The story of numbers

One of India’s greatest contributions to the world is the number system that everyone uses today. What the world knows today as Arabic numerals are really Indian numerals – including the controversial Zero. In the first millennium AD, they traveled from the Indian subcontinent westward to Baghdad, where the mathematician Musa Al Khwarizmi – who also initiated the field of algebra (al jabr) – wrote a treatise on them. At the time, Europe was using the cumbersome Roman numeral system. Watch this playful video that describes this history; watch how Indians used zeroes and ones to create stupendously large numbers.

(I should mention also that ancient Mexico also had its own sophisticated number system, and this system also included zero. Their inventions however are not always acknowledged in the history of mathematics - partly because history is not just Eurocentric, it is "Old-World centric".)

Video via Atanu. Also: An earlier post on the same topic; and the mysterious Ishango Bone of Africa.

My class and the US healthcare system

I am teaching a class this semester focused on the use of quantitative methods to improve the delivery of healthcare. Such things as: How can patients get faster access to medical appointments with their primary care doctors? What are the dynamics of supply and demand? How can emergency room operations be improved? Can medical practices be reorganized and if so how much improvement will it bring?

I like what I am teaching, but I don't want students to get bogged down just analyzing models and crunching numbers. I'd like them to know the big picture as well -- especially what's going on currently in the US healthcare system, how it compares to other countries. I want to bring social aspects into consideration. Some may say this borders on activism and should be avoided in a class meant for engineers. But are engineers not supposed to work for the greater good?

Anyway, in my second class, I screened this documentary -- available free online. Sick Around the World compares the health systems of developed countries -- Britain, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Switzerland -- and reveals the glaring flaws in the US healthcare system. As to how those flaws should be fixed -- well, that's too difficult a question. Recently, an academic whose research is on improving healthcare in developing countries said to me: "You can improve and make things better in poorer countries. But the US health care system - well, I don't think that is going to change."

Three key shortcomings emerge from the documentary. In the countries listed above 1) No one with a pre-existing condition is denied insurance 2) Everyone is covered one way or another 3) Pricing mechanisms are transparent and nobody goes bankrupt because of medical bills. Are these basic things too much to ask in the United States?

And last week, I had students read and discuss this essay by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. The essay is a few years old now, but the the issues raised are still relevant. Gladwell asks the question: Why doesn't the US have universal healthcare coverage? He posits that US policy-makers fear moral hazard, the idea that people may overuse the healthcare system if they have insurance. But is moral hazard really an issue in healthcare? Would you really increase the number of times you visit the hospital if you had better insurance?

Gladwell begins the essay with an intense description of tooth decay, a seemingly peripheral condition. But as he shows, those without insurance often ignore their teeth - with no health insurance, a dentist's visit is too expensive. Their teeth rot as a result. Their social skills plummet as they become increasingly conscious of the decay.

People without health insurance have bad teeth because, if you're paying for everything out of your own pocket, going to the dentist for a checkup seems like a luxury. It isn't, of course. The loss of teeth makes eating fresh fruits and vegetables difficult, and a diet heavy in soft, processed foods exacerbates more serious health problems, like diabetes. The pain of tooth decay leads many people to use alcohol as a salve. And those struggling to get ahead in the job market quickly find that the unsightliness of bad teeth, and the self-consciousness that results, can become a major barrier. If your teeth are bad, you're not going to get a job as a receptionist, say, or a cashier. You're going to be put in the back somewhere, far from the public eye.

Bad teeth, thus, become an "outward marker of caste" -- the caste of the uninsured. Disturbing stuff. Go read the full essay.

Conversations in cabs

I get along extremely well with cab drivers. I can hardly remember a ride without an enriching conversation. Many drivers in the major cities of the United States are immigrants; most I met were from Africa. In Washington DC there is a fifty percent chance your driver will be Ethiopian. My discussions have always been political: I ask about how things are going in this or that country; we then talk about India. Invariably, the drivers tell me about Indian acquaintances in their respective home countries – Indians settled as teachers, doctors, professionals. I also use these conversations to test my still-evolving notions about Africa.

Let me present here two vignettes. These two don’t follow the trajectory I’ve described above -- well at least not entirely -- but they are the ones that stand out in my mind.

1.

I met Steven in 2007, in a small suburban town in Maryland. Steven was from Ghana; his demeanor was hurried and his tone aggressive. But this turned out be just an external manifestation, a habit. Steven was friendly and eager to talk. Like many other drivers I've met, he was well traveled. He had even been to India: he had visited Calcutta in the late eighties, remarkably, to participate in an international ping-pong tournament, and had been impressed. What had he found striking?

“Well, you guys have your own cars, and you have your own transportation systems. I could tell you were well on your way to becoming a superpower.”

I wasn’t surprised with the superpower part – that was a common refrain in the Western media as well. I was surprised because Steven’s conclusions were based on an India glimpsed before the country’s economic liberalization. The cars he was referring to were hulky Ambassadors, and the transportation system, Calcutta’s trams. Many Indians lament the period before the economic reforms of the 90s, when growth in India was sluggish and stifled by bureaucracy.

Steven, in contrast, had been impressed by the achievements of the Indian state. Admittedly, he could not have learned much from one short visit. But perhaps Steven looked at it that way because African states, with a few exceptions, provide little for their people. I told him I thought Ghana was doing well. He did not think so. “There are no jobs,” he said unhappily, with something approaching rage. “What do you do when you have no work?” He wasn’t convinced that other parts of Africa were doing well either. “People say South Africa is doing well. But it’s just the white people, a small minority. For the blacks, it’s the same story.”

Steven wasn't the only one with such cynicism. The same sentiments constantly resurfaced in almost all my conversations. There was frustration and helplessness over the divisive, ethnic nature of politics in Africa. What I’ve heard from Africans only provides anecdotal evidence that supports a well-known fact: that Africa’s nations – whose borders were decided rather arbitrarily in European capitals in the 19th century and not on any templates from African history – are not nations fully yet.

2.

