Thirty letters in my name

The year in retrospect

2011-12-30T16:33:00.033-06:00

Or what interested me in 2011

This was a fascinating year in many ways. It was certainly the busiest year of my life. I’ve been busy before but only for a few weeks or a month. But this year, the busyness of my schedule was taken to a whole new level. It may sound funny, but I realize now what people mean when they say they “work”. For the first 2 years of my faculty position, I still felt like a graduate student, and as if there were no worries in the world. Work would get done when it had to. This feeling of lightness allowed me to travel repeatedly to Latin America (Mexico, Peru and Bolivia) and write pieces at a pace that I had never managed before. But now that I have my own students – doctoral students who are very committed and work very hard but who understandably require a lot of guidance – the responsibilities are greater.

That’s the main reason I haven’t been able to write much here. But despite all the activities at the university that vied for my energy and attention – the endless emphasis on papers and grants to prove that one is “good” at what one does – this break from writing for the blog did open up time for a free-ranging exploration of many new topics. As always, I am amazed at how much there is that one doesn’t know. More importantly, I am amazed how previously uninteresting clichés and topics suddenly acquire new meaning and relevance because of altered life circumstances.

For reasons difficult to explain, I started thinking seriously about spirituality and religion this year. I was driven to find out what was at the bottom of it all. I was especially interested in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism), because unlike the ritualistic version of Hinduism that I grew up and was dissatisfied with, these traditions prescribed a contemplative and experiential approach that could be applied easily in everyday life.

It became clear to me that understanding how sense perceptions are translated into thought and how thought creates our conscious experience was perhaps the first step in understanding the reality that we face. All philosophical, religious and scientific questions – what is moral and immoral; the nature of suffering and happiness; science’s search for an answer to explain the mysterious workings of the universe – are questions within the realm of human consciousness. Consciousness is the very source that creates these questions and the reality that we experience. But what is this mysterious source and is there a reality that is outside of it? Another, related question that continues to puzzle me is this: What is the "I" in my consciousness that makes me feel as a separate individual -- in other words makes me feel the duality of “I” versus “the rest of the world”?

I became interested in meditation, which seemed like a logical first step in investigating what the mind is all about. I realized through practice that meditation is a fascinating and baffling scientific experiment where you are both the observer and the observed. In other words, it is the “I” in me observing its own behavior – a strange idea, to say the least. Of course, I found no comprehensive answers through meditation – expecting such answers is unrealistic to begin with – but I did begin to understand how thoughts function and how they skew our perception of reality.

I found many benefits from an unstructured form of meditation that I have been practicing for over a year. I arrived at it after experimenting with and rejecting prescribed methods. Unlike what the manuals or the books said, I did not focus my attention on anything but simply let things be and let thoughts wander. I found that to keep one’s attention on a single object is quite unnatural. Our consciousness does not function that way. It is always dynamic, shifting and moving, even when the mind is calm. So my meditation was a simply a session of sitting (15-20 minutes) every night without interfering with the mind’s activities. Somehow, these sittings led to deeply relaxing and still moments. Thoughts slowed down on their own, without any conscious effort on my part. I realized the key role that breathing plays in relaxing the body and why it is emphasized so heavily in the Indian meditation traditions.

I also learned that most thoughts are not created by choice. Thoughts appear and flit across the screen of our consciousness as randomly as clouds in the sky. When there are no thoughts, there is simply an awareness of the body, the breath or sensations within the body, but these too are finer forms of thoughts, or finer perceptions experienced through the veil of thought (the blue of the sky, to stretch the previous analogy). Emotions, whether unpleasant or pleasant, are simply physiological disturbances – a constriction near the chest or stomach, or a pleasant wave of energy – and all emotions, and the thoughts associated with them, are impermanent. That is, they have a temporary life-span within the mind-body system.

The questions about the nature of consciousness lead to other, equally interesting questions in biology and physics. How do other species experience reality? Do they have self-awareness and if so how different is it from what humans have? How do other species deal with suffering and loss? Why do human always feel they are better than all other species, when there is really no objective basis for putting one species above another? And what about the vastness of the universe, the strange fact that time and space are intertwined, and the counterintuitive theories of quantum mechanics?

These lines of enquiry lead me to a number of interesting books – from the essays and speeches of philosopher/mystic Jiddu Krishnamuti; the teachings of Ramana Maharishi; essays by American Buddhists who in my opinion have taken a very practical and very useful approach to Buddhism; and the self-help bestseller, The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.

On the science side, I read (or sampled) Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and The Magic of Reality; Brian Green’s explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity in The Elegant Universe; David Linden’s The Compass of Pleasure; F. Baumeister’s Willpower; and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. I also liked Brian Greene’s documentary, The Fabric of the Cosmos, which explored the nature of space and time.

I did not always agree with or understand the abstract ideas discussed in these books -- whether spiritual or scientific – but they were useful, nevertheless, and revealed new perspectives.

I had almost forgotten, meanwhile, about literary fiction and its ability to capture the interplay of thought, memory and time, and detail the inner life of a person as no other form can. I had not read fiction for more than a year. It was by chance that I stumbled upon Ivan Turgenev’s A House of Gentlefolk this November. I had bought the slim book a long time ago and it had stayed, untouched, on my bookshelf for years.

It turned out to as good as the other, more famous Turgenev book, Fathers and Sons. Turgenev’s deft characterizations, the fast moving story, the poignant moments when the characters reflect on the crises of their lives, took me back to the time, about ten years ago, when I believed unequivocally that literary fiction was the highest form of writing. That impression has faded a bit in recent years or as I came to rely more and more on non-fiction.

A House of Gentlefolk reminded me of how good fiction is at touching some of the incomprehensible aspects of life – those emotional aspects that cannot be described or quantified easily but are simply felt subjectively. I finished the book within a week, and, like a man in search of an old treasure he himself has buried but has forgotten where, I started looking closely at my shelves for other works of fiction. After starting and abandoning Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I finally settled on Thornton Wilder’s ingeniously simple yet profound play, Our Town, which took only a few hours to finish. Through simple characters and the almost naive, small town setting (in New Hampshire), Wilder was able to demonstrate with great power the meaning of death and changes in perspective that it brings.

But my most dramatic discovery of the year came just a few weeks ago, when in a bookstore in Northampton (not far from Amherst, where I live), I found Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Back in 2007, my friend, the novelist and writer Chandrahas Choudhury, had recommended their translation of The Brothers Karamazov. I took his advice then and had the most sublime few months reading Dostoevsky’s classic work.

I bought the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina, but I thought it would be impossible to read an 800-page novel, with the end of the semester approaching. Luckily, I had to make two trips to New York City on back to back weekends, and the long train journeys (Amtrak trains) allowed me to get well into Anna Karenina. But it was not hard at all – in fact, the novel flowed so easily, so seamlessly from one character to another, from one scene to the next, and so clear and concise was the psychological detailing that it never felt like anything was being overdone. In three weeks, I was more than halfway through the book. This amazed me since I am an incredibly slow reader, generally incapable of reading more than 30 pages a day.

Anna Karenina has a very simple storyline. It is most a novel about families and marriage – marriage more than anything else. It is set in the decade following the emancipation of the serfs (the 1860s or the 1870s). Darwin’s ideas of the “animal origin of man” had just reached Russia. Electricity had arrived but was not yet common, travel in trains was common and telegrams had made communication quick and easy. Christianity in Russia was changing too – there were more rapturous, evangelical versions but also many more unbelievers and nihilists who used scientific materialism to reject the structures of religion.

The characters in Anna Karenina are ordinary. By that I mean they aren’t people with special talents, just people with both good and bad in them. At one level, the story is a simple tale of gossip – what is after all so new about an extra marital affair, which is at the heart of the novel? Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov had gruesome murders at their core – and it always felt that there was something serious at stake; the plots were intricate and thrilling.

But the genius of Tolstoy is in providing intimate portraits of the married relationships and affairs of intertwined families, interspersing these personal lives with the social and religious questions of the era.

I couldn’t help feeling that Anna Karenina that has tremendous relevance even today. And as often happens while reading a great book, every single observation of mine, about the world and people, is colored by Tolstoy's view. In a year that I began to think seriously about how thoughts create both our expectations and disappointments, Anna Karenina, more than any other non-fiction book I read, was able to accurately portray, through its many characters, the unreliable and constantly changing nature of the individual self – now experiencing moments of transcendence, the next moment in deep grief, disoriented and puzzled, then finding from nowhere the strength to recover and feel happiness.

And finally, a note on the one other thing that inspired me to no end this year. Even as a child I had always been drawn to animals and nature. It is an instinctive feeling that most of us share. But my interest then had been only in specific wildlife settings – such as wildebeest migrations in the plains of the Serengeti – and not much else. Birds or insects or beavers or trees or the complex interactions in nature which make life tick never interested me much.

That changed this year. Perhaps the biologist Edward Wilson’s remarkable experiments and study of the social behavior of ants, seeded my curiosity about nature as a whole. Further, it seemed almost impossible not to think of nature when dealing with spiritual and religious questions. I often find it puzzling that many organized religions, so engrossed in their own dogmas and rituals, pay very little attention to nature. Miraculous things already happen in nature, yet we remain interested only in unverifiable myths and legends.

In March, with the snow still covering most of the woods and the ponds still frozen, I started walking the trails that surround Amherst. I began to observe birds, beavers, raccoons, foxes, chipmunks, skunks, ants on the pavement, struggling spiders in my bathtub, and much else. When you do this on a regular basis, the human-centered or self-centered view that dominates our lives begins to break down momentarily. It never goes away completely – the ego is much too strong – but a different perspective begins to open up. Humans tend to be incredibly self-congratulatory: all our religious and scientific institutions always stress how special humans are, how evolved we are compared to other species and so on. But the fact is that humans, whatever our abilities, are no more or no less important than any other species on earth.

In parallel, I watched many documentaries on PBS Nature (PBS refers to American public television). These documentaries are available free online. I was interested most in the difficulties of surviving in the wild, and how animals cope with physical pain, suffering and loss. A recurring example was the high mortality of offspring in the early days or months, when they are most vulnerable and unable to fend for themselves. The mother puts an enormous effort and is yet, in many cases, unable to save her offspring. In some species – elephants, lemurs, hawks – the pain of the loss lasted visibly for days.

I was moved by these stories. The arbitrariness of life was now an inescapable fact for me. Yet the same arbitrariness also implied that one could approach life in an open ended, less burdensome way, with fewer illusions.

The best of all the documentaries I watched was My Life as a Turkey, which premiered in November this year. It is a reenactment of Florida farmer Joe Hutto’s attempt at imprinting – in plain terms, the attempt be a mother, despite being of a different species, to wild turkey chicks (wild turkey are different from the turkeys that are consumed as food). Hutto begins by incubating eggs and mimicking sounds that a mother Turkey might take. The pivotal moment is when the chicks emerge and see him before they see anything else. Some sort of bond is formed and the wild turkeys follow Joe Hutto for the next year or so. Hutto is totally responsible for their welfare and makes a full time commitment. This means he will live in the forest, cut off from other humans, for as long as it takes to raise the chicks.

The premise of the documentary – based on Hutto's book Illumination in the Flatwoods – may not sound exciting, but I invite you to give it a try. It is superbly edited, well narrated and has stunning visuals of the forests of Florida. My Life as a Turkey is interesting both as a scientific experiment and for its philosophical content. Joe Hutto’s sentences from the book, which are used in the reenactment, are thoughtful. The curiosity of the growing turkeys; the intelligence they are born with about the natural world (“humans do not have a privileged access to reality”); their ability to live in the moment which we can only envy – all of this made it one of the best documentaries that I have ever watched.

A very happy new year to everyone!

A buttferfly's 2000 mile journey

2011-12-03T12:18:00.027-06:00

Every summer, the North American Monarch butterfly embarks on a remarkable journey that begins in Canada or the northeastern United States. In two months, millions of these butterflies congregate in a high forest in Mexico. Each day, the butterfly travels fifty miles and the total journey is around two thousand miles.

Birds of course can fly even longer distances. But then birds also travel in groups: there are older members in the group who have covered these distances before and are therefore in a position to guide others. The Monarch butterfly makes the journey alone and it does so only once. When a Monarch butterfly starts from Canada, it has never flown before. No one is there to guide it to Mexico.

And yet, this delicate creature, with wings less than four inches wide, crosses the Great Lakes – imagine crossing these massive bodies of water, where there are few opportunities for nectar and rest – then Midwestern towns, the Great Plains, the deserts of Texas, the Sierra Madre range in Mexico, and makes its final approach to forests in Michoacan, 100 km northwest of Mexico City.

Some unknown compass – either the earth’s magnetic field or the sun – seems to tell it exactly where to go. Even when these butterflies are tagged for study are taken off course by scientists (say far to the east or west), they still recover and know exactly how to adjust their path.

Nature always throws up these inexplicable and mysterious examples. Why should we believe in the unverifiable miracles advertised by organized religion – that the Buddha was enlightened, that Krishna lifted a mountain, or that Jesus walked on water – why even think of them when the miracles of nature are much more tangible, more varied and can be observed every day?

The butterflies start from very different regions in the northern US and Canada, thousands of miles apart, but as they approach Mexico, they start to cluster together and can be seen in their hundreds of thousands in Texas as they narrow in on their destination. In the forests of Michoacan, they congregate in the millions, covering the skies, the forest floor, the trees, the twigs – just about everything. What started as a lone journey now culminates in the collective blanketing of a destination they were drawn to.

As they hang from the branches of trees, they look like leaves themselves -- see picture to the left.

The Monarchs rest in Michoacan until spring, and then begin the journey back. But no butterfly ever makes it back to Canada. About a third of their way back – around Texas – they mate and die. The few hundred eggs that each female lays then transform into butterflies and continue the journey. But this generation too does not make it all the way back. About halfway or three quarters of the way back is another mating cycle and the third generation continues the reverse migration. In the end, what we have is an incredible intergenerational relay spanning four generations. As they move northward, the butterflies begin to disperse geographically, eventually reaching original regions where the epic southward migration began.

For some reason, no single butterfly ever completes the cycle, but the generation that is born in Canada and reaches Mexico is the one that lives the longest.

The Nagpur dogs -- Part 1

2011-10-22T11:54:00.018-06:00

My fascination with dogs began when we moved to the central Indian city of Nagpur. We lived in a third story flat with four balconies. Each balcony faced a different direction and offered different views of the neighborhood.

I had just begun eighth grade that year. I used to wake up early in the morning, seat myself on a stool in one of the balconies and try to study. More often than not I would doze off, but if I did stay awake, the textbook was hardly what drew my attention. I would instead look at stray dogs that were very active at dawn. Early morning seemed to be their time. Maybe the cool air energized them. They played frantically, chasing each other down, trying to wrest torn rags from each other. At eight, with the sun up and strong, they would be exhausted. They would lie in the shade, front feet stretched, their snouts nuzzling in between, noses twitching and ears still alert for anything untoward. That was about the time I was ready for a heavy breakfast as well.

On the western side, adjacent to our flats, were two single story houses. The one immediately below belonged to a Rajasthani family. I often visited them because there were two kids my age – Dilip and Jeetendra – but also because the family always had pets. They even had a cow they kept in a shed on the other side of the house. This affinity for domestic animals seemed be a carryover from their rural past in Rajasthan. Strangely the animals of the house never lived long. The family saw three dogs during the five years I was their neighbor: Sheru, Rocky and Tommy, in that order.

The other house, diagonally across, I did not know much about. I mention it simply because there was a Doberman, Lucy, perennially leashed there. Her steel food bowl was replenished day after day but she was rarely taken out for a walk. She barked herself hoarse, asking for attention. Her pleas would intensify in the morning when the man of the house left for work.

To one side of these houses was the “Garden and Bar Restaurant”. It was the sort of place my parents, vegetarians and teetotalers that they were, would never visit. The restaurant had a square perimeter marked by a hedge of high bushes. Appended to one corner, like a jump drive to a laptop, was small stall, no more than 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall. This was a pan thela (a little stall selling betel leaf garnished with spices and intoxicants). Motorbikes, scooters and cars would park in the area in front of the thela for a cigarette or pan. The strays tended to congregate here too: the owner of the thela was someone whom the dogs seemed to like.

Another place the strays frequented was the garbage dump behind the restaurant. The dump was a large square space, disorganized and overgrown with weeds. This was where restaurant leftovers and other odds and ends were commonly disposed.

The northern balcony faced a busy highway called the Ring Road. The highway had a median with tall forked streetlights that provided pedestrians and dogs a break while crossing. The traffic consisted mostly of noisy trucks. Across the road were new flats still in construction. The poor laborers who worked on building had made their own patchwork huts for their families. One of these families had a dog named Moti. Moti was big and confident enough to be one of the alpha males in the neighborhood. He had ears that stood up as sharp as arrow ends even when they were off guard. He also had beautiful colors: a base of white with large patches of cream and brown. He sported a dark-brown collar that lent him a kind of formal elegance, like a man wearing a sharp suit.

The story I am trying to tell isn’t a single coherent story, rather a series of interlinked anecdotes and observations. But in my mind at least the protagonists are clear: three sister strays who were born in the neighborhood. By the time we moved in to Nagpur, they were already a few years old. Later I would marvel that all three had survived into adulthood. I say this because the sisters’ own litters over the years almost always struggled to make it.

The three sisters were mostly black, but their faces had a touch of tan or cream, in varying shades. In physical appearance, they were very similar, but their personalities were distinct.

The biggest (and I speculate the eldest) of them had a long and slender frame and a pointed snout. She looked the healthiest and the calmest. At some point after I learned to recognize her, she changed neighborhoods. Initially, she frequented the area around the restaurant and pan thela, but then she moved – and it seemed like a permanent move – across the road a couple of blocks away, near where Moti lived. I was surprised, since dogs are generally faithful to the territories they are born into.

The other sisters were smaller. One, whom I’ll call Mina, had strange faded black marks on her light colored face and snout. They suggested – at that time, to my overactive adolescent imagination – that she had been whipped or that these marks were scars. But they may just as well have been colors she had inherited. I found it impossible to get close to her, no matter how hard I tried or how friendly I was. Mina did not trust humans, and this allowed her to keep a safe distance from them -- probably a good thing, because not everyone liked strays. Dogs in India are wary every time they see a person bend down. More often than not, the bending down is a prelude to the pickup of a stone that will be hurled their way. The mischievous boy that I was, I resorted to this shooing gesture once in a while, just to scare dogs and tease them, even when I was not threatened.

I was closest to the last of the sisters, whom I’ll call Meera. Meera was a sprightly dog, playful, generally upbeat. She responded well to people. She was aggressive when needed, and especially when strange dogs passed her territory. She was also involved the few times I had seen packs of stray dogs hunt and kill a solitary stray pig. The balance of power between stray pigs, who generally traveled in groups of half a dozen, and dogs always shifted – you could never tell who had the upper hand. Sometimes the pigs, who competed with cows and stray dogs at garbage dumps – the pigs certainly seemed to have proprietary rights to the filthier places: sewage and gutters – could easily face up to and scare a dog. At other times the pigs were easy victims. Meera sensed this balance well, and could be vicious on pigs when the time was right. The occasional pig hunt, which happened once or twice a year, seemed to recall an earlier pre-domestication time, when an unstable truce might have existed between the two species in the wild.

Meera was also a wonderful mother and gave the best to her puppies, even though none of them ever (at least for the five years I was in Nagpur) made it to adulthood.

The three sisters also had a brother. I remember him well, because he was named Hari by the family that adopted him (that was an odd name for a dog in India, where pet names are noticeably different: Tommy, Rocky, Pintu etc.) The family had a house diagonally across the Rajasthani home. Hari looked almost exactly like his sisters except that he was larger. He was never leashed so he took the opportunity to jump over walls and interact with other strays. He roved fearlessly into other neighborhoods and was in this sense more enterprising than the other alpha male in the vicinity, Moti.

Moti liked to stick to where he was, but Hari traveled. Every time I looked out of my balcony, I would long to see a standoff between the two. It happened one day but ended pretty tamely. Hari had intruded too close to Moti’s area, and they growled at each other for a while. They were about the same size, so posturing and bluster seemed to be the best strategy rather than out and out attack, which would have doubtless harmed both. After some time, Hari retreated and that was the end of that.

I was always struck this natural intelligence that seemed to operate in the strays that I observed (It would be difficult to generalize, but this basic intelligence applies to other species in the wild, where, despite very brutal acts by animals, conflicts do not escalate. There is always a kind of letting-go, an understanding that further fighting isn’t worth it, as if a risk versus benefit analysis were being carried out instinctively by the animals.). The strays acted as if they knew what was best in a global sense. When a dominant dog spotted a meek, limping intruder, he always responded aggressively, but the aggression was mostly posturing. I have never seen a dominant dog attack a meek intruder especially when the latter has his tail down and under. The intruder, though, will be harassed and terrorized (through growls and threats of attack) until he leaves.

To date, I have seen one intense dog fight, also in Nagpur, at a bus stop near our flat. For some reason I don’t remember well, two dogs were suddenly locked in a serious combat. Each dog had his jaws clamped over some part of the other dog’s body and was unwilling to let go. It took the repeated threats and stones of people waiting at the bus stop to separate them. But once they did separate, they both limped off hurriedly in opposite directions, pausing now and then to lick their wounds – which were no doubt serious wounds that would last a while – but generally behaving as if the fight was a thing of the past and it was time to move on.

(To be continued...)

Some thoughts on self-awareness

2011-09-27T21:42:00.009-06:00

Self awareness is a remarkable characteristic of humans. It is our constant companion during our waking hours and indispensible in everyday life. We take it for granted. It is the “I” feeling in each of us, the division in our consciousness that tells each one of us is a distinct person, separate from all that is around. If you’ve woken from dreamless sleep in the morning, it is self-awareness that works with memory to recreate the world that we were familiar with. It reminds us where we are, how we are feeling and makes us do things.

It is hard, however, to pin down or quantify in concrete scientific terms what this awareness actually is. Hard because it is the same self-awareness that wants to quantify itself – like a dog that wants to tirelessly chase its tail.

But it is possible, I think, to get a qualitative sense of self-awareness, by understanding the nature of thought.

Behind each thought that arises in the mind there seems to be a “thinker”, the coordinating entity -- the “I” – which produces the effect of being self-aware. The thinker, to use the jargon of spirituality, is the ego. However lost or spaced out we are, this thinker always seems to be present even if it is at the periphery. The thinker seems to own the thought, whatever the nature of that thought may be: a positive thought, a great idea, a sad feeling etc. This ownership in turn leads the thinker to feel it is “happy”, “intelligent”, “sad” etc. This probably what is happening when someone says, “I am feeling great” or “I am feeling miserable”. When we feel some intense emotion, then there seems to be something within us that feels it.

Does the thinker actually exist? If so where in the brain is it? That is too difficult a question. We may never find a satisfactory answer. It is possible that there may be no thinker at all, just biochemical reactions in the brain that create the illusion of a thinker. The thinker may simply be another thought, except that it pervades all other thoughts. This agrees with one of the pillars of Buddhism, that there is no self. If there is no thinker then whatever is happening is simply happening -- there is no one making it happen. Free will exists only if there is such a thing as a thinker in each individual. Otherwise, there is only the illusion of free will. There is a dangerous determinism that accompanies this argument, but let's not go there for now. All is this pretty speculative anyway.

What really matters is the thinker’s existence is pretty convincing to each individual. In fact, the individual feels she exists because the thinker in her exists. This recalls Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” though I don’t know if he said it in the same context. That is why when a thought is not pleasant, then the thinker does not feel good either – and that is the root of individual suffering.

A cardinal a day keeps color blindness away

2011-08-20T12:02:00.012-06:00

The male cardinal is bright red and a treat to watch. In my two and a half years in Massachusetts, I had never spotted one. But this March, I started seeing them frequently: outside my window, during my walks in the woods around Amherst, and while driving (they would often fly across the road). One gets pretty superstitious when such things happen. I started to feel special every time I saw one. I asked others if they had seen any and would feel proud if their reply was negative. There was probably a simpler explanation of course. It snowed and rained a lot this year, and the population could have spiked for some ecological reason. Or the sight of the first made me look for more every day, with the result that I had simply begun to see what had always been there.

Whatever the reason, the sight of cardinals did me make me feel great. They sparked a wider interest in birds, nature and other species. It all seemed a tremendous mystery.

The apartment I used to live had massive windows in the living room. It overlooked a wide green lawn that sloped down to a stream. Close to the window was a fledgling tree or plant that had grown only to a few feet. It was here that every morning the birds of all kinds would come, perch on a weak branch for a few seconds, their heads bobbing this way and that, before moving to a nearby bird feeder. There was a family of chipmunks too. They had their own routine and burrows into which they disappeared and hid food. The squirrels – giants compared to the chipmunks – frequented the bigger trees just beyond, flashing their bushy tails and chasing each other. This was very much a window onto domestic wildlife.

It was here that I saw the same pair of cardinals almost every day for a few weeks. Only the male cardinal is red. As in so many other species – peacocks, lyrebirds –and in contrast to humans, it is the male that struts his beauty or defining characteristic. That defining characteristic can be color, a dance, a unique song. The female cardinal is a drab grey – but still carries a tinge of red. Like so many other birds, cardinals mate for life. So a sudden sighting of bright red would invariably be followed by sober gray or vice versa. A month or two later, I learned to identify their calls. Cardinals have very distinctive metallic sound. Even if I was unable to spot them, I knew they were around in the trees. I just had to roll down car windows while driving through tree-lined narrow roads.

An aside: There is also a rarer but equally colorful competitor --the yellow finch. A finch is smaller than the cardinal – about the size of sparrow. It is a bright yellow, and the brightness is made sharper by the black strips along the finch's wings. Finches were harder to spot, but they did show up once in few weeks.

Back! And notes from Oaxaca...

2011-08-09T21:53:00.004-06:00

It’s been eight months since I disappeared. This unplanned, unannounced sabbatical – after more than five years of posting regularly – happened because work took over, and other reasons too difficult to elaborate here. Let’s see if I can get back. I probably won’t be as prolific as before but I do hope to write once in three weeks or so. I also promise to write about some new themes.

