Away traveling

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

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

Does language shape our worldview?

Lera Boroditsky thinks so. And she presents a fascinating example:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

On Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

(Spoilers ahead for those who haven't read.)

What if sudden misfortune strikes someone in a family? What if the misfortune is of the kind where the member is disabled or becomes diseased but does not die? What does it feel like to be helpless?

Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is about these questions.

Gregor Samsa of Prague, the only breadwinner of a family struggling to make ends meet, wakes up one morning and finds he has metamorphosed into a gigantic insect with “many legs pitifully thin compared to the rest of him”. He is lying in his room and has to get to work, but is unable to move in the usual human way. As pleas from his parents and his manager from work who has come to ask about his absence mount, Gregor slowly gets to the door, succeeds after much labor in opening it and reveals his new self. His family is shocked, the manager runs away, and his father shoos Gregor back into his room.

Gregor can still think as before but his speech is unintelligible. His appearance is grotesque but he is not harmful in any way. He has the best of intentions. It is his sister, Grete, who now takes care of Gregor and feeds him, even though they cannot communicate. Gregor and Grete had shared a wonderful relationship. Gregor appreciated his sister’s talent for music and was putting away some earnings to send her to music school. The two siblings had planned to announce this to their parents during Christmas. Now, with Gregor's metamorphosis, that plan is no more.

And yet, Grete tries her best to help Gregor. He reciprocates the best he can. This a moving part of the story:

To find out about his likes and dislikes, she brought him a wide assortment of things, all spread out on an old newspaper: old, half-rotten vegetables; bones left over from the evening meal, caked with congealed white sauce; some raisings and almonds; a piece of cheese, which two days before Gregor had declared inedible; a plain slice of bread, a slice of bread and butter; and one with butter and salt. In addition to all this she put down some water in the bowl apparently permanently earmarked for Gregor’s use. And out of a sense of delicacy, since she knew that Gregor would not eat in front of her, she left hurriedly and even turned the key; just so that Gregor should know that he might take himself as comfortable as he wanted.

Since his appearance has the potential to unsettle, Gregor scurries and hides under the couch as his sister enters the room to lay the food on the floor. But Gregor's head is still visible. To make sure his sister does not get a glimpse when she brings food, he struggles painfully with his legs to arrange a bed sheet in such a way that he is completely invisible. Grete is grateful. In turn, she also recognizes that Gregor, when he is alone, might benefit from positioning himself, difficult though such a maneuver is, against the window to look outside – it was something he did frequently before. She adjusts the chair every day so Gregor is able to do this in his present vermin state.

But is Grete’s compassion endless? The latter part of the story – the tragic part – is the family’s gradual realization that Gregor has become a liability. To keep the family going and to pay back the mortgage, Gregor’s retired father has to return to work; his mother turns to sewing clothes; Grete becomes a saleswoman. Over time, Grete becomes irritable. She stops cleaning Gregor’s room. Dirt and crumbs gather. Gregor loses interest in food and spits it out. He begins to starve, walks in his own filth, and becomes weak. One morning, after an altercation, his father hurls apples at him, one of which gets lodged painfully in his scaly back.

As the story draws to a close, Kafka seems to be posing the question: How unconditional is our love for those whom we consider close and how much can we endure for them? The Metamorphosis does not give a clear answer, but we are able to intuit the internal lives of those trapped in such a conundrum. Kafka achieves this in fifty pages of spare, well-controlled prose. No wonder The Metamorphosis is considered one of literature’s greats.

And here is an essay on recent book on Kafka's relationship with his father.

Mexico travel notes – San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan

Other posts on my Mexico trip: Traveling to Mexico City, A whirlwind summary of Mexico, Ganesha in Mayan country, Karina's world, Arqueologia and Cibersexo in Mexico City, and Along the Usumacinta. Together they might give a better sense of the trajectory of my travel and the themes I am trying to explore.
__

Near the highland town of San Cristobal de las Casas in southern Mexico are the towns of San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan. These are Mayan towns. The people are short in stature, their complexions are dark, and their eyes small. As in many places, skin color here is an indicator of socioeconomic status. In Mexico, most people are of mixed Native American and European descent but the darker you are, the more indigenous you are, and therefore – given the history of subjugation – the more likely you are to be poor. Spanish is the lingua franca throughout Mexico, but Tzotzil and Tzetzal, both Mayan languages, are spoken in this part of the country. And the religions practiced are a blend of Mayan and Christian beliefs.

In San Juan Chamula I went to a “church”. I use quotations because this wasn’t a typical church, even if from the outside it looked like one. The picture above (I know, it’s a bad picture, and features a stranger's head prominently) is of the large, haphazardly organized market facing the church. San Juan Chamula is a materially poor place. It is not unlike an unclean and crowded small town in India. Food stalls flanked the main road. Children ran around visitors trying to sell trinkets. The day I visited, a ceremony was in progress near the church entrance, where a group of men, women and children had gathered for a slow dance. In commemoration, some town officials – wearing shawls and sporting wide, sombrero-like hats – set off rockets at regular intervals. I have missed Diwali in India for the last nine years, but the fireworks at this December event in southern Mexico made up for it somewhat.

Inside the church there were no pews; the floor was strewn with aromatic pine needles. Along the sides were figurines of saints in glass cases, whom the locals, seated on the floor, worshiped with great reverence. But it was the altar that was striking. There was no visible statue or image of Christ. All I could see was an excessively decorated space: the principal adornments were banana leaves and balloons. I was startled by this use of banana leaves. In south India they are everywhere of course: they may be used as, say, disposable plates, or to build makeshift arches at entrances to weddings and religious events. But I had not expected to see them used in somewhat similar fashion in Mexico. And there was a further similarity: getting a glimpse of the decorated altar in the church felt akin to getting a darshan of an overdressed, impossible-to-see deity at a crowded temple in India.

Later in the afternoon, I went to Zinacantan, to a house where textiles were sold. The building was a simple, single-storied structure. The interior was cool and the floor earthen. A living room led to an enclosed courtyard where clothes in bright colors and patterns – scarves, blouses, skirts, bed sheets – were displayed for sale. These were also the colors and dresses that the women of the region wore. Bright blue seemed to be a favorite, like the dress of the woman in the picture (she’s demonstrating the weaving process). The house seemed like the communal space of a large family. The sellers were all women; the men stared shyly from a distance.

Grants, writing and a poem

Apologies for the sluggishness this month. I got busy with a grant application to a federal agency under the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This type of writing is not fun. You have to sound very assured and gung-ho about your research but that’s not how you feel inside. That is why grant writing and writing for technical publications can never have the same tension that writing of the personal kind has. The term “personal” is to be interpreted in the broadest sense: I do not mean writing about oneself, but writing honestly about topics and themes one feels deeply about.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been planning two pieces. The first is about the dogs, both pets and strays, I came to know while living in Nagpur for five years. We lived in a third floor flat and our place had four balconies. I could observe neighborhood dogs closely early in the morning when I was supposed to be studying. I became familiar with two generations of dogs; there are many small stories I want to weave together and tell.

