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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suketu Mehta on the Bhopal tragedy

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

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

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

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?

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

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...