would agree only to play roles that corresponded to his personal values and commitments.

4. MGR and women

Narendra Srinivasan makes an interesting observation in his book Ethnicity and Popular Mobilization. ‘Women were sensitive to the basic issues MGR raised – the availability of food and water, as they are homemakers; and temperance, as excessive male drinking bled their family budgets and often led to violence against them.’ Rural women desired protection against a culture that was associated with alcohol, violence and the perception of women as whores. MGR gave them status and a sense of dignity by calling them ‘thaikulam’, community of mothers.

And women loved MGR, no matter what he called them. With the advent of cinema halls, there was a newfound freedom they enjoyed within the darkened walls with just their hero on the screen. They could consort with the beloved hero in their imagination, identifying with MGR’s various heroines. ‘The intensity of this identification,’ Subramanian says, ‘meant that support was readily transferred after MGR’s death to Jayalalithaa, who was one of MGR’s popular screen heroines through the 1960s and the early 1970s.

Interestingly enough, Rajnikant, the other cine star Tamilnadu is crazy about, is not so popular with women. Vaasanthi reasons that this is because of "Rajni's anti-hero image -- the irreverent, smoking, drinking, woman-bashing hero -- appealed only to the diaffected male in search of an identity, and definitely not a female audience."

5. The poor, Sri-Lankan born Malayali

And finally here’s a very short biography of MGR that may help complete the picture. I present this deliberately at the end, rather than give an up-front introduction – that’s because sometimes you get fascinated with a person’s deeds and then want the details: “Who was this guy?” “What was his background?” In short, MGR was Malayali and was born in Sri Lanka into a very poor family. But here's more:

Marudur Gopalmenon Ramachandran was born on 17 January 1917, in Kandy, Sri Lanka. MGR’s father, Gopala Menon, died when was still a child and left the family penniless. Ramachandran’s mother Sathya moved to India with her children and settled in Kumbakonam, Tamilnadu. Hunger claimed the lives of two of his sisters and an elder brother. Driven by extreme poverty, MGR began his acting career as a theatre artist at the age of seven, and joined the Madurai Original Boys Company, owned by M. Kandasamy Pillai. Ramachandran was fair-complexioned and pretty as a girl, and it was said that it was common for the wealthy, land-owning young men of Thanjavur district to sexually abuse such kids. This, according to a chronicler, may have affected MGR’s psyche. After a long struggle M.G. Ramachander, as he was then called, got a break doing small roles in mythological films followed by action films that became his forte. Critics never thought much of his limited talent as an actor though his films broke records at the box office. He also won the National Award for acting in Rickshawkaran.

The Brahmin and the Buddhist

At a stall in a Bangalore temple, I found a little book – the size of a pocket book, seventy odd pages thick, and priced at ten rupees – on Swami Vivekananda’s famous Parliament of the World Religions speech in Chicago, 1893.

The book contained the text of Vivekananda’s address and there was a section titled Buddhism: The Fulfilment of Hinduism. I was drawn immediately. Like many other Indians, I’ve always wondered why Buddhism, after having been so dominant for a millennium in India, receded so comprehensively even as it expanded eastward. What was the relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism? The former, with its suspicion of ritual worship and caste, seemed like the latter’s adversary; it also seemed as if the latter had reasserted itself strongly and caused the former's decline. To such an extent that Buddha is considered by many today as an incarnation of Vishnu.

Vivekananda’s reading is different: to him the Buddha was “the fulfilment, the logical conclusion, the logical development of the religion of the Hindus.” Rejecting the ceremonial side of Hinduism, the Buddha had instead taken the spiritual route. Caste was not a barrier to enlightenment: “a man from the highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India and the two castes become equal...there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution.” And Vivekananda speaks admiringly of the Buddha’s “wonderful sympathy for everybody, especially for the ignorant and the poor.” Because Sanskrit was largely the language of ritual and not spoken, the Buddha wanted his teachings to be written in the vernacular of the day.