It has been an interesting and intensely busy year. I taught two classes last semester and organized a conference in Amherst. That meant that a very tight weekly schedule, and the lazy days of lounging and doing nothing – one of the perks of academia, and also why I chose it – did not present themselves with the same regularity. It summer right now and I don’t have to teach until September, even though there are still students to mentor, grants and publications to write, collaborations to develop, and the associated stresses to handle.

Meanwhile, a long overdue travel update. Last December, I went to Oaxaca City, in southern Mexico. Mexico again? You might well ask. Well, my options for travel abroad were limited to Canada and Mexico, because my work visa had expired (and still remains expired). They say Canada in the winter isn’t the place to be, so it was to be that other North American country again.

***

Food

This time, I wasn’t as curious about history or archaeology or Mesoamerican cultures. I had exhausted that sort of intensity during my prior visits to Chihuahua, Mexico City and Chiapas. I took it easy this time. I walked the streets of Oaxaca, enjoyed the warm weather and the food. I went to a gourmet tortilleria, Itanoni, in a residential part of the city. In fact, ridiculous as it may sound, of all locations in Mexico, I chose Oaxaca simply so I could sample the food at Itanoni. I had read about it in 1491, Charles Mann’s eye-opening book on the cultures of the Americas. Mann had written of authenticity of the tortillas at Itanoni and how ancient varieties of corn and preparation methods were being preserved. But what matters is whether the food tastes good and Itanoni did not disappoint. I went there three times, despite the relatively stiff taxi fare from my hotel to the restaurant. I had freshly made tortillas with a variety of fillings – aguacate (avocado), papa con chile (potatoes with chilies), queso (cheese), and frijoles (beans) with a special local herb.

The street food was a riot. The regional Oaxacan fare, run by small families, was great of course, but what I’ll remember most is the elaborate pushcart selling freshly made potato chips, two blocks from the main square. On the night of Dec 25th, the city’s churches paraded different costumes (fairies, angels, versions of Nativity) in the backs of trucks in the main square, accompanied by loud music. Festive though this was, I was more captivated by the assembly-line style production of chips in the pushcart: the sweating man slicing potatoes non-stop, another deftly releasing them into the oil, yet another straining the oil, and the cashier spraying varieties of dangerously spicy salsas on request. There were small portions, there were large portions and then there were massive portions. The Christmas crowd – me included – queued up and had its fill.

***

Microfinance tourism

I happened also, by chance, to interact with a two microfinance organizations. The first, Fundacion El Via, has its headquarters in the Oaxaca Language Institute. Oaxaca is generally thought of as a poor state (the label of poverty is bandied about freely and there are numbers and statistics to support that label, but what it actually means is less clear). The Fundacion El Via idea is this: A visitor would get to see new family business ventures started by women in a nearby village, Teotitlan del Valle. Examples might be small scale sales of textiles woven in-house in the indigenous style, a smoothie stall in the village market, a new tortilleria. These business ventures are financed from the money visitors give for an afternoon tour. Once the tour is done, the visitor is emailed updates (with pictures) on how the families that directly benefitted from the loan are handling their lives and businesses.

This, I felt, was a clever way of appealing to the bleeding hearts of rich tourists. It was based on the premise that the conscientious tourist is not simply a voyeur of poverty, but genuinely cares. Even if this was a delusion, Fundacion El Via’s marketing of the idea was attractive. I met four women in Teotitlan del Valle during my afternoon visit. All the women had apparently benefitted from the microfinance loans. I was invited into their houses. They seemed cheerful and seemed to balance having children, and husbands who might have been doubtful of their new entrepreneurial role, very well.

Carlos, the founder of Fundacion El Via, was privileged. He had grown up in Oaxaca. His parents ran the language institute. His pale complexion and height set him apart from the short and dark skinned indigenous Oaxacan women he was trying to help in Teotitlan del Valle. Carlos had an MBA degree from Boston University and had returned to start Fundacion El Via. He was smart and knew the microfinance landscape well. He was grappling with bureaucratic difficulties: for the Mexican government, his organization was in the business of tourism, not a not-for-profit organization.

“A recent survey identified that there are 625 microfinance organizations in the state of Oaxaca,” Carlos told me. “There have been microfinance scams because of the financial crisis, since some of these organizations had money in stocks. And microfinance in Mexico is not the same as in Bangladesh or in India. In Bangladesh, poverty is concentrated, so it is easier to set up an infrastructure. In Mexico, poverty is scattered and remote, requires more coordination, transportation resources and set up.”

***

Grameen and Shamsuddin

It was Carlos who told me about Grameen in Oaxaca. This wasn’t a surprise given the presence Grameen has in the microfinance world. Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire, had met with Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen, and had agreed to finance and set up Grameen branches in Mexico.

Grameen, Oaxaca was managed by a Bangladeshi man, Shamsuddin, who had arrived in Mexico the in July 2009. Shamsuddin knew no Spanish. In the beginning, he would stand with a Mexican interpreter at the corner of streets to ask passersby if they needed a loan; or he would knock on doors. This was an irresistible image: a Bangladeshi man with little local knowledge working to solve problems of poverty in Mexico. And it was something new. For it’s usually Western organizations who have (at least in the last century) claimed to carry the burden of for developing and poor countries.

It was that image that drew me to the Grameen office in a residential part of Oaxaca City on my last day. I spent nearly two hours talking with Shamsuddin. We got along well. He was in his fifties. He wore a blazer but his demeanor reminded me of the authority of government officials India – even the manner in which he had coffee ordered for me. The office room was painted blue. There were framed photographs on the walls of Mohammad Yousuf and his family in Mexico City, with Obama, and on his walk to accept the Nobel Prize. Shamsuddin knew Yunus well and considered him a teacher and mentor. He worked with Yunus since the early inception years of Grameen in the eighties.

His work had taken him to Malaysia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. From 2003 to until 2009, he had worked for Grameen, Turkey. Turkey had even offered him a citizenship for his service, but for some reason, instead of spending the latter part of his career with his family, either in Turkey or Bangladesh – which he seemed to want – he had ended up in Mexico, to start a new operation. He had now acquired a basic working knowledge of Spanish and was assisted by Mexican helpers. This included a cook, an assistant and a driver. The cook, woman in her late twenties, came to serve coffee; she said there was no milk. The driver, a jovial man with a mustache, took me back to the main square in Oaxaca City.

During my conversation with Shamsuddin, several women came in to discuss their loans or validate their checks with Shamsuddin. His Spanish though awkward seemed effective. Grameen Oaxaca now has given 7000 loans in Oaxaca. That seemed like considerable progress in less than two years.

“Grameen is a job with a steady salary, but it requires constant commitment,” Shamsuddin said.

But he didn’t seem entirely happy. Somehow, he kept going back to his days in Turkey. The people of Mexico were friendly, punctual and did their work well. But he felt they were impenetrable. There didn’t seem to be a warmth and general sense of friendliness that he’d experienced in Turkey. Perhaps it was the language, which he hadn’t able to fully grasp.

Grameen’s goal in Mexico is to set up 30 branches. There are already a few outlying offices in Oaxaca. Shamsuddin also wanted to start something in neighboring Chiapas – a state more remote and poor than Oaxaca – but the strong presence of armed movements of the left seemed a threat. Extortion there, he had been told, was inevitable.

Happy new year!

2011-01-01T00:44:00.005-06:00

A very happy new year to everyone! It was a busy but good year overall. I did not read as many books as I would have liked but what I did read, I enjoyed immensely. Favorites include John Hemming's The Conquest of the Incas, Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, Edward Wilson's Anthill and Nature Revealed, Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, VS Naipaul's The Masque of Africa, and Bhante Ghunaratne's Mindfulness in Plain English. The last book is an primer on the Buddhist idea of meditation and self inquiry, a topic I will continue to read about (and hopefully practice too, for many of these ideas are useless if one talks about them intellectually; they have to be experienced). The frequency of my posts has slowed down, but I hope the infrequent longer pieces have had enough content to sustain your interest. Travel continues to be good; I have an upcoming essay on micro finance in a developing country based on some conversations I had last week with a Grameen employee (though upcoming could mean anything from two weeks to two months!).

I am enjoying the winter break in Massachusetts, and even though it's cold and there is slush and snow on the pavements and the town and campus are mostly deserted, it's good to have some calm before the coming semester, which starts Jan 18th. I'll be teaching every day of the week, and my students will have the burden of keeping my "research program" -- whatever that may mean! -- going.

That first crossing into Mexico

2010-12-24T17:55:00.019-06:00

In May 2007, I traveled with archaeologists from the University of Arizona to Chihuahua, the large, northern state of Mexico. At the time, I had not visited any country other than India and the United States. I was restless to see a new place, to experience something new. So the physical act of crossing a border had special meaning for me. That it was the US-Mexico border, a volatile place with a reputation for violence, did not bother me. What mattered was the travel – travel to a developing country whose history I was fascinated by.

We started early in the morning from Tucson, Arizona. We were supposed to cross in the town of Douglas. That would get us into the Mexican state of Sonora; a highway through the mountains would lead to Chihuahua, to our final stop, the town of Casas Grandes, where the archaelogical sites were. Most of our drive – and I liked it that way – would be through Mexico and not the US.

But our plans changed immediately after we started. There had been some trouble in Sonora – something to do with drug or human trafficking gangs, whose presence made all cities on the border dangerous. Forty men had attacked a police station and stolen arms. A grenade had been thrown at a newspaper office. A shootout followed as the police and army responded.

The hint of danger gave the illusion that through my travel I was “engaging” with important contemporary realities. The truth, of course, was that I had no idea of what was going on.

Because of the news, our guides avoided the Sonoran route, and instead took the longer route through New Mexico directly into Chihuahua. But this meant that by noon, despite many hours of driving, we were still in the United States. The entry into a new country, which I had been anticipating eagerly, would be delayed. The crossing came at last at 2 pm, when we reached the border town of Columbus. We passed the US customs and immigration station, and the Welcome to Mexico – Bienvenidos – sign.

Suddenly, we were across, in the town of Palomes, in Mexico.

I was elated. It didn’t matter to me that it was a run-down, poor town: the important fact was that I had made it across; I had “traveled”. The main town avenue was split by a row of forked streetlights; and on each side were shops and businesses, painted bright green, yellow and pink (my first experience of the Mexican penchant for contrasting and bright colors). The cars were small and battered looking. The music was loud in some stores. A frail looking man approached me with wallets and sunglasses to sell.

In Palomes (and for the rest of that trip) I focused on every culturally exotic detail I saw and tended to fixate on it. I later realized that this must be how the eager first time tourist orientalizes his experience.

A woman, no more than five feet fall, somewhat stocky, with a chocolate dark complexion and small slanted eyes came to beg for money. She was dressed in a ragged but colorful skirt. Her two children, a boy and a girl, tagged along. They were already expert at being persistent. “Money! Money!” the boy shouted, understanding that the visitors may not understand Spanish.

I saw other women with the same distinct look, height and dress in Palomes. Some of them sold simple souvenirs outside restaurants and stores. They were women of the Tarahumara tribe. The Tarahumara have faced a long history of dispossession, which continues now, with the forced cultivation lucrative drug yielding crops on their lands. Later, I saw a very shy Tarahumara woman seated under the shade of a tree. She sold hand-woven baskets but also allowed herself to be photographed by tourists for a little bit of money. But it was clear she wasn’t comfortable doing this; her head would lower and never face the camera. I hesitated, but I couldn´t resist taking a picture. I did it simply because, being a Tarahumara, she looked noticeably different. The picture did not come out well. In the end I was left only with a lingering guilt.

The trip was only for a few days. Chihuahua had a landscape similar to Arizona – dry mountain ranges and valleys with desert scrub vegetation. We visited the ruins at Casas Grandes and a village (Mata Ortiz) of artisans, who, inspired by the designs on recently unearthed Pre-Columbian shards of pottery, have initiated a flourishing and commercially successful modern pottery tradition. The parks, the traffic, the style of the shops and homes in Casas Grandes reminded me of middle-class residential neighborhoods in provincial Indian towns. We returned by the same route – through Palomes, where I had some trouble convincing US immigration officials of the validity of my reentry claim. My legs shook from nervousness at the prospect of being denied, but the officials (who were polite throughout) eventually allowed me in.

***

Since that first trip, I have traveled many times to Mexico and the countries of Latin America. Each visit diluted the novelty of travel and allowed me to focus on other aspects. But I am still not immune to the sort of reaction I had when I first crossed into Mexico. In December 2008, when I met the Lacandon, a small Mayan group in the rainforest bordering Mexico and Guatemala, I was awed by the strangeness of what I was doing. And last December, when I met Aymaras in La Paz, Bolivia, my judgment of Bolivia´s recent politics was influenced by wonder of where I was – in a capital city 13000 feet high in the Andes, close to Lake Titicaca – and the exotic looks, mannerisms and the dresses of the people among whom I was traveling.

Of course, there is nothing particularly wrong or bad about all this. After all, the joy of travel is in experiencing that which is new. I guess it is only when we continuously stress the differences and are unable to go beyond them that our perspectives suffer.

In search of an agraharam

2010-12-03T19:26:00.023-06:00

My family’s ancestral temple is in Swamimalai, a small town in the district of Thanjavur, in Tamil Nadu. The temple is unspectacular. The malai of Swamimalai promises a hilltop setting, but there is nothing of the sort. Instead the slight elevation is simply a matter of climbing a few steps. The town itself is quiet; except for an institute that teaches the centuries old art of making bronze icons, Swamimalai is indistinguishable from other towns along the fertile Cauvery delta.

“Ancestral” is meant in the patriarchal sense. My paternal grandfather had been born in the same district, though he had moved early to Madras to work as a typist for India Pistons. There was a hardly a chance, given all the movements of the last century, that any members of his community would have stayed. Yet, I was curious: for this was a community of Brahmins that, in the generations before my grandfather, lived in special communes called agraharams.

Agraharams were meant exclusively for Brahmins, with a view to maintain purity in ritual and daily life. Though an apartheid like idea, the houses are not like what you see in the walled off gated communities of today. As a child I had visited an agrahararam near the city of Erode, at the bank of a tributary of the Cauvery. The families were tightly knit; the rooms small and austere; and there was a temple round the corner.

Understandably, there are few such communes in Tamil Nadu today. Agraharams were splintering even the early part of the twentieth century, when Brahmins in Tamil Nadu dominated the administrative jobs in the British government. Families chose cities and the comforts of modernity. In the classic Kannada novel, Samskara, set in the 1960s, UR Ananthamurthy artfully describes the moral decay of Brahmins in agraharams. More fundamentally the idea of an exclusive upper caste commune seemed anachronistic in the new world that was taking shape.

****

Last July, I visited the temple at Swamimalai with my parents. I wanted to trace the agraharam my grandfather’s grandfather had lived in. My relatives had mentioned the village or town to look for. I had assumed that it would be walking distance from the temple, the temple being the place of worship around which the activities of the community revolved. But it turned out to be twenty odd kilometers away, between the city of Kumbakonam and Thanjavur. The road between the two cities follows the course of the Cauvery River, but through the interior, so the river is not visible. We passed countless farms and the occasional town with party flags and large posters of much deified political icons.

The road narrowed when we came to Ayyampettu. This was the small town we had been told was close to the agraharam. The demographic seemed to be majority Muslim. Mosques were at every corner, some of them very new. The men wore white caps and the women black chadors and head scarves. I was surprised. Every Indian town has a Muslim quarter, but I’d had a predetermined idea, a very Hindu idea, of how my ancestral village might look like. I wondered how long the place had been Muslim. If it had been like this for many generations, perhaps even centuries, then the agraharam would have been adjacent to mosques. The communities would have lived side by side but, in a manner that is repeated all over India, would not have interacted much.

There were two agraharams near Ayyampettu. We drove through smaller streets and fields of sugarcane to the first. A board and a square arch with religious icons proclaimed entrance to the commune. There was a small temple immediately beyond. The houses were in two rows on either side of an unpaved street. They looked old, the red tiles of their sloping roofs fading to black. The ledges of the verandahs had alternating vertical stripes of red and white – similar to the stripes I had seen painted on the walls of temples.

My parents stayed in the car, but I knocked on one door and was invited inside. The interior was simple and barely had any furniture. An elderly Brahmin couple lived there. They were welcoming and smiled at me. They had just finished with their prayers. It all felt very quaint and I realized then that this how the agraharams of today probably were. Devoid of modern comforts they seemed like places of antiquity where only elders lived.

The ancestor I was looking for had been a prominent judge. I mentioned his name and asked the Brahmin couple about him. They did not think he had lived here, but said I could try the commune on the other side of town. That place was called Agramangudi. The drive took us through more Muslim quarters and narrow streets. But the exact location eluded us. We found eventually that there wasn’t an agraharam anymore – at least not in the formal sense of the term. Instead, the street where Brahmin families had once lived was now in a state of disrepair. The dilapidated houses were the site of makeshift living arrangements by the poor of the area.

One house, though, had been renovated. It was large; the walls had a deep yellow shade and the verandah ledges were brightly painted with the same vertical red and white stripes I had seen earlier.

Ravi Iyer and his wife lived in the house. They were the only Brahmins in the neighborhood. And it turned out that my ancestor had indeed lived here. Ravi recalled from his own grandfather the name I mentioned; he also seemed aware that the ancestor had been a prominent judge. The house immediately adjacent to Ravi’s had probably been his residence. So we had arrived at the correct place.

Ravi was in his late sixties or early seventies and was an imposing person. He was tall, had white hair and sported a bushy and equally white mustache. He was wearing a half-sleeve shirt and a white veshti (a skirt-like wraparound). He invited us in. The house was spacious and well kept. There was a beautiful shrine to Vinayaka, the elephant god, his idol surrounded by concentric white and orange circles. The teak furniture, the almirahs, the tulsi plant on a raised slab in the inner courtyard, and the smells of the kitchen and the prayer area reminded me of the Brahmin homes I had visited as a child.

Ravi had been in the navy; he had lived in Delhi, Agra, and Rajkot. In 1990, he had decided to renovate this house that his father had left him in Agramangudi. He and his wife had lived here ever since. He had strong views on those that had left and never came back. He seemed unhappy that the world that he had known – the Brahmin world of agraharams – had collapsed.

“These days, Brahmin kids don’t care about anything. In our generation, they used to go to Bombay or Delhi. These days, kids go abroad. They forget everything! Look at this place, Agramangudi, and you’ll know what I am talking about. Not a single Brahmin family here. They have all fled.”

To Ravi, all this suggested a moral decay in society. It was something I would hear again and again – from my father, from my other elder relatives. Society was far more selfish now, more vulgar; there was no room for compassion. The West was, unequivocally, the principal villain in all this. That was where the seed of decay had been sown. My uncle, whom I met the very next day, would tell me, “Think of why elder people are living alone in nursing homes now. That is a very Western idea. The very idea co-existence, which used to be strong earlier, has been demolished.”

I had mixed reactions to such denouncements. Partly because none of my relatives had actually lived in the West. And partly because things had been changing all the time, not just the last twenty years. Even the world of Ravi’s adult life – this was back in the 1960s – had been in a state of flux. That was the time when the Brahmin exodus from Tamil Nadu to other metropolitan areas of India and abroad began. The exodus was in response to a growing political power of the Tamil middle and lower castes – expressed through Dravidian progress parties, the DMK for example.

Ravi said: “If at that time the Brahmins had stood up to these DMK fellows, things would have been different. But we were weak. We just fled. In contrast, look at the tulukas (Muslims) that live here. This town is full of them. Look at how, despite going around the world, they always return back to build homes, businesses and mosques.”

This was getting too serious. Luckily Ravi’s wife, a tall, jovial woman, less concerned about grand ideas of moral decay (or perhaps aware of the futility of discussing them), served us coffee. She shifted the conversation to the more mundane – the heat outside, temples we had visited, and marriages (or, as is often the case these days, the delay in getting married). Ravi went with the flow.

****

Before we left, we were taken to the house that had been my ancestor’s. It felt special that I had managed to trace the place; yet it wasn’t that special. Each one of us has four ancestors if we go back two generations (paternal and maternal grandparents). Go back four generations and there are sixteen. I had merely traced one of the sixteen; and he had been accorded a special place because of the patriarchal system. If I were to sketch an origins map of all sixteen I wondered what I would find. It would probably point me to agraharams in different parts of south India. And there might be some surprises in store – perhaps purity of caste, which the community was always proud of, would not withstand the detailed scrutiny.

The house was in bad shape. Large blocks of concrete were missing. There was a string cot near the entrance. From the doorway, I could see a clothesline and a woman peering at us. The home, like others in the neighborhood, was the makeshift residence of a poor family.

An agraharam could not have been here without a small temple, and there was one at the end of the street. This then was the real ancestral temple, not the one we had seen at Swamimalai. There was some construction going on. A truck had emptied a mound of broken stones and there was debate between the laborers and the supervisor on whether the unloading had happened at the right place. A green and saffron BJP flag – surprising here, in this rural corner of Tamil Nadu, a state where the BJP had never gained a strong footing – fluttered on a nearby lamppost. It probably meant nothing.

We paid our respects at the temple and were on our way to Thanjavur soon after.

When the coffee hits the keyboard

2010-11-21T19:44:00.006-06:00

Life is busy as it is. But when on a quiet Sunday morning, you knock a cup of coffee (with a lot of milk in it) onto your laptop, it becomes busier still. My laptop won't start now and this means at least a week if not more of makeshift arrangements, looking carefully at one's backups to see what's missing, installing new programs on a new laptop (if I do have to get one).

And when the coffee splashed over the keyboard, I had been working on a travel piece. I had written about two pages, but now have no backup. So this means blogging, which had crawled to a stop anyway, will still more crawl to a stop. And the end of the semester is round the corner. I am looking forward to the winter break, but after the break a Tsunami of work will hit me. I'll be teaching two classes (probability and statistics; and operations research in healthcare) for the first time. Even though I've prepped those classes, my peers tell me two classes will me give no breathing space to do any research, let alone writing of the fun kind.

We'll see what I can manage here over the next half year. Hopefully it won't be too bad.

Back from Austin

2010-11-11T23:24:00.010-06:00

I am back from a conference in Austin. I enjoyed the warm weather, the lively bars and pubs on 6th street (downtown), catching up with good friends, and conversations with Texan cab-drivers. One of these cab-drivers, a bearded old man in a cowboy hat, had a lovely accent. He was also the friendliest of them all. This being an academic conference, technical jargon dominated the hallways and sessions. I remember walking by a session on financial models and watching with some horror mathematical symbols and terms such as “equilibrium” and “global optimal” on slide after slide. It reminded me of something I’d read in a recent book: “We have trained our minds to compute, not think” and “Complicated equations do not tend to cohabit with clarity of mind”.

A typical conference conversation between two people might go like this:

“Have you graduated yet?”

“No, but I think I’ll be done in spring. My adviser wants me to write an additional paper to derive some theoretical properties; we are hoping to submit it to one of the technical journals.”

(That paper will be read by handful of people, but the fact that it appeared in a prestigious technical journal means more than the paper’s content. So the paper will have greater presence and impact on the author’s CV; the worth of the actual work might remain untested and unverified even if it gets many citations. The name of the journal will automatically lend credence to the author. It works like magic in academia.)

“So are you in the job market now?”

“Yes, I am interested in both academic and industry jobs. I interviewed with FedEx yesterday and am talking with MIT today.”

“Wow! Well -- good luck. Let’s collaborate -- here's my card!”

“Collaborate”, “work together”, “multi-center grants”, “co-authoring papers”: the immediate effect of these terms is the exchange of business cards. Wallets start bulging and teem with exciting future possibilities. People run out of their own cards and then write their contact information on slips of paper.

I had a good time overall. I saw a lot of posturing, arrogance, self-absorption but also genuine reaching out, friendliness, warmth, gossip and laughter. I ate Tex-Mex food (at a restaurant called Chupacabra, named after a mythical animal), drank the occasional beer and on the last day went to see Texas State Museum. My last meal at Austin was an Indian meal at a restaurant called Clay Pit.

That's the news for now. The next post might take a while, as I catch up with work and some local travel.

Travels in Cuzco

2010-10-31T10:51:00.031-06:00

In December last year, I took a flight from Lima, Peru’s coastal capital, to Cuzco, the once splendid high altitude capital of the Incas. Cuzco, now a booming and rampantly commercial tourist town, is the starting point of a trip to the famous Machu Picchu. The journey by bus, a steep uphill climb into the mountains, takes over twenty hours, but by flight it is a pleasant hour and a half. The Andes slice through the nations of western South America – Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile – to leave remarkably different terrains. In Peru, to the west of the Andes is a thin coastal strip that is mostly dry desert; this is where Lima is. To the east – surprisingly for the uninitiated visitor – is the dense jungle of the Amazon and the border with Brazil. The Andes themselves are not monolithic; the succession of mountains, rivers and high valleys gives way in the south of Peru to a high plateau called the Altiplano, where the surreally blue waters of Lake Titicaca are to be found, along the border with Bolivia.

Like the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East, which saw the early rise of complex societies, western South America too has for millennia seen a series of kingdoms and empires. The largest, best known and last of these empires was the Incan one, which stretched for few thousand miles along the length of the Andes, from Columbia to Chile. The Incas’ was an unabashedly high-altitude culture: Cuzco, their grand capital, is at an elevation of 12,000 feet. The mountains were an artery through the empire. Roads, suspension bridges, supplies along the routes, and a system of runners who ran the length of mountain range at breakneck speeds to relay messages: all this kept the empire well connected.

From the air, Cuzco revealed itself as an extended sprawl in a high valley. The houses were closely spaced, and had sloping, red-tile roofs. In atmosphere and style – the high setting, the medieval look, the predominance of tourists and their revelry, the narrow streets of stone rather than asphalt, the dark American Indian faces of the locals – it reminded me of San Cristobal de las Casas, the southern and Mayan part of Mexico. A tall, young taxi driver who spoke fluent English took me to my hostel. He was savvy, knew a few Hindi words, and after much fumbling with the CD player, finally managed to play a popular Punjabi song. He was one of many young men I met during my travels who had smartly aligned themselves to make an impression on tourists.