The second is about my first year of college in Tiruchirapalli -- at the Regional Engineering College (now National Institute of Technology). The experience was special. By design, regional engineering colleges are meant to bring together students from the local state and students from all parts of India. So we had representation from every state. We had people of all complexions: there was an incredibly fair guy from Kashmir, and my austere and studious roommate for the first year was very black . All the major languages of India could be heard in the corridors of hostels. It was my first lesson in diversity.

These are going to be long pieces. It will take me a while to write them, and maybe in the process, I’ll get bored and distracted, as so often happens. But my hunch is something will materialize. Pardon the lethargy meanwhile.

Since this is a post without much direction, I have the license to ramble a bit. Let me share with you a poem I wrote in my third year of college. I was a prolific poet then and spammed online bulletin boards with my work: early indication that I would become a blogger. This is a dark poem, very cheesy: it expresses my rage against deforestation. Keep in mind, before you nitpick about my very "black and white" view, that I was 18 or 19 then!

The wood-cutter and the woodpecker

Chunk! Chunk! goes the woodcutter's axe;
Peck! Peck! attacks the woodpecker.
When the two pairs of eyes met,
there ensued a conversation:

"Why, dear man, do you cut the tree?" the pecker asks;
"For the same reason that you peck the tree."
"Your answer does not satisfy; it puzzles me."
"A living exists for us because of this tree;
you pick insects and thus subsist
while I sell timber and get money."

"But does not the tree die
as the axe hacks the bark away?
Does not the squirrel flee
to another tree miles away?
Do not the eggs break on falling
much to the mother-bird's dismay?"

"True - but for the living of one
another has to succumb.
It is this rule of survival
that we experience every day.
Woodpecker, do you not eat
insects embedded in the bark of trees?
do you not kill them?
impale them with your pointed beak?
Talk not of my cruelty;
think of your own shame."

Shocked by what had been said,
the woodpecker withdrew.
Lashed at by man's vicious tongue
decieved by his sincere talk
and cloaked in guilt and shame,
it never ate insects again;
and of hunger died one day.

Today, in the forest, there remain only stubs
of the trees the axe brutally cut.
All the woodpeckers have died of shame;
all the squirrels have run away;
and all the birds have flown away.

Today, in the forest, remains barren land,
in the middle of which wooden houses stand.

Who's eating under the table?

Details here and here. Photo credit: Ritesh Uttamchandani.

Still searching for: Dinner With The President

In June 2007, I saw a preview of Dinner With The President, a documentary about democracy in Pakistan. I’ve been looking for the movie ever since but have not been able to find it. In the meantime, all the teaser clips that I see of the movie only make me long for it more. In the two years that have passed, much has happened in Pakistan: the President of the documentary’s title is no longer the President; a political icon has been assassinated; and the Pakistani Taliban are posing a serious challenge. Yet, my sense is that Dinner With The President still remains relevant.

The President of the title is of course Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf surprisingly agreed to a dinner interview with Sabiha Sumar, one of the makers of the documentary. But Musharraf is not the only person Sabiha interviews. She talks to the young and the elite; she travels to a tribal area presumably in Pakistan’s west or northwest and talks to elders. The latter meeting is particularly tense. There is not one other woman at this gathering. Undaunted, Sabiha asks questions that make all the assembled men squirm. What does democracy mean to them? Why do they insist on strict interpretations of the Quran? Where does it say in the Quran that women are supposed to wear head scarves?

The responses is not all uniform. There are few dissenting men who seem to be against the intransigence of some of the elders. At the end, Sabiha's questions become so disconcerting to the assembled group, some men walk out, while others stay and talk to her.

The full clip of this interaction – a must-see in my opinion – is here.

King Leopold and Mobutu

King Leopold II of Belgium owned the Congo in the late 1800s; it was called the Congo Free State. He treated it like his personal property. He did this suavely and charmed his European contemporaries. But terrible things were happening in the Congo. Leopold never visited this profitable African patch of land (as large as Western Europe), but he was well aware and responsible for all the atrocities. He let others, like Stanley, do the dirty work. Congolese were being enslaved by force; their hands were chopped off if they refused to cooperate in the lucrative rubber production enterprise that Leopold was running. Millions of people were murdered. Yes, millions: it is a holocaust most of us don’t even know about. Leopold, meanwhile, lived lavishly and built mansions all over Europe. (For more on this forgotten chapter of 19th century history, read King Leopold’s Ghost.)

The demons of history keep reincarnating. A hundred years later, the Congo – now renamed Zaire, a word with Portuguese roots – came to be ruled by another despot, a homegrown one: Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, which translates roughly to “an all powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.” That is how the man called himself.

The world knew him simply as Mobutu. He wore a leopard hat and carried a cane. He was America's ally in Africa's cold war intrigues. He ransacked Zaire, embezzled huge amounts of money, and built palaces everywhere. But he lavished special attention on his ancestral home, near Zaire’s border with the Central African Republic. There he created a gaudy town called Gbadolite. As Richard Dowden writes in Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles:

“As if spraying his territory, he built a palace in every major town in Congo, but at Gbadolite there are three. The rest of the town is there simply to serve them. So it has an international-sized airport so that Mobutu’s family could hire Concorde to go shopping in Paris or New York and a Coca-Cola factory in case they needed a drink…

Kawele Palace was the private home. The entrance is a triumphal arch and at the back there is a vast swimming pool on two levels and a banqueting hall of royal proportions. From the terrace you can see across to what was once Mobutu’s zoo and a European-style farm with cows flown in from Switzerland and sheep from Argentina.”

In other words, an incongruous but not unusual juxtaposition: a flagrant display of wealth in an extremely poor place. A century ago, King Leopold sucked the wealth out of Congo and built mansions in Europe, but his 20th century reincarnation built mansions in Congo in addition to building some in Europe. But let me not go on and on about this – all my knowledge about Congo comes from books, and a real engagement with a place is possible only after some serious, focused travel.

Let me instead finish with an anecdote about Mobutu which shows what a bizarre life he led (the anecdote is from Dowden's book as well). Like many rich and powerful men, Mobutu had a wife and a mistress. The mistress was the wife’s twin sister. To please his wife and ensure she did not know of the time he spent with his mistress, Mobutu played an elaborate game of hide and seek:

And the middle of the town [Gbadolite] on a low hill is a palace for Kosia, the twin sister of Mobutu’s wife, Bobi. In public the twins accompanied him, dressed identically. In private, I am told by a former guard, it was a different matter. Bobi was very possessive and when Mobutu wanted to spend time with Kosia, he would tell his wife that he was going to Kinshasa. The presidential convoy would swoosh off to the airport but Mobutu would sneak back to Kosia’s palace. A Mobutu lookalike complete with leopard hat and cane, would mount the steps of the plane and wave to Bobi – you can see the runway from the presidential bedroom – then the plane would leave for Kinshasa. A few days later the process would be done in reverse. The guards at Kosia’s place were under separate command from those at the President’s house and were forbidden to talk to each other on pain of death.