But it is in the final two paragraphs that Vivekanda reveals his thesis: how Buddhism and Brahmanism (which I assume refers here to Hinduism -- at least the Hinduism of the Vedic kind) complement each other, how without one the other cannot survive.

As Buddhism died out in India,

Brahmanism lost something – that reforming zeal, that wonderful sympathy and charity for everybody, that wonderful leaven which Buddhism had brought to the masses and which had rendered Indian society so great that a Greek historian who wrote about India of that time was led to say that no Hindu was known to tell an untruth...

Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realize what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. The separation between the Buddhists and the Brahmins is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why India is populated by three hundred millions of beggars, and that is why India has been the slave of conquerors for the last thousand years. Let us then join the wonderful intellect of the Brahmin with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful humanizing power of the Great Master [the Buddha].

It’s a striking thought, since there are indeed places in the world today -- India is one, of course -- where the two religions exist independently, without the other.

Ma for the brain, Pa for food and sex

Maternal and paternal genes don't contribute equally to the child's genetic makeup, this Scientific American article suggests; they actually compete to silence the other's influence. This is pretty normal, but if the process goes awry, neurological disorders result. And here's the interesting bit: apparently mothers are more responsible for cerebral stuff -- stuff to do with language, thought and complex activities -- while fathers are more responsible for pleasures of the senses: eating and mating.

Needless to say, all this is emerging knowledge, and is to be taken cautiously. But the next time you meet your parents, you may look at them strangely now that you have read the article. Ah, so this is why, you will secretly think, I have this strange, unmentionable fetish; this is why I love jalebis and candy; this is why I am poor in music and math!

Key concepts from the article [link]:

1. When passing on DNA to their offspring, mothers silence certain genes, and fathers silence others. These imprinted genes usually result in a balanced, healthy brain, but when the process goes awry, neurological disorders can result.

2. Imprinting errors are responsible for rare disorders such as Angelman and Prader-Willi syndromes, and some scientists are beginning to think imprinting might be implicated in more common illnesses such as autism and schizophrenia.

3. Even typical brains are the result of asymmetric contributions from Mom and Dad. Higher cognitive function seems to be disproportionately controlled by Mom’s genes, whereas the drive to eat and mate is influenced by Dad’s.

Vaasanthi on the world of Tamil politics

I have just read the introduction of Tamil journalist and writer Vaasanthi’s book Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics, and I already know I am going to enjoy reading the book, that it is going to tell me things about my home state that I am completely unaware of. After my travel last week through cities in Tamilnadu’s interior, I am eager for analysis that can provide perspective. Vaasanthi's is just the right book. Here she is, telling us why politics in Tamilnadu is so regional:

The most striking difference has been the regionalization of party politics in Tamil Nadu when compared with other states. While ethnic forces were gaining ground in other parts of India as well, it was in Tamil Nadu that they dominated party politics. It is this that has, till today, prevented the growth of parties with an all-India face in the state. By transforming Tamil language into a object of passionate attachment, by introducing notions of self-respect and regional pride and by providing their version of Tamil cultural history, the DMK spokespersons came out as better Tamil nationalists than the Congress, for instance. The party created what has been described as a ‘hegemonic hold over Tamil political life and culture’. The Congress has long since been marginalized in the state for this reason.

The Tamils cannot relate to the BJP’s Hindutva either for the same reason. The increasing religiosity in evidence now in Tamilnadu should not be attributed to the spread of the BJP. The BJP with its North Indian, Hindi-speaking, Hindu-fundamentalist veneer has made little dent on the Tamil psyche. The pronounced religiosity that is strikingly visible in Tamil Nadu is another contradiction that might baffle an outsider who has heard about the Dravidian movement and its atheist protagonist, Periyar. Ironically, the growing religiosity is the direct result of the shift in the caste hierarchies thanks to the Self-Respect Movement and the reservation benefits and the resultant upward social mobility, which has brought about a silent and willing ‘Brahminization’ of the backward communities who tend to project their caste status through their religiosity.