My hostel was at the steep upper end of what was called the Choquechaca Street, away from the bustle and noise or the Plaza de Armas (the main square). It was run by Peruvians in their early twenties. Like their traveling guests, they too had the air of vagabonds. They worked irregular shifts, partied hard, and never gave the impression of permanence. There was Jose, who had a family in one of Lima’s shantytowns; Christina, also from Lima, who had abandoned her degree and now was attached to a bearded, dreamy Australian wanderer in Cuzco; and Luigi, a short, frail man, from the town of Iquitos, at the remote eastern end of Peru, reachable only by air or water. Luigi’s flirtatious way with women, the slightness of his physique and even his classically American Indian features – high slanted cheekbones, dark-red complexion – bore an uncanny resemblance to my roommate in college, from Mirzapur in North India.

The nations of the Americas fall into two broad categories. In some, American Indians have been marginalized and their numbers have reduced to an extent that they remain largely invisible. The United States, Argentina, and the Caribbean Islands fall in this category. And then there are countries, like Mexico (southern Mexico especially), Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia where indigenous populations form a significant majority.

In the Andean highland cities of Peru, the Quechuas, whose ancestors built the Incan empire, are the largest group. And it was the Quechuas that I saw in large numbers in the main square of Cuzco. I had arrived the day before Christmas. It was cold even though it wasn’t winter in Peru. The high altitude, which I hadn’t adjusted to, made the short walk to the main square strenuous. The square was abuzz with preparations. Indigenous women, their children in tow, had come to sell their wares in what was going to be a huge market. The older women had plaited hair and their attire was distinct: bowler hats and skirts; and many layers of clothing to protect against the cold, which made them look stocky. There was a long queue on one side of the square. Food and soup were being distributed in ladles to the poor, especially children: the largesse of Christmas.

It was there, in the fading light of the day, that the strangeness of where I was struck me. All around, in the higher elevations of the surrounding mountains, were the outer settlements of Cuzco. The city was much larger that I had thought. The square itself had once had been surrounded by palaces of the Inca rulers; in their place now stood imposing ocher-colored cathedrals and churches. Church imposed over a Pre-Columbian place of significance: the trend repeats over and over again in Latin America. But here, high in the Andes, with the indigenous Quechua filling the square on the eve of Christmas, the violence of that 16th century clash felt especially real.

The Spanish arrived in Peru in 1533, twelve years after conquering the Aztec empire in Mexico. They took Cuzco fairly easily in the beginning, but then the Incas fought back ferociously. From various vantage points the Inca army hurled red hot stones onto the roofs of houses, setting them on fire. The whole of Cuzco burned and for a while, it must have seemed, as the Inca army slowly circled in, that the outnumbered Spaniards would lose the city. They didn’t. They survived narrowly and fought back. The cathedrals in the main square of Cuzco are testament to the eventual victory of the Spanish.

In a side street, I had seen intact examples of Inca walls: large and smooth interlocking blocks of stone, without mortar and which fit like a puzzle. Their minimalism, their lack of adornment, only elevated their beauty. They hinted at another sensibility, much of which had been lost.

But the Quechuas I met insisted that it wasn’t a simple case of one culture dominating the other. Catholicism merely provided the outer shell beneath which the animist ways of the past still carried on. Even in the cathedrals, there are subtle but unequivocal hints of indigenous influence: a rendition of the Last Supper has a guinea pig, an Andean delicacy, as the main dish and not lamb; the virgins are cleverly portrayed in the shape of Andean mountains since the Quechua worship the mountains. But at a more mundane, day to day level, I had no sense – and no time to explore – how the two ways were being reconciled. And I often got the sense that the question was moot, that enough time had passed since the conquest for a kind of unselfconscious synthesis to emerge.

It was dark now and on one of the high hills surrounding Cuzco was a luminescent statue of Jesus – Cristo Blanco, or White Christ. I was struck by it: it was as if the light was coming from within, as if the statue itself were a fluorescent piece.

Two days later, I made the ascent up the steep hill that led to Cristo Blanco. The hill was immediately adjacent to my hostel. The path took me through haphazardly set one story houses along the slope. On the way a drunk, unhappy man helped with directions; another man asked if I was interested in riding a horse; and a woman could be seen beating up and shouting at her husband for having cheated. A little later I met Doggy, the large stray that for some reason unfailingly retired at the hostel for the night (though no one there “owned” him), but during the day roamed the corners of Cuzco, with a total lack of fear of other dogs. I saw him a few days later in a completely different part of the city. He seemed to possess some of the conquistadorial spirit of the 16th Spanish invaders of the Americas, who time and again rushed headlong into conflicts and toppled empires despite being hopelessly outnumbered. Doggy in fact was at that moment fighting an equally spunky dog. It took the stones of passersby to separate the two.

A hundred odd feet below Cristo Blanco is Saqsayhuaman, the remains of an Inca fortress. Unlike the smooth walls I had seen in the center of Cuzco, these were much larger, coarser structures, but no less impressive. They were ideal fortifications. They seemed like arbitrary and natural agglomerations of boulders until you noticed how carefully they had been assembled. Yet again there was no mortar holding the different pieces together. The Inca army, in an effort to recapture Cuzco from the Spaniards, had used Saqsayhuaman as their base. In fact, if John Hemming’s meticulously researched The Conquest of the Incas is to be believed, their attack had followed the same steep path I had taken from my hostel.

It was a short ascent from Saqsayhuaman to the large white statue of Christ. Most of Cuzco, which sits in a valley, could be seen from here, the various shades of the red of the roofs and the white of the walls mingling together, as if a carpet of those colors blanketed the valley. Christ is portrayed as he is other parts of the world. His arms were raised in a gesture of welcome. This positive image contrasted with slumped posture of a hooded man who sat at the base. His face was not visible; he did not move for the entire duration of my visit. Nearby there were large crosses wrapped in fine cloth, with designs woven onto them. At night, a powerful set of lamps on the platform shone white light onto the statue, and this gave the impression of luminescence I had been so struck by.

Hip hop economics

2010-10-21T09:51:00.004-06:00

Found this great video thanks to a friend on Facebook:

There is a wonderful Friedreich Hayek quote at the end: "The curious task of economists is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." And that task applies as well to super confident, suit-wearing economists and all people who take their knowledge of the world too seriously.

Random stuff

2010-10-18T21:52:00.030-06:00

It’s late October already. The air outside is cold and crisp, and fallen leaves, the currency of the season, are everywhere; the woods are aflame with color. The strange thing about fall colors – the irresistibly rich shades of red and yellow – is that you want to experience them in some deep way, capture them forever, yet the awareness that they are transient and foreshadow the approaching gloom of winter tinges the season with melancholy.

The semester is busy as usual – I am writing publications and grants, claiming that I will solve the world’s most pressing healthcare delivery problems; serving on departmental committees, the most difficult part of which is dealing with the profusion of emails about when the committee should meet. In one committee, I have now counted twenty seven emails and there is still no agreement on a meeting time. That doesn't surprise me: professors live in their own autonomous worlds and only rarely do those worlds intersect.

I am teaching, for the third time, a class on linear optimization. Teaching is the most enjoyable part of academia and an intensely social activity (and hence the most tiring). I’ve got students from eleven countries this time. Asia, as usual, is well represented (Turkey, Iran, India, China), but there’s a also student from Chad and one from Nigeria.

I also attend the occasional conference where academics who feel supremely confident about themselves strut around fancy hotels in suits, their name tags weighed down by such pompous titles as “Cluster Chair” or “Section Chair”; conferences where academics talk in a cliquish, incomprehensible language, all the time forgetting (sometimes deliberately, for the sake of tenure and election to special academic societies) that the world outside is vastly more complex than their mathematical models or theories suggest. The biggest benefit of these gatherings, it would seem, is that they temporarily rejuvenate the economy of the downtowns they are held in. The hotels, the taxi-drivers who wait patiently to drop attendees to the airport, the waiters who serve drinks or politely take away dishes after a reception – and whom the conference attendees, so engrossed with their “networking”, are completely unaware of (because networking with regular people doesn’t get you anywhere) – benefit the most. There is a further irony: many plastic bottles of water will be wasted at these conferences and yet academics will present airy-fairy mathematical models on how the scarce resources of the world should be used more efficiently.

Academic talk (and rants) aside, I am aware I haven’t posted quite as regularly. That’s because I want my essays to evolve a little more. And yet, it’s hard to leave the blog blank for long – hence this rambling post. But let me assure you: there are travel pieces in the works. One is about a trip to my family’s ancestral temple in the district of Thanjavur in south India; another is about my travels in Peru and my conversations, while on the train to Machu Picchu, with fellow Latin American travelers.

I also want to mention the two books I am reading. The first is a 7th century work of fiction in Sanskrit, called Dasakumaracharita, by Dandin (translated by Isabelle Onians for the Clay Sanskrit Library; Onians’ interpretive notes at the end of the book are essential for a richer understanding of prose). The story is about the adventures of ten young men, who set out on separate and somewhat interlinked journeys in north India, which at the time consisted of a patchwork of kingdoms. Dasakumaracharita provides a glimpse of the sensibility and religious views of that period. I might write a longer essay on the book when I am done (and considering that I am terribly slow reader, you might have to wait a while).

The second book – in sharp contrast to Dasakumaracharita – is Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, my first real introduction to physics. When I was in the second grade, my father bought me a book called Children’s Knowledge Bank, a collection of easy-to-read articles, each a page long. There was one on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Of course, I was clueless then, and I don’t understand much now either.

But Brian Greene’s summary of general relativity has at least provided the wonder I wish I had experienced long ago. What aesthetic elegance theories of physics can have! I never knew that space and time are inseparable and how we experience them is really a consequence of gravity. I never knew that no matter how fast you travel, light still travels at the same speed; that is, if you chased after light at very, very high speed, it would still escape from you at the same speed. And the bizarre idea that time would actually slow down if you move very fast. In fact, if you traveled at the speed of light, you would not age at all. As Greene writes, “light does not get old: a photon that emerged from the Big Bang is the same age today as it was then. There is no passage of time at light speed.”

This has been an exceptionally good year for science books – from the biologist Edward Wilson’s Nature Revealed, to Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, and finally The Elegant Universe.

A little tied up

2010-09-14T21:36:00.002-06:00

With the start of the new semester, I am kind of swamped; and there are plenty of other things going on too. Hence the lack of new posts. But I will try to be back as soon as time permits.

The unexpected origin of ragi

2010-09-09T20:47:00.007-06:00

KT Achaya writes in The Story of Our Food:

The great Russian botanist, Vavilow, about seventy years ago, identified what he called "centers of plant origin" in which the "evolution of plants was directed by the will of man." There were nearly a dozen of these centers all over the world where plants gradually took their place as foods for human beings. Of particular interest to India was the so-called Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, stretching from Israel to Iraq, which was an early center of agriculture and of plant evolution.

What actually happened was this. Man would pick promising weeds growing wild which carried grains. By choosing plants with abundant or plump grains, a process called selection, the quality of the grains and the yield of the plant in the next crop were both improved. Sometimes, nature itself would take a hand in the process; a wild weed would cross by chance with a cultivated species to produce offspring of a quality superior to both.

Achaya then goes on to describe how ragi, ubiquitous in India for millennia, has an unexpected connection to a different part of the world:

Botanically, ragi is Eleusine coracana. It was born in Uganda in East Africa. How do we know this? For several botanical reasons, such as the existence of its wild ancestors, the long mention of the grain in tradition, and the fact that ragi figures in old religious ceremonies in those areas. Ragi is a tetraploid, and so is the African wild plant called E. africana, which gave rise to it. But the Indian wild plant, which is called E. indica, is a diploid which does not cross with ragi at all. Now what does this mean? Only this, that the Indian wild weed could not have given rise to the ragi plant in India. This plant must, therefore, have come to India from East Africa some time in the past. When did this happen? Ragi has been found in an Indian excavation which is dated at 1800 BC, and at several other archaeological sites in central India of a slightly later date. We must therefore infer that some unknown benefactor brought this foodgrain from Africa to India in about 2000 BC. It also seems possible that two other food-grains, jowar and bajra, also came at the same time to India, from the same area in East Africa, where they were originally evolved. You see, therefore, how no country ever stands really alone; certainly our food has come to us from unexpected places.

Quotes from the The Black Swan

2010-08-31T09:15:00.006-06:00

I finished Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan a month ago, and still can't (and do not want to) shake off its influence on my thinking. Here are some quotes from the book:

“What we call ‘talent’ generally comes from success, rather than the opposite.”

“Death is often a good career move for an author.”

“Complicated equations do not tend to happily cohabit with clarity of mind.”

“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.”

“In the end we are being driven by history all the while thinking that we are doing the driving.”

“Uncertainty is our [Taleb’s] discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.”

“Perception of causation has a significant biological foundation.”

“We pull memories along causative lines revising them involuntarily and unconsciously.”

“The same condition [impulse] that makes us simplify pushes us to think the world is less random than it actually is.”

“Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some [illusory] order on things.”

“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”

“Respect for elders in many societies might be a kind of compensation for our short term memory.”

“It is tough to deal with social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure.”

“It is my great hope one day to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.”

“A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.”

“Gambling is sterilized and domesticated uncertainty.”

“Probability is a liberal art…” [one of the best quotes in the book!]

“One needs to exit doubt to produce science…” [a jab at science, especially scientific theories that dumb down skepticism]

“For many people knowledge has the remarkable power of producing confidence rather than measurable aptitude.”

“That strange activity called the business meeting, in which well fed but sedentary men involuntarily restrict their blood circulation with an expensive device called the necktie.”

“If you hear a prominent economist use the word equilibrium or normal distribution put a rat down his shirt.”

“Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world, thanks to the opportunity [for some people] to be lucky.”

“We tend to be against religious theories but not economic theories.”

“Luck is far more egalitarian than even intelligence.”

Our relationship to the natural world: Some initial thoughts

2010-08-27T11:42:00.021-06:00

1.

Our relationship to the natural world is ambiguous. On the one hand, we are drawn to landscapes. We love to visit national parks; we like to build lakefront homes surrounded by woods; and even an overwhelmingly urban space such as New York needs Central Park. The biologist Edward Wilson has a term for this: biophilia.

What is behind the instinct? One possible explanation – Wilson’s, not mine – is that humans, for hundreds of thousands of years, were inextricably part of the natural world: it is where we evolved. Our survival demanded an intimate and practical knowledge of the flora and fauna around us. We probably developed our innate fear of snakes, aggressive carnivores and heights then; these reactions are still hard wired in us. We developed also an appreciation for the environment. That too is still with us; that is why excessive development at the expense of forests and the wilderness provokes a reaction.

But even as hunter gatherers, we were always constantly tinkering with our habitats, trying to figure out ways to use it more effectively: controlled burning, deliberately dispersing certain seeds, slow attempts to tame certain animals. Around ten thousand years ago – and this seems to have happened independently within a few millennia in different parts of the world – we developed or “chanced upon” agriculture.

Agriculture fundamentally changed our relationship with the natural world. We no longer needed to be jointly involved in the process of creating food. The farmers were there to do that. We could follow other passions – the arts, the sciences. The time we gained for these pursuits has brought “progress”, to where we are today. But we still are very much part of the natural world. It is just that we don’t look at it that way. We feel the environment is something on the outside, to be enjoyed during walks or excursions.

2.

Cultures interact in distinct ways with the environments they inhabit. The United States is famous for its stunning national parks. The dedicated rangers, caretakers of these parks, are passionate about their work. They convey their wonder of the natural world, but their curiosity is mainly scientific. The ranger will likely be excited about the park's geology, botany and details of what might have happened during the Paleolithic era.

Then there are the trekkers, the mountain climbers, the campers. Their motivation comes from the need to experience nature up close or to get away from the world of work and stress, or the thrill of a daring feat.

In this sense, the American relationship to the natural world is “secular”. Religion resides not in nature but in the church, synagogue or mosque and their associated communities. That is understandable: Christianity is after all a Middle Eastern religion; and the Middle East is where all the holy places are.

Contrast this with how American Indians looked at the land. For them, the connection was much deeper, inextricable. I don’t mean this in a shallow, “hippie” way; neither do I think there was something consciously “environmental” about it. Rather, the land was part of their origins as a people. The mountains, rock formations, rivers, the birds, the animals, waterfalls and natural landmarks were sacred. Stories about them were relayed across generations through oral tradition.

This aspect is not unique to American Indians of course. Plenty of cultures where the religion is homegrown and old have it too. But India is perhaps – to me at least – the most illustrative modern example. Hinduism is about as homegrown and diverse as any religion can be; and it is intimately connected to the land. While traveling through Tamil Nadu last year, I was struck by how temples were used to commemorate natural landmarks – be it the Cauvery River, or a cave, or a hilltop.

If the Grand Canyon had, by some accident of geology, been in India, it would have been a national park, yes, but it would also be a sacred place, where millions of pilgrims might visit a certain time of the year.

Perhaps, in the beginning, all human religions were necessarily religions connected to the earth. Agriculture led to an increase in societal complexity, and paved the way for the more social religions: the world conquering monotheisms of the Middle East. And in recent centuries, economic ideologies and science have created their own worldviews. We seem, in the process, to have lost the instinctive spiritual connection we once had with the earth. Now, the environmental conservation and biodiversity movement is trying, using the framework of science, to make us aware of what we are losing. That may be the correct way in this time and age. But who knows; we’ll just have to wait and see.

The food post -- Part 1

2010-08-16T22:14:00.024-06:00

My friends know well that I do not drink much. In fact, I know nothing of the nuances: which glass suits which wine, the subtle differences between beers, the myriad cocktails. I am even worse about hard liquor, which I haven’t tried beyond a few sips.

But with food it’s a different story. I have a hard time understanding those who want to “get done” with the chore of eating. To me, every meal has to be deliberated on, even if the options are limited and even if I am busy. When I am on the road and alone (and especially so), I search earnestly for a place to sit and enjoy a hearty, elaborate meal.

I am picky though. I prefer vegetarian because that is the way I was brought up. Meat turns me off with its texture and odor. I am willing to reconsider if I am at a Pakistani restaurant that is known to make exemplary chicken curries. I prefer foods that are “liquidy”: soups and moist dips. Dry sandwiches are okay but they have to be nothing short of spectacular, else they risk condemnation. That is why the bagel is my least favorite food: it turns my mouth (and throat) into an arid, oasis-less desert. No, it does not matter how much cream cheese I add -- sorry!

2.

Indian food was all I’d tasted when I first came to the US. I was unwilling for a few months to try anything outside what we graduate students cooked (and I was afraid of credit cards: I had never used one and it seemed like the most complicated process, what with signatures and all). Someone suggested a restaurant called Haji Baba. At the time, I had a subconscious anti-Muslim bias and the Arabic lettering outside the restaurant frightened me. The irony is that the same place later became a favorite, and a way to signal to my more “parochial” friends how “cool” and “multicultural” I was.

So it was a gradual and tentative opening out: the inauthentic yet ubiquitous Chinese restaurants with food soaked in sugar syrup to please the super sweet American tooth; the excitement and later exhaustion with the dull Indian buffets with mass produced northern fare; the repulsion upon first encountering pasta and raw broccoli (Newman, the postal officer in sitcom Seinfeld, rightly calls the latter a “vile weed”, though recently I’ve figured out how to use it well).

In time, I discovered my flavors. The farther north and west of India the cuisine's origins were (but not quite as far as Europe), the better I liked the food. In any American city, if I spot an Afghani or Iranian restaurant, I will not have the slightest hesitation. But it is not the famous kababs that I like, rather it is the simpler vegetable preparations. Eggplant dishes such as kashk e badejmaan and mirza ghassemi for example bring out the essence of the vegetable much better than the Indian version, the baingan bhartha.

And the rice! Rice made the Iranian way (polo, which may be the etymological root of the Indian pulao) is something else. My favorite is the adas polo – rice with lentils, raisins, dates, saffron – at Persian Room, a somewhat upscale restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. At that high ceilinged place with blemish-less white napkins, it was easy to forget, because of the quality of food on offer, that I was a poor graduate student.

There are dozens of such Middle Eastern restaurants in the Phoenix metro area (Arizona). The Lebanese restaurant, Haji Baba, I’ve already mentioned. Dipping pita bread in garlicky mashes, hummus and babaghanouj, or having falafels with tahini sauce: these are the usual pleasures. But an under appreciated dish, and one I love, is fava beans, seasoned with sumac and served curry style, along with buttered long grain rice.

3.

Farther west and in a different continent is a cuisine that has captivated me for years now. To most, Ethiopia suggests only famine and poverty. But the tragedies stick in our minds longer of course, and we forget the day to day. I find an echo in Ethiopian cuisine of Indian styles – in the spices, the lentils and the vegetables – but I do not mean to lessen its distinctness or originality by making that comparison.

For starters, Ethiopia is the place where the nutritious yet largely unknown grain teff was domesticated (coffee too is first traced to Ethiopia). Teff is used to make injera, a sour, porous and spongy flatbread (like a dosa). It is a mystery why this African grain, so rich in ingredients, never leapt continents to become as popular as wheat, rice and maize.

Injera is served on a large circular plate. On top, are arrayed small sized vegetable and lentil preparations (I always order the veggie combo; meat is the farthest thing from my mind at an Ethiopian restaurant). The meal is supposed to be communal and eaten without silverware. The lentil preparations – misir watt, kik misir watt – are striking; I rate them much higher than the ubiquitous dals of India. Among the vegetables, my favorite is the the gomen watt, a collard greens dish.

I attribute my love of Ethiopian food to Blue Nile, a restaurant that opened very near my apartment in Tempe, Arizona. So taken was I from then on that during my travels, I made a conscious effort to look for Ethiopian meals. In DC, where the community is the strongest, I’ve tried Meskerem and Etete; in Minneapolis, Fasika; in Las Vegas, Merkato. Then there are two restaurants whose names I do not remember, but whose food I do. In Tucson, I ate the spiciest Ethiopian meal I’ve ever tasted; I remember enjoying immensely even as I sweated throughout. And in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (during this trip), a hole in the wall place unexpectedly turned out to be memorable.

I’ll stop here for now, but the journey isn’t quite complete. In the continuing piece, I’ll turn my eye, briefly, to cuisines to the east of India. And rather than talk of the history of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia – I’ve bored you enough with that – I’ll talk of my meals there.

The motivation behind the travel

2010-08-08T22:43:00.011-06:00

To the uninitiated reader, my travels can seem a little puzzling. Why Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia? A friend recently said I was traveling to places with “rich histories but screwed up economies”. He asked whether there was a “mission”. There is indeed one and I shall try to explain it here.

I came to the United States a decade ago, in August 2000, to start graduate school in engineering. I was fresh out of college and had no idea of the history of any place, including India. I did not for example know that Judaism was the religion of the Jews, even that it referred to a religion. Most students get radicalized, develop a political and historical consciousness during college. But the place I attended in south India failed as much in this regard as it failed to give me a half-decent technical education.

The milieu in the United States, in Phoenix Arizona, was a curious one. On the one hand, graduate school was full of highly motivated students from all parts of Asia. On the other, the neighborhood I lived consisted almost entirely of immigrants from Mexico’s poorer parts, who did odd jobs, legally and illegally, for a living.

This change in the frame of reference as confusing as it was invigorating. It was a first glimpse of how complex the world was. History, which I had long ignored and thought boring, suddenly became indispensable. I was stunned to learn that Muslims had been dominant in Asia, Europe and North Africa before the Renaissance; that a tribal like Genghis Khan had, through a combination of shrewdness and military strategy, built an unimaginably vast empire. I was equally stunned that India too once had a great past, a claim that had earlier, living with Indian realities, sounded hollow.

Without realizing it, I had, like millions of people the world over, internalized the idea of Western superiority. The notion that non-Western people could be dominant was liberating.

But there was one group of people I knew nothing about. They had walked the very land I had now come to; they were even called what I was called -- Indians. From my days in school, I carried the most basic stereotype: horse-mounted, tall and splendidly feathered men. Otherwise I drew a blank. Who were these Indians, why did one hear so little of them and why weren’t there many among us?

The demographic decline of American Indians has been such that it is easy to believe there were very few when the Europeans arrived. There is a certain inevitability about it: technologically superior people come to pristine wilderness that is mostly empty. A few hostile tribes put up a valiant fight, but they stood no chance in the long run. To me, as to many other Asians, the Americas were a place where Europeans had come as a busload of tourists might come to an exotic setting. They liked the place and happened to stay.

It is true that North American Indians did not have large continent spanning empires as in Europe or Asia. But the idea that the land was sparsely populated is a myth. North America had an immense diversity of groups, from the basic hunter-gatherer tribes to those practicing a mix of hunting and agriculture; from the Plains tribes to the coastal cultures; there were dozens or languages and subcultures; and many groups – the Iroquois for example – had coalesced into confederacies (take a look at this map; click to zoom in on the specific names in different regions). European ships that sailed along the east coast in the 1600s could not strike deep roots along the coast because it was thickly populated.

Why then are there only 3-4 million people of American Indian descent today in the US population of 300 million? Massachusetts, Connecticut, Chattanooga, Potomac, Dakota, Kansas, and scores more such names in every state, every region: today etymology provides the only evidence of American Indian presence. The people who left these names have either disappeared altogether or have been marginalized. Phoenix, the sprawling Arizonan city I lived in, was itself a tribute to the Indians, but few are aware of it. White settlers in the late nineteenth century named it so because they anticipated a modern city to rise out of the ashes of the Hohokam, an agricultural people who had marked the desert valley with their well engineered irrigation canals in the centuries before Columbus.