In Atlanta earlier this week, I rode with a driver whose accent suggested he might be African-American. But I was mistaken. Paul was from Jamaica. And since the Caribbean is full of people of Indian origin, it wasn’t surprising that Paul had several close Indian acquaintances; his own half-brothers were half-Indian. To top it off, Paul, like me, loved cricket. As we headed towards Midtown Atlanta, we were bogged down by the morning traffic. But I didn't mind at all: we had plenty to talk about.

I called Paul again in the evening for a ride back to my hotel, but he was busy, and instead sent someone else. This time, it was a middle-aged man, Olivier Kone, from Côte d'Ivoire. It felt like a relay: one interesting cabbie was passing me to another. I had never met anyone from Côte d'Ivoire before. But I did remember VS Naipaul’s long travel essay about the country, The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro. Yamoussoukro is the capital of Côte d'Ivoire – rather it was made into a political center by the country’s first leader, Félix Houphouët-Boigny. In the 1960s and 70s the country was booming: exports in cocoa and coffee fed the economy. Naipaul, writing at the time of the boom, had presciently stated it would all collapse. He saw an excessive reliance on French expertise. The country unraveled in the 1990s after the death of Houphouët-Boigny; I am not fully cognizant of the reasons, but ethnicity – Africa’s bane – played a role here as well.

I discussed all this with Olivier. As we approached my hotel, he asked what I had seen in Atlanta. I told him I’d been too busy. I'd been considering the Coca Cola Center -- which many recommended -- but I was much more interested in the Martin Luther King Center on Auburn Avenue in downtown Atlanta. Atlanta had been King’s home and is where he is buried. The Ebenezer Baptist church, where King and his father had pastored, is also in the neighborhood.

“What’s there to see in the Coca Cola center man? They charge you $25 to see a beverage! Go see King’s place. It's free; and it’s a special place. In fact call me tomorrow morning; I’ll take you there and drive you back to the airport. I won’t charge you for the time you spend watching the exhibits.”

We agreed on a time and set out together the next morning. The Atlanta skyline was ahead of us as we took the interstate. When we got to the center, Olivier took off the Taxi sign from the roof of the cab and accompanied me -- he wasn't a cabbie for this visit. The King Center comprised of about three buildings, all with drab exteriors. That was disappointing: I expected the place to be grander; it was, after all, commemorating one of America's greatest leaders. The emptiness on Auburn Avenue that morning only added to the seeming insignificance of the place. The interior was better and consisted mostly of black and white pictures from the 1950s and 60s and sound clips of King’s rousing speeches.

Olivier was keen to show me the large, dark-brown statue of a walking Gandhi – a gift from India – outside one of the buildings. He led me also to a room dedicated to Gandhi; there were pictures of King visiting India in 1959 -- one picture showed him shaking hands with Lal Bahadur Shastri. King was born in 1929, sixty years after Gandhi. Gandhi’s non-violent struggle against the British had inspired King; but King’s achievement, in my opinion, surmounts Gandhi’s. The legacy of slavery and segregation is far more humiliating than of colonialism. It is also harder to fight against: the struggle is as much in the mind of the oppressed as against the policies of the oppressors.

It was time for me to get to the airport. As Olivier and I walked back to the cab, it struck me that ours was a special visit. We were certainly an unusual pair: he was from Côte d'Ivoire; I was from India. We hardly knew each other and yet it did not feel that way. Olivier is black and the struggle for civil rights no doubt resonates strongly with him. I was aware business was one reason why he had suggested I call him in the morning. But there was also earnestness: Olivier genuinely wanted to show me the place, especially the Gandhi statue and exhibits. He wanted to take pictures for me and was disappointed I did not have a camera.

And to think that it was all chance. Had Paul, the Jamaican cab-driver, not sent Olivier, I would have never met him. And but for Olivier’s insistence the previous night that I visit the King Center and his offer to take me there, I would have never gone.

But then itineraries do change unexpectedly -- I am glad mine did.

Nigeriatown in China, like Chinatown in Nigeria

Perhaps globalization's most visible symbol is the ubiquity of Chinese products everywhere in the world. China in Africa is an especially big story these days. But what you might not have heard is the growing presence of African immigrants - many of them Nigerians - in Guangzhou, China. Take a look.

Let's kindle reading passions

How? With this product that will allow both the structured reading of books and unsystematic browsing. I am sold.

Ramble on! And pictures from Mexico

I've been overwhelmed with work. The downside of being an academic in the US, especially if you are in engineering or the sciences and at a research university, is the relentless emphasis on getting grant money -- from federal sources such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (if you work in healthcare). And grants carry even more weight as universities struggle with budget cuts in the current economic situation.

There are positive things about the process: once you get a grant, students get funded, research happens, new discoveries are made. But boy, is the process sapping! And grant writing is strange also because the content is largely triumphant and runs roughshod over skepticism. No one will give money unless you sound completely sure. The best writing, though, comes from intense introspection: great literature is all about doubt and fallibility.

I have couple of deadlines coming in a week. Which is why this space has been idle so far this month. I expect this to be a slow month for blogging. But since this might be one of the few chances I may have to write in the coming days, let me keep typing - or rambling.

I've written only a couple of essays about my Mexico trip; I had been planning to do a whole lot more. It may still happen but here are some pictures meanwhile, with some narrative. Please make sure you click on the pictures - you'll get a much better view.

1. I took this picture during the southern approach to Mexico City. The Valley of Mexico is a high valley - Mexico City sits in it at 7000 feet. And all around are mountains, some of them volcanic. When Cortes met Montezuma in Mexico City (then called Tenochtitlan) on Nov 8th, 1519, one of them could be seen in eruption. Let's imagine, then, that the mountain you see below was the one Cortes saw.


2. This one I took before the final approach to Mexico City. The sprawl of Mexico City is partially captured here. The city and its immediate surroundings are home to about 20 million people, like Bombay.


Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that the plane was approaching Mexico City on Nov 8, 1519, at the same moment that the Spanish conquistador Cortes had that historic meeting with the Mexica ruler, Montezuma. What would we have seen? First of all, the valley would have been filled with lakes, almost none of which exist today. Secondly, in the middle of one such lake, would be a city that would keep you spellbound. Pyramids, towers, markets, long arrow-straight causeways, neatly swept streets, stunning botanical gardens, canoes flitting in the lake like butterflies, and hundreds of thousands of people.

What a sight that would have been!

3. The Spanish destroyed the lake city, and built Mexico City on top of the Aztec capital. The lakes were drained. The debris from Aztec monuments and buildings was used in the construction of churches. Curiously enough in Mexico, the surviving great monuments are from a much older time. Like this one below, the Pyramid of the Sun (part of Teotihuacan), dated to around 500 CE (no connection to the Aztecs). It is the third largest pyramid in the world. The largest pyramid in the world is - are you ready? - also in Mexico, in Cholula, Puebla. It is not, as you might have thought, the Giza pyramid.


The little figures you see crawling atop the pyramid are people (like I said before, click for a better view). In Mexico, tourists fall upon ancient ruins as an army of ants upon tasty crumbs. Most tourists are Europeans. They are generally fascinated by the ancient cultures of Mexico. This is really an extension of the European reaction to the splendors of the Americas when they were "discovered". Most cultures place themselves at the center of the world (China, for example, is The Middle Kingdom);the Europeans were no different . They were bewildered upon encountering the civilizations of the Americas. How could it be that others had independently figured out the nuances of architecture, astronomy and mathematics? This disbelief mixes with a horrified fascination for the brutality of pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico: many of them practiced ritual sacrifices.

Yes, human sacrifice is a bad thing, and the Spanish were right in being shocked. But how many heretics did Spain burn at the stake during its inquisitions?

Karina's world

I met Karina at Casa Na Bolom, a hotel and an archaeological research institute in the highland city of San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. Once headed by Trudy and Francis Bloom – she was a Swiss anthropologist and photographer, he a Danish archaeologist – Na Bolom has always been committed to serving the indigenous groups of Chiapas, especially the Lacandon, a small community who live in the rainforest near the Mexico-Guatemala border. Lacandonese families can stay at Na Bolom; they can get medical treatment if necessary; and there are also education initiatives for their children.

Karina was one of these children. She was playing in the courtyard – a beautiful courtyard enclosed by bright yellow walls – with her brother and sister. She was about five years old. She had wide face, and her features were very much like those of the other indigenous children and women I met during my travels in Chiapas. Her mother, Maria, sat in the courtyard selling beads.

I met Karina shortly afterward. She readily sat next to me on the wooden bench, a big smile on her face. She wasn’t shy. I did not speak Spanish, so we communicated in gestures.

“Hari,” I said, pointing to myself. She was smart and understood immediately: “Karina,” she said.

We played for a bit. I made a rocket out of the map of San Cristobal and pretended it was headed towards me and I was fleeing unsuccessfully. Karina laughed heartily. She insisted that I repeat it. I did, and within minutes we were like good friends.

That was the last I saw of her. But the next day I traveled from San Cristobal down to the rainforest along the Mexico-Guatemala border – coincidentally, to the little village of Lacanja, where Karina had been born. When I realized this, Karina became an accompaniment to every detail I observed during my travels: the hike through the rainforest, the other Lacandonese I met, the villages I passed by on my drive. I wanted to understand the milieu she was growing up in, how she must be beginning to view the world around her.

___

A trail in the Lacandon Rainforest (picture mine)

Already, Karina was bilingual: she spoke Spanish fluently, but with a slight accent; I had also heard her speak her mother tongue, Lacandon, with her mother and siblings. Karina had probably spent most of her time growing up in Lacanja. She would have been used to walking with elders through the rainforest, an experience that will instill a wonder for the natural world in her.

Karina would have been told she was Mexican; and that Guatemala was short distance away, on the other side of the Usumacinta River. But the talk of nations and boundaries may not have made much sense. She was first and foremost Lacandonese. And she would realize, as she grew up, that hers was a very small community - and a community that was changing fast. Lacanja may be remote, but roads have brought tourists and economic opportunities in the last few decades.

Karina probably knows already that her people are materially poor. In fact, if you look at pictures of the Lacandon, you would think they were an isolated tribe of hunter-gatherers living in the pristine rainforest. But appearances are always deceptive, and the twists and turns of history always humbling. Very close to the Lacandon rainforest are breathtaking Mayan ruins – in Bonampak, Yaxchilan, and Palenque. The Lacandon may have come from Yucatan, another region where Mayans were once dominant. Karina will come to know, upon visiting these ruins – some of which her people consider sacred – that she is Mayan. Lacandon, in fact, is a Mayan language. Her ancestors built spectacular city states in the first millennium AD, and excelled in astronomy and mathematics.

Once upon a time, then, Karina’s people must have led a different sort of life.

With the coming of the Spanish, however, the Lacandon retreated to the rainforest. In the 1940s they were connected again with the broader world. Due to their isolation, they had, unlike indigenous communities in Mexico, retained many of their Mayan beliefs.
___

Moss-covered Mayan ruins at Yaxchilan (picture mine)

Karina will quickly realize as she travels the cities of Chiapas that other Mayan groups (Mayan language diversity in Chiapas is impressive: Tzotzil, Tzetzal, Tojolabal, Chol, Chuj and Zoque) are also poor, but have more experience with modernity. She will also learn of the Zapatista movement - more precisely EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional), named after Emiliano Zapata, a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) - which surprised everyone by capturing cities on Chiapas on the Jan 1st, 1994. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect the same day. This was not a coincidence: the Zapatistas were and still are against neo-liberal economic policies.

A board I spotted close to Lacanja

The army is still attempting to hunt these rebels. There are many checkpoints on the way to Karina’s village, Lacanja. There are also plenty of signs that the Zapatistas have sympathizers - they are, after all, on the side of the Chiapas' poor Mayan communities, who form a significant portion of the state's population. Perhaps on one of her trips from San Cristobal to Lacanja, Karina will see this board that I saw, and wonder what it is about.