Imagine that: a Concorde takes off with an impostor in it; it travels all the way to Kinshasa, 710 miles away, and then returns a few days later. Just to keep the rigmarole going. It’s both hilarious and grotesque.

Update: Please see Alex Engwate's thoughtful comment, where he clarifies where the name Zaire comes from (I have mistakenly called it a word with Portuguese roots).

Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan

How did the Pakistani Taliban reorganize itself? How duplicitous is the Pakistani Army's role? How are the United States and the CIA involved? What is the nature of India's support to Balochi dissidents? If you read Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos, you'll get the answers: the book is a definitive guide to the politics of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

And with the Taliban now in Swat, not far from Islamabad, Rashid sends us an update.

Along the Usumacinta

The young man in the above picture is from Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state; he is the operator of a motor boat that takes tourists to the Mayan ruins in Yaxchilan. I guess I caught him in a contemplative mood. We were traveling along the Usumacinta River: the river forms the border between Guatemala and Mexico. Mexico is to the left; Guatemala to the right. On either side of the river is a rainforest so fecund, it consumes everything. That morning, the mist hung low and veiled the treetops.

One wonders how the Mayans built their city states in this environment. Their ruins still exist, covered in moss and under the protective shroud of the rainforest. Above: one of the better preserved Mayan stelas in Yaxchilan.

White-tailed deer and ferns

At Quabbin Reservoir in Western Massachusetts, not far from Amherst, where I live. Yes, I know, the white tail isn't visible - but what am I supposed to do if the tail is short and is coyly hidden between hind legs?

And May seems to be the time that ferns make their presence felt -- they form a thick green carpet in the woods surrounding major trails. In the picture, I like the contrast between the green of the ferns and the white of the barks.

The ironies, misnomers and reverberations of history

I am looking forward to reading Empires of the Indus. Alice Albinia, the author, tells us the story of the Indus River by revealing the layers of history associated with it. She does this by embarking on a journey along the river, upstream (pictures from her journey here). The Indus, of course, gave India its name, though the river itself is in Pakistan -- and its origins in Tibet. Most Indians know very little about it. I had subconsciously relegated it to antiquity along with the Indus Valley civilization when a Pakistani friend assured me the Indus still exists.

Here is Albinia from the preface of the book:

The very name India comes from the river. The ancient Sanskrit speakers called the Indus, ‘Sindhu’; the Persians changed the name to ‘Hindu’; and the Greeks dropped the ‘h’ altogether. Chinese whispers created the Indus and its cognates – India, Hindu, Indies. From the time that Alexander the Great’s historians wrote about the Indus valley, spinning exotic tales of indomitable Indika, India and its river tantalized the Western imagination.

Hundreds of years later, when India was divided, it might have been logical for the new Muslim state in the Indus valley to take the name ‘India’ (or ‘Industan’, as the valley was called by an eighteenth-century English sailor). But Muhammad Ali Jinnah rejected the colonial appellation and chose the pious neologism Pakistan, ‘Land of the Pure’, instead. He assumed his coevals in Delhi would do the same, calling their country by the ancient Sanskrit title, ‘Bharat’. When they did not, Jinnah was reported to be furious. He felt that by continuing to use the British name, India had appropriated the past; Pakistan, by contrast, looked as if it had been sliced off and ‘thrown out’.

Such are, as Albinia says, “the ironies, misnomers and reverberations of history". What an apt phrase.

Why globalization has led to bigger cities

With so much interconnectedness and the ease with which information and goods flow, you would have expected the world today to be more dispersed. Instead, the developing world now has more megacities and greater concentrations of people. Edward Glaeser explains why. Excerpt:

More than 2,500 years ago, the knowledge of the Mediterranean world made its way to Greece through Athens. Twelve hundred years later, Greek and Indian knowledge entered the Islamic world through the Abbasid Caliphate’s House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Eastern wisdom came west again, through Venice and the cities of Spain. The circle continues today, as Western technology makes its way east, again through urban portals like Bangalore. Since there is so much for developing countries to gain economically by integrating with the developed world, the urban gateways to the West attract millions.

Coversations on the road

Serious travel is about meeting people. Whether it is the town just around the corner from where you live or some remote part of the world, a journey does not have shape or narrative until you meet and talk to the people among whom you are traveling.

The last few weeks I’ve been bouncing from one American city to another. Three weeks ago, I was in Arizona navigating the urban contours of the sprawling Phoenix metropolitan area; a few days later I was in a van hurtling through the gently undulating Minnesota countryside full of just-tilled corn farms; and today I am in Miami, where the Atlantic Ocean looks a bizarre and beautiful shade of green, and where all the cab drivers are from Haiti – until just a few hours ago when I met one from Nicaragua.

My conversations with those I’ve met along the way have been brief; they haven’t allowed for a deeper engagement. But they are nevertheless glimpses of how interesting people can be; and how there are plenty of surprising discoveries to be made in casual conversations.

Here, then, are two vignettes.

The first is about a man I met while traveling on a shuttle to the Minneapolis airport. He was slightly plump and in his fifties. But what marked him out was his long white hair and flowing white beard. He could have been a character out of JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings – Gandalf say – and this impression was accentuated by the peculiar twang with which he spoke. It was a Midwestern accent for sure, but some rural version I’d never heard before.

This man, Sam, was from northern Wisconsin, which he called “wild country, as wild as it gets”. For some reason he had started a farm in Western Minnesota, still the Midwest, but far away from his roots. Along with his wife and kids, he had raised cows and hogs – at one point he had two hundred of them – and grew his own vegetables. They had aimed to live off the land as much as possible and to not buy any of their food. With the outbreak of mad-cow disease, Sam stopped raising cows and switched to bison.

As their kids grew and the time came for them to attend college, both Sam and his wife decided to go to school themselves. His wife went to a college in Wisconsin first and he followed later. Sam left his farming activities and got trained in managing electrical equipment. And then he took the oddest decision: he took up a job in a place near Anchorage, Alaska. He began working for an Inuit community. He came back to Minnesota from time to time to see his wife and children.

Alaska was where he was heading now: he had been back to see his family and now was on his way to the Minneapolis airport to catch a flight to Anchorage. Later in the summer, he would return, drive to Colorado and hunt elk. It was something he did on a regular basis. Every year, he would kill an elk, store the meat and bring it back to Minnesota and make burgers – enough to last him the entire season.

How did they taste?

“It really depends on how you make them. Most butchers don’t know how to take care of meat. I do mine carefully.”