Something profoundly tragic had happened here. In the heat of America’s meteoric rise over the last century, that something has been forgotten and left at the margins of history. Its scale tends to get underestimated, because the evidence is silent and not obvious. An entire continent lost its voice and, most importantly, its people. Today, we have worldviews – African, Chinese, Indian, Western – that are deeply rooted in their histories, even if the externals are predominantly Western. But to find an Indian perspective in North America one has to travel to little known but still culturally vibrant reservations.

It was this history that I began to explore while living in Arizona. I visited archaeological sites in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, from the large and architecturally sophisticated – the much ignored and remote Chaco Canyon in New Mexico – to small but equally instructive ruins around Phoenix and northern Arizona. I went to the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Apache and Tohono Odham reservations, to see how modern day American Indians had fashioned some measure of cultural continuity in impoverished settings. When I moved to Minnesota, I visited the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, where the same history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing had culminated in the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. Because of its geographic isolation, the Americas (along with Australia) faced the worst consequences of European colonialism. Diseases, to which American Indians had no immunity, wiped out entire societies.

If the North Americans had faced such devastation, then how had the rest of the Americas, similarly isolated, fared? While the predominantly tribal societies of North America had been conquered by European Protestants, the massive empires of the Central and South had been downed by a band of daring conquistadors from Catholic Spain. The Caribbean natives faded in the decades after Columbus’ arrival; Argentina’s natives were exterminated in the eighteenth century. But in Mexico and the Andean nations (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia) the descendants of the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas (and many other indigenous groups) are still there. The conquests were no less devastating, but a forcibly imposed Catholicism had brought Indians into its fold, even as it erased earlier beliefs.

The new culture also allowed for racial mixing between Native Americans and Europeans (giving rise to the Mestizo) – and blacks too. The poor southern Mexican immigrants in my neighborhood in Phoenix Arizona, brown skinned like me and noticeably short, were of that stock. In fact, Hispanics, who are partly American Indian, are achieving demographic parity with the whites in southwestern America. In a different way, they are reversing what whites once did when they conquered these lands.

My curiosity about indigenous Latin America spurred visits to Mexico City (formerly the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan), Chiapas (in Mexico’s Mayan south), the Andean parts of Peru and Bolivia. These places are the polar opposites of the United States since Indians are the majority. But Spanish colonialism has marked them badly and left them poor. That is why the places have strong socialist movements: the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Evo Morales in Bolivia.

The small discoveries that I make during my visits are the reason why I travel; that is why I have been writing about my visits to Indian reservations in the United States, and more recently about Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. Of course, I know only a fraction of the story. In Latin America, my progress has been hindered because I do not know Spanish. I don’t have any overarching theories, but I always find it instructive to understand the specifics of each place, yet be aware of the broader contrasts.

The arrival of the Europeans to America was a Black Swan – an unprecedented event that had a massive impact. No one could have predicted the consequences. Millions of American Indians died, either due to disease or conquest, and the Americas (especially North America) lost their voice and culture. Europe and Asia benefited immensely from the crops and foods domesticated in the Americas (corn, tomatoes, potatoes, chilies to name a few). Europeans found a new place to emigrate to – for them it was a positive Black Swan that unleashed new energies.

History works in quirky ways and its logic remains only partly visible to us – and that too only after the fact.

Taleb on history

2010-08-04T13:05:00.008-06:00

History is totally unpredictable. If you ask me how the world will be in ten years I really have no idea. One assumes it will not change much or will change only gradually, but who knows. Once a significant event has happened, everything seems inevitable; we tend to invent convenient narratives. We like to use newly inferred "knowledge" to advance our ideologies.

I too, in my writings on history, have been guilty of such theorizing. Narratives based on past events are therapeutic and invigorating; they give the illusory sense of greater knowledge and a warm glow when one is able to talk about them at parties and social events. I am not suggesting that there is no causality or narrative at all, or that history should not be studied. But the current manner in which it is analyzed does suffer from these issues that Nasim Taleb points out in The Black Swan:

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what’s inside the box, how the mechanisms work.

The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:

a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;

b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and

c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories – when they “Platonify.”

The Arab conquest of Sind, and the Spanish conquest of Mexico

2010-07-25T10:13:00.013-06:00

Contrasts in the historical trajectories of different regions can provide fresh perspectives. That is why my favorite books are those that synthesize anthropological and historical knowledge across continents – Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange, Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, Charles Mann’s 1491. And in literature, Octavio Paz and VS Naipaul are superb at interweaving the contrasts of world history in their nonfiction.

In Among the Believers for example, Naipaul dedicates a chapter analyzing the seventh century Arab conquest of Sind as narrated in historical text Chachnama. That first incursion of Islam in Hindu-Buddhist South Asia – now Pakistan – has a striking similarity to the violent advance of a different but ideologically similar monotheism, Catholisicm, almost eight hundred years later, in the Americas. I’ll let the excerpts below tell the full story:

In the imagination, the Arabs of the seventh century, inflamed by the message of the Prophet, pour out of Arabia and spread east and west, overthrowing decayed kingdoms and imposing the new faith. They move fast. In the West, they invade Visigothic Spain in 710; in the east, in the same year, they move beyond Persia to invade the great Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Sind. The symmetry of the expansion reinforces the idea of elemental energy, a lava flow of the faith. But the Arab account of the conquest of Sind – contained in the book called the Chachnama, which I read in Pakistan in a paperback reprint of the English translation first published in 1900 in Karachi – tells a less apocalyptic story.

The Arabs had to fight hard. They turned their attention to Sind at some time between 634 and 644, during the reign of the second caliph or successor to the Prophet, and in the next sixty or seventy years made ten attempts at conquest. The aim of the final invasion, as the Chachnama makes clear, was not the propagation of the faith. The invasion was a commercial-imperial enterprise; it had to show a profit.

There are resemblances to the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru, and they are not accidental. The Arab conquest of Spain, occurring at the same time as the conquest of Sind, marked Spain. Eight hundred years later, in the New World, the Spanish conquistadores were like Arabs in their faith, fanaticism, toughness, poverty and greed. The Chachnama is in many ways like The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, the Spanish soldier who in his old age wrote of his campaigns in Mexico with Cortes in 1519 and after. The theme of both works is the same: the destruction, by an imperialist power with a strong sense of mission and a wide knowledge of the world, of a remote culture that knows only itself and doesn’t begin to understand what it is fighting. The world conquerors, the establishers of long-lived systems, have a wider view; men are bound together by a larger idea. The people to be conquered see less, know less; their stratified or fragmented societies are ready to be taken over. And, interestingly, both in Mexico in 1519 and in Sind in 710 people were weakened by prophecies of conquest.

There is this difference between The Conquest of New Spain and the Chachnama. Bernal Diaz, the Spaniard, was writing of events he had taken part in. The Chachnama is Arab or Muslim genre writing, a “pleasant story of conquest”, and it was written five hundred years after the conquest of Sind. The author was Persian; his source was an Arabic manuscript preserved by the family of the conqueror, Bin Qasim.

The intervening five centuries have added no extra moral or historical sense to the Persian narrative, no new wonder or compassion, no idea of what is cruel or what is not cruel, such as even Bernal Diaz, the Spanish solder, possesses. To the Persian, writing in 1216, the Arab conquests are glorious; they are the story of the spread of true civilization. Conquest is pleasant to read about because conquest is “based on spiritual rectitude and temporal excellence… of which learned philosophers and generous kings would be proud, because all men attain advancement to perfection by acknowledging as true the belief of the people of Arabia.” There is an irony in this praise of conquest: not many years after those words were written, the invading Mongols were to arrive in Persia and Iraq, and the Arab civilization which the Chachnama celebrated was to be shattered, stupefied for centuries.

And at the end of the chapter, Naipaul writes:

The Chachnama shows the Arabs of the seventh century as a people stimulated and enlightened by the discipline of Islam, developing fast, picking up learning and new ways and new weapons (catapults, Greek fire) from the people they conquer, intelligently curious about the people they intend to conquer. The current fundamentalist wish in Pakistan [Naipaul was writing in 1979] to go back to that pure Islamic time has nothing to do with a historical understanding of the Arab expansion. The fundamentalists feel that to be like those early Arabs they need only one tool: the Koran. Islam, which made seventh-century Arabs world conquerors, now clouds the minds of their successors or pretended successors.

Five years of Thirty Letters in My Name

2010-07-21T20:15:00.002-06:00

This blog turns five today. I've enjoyed writing here immensely. Consider this an open thread; do post what you feel about this blog, why you dislike or like it, what type of writing you'd like to see more.

Pictures of Cuzco, Peru

2010-07-06T13:52:00.012-06:00

I've been terrible about posting lately, and for that, my apologies. Last year, I was consistent with eight posts a month, but that kind of target driven writing has its problems. I've been slower this year and that may continue, not because there isn't enough write, but because I hope to produce posts with more content. The pictures and the long excerpts from books, though, shall continue. On that note, here are a few snaps from Cuzco.

Human nature and wild nature

2010-06-29T20:12:00.005-06:00

Edward Wilson, yet again with a startling insight, in the 25th anniversary foreword to Sociobiology: The New Synthesis:

Human nature – the epigenetic rules – did not originate in cities and croplands, which are too recent in human history to have driven significant amounts of genetic evolution. They arose in natural environments, especially the savannas and transitional woodlands of Africa, where Homo Sapiens and its antecedents evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. What we call the natural environment or wilderness today was home then – the environment that cradled humanity. Before agriculture the lives of people depended on their intimate familiarity with wild biodiversity, both the surrounding ecosystems and the plants and animals composing them.

The link was, on a scale of evolutionary time, abruptly weakened by the invention and spread of agriculture and then erased by the implosion of a large part of the agricultural population into the cities during the industrial and postindustrial revolutions. As global culture advanced into the new, technoscientific age, human nature stayed back in the Paleolithic era.

Hence the ambivalent stance taken by modern Homo Sapiens to the natural environment. Natural environments are cherished at the same time they are subdued and converted. The ideal planet for the human psyche seems to be one that offers an endless expanse of fertile, unoccupied wilderness to be churned up for the production of more people. But Earth is finite, and it still exponentially growing human population is rapidly running out of productive land for conversion. Clearly humanity must find a way simultaneously to stabilize its population and attain a universal decent standard of living while preserving much of Earth’s natural environment and biodiversity as possible.

Conservation, I have long believed, is ultimately an ethical issue. Moral precepts in turn must be based on a sound, objective knowledge of human nature…I am persuaded that as the need to stabilize and protect the environment grows more urgent in the coming decades, the linking of the two natures – human nature and wild Nature – will become a central intellectual concern.

Pictures from El Alto, Bolivia

2010-06-24T22:30:00.014-06:00

El Alto is a Aymara city perched at the rim of the canyon in which the world's highest capital, La Paz, is nestled. So El Alto, at 13,615 feet, is higher than La Paz. It is also poorer, confirming the trend I'd noticed in Andean Peru and in Lima: material wealth diminishes with elevation. The gated communities and the fancy stores are at the lowest points of La Paz. Complexion also changes with the drop in elevation: from Aymara dark brown to Spanish white. Evo, whom I mentioned in my last post, is a hero in El Alto, but the billboards celebrating his election victory disappear as you descend.

Despite the naked brick buildings and the generally unsanitary conditions, El Alto is full of entrepreneurial energy. The city market is full of every imaginable commodity -- second hand cars, cattle, clothes -- and sprawls over dozens of blocks. Some of the prosperity shows in El Alto: the wealthier Aymaras have offices with glass facades on their originally naked brick buildings.

Tiwanaku and Evo Morales

2010-06-18T16:27:00.013-06:00

Most of us have heard of the Incas, but they were only the last of a line of empires that rose in western South America. Before them, in the high and mostly dry plateau of the Andes, called the Altiplano, the Tiwanaku flourished. The indigenous Aymara of modern day Bolivia consider themselves descendants of the Tiwanaku. In January 2006, a day before he assumed presidential office, Evo Morales, an Aymara himself, attended a ceremony at the principal archaeological site of of this ancient culture, two hours from La Paz.

The Spanish colonized this part of the world with much brutality in the 16th century; Bolivia became independent in the 19th century but it was a sham independence: the Spanish descended elites still held power. Evo Morales’s remarkable ascension to the highest office in Bolivia in 2006 – he had been a Coca farmer once – was a truly historic moment. Hence the coronation at Tiwanaku. Like the blacks of South Africa, the majority Aymara too were denied for a long time. Evo Morales may be viewed skeptically in the West because he is socialist, but it is from the perspective of indigenous empowerment that his rise is significant. In 2009, a month before I visited La Paz, he was reelected with an even stronger majority.

Above, you'll find some pictures of relics from the Tiwanaku site. The Spanish missionaries of the sixteenth century couldn’t let them be. They "exorcised" the spirit of the second relic by scraping a cross on the right shoulder. No doubt, this nasty bit of sabotage stemmed from a deep insecurity. If the God of Christianity was indeed the only worthy and true God, then why did that fact have to be imposed in a coercive manner?

Conquerors, but also cultural carriers

2010-06-14T09:59:00.013-06:00

In the marvelous introduction to his book, Genghis khan And The Making Of The Modern World, Jack Weatherford writes,

The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no new religions, wrote few books or dramas, and gave the world no new crops or methods of agriculture. Their own craftsmen could not weave cloth, cast metal, make pottery or even bake bread. They manufactured neither porcelain nor pottery, painted no pictures, and built no buildings. Yet, as their army conquered culture after culture, they collected and passed all of these skills from one civilization to next.

The Mongols deliberately opened the world to new commerce not only in goods, but also in ideas and knowledge. The Mongols brought German miners to China and Chinese doctors to Persia. The transfers ranged from the monumental to the trivial. They spread the use of carpets everywhere they went and transplanted lemons and carrots from Persia to China, as well as noodles, playing cards, and tea from China to the West. They brought a metal worker from Paris to build a fountain on the dry steppes of Mongolia, recruited an English nobleman to serve as interpreter in their army, and took the practice of Chinese fingerprinting to Persia. They financed the building of Christian churches in China, Buddhist temples and stupas in Persia, and Muslim Koranic schools in Russia. The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors, but also as civilization´s greatest cultural carriers.

The Mongols who inherited Genghis Khan´s empire exercised a determiend drive to move products and commodities around and to combine them in ways that produced entirely novel products and unprecedented invention. When their highly skilled engineers from
China, Persia and Europe combined Chinese gunpowder with Muslim flamethrowers and applied European bell casting technology, they produced the canon, an entirely new order of technological innovation, from which sprang the vast modern arsenal of weapons from pistols to missiles. While each item had some significance the larger imnpact came from in the way the Mongols selected and combined technologies to create unusual hybrids.

Seemingly every aspect of European life -- technology, warfare, clothing, commerce, food, art,liteature and music -- changed during the Renaissance as a result of the Mongol influence. In addition to new forms of fighting, new machines and new foods, even the most mundane aspects of daily life changed as the Europeans switched to Mongol fabrics, wearing pants and jackets instead of tunics and robes, played their musical instruments with the steppe bow rather than plucking them with the fingers, and painted their pictures in a new style. The Europeans even picked up the Mogol exclamation hurray as an enthusiastic cry of bravado and mutual encouragement.

The Mysore story

2010-06-07T17:26:00.017-06:00

In the early 2000s, I wanted to write a short story set in the south Indian city of Mysore. I had been inspired by my travels to the city. The style of the story was a typical response of someone who had just arrived abroad -- I had come to the United States just then -- and feels nostalgic about home. What had once been part of my milieu now was exotic even to me. I never quite finished the story -- there are many failed versions in fact -- but here is whatever I managed to put to paper.

I present this in unedited form, so the typos and awkward sentences have not been corrected -- that is intended to be part of the charm. Or so I hope.

"""""""""

The line between the realms of mythology and reality is often thin and hazy, and sometimes a drifting vagabond never realizes when he has crossed one and is treading on the other. So it was, when, blown by an overnight storm and cocooned by a dark low-travelling rain-cloud, I was carried to the city of Mysore. Like a dream that is often forgotten when a slumbering person wakes up to groggy reality, the dark clouds that cradled me disappeared to reveal a shining morning and a smiling sun, and there wafted in the air the faint but unmistakable scent of sandalwood. I sniffed heartily to olfactory content, and saw a man-sized, live and moving toy, holding incense sticks that burned cheerfully orange at their tips and wore crumbling grey hats of ash.

“Welcome to Mysore,” said the toy. The orange flames burned brighter in acknowledgement. My guide was quite remarkable looking. Though made of sandalwood, his facial feaures and his limbs had the potential of free expression and movement. He had a great black moustache painted above his thick upper lip, and gold earrings dangled on his long Buddha-like ears; a huge red dot adorned his forehead, and a gold crown sat majestically over his head.

He walked and I followed him, but I really just had to follow the trail of scent that he left. We reached a roadside where a tonga stood; the horse that would give us a ride was nodding its head and clicking its hoofs musically in a slow foot dance. “Enter,” said the Sandalwood man grandly, and I did. He guided the tonga smoothly through the roads of Mysore. A quaint atmosphere enveloped me, and I absorbed it while my heart danced in it; there was a song on my lips to the tune of the undulating ride and the soft beats of the horse’s hoofs of the tar road. While I was thus singing to myself, my driver and escort started a lilting song too:

“ Tall eucalyptus and coconut trees
Rustle! Rustle! Rustle! in the gentle breeze
Cuckoos and mynahs sing their sweet songs
Tring!Tring!Tring! the bicycles respond!”

Indeed, there were lots of bicyclists right in the middle of the road, some on the sides, and the tonga had to weave through them as they waved and shouted and rang their bells. After a while we reached more crowded streets with the bazaars and the coffee houses where people chatted gaily, and sipped on coffee in ever-silver tumblers and cups. We were in the heart of the city, and the spectacular domes of the Mysore Palace had come into view.

“To there we head,” said the Sandalwood man with great hype. “We shall call on the Maharaja.”

We marched on slower through the traffic of people and reached the gates of the palace. The ochre domes shone bright in the sun. It was a great piece of architecture: European, Islamic and Hindu styles all merged into one fantastic palace.

“Indo-Saracenic, they call it,” said my guide, at whom I wasn’t looking, for the arresting sight that the palace had never allowed me to. We entered the palace, and armed guards bent in respect. If the exterior was majestic the interior was twice so: there were ornate dark brown wooden carvings on the doors of lotuses, peacocks, elephants, gods, and grazing deer of the forest; on the walls and stained glass windows there were intricately drawn designs and symmetrical patterns curvaceous as a swan’s neck and adorned with dots and geometrical shapes; there were paintings depicting the life of the king and his family, portraits of royal family’s ancestors, paintings of battles and those of celebration and horsemanship during the festival of Dasera for which the city was famous; and there was size, the immense size and height of the rooms, which ended in domes that made you feel dizzy with grandeur. All these I observed while I was being led to the Durbar room where on a golden throne sat Maharaja Wodeyar. He was attired with the best of clothes, those befitting a king; his robes flowed of silk and gold. And on his right side sat a strange-looking, furtive person, who looked like a puppet made of shining cloth. I caught a striking glint from his eye that seemed so powerful that I stood for a moment entranced, and then that mysterious bit of light disappeared.

“Welcome to Mysore,” said the Maharaja. His smile was bright and his demeanour cheerful; yet, if I was not wrong, I could detect the faint touch of a frown on his brow. Gesturing to the person on his right, he said: “And this is Silk, of the Mysore silk fame, that beautiful piece of everlasting luster. I can see that you have already met the Sandalwood.” He winked at me. “They don’t get along, the two of them; for both compete to make themselves famous in this city!”

“I am honored, O king, to be treated with such great hospitality,” I said with evident awe. All of us were seated now. A servant wandered in silently, and offered fresh coconut water to me. Sandalwood and Silk faced each other, their faces turned upward, each avoiding eye contact with the other. The Maharaja looked at me, and said:

“It is not without reason that you are treated with such special care.”

I arched my eyebrows, for there was something in his tone that suggested a burden.

“Yes, it is so. We got you from the real world for the stars foretold something about you. Our astrologer looked at the end of his long white beard in contemplation, and in his mind celestial objects floated – the planets, the stars, and the galaxies. His calculations matched with the date of your birth, the time, the exact hour – it seemed that you were the person we were looking for. Hence you were called to assist in a problem that bothers us.”

“This intrigues me. What is the nature of my assistance?”

“That has to do with your vagabond-like nature, your tendency to roam in the forests, and your knowledge of beasts.”

“A riddle it is all to me, and doubt resides like an dreadful intruder in my mind. Pray be clear.”

“In due time… do not make haste, although the issue at hand does require us not to be idle. We shall talk over lunch, which shall be soon, and my cook, who is also my vizier in matters of distress, shall join our talk.”

Lunch was served on banana leaves cleaned with water. The Maharaja ate with me while the cook supervised. The cook, whose name was Manisundar, talked a lot; he seemed quite an intelligent chap. His skin was covered with a formidable layer of oil and grease, and exuded the aromatic steam, heat and spice of the frying pan. He chattered on in a vocabulary that initially seemed strange, but later, when I was habituated to his “phrases”, I started to see light in his speech.

“Manisundar here has never liked anything as much as he has liked cooking. It is strange,” the Maharaja said. “Oh, how much he likes his cooking! He cannot stand anyone else in the royal kitchen, and does all the work himself.”

“Lord of all Vegetables, how will I survive without that?” asked Manisundar. “Cutting beans, snipping off those sticky ends of a ladysfinger, grating coconuts for chutney – of all these things if you deprive me, I shall have to fry myself deep one lunch in scalding vegetable oil!”

“There, there he goes again – stop that suicidal talk of yours!”

“Ah, okay, more mango pickle, tourist? Burns your tongue doesn’t it in a tangy-sour way! Quite my intention.”

“Er, yes, the food is quite delicious, delectable,” I said.

“Let’s talk of the pressing matters now that trouble the kingdom,” the Maharaja said importantly. “It is high time we did so.” There was a stern pause and I was all attention, with my ears straining and twitching with curiosity so much that they moved; and Manisundar watched them with glee and mirth.

“You may have heard of the buffalo demon Mahishashur, whose massive statue resides up Chamundi hill.” I nodded and he continued: “Well, he is the problem, the demon! He has the city named after him, what more does he want! Ages ago he was killed by Goddess Chamundeshwari, and the people of Mysore thought that was the end of that. But no, his spirit still moves, and he still troubles the people of Mysore; he is still as notorious as he was millennia ago, not giving up his mischief.

“You might ask what mischief he does. Ask what mischief he does not do! His apparition has been spotted in the night, moving about; people cringe in fear when he prowls around, troubling the innocent. But though that is a problem too for us, the real problem caused by him, I believe, lies elsewhere. His spirit is one with that of a living bandit named Marasuran, who lives, it is said, in the forest of Nagarhole. Occasionally, he comes to town with his cronies and wreaks havoc amongst the people, stealing their belongings, and even killing some. They come in strong and powerful horses, whose stamina is outstanding, far more than what our army horses can achieve. The most striking thing about this villain Marasuran is his capacity to elude. The forest is his home, and we have reason to believe that he has no one house or hideout; he lives all over the forest. Entire armies of men have gone about searching the thick dense parts of the forest, and they have sighted him, yes, but he has vanished strangely, and there is something miraculous about his escapades that has led me and my wise sages in court to believe that he is none other than an incarnation of the demon himself.”

There was silence for a while as the Maharaja paused and looked at Manisundar before he said in a low whisper, dramatically:

“Manisundar here believes that the bandit gets help from the birds and beasts of the forest.”

The cook nodded sagely, and said: “During my occasional visit to the forest to pluck some herbs and fresh leaves for the delicacies of the kitchen I have sensed and seen strange things. Steamed rice and round pumpkins, it was frightening! The whole living forest had its eyes on me, as if they knew I was from the Maharaja’s court. For some moments there was complete silence, and it is a terrible feeling; everything around you stands still, alert and frozen in time. I have never yearned for the sound of bursting mustards in hot oil more than in those chilly moments when shivers sneaked through my body. Once I saw someone running stealthily over rustling leaves and I followed the footsteps. At one point I was running parallel to the fugitive, and there were the trunks of trees between us. I saw the profile of a tall man dressed in shabby clothes, but remarkably athletic and lean. His running form went behind a tree and he evaded my vision for a split second or two; but what came out was utterly surprising and disturbing: a large croaking black bird, its wing flapping loudly, emerged from the other side to my astonishment, and a monkey, which I could have sworn was not there a moment ago, was suddenly climbing the tree. The fugitive was gone! I stood stunned and petrified; I felt deceived and cheated with a form of trickery that was beyond my comprehension. And as if basking in the glory of the deception, I heard a barking deer barking away somewhere; to me it sounded like laughter. Carrots are red, capsicums are green, and brinjals are violet, but after that little episode I felt the colour of all vegetables drowning into diabolical shades.” At this point his voice had reached a shrill squeak and tottered off lamely into silence; he gulped, and I could see his Adam’s apple bob up and then subside.

“What happened after that?” I asked

“Nothing. I just came back, and decided that I’d have to give up my fancy little herbs that could have enhanced the culinary treats that come out of the royal kitchen. There has been nothing more disheartening in life. I went to the masterful poet in the king’s court Devraya, told him of my problem, and to console me and ennoble my sorrow, he composed the following lovely verses:

Of cardamom and clove, I sing many praises
The flavour of coriander and cumin, I eulogize
Of these, I obtain, a good measure and plenty
But for the herbs of Nagarhole, I forever pine.”

He sighed and gloom hung over the room. Into this gloom came Sandalwood and Silk and joined us, exuding their scent and shine. The cook brightened and said: “These two great representatives of Mysore, they cheer me up so well! But I do hold a grudge against them for they never eat my food, not even the great, irresistibly sweet mysore pak that I prepare so often.”

It was well before dawn the next day that we set off for the forest of Nagarhole in two chariots. From Mysore, the forest was quite distant, and it would take a while to get there. Manisundar, Sandalwood and myself were in one chariot, whereas Silk and the Maharaja were in the other. It was still dark and the stars, if they weren’t hidden beneath pale-white scattered clouds, kept a twinkling vigil over us. Manisundar spoke to me almost incessantly, and whenever he was advising me to be cautious in my forest adventure, his voice dropped to a whisper as if he feared that the demon would listen.