“Muera el sistema capitalista” or “Death to the capitalist system.”

But if Karina travels to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the sprawling capital city of Chiapas (almost eight hours away from Karina’s birthplace: how inexorable distances can be in this small state!), she will notice that the capitalist system is thriving. American stores are everywhere. The modern bus station in Tuxtla – sparkling white and red – is part of a humongous mall that could easily shame some of the ones I’ve been to the US. It is also superbly maintained: for every little blemish on the floor, there emerges, dutifully, out of nowhere, a new janitor.

This, Karina will know instantly, is a place very different from the Chiapanecan hinterland she belongs to.
___

Karina’s world, then, has been shaped by many forces, spanning both space and time: the dense rainforest of Chiapas and the incessantly mountainous terrain; Mayan city states; the multitude of languages; the Spanish conquest of the 16th century and its lingering effects; the blending of Christian and Mayan faiths; the modern Mexican nation state, which is sometimes like an extension of Spanish subjugation; NAFTA and the Zapatista Rebellion.

Consciously or otherwise, Karina will carry all of these with her.

Why does India neglect its classical languages?

Asks Sheldon Pollock, in this essay in The Hindu.

At the time of Independence, and for some two millennia before that, India was graced by the presence of scholars whose historical and philological expertise made them the peer of any in the world. They produced editions and literary and historical studies of texts in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu — and in Apabhramsha, Assamese, Bangla, Brajbhasha, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, Persian, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Urdu — that we still use today. In fact, in many cases their works have not been replaced. This is not because they are irreplaceable — it is in the nature of scholarship that later knowledge should supersede earlier. They have not been replaced because there is no one to replace them.

[...]

Today, in neither of the two great universities in the capital city of India, is anyone conducting research on classical Hindi literature, the great works of Keshavdas and his successors. Imagine — and this is an exact parallel — if there were no one in Paris in 2008 producing scholarship on the works of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Not coincidentally, a vast number of Brajbhasha texts lie mouldering in archives, unedited to this day.

[...]

Nine years ago, H.C. Bhayani, the great scholar of Apabhramsha, passed away. With his death, so far as I am able to judge, the field of Apabhramsha studies itself died in India. To my eyes, the situation with Apabhramsha is symptomatic of a vast cultural ecocide that is underway in this country. And not just language knowledge is disappearing but all the skills associated with it, such as the capacity to read non-modern scripts, from Brahmi to Modi to Shikhasta.

[...]

There is another Sanskrit proverb that tells us it is far easier to tear down a house than to build it up (asakto ham grharambhe sakto ham grhabhanjane). The great edifice of Indian literary scholarship has nearly been torn down. Is it possible, at this late hour, to build it up again? [...] Why should India not commit itself to build the same kind of institute to serve the needs of its culture — not just dance and art and music, but its literary culture? Why should it not build an Indian Institute of the Humanities devoted not just to revivifying the study of the classical languages, but to producing world-class scholarship, as a demonstration of what is possible, a model for universities to follow, and a source of new scholars to staff those universities?

Indeed, why not? The state of affairs is best illustrated by my own ignorance of Apabhramsha - I know what it refers to now, but if you had asked me just a few minutes ago, before I encountered it in Pollock's essay, I would have had no clue. So it goes.

Also: a recent post on Sanskrit.

Nadeem Paracha's Blow Daddy

While still on Pakistan, here's a brilliant piece of satire from Nadeem Paracha in Dawn, one of the country's most prominent newspapers (credit for pointing this out goes to a good friend of mine from Pakistan). Just as the Dalrymple essay linked in my previous post meticulously lays bare the danger that Pakistan faces due to the military's courting of Islamic extremists for dubious ends, so this piece by Paracha lays bare, with comedy that is as chilling as it is hilarious, how narrow the world of the extremist is, and how it is built on lies. Paracha cleverly uses the format of a conversation between a father and his son to illustrate his point - a short extract below:

Daddy?

Yes, son.

Are we going to have a war with India?

Perhaps.

Oh, goody. We will thrash them, right? Like we did in 1857!

It wasn’t in 1857, son.

Oh, okay. But whom did we thrash in 1857?

The British, son…

And the Hindus too, right?

Well…

Did Quaid-i-Azam fight in that war along with Muhammad bin Qasim and Imran Khan?

No, son. The Quaid and Imran were born much later and Muhammad bin Qasim died many years before.

Then who ruled Pakistan in those days?

There was no Pakistan in those days, son.

But there was always a Pakistan! It has been there for 5,000 years!

Who have you been talking to, son?

No one. I’ve just been watching TV.

It figures.

Daddy, why are all these people against us Arabs?

Arabs? But we aren’t Arabs, son.

Of course we are because our ancestors were Arabs!

No, son. Our ancestors were of the subcontinental stock.

Sub-what?

Never mind.You seem to like wars, son.

Read on

William Dalrymple on Pakistan

William Dalrymple writes in the New York Review of Books of the steadily disintegrating situation in Pakistan. The main reason for this is the policy of courting Islamic extremists, wholeheartedly adopted since the 1980s by the Pakistani army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI must simply and unequivocally be termed a rogue agency. But ISI had the support of the CIA (which, for the role it has played in meddling with countries the world over, must also be called rogue). The CIA-ISI supported Islamic extremists were then fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The ISI also found extremists useful in bogging India down in the Kashmir conflict.

Decades have passed and the beast that was unleashed in the 1980s is now threatening to consume Pakistan. Even in Lahore, Pakistan's cultural and artistic capital, far away from the Afghan border, journalists and editors are being threatened by radical groups. The activist Asma Jahangir has also received warnings - "in her case, to desist helping the victims of honor killings."

Dalrymple's entire essay, which focuses on Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's book Descent into Chaos, is well worth reading; but here are some of my picks - these, in my opinion, are the most telling.