A man from northern Wisconsin starts a farm in Western Minnesota without any prior experience; then goes to school and gets a college degree late in life; takes up a job in Alaska among the natives, and spends the winters in Alaska’s darkness; periodically returns home, spends time with his son and wife, hunts elk and is an expert at making elk burgers. Sam said all this easily, in that strange accent of his.

With his hair and his beard, and the life of wandering he had chosen, Sam was something of an American sadhu.
__

My second story is about a cab-driver, Greg, in Minneapolis. Greg was from Liberia, but had lived in Minneapolis for a while now. He had a well established business but the economy had recently pushed him into driving taxis. I’d never met anyone from Liberia before, but I had heard a lot about the country’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. (Liberia’s history is full of irony: slaves from America were settled there in the middle part of the nineteenth century, but they promptly imitated their former masters, and, in a hideous echo of their own experience, began enslaving their indigenous fellow countrymen. Sirleaf is of that stock: she is a descendant of (or at least is associated with) the early American settlers. The odds were stacked against her since her predecessors had been rapacious rulers -- which is why her election was somewhat unexpected.)

I asked Greg what he thought of Sirleaf. I was cautious in phrasing the question, for in the past there had been visceral reactions when I’d mentioned names of African leaders – even those popular in the West.

But Greg was a fan of Sirleaf: “She’s educated, she is articulate, she is not corrupt, and she is trying her best – what more can one ask for? I think Liberia will be much better off because of her leadership. I just wish she can rule for a long time.”

As we approached my destination, I realized the song playing faintly on the stereo was quite familiar. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was popular song from the Dharmendra-Mumtaz movie Loafer: Aaj Mausam Bada Beiman Hai. Almost all Africans I have spoken to are familiar with Bollywood, but this was a song from the 1970s – popular, yes, but you wouldn't expect it to be known outside India. I asked him if it was his CD that was playing. Greg increased the volume.

“Yes, it is my CD -- I love Hindi songs. Have you seen Mr. India?”

I wished then I’d had more time to talk with him. But it was time for me to leave. Just as I was paying him, he showed me the book he was reading: The Essential Rumi.

How many more such surprises and delights, I wondered, could we have shared had we chatted for five more minutes?

Arqueologia and Cibersexo in Mexico City

(Picture of roadside book stall in Mexico City, taken during my trip last December.)

Among magazines for the lascivious eye -- with pictures of almost-nude women, including a cover that says something about cybersex -- are six issues of Mexico's most prominent archaeology magazine. Indeed, one could cheekily conclude that this image demonstrates the power of Mexico's past. When your archaeology magazines are adjacent to titillating best-sellers, it must mean you value archaelogy as much as you value matters of the sexual kind, no?

Or, if you prefer the cynical view, you need archaelogy -- universally considered a dreary and boring field -- to be juxtaposed with sexual imagery, else it will never sell.

To be called Taliban

I referred briefly here to the sense of humor of the Ogallala Indians of Pine Ridge reservation, South Dakota. But it wasn’t always a pleasant sense of humor as I found out once.

Let me elaborate.

During my travels on the reservation, I was trying to get in touch with a community activist named Pinky. She lived in the town of Manderson and owned a convenience store – daintily called Pinky’s Store. As I drove into the parking lot, I saw several men lounging aimlessly outside: Pine Ridge was wracked with poverty and unemployment.

Pinky was not in. I stood outside pondering my next step when I saw one of the loitering men staring at me, a strange smile on his face. He was tall, skinny and dressed in military fatigues. There was a glazed look to his eyes suggesting he may have been drunk. It was still morning.

“Taliban!” he said, still smiling, a triumphant look on his face.

I wasn’t sure I had heard him right. I stared back.

At the same time, another loiterer approached me. He was friendly, also tall, and somewhat chubby; the skin on his face was blotched and his teeth were bad – this was true of many men I met in the reservation. He asked if I needed help with directions. I did. But after he’d explained which road led to which town and what was worth seeing on the reservation, he cleverly asked for a couple of quarters.

“I need it for a cigarette.”

As I searched for coins, I stole a glance at the man in the military dress. He was still looking at me and he still had that annoying smile.

“Taliban!” he said again, with something approaching glee.

I was now sure of what I’d heard. The remark was clearly directed at me. Bemused and somewhat puzzled, I stared back at him even as I took in the insult. But I wasn't sure how to respond or start a conversation, so I left shortly after.

Why, I wondered later, had he called me Taliban? I can never know for sure, but I can certainly speculate. The young Ogallala man had probably served in the US military; he had probably been posted in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Perhaps he was no longer serving now, or had returned home for a break. The typical Taliban recruit is probably not as dark-skinned as me; yet our soldier might have come across enough men with that unmistakably South Asian skin tone – that distinctive shade of brown – that all of us from the subcontinent share.

Then, out of the blue that morning, this Ogallala Indian soldier had seen me. He had seen me in the reservation, of all places. And in me he had recognized that same shade of brown he had come across frequently while serving in Pakistan or Afghanistan. And drunk that he was, he had simply associated me with the Taliban. It was his way of having fun; his way of teasing me. Hence the smile.

An Indian from India travels to an isolated, poverty-stricken corner of South Dakota and finds himself among other Indians. And here, seemingly far away from where the much advertised “war on terror” was being fought, he finds himself being cheekily associated with some of the extreme elements of that war.

Strange how the weirdest connections can materialize in the unlikeliest places. But that is how the world is today: strands of one place and people are linked, however tenuously, with strands of another place and people. It is stating the obvious, but for good or bad and whether we like it or not, we are all tied together -- inextricably tied together.

About powwows

I.

Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota

In August 2007, I drove from Minnesota to the western end of South Dakota, to the Pine Ridge reservation, where the Ogallala Sioux live. The Ogallalas are one of the many Sioux groups in South Dakota. Like other large reservations in the US, Pine Ridge is remote. The 12-hour drive took me through the vast, gently swaying and mostly treeless prairie of Minnesota and South Dakota. There were no big cities, only small towns and hamlets.

I’d heard and read stories of poverty at Pine Ridge – high unemployment rates, housing problems, high incidence of diabetes. In fact, Shannon County, one of the main counties of the reservation, is the poorest in the United States. Poverty was indeed visible in some places, but the city of Pine Ridge was full of energy the day I arrived. Other reservations I’d been to had been strangely quiet and lethargic places. Apart from the odd community center, a gas station store or a school, there isn’t much to see; streets are generally empty. And the people are so shy, they hesitate even to look the visitor in the eye.

Pine Ridge was different. Every time I was lost, someone would approach and offer help. The Sioux are a gregarious people, even if on occasions they expected something in return – a couple of quarters for a cigarette or soda. And they had a sense of humor too. A seller of roasted corn asked me sit on his bench, and upon hearing where I was from, said:

“So you are the real Indian! Alright then, I am a Mexican from Tijuana. How’s that?”