“It is important for you to locate the bandit first. Like I locate those little worms than hide in grains of rice. Your skill with beasts is the way to do it.”

I nodded my head skeptically: “I know my way with beasts, and I have roamed in many forests, but that doesn’t mean I can deal with beasts who are under a spell of the bandit!”

“Enter the forest, and maybe you will see things differently. I know you agreed to this plan of mine as the allure of the forest is too much for you to resist! ”

He paused and said: “You may even meet people in forest, strange people, hermits, wanderers like you. Judge and do as you feel best.”

Sandalwood spoke for the first time: “Cut the wood of the tree closest to you if you need help or if you find something significant. The scent of a damaged bark of a tree is something I can detect early, and I’ll come rushing; it may take a little while, but I’ll be there.”

For the first time, I felt a tinge of fear tarnish the pure sense of anticipation and excitement that was within me.

Dawn was breaking and the eastern sky was starting to show light. The speed of the chariots had slowed, and after a while they came to a stop. All of us alighted. The Maharaja came to bid me goodbye: “You are almost in the forest now. This is where we leave you! I wish you good luck in your endeavour. The people of Mysore and myself cannot be more indebted to your courage and enthusiasm. May the great Goddess be with you! Remember, Silk and Sandalwood shall be in Nagarhole too, at some other points of the forest.”

The chariots rode away, and I was left alone. There were trees around me but it was not the dense forest yet. A thrill went through me as I inhaled the fresh air of the morning.

The art instinct

2010-06-01T22:17:00.004-06:00

Edward Wilson writes in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis:

Artistic impulses are by no means limited to man. In 1962, when Desmond Morris reviewed the subject in The Biology of Art, 32 individual non-human primates had produced drawings and paintings in captivity. Twenty three were chimpanzees, 2 were gorillas, 3 were orangutans, and 4 were capuchin monkeys. None received special training or anything more than access to the necessary equipment. In fact, attempts to guide the efforts of the animals by inducing imitation were always unsuccessful. The drive to use the painting and drawing equipment was powerful, requiring no reinforcement from human observers. Both young and old animals became so engrossed with the activity that they preferred it to being fed and sometimes threw temper tantrums when stopped. Two of the chimpanzees studied extensively were highly productive. “Alpha” produced over 200 pictures, “Congo”, who deserves to the called the Picasso of the great apes, was responsible for nearly 400. Although most of the efforts consisted of scribbling, the patterns were far from random. Lines and smudges were spread over a blank page outward from a centrally located figure. When a drawing was started on one side of a blank page the chimpanzee usually shifted to the opposite side to offset it. With time the calligraphy became bolder, starting with simple lines and progressing to more complicated multiple scribbles. Congo’s patterns progressed along approximately the same developmental path as those of very young human children, yielding fan-shaped diagrams and even complete circles. Other chimpanzees drew crosses.

The artistic behavior of chimpanzees may well be a function of their tool using behavior. Members of the species display a total of about ten techniques, all of which require manual skill. Probably all are improved through practice, while at least a few are passed as traditions from one generation to the next. The chimpanzees have considerable faculty for inventing new techniques, such as the use of sticks to pull objects through cage bars and to pry open boxes. Thus the tendency to manipulate objects and to explore their uses appears to have an adaptive advantage for chimpanzees.

The same reasoning applies a fortiori to the origin of art in man…Human beings have been hunter-gatherers for over 99 per cent of their history, during which time each man made his own tools. The appraisal of form and skill in execution were necessary for survival, and they probably brought social approval as well. Both forms of success paid off in greater genetic fitness. If the chimpanzee Congo could reach the stage of elementary diagrams, it is not too hard to imagine primitive man progressing to representational figures. Once that stage was reached, the transition to the use of art in sympathetic magic and ritual must have followed quickly. Art might then have played a reciprocally reinforcing role in the development of culture and mental capacity. In the end, writing emerged as the idiographic representation of language.

Liz

2010-05-29T13:01:00.013-06:00

Elizabeth Adamitiz is seventy four. She lives alone two houses down from me, at the end of Summer Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. Late in the afternoon, she takes short walks in the neighborhood. She has a broad face and wears large glasses; her hair, short now, is sparse and mostly gray. From far, her stooped posture and slow gait makes her look old and helpless, but she has one of the widest smiles I know. It enlivens her face, carries a hint of mischief and is generally the prelude to a witty remark.

Liz has been single throughout. She enjoys company, but does not seek it. With a twinkle in her eye, she says she is a loner. But she regrets that no one she knows is around. She was the last of six children. “Everyone is dead; my sisters are dead, my family is dead. Well, for all you know, I am dead too!” She laughs. She has nieces who live in nearby towns; one of them, only four years younger, visits often to deliver groceries.

Liz‘s short term memory is poor enough to be nonexistent. She chats with me but remembers nothing of our previous conversations. She remembers me vaguely but not where I work or which house I live in. She even forgets what I told her minutes earlier: our conversations move in a loopy, circular manner, with repeated iterations through the same questions and themes. “Did you just tell me that?” she asks, well aware of her condition. I nod. “Oh jeez,” she says flashing her irresistible smile, “so that’s how knocked I am!”

In keeping with her playful demeanor, she asks me to “raise hell when I can”. When I give her a puzzled look, she repeats emphatically, “Raise hell, kid! Have fun in life! Go drink, go chase the girls! I raised a lot of hell when I was young.” When an attractive woman in her twenties jogged by us, she promptly took her glasses off, handed them to me and said: “Here, you'll need this to take a proper look.”

Liz grew up in Amherst and has stayed put. From her birth to now, she has lived in the same house. She has not traveled beyond New England; no visits abroad, to Europe, Mexico, or even Canada, only a few hours north by car. I found that striking. My family had moved from state to state, city to city, driven by circumstance and my father’s profession. My grandmother, who is a few years older than Liz, grew up in rural Tamil Nadu, moved to Madras and now stays occasionally with her two sons in Bangalore. By any standards, the degree of Liz’s rootedness is unique.
___

One day, I asked her how the neighborhood had changed. It was a warm spring afternoon; we were seated on her porch. Large bushes, well trimmed, flanked us on each side. Close to the street’s end – about fifty yards from where we sat – was the trail that ascends and curves to reveal a beautiful pond, surrounded by woods. In the evenings, beavers wade through the water to chew on the limbs of trees strewn at the pond’s rim. At its eastern end, a minute’s walk from Liz’s porch, is a small waterfall. I loved the neighborhood’s idyll and natural beauty. It was a quiet part of what was an already quiet college town. But it never occurred to me that it could have a history – until, Liz, with her unique perspective, gave me a sense.

Summer Street, she insisted, was once a “rough part of town”. Today, in American cities the phrase is an indirect reference to a poor black or Hispanic neighborhood. But Amherst never had – still does not have – much racial diversity. What, then, did rough mean in Liz’s day?

In early and mid twentieth century, the street was full of newly arrived Lithuanian immigrants. They were poor and their houses ramshackle. They were fond of drinking. Conveniently, there was a liquor store – a “packet store” as Liz called it – up the street. Even the police admitted that the street was tough; they would drive through not in one but two cars. Only one house did not belong to an immigrant. “He was a Yankee!” Liz said. “But he became one of us.”

Liz’s parents, Catholics, were from Lithuania, “the old country”; Lithuanian was the language she first learned. She still speaks it well. Her mother died in 1953 when she was seventeen. Her father earned a meager salary as a farm hand, taking care of cattle. He worked for Walter Jones, whose grandson now owns the major apartment complexes in Amherst. It was fascinating glimpse of how the early twentieth century families of the town, working class and well off, immigrant and Yankee, had ended up in two generations. Mill Hollow, the nondescript apartments built in the 1970s, across Liz’s small but nearly century old house, was Jones’ property. It had once been an open field where Liz played softball as a child. “I used to hit the ball hard and it would end up in the brook. The kids would holler at me.”

The poverty of her immigrant parents was important in Liz’s conception of her identity; she mentioned it every time we talked. But it was not an ideological or political stance -- just matter of fact. At elementary school, Liz could tell that she and her friends from the street were different from the others, mostly professors’ kids. “These smart kids were up to it; they spoke the language of the teachers. We didn’t really grasp much.”

That difference still exists. Amherst projects itself as a haven for progressives and in the process sometimes appears self absorbed and snobbish. It is not a deliberate, harmful or in-your-face snobbishness, but a subtle presence. The boutique stores and trendy coffee shops in downtown cater to this demographic -- generally well off students and professors. The other Amherst, working class Amherst, provides the local services: the garage mechanics, the electricians, the farmers, the construction workers. It is possible to tell them apart from their dress and demeanor. Tina, Liz’s immediate neighbor, whose husband works as a fireman and occasionally delivers newspapers at 4 am in the morning, is from the other Amherst (she also happens to be the only other Lithuanian descendant now living in the neighborhood.)
___

Liz did not go to college. She probably did not have the means. Instead, for thirty six years, she worked as helper at the university dining commons. Unsurprisingly, given her bright and spunky personality, Liz got along well with college kids. When she was thirty, she fell in love with a marine but he left her while away on duty. Her father passed away in 1974, but by that time, Liz had paid the mortgage and owned the house. She loves dogs and once raised three – all of them are buried in her backyard.

After retirement, she began talking long walks, chatting now and then with passersby. These days, she doesn’t walk far but walks no less frequently, surveying the neighborhood houses, now changed in color and style, full of new residents, very different from the “rough” Lithuanian look and feel she was used to. Even quiet streets in quiet towns change fast.

More pictures from Lake Titicaca

2010-05-23T20:48:00.005-06:00

The genius of Inca masonry

2010-05-17T15:39:00.011-06:00

During my travels in Peru, I found nothing more striking or elegant than Inca walls. Above you’ll find two examples. The first is in a street in the Andean city of Cuzco, once the capital of the Incas. The second is at Saqsayhuaman, an Inca fortress whose ruins today overlook the sprawl of Cuzco. Notice that the walls are not held together by mortar; rather they consist of large interlocking stones that fit like a puzzle. One can only imagine the labor and organization required for such precision. In a seismically active area, these structures have endured to this day – while many Spanish constructions in Peru since mid 1500s have collapsed. In some cases, the walls blend with the landscape, like a naturally formed jumble of rocks, to an extent that they do not seem constructed (the second picture for example). They have an austere, minimalist look which elevates their beauty even more.

The other distinctive feature of Inca architecture is trapezoidal doors and niches. As John Hemming writes in The Conquest of Incas:

Doors and niches were invariably built in trapezoidal shapes, with the sides tapering inwards towards the lintel at the top. This was a logical method for builders who had not discovered the principle of the arch. It reduced the length of the lintel stone and spread the thrust of the weight it supported. Rows of such trapezoidal niches broke the monotony of Inca walls. Sometimes the niches were the size of sentry-boxes, tall enough to accommodate a line of standing attendants, but more often they were smaller, sunk into the wall at chest height to form a row of convenient cupboard alcoves.

Examples above of a trapezoidal door (from Saqsayhuaman) and wall alcoves (from Machu Picchu).

Busy, but be back soon

2010-05-10T19:33:00.004-06:00

Occupied with grading and other end of semester tasks -- typically a deluge -- but will be back in a week or so. There still much to write about my Dec-Jan trip to Peru and Bolivia, and I hope to get something on paper soon, before my memory begins to play tricks.

How a spider balloons itself, and Anthill

2010-05-04T20:49:00.021-06:00

The [ballooning] method is widespread and ancient among spiders. When an immature spider possessing this ability wishes to travel a long distance, it crawls to an unrestricted site on a blade of grass or twig of a bush, lifts the rear part of its body to point the spinnerets at the tip upward, and lets out a line of silk. The delicate little thread is the spiderling’s kite. The air current lifts and pulls at it until the young spider feeling the tension, gradually lengthens the thread. When the strength of the pull exceeds its own body weight, it lets go with all eight feet and sets sail. A flying spiderling can reach thousands of feet of altitude and travel miles downwind. When it wishes to descend, it pulls in the silk thread and eats it millimeter by millimeter, heading for a soft if precarious landing. The risk it takes offers good odds. Sailing aloft under its silk balloon, the spiderling can reach land still uncrowded by competing spiders.
___

That’s from The Anthill Chronicles, a short, self-contained novella within the famous biologist E.O. Wilson’s first novel. The novella, one of the most beautiful and mysterious stories I’ve read in a while, is about the rise and fall of four ecologically intertwined ant colonies on a small tract of land, a longleaf pine savanna in rural Alabama. One of the ant societies is a "supercolony" that runs rampant. Wilson, wisely, does not make the ants speak as humans do; instead, he uses his immense scientific knowledge to tell us what goes on in their subterranean nests. The execution is superb; there is probably no better narrative description of how the world appears to ants. The ants' quest for territory and foraging grounds, brutal wars, cycles of dominance and decline -- epics condensed in time and space --are strikingly similar to ours; and yet there are some contrasts. Ant colonies, for example, are fanatically communist and are heavily dominated by females; males play a peripheral, utilitarian role.

Deftly interlinked with the story of the ants is the story of the protagonist, Raff Semmens Cody, a child of the American south (like Wilson himself). Raff is fascinated by the same tract of land that contains the anthills and is interested in protecting it. This dual structure of novel – one at the level of the ants, the other the level of humans, but both examining in understated fashion the perils of overburdening the ecosystem – allows for an unusual perspective.

The fun in teaching probability

2010-04-30T20:35:00.021-06:00

My last class this semester will be on Monday. Whether you are a student or professor, the end of the semester is always something to look forward to, especially if a four month long summer free of classes awaits. This time, though, I won’t feel the same way – the sentiment is primarily because I've been teaching probability and statistics. Both these topics are so rich and full of startling revelations that I will, for the first time, miss preparing for lectures. The class itself, consisting of ninety undergraduates, was a lot of fun (even if grading was not); I used the personal response system which worked well (I ask students a question and have their answers displayed immediately, enabling instant feedback, like an audience poll in a game show).

The mathematician Steven Strogatz, whose short pieces in the New York Times have thrilled many readers, recently wrote about conditional probability, a notoriously twisted concept. I spent two weeks covering it. Using a common example, I tried to tell my students that “testing positive if you have the disease” is not the same as “having the disease if you test positive”. To some this is mere semantics or subterfuge -- and indeed, much of probability can seem like smoke and mirrors, like the Monty Hall Problem -- but trust me it is not. Strogatz provides another example:

Perhaps the most pulse-quickening topic of all is “conditional probability” — the probability that some event A happens, given (or “conditional” upon) the occurrence of some other event B. It’s a slippery concept, easily conflated with the probability of B given A. They’re not the same, but you have to concentrate to see why. For example, consider the following word problem.

Before going on vacation for a week, you ask your spacey friend to water your ailing plant. Without water, the plant has a 90 percent chance of dying. Even with proper watering, it has a 20 percent chance of dying. And the probability that your friend will forget to water it is 30 percent. (a) What’s the chance that your plant will survive the week? (b) If it’s dead when you return, what’s the chance that your friend forgot to water it? (c) If your friend forgot to water it, what’s the chance it’ll be dead when you return?

I am too tired to give a detailed answer; moreover, conditional probability is just one concept in probability. There are plenty others, and this semester I often felt like I've stumbled upon a treasure trove of delightful ideas. Even this week I was discovering some that I had glossed over as a student. Someday, I will write extended pieces on what I have learned and how they apply to common situations.

Meanwhile, for those of you who would like to be tested, here are a couple of questions I asked in my exams -- up to the challenge? The first one (credit Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk) is easier than the second; it does not need any prior knowledge of probability.

a. Two students were partying in another state the day before their final chemistry exam. They got back only after the exam was over. However, they made up an excuse. They lied to the professor that they had a flat tire while returning and asked if they could take a make-up test. The professor agreed, wrote out a test, and sent the two students to separate rooms to take it. The only question on the test, worth 100 points, was: “Which tire was it?”

What is the probability that both students will give the same answer?

b. Suppose you toss a coin once and roll a die 4 times (these are two independent sets of experiments). Success in a coin-toss is getting a heads, while success in a die roll is getting a 5 or a 6. What is the probability that the number of successes in the coin toss equals the number of successes in the 4 die rolls?

Socialism in ant colonies and its lack in human societies: E.O. Wilson's perspectives

2010-04-27T20:08:00.008-06:00

I recently chanced upon an old, 1997 interview of the famous biologist Edward Wilson. Wilson is known for his work on ant societies and in the interview he provides some good insights. Ant societies are well and truly socialist -- why so and why not human societies? The answer might lie in the differences in reproductive abilities. Long excerpts below:

There are about 9.500 known species of ants, many of whom you studied, but there is only one species of Homo. Why?

I think I have the answer for that. That is because we are so big. We are giant animals. The bigger the animal, the larger the territory and home range that the animal needs. Ant-species, consisting of very tiny organisms, can divide the environment up very finely. You can have one species that lives only in hollow twigs at the tops of trees, another species that lives under the bark, and yet another species that lives on the ground. Human beings, being giant animals and particularly being partly carnivorous, cannot divide the environment up finely among different Homo-species. There have been episodes in which there were multiple hominid-species, probably two or three species of Australopithecus, co-existing perhaps with the earliest Homo. But it is evidently the tendency of hominid species and particularly of Homo to eradicate any rivals. It is a widespread idea among anthropologists that when Homo sapiens came out of Africa into southern Europe about a hundred-thousand years ago, it proceeded to eliminate Homo neandertalensis, which was a native European species that had survived very well along the fringe of the advancing glacier.

You write that ants often share food among themselves. Why, and how did you find out?

Back in the fifties Tom Eisner, a colleague of mine, and I did I believe the first experiments tracing radio-active label led sugar-water through colonies of ants. We were able to estimate the rate at which the food was exchanged, and the volume that was exchanged. Not only do many colonies exchange food with fanatic dedication, but in the colonies of many ant species the workers regurgitate food back and forth at an extraordinarily high rate. Now we understand that the result of this is that at any given time, all the workers have roughly the same food-content in their stomach. It is sort of a social stomach. So that an ant is informed of the status of a colony by the content of its own stomach. It therefore knows what it should be doing for the colony. If you only had a small number of extremely well-fed ants and the rest were hungry, the workers would go out hunting for more food, whereas in fact it might be a bad time to hunt for food.

Why doesn't this sort of communism exist among humans?

What I like to say is that Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species. Why doesn't it work in humans? Because we have reproductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring. The great success of the social insects is that the success of the individual genes are invested in the success of the colony as a whole, and especially in the reproduction of the queen, and thus through her the reproduction of new colonies.

This was I think one of the main contributions of the idea of kin-selection. We now understand quite well why most species of social insects have sterile workers, and therefore can have communist-like systems. In which the colony is all, the individual is only a part of the colony, and the success of the whole community is what counts far above the success of the individual. The behavior of the individual social insect evolved with reference to what it contributes to the community, whereas the genetic fitness of a human being depends on how well it can individually use the society. We have become insect-like only by extreme contractual arrangements.

You write that a major difference between humans and ants is that we send our young men to war, while they send their old females. Why is that?

Well first of all, all the worker-ants are female. In the bee, ant and wasp-societies sisters are extremely closely related to one another, and therefore it pays to be altruistic toward sisters, whereas brothers do not benefit by giving anything to sisters. So the females are the ones who are fanatically devoted to one another.

Why are they old? Once again it comes down to this matter of what is best for the colony. As the workers grow older, they put more and more of their time outside, and as they become quite old or injured or sick, they spend their time either outside of the colony or right at the edge. The advantage of this is that the individuals that are going to die soon anyway, having already performed a lot of services, are the individuals that sacrifice themselves. It is the cheapest for the colony.

Whereas in humans, not only are the young males the strongest, but by being mammals in a competitive society young males tend to be greater risk-takers, braver and more adventurous. They are moving up in the ladder of status, rank, recognition, and power. And to be a member of the warrior-class when it is needed, has always been a rapid way of moving up. So that appears to be the main reason why we send young men out, and they are willing to go.

Chance masquerading as skill: A personal take on T20 Cricket

2010-04-22T14:40:00.011-06:00

For those who don’t follow cricket, the second part might not be of interest.

1. Not quite chess

As an only child, I had many ways of keeping myself occupied. I couldn’t play a game of chess by myself, so I had to create artificial teams that competed against each other. But the game could not be played the regular way – how can you outwit the opponent when you yourself are the opponent? So I created “dice chess”; I worked the specific rules out slowly, but the idea was simple. You moved a piece only as many squares as the outcome of a die roll. You could choose which piece to move, but there were restrictions. A pawn couldn’t be moved unless you rolled a one; a horse couldn't be moved unless you rolled a three or a six. More radically, you might have checkmated your opponent, but the game wasn’t over until you rolled the number that actually finished the job – the king could therefore escape even from a hopeless situation. This resulted in some very thrilling comebacks and unexpected results.

The dice meant that I could play by creating two artificial teams; I could now think for both teams, since the outcome of the die roll decided my moves. Given a roll, I did the best for each team. In all other respects, I was just a passive observer and commentator (yes, I did actually speak out loud when the games were going on). In my commentary, I put up the pretence that dice chess was a serious game and that there was serious skill involved in winning. My teams were typically based on the books and comics I read. Walt Disney had a team; Indrajal Comics had one; the Hardy Boys were in what I called the Franklin W Dixon (FWD) team; as I started reading more novels (around the eighth grade), Agatha Christie had hers. I would design elaborate tournaments, with the usual league round robins, semi finals and the finals. There was also an imaginary audience that cheered the teams (yes, I mimicked the roar of the audience too, when a something momentous happened on the board).

To be sure, there was some skill involved. For instance, a bishop might be two squares away from the opponent’s king: rolling a two would finish the game; the chance of winning was one in six. But if you had a bishop within two squares of the king and a horse within striking distance (the horse in fact turned out be an unusually powerful player in dice chess), it would mean rolling a 2, 3 or 6 could finish the game – you now had fifty percent chance of winning. It was all about maximizing your chances.

I conceived the game in fifth grade, and for fifteen years I kept it to myself-- until graduate school, when I introduced it to my lab mates. They were excited about it, and for a while, we were playing mini-tournaments in the afternoons and avoiding research.

A few key aspects I had not thought carefully about became evident as I played with others. First, the game was so dependent on the die roll that it was no longer chess. Yes, it was based on the rules of chess, but you had to think less. You reacted to the die roll rather anticipating what the opponent would do. Those who did not like chess because it is a mentally daunting game – I include myself in this group – found dice chess a much more relaxing option. Second, there was much less skill involved than I had thought; the victories were victories of chance and very little of skill.

Viewed less charitably, dice chess was a colossal insult to and a diminution of the original game. Chess champions like V Anand would laugh at it, and yet if they were paid millions of dollars – because large numbers of people liked it – it would be no laughing matter; they might feel compelled to play the significantly diminished game. And if separate schedule of a few months were to be carved out for dice chess, they might have less energy for the intense concentration and powers of extrapolation that the original game demands.

2. Not quite cricket

The analogy is obvious, even if not precise. T20 Cricket is not all chance, but most of it is – and this is precisely the reason it is “unpredictable” and “exciting”. It opens up the possibility that any team can win. There is no question that there some skilled players and they do their best within the limitations of the format; and some new strategies are now being used. But to claim that it is cricketing skill that decides T20 outcomes more than chance is to delude oneself. Most viewers, in fact, are aware of this, but just as dice chess thrilled me into excited commentary as I conducted my “solo” tournaments, so too are viewers, myself included, knowingly lured by the temporal pleasures of T20 cricket.

That randomness plays a greater role in T20 than in cricket’s longer forms can be inferred from the simplest statistical ideas. Every game of sport, whether cricket or soccer or tennis, is a random experiment, even if one team or player is stronger and more likely to win. In statistics, you conduct the same random experiment many times to make sure that the data you are collecting has validity. It matters how many times you do the experiment. But equally important is the length of each experiment. If the length is short (think, equivalently, of a one set tennis game or a twenty minute soccer game, or a one day golf tournament), then you cannot be confident of the outcome you are measuring, no matter how many times you measure it. So although a lot of T20 games are played – as in the IPL – there is little meaning in the outcome of each individual game.

In contrast, test matches are played over five days; the game is too long in the view of many but the length is precisely why we are able to infer something concrete (and some of the most exciting test games have been played over the last few years). The length is also why the format is the hardest; if you are skilled, it will eventually show. If you are not skilled, you will not survive test cricket. It is almost impossible for a really weak team (say Zimbabwe) to beat a strong team (say Australia). There are good reasons why New Zealand, a 2009 T20 World Cup finalist, has performed poorly, home and away, in the longest form of the game.

In T20s, the skilled will be successful over time – as Tendulkar and Kallis have demonstrated in this year's IPL – but the short format allows those without skill (read a few lusty blows, or a few freak wickets) to have an unusually high influence in determining a positive outcome for their team. Chance, in other words, masquerades as skill in T20 cricket. It is not a simplification to say that the IPL is a nationwide lottery, a kind of frenzy that urban Indians and the diaspora revel in. It is an exhibit for the worst excesses of capitalism and celebrity worship. It leaves little room for nuance.

At the moment, the murky financial side of IPL is unraveling. One hopes also that a more objective assessment of the format will be made. Even with twenty overs, there are more intelligent ways to design the game. Have 11 players in your team, but the batting team can lose only five wickets (a total of six batsmen), rather than ten; the remaining five will not bat, but are specialist bowlers. It won’t necessarily solve all problems, but at least, the contest between the bat and ball will be more even. Risks will have a high cost. Sixes and fours, which have been devalued in the current format, will gain some meaning.

Just as dice chess is not really chess, so T20 as it is now is not really cricket. Think, in contrast, the epic innings that the serene Hashim Amla played in vain in the second test at the Eden Gardens. That innings, played just before the T20 frenzy began this year, is the perfect antidote to the IPL’s numbing onslaught.