"As Hamid Gul, the director of the ISI who was largely responsible for developing this strategy [of using jihadis in Kashmir], once explained to me, if the ISI "encourages the Kashmiris it's understandable." He said, "The Kashmiri people have risen up in accordance with the UN charter, and it is the national purpose of Pakistan to help liberate them. If the jihadis go out and contain India, tying down their army on their own soil, for a legitimate cause, why should we not support them?" Next to him in his Islamabad living room lay a large piece of the Berlin Wall presented to him by the people of Berlin for "delivering the first blow" to the Soviet Empire through his use of jihadis in the 1980s."

[...]

"The army's senior military brass were convinced until recently that they could control the militants whom they had fostered. In a taped conversation between then General Pervez Musharraf and Muhammad Aziz Khan, his chief of general staff, which India released in 1999, Aziz said that the army had the jihadis by their " tooti " (their privates). Yet while some in the ISI may still believe that they can use jihadis for their own ends, the Islamists have increasingly followed their own agendas, sending suicide bombers to attack not just members of Pakistan's religious minorities and political leaders, but even the ISI headquarters at Camp Hamza itself, in apparent revenge for the army's declared support for America's war on terror and attacks made by the Pakistani military on Taliban strongholds in FATA. Ironically, as Rashid makes clear, it was exactly groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which were originally created by the ISI, that have now turned their guns on their creators, as well as brazenly launching well-equipped and well-trained teams of jihadis into Indian territory. In doing so they are severely damaging Pakistani interests abroad, and bringing Pakistan to the brink of a war it cannot possibly win."

And last, but certainly not the least, is Dalrymple's suggestion that the "Saudi-financed advance of Wahhabi Islam" needs to be stopped, and that the Sufism of provinces such as Sindh could be an effective counter against such puritanical strains:

The Saudis have invested intensively in Wahhabi madrasas in the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab, with dramatic effect, radically changing the religious culture of an entire region. The tolerant Sufi culture of Sindh has been able to defy this imported Wahhabi radicalism. The politically moderating effect of Sufism was recently described in a RAND Corporation report recommending support for Sufism as an "open, intellectual interpretation of Islam." Here is an entirely indigenous and homegrown Islamic resistance movement to fundamentalism, with deep roots in South Asian culture. Its importance cannot be overestimated. Could it have a political effect in a country still dominated by military forces that continue to fund and train jihadi groups? It is one of the few sources of hope left in the increasingly bleak political landscape of this strategically crucial country.

Ramachandra Guha on his Lahore trip

The historian Ramachandra Guha, author of India after Gandhi, writes about his recent Lahore trip here. A sample:

The day before I was due to depart for Lahore, a publisher friend sent me a story by a writer she referred to as "a sort of Pakistani R.K. Narayan". I read it on the flight, and found that for once a publisher had sold an author short. Through the character of an ordinary electrician, Daniyal Mueenuddin had uncovered the violence and callousness of everyday life in rural west Punjab of Pakistan.

True, the elegance of the prose matched that of the Mysore master. But the world was more brutal, and hence more credible.

However, the world I was about to enter was altogether more civil and genteel. Lahore is Pakistan’s most cultured city. In three intense days, I met a cross-section of Pakistan’s thinking classes—journalists, activists, lawyers and economists. Naturally, our talk was dominated by the tensions then prevailing. I sensed, among these sensitive and hospitable people, a triple fear: the fear of their city being overrun by Taliban-style fundamentalists; the fear of their government being taken over once more by the military; the fear that after the recent terror attacks, their country would be shunned and scorned by India, and the world.

Quick thoughts and quotes on Sanskrit

I learned Sanskrit for five years, in middle and high school. And yet, at the end of those five years, I had nothing to show for my efforts. All the rote learning and exhausting analyses of sandhis had come to nothing. I couldn’t speak the language except for a few rudimentary, stilted sentences. Others in the class were the same way.

Over the years, I’ve lost touch with Sanskrit, and only recently have I begun to learn of its history and merits – often by Western scholars of the language. The Clay Sanskrit Library (New York University Press) for instance, is a monumental undertaking: many ancient Sanskrit texts, secular and religious, poetry and prose, are being translated; the library has already released several titles. I am currently trying to read Dandin’s Daskumaracarita (I really don’t know how to add the proper accents to the title, but the English translation, by Isabelle Onians, is called What Ten Young Men Did.)

One of the best and most evocative descriptions of Sanskrit I’ve read, though, is in linguist Nicolas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Ostler surveys the world’s greatest languages: if you ever wanted a scholarly yet readable history of languages, this is it. But it is clear he has lavished the most attention upon the 75-page chapter, Charming like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit. This is not surprising: Ostler has a PhD in linguistics and Sanskrit from MIT.

It was in Charming like a Creeper that I first learned how complex the grammar of Sanskrit – which I had much difficulty learning in school – is and how it had been relentlessly analyzed by Indian scholars such as Panini before and in the first millennium AD. As Ostler writes, “the Sanskrit word for grammar, vyakarana, instead of being based, like the Greek grammatike, on some word for word or writing, just means analysis: so language is the subject for analysis par excellence.”

The rules of grammar in Sanskrit as expounded by Panini in his treatise Ashtadhyayi are as rigorous as the transactional format of the Turing machine. This is an amazing connection: between millennia-old ideas of grammar and modern computing. I admit I am still trying to understand what this exactly means; perhaps in a few years I can write about it with more authority. But for now, here is an extract from Ostler’s book:

“…the grammar that the tradition had defined was a vast system of abstract rules, made up of a set of pithy maxims (called sutras, literally threads) written in an artificial jargon. These sutras are like nothing so much as the rules in a computational grammar of a modern language, such as might be used in a machine translation system; without any mystical or ritual element, they apply according to abstract formal principles.”

Ostler also talks about how Sanskrit spread to the far corners of Asia, traveling along with its principal disseminators, Buddhism and Hinduism. Unlike the languages that accompanied monotheisms of the Middle East – Arabic or European languages such as Spanish – the spread of Sanskrit was entirely devoid of conquest. The south-east Asian kingdoms and even places as far away as Japan, took up elements of Sanskrit probably because it was a matter of prestige, arriving with either Hinduism or Buddhism. Evidently, India had a reputation at the time as a place where great ideas and philosophies emanated from.