(At the powwow in Pine Ridge - August 2007. Picture mine)

Pine Ridge was full of people that afternoon, and the crowds were there for a reason: the 22nd Ogallala Lakota Annual Powwow had just begun less than a mile away.

Simply put, powwows are Native American song and dance contests. They have emerged as modern equivalents of older ceremonies the tribes of the Great Plains used to have. They are festive but they are not like, say, rock concerts. Rather, powwows are generally somber and spiritual.

Drum groups – to whose intense beats and high-pitched chorus dancers bedecked with feathers perform – come from tribes all over the United States and Canada. The event is typically held in a fairground – as it was in Pine Ridge that day – with the drummers housed in tents encircling the central space, called the arbor. The arbor is where the dancers perform. On the outside periphery are shops selling all sorts of trinkets, souvenirs, crafts, t-shirts, and, importantly, high calorie fare – fry bread, funnel cakes, corn dogs, fries – that can add to your waistline in a day.

(One of the dancers. Picture mine.)

Incoming traffic to the powwow fairground in Pine Ridge had blocked the main road. And people were driving in from all directions, even the unpaved roads. Some arrived as part of a parade of horses. A cloud of dust had risen around the tents where cars were jostling for a parking spot. Almost everyone in the cars and at the powwow was Indian. Along the congested road, Indians were selling hot dogs and corn garnished with lime and chili; in a basketball court adjacent to the fairground, Indian kids, many of them wearing Tupac t-shirts (the rapper is enormously popular in the reservation), were playing an intramural basketball game as hip-hop blared from stereos; and at the powwow itself, Indian dancers – kids as well as adults, dressed in breeches, shawls with colorful designs woven onto them, their faces painted in many colors – danced in serious and self-absorbed fashion, careful of their foot movements; and there were portly Indian policemen, participating in powwow ceremonies, sporting black hats, their shirts displaying tribal seals.

Indians, in other words, were everywhere. That's not what the uniniated visitor would have expected to see in South Dakota.

II.

1846 and Now

Back in the 1840s, this part of the state was dangerous frontier country for traveling whites precisely for that reason: Indians were everywhere. The great westward movement of American settlers – something that Thomas Jefferson set into motion with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 – was in full flow. The Ogallala Sioux were witnessing weary hordes of settlers from the east making their way to the Pacific Coast in slow-moving wagons. The Sioux, proud people that they were, looked upon these settlers initially with derision. They were no strangers to Europeans; they had met the French, vagrant adventurers and fur-trappers. But there had been nothing like this: large groups of people doggedly migrating in pursuit of a new life in the West.

Francis Parkman, author of the classic The Oregon Trail was one of few who saw firsthand the interaction of the Ogallalas with the whites. Parkman was an adventurer from Massachusetts; he was specifically interested in Indians – in a condescending sort of way as was the norm at the time – and that is why he had made the journey to the frontier. Later he would live with the Ogallalas for three weeks.

In the early part of his trip, in the summer of 1846, Parkman was traveling in the western end of Nebraska – not far from where Pine Ridge is today – when he saw a group of settlers cross paths with a large band of encamped Ogallalas. Parkman was an astute observer, and to him this meeting of the two groups was indicative of something broader; it was a precursor of what was to come. This is how Parkman describes it in The Oregon Trail:

“Not far from the chief stood a group of stately figures, their white buffalo robes thrown over their shoulders, gazing coldly upon us; and in the rear for several acres, the ground was covered with a temporary encampment. Warriors, women, and children swarmed like bees; hundreds of dogs of all sizes and colors ran restlessly about; and close at hand, the wide shallow stream was alive with boys and girls and young squaws, splashing, screaming and laughing in the water. At the same time a long train of emigrants with their heavy wagons was crossing the creek, and dragging on in slow procession by the encampment of the people who they and their descendents, in the space of a century, are to sweep from the face of the earth.” [italics mine]

More than one hundred and sixty years have passed since Parkman prophesied the extinction of the Indians. Has his claim, so confidently made in 1846, come true? In essence, yes: there are a mere 3-4 million people of Indian ancestry in the United States – that’s out of a population of nearly 310 million. Contrast that with this startling fact: Indians from India – people like me, very recent immigrants – number more than 2 million in the United States.

But if Parkman were to somehow lift himself from his grave and attend the powwow in Pine Ridge in 2007 (or any year for that matter), he would have nothing but surprise in store for him. Indeed, the crowds at the powwow that evening would have served as a pointed rejoinder to the claim that Indians were destined to vanish. Despite the demographic decline they have experienced for the last five centuries, American Indians are doing the best they can to take modernity in their stride and maintain some measure of cultural continuity.

And powwows, in my opinion, are one medium through which that reinvention is taking place. Because it features tribes from all over North America, a powwow is like a federation of Native Americans. It can seem like an alternate, subterranean world, distant from the American mainstream. But powwows are conducted frequently, in every part of North America. I myself have been to powwows in the Phoenix metro area; I am aware they are are held even in small towns in the eastern states and the Midwest. No matter where you live in the United States, there will most likely be one within three hundred miles of you this weekend.

So attend one if you can and you will sense, even if only in a fleeting way, what an Indian America on a grander scale might have been like had history taken a different course.

Michael Jackson and Balasaheb Thackeray

From Suketu Mehta's Maximum City:Bombay Lost and Found:

Shiv Sena's notions of what is culturally acceptable in India show a distinct bias towards kitsch: Michael Jackson, for example. In November 1996, Thackeray announced that the first performance of the pop star in India would proceed with his blessings. This may or may not have had to do with the fact that the singer had promised to donate the profits from his concert -- which eventually ran to more than a million dollars -- to a Shiv Sena-run youth employment project. The planned concert offended a number of people in the city, including Thackeray's own brother, who saw something alien in the values singer represented. "Who is Michael Jackson and how on earth is he linked to Hindu culture, which the Shiv Sena and its boss Thackeray talk about so proudly?"

The Shiv Sena Supremo responded, "Jackson is a great artist, and we must accept him as an artist. His movements are terrific. Not many people can that way. You will end up breaking your bones." Then the Saheb got to the heart of the matter. "And, well what is culture? He represents certain values in America, which India should not have any qualms in accepting. We would like to accept that part of America that is represented by Jackson." The pop star acknowledged Thackeray's praise by stopping off at the leader's residence on his way from the airport to his hotel and pissing in his toilet. Thackeray led photographers with pride to the sanctified bowl.

Queues at polls

Queues of all sorts fascinate me, and in this season of elections, it is only understandable that they are rampant at polling places. India and Indonesia are having their elections, and so is South Africa. The news from South Africa is that the turnout is massive -- officials are struggling with "angry queues at polling stations and too few ballot papers" [BBC]. The balance between demand and supply is askew and that, of course, is the perfect recipe for queues.