Perelman and the Poincaré Conjecture

2010-04-19T11:56:00.007-06:00

A riveting account of the life and mathematical achievements of the recluse Grigory (Grisha) Perelman, who recently cracked the Poincaré Conjecture:

Masha Gessen’s Perfct Rigor is a fascinating biography of Grigory (Grisha) Perelman, the fearsomely brilliant and notoriously antisocial Russian mathematician. Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture, one of mathematics’ most important and intractable problems, in 2002—almost a century after it was first posed, and just two years after the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a one-million-dollar prize for its solution.

[...]

Up until March of this year, there remained one more chapter to the Perelman saga. Would he accept the one-million-dollar prize promised by the Clay Mathematics Institute for solving one of the seven so-called Millennium Problems? While the rules say that a proof must appear in a peer-reviewed mathematics journal (not just in an Internet posting), the mathematicians mentioned above have published papers in such journals expounding and amplifying the proof. Surely Perelman deserves the prize, which he was finally and officially offered on March 18.

Five days later, on March 23, Perelman rejected the Clay prize. He reportedly said through the closed door to his spartan apartment, “I have all I want.” The comments he made after rejecting the Fields Medal probably reflect his present state of mind as well:

"I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I’m not a hero of mathematics. I’m not even that successful. That is why I don’t want to have everybody looking at me."

Some might argue that monetary awards for mathematical work are inappropriate, or that the Poincaré Conjecture is of little practical value and not worth the one-million-dollar prize. The aesthetic and epistemic value of the proof is priceless, however, and it may eventually yield more earthly consequences as well. As for the size of the award—how many no-name hacks are there on Wall Street who make a million dollars or more not just once but every year, and contribute exactly what? Whether Perelman has practical need for the money or not, he could use it to help support his mother or mathematicians of his liking, or to advance the kind of education conceived by Andrei Kolmogorov, or for some purpose only he could imagine. Reconsider your decision, Grisha.

Pictures of Lake Titicaca

2010-04-17T23:32:00.010-06:00

Titicaca is located on the border between Peru and Bolivia at an elevation of 12,000 feet. I took these pictures on the Bolivia side. In the second picture, the little town around the hill, facing the lake, is Copacabana.

The neglect of India's classical languages

2010-04-14T22:03:00.015-06:00

Last year, the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock asked why India pays scant attention to its linguistic heritage. The neglect of classical languages means that the vast majority of Indians remain divorced from a deeper understanding of their own past. To put things in perspective, think of how well studied Western classical languages are; it is no surprise that the West understands its own journey to the present really well -- and is constantly reinterpreting it.

I feel proud of India’s Hindu-Buddhist history, but my knowledge of Sanskrit or even my own mother tongue Tamil – yet another classical language – is so poor, any understanding I may claim to have of this heritage can only be superficial. I have not read a single text in an Indian language. Even the realization that Sanskrit has a complex grammar, that novel numerical methods constitute much of ancient Indian mathematics, was recent – I learned of them through the painstaking work of Western scholars such as Nicholas Ostler and Kim Plofker.

In her new essay, Crisis in the Classics, Ananya Vajpeyi stresses the enormity of the Indian problem:

Kusum Pawde, a Maharashtrian woman of non-Brahmin origins, has written a seminal essay titled “The Story of my ‘Sanskrit’,” describing the struggles she faced growing up outside upper caste society in Maharashtra and becoming a Sanskrit scholar and university teacher. Her story took place back when the study of Sanskrit was still confined to Brahmin men; Pawde had to fight discrimination on the grounds of both caste and gender. Yet, when I first read her essay whilst doing my own doctoral work in Maharashtra thirty-five or forty years after she completed her education, even with my rather different social and financial situation, I found it no less difficult to navigate the world of Sanskrit scholarship.

The only place Sanskrit felt accessible was in the classroom at the University of Chicago with American professors and classmates, or on the fifth floor of the Regenstein Library, which housed every text – old or new, classical or vernacular, Indian or European – that one might conceivably need. Between 1998 and 2003, I spent almost five years in the field, travelling to every major centre of Sanskrit, learning throughout the Deccan and southern India. By the time I returned to Chicago to write my dissertation, I had to concede that there was no “there” there for the study of pre-modern India, in India.

In early 2010, Gurcharan Das told me that he was disturbed about having to go to American universities to study or refresh his Sanskrit in preparation for writing his latest book, The Difficulty of Being Good (2009). Das was an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, where he read Sanskrit with Daniel Ingalls. Four decades later, he returned to the University of Chicago to brush up his philological skills with Ingalls’ students, Sheldon Pollock and Wendy Doniger.

As we shared stories across generations, I recounted to Das my own disappointments and difficulties in trying to study Sanskrit in India. I told him about my misadventures at universities, libraries, archives, and traditional schools in multiple states – Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Bengal. I had spent my twenties in graduate school, searching for Sanskrit. I found it more readily in the U.K. and the U.S.; in India, it consistently eluded me. Das looked at me in amazement; it had not occurred to him that his experience – call it the difficulty of being good at classical studies in India – was not by any means unique to him.

[...]

Arguably, linguistic diversity and literary richness ought to be India’s strongest suit, given its history both as an old civilization and as a diverse and multi-vocal democracy. Alas, we have driven our languages and literatures into the ground. Linguistic chauvinism and language-centred identity politics abound. Yet, not a single political ideology protects and nurtures the languages, which remain orphans in the political process and in the networks of institutional patronage cultivated by different parties.

[...]

But Sanskrit was never merely – and certainly need no longer be – a tool of epistemic violence against vulnerable sections of our society, including women, lower castes, tribals, and Muslims. It is, like it or not, one of a very small number of keys to our entire recorded history; without an ability to be functional in this language, without preserving its texts, its archives, and its material residues, we simply cannot know our own origins. Wilfully destroying and forgetting the historical past, in the manner of Communist Russia and China in the twentieth century, or distancing and censoring it in the manner of other new republics based on old cultures, like Turkey and Iran, is not the way forward for India.

Try to imagine independent India without its founding, fundamental, and inalienable texts, whether ancient or modern, upper caste or outcaste: the sermons of the Buddha, the edicts of Asoka, the epics of Vyasa and Valmiki, the songs of its Sufis and bhakti poets, the teachings of its saints and sages, the lessons of its gurus, the Constitution of its Republic, Gandhi’s letters, Ambedkar’s articles, Nehru’s speeches, Tagore’s national anthem, and the innumerable stories that we continuously recount. Not land, blood, race, religion, or state – language itself is our essence. Without our words, we are nothing.

It's a superb essay, a heartfelt plea that one hopes will be heard -- and soon. Read it here.

Travels in Tamil Nadu: Kumbakonam

2010-04-10T22:21:00.024-06:00

Pardon the typos...

The south Indian city of Kumbakonam lives up to its epithet. Temples are everywhere: their elaborate gopurams (towers) rise dramatically along its crowded, narrow streets, and in the villages and towns around the city, a varied pantheon finds representation. The city’s large Mahamanam tank is said to collect India’s holy rivers in miniature, imparting this local and insignificant seeming landmark a grander, pan-Indian connection. Bathing in the tank on the day of the Mahamanam Festival – Tamil Nadu’s own Kumbh Mela – is akin to washing one’s sins in such rivers as the Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati, and Cauvery (see rare picture from 1905 below of the festival and the tank; picture credit here).

I grew up with little interest in temples and deities. As characters in stories and epics, the gods with their quirks and foibles were fascinating, but as idols to be worshipped in a temple, they were invariably boring. Kumbakonam has the usual – Shiva, Vishnu, Murugan; there’s also a rare Brahma temple. But the majority of the holy places around town pivot on a fascinating theme -- the deification of celestial bodies: the sun, the moon, the planets, better known as navagraha. It made sense to me that these mysterious entities, markers of time, direction and the recurrence of seasons – and, in the case of the sun, indispensable – should be worshipped.

In the temples I visited as a child, the navagraha were personified as black figurines, their details faint; they were typically arranged on a raised platform in three rows. Though I was always instructed to circle them devoutly, they were never the main attraction. In Kumbakonam, there is a temple for each graha. Though they consist of five planets, the grahas generally refer to celestial landmarks – the sun (Suryan), the moon (Chandran), Mars (Chevai), Mercury (Budhan), Jupiter (Guru), Venus (Shukram or Velli) and Saturn (Sani). The remaining two, Raagu and Ketu, are not actual bodies but nodes: “they are the two points of intersection of the paths of the Sun and the Moon as they move on the celestial sphere”[source].

3.

The Gurukovil (or Guru Temple) is in Alangodi; it has the most garish gopuram (tower) I have ever seen. Though striking, I personally prefer the understated elegance of older temples, such as the Brihadishwara. The difference is in the degree of detail: the newer temples tend to exaggerate (dilated eyes, fiery moustaches, tusks and teeth), while the older temples prefer abstraction and are yet noticeably sensuous.

The cool inner sanctum of the Gurukovil hosts a lingam with a Nandi facing it. Guru himself is to the left of the sanctum, almost an afterthought, reached only by walking halfway around. But he receives plenty of attention from worshippers. I caught a glimpse of him right after an abhishekam, bejeweled, garlanded, slits that were eyes marked out from his otherwise ash-covered form. It was also at this temple that I noticed four Muslim women in black chadors lighting candles for him (I mentioned this in an earlier post).

4.

That same evening, I went to the Suryanar Kovil (Sun Temple). Guru was here too, facing a large idol of the Suryan: the heavyweights of the solar system, Jupiter and the Sun, enjoying a tete-a-tete.

The rest of the temple hosted the other seven grahas, each housed in a smaller enclosure, aptly around the sanctum for the Sun. At one of them, an archaka (a priest) was conducting an abhishekam for a large family. This meant stripping the black stone idol that represented the deity, bathing it in water, milk, a mash of chopped bananas, honey, jaggery and dates, washing it again with water, and finally dressing it in new cloth and adorning with flowers -- all this while prayers with a distinctive cadence were chanted.

The priest was stocky, pot-bellied and wore earrings and a sullied sacred thread; his veshti (a white wrap-around) was worn in a complicated, many-layered fashion and sat tight over his wide waist. He did his work earnestly. But the lady of the family – who was clearly in charge – was not satisfied with the material aspects of the abhishekam.

“Why aren’t you adorning more? Shouldn’t you be using more fresh flowers? What about the clothes for the grahas? I paid a lot for this; and I specifically asked for something elaborate.”

The priest was immediately on the defensive.

“Amma, what use is it telling me? I have no control over these things. You should have been more specific when you paid for the abhishekam; you should have told the people there. What use is it coming and telling the Iyer [Brahmin priest] here?”

It was a comical tussle about money and service quality in the middle of a somber religious ritual. As the priest moved from one graha to another (from Raagu to Chandran to Budhan), the lady kept insisting that it wasn’t enough. And the priest kept defending himself in his distinctive Brahmin-accented Tamil. At the end, the lady gave money to the priest as was customary, but he refused it, leaving the family bewildered and dissatisfied (though some of the younger members snickered).

There is a subtler issue at work here and it has to do with political control of temple revenue. The government of Tamil Nadu – currently led by the avowedly anti-Hindu Karunanidhi – has increasingly taken control of many temples. You pay for services, such as an abhishekam, to the temple officials and it is they who decide what you get. I am speculating here, but this probably puts priests at odds with the officials: the former who once had more control now have less say.

On not being a morning person

2010-04-03T17:32:00.014-06:00

They say you are either a morning or a night person. I am certainly the latter: it is a pity to miss the freshness of dawn, but it seems an even greater pity to miss a few extra hours of sleep. No matter how early I get to bed, my eyes just won’t open earlier than eight – so much for the old adage about rising early.

I wonder if I ended up this way because as a child I had to be in school only at 11:30 am. This was back in the eighties; my parents lived in Gujarat, in the Naranpura area of Ahmadabad. We were tenants in the small upper section of a house owned by a large family. The living room doubled as the bedroom; attached to it was a small kitchen. My mother would wake me up at eight, well after my father had left, and with eyes barely open, I would begin my journey to the toilet.

I call it a journey because the toilet was downstairs and was shared – we didn’t have our own. I made the descent lazily, leaning against the railing, contemplating a nap every step of the way; so slow was I that on some days it took me thirty minutes to get down. The stairs were out in the open and faced the backyard, most of which was under the canopy of a neem tree. To the left was a narrow pathway, a kind of neutral zone between houses that led to a nearby temple. The pathway was frequented by stray dogs, cats, and especially cows, which came to chew on discarded pieces of paper or rummage through trash. It was during those slow morning descents that I started observing domestic animals – to the point of being mesmerized. Even today, I can watch dogs play and interact for hours on end.

I got back around nine. Then, as I sipped Bournvita or Maltova (chocolate drinks) I felt the texture of my mother’s sari with my fingers. This meant she had to sit on the floor next to me for the entire time it took me to finish. It was a strange ritual, one I find hard to explain today. But I do remember distinctly that the drink tasted heavenly when her sari’s texture was somewhat rough.

Such laid back mornings – minus the chocolate drink and strange ritual – were still the norm during high school in Nagpur. At college in Trichy, though classes started at 8:30 am, I routinely bunked the first two, so I could have a leisurely breakfast of tea, eggs, bread and jam at the mess until 10:00. Early morning classes were harder to miss in grad school, where the quality of education was just too high to be ignored, but once course requirements were done, I reverted to the late start schedule. For a while, my breakfast consisted of enormous quantities of whole wheat bread, almond butter and soy milk.

And the pattern continues to this day. One of the pleasures of being an academic is that I don’t have to be in my office at 9; in fact, I don’t have to be there at all unless necessary. On the days that I don’t teach, I wake up, make my coffee (flavored hot milk really), and settle to read the the blogs listed on this page. It’s only around noon time that I really get going. The flip side, of course, is that I do most of my work at night, which thankfully is capacious enough to accommodate my worst procrastination excesses.

Pictures from Machu Picchu

2010-03-27T13:36:00.021-06:00

John Hemming provides a precise summary of the famous archaeological site in The Conquest of the Incas:

Most visitors to Peru see Machu Picchu, which is perched on a narrow saddle of rock high above a hairpin curve of the Urubamba [river]. The granite sugarloaf of Huayna Pichu towers above the ruin, and the surrounding forested hillsides are often gripped by shrouds of low clammy cloud. Such scenery makes Machu Picchu one of the world’s most eerily beautiful ruins.

I took these pictures on Christmas day, 2009. It was gloomy, rainy day, but this only enhanced the beauty of the place. Machu Picchu well and truly lives up to its hype. The animal in the first picture is a drenched llama. The fifth picture is of a turbulent Urubamba river, which is part of the Amazon system. The last shows the hairpin curve of the Urubamba observed from the perch of Machu Picchu. At the base of the mountain is the train station where visitors disembark. The final part of the journey is by bus, which switchbacks its way through the forested hillside before reaching the ruins.

King Khan in Lima

2010-03-20T15:55:00.029-06:00

My Name is Khan (MNIK) is one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. The embarrassing sentimentality of its scenes, which promote a cheesy, highly simplistic race-and-religion-transcending solidarity, make it unwatchable in parts. Bollywood’s alpha males – the Khans and the Roshans – are no longer overtly alpha-male, but they still are superhuman in other ways: they deliver babies using vacuum cleaners (3 Idiots); they invent new devices and fix just about anything (3 Idiots and MNIK); and most importantly, they live the most ideal and moral lives, are tremendously compassionate, follow their own unique visions, and deliver telling truths.

What else is this if not poorly concealed narcissism?

But my post isn’t supposed to be a rant on the modern day Indian superhero. Rather, it’s a rambling account on how I came to know of the popularity of a certain Khan in an unlikely city: Lima, Peru. This shouldn’t surprise us, given how interconnected the world is today. In fact, most Africans and Central Asians I’ve spoken to are decently well versed with Bollywood.

And yet Lima? The Latin American capital is halfway across the world from India; besides Peruvians have as little clue about Indians as Indians about Peruvians. Still, Shahrukh has succeeded in establishing himself there, to the same extent that Machu Pichu – that most iconic and magical of archaeological sites – has succeeded in becoming a much sought after destination for Indians with money (when I landed in Lima, prominent among the names displayed on cutouts by the receiving parties at the airport, were “Mukherjee” and “Patel”).

___

Once, during a bus ride in Lima, I was seated across from the driver. He was a cheerful man. When he learned where I was from, he looked at me with a sort of awe that can only come from having discovered something immeasurably exotic. He announced my nationality a few times to the ticket collector, who wasn’t impressed. After we’d got past discussing Taj Mahal, he settled on Shahrukh Khan, with whom he was clearly besotted. Unfortunately, I was reduced to speaking in gestures and nodding sagely though I understood very little of what he was saying.
___

At a Peruvian-owned DVD shop a few blocks away from downtown Lima, near the Rimac river, I found an entire section dedicated to Bollywood. There was a massive poster of Jodhaa Akbar, with Hrithik and Aishwarya prominent. But if you look closely, a Khan poster lurks behind to the right, sidelined and only partly visible.

But Khan shouldn't feel slighted, for the most artistic of tributes to him in Lima comes from this illustrator, whom I found busy at work in a street not far from the DVD shop.

___

Just when Shahrukh seemed undisputed king in Lima, I learned that the immensely popular Thalaivar, who drives Tamil fans wild, has actually graced the land of the Incas for a song shoot at Machu Pichu in the Andean highlands (picture credits here). As can be seen, we have a feathered Aishwarya hopping with a bearded and macho looking Rajnikant. If the extras were local, then it follows that the Indians of India must have danced with the Indians of Peru.

I am sure the spirits of the dead Incas must have doubled in laughter upon watching this: “So these are the people we were mistaken for?”
___

Update: There is even a fan page on Facebook, called Bollywood Peru.

On Kim Plofker's Mathematics in India

2010-03-13T00:07:00.034-06:00

That the concept of zero and the now widely used, indispensable decimal numeric system (imprecisely called Arabic numerals) came from India is old news -- a piece of trivia circulated often enough to have little or no surprise value. There is more, much more, to ancient Indian mathematics than these iconic contributions. Though I am trained in the quantitative sciences, I learned all of it – linear algebra, the theory of probability, and combinatorics – from the classrooms and labs of US universities, and very little from India. So it is only appropriate – though also ironic in another way – that the knowledge of ancient India should be made available to me through the painstaking research of a Western historian of mathematics, Kim Plofker.

Plofker has plowed through a range of Indian texts, beginning from the Vedic period – that’s three thousand years ago – to the eighteenth century to produce Mathematics in India. Hers is an achievement as much of linguistics, translation and history as of mathematics. The book sits on my desk, and there it shall be for some years, gathering dust, as I dip in only occasionally. It’s not the type that can be easily read from cover to cover – no book of mathematics is – but Plofker tries her best to make terms and concepts accessible.

Luckily, David Mumford, winner of the Fields Medal – the most prestigious prize in mathematics – has written a six-page essay on the book, which captures, concisely, the major achievements of Indian mathematics. There is the use of Pythagoras’ famous theorem in the construction of pillars, some centuries before the Greek philosopher is said to have postulated it in fifth century BC; Pāṇini’s rules of Sanskrit grammar and recursion, which “without exaggeration…anticipated the basic ideas of modern computer science”; Pingala, whose study of Sanskrit verses led to the binary notation and the development of Pascal’s famous triangle, useful in the calculation of binomial coefficients (which, coincidentally, is what I am teaching now); and Madhava of Sangamagramma (circa 14th century), the genius of the Kerala School, who contributed along with others, to "the discoveries of the power series expansions of arctangent, sine, and cosine" (a text on this in Malayalam has survived).

But what interested me most was the applied orientation of Indian mathematics. Like the ancient Mexicans, who designed sophisticated calendars (and who also used the concept of zero, probably earlier than the Indians did, though such rat races about who did what first are useless beyond a point), the mathematicians of India were spurred by the questions of astronomy. But the applied orientation goes even further than that. Mumford writes:

"It is important to recognize two essential differences here between the Indian approach and that of the Greeks. First of all, whereas Eudoxus, Euclid, and many other Greek mathematicians created pure mathematics, devoid of any actual numbers and based especially on their invention of indirect reductio ad absurdum arguments, the Indians were primarily applied mathematicians focused on finding algorithms for astronomical predictions and philosophically predisposed to reject indirect arguments. In fact, Buddhists and Jains created what is now called Belnap’s four-valued logic claiming that assertions can be true, false, neither, or both. The Indian mathematics tradition consistently looked for constructive arguments and justifications and numerical algorithms [Mumford's italics]. So whereas Euclid’s Elements was embraced by Islamic mathematicians and by the Chinese when Matteo Ricci translated it in 1607, it simply didn’t fit with the Indian way of viewing math. In fact, there is no evidence that it reached India before the eighteenth century."

This is particularly pleasing to me, because my own research, coincidentally, is about using mathematics in computationally feasible ways for various applications, rather than basking in the beauty and abstraction of theorems. (I will admit, however, that I was once obsessed with writing a paper that had only theorems and proofs in it; I did manage something, but only by borrowing significantly from the work of others; and still, months of edits await the paper before it can find its way to print.)

What might be an example of this “applied” orientation? Mumford writes of the “the discovery of the formula for the area and volume of the sphere by Bhaskara II” (circa 12th century):

“Essentially, he [Bhaskara II] rediscovered the derivation found in Archimedes’ On the Sphere and the Cylinder I. That is, he sliced the surface of the sphere by equally spaced lines of latitude and, using this, reduced the calculation of the area to the integral of sine. Now, he knew that cosine differences were sines but, startlingly, he integrates sine by summing his tables! He seems well aware that this is approximate and that a limiting argument is needed but this is implicit in his work. My belief is that, given his applied orientation, this was the more convincing argument. In any case, the argument using the discrete fundamental theorem of calculus is given a few centuries later by the Kerala school, where one also finds explicit statements on the need for a limiting process, like: “The greater the number [of subdivisions of an arc], the more accurate the circumference [given by the length of the inscribed polygon]” and “Here the arc segment has to be imagined to be as small as one wants. . . [but] since one has to explain [it] in a certain [definite] way, [I] have said [so far] that a quadrant has twenty-four chords.”

One of the delightful bits in the excerpt is the choice of “twenty-four chords” – it implies a casual, intuitive approach, yet the same is preceded by knowledge of what needs to be done to achieve exactness. That’s the essence of a “heuristic” or an approximation, which engineers use all the time.

Finally, the closing paragraph of Mumford’s essay:

It is high time that the full story of Indian mathematics from Vedic times through 1600 became generally known. I am not minimizing the genius of the Greeks and their wonderful invention of pure mathematics, but other peoples have been doing math in different ways, and they have often attained the same goals independently. Rigorous mathematics in the Greek style should not be seen as the only way to gain mathematical knowledge. In India, where concrete applications were never far from theory, justifications were more informal and mostly verbal rather than written. One should also recall that the European Enlightenment was an orgy of correct and important but semirigorous math in which Greek ideals were forgotten. The recent episodes with deep mathematics flowing from quantum field and string theory teach us the same lesson: that the muse of mathematics can be wooed in many different ways and her secrets teased out of her. And so they were in India: read this book to learn more of this wonderful story!

The conquest story revealed. And coming up...

2010-03-07T21:36:00.016-06:00

Alright -- it’s time to get more direct. February was full of strange posts that had to do with a famous conquest in history. Which conquest was this and why wasn’t I referring to it more directly? The reason is a decidedly vain one. Just as the hero in an Indian movie has to make a special, memorable entry, so I too was looking for some grand way in which to begin writing about my travels of last December and January. And if my attempt only made you yawn and put you to sleep -- well, at least it served some purpose.

So let me get it out of the way: the story I was referring to was the conquest of the Incas. The mountain range along whose length the kingdom had its domain is the Andes; HC, the king in the first part, is Huayna Capac; the warriors from the ocean were Spanish conquistadors, the battle-efficient beasts they ride are horses (which the Incas had never seen before, hence the belief that the men were half-men, half-beasts); the captain of the invading warrior army, FP, is Francisco Pizzaro; HS, one of Huayna Capac’s sons, is Huascar; the other son, AH -- the protagonist of the story, who was kidnapped by the Spaniards -- is Atahualpa; the capital city C, is the 11000-feet high Andean city of Cuzco; the northern city, Q, is Quito; M, where the history-changing, woefully one-sided battle was fought and lost by the Incas, is the city of Cajamarca. Finally, the symbol with the intersecting pieces is the Christian cross, and the box with the creased pads and strange printed symbols, which Atahualpa threw in irritation, is the Bible.

I hid the names deliberately to tickle your curiosity, but by not talking about the horses, the beards of the Spaniards, the cross and the Bible directly, I was also trying to capture the disorientation of the Incas who had never seen such things before. (They did not have a writing system but that did not impede them from running an efficiently administered empire; they did have complex knotted strings, called qhipu, which clearly had some sort of accounting function, if not more).

The Andean empire of the Incas was the last completely isolated empire in the world. That makes their achievements even more special and original, but it also made them vulnerable to the Spaniards who came with the knowledge and resources of both Europe and Asia, a much larger, more contiguous, more diverse and better connected landmass than the Americas.

My twenty-day visit to Peru and Bolivia inspired the posts, as did John Hemming's magisterial and impeccably researched The Conquest of the Incas. In the next weeks and months, I will write about the history of these countries, provide photographs, excerpts from books, and discuss current affairs. Bolivia, where Evo Morales was recently reelected, presents a fascinating study in popular left wing movements. That is precisely the reason I visited the city of La Paz, whose politics is as dramatic as its impossibly high setting (at over 12,000 feet, La Paz is the highest capital city in the world).

Watch this space, then. The posts won’t come all at once or regularly, but come they will.

Things fall apart: The story of a conquest -- Part 3

2010-02-25T23:48:00.038-06:00

Read Part 1 and Part 2. This part, the final one, continues from when the new king, AH, hurls a "box" given to him. For the sake of continuity, I have repeated the last paragraph of the second part. I have also provided a couple of pictures: first a rendition of AH's capture; and second a glimpse of the mountainous landscape of the region whose history this is (not to be confused with where the battle took place). I took the picture during a visit last December.