The case of Japan is particularly interesting. Ostler proposes that

“Japan owes the order of its symbols in its syllabary, the so-called kana, or go-ju-on, ‘fifty sounds’, to the order of letters in Indian alphabets.”

[…]

“This thoroughgoing intellectual borrowing at the root of the writing system demonstrates that not just the sound of the Buddhist chants but also elements of traditional analysis of language had spread to Japan with Sanskrit.”

Thus, Sanskrit, traveling with the Indian subcontinent's spiritual exports, influenced the far-flung parts of Asia not only with regard to religious ideas, but also subtler aspects, such as the structure of languages. Japan was not the only case: Tibet, Cambodia, and Thailand were influenced too in this fashion. In fact, these cultures may have become literate only with the coming of Sanskrit and its associated vernaculars, such as Pali.
___

And finally, a quote from an interview of Ostler, in which he summarizes why he loves Sanskrit so:

Q: Your affection for Sanskrit comes through in your book. What is it about Sanskrit that appeals to you?

A: Well, the Indian background helps: my parents would never have met if they had not both been sent out to India owing to the Second World War. But Sanskrit has many virtues that attract. Its grammar has been rigorously analyzed, but not in a doctrinaire way – there is room for intellectual debate. The classical Indian culture in which Sanskrit first flourished offers an immense variety of material, from romantic comedy and sensual poetry to epic, massive-word play, political science and philosophy. It embodies a contradiction, that a language whose literature is so lithe, should be indigenously analyzed as a sort of architectural structure. And I suppose I like the fact that it is so difficult (coming from English, certainly), yet so familiar in another way (coming at it from Latin, Greek and Russian).

Ganesha in Mayan country

Generally, India has never been very distant, no matter where I've traveled. It isn't hard to find Indians and, besides, there is always the ubiquitous Indian restaurant, however pathetic. Even in the town of St. Etienne, which is in a provincial part of France and where I never expected to eat any curry, I found at least four Indian restaurants.

But in remote Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, the only Indians are Mayan Indians. In the highland city of San Cristobal de las Casas, there was, for a long time, no indication that there would be anything from the home country - and I expected it to stay that way. So you can imagine my surprise when, on one of my walks through town, I found the following sign.


I still haven’t figured out what it means – I believe it is a sign for a hotel or hostel. But how nice it was to see my favorite deity, the pot-bellied Ganesha, the Elephant God, rendered so well so far away from home.

A whirlwind summary of Mexico

I am back from Mexico. The trip was illuminating in many ways. It’s time now to get on paper everything of importance that I observed. I’ll start with broad thoughts on the country, and in future posts – which might run for the next two months, or even more – I’ll elaborate on specific aspects. Wherever possible, I’ll try to contrast Mexico with India in the hope of unearthing interesting insights. Some readers may have wondered why I focus on topics that most of the time are unrelated to India. Indeed, it’s been a conscious choice, made in the hope that, at some time in the future, armed with knowledge about other cultures and their histories, I’ll be able to understand my own background better.

Mexico – the modern nation state – is about a fifth the size of the United States (India is about a third). It is broad in the north, and progressively tapers in width; at its southern end, the Yucatan Peninsula juts back up into the Atlantic, like the tail of a scorpion. This northward tilt of the Yucatan Peninsula means that Miami to Cancun is a short jaunt. Unsurprisingly, coastal Yucatan is full of beach resorts packed with American revelers.


My first trip to Mexico was in May 2007. I visited then the northern state of Chihuahua, the largest in the country, and which shares a long border with the United States. This time, I visited Mexico City, the capital, in Central Mexico. I also went to the country’s southernmost state, Chiapas. These are three very different places. Mexico may only be a fifth of the United States in size, but mountain ranges run relentlessly through the country. It takes a lot of time to travel by road in Mexico. For instance, Chiapas is a tiny southern state, and though roads there are in good condition, it takes seven hours to travel from San Cristobal de Las Casas in the central highlands to the Lacandon Rainforest, along the Mexico-Guatemala border.

Geography of this sort generally means diversity, and indeed, Mexico had diverse cultures before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City is testimony to that diversity. This unbelievably comprehensive museum collects and maintains with great care all pre-Hispanic cultures. Not just the Aztecs and the Mayans, the most visible and popular cultures, but also Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Olmecs, Toltecs, the people of Casas Grandes and countless others. Just as the Indian subcontinent has a shared civilizational heritage, yet each region its own culture, language and distinctness, so Mexico once had numerous cultures with common practices but which maintained their own identities and languages.

All that began to change in 1519, when strange things began happening on the Atlantic coast of Mexico. Bearded men arrived in ships, and rode on massive beasts that had never been seen before. Horses, which the Spaniards introduced, were new to the Americas. Indeed, all domesticated mammals – cows, pigs, donkeys, pack mules – did not exist in either North or South America at the time of Spanish arrival.

The clashes that ensued between the Spanish and the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mexico were won decisively by the Spanish. Some of the collisions were quite destructive - destructive on the pre-Hispanic side - as I’ve often stressed before.
____

In the centuries that followed, indigenous languages slowly faded – though many like Nahuatl still persist to this day – and Spanish became the lingua franca. Millions were converted to Catholicism. The Catholic Church became powerful. In contrast to Protestant United States, where the natives were either exterminated or corralled into reservations, the Spaniards in Mexico (then called New Spain) intermarried with the Indians, giving rise to the mestizo. This is a vital fact and difference between Mexico and its northern neighbor.

Colonial Mexico had a clear hierarchy: at the top was the tiny elite comprising of those born in Spain but living in Mexico; next were the criollos, who were of Spanish descent, but born in Mexico; next came the mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Indian descent. At the bottom of the pyramid were blacks and mulattoes who had been imported as slaves, and, of course, millions of Indians, many of whom were also enslaved and given very few rights.