And there's nothing like a good image to tell a story. I love this picture, which I pilfered from the same BBC article: democracy -- or at least one of the steps of modern-day democracy -- expressed by a long, snaking line of people patiently waiting to have their say.

Mr.President, let me teach you batting

For those who may not know, this is batting maestro Brian Lara teaching the President how to hit a good front-foot cover drive. But from the awkward footwork and squatting that is on display, it looks as if the President may splay his feet and rip his pants. Ah, cricket doesn't come easy to the uninitiated. Let's hope this isn't a metaphor for the President's political skills. But at least, you could say, he's trying to learn.

Photo via Amitava.

What it means to be Christian

A Spanish evangelist, Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, traveling in Peru circa 1560 finds out what being Christian means to the Indians of Peru:

It is of note that the Indians of Peru, before we Christians had come to them, had certain and particular modes of swearing, distinct from ours. They had no assertive oaths, such as 'by God' or 'by heaven' but only execration or curses...e.g. 'if I am not telling the truth, may the sun kill me' they said...Once when I asked a chieftain in a certain province if he was Christian, he said, 'I am not yet quite one, but I am making a beginning.' I asked him what he knew of being Christian, and he said: 'I know how to swear to God, and play cards a bit, and I am beginning to steal.'

This is an excerpt from one of Fray Domingo's books - which interestingly happens to be a book on Quechua grammar. Quechua is a Native American language of South America, still spoken by indigenous people in Peru, Bolivia and also in other countries - there are an estimated 10 million speakers. I found the above excerpt in Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (the link takes you to one of my earliest posts -- way back in 2005, when the earth was cooling).

Atanu Dey on the military-industrial complex

Great piece here on how certain parties in both rich and poor countries have strong incentives to proliferate weapons in the global market, and -- unsurprisingly -- how this is very good for business. Consider the recent news where the US appears to be thinking of selling predator drones to Pakistan. Atanu writes:

The absurdity of the situation is resolved if you consider that the military-industrial complex of the US is involved in a simple dollar auction.

Briefly, the US gives Pakistan drones under some pretext. Since Pakistan is broke, it cannot pay for them. So the US gives military assistance to Pakistan to buy the drones with. Which basically means that the US pays its weapons manufacturers for supplying the Pakistanis. That’s the first-order effect of military aid to Pakistan: US weapons manufacturers continue to be in business.

The second-order effect follows predictably. India now has to match Pakistan’s weapons. India pays the US to buy drones. This means more business for US weapons manufacturers.

The war on terror has to continue because that’s what allows the machinery of the military-industrial complex humming away. The US is a military superpower and any day of the week it actually wants to, it can totally wipe off global Islamic terrorism. That it chooses not to do so is simple: its weapons industry will hurt like hell. Sure the US exports a lot of stuff other than weapons. But the politicians who make the policies are in the pockets of the weapons manufacturers.

All this reminds me of Dwight Eisenhower's prescient Presidential farewell address in 1961. Eisenhower was a military man himself, and he must have known well the ugly nexus that was developing between making of weapons and the making of money. This is the exact sentence he used:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

Nobody seems to have heeded. The military-industrial complex is a reality now -- a major reality, and not just in the US. How do we get out of this one?

Also see, Why We Fight.

Contrasts in history: The example of Prostestant colonialism

History’s biggest insights lie in understanding contrasts. Why did things turn out a certain way in one part of the world and so differently elsewhere? Answers to such questions can be revealing. After Columbus’ journey to the Americas, Europeans sailed to all inhabited continents. The results have been very different: in most of Africa and Asia, they left eventually, leaving the natives to figure out their post-colonial trajectories; in Mexico and South America, they mixed with the natives, giving rise to the mestizo; and in North America and Australia, they almost entirely displaced the existing indigenous population. Understanding these differences and their associated circumstances explains to a large extent why the world is the way it is today. This was also the subject of Jared Diamond’s superb Guns, Germs and Steel.

Recently, while reading Richard Dowden’s Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (earlier posts here and here), I found a fascinating comparative study that builds on the same idea though on a smaller scale. Dowden’s analysis has to do with Protestant groups that colonized peoples in different parts of the world. He first compares the Afrikaners of South Africa (who were Protestants), and the Ulster Protestants of Ireland:

“While working in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s, I had begun to notice the strong parallels with South Africa. The most striking parallel was between the Afrikaners and the Ulster Protestants. Both had arrived as colonists during periods of religious persecution in seventeenth century Europe. Both embraced orange as their color, derived from the House of Orange, the Dutch monarchy who had stood out against the Hapsburg Catholics. The hero of the Irish Protestants was William III, the Dutch king who finally defeated the Catholic James II and established Protestant British rule in Ireland. The Afrikaners were Dutch Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution in the Netherlands...

The Ulster and South African varieties of Protestant fundamentalism had a lot in common. Theirs was a whole world view, an attitude to the meaning of life, self and land. Both believed that they were God’s chosen people, rewarded for their faithfulness by the gift of the land they now occupied. The fact they had won the land by conquest reinforced in their minds the idea that God was on their side. They also believed in the puritan values of hard work, thrift and honesty. When I heard an Afrikaner clergyman talk of black Africans as lazy, dirty and unpunctual, I could have been listening to some of the militant followers of Ian Paisley, the Ulster Protestant political clergyman, talking about Catholics.

Now throw into the mix yet another Protestant group, which would go on to build one of the most successful and powerful nations in the world, and things become even more interesting:

A third group of migrating Dutch and English Protestants left their homes at the same time as the Afrikaners first settled in South Africa. They sailed west rather than south and helped found the most liberal state known to humankind, the United States of America. They too were informed by the puritan ethic and the gratifying feeling that God had rewarded them with land of their own. But although they were liberal towards each other, the new Americans overwhelmed – and virtually exterminated – the native population. If today’s white South Africans are colonists, so are the non-indigenous populations of North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. The only difference is in the numbers of surviving native peoples. In the United States, descendents of the original inhabitants represent 1.5 percent of the population, in Canada it is 2 percent, in Brazil less than 0.4 percent. Aboriginals make up 2.4 percent of Australians. The Maori make up 14.6 percent of New Zealand’s population, though only 4.3 percent use Maori as their first language. In South Africa, the indigenous people are 75 per cent of the population. I once heard an Afrikaner quip to an American diplomat trying to foist non-racial constitution on South Africa, ‘At least we left our natives alive.’

There is truth to that assertion (though it's a ridiculous and completely unacceptable excuse for Afrikaner colonialism and apartheid). Whatever the ignominies black South Africans have had to go through, and whatever their troubles in post-apartheid South Africa, they at least have a chance to define their own destiny now. As do other formerly colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. I do not mean to trivialize the problems such nations face. But when an entire continent is silenced through a combination of devastating disease outbreaks (inadvertent) and relentless land-grabbing and conquest – as happened in North America and Australia – there is little a people can do. So, while the Indians of India may rejoice their country’s increasing presence on the global stage, the Indians of North America can only look back and ponder at what might have been.