During my trip, I witnessed this “pronounced religiosity” that Vaasanthi mentions – and it was news to me that it wasn’t there, say, twenty or thirty years ago. But the last sentence in the quote explains a lot: it is precisely the sort of insight I am looking for.

Healthcare costs: the Atul Gawande New Yorker essay

Do expensive state of the art medical facilities correlate with better health outcomes? In this superb essay, surgeon and writer Atul Gawande tells us how, in certain places in the United States, technology can collude with strange monetary incentives to increase health care costs and reduce the quality of care. Physicians are leaning towards more tests, more scans, more surgeries -- all of which generate revenue -- when simpler wait-and-watch alternatives would have been preferable. And there is no conspiracy here: the system in the United States seems to have subconsciouly evolved this way because of the incentives in place. Atul Gawande travels to the city of McAllen, Texas and makes the argument that the overutilization of medical resources has sent costs skyrocketing. And he tells us that only by trimming the fat from the system will Obama be able to finance healthcare reform.

Development in dangerous places

In 2001 the United Nations announced the Millennium Development Goals, pledging to end global poverty by 2015. I argued then that it needed to focus its concern on a much smaller group of countries than it had identified. There is, as I argued in The Bottom Billion, an essential difference between a poor family in China and an equally poor family in Chad. Although both enter into the global headcount of families living in extreme poverty, the poor family in China has credible hope that its children will grow up in a society of transformed opportunities: China will be part of the future global economy. Credible hope for the future of one’s children makes poverty bearable; that was the condition accepted by millions of immigrants to America. In contrast, Chad has not offered its population a credible basis for hope.

Chad is not alone. It is one of a group of about 60 small, impoverished, post-colonial countries that “came unnatural into the world.” With neither the social unity needed for cooperation, nor the size to reap the benefits of larger scale, they are structurally unable to provide the public goods—such as security—that are critical for decent quality of life and imperative for economic development. They have diverged from the rest of mankind. They will never tap their vast reservoir of frustrated human potential unless the international community, at least for a time, supplies basic public goods that go beyond the typical aid agenda. This, stated baldly, is the thesis of my new book, Wars, Guns, and Votes. It is a troubling thesis. I have come to it reluctantly, and the international community has shied away from it, as have the societies of the bottom billion themselves.

Why is outside intervention necessary? The countries of the bottom billion are, paradoxically, too large to be nations, yet too small to be states. They are too large to be nations because, with rare exceptions, too many different peoples, with too many distinct ethnic and religious identities, live in them. This is not because they have large populations: on the contrary, the typical bottom-billion country has only a few million people. But these populations have yet to forge a strong sense of national identity that overrides older sub-national ethnic and religious identities. Considerable research shows that where sub-national identities predominate, it is more difficult for people to cooperate in providing public goods.

That's Paul Collier in the Boston Review. Link via Amitava Kumar. Update: William Easterly launches a scathing critique.

Away traveling

I will most likely be unable for post for the next ten days. That's because it is time to travel again, talk to people, and see new places. This time, I am traveling in the home country: I will be following an arc through the upper half of Tamilnadu. I will be visiting temples in Tiruvanamalai, Kumbakonnam, Thanjavur, Tiruchirapalli, before returning to Bangalore through Erode and Sathyamangalam. I hope in the process to get a better sense of Tamilnadu's history and its religious traditions. I know it instinctively, since I am Tamil myself, but I have not looked at it as rigorously as I have looked at, say, Native American or Mexican history.

And along the way, I will be reading two interesting books: UR Anantha Murthy’s classic Samskara, and, Arzee the Dwarf, the just-released first novel of my friend, Chandrahas Choudhury, whom I met in Bangalore last Friday at the book launch, and had some very good conversations with over the last three days.