Today, mestizos form nearly 60-75% of the population of Mexico. Northern Mexico – the Chihuahua region – even had Chinese immigrants, who had come to work for the construction of railroads in the 19th century. I met a potter in the village of Mata Ortiz who claimed he had some Chinese ancestry - and it looked that way too. There are also Mormon and Mennonite communities in Chihuahua.

In 1821, Mexico gained independence from Spain, but the country remained on the boil for the next hundred years. In that period, it lost almost half of its territory – all in its north: Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas – to American aggression. This is why immigrant Mexicans in the American Southwest today will tell you that they are merely repopulating a territory that is rightfully theirs.

____

In the late 1850s Mexico elected a liberal Indian President, Benito Juarez (left). This was a remarkable achievement, not only because Juarez was Indian - Indians were the most underrepresented group - but also because he was born into a poor family. Western Europe, meanwhile, was hatching its colonial schemes: Mexico was soon invaded by France, and came to be ruled for a while by, believe it or not, Maximilian I, a scion of an Austrian royal family. (Maximilian's wife Carlota was the daughter of the Belgian King Leopold, who plundered the Congo and sanctioned the death of millions – a holocaust that is hardly ever talked about.)


Eventually, though, Juarez regained control and after his death, Porfirio Diaz ruled for more than three decades. Diaz’s rule ended with the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, in 1911. The revolution essentially channeled the rage of peasants and the working class against wealthy, property-owning elite, and threw up such leaders as Emiliano Zapata, Francis Madero, and Pancho Villa. If you visit Mexico, you’ll find Zapata’s fiery face, with its long mustache (left), staring at you from walls and paintings – Zapata seems to be everywhere. His name also features in a modern, still-existing movement in Chiapas, which I mention below.

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For the last 80 years, Mexico has had relative political stability, though one party – the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI – held power for more than seven decades, up until 2000. The country has benefited from its large oil reserves. In the 1990s, the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were finalized, causing much controversy.

On January 1st 1994, as NAFTA went into effect, and as communal land was increasingly privatized, a new movement, comprising largely of indigenous people, emerged in Chiapas, called the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN in Spanish). EZLN was suppressed by the Mexican military in its initial years, but is still active in the villages of Chiapas. I saw plenty of signs during my travels that suggested it is still functioning.

With regard to the concerns they raise, movements like EZLN are not different from shadowy Marxist-Naxal movements in India.

____

Like India, Mexico is deeply unequal and many live in poverty. Mexico's complex history of subjugation and power have meant that wealth has not always trickled to those at the bottom. But if I compare, say, Bombay with Mexico City – two of the world’s largest cities – I would say the former, despite being more glitzy and glamorous, is a lot poorer and weaker in terms of infrastructure than the latter.

But as far as petty and violent crime is concerned, Mexico City probably fares worse: carjackings, kidnappings and murders are rife. Mexico’s drug cartels, its bane, have entered a new phase: the equilibrium of power seems to have spiraled out of control, resulting in increased violence this past year (violence has been especially severe in certain states like Michoacan and Sinaloa). The cartels are also locked in a struggle with Felipe Calderon’s government, which has decided to confront them head on. During my visit, one newspaper had a headline that screamed “Decapitated!” (in Spanish, of course); and below was the gruesome image of ten trussed-up headless men.

____

Infrastructure in Mexico is quite good. Roads and public transportation are very reasonable – the buses extremely comfortable and fares low – even in poorer states like Chiapas. One can argue that the country has been independent since 1821, and therefore has had much more time to control its trajectory as a nation and provide for its people. Indeed, given that it is rich in resources, it might come as a surprise to many that Mexico has not attained first-world status yet.

But really there is nothing to be surprised about. Modernity remains a wily beast, always eluding, always evanescent. Few countries have managed to tame it successfully, and Mexico is no exception.

Best fiction and nonfiction at The Middle Stage

I should be writing about what I am doing in Mexico - as I vaguely promised - but I really haven't had the time. A part of me insists strongly : "When you are traveling, focus on the travel, observe, talk to as many people as possible, and worry about collecting your thoughts later." And so I haven't gotten down to writing anything. But just to orient readers, I am in the southern state of Chiapas, which borders Gautemala.

Let me also use this opportunity to say Happy New Year to all my readers.

I do have something else to share. I've written earlier about Chandrahas Choudhury of the The Middle Stage earlier. Chandrahas is an exceptional interpreter of books and literature. And nowhere is the scale of his effort and the diversity of books he writes about more evident than in his end of the year list of best books. This year, his readers get an extra reward: a separate list for fiction and non fiction. This a great collection, and contains many books that you may not have heard of. But as you pause to read Chandrahas' notes on the books, you'll realize why they are good and how, especially in the case of non-fiction, they tell us something new.

Traveling to Mexico City

Some readers of this blog know I am fascinated by Mexico. Why? There are many reasons, but one is certainly Mexico's history - particularly the history of Mexico City. There's an element of drama in how the city was founded by the Mexicas (who are known more popularly but imprecisely as the Aztecs). There's also an element of drama in the city's eventual conquest by the Spanish.

Bernal Diaz Del Castillo (1492 - 1584) provides in The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico an eyewitness account of Spanish soldiers entering the City of Mexico for the first time. The soldiers were led by the conquistador Hernan Cortes. It was a remarkable historical moment, and Castillo's account is one of the few glimpses we have of the Mexico City of the early 16th century - called by its then rulers as Tenochtitlan - before it was laid to waste.

We proceeded along the Causeway which is here in eight paces in width and runs so straight to the City of Mexico that it does not seem to turn much or little, but, broad as it is, it was so crowded with people that there was hardly room for them all, some of them going to and others returning from Mexico [City], besides those who had come out to see us, so that we were hardly able to pass by the crowds of them that came and the towers and cues were full of people as well as the canoes from all parts of the lake.

[…]

Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the Causeway were many bridges at intervals and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we – we did not even number four hundred soldiers!

(Picture of the lake city of Tenochtitlan - the lake has since been drained - as recollected by Cortes, the conquistador who took over it; picture from here.)

Even today, Mexico City, with a population of somewhere between 15 and 20 million, is one of the great cities of world. Many parts of the city are capsules of history, markers of that dramatic collision between the Spanish and the Mexicas.