It is the most tragic thing that can happen to a people: suffering a demographic decline that robs them of their chance in history.

And Indonesia too...

Close on the heels of my post about the logistical complexity and scale of the India's upcoming general election, comes this short one on Indonesia. Yes, Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, with a population of 240 million, also goes to polls this year, and The Economist has a feature on the country in its latest issue.

The poll itself is an exercise whose scale and logistical complexity are second only to those of a general election in India. Across more than 900 inhabited islands, 171m people have registered to vote. They have 38 national parties to choose from, and an estimated 800,000 candidates for the national parliament, known as the DPR, and lower-level provincial and other legislatures. And this is only the start of what may be a three-stage process.

Strangely, Indonesia's national motto is "Unity in Diversity" -- exactly the phrase I heard growing up in India.

Looking back: India's first General Election - Excerpts from Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi

India holds its general elections this month. This is, on paper at least, the largest exercise of democracy in the world. However bizarre democracy and politics in India might be – incredibly fragmented and rife with opportunistic alliances: the economist and blogger Atanu Dey calls it Cargo Cult Democracy, democracy of the cosmetic kind – whatever the shortcomings, you cannot but marvel at the scale and logistics of the election itself. More than 700 million people will have the ability to vote this time. The election will be held in staggered fashion, in five phases – beginning April 16th and ending May 13, with results announced on May 16th. There will be 828,804 polling centers; and as in 2004, the election will be conducted using electronic voting machines – there are 1,368,430 of them across the country.

The Indian general election interests me precisely because of these operational aspects. My doctoral training in an area called operations research, which can be described as the science (or mathematics) of planning well. Needless to say, a general election involving huge numbers of people and parties and covering a vast area requires some very careful planning.

Behind all this is the Election Commission of India (ECI), a remarkably efficient organization – surprising, because it is a governmental administrative organization. ECI was formed in 1950, and set its high standards at the very outset. The first Chief Election Commissioner was Sukumar Sen, who had the unenviable task of conducting India’s first general election in 1951. Born in 1899, Sen was educated in Presidency College and London University, where he won a gold medal in mathematics. And mathematics is a useful skill to have when you have to get the numbers and the coordination right for an election and an electorate spread over the area of a million square miles.

In 1951, India had a population of roughly 360 million. The size of the electorate was about 176 million. The 2009 general election will be a larger operation, but the first election, in 1951-52 (it was staggered then too), was quite the leap in the dark. The country had been independent for just four years and a significant portion of the electorate was illiterate. A successful election meant that an effort of that scale could be confidently mounted again and again over the next decades -- what was daunting then is now a routine business.

Here are some excerpts from Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi about the election of 1951.

1. India’s first election, Guha writes,

was, among other things, an act of faith. A newly independent country chose to move straight to universal adult suffrage, rather than – as had been the case in the West – at first reserve the right to vote to men of property, with the working class and women excluded from the franchise until much later.

2. Numbers from the 1951 election:

224,000 polling booths were constructed, and equipped with 2 million steel ballot boxes, to make which 8,200 tonnes of steel were consumed; 16,500 clerks were appointed on a six-month contracts to type and collate the electoral rolls by constituency; about 380,000 reams of paper were used for printing the rolls; 56,000 presiding officers were chosen to supervise the voting, these aided by another 280,000 helpers; 224,000 policemen were put on duty to guard against violence and intimidation.

3. Geography complicated election logistics, but here’s a peculiar social challenge ECI faced that is also somewhat comical:

A second problem was social rather than geographical: the diffidence of many women in northern India to give their own names, instead of which they wished to register themselves as A’s mother or B’s wife. Sukumar Sen was outraged with this practice, a ‘curious senseless relic of the past.’, and directed his officials to correct the rolls by inserting the names of the women ‘in place of mere descriptions of such voters.’ Nonetheless, some 2.8 million women had to be struck of the list. The resulting furore over their omission was considered by Sen to be a ‘good thing’, for it would help the prejudice vanish before the next elections…

4. How did ECI improvise to accommodate the largely illiterate electorate? Pictorial symbols and multiple ballot boxes. Details:

Where in Western democracies most voters could recognize the parties by name, here pictorial symbols were used to make their task easier. Drawn from daily life, these symbols were easily recognizable: a pair of bullocks for one party, a hut for a second, an elephant for a third, and an earthenware lamp for a fourth. A second innovation was the use of multiple ballot boxes. On a single ballot, the (mostly illiterate) Indian elector might make a mistake; thus each party had a ballot box with its symbol marked in each polling station, so that voters could simply drop their paper in it. To avoid impersonation, Indian scientists had developed a variety of indelible ink which, applied on the voter’s finger, stayed there for a week. A total of 389,816 phials of ink were used in the election.

5. And, finally, a little anecdote that tells us of the earnestness of many election officials who tried their best to make things tick in remote places:

An American woman photographer on assignment in Himachal Pradesh was deeply impressed by the commitment shown by the election officials. One official had walked for six days to attend the preparatory workshop organized by the district magistrate; another had ridden four days on a mule. They went back to their distant stations with sewn gunny sacks full of ballot boxes, ballots, party symbols and electoral lists. On election day, the photographer chose to watch proceedings at an obscure hill village named Bhuti. Here the polling station was a school-house, which had only one door. Since the rules prescribed a different entry and exit, a window had been converted into a door, with improvised steps on either side to allow the elderly and ailing to hop out after voting.

It's true, isn't it: that it takes small and sincere efforts like these to achieve something larger. Even if that something larger -- democracy -- is only, as BR Ambedkar once said, "a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic".

The mathematics of matching kidneys

“Kidneys are unusual organs,” says the blogger and academic Michael Trick, “We are given two, though we can get by with one. So, unlike the heart, say, we each have a 'spare' that we can donate to others.” Indeed, for patients suffering from kidney failure – known more technically as end stage renal disease – one option is transplantation: taking somebody else’s healthy kidney and grafting it in the patient. In the United States, there are estimated to be more than 60,000 patients waiting for such transplants to happen. Kidneys of deceased as well as living donors can be used, and both approaches have their pros and cons. But transplants involving living donors are increasing – in the United States they are 47% of all transplants.

If a transplant involves a living donor, then who might such a donor be? Perhaps someone close to the patient – a sister, a relative, a friend. But it turns out you can’t just use any kidney. You can accept a kidney only if your blood group and the donor’s are compatible. An O recipient can accept only O kidneys; A can accept O and A; B can accept O and B; and AB can accept any kidney. And there may be other medical reasons and patient preferences too that may disallow certain transplants.