From the next post on, I promise not to speak in riddles and hints.

Please also pardon the typos -- will try to fix them in the next couple of days. The last two pieces had some horrendous ones.
___

In his other hand, the oddly attired man held that looked like a rectangular box, which he gave to AH. But it did not "contain" anything. The cover opened to one side revealing a cluster of rustling, thin and creased pads, one laid over another, and with strange symbols on them. A wonderful aroma wafted from the pads. Though as beautiful as works of art, the symbols made no sense to AH. Yet, the interpreter, who was translating, repeatedly mumbled something about “submission”.

It sounded like nonsense to AH. Irritated, he threw the box from the perch of his litter.

And all hell broke loose.

Later, in captivity, AH would regret that gesture: had he not been so arrogant, he might have slyly outmaneuvered his opponents and trapped them later. But at that moment, drunk from his military victories and the triumphant march from the northern city, Q, to the provincial town, M, control of the kingdom well within his grasp, AH could not have responded in any other way.

The hurling of the “box” was akin to igniting a conflagration. AH had touched a very raw nerve. With loud cries that conveyed unequivocally the insult they had experienced, the warriors exploded out of their positions from the buildings surrounding the square. They seemed prepared for this very moment; the fact that they were impossibly outnumbered did not deter them. Mounted high on their beasts, they attacked with surprising vigor and speed.

But more than anything else, it was the fate of the king that left his massive army in a state of paralysis.

AH’s litter was being carried by his chiefs. The warriors slashed their sharp metal rods to deadly effect, severing off the chiefs’ arms. And yet, in a dizzying exhibition of loyalty, the limbless chiefs continued to support the shaking litter with their shoulders. And when they fell, others would take their place; the warriors would then chop fresh limbs. This continued for a while until the litter itself was tilted and AH was captured alive and taken by the captain FP.

It was inconceivable that the king, considered divine and invincible, should be kidnapped in this way.

The man pulling AH down from the titled litter is FP, the captain of the warrior army. To the left of the painting, holding aloft the symbol with the intersecting pieces is the same man who gave AH that puzzling thing with the strange symbols which he threw in irritation, triggering the warriors' fury. This rendition of the capture is appropriately the cover of Jared Diamond's famous Guns, Germs and Steel.

Taking advantage of the enemy's disbelief and paralysis, the invading warriors charged into the ranks of the countless foot soldiers. Seated on their beasts, which reared, neighed, raced and trampled, they killed at will. Stupefied at the capture of their new king, and terrified by the unprecedented assault, AH’s men fled. At the end of the battle, the plain was littered with dead men -- and all dead men were AH's men.

Incredibly, a hundred and fifty men had defeated an army of a hundred thousand men and had not suffered a single casualty. Only one of the invading warriors was injured. For that reason and because of similar successes in future battles, the warriors – and their beasts especially – would be regarded as powerful as Gods.

In captivity, AH was given his privileges; he kept his servants; he still wielded authority. The shrewd man that he was, he began to understand the weaknesses of his captors. He even became friendly with them; FP chatted with him quite amiably. AH became an expert at the game of moving pieces on a checkered board that FP had taught him. And with that, the invaders’ aura of invincibility faded. AH realized they were men just like him. He understood their greed: they were crazy for metals that shone; they had come to the kingdom primarily in search of them. AH cleverly negotiated his release by promising to deliver a roomful of these metals. There was plenty of it available in his kingdom: in temples and religious places and in shrines where the mummies of his ancestors were kept with care.

But AH ultimately underestimated his captors. These were treacherous and willing to go to any extent to achieve their ends. Once AH had delivered the metals, he was suddenly hanged, by the same men he had become friendly with. The men obeyed orders that came from some distant land, from a different monarch, to whom they proudly owed allegiance; and this distant land kept sending more oddly attired men who preached with great determination, an unparalleled sense of righteousness, and wore pendants that had the same symbol -- the ubiquitous intersecting lines – that AH had seen at the square of M just before his capture; but most importantly, this distant land sent more settlers and beasts – and what terror the beasts wrecked! – so that it became impossible for his people rebel successfully against them.

This was no simple kidnapping and ransom procurement mission; this was settlement on a permanent basis; plunder was institutionalized for perpetuity.

After AH’s death, another brother, TH, emerged and became the invaders’ puppet king; but he died of disease soon. Yet another brother, MC, came forward; he too was treated initially as convenient figurehead, but broke away and organized cleverly thought out rebellions. But in the end, the military might of the invaders and the manner in which they exploited alliances with the local tribes -- who had not forgotten their own subjugation, only a couple of generations ago, by HC and his ancestors -- ensured that MC had to recede with his followers into to the eastern part of the kingdom, where mountains jostled with dense jungle.

Society changed irreversibly during the conquest. The efficient administration the kingdom had possessed gave way to cruel system of exploitation where impossible tributes were levied by the settlers on the natives. The discovery of new ores for metals propelled a vicious cycle of forced labor, misery and demographic decline. The settlers also demolished what they saw was the idolatry of the natives, who worshiped the sun and the earth; they supplanted it with their own faith.

AH’s dramatic capture and his execution a few months later thus marked the beginning of the end. It was a pivotal moment in the history of his kingdom. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Language, grammar and culture: The Pirahã of the Amazon

2010-02-23T22:49:00.015-06:00

In this short post from last year, which linked to the work of Lera Boroditsky, we saw that there might be a nontrivial link between the language and worldview. That is, the words we use are not mere words, they influence how we think. The corollary is that if we did not know certain words or phrases -- and this routinely happens as words in one language are often missing in another -- we might look at the world very differently. That is precisely what this essay in the New Yorker about the Pirahã, an isolated Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe, seems to suggest.

The tribe is different in that they are tremendously resistant to cultural change. Their complex language plays a role in this stubbornness. It is difficult to learn, and plenty of aspects we take for granted in the other languages are missing; it defies -- or may defy: it hasn't been proved fully yet -- some well accepted principles put forth by Noam Chomsky and his colleagues that were thought to apply universally. And the language of the Pirahã drives their culture, which the linguist Everett thinks is obsessively dedicated to empirical reality and has no place for abstraction. To understand, consider this extract:

Over the course of three weeks, Everett wrote what would become his Current Anthropology article, twenty-five thousand words in which he advanced a novel explanation for the many mysteries that had bedevilled him. Inspired by Sapir’s cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”
To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent [with disdain]. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes [some boys had built a model as soon as the author arrived] to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.

Everett was convinced that the Pirahã’s immediacy-of-experience principle went further still, “extending its tentacles,” as he put it, “deep into their core grammar,” to that feature that Chomsky claimed was present in all languages: recursion. Chomsky and other experts use the term to describe how we construct even the simplest utterances. “The girl jumped on the bed” is composed of a noun phrase (“the girl”), a verb (“jumped”), and a prepositional phrase (“on the bed”). In theory, as Chomsky has stressed, one could continue to insert chunks of language inside other chunks ad infinitum, thereby creating a never-ending sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat that is slightly crushed around the brim although still perfectly elegant is walking down the street that was recently resurfaced by a crew of construction workers who tended to take coffee breaks that were a little too long while eating a hot dog that was . . .”). Or one could create sentences of never-ending variety. The capacity to generate unlimited meaning by placing one thought inside another is the crux of Chomsky’s theory—what he calls, quoting the early-nineteenth-century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, “the infinite use of finite means.”

According to Everett, however, the Pirahã do not use recursion to insert phrases one inside another. Instead, they state thoughts in discrete units. When I asked Everett if the Pirahã could say, in their language, “I saw the dog that was down by the river get bitten by a snake,” he said, “No. They would have to say, ‘I saw the dog. The dog was at the beach. A snake bit the dog.’ ” Everett explained that because the Pirahã accept as real only that which they observe, their speech consists only of direct assertions (“The dog was at the beach”), and he maintains that embedded clauses (“that was down by the river”) are not assertions but supporting, quantifying, or qualifying information—in other words, abstractions.

The full essay is here. This is one of the most fascinating things I've read in recent times -- though, of course, one should be skeptical of all of Everett's theories and put them to rigorous test.

Things fall apart: The story of a conquest -- Part 2

2010-02-21T19:45:00.009-06:00

Read Part 1. You'll find the preamble there as well.

For names of people, I use two letters; and there are only four characters in the story – three kings or princes, HC, AH, HS, and the captain of the invading warrior army, FP. For names of cities, I use a single letter; and there are three cities, C, Q and M. These abbreviations, too, could provide clues about the place and empire whose fall I am alluding to.

____

Coincidentally, about a hundred and fifty of the famed warriors – the half men half beasts the kingdom had heard rumors about – were sailing along the coast at the same time, their progress parallel to AH’s victorious advance inland along the mountain range. The warriors were unaware of happenings in the kingdom but they soon made landfall and made their way up the mountains to a small provincial town called M, where AH’s victorious army, consisting of a hundred thousand men, was resting and partying boisterously at the outskirts.

M lay halfway between the northern city Q and the capital C. The main square had buildings on each side and a vast plain stretched from the square. Here, the warriors met the following day with AH and his army.

It was a surreal encounter that would, even centuries later, elicit utter disbelief.

AH had no idea that these curious looking visitors – completely unlike anything he or his people had ever seen – had downed an empire to the north. And that there were out to do something similar now. But AH couldn’t be blamed: however majestic and odd the much feared men looked, they were few in number and hard to take seriously.

Most of them had thick hair growing on their faces; it covered their cheeks, chins; the same shock of hair, sometimes smooth, sometimes messy, often drooped to their chests. They were dressed in some kind of hard metal that covered much of their faces and bodies. They held a long, gleaming rod in their hands. But, strikingly, each of them was in union with a beast that was six feet tall and had a long and powerful snout. The animals looked spectacular but benign. Each warrior’s torso was positioned at the back of his beast, straddling it. This gave them the advantage of height: they towered over AH’s foot soldiers, who held clubs and maces.

Only AH who was carried in a high, caparisoned litter looked down on the warrior army.

The meeting at the square of CM was supposed to be one in which AH sized up these strange visitors. The previous day the captain of the visitors, FP, had met peacefully with AH at the outskirts where the army was camped, and AH had promised to come to the square the next day.

He did come, but late and at an inexorable pace with his massive army. Like his father, AH was a proud man and held ferocious authority over his subjects. He led a lavish lifestyle; everything that he used was revered and retained by his servants. The bones of the meat that he ate were kept with care; as were clothes of his that were soiled. When he expectorated, the spit was not allowed to touch the ground, but a woman collected it in her hand. It was understandable that AH, well aware of the feelings of submissiveness he generated among his people – he was the son of the great, divine king HC after all – should treat the new entrants to his lands with disdain.

At the meeting in the square, one of the warriors was dressed in attire noticeably different from others. He started speaking passionately. He clasped in his hand an item that seemed to be made from two metal pieces: the shorter piece, two inches long, intersected near one end of the much longer piece. It meant nothing to AH, but in the coming years, this pattern of two intersecting straight lines would become commonplace in the kingdom.

In his other hand, the oddly attired man held that looked like a rectangular box, which he gave to AH. But it did not "contain" anything. The cover opened to one side revealing a cluster of rustling, thin and creased pads, one laid over another, and with strange symbols on them. A wonderful aroma wafted from these pads. It was beautiful as works of art are, but the symbols made no sense to AH and yet, the interpreter, who was translating, repeatedly pointed to the box, and kept mumbling about “submitting”.

It all sounded like nonsense to AH. Irritated, he threw the ‘box” from the perch of his litter.

And all hell broke loose.

(final part to come...)

Things fall apart: The story of a conquest -- Part 1

2010-02-17T22:12:00.015-06:00

What I’ve tried here is to tell, in my own words, the story – only the basic outline – of a empire’s fall. The actual story is very famous, and some of you will be able to identify immediately the specific historical encounter I am recounting. But irrespective of how well read you are, it is hard to be knowledgeable about all things in the world. So, if at all you find such things interesting, I invite you guess, as I deliver this retelling in two or three parts, the place and empire I am alluding to.

For names of people, I use two letters; and there are only four characters in the story – three kings or princes, HC, AH, HS, and the captain of the invading warrior army, FP. For names of cities, I use a single letter; and there are three cities, C, Q and M. These abbreviations, too, could provide clues.

____

Once upon a time there was a mighty but isolated kingdom. Its contours followed the entire length of a famous mountain range that ran in an unrelenting line from the north to the south. To the west of the range was a thin, largely dry coastal strip; to the east was dense jungle through which an immense river made its way, for hundreds of miles, to the ocean.

The king, HC, was respected by his people. His ancestors had laid the foundations of the empire, but he had expanded their realm both north and south along the range, blazing his way through fierce tribes that refused to give in easily. Indeed, at the time this story begins, HC was at battle in the north with the bulk of his army. The going had been tough and HC had been in this part of his kingdom for years now. The capital, C, the seat of power, was well to the south, and had been left to his regents; with the recent bloody imperial conquests, the kingdom had reached the limits of its expansion. Yet, its administration worked smoothly. Every day runners ran the length of mountain range – at breakneck speeds even at incredibly high altitudes -- to relay messages and keep the lines of communication open.

HC began to like the north; he contemplated building a second capital at Q, where the winter temperatures were milder than at C and the land more arable. What he did not know, however, was the fate that was to befall him and his people. A few hundred miles north of where HC was stationed, the mountains gave way to a largely impenetrable jungle; and further beyond, this difficult terrain narrowed to a strip only seventy kilometers wide, flanked on both sides by two vast oceans. When emissaries arrived from these unconquered parts to the kingdom, they brought news that sounded strange – too strange to be taken seriously.

The reports spoke of the sudden and violent conquest of a similarly large kingdom a thousand miles north of the narrow strip. The conquerors were a race of warriors who had come from the ocean. It was said they looked utterly different. The terrifying thing was that they were half men and half beasts, but with the added advantage that each man could detach from the beast and then rejoin at will. There was news that the warriors now had bases in the narrow strip, and were sailing in ships close to the coast.

Something even more deadly was afoot. Wherever the warriors went, the locals would develop painful rashes that pocked their faces and bodies, rendering them unbearably ugly. Most of them eventually died. The mortality was so severe that there was no one to bury the bodies. Entire villages perished. Not only that, this deadly epidemic of rashes seemed to precede the warriors, like a secret weapon, and never affected the warriors themselves.

HC died suddenly in one such epidemic: the rashes overcome him until he was bedridden, barely able to speak. He was in immense pain; he turned blind as the blisters invaded his eyes. Hundreds of thousands around him died too, but it was the king’s death that triggered what would eventually turn into a brutal civil war.

Or, more appropriately, sibling war.

It was traditional for a king to marry his blood sister; a son born of such a union was the most legitimate successor. It was also common for the king to have dozens of other wives, legitimate and illegitimate. This meant there were dozens of princes, anxiously awaiting their chance after HC’s death. But in his deathbed, HC seemed to prefer two princes: AH and HS. What he really wanted was AH to handle the northern part of the kingdom, with his new capital at Q, and HS to continue ruling from the ancestral capital C. AH in fact was with his father at the time of his death in the north.

What actually happened was no surprise: the brothers began a violent succession battle. Their armies clashed repeatedly. Thousands lost their lives. HS gained the upper hand initially; his generals captured AH and chopped a portion of his ear off. But AH escaped secretly with the help of his wife, gathered his generals – the same generals who had been with HC at the time of his death, and had been bogged down fighting the fierce tribes of the north – and launched a spectacular counterattack.

The northern army – AH’s army now – began to advance south, to the capital C, inflicting terrible punishments on those of the kingdom who sided had with HS.

AH was set to become the undisputed new king.

(To be continued...)

Dil to Bachcha Hai Ji

2010-02-10T19:41:00.018-06:00

For me, the most delightful moment in the new movie Ishqiya is the scene that goes with the melodious Dil To Bachcha Hai Ji – crudely “The heart is a child after all”. That translation doesn’t do the song justice but it does convey something elemental: we may age but we can be occasionally possessed of a carefree happiness that makes us young again.

Khalujan, the character that Naseruddin Shah plays, is in his late forties, or early fifties – it’s a testament to the actor’s versatility that in Firaaq he plays, and looks, a much older man. He is old in Ishqiya too; his beard is mostly gray. But as soon as he meets Krishna (Vidya Balan), the beautiful, alluring widow some twenty years his junior, he colors his beard black. And with the knowledge that he is falling in love, a kind of babyish joy suffuses his face.

Dil To Bachcha Hai Ji plays when Khalujan is standing in a crowded bus. A woman seated by the window looks at him adoringly; the man next to her notices this and offers Khalujan his seat. Khalujan, flattered by the woman’s glances – and she too, like Krishna, is young – refuses politely, but the woman continues look at him. He finally relents and takes the seat. Later, asleep, he leans his head unknowingly against the woman’s shoulder, and dreams of Krishna with contentment, the lilting melody of the song in the background. He is woken suddenly by the laughter of the other women in the bus and smiles sheepishly -- they are laughing at him. “Is umar mein ab khaogey dhoke” – the song goes at one point (“disappointments await you at this age” in my unsubtle translation).

It’s a brilliant scene in which Khalujan’s charm, joy and vulnerability all come together.

The song is Vishal Bharadwaj’s composition, and is sung by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan; the sublime lyrics are Gulzar’s. The tune plays in the style of old Hindi songs, but to accompaniment of Latin beats and strumming; there's an Arabic interlude as well. It’s an exquisite blend – take a listen.

An earlier post about a song in a very different kind of movie, Om Shanti Om.

Class, privacy and Facebook

2010-02-05T20:03:00.006-06:00

Charles Petersen's engrossing essay in the New York Review of Books on the role class played in Facebook's conception (at Harvard) and early evolution. He also has thoughts on FB and privacy:

The class basis of Facebook's early success is most evident in comparison with its greatest rival: MySpace. To join Facebook, you needed a college e-mail address; for everyone else—once Friendster, for various reasons, became less popular—there was MySpace. The result, as David Brooks observed in 2006, was a "huge class distinction between the people on Facebook and the much larger and less educated population that uses MySpace."

Even after Facebook opened its membership, successively, to high schools, corporations, and the world at large—trying to capitalize on the site's early success, which, Zuckerberg and his inventors hoped, was due to more than mere exclusivity—class distinctions re- mained important. Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society who is one of the best- informed academics studying social networks, wrote a much-discussed essay in 2007 that laid out, in broadly stereotypical terms, the preferred sites of many high school students:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college.... MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks...and other kids ...whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school.

One of the most notable examples of class distinction, as Boyd noted, came from the US military, which permitted soldiers to use Facebook but banned MySpace in 2007:

Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it's not the [social network] of choice for 18-year-old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook.

MySpace remains banned within the military to this day, while Facebook, despite security concerns, is still available to American troops.
[...]
Given the common fatalism about the "death of privacy," I find it encouraging that Facebook's problems have resulted not from a complete lack of privacy, but rather from widespread paranoia about whether the site's privacy system could be trusted. Before the site launched in 2004, an insistence on online privacy had come to seem, at least in cutting-edge quarters, like a kind of snobbery. Facebook, precisely thanks to the elitist nature of its founding, was able to show millions of college students—those who use the Internet most—that excluding the wider world actually expanded what you could do online. As we have known offline for centuries, and as these students learned on the Web, there are many things, from party photos to Marquis de Sade quotes, that one might comfortably pin over a desk or hang on a wall, but that would best not be made visible to just anyone online.
[...]
It's true that Facebook can lead to a false sense of connection to faraway friends, since few members post about the true difficulties of their lives. But most of us still know, despite Facebook's abuse of what should be the holiest word in the language, that a News Feed full of constantly updating "friends," like a room full of chattering people, is no substitute for a conversation. Indeed, so much of what has made Facebook worthwhile comes from the site's provisions for both hiding and sharing. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that some things shouldn't be "shared" at all, but rather said, whether through e-mail, instant message, text message, Facebook's own "private message" system, or over the phone, or with a cup of coffee, or beside a pitcher of beer. All of these "technologies," however laconic or verbose, can express an intimacy reserved for one alone.

The beauty of mathematics

2010-02-01T20:24:00.004-06:00

Steven Strogatz's column on mathematics -- the first of many to come -- in the New York Times:

[Numbers] apparently exist in some sort of Platonic realm, a level above reality. In that respect they are more like other lofty concepts (e.g., truth and justice), and less like the ordinary objects of daily life. Upon further reflection, their philosophical status becomes even murkier. Where exactly do numbers come from? Did humanity invent them? Or discover them?

A further subtlety is that numbers (and all mathematical ideas, for that matter) have lives of their own. We can’t control them. Even though they exist in our minds, once we decide what we mean by them we have no say in how they behave. They obey certain laws and have certain properties, personalities, and ways of combining with one another, and there’s nothing we can do about it except watch and try to understand. In that sense they are eerily reminiscent of atoms and stars, the things of this world, which are likewise subject to laws beyond our control … except that those things exist outside our heads.

This dual aspect of numbers — as part- heaven, and part- earth — is perhaps the most paradoxical thing about them, and the feature that makes them so useful. It is what the physicist Eugene Wigner had in mind when he wrote of “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.”

Markets in two contexts

2010-01-30T15:25:00.029-06:00

1.

The two stories I’ll be linking to in this post have something in common: the attempt to use “markets” to solve big problems. First, PBS Wide Angle profiles the Ethiopian economist Eleni Gabre-Madhin, who recently returned, after a long stint with the World Bank, to her home country to start a commodities exchange. The exchange’s principal focus is to trade grain – sesame, the all-important teff, maize and the like – in an efficient, transparent way. Whether such an idea will work is another question – and the documentary portrays well the immense challenges she faces.

What fascinated me most was that Eleni, in the years she was conducting academic research, tried her best to “follow the trail of grain”. That meant literally starting with the small farmer with the two acre plot who produces the crop, then moving to warehouses, the middlemen and traders, and finally to the actual markets. The lack of information along this chain and the fluctuations of supply and demand can cause wild price variations, which cripples small farmers. One such farmer in the documentary – a quiet, dignified man with a small plot that is in risk of failing this season because of drought – asks poignantly (I am paraphrasing here):

“Why is there variation in prices? Is there not a standard stable way of doing things? If there is a solution, I would like to know about it.”

The bigger context is Ethiopia’s famines: Eleni claims that it is the ideal of elimination of hunger that inspires her. In 1984, the year when famine took a terrible toll in one part of Ethiopia, a surplus existed in the southwestern part. If Eleni is successful -- and that's a big "if" -- her commodities exchange will become the standard way to trade grain throughout Ethiopia; it will ensure the quick transmission of price and quantity information, provide a regulated environment in which the shortages and surpluses cancel out, thus averting the possibility of famines.

2.

An inversion of the shortages-canceling-surpluses concept recurs in another commodities exchange. And this is an unusual one: the carbon market. Here surpluses are excesses in greenhouse gas emissions (and hence a bad thing); the shortages are efforts or the promise of reduced emissions (hence good). The UN regulated market under which this system operates is called cap and trade, a result of the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. The EU and other developed countries – except the United States – are now part of it. In the US, cap and trade legislation is still under debate.

Trading in carbon is big business now: it’s the fastest growing commodity exchange market, already worth 150 billion dollars. The idea is simple: Companies whose emissions exceed a predetermined limit or cap can offset their excesses by purchasing carbon credits from other companies that are below the limit. Or, they can do it by investing in wind farms or biofuels or similar efforts which hold the promise of reducing emissions. These credits or carbon offsets, many of which are from the developing world – the developing world sees an economic opportunity in the rich world’s emissions – are often bundled together and sold in exchanges. This is fueling a "carbon boom" – which, of course, will end suddenly sometime, because it’s hard to measure what is being sold: measurement varies across the world, and the actual impact on emissions cannot be determined with any certainty.

You would think one clear-cut way of earning carbon credits is to avoid deforestation. Preserve a forested region full of trees that store carbon and you gain as many credits as the carbon estimated to be stored in the trees. Each tree has a price in other words (journalist Mark Schapiro is shown a tree that is worth a dollar because it contains an estimated hundred kilograms of carbon). With this in mind, General Motors, American Electric Power and Chevron chose to preserve huge tracts of relatively pristine land in the Cachoeira reserve in the Brazilian state of Paraná. They brokered a deal through Nature Conservancy and the local SVPS (Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education). Though the US is not part of the cap and trade system, these corporations presumably estimated that they would eventually earn from these credits, in addition to boosting their reputations as champions of preservation.

Avoiding deforestation, however, does not have a clear cut case for reducing emissions -- indeed the UN has disallowed this option. There’s the chance that the deforestation simply shifts to unprotected areas, creating no overall emissions reduction. And more fundamentally, as Mark Shapiro reports in an essay in Mother Jones,

"when companies create reserves on already forested lands, their contribution to the fight against climate change is limited: "Do they get the credit for simply enhancing what was there already?" José Miguez, one of Brazil's top climate officials, told me that during the Kyoto talks his government opposed using its forests to enable northern industries to pollute more. "The forest is there," he said. "You can't guarantee it will absorb extra carbon. The General Motors plan gives a false image to the public in the United States. For us, they are pretending to combat climate change."

In the short yet revealing PBS Frontline World documentary, Brazil: The Money Tree, Shapiro reveals a deeper problem: what of the people who have been living in these forests and using its products? The commodification of trees by big corporations in the name of preservation has resulted in the use of coercive techniques – arrests and even armed patrols – to keep people, whose livelihood depends on the products they obtain from the preserved lands, off limits. This even in cases where the activities are not destructive to the forest’s existence.

Bring money into the picture and all sorts of conundrums pop up – even when the price tag is on something seemingly as innocuous as keeping a tree standing.

Some links

2010-01-26T22:44:00.006-06:00

Sadanand Dhume writes about Islam in Indonesia; Chandrahas Choudhury on the importance of translations in Indian literature. And Sidin Vadakut, who graduated a year after I did from REC-Trichy, now has his first novel out -- it's called Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin "Einstein" Verghese. An extract can be found here -- it's hilarious. Sidin himself summarizes: "My book is, as it were, a pure crystallized expression of the post-modern dialectic that envelops us all in the modern workplace. It is a startling, unsettling piece of fiction that cuts perilously close to the existential reality that is us. By which I mean you and me. All of us. Firmament."