So, from the above discussion, you may end up with an incompatible donor-recipient pair, and this frequently happens in practice. But this is not a dead-end; what you can do is find another incompatible donor-recipient pair, such that the blood group of the donor in the first pair is compatible with that of the recipient in the second pair, and vice-versa. If this is the case, an exchange can happen, as shown below.

Figure 1 (Picture from here)

Both pairs are now set. Simple enough. But if you look at this from the larger, societal point of view, the problem is more nuanced. There may be thousands of such incompatible donor-recipient pairs in the waiting list. If you just go from the point of view of one pair, you are likely to find a match, but you may end up ruining options for others.

How can this happen? Well, let’s look at this simple example involving just five pairs. Each pair is represented using a node, while the edges indicate that an exchange is possible. So an exchange of the type shown in figure 1 is possible between pairs 1 and 2; 2 and 3; 2 and 4; 4 and 5. Since there is no edge between 1 and 5, the pairs cannot exchange – this might be, say, because the donor of 1 belongs to blood group B but the recipient of 5 belongs to O, ruling out an exchange.

Figure 2 (mine)

Now let’s look at possible solutions. If 2 decides to exchange with 4, then only one match is possible. Three other pairs (1, 3 and 5) will have to wait for future pairs to enter the list – until then, the recipient in each pair will be on dialysis, which is extremely expensive. But there exists a better solution: let 1 exchange with 2 and let 4 exchange with 5. Four pairs now get matches, and only one pair has to wait. Thus the latter solution maximizes the number of matches in the graph, while the former solution leaves many dissatisfied.

Imagine now that there are thousands of pairs with myriad linkages – as there indeed are in reality. Can you visually think of a graph of the type above and come up with a solution? Clearly, it’s not feasible – unless we develop the superhuman ability to delineate complex and dense graphs in our minds and traverse them. Fortunately, though, the matching of kidneys turns out to be equivalent to a well studied problem in graph theory called maximum matching. Even better, there exists an algorithm that will give a solution in quick time no matter how large your graph is. Got a thousand pairs in your list? No problem – you’ll get a solution in a few seconds! The algorithm was first proposed way back in 1965, in a groundbreaking paper by Jack Edmonds. Edmonds clearly was not into sleep-inducing technical titles that are the norm in most publications: his paper is stylishly called Paths, Trees and Flowers [1] and can be accessed easily online.

Thus did the solution to a puzzle in graph theory become relevant for a pressing medical problem of today – and it is not always possible to see such happy marriages. Not that this one is perfect: the kidney matching problem in reality is not as simple as the maximum matching problem of graph theory. Medical problems – especially transplantations – are riddled with ethical, political, logistical and cost issues. Despite this, the kidney matching problem (or the paired donation problem) is something to be celebrated. It’s a neat, easy-to-understand application, and its importance can’t be overstated.

Picture from here

The problem became known in the medical community due to a paper in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) [2]. Sommer Gentry and Dorry Segev were the principal researchers. If graph theory in an organ transplantation context seems like a unique marriage, then is it any surprise that it emerged from an actual marriage - between a mathematician and a transplant surgeon? Sommer is the mathematician; Dorry the surgeon. I met Sommer at a conference in Philadelphia last year, and chatted with her over lunch (which is how I became aware of the problem). She is currently at the US Naval Academy, while Dorry is a surgeon at John Hopkins; they live in Anapolis, near Baltimore.

But to return to the paper. There is an extensive discussion in it about the challenges that come up in kidney transplantations: national vs. regional matching, logistical issues, and how to deal with patients with greater need. The national vs. regional question is especially worth mentioning. Local and regional kidney donation programs already exist in the United States, but what if a national system was to be tried out? Clearly the availability of a larger pool of kidneys would mean more matches. But then travel and the cost of transporting organs becomes an issue. But here's the twist: the paper demonstrates that in the national system, the number of matches would increase and yet only 2.9% of the national pool would actually need to travel. Who would have guessed! But this is precisely the sort of counterintuitive insight that a mathematical model is capable of providing.

Finally, why have we discussed only 2-way exchanges so far? Indeed, we can do better. Let's consider three pairs. The donor of Pair 1 could donate to the recipient of Pair 2; the donor of Pair 2 then donates to the recipient of Pair 3; and lastly, to complete the cycle, the donor of Pair 3 donates to recipient of Pair 1. That's a 3-way exchange. Perhaps longer ones can be identified in a pool but what effect does the length of a cycle have on the number of matches in the overall pool? This is a fertile area of research, and some it has already been implemented. Recently, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, there was a six-way exchange – the largest of its kind – involving twelve people. And the cycle of six was completed because of an altruistic donor who was unrelated to the twelve people involved, yet gave away his/her kidney.

Indeed, if you are going to have an impact on twelve rather than two, wouldn’t you be more inclined to be altruistic?

References

[1] Paths, trees and Flowers, by Jack Edmonds, Canadian Journal of Mathematics (1965).

[2] Kidney paired donation and optimizing the use of live donor organs, Segev D., Gentry S., Warren D., Reeb B., and Montgomery R. Journal of the American Medical Association (2005).

Kashmir's Buddhist past - a quick excerpt

Basharat Peer’s memoir, Curfewed Night, is about Kashmir’s woes, but there are plenty of other interesting bits in the book that have nothing to do with the dark mood of the last two decades. I love the parts where Peer writes of his visits to spiritual places – Sufi, Hindu, and Buddhist – and though some of these places are facing neglect, they are nonetheless indicative of the region’s rich and diverse religious history. For instance, it was Ashoka who founded “Srinagari (the City of Wealth) around 250 BC on the outskirts of what is modern Srinagar … it was from the seminaries of Kashmir patronised by Ashoka that missionaries spread Buddhism to China and Japan.” And here’s an excerpt about the fourth Buddhist Council that might have been held in Kashmir:

“When I was a child my father told me stories of the Fourth World Buddhist Council, which was held in Kashmir in the second century under the rule of the learned Gandharan Buddhist king Kanishka. Every now and then someone claims to have found the true location of the council but most believe it was held near the ancient Garden of Harwan on the northwestern fringe of Srinagar. On a family excursion to the garden – which is lined with waterways and shaded by towering chinar trees – my father had pointed to the hillock above and told me it was where the council was believed to have gathered. I went there a few days after visiting the Srinagar museum. A signboard, ‘Buddhist sites’, guided me to a terraced area where, in 1905, archaeologists found a stupa, prayer hall, and living quarters. In the centre of the site are remains of the stupa. I stared at its stone base and two concentric squares of roughly polished stones covered with wild grass. It was hard to imagine what it might have looked like. To the left, were four fallen stonewalls covered with moss. “That was a vihara, where the monks met,” said Mohammed Khazar, an elderly caretaker of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which maintains the site. According to the Chinese traveller Hieun Tsang, more than 5000 monks had come together to debate and discuss the faith.”