Moscow's metro dogs: Strays that use public transport

2010-01-22T16:58:00.006-06:00

From FT:

Every so often, you would see one waiting on a metro platform. When the train pulled up, the dog would step in, scramble up to lie on a seat or sit on the floor if the carriage was crowded, and then exit a few stops later. There is even a website dedicated to the metro stray (www.metrodog.ru) on which passengers post photos and video clips taken with their mobile phones, documenting the savviest of the pack using the public transport system like any other Muscovite.

[...]

“The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,” says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology, who has worked with Vladimir Putin’s black female Labrador retriever, Connie (“a very nice pup”). “This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.
Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.
“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their biological clocks.”

Teaching probability

2010-01-21T22:04:00.011-06:00

This semester I am teaching an undergraduate introductory class on probability. I don’t typically announce my courses here, but teaching probability is a special enough task to deserve mention -- for me at least.

As a high school student, I used to dread questions about blue, black and red balls drawn at random from an opaque box. The typical question went like this: if the first three balls are blue, what is the chance a black one will be next? The initial questions were innocuous enough, but they quickly got complicated. They also tested your ability to count – to figure the number of permutations or combinations, without which you couldn't answer. At the incredibly difficult mathematics examination for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), there were quite a few of these counting questions. Let’s just say that I did not even attempt them.

College contributed nothing to my knowledge about probability (college, to be frank, was a four year vacation and I have no regrets). It was only during graduate school, where I took a number of statistics courses, that I was introduced to the mathematics of randomness. And over the last few years, much of my research has involved probability models – some very sophisticated ones at that, thanks to my colleagues who have majors in math and physics. Even now, my early lack of aptitude for the field and poor undergraduate training comes back to haunt me.

But there’s no better way to drive insecurities away than by teaching. The cliché that the best way to learn is to teach is very, very true. Which is why I am excited about my class this semester. The material itself is not difficult, since it’s an undergraduate class. But even the simplest topics in probability can cause confusion; and what better way to tackle them than at the foundational level.

Last week, I went to check my classroom. It was late in the afternoon and the campus was empty. The classroom was in the Chemistry building, and had tiered, auditorium style seating; the seats were bright red. It was a grand setting, and I could imagine it bustling with sophomore year students -- there are ninety students enrolled at this time. And for the first time I’ll be using what is called the PRS clicker system: I will ask students multiple choice questions during each lecture. Students will choose what they think is the right answer on their personal clickers (they’ll press a button, in other words). A slide will immediately display how many clicked each option, as in a game show. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to have this type of instant interaction – and, importantly, feedback on how well the class is understanding the material – especially in a class about probability, as slippery a topic as any in the whole of mathematics?

Fancy embellishments aside, the real grandness of probability lies in its elusive, mysterious quality. Everything we do in life is governed by chance. Our instinct toward religion partly stems from the uncertainty that always seems to stalk our futures. The theory of probability lends mathematical formalism to uncertainty. But it also makes us think of some very vexing questions: What does it mean when we say things are truly random? Why do things turn out the way they do?

That’s the charm of it: it’s more philosophy than mathematics.

The idea of India: An extract from Aatish Taseer's upcoming Temple Goers

2010-01-16T23:47:00.016-06:00

The extract, a very entertaining one at that, is here (Aatish Taseer's website is here). The scene described features a writer, Vijailal, a fictionalized version of VS Naipaul, at a dinner with prominent guests in a Delhi home. What’s more, in the conversation, Vijailal takes the familiar Naipaulian -- and supposedly “Hindu-nationalist” – stance: he berates the loss of Hindu-Buddhist India to the ravages of Muslim conquerors.

The interpretation is a vicious flash point: India is yet to come to terms with this part of its history. In Latin America, the Spanish conquest of indigenous empires -- the Aztecs, the Incas and countless smaller groups -- was similarly brutal (the similarity may not be a coincidence: it is important to remember the Spanish fought the Arabs immediately before sailing to the Americas). Yet countries such as Mexico, Peru and Bolivia have reconciled with this painful history. Unlike India, indigenous cultures in these places were trampled and destroyed to such an extent that there is nothing to do but to acknowledge this nadir of history and move on. Strikingly, most Pre-Columbian religious sites of Latin America -- those that survive -- are now archaeological sites. They are secular spaces; they no longer hold the same cultural or religious meaning.

In India, however, the past, though not fully accessible to everyone, has survived despite the invasions of the last millennium; the traditions continue and have even been strengthened, albeit in an altered, modern form; the religious places still remain religious places, they are held in reverence, even if they are archaeological sites. While this continuity is astonishing, the wound inflicted by Islamic invasions still rankles.

Two excerpts from Taseer’s extract, I felt, were striking. In both, Vijailal – the character resembling Naipaul – argues that there did exist such a thing as India: not the modern nation-state of course, but a culture that understood itself through the prism of religion:

“You ask the average Indian, and he would not think of himself as an Indian. He would think of himself as a Gujarati, a Punjabi, a Tamilian, an Assamese. He wouldn’t have the faintest idea of India, ‘the land’.”

The writer [Vijailal] seemed caught between the interruption and Shabby’s raised voice, and what he was going to say next. He lowered his head and muttered, “Not the temple-going Indian, not the temple-going Indian.”

Then raising his head and voice at once, he silenced Shabby. “Not the temple-going Indian. People like you perhaps, but not him. He knows this country backwards. He forever carries an idea of it in his head. For him, it possesses a sacred topography. He knows it through its holy places. He knows it from the mountains in the north where the rivers begin, and from where the rudraksh he wears around his neck come, to the special place from where the right stones for the lingas come. He knows the rivers when they widen and the great temples and temple cities, with their stone steps, that have been set along their banks. He knows the points where those rivers meet other rivers, and their confluence becomes part of the long nationwide pilgrimages he will make several times in his lifetime. In fact, it could be said that there is almost no other country where the countrymen are as acquainted with the distant reaches of the land through their pilgrimages as in India; perhaps no country where poor people travel more. They think nothing of jumping on a bus or train, for two or three days, to journey to Tirupathi in the south or Jagannath in the east. And in this way, the religion itself is like a form of patriotism.”

[...]

“You know,” he began, looking deeply into the room, where illuminated foliage could be seen beyond darkened windows and the orange coils of an electric heater burned steadily, “they say that Benares is a microcosm of India. Today, most people take that to mean that it contains all the horror and filth of India, and also, loath as I am to use these words, the charm, the beauty, the magic. But Benares was once a very different kind of microcosm; it was a very self-conscious microcosm. The streams that watered the groves in its Forest of Bliss were named after all the rivers of India, not unlike the avenues in Washington, DC, being named after the American states. All the princes from around the country had their palaces along the river. And they would come and retire there after they had forsaken the cares of the world. The Indian holy points, the places of the larger pilgrimage, were all represented symbolically in Benares. It was said you could do the whole pilgrimage in miniature in Kashi. And Kashi too was recreated symbolically across the country. It wasn’t a microcosm; it was a kind of cosmic capital.

“And on certain days the moon would appear in the afternoon and the water from those symbolic Indian rivers would run through the groves and flood the Ganga, which at one particular point curls around the city. The ancient Hindus, with their special feeling for these cosmic changes, would gather at high points in the city to watch, like people seeing a fireworks display. That was how people, common people,” he added pointedly, “were brought in touch with the wholeness of the place, in just the same way as someone crossing a street in Manhattan might feel when, looking to one side and seeing the sweep of the avenue, he says, ‘I’m in New York!’ It’s my dream to see that wholeness restored in India.”

___

On a related note, let me quote Sandeep, a popular Bangalore based blogger and columnist – and a vociferous defender of Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism). Sandeep has an impassioned piece on how the subcontinent's oldest religion has been the victim of concerted attacks over the last two and a half millennia and has yet managed to adapt. He begins the piece, though, on a less confrontational note, using the example of the recently passed Makar Sankranthi, to show the cultural unity of India:

Today is Makara Sankranti, celebrated across India to both herald the beginning of longer days, and reap the harvest of months of backbreaking work in the fields. But the greater significance of Makara Sankranti like most Hindu festivals, is to highlight another living instance of the amazing cultural unity of India. People in Karnataka exchange a mixture comprising sugarcane blocks–artistically moulded into various forms and figures and shapes of Gods, Goddesses, flowers, fruits, animals–white sesame seeds, jaggery, and a piece of sugarcane. In Andhra Pradesh, sugarcane is replaced by the jujube fruit (Regi Pandulu) and sweets and delicacies are prepared and offered to God. Assamese are more creative: they have on offer at least 10 different varieties of Pitha, a kind of rice cake. Gujaratis wait for this to zestfully fly kites all over and make Undhiyu and Chikkis (sweetmeat made of sesame, jaggery and peanuts). Maharashtra feasts on tilgul (sweetmeat made from sesame) and Gulpolis, and wish each other peace and prosperity. Tamil Nadu gorges on varieties of pongal–thai pongal, mattu pongal and kannum pongal, each variety of pongal as a way of offering gratitude to the Sun, cattle, and friends and relatives. Every state and place–Bundelkhand, Rajasthan, Punjab, Bengal, Goa, Kerala, and Orissa–has its unique way of celebrating Makara Sankranti but contains a subterranean thread that ties all of them with India.

The full essay, with the more accusatory bits, is here. Feel free to discuss and debate the validity of these viewpoints.

Coordinating disaster relief -- what are the best practices?

2010-01-14T10:45:00.003-06:00

The tragedy in Haiti brings to light again the difficulty of coordinating relief in a place that has been crippled by a natural disaster. The completely unpredictable nature of these disasters means that relief planning begins amid chaos. I have always wondered if collecting stories of rescue operations, short term and long term, efficient or otherwise, from various parts of the world that have experienced similar tragedies would help in future cases. Perhaps there is already a repository of such knowledge?

Where did the time go?

2010-01-11T00:01:00.004-06:00

How the brain processes the passing of time is a mystery. There is of course the objective passing of time, but our perception of it is very different. Some days can seem like months, but at other times weeks can slip by rather quickly. The last twenty days, when I traveled to new places (more on that in the coming weeks), seemed like a long time – two months, say – probably because of the number of things I did within a short period. Here’s a recent article that discusses new research on this topic. Excerpt:

In fact, scientists are not sure how the brain tracks time. One theory holds that it has a cluster of cells specialized to count off intervals of time; another that a wide array of neural processes act as an internal clock.

Either way, studies find, this biological pacemaker has a poor grasp of longer intervals. Time does seem to slow to a trickle during an empty afternoon and race when the brain is engrossed in challenging work. Stimulants, including caffeine, tend to make people feel as if time is passing faster; complex jobs, like doing taxes, can seem to drag on longer than they actually do.

And emotional events — a breakup, a promotion, a transformative trip abroad — tend to be perceived as more recent than they actually are, by months or even years.

In short, some psychologists say, the findings support the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.”

Now researchers are finding that the reverse may also be true: if very few events come to mind, then the perception of time does not persist; the brain telescopes the interval that has passed. [link]

This year will be tenth that I have been abroad in the United States -- I came to study in the United States in August 2000, a few days before my twenty first birthday. A decade seems to have slipped by quickly, but then if I think of what I have experienced in that time, ten years seems about right.

Realism -- lifeness

2010-01-09T18:01:00.003-06:00

The last paragraph of How Fiction Works -- one of my all time favorites now -- by the brilliant literary critic, James Wood:

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to a different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind –lifeness – is the origin. It teaches everything else; it schools its own truants: it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist. It is nothing like as naïve as its opponents charge; almost all the great twentieth century realist novels also reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice. All the greatest realists, from Austen to Alice Munro, are at the same time great formalists. But this will be unceasingly difficult: for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging. Chekov’s challenge – “Ibsen doesn’t know life. In life it simply isn’t like that” – is as radical now as it was a century ago, because forms must continually be broken. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.

There’s some synergy between this and what Naipaul has to say on the writer’s biggest challenge: finding the most original form to express his experience.

HNY

2009-12-31T15:42:00.002-06:00

To all readers of Thirty Letters! My apologies for not posting more frequently, but I will be back in the next ten days or so. Meanwhile, do enjoy the coming of 2010!

Best best books 2009

2009-12-26T11:18:00.007-06:00

Savor Chandrahas Choudhury´s best non-fiction and fiction books of the year. This is from a man who lives and breathes books -- and earns a living that way too. Note especially the lesser known entries in the list --for example the Tamil writer Salma´s The Hour Past Midnight, which I will definitely be reading. My own very short list-- many books in it inspired by Chandrahas´ selection from last year -- is here.

A break

2009-12-22T11:22:00.002-06:00

Thirty Letters will be taking a break for two weeks and a half. If I post, it will just be some links - or I might say hello now and then. Full service resumes second week week of Jan. Merry christmas to everyone!

Travel notes from Chiapas, Mexico -- Part 2

2009-12-14T23:53:00.014-06:00

Read Part 1. Earlier posts on Mexico, 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.

1.

The ride from San Cristobal to Palenque – famous for its Mayan ruins – and then on to the village of Lacanja took eight hours. I traveled with a group of Mexicans. We started in a van early in the morning. The town of Ocosingo, where we had breakfast, was high in the mountains; most of it was still hidden by the morning mist which veiled the tops of trees. The town comprised primarily of rickety buildings and huts adjacent to plots of corn and orchards of banana trees. It was clearly different from Tuxtla, the somewhat booming provincial capital I’d arrived in, and San Cristobal, whose quaintness makes tourists coo in admiration. Ocosingo, it turned out, was an advance glimpse of the largely agrarian and poor Chiapanecan countryside.

(Landscape near the town of Ocosingo.)

Some of the Mexicans I was traveling with were fluent in English; they interpreted for me. Among them was a couple, Carlos and Maria. Carlos was in his late twenties; he was skinny and wore glasses. Maria was perhaps a year or two older and slightly taller. Both worked in Mexico City, for the same firm. They had met and fallen in love a few weeks ago. It wasn’t clear if Carlos was already married and if this was an adulterous affair. Whatever the case, Chiapas was their getaway. Here, far away from Mexico City, they were very public about their courtship: they kissed and smooched and made honeyed noises – so much that it became sickening after a while.

They were at it in front of Misol Ha, a magnificent waterfall, about three hours from San Cristobal. At the Mayan ruins at Palenque – which, because of the number of people and commercial activities that surrounded it, seemed like an extension of Disneyland rather than a place of genuine antiquity – they continued their brazen lovemaking. Even the most spectacular of stepped pyramids would not deter them. Later in the evening, in the rainforest town of Lacanja, they insisted, despite the lack of tents, that they be assigned a separate, isolated one for obvious reasons.

(The Misol Ha waterfall en route to Palenque.)

2.

The Mexico of today is a direct consequence of a titanic, half-a-millennium-old clash. In 1521, Spain conquered the massive, organizationally sophisticated yet repressive empire of the Aztecs. In the next two centuries, New Spain expanded northward and southward, its wealth resting on the toil of slaves from Africa and millions of Indians. In the process, however, society became very mixed. To be sure, whites of Spanish descent still remained powerful, but the part-Spanish part-Indian mestizo became prominent as well – a large proportion of Mexico today is mestizo. But the unmixed Indian – whether of Aztec or Mayan stock, or of the hundreds of other tribes and confederacies in various parts of the country – remained, for the most part, at the bottom. If it is caste that draws the lines in India, in Mexico it is the different racial classes that emerged from the Spanish conquest. Even today, the whiter you are, the more likely it is that you are part of the elite. Darkness means indigenousness, a relegation to the lowest rungs of society.

Carlos and Maria were likely mestizos but they were pale enough to be almost white. It certainly seemed they´d had a privileged upbringing. On occasions Carlos would turn dismissive and arrogant – and it was in these moments that the gulf between him and the indigenous Indians among whom we were traveling became most obvious.

3.

The town of Lacanja, where we stayed for the night, lies at the edge of the Lacandon Rainforest. Our accommodations – beds with mosquito netting -- were simple but clean. It was pitch dark outside; the rush of the river and the heavy but intermittent rain set up a roar and a patter.

To get to the Mayan ruins at Yaxchilan – a must for the pretentious traveler who parades his off-the-beaten-path adventures – you have to catch a ferry at a clearing at the bank of the Usumacinta River. The river forms the border between Mexico and Guatemala. The jungle dominates both flanks, but hamlets dot the bank on the Guatemala side: huts, children splashing in the water, and more ominously, now and then, the flash of a military uniform.

(The Usumacinta River. Guatemala begins on the opposite bank.)

4.

Motor boats and their operators waited at the clearing for the tourists. A little inland was a simple canteen, where we stopped for breakfast and later returned – after having seen the ruins at Yaxchilan – for lunch. The place served basic Mexican fare. It was run by the locals, the Lacandon, a community of a few hundred. Like other groups in Chiapas, the Lacandon are descendents of the Mayans but what set them apart was their isolated jungle existence until the mid 20th century. In this sense they were akin to a long lost Amazonian tribe. On the menu was a tacit admission that service at the canteen might not be up to the mark because “we are a people of the jungle who have only recently been connected to the outside world. We are, however, working hard to do better.” Surprisingly, the note was in English. The Lacandon may have just come "out of the jungle", but those who ran this canteen were savvy enough to connect with the English-speaking Western traveler.

During lunch, Carlos talked with Maria and me about his plans. These plans too had to do with the “outside world”. He wanted to get an MBA; he preferred the prestigious universities in the United States – Harvard or MIT. He had an uncle in Boston who might be able to help. When a waiter passed by, Carlos ordered fresh squeezed orange juice; I ordered one as well. The waiter, a dark Lacandon teenager with an awkward hairstyle and a dour look, nodded imperceptibly. The contrast was sharp – here were the three of us, evidently privileged in that we could talk about MBAs and travel between global metropolises as if it were normal. Set against us was the young waiter, who had a different reality: his obvious animosity towards us likely stemmed from that reality.

“I especially want your opinion on an issue,” Carlos said to me. “It’s not the MBA. It’s about my current job and a new job offer I have.”

Carlos currently worked in a Mexican-owned pharmaceutical firm, but had just received an offer from an Indian pharmaceutical company (Indian as in from India).

“I know Indian companies are doing well these days, but I have a concern,” Carlos continued. My orange juice arrived, but the teenage waiter had not brought Carlos’. Carlos reminded him again, this time with a touch of anger and condescension.

“These guys have terrible service… Anyway, my concern has to do with growth at this Indian firm. When it comes to promotions and new opportunities, could it be that this company might sidestep me because I am Mexican and instead prefer somebody Indian?”

There was no way I could have answered that question, simply because I knew nothing about dynamics within Indian corporations. But I found it ironic that ethnicity remained such a concern in a supposedly “global” setting.

“It’s hard to generalize,” I offered.

Lunch was almost over. Carlos had still not received his juice. I pointed to him the apology on the menu about the relative newness of the canteen and hence the lack of service experience. Carlos flared up.

“Just out of the jungle – what a lie! These guys need the slightest excuse: they know exactly how to play the game. They are clever, these guys. They are doing this deliberately to us.”

“But why?”

“We are from the city, that’s the only reason. They hate us out here because we are from the city!”

Carlos stood up to look for the waiter, ostensibly to give him a piece of his mind. But not finding him, he sought out another waiter and vented his frustration. The waiter promised the juice would come. And it did come, but only when we were ready for the bill. It was brought by the original waiter.

Carlos glared at him. But the boy’s defiant, dour expression did not change.

Such a trivial issue, and yet it had brought divides to the fore: between the urban rich and the rural poor, between a privileged, almost-white mestizo and indigenous teenager living in a small jungle outpost.

Sunitha Krishnan -- TED talk

2009-12-07T14:13:00.000-06:00

Suketu Mehta on the Bhopal tragedy

2009-12-04T22:23:00.004-06:00

Twenty five years after the unbearably tragic Bhopal Catastrophe, the guilty are still out there. Suketu Mehta raises questions about corporate impunity (via 3QD):

Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the international legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there’s an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an industrial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he’d be sunning himself in Goa?
The Indian government, fearful of scaring away foreign investors, has not pushed the issue with American authorities. Dow has used a kind of blackmail with the Indians; a 2006 letter from Andrew Liveris, the chief executive, to India’s ambassador to the United States asked for guarantees that Dow would not be held liable for the cleanup, and thanked him for his “efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate.”

What’s missing in the whole sad story is any sense of a human connection between the faceless people who run the corporation and the victims.

My favorite books this year

2009-12-03T16:12:00.007-06:00

It's that time of the year -- everyone comes up with lists. I generally don't do this, but given that the end of the semester has pretty much taken over my schedule, a post like this is a lot easier than a long essay or a review. So here are my ten for the year, in no particular order:

1. Curfewed Night -- Basharat Peer
2. Butter Chicken in Ludhiana -- Pankaj Mishra (which prompts the question: why does Mishra write such boring stuff these days?)
3. Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars -- Vaasanthi
4. Arzee the Dwarf -- Chandrahas Choudhury
5. Descent into Chaos -- Ahmed Rashid
6. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka
7. Contested Lands -- Sumantra Bose
8. Red Sun -- Sudeep Chakravarti
9. How Fiction Works -- James Wood
10. The Ayatollah Begs to Differ -- Hooman Majd (even though I haven't finished it yet)

Some other books that caught my attention:

1. Essentials of Indian Philosophy -- M. Hiriyana
2. A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy -- Chandradhar Sharma
3. The Columbian Exchange -- Alfred Crosby
4. The Mexico Reader: History, Politics, Culture
5. The Peru Reader: History, Politics, Culture
6. Samskara -- UR Anantha Murthy
7. The Story of Our Food -- KT Acharya

Frontline: A Death in Tehran

2009-11-30T19:24:00.006-06:00

The death in question is of the young Neda Agha Sultan, who was out on the streets of Tehran protesting, after the controversial election election results in June this year. She was shot -- probably by a basij. Frontline provides some perspective of the events -- including footage collected from camera phones and camcorders -- leading to the shooting.

Reprise: The real story behind American Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T10:26:00.010-06:00

No, this is not meant to spoil your thanksgiving meal. But it's always good to know the story beyond what popular culture tells you. So I'd like to point to last year's post which illustrates that thanksgiving was good for the Pilgrims, one of the early groups that settled in Massachusetts in the early 17th century, but behind it lies a larger, unspoken tragedy that befell the diverse -- and at that time thriving -- set of east coast Native American communities. In fact, the odd sounding names Massachusetts and Connecticut are names in their languages. So, here's a reprise of one of my favorite posts from last year. A short excerpt:

[The Thanksgiving story] is a very important story: all nations attach special relevance to their beginnings, and the Pilgrims are a vital part of America’s national narrative. But the story, while true, is told in isolation, without a proper context; there is a sense of idyll about it. And the way it is told propagates a broader myth: that European settlers settled a largely empty expanse of North America, a vast natural wilderness. Sure, there were a few tribes here and there, some friendly, some hostile, but what could they do? They were destined to lose.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The textbook version of Thanksgiving not only obscures the broader socio-political context of the time; it also hides an immense tragedy.

Read the full essay here.

To be sure, history, however multi dimensional and complex, shouldn't change our wish to give thanks; or, more importantly, shouldn't diminish our appetites. So let's all eat heartily -- happy thanksgiving!

What is the nature of the self?

2009-11-24T16:04:00.013-06:00

The physician and neuroscientist Vilayannur Ramachandran explores this fundamental, still unsolved philosophical conundrum in the last chapter of his book Phantoms in the Brain (co-written in the late 1990s with Sandra Blakeslee). This is how the chapter begins:

In the first half of the next century science will confront its greatest challenge in trying to answer a question that has been steeped in mysticism and metaphysics for millennia. What is the true nature of self? As someone who was born in Indian and raised in the Hindu tradition, I was taught that the concept of the self – the “I” within me that is aloof from the universe and engages in lofty inspection of the world around me – is an illusion, a veil called maya. The search for enlightenment, I was told, consists of lifting this veil and realizing that you are really “One with the cosmos.” Ironically, after extensive training in Western medicine and more than fifteen years of research on neurological patients and visual illusions, I have come to realize that there is much truth in this view – that the notion of a single unified self “inhabiting” the brain may indeed be an illusion. Everything I have learned from the intensive study of both normal people and patients who have sustained damage to various parts of their brains points to an unsettling notion: that you create your own “reality” from mere fragments of information, that what you “see” is a reliable – but not always accurate – representation of what exists in the world, that you are completely unaware of the vast majority of events going on in your brain. Indeed, most of your actions are carried out by a host of unconscious zombies who exist in peaceful harmony along with you (the “person”) inside your body!

Nevertheless, many people find it disturbing that all the richness of our mental life – all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate selves – arises entirely from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain. How is this possible? How could something as deeply mysterious as consciousness emerge from a chunk of meant inside the skull? The problem of mind and matter, substance and spirit, illusion and reality, has been a major preoccupation of both Western and Eastern philosophy for millennia, but very little of lasting value has emerged. As the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland has said, “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”

__

Why this post suddenly? Because I've been thinking about the idea of "soul", and whether we are more than just an aggregation of the the physical body, the brain and its interior functions. This soul or, less metaphysically, "consciousness" is what marks us out, but how is it linked to the body? Some scientists are beginning to tackle that question, which is what prompted this post.

Travel notes from Chiapas, Mexico -- Part 1

2009-11-21T21:05:00.017-06:00

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.

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, we passed a few single story car repair shops and houses. Men in vests sat outside in plastic chairs. It still seemed very rural, but suddenly, at an intersection that occurred at an elevation, Tuxtla's sprawl came into view: 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 deal 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 – 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

2009-11-15T10:36:00.018-06:00

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

2009-11-11T22:11:00.009-06:00

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

2009-11-08T19:52:00.009-06:00

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

2009-11-03T22:59:00.010-06:00

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.