___


I’ll be traveling to Mexico City tomorrow, to explore some of that history. Especially the famous National Museum of Anthropology, where there is a model of Tenochtitlan and its spectacular pyramids, in addition to an inexhaustible number of exhibits on Mexico's long and complex history. I’ll be in Mexico City for a few days, and then will go on to Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico, bordering Gautemala, to get a sense of the country's Mayan past. There, my plan is to visit the ruins at Palenque (example relief from the museum in Palenque, left).

Blogging thus may be light until the New Year; but if I do have internet access and have the time, I will try to write from some of the places I am visiting.

Hurling size 10 shoes: What people do in a free society

By now, most of you would have seen this. As Falstaff says, reality can sometimes outdo fiction. What was President Bush's response? This:

“All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said, continuing to take questions and noting the apologies. He also called the incident a sign of democracy, saying, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves,” as the man’s screaming could be heard outside.

Links

1. I've always put in a good word for the documentaries of Frontline, but now I've found another terrific source. This too a PBS production; it's called Wide Angle. The two documentaries I would especially recommend: Brazil in Black and White, which follows several Brazilian kids trying to get into college, and the effect of a recently implemented affirmative action policy. And Back to School - this one is an all time favorite - follows six children (one each in Kenya, Benin, India (in Rajasthan), Japan, Romania and Brazil and Afghanistan), trying to attend primary school, and the challenges they face.

2. Confessions of a xenophile: Amitav Ghosh writes in this contemplative essay about his early experiences in the village of Lataifa in Egypt, which led to one of his best books, In an antique land. Ghosh ties his time in Egypt to something broader: a yearning for universalism. Some excerpts:

The world today is very different from that of 1980, when I came to Egypt. The conversations and exchanges that re-commenced in the post-war period are now in danger of being broken off again. Today, especially in the Anglo-American world, capitalism and empire are once again being packaged together, in a bundle that is scarcely distinguishable from the old ‘civilizing mission’. Indeed, one of the outcomes of the horrifying attacks of 9/11 was that it led to an extraordinary rehabilitation of imperialism, not merely as a political and military force, but also as an ideology – one that has led to the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq.

[....]

Against this background it is tempting to look back on the days of non-alignment with some nostalgia: and indeed there was much that was valuable in that period. Yet it would be idle to pretend that solutions could be found by looking backwards in time. That was a certain historical moment and it has passed. If I have reflected on it here, it is not in order to suggest that we should try to turn back the clock – as religious fundamentalists seek to do – nor in order to fall back on an ideology of permanent victimhood such as that which the French rightly castigate as ‘tiers-mondisme’. I have pointed to that period, rather, in order to evoke the desires and hopes that animated it, in particular to its strain of xenophilia, to its yearning for a certain kind of universalism – not a universalism merely of principles and philosophy, but one of face-to-face encounters, of everyday experience. Except that this time we must correct the mistake that lay at the heart of that older anti-colonial impulse – which is that we must not only include the West within this spectrum of desire, we must also acknowledge that both the West and we ourselves have been irreversibly changed by our encounter with each other. We must recognize that in the West, as in Asia, Africa and elsewhere, there are great numbers of people who, by force of circumstance, have become xenophiles, in the deepest sense, of acknowledging that in matters of language, culture and civilization, their heritage, like ours, is fragmented, fissured and incomplete. Only when our work begins to embody the conflicts, the pain, the laughter, and the yearning that comes from this incompleteness will our work be a true mirror of the world we live in.

A visit to an emergency room

No, nothing to be alarmed about: I did not visit as a patient. My research focuses on developing methods that can make healthcare run more efficiently, and I’ve just begun to explore how emergency room (ER) operations can be improved. For a country that is the leader in just about everything – especially medical research, technology and innovation – the United States has a lamentable health care delivery system. And nowhere is it more evident than in emergency rooms across the country. Patients, even patients who have had a stroke, may have to wait hours before getting care. Some wait seven to eight hours. In major cities, ambulances carrying patients to an emergency room are diverted to other emergency rooms, simply because there is no capacity and queues are long. (Queues again! Haven’t we talked about queues before?)

The ER I visited is in Baystate Medical Center, in Springfield, Massachusetts. In terms of volume, this is one of the largest in the country. About 110,000 patients use it each year; about 300 patients come to the ER every day, 80 of them brought by ambulances. Others just show up by car, accompanied by friends or relatives.

Some have ordinary ailments, like a cold or sore throat. Instead of going to visit a primary care doctor, they use the ER. They do this probably because they don’t have a doctor. And that in turn is probably because they don’t have insurance. The statistic that crops up in just about every major discussion about the US healthcare system is that there are about 45 million uninsured patients in the country – a colossally high number; indeed an unforgivable number if you compare with other developed countries. Massachusetts is a bit ahead of the curve and has tried to fix the problem, but other states lag.

So if you don’t have insurance, and if you have a medical condition, you end up using the ER and pay a huge bill. But even if you have insurance, you might use the ER because you could not obtain an appointment with your doctor. ERs cannot refuse care; they have to treat everyone who shows up, irrespective of whether the patient has a trivial condition or is uninsured.

ERs, thus, are a safety net; they soak up the consequences of inefficiencies whose root causes lie elsewhere.

____

At the Baystate ER, patients with minor ailments are sent to a Fast Track section. That way they do not interfere with the more critical patients who are sent to the main area. But the name Fast Track has become something of a joke. Waiting times for getting into Fast Track can be very long. So to pacify patients and ensure they don’t feel mocked, the Fast Track area was recently renamed the General Treatment section.

Needless to say, only the name has changed; the waiting times have not.

When I visited the Baystate ER, it was about 2 pm in the afternoon. It was crowded. Early mornings are the least busy hours; but by noon things start picking up. By late afternoon, early evening, the ER is packed. This too is a US-wide trend – and perhaps true worldwide as well.

In the waiting area, there were patients and their relatives and friends. A couple of the patients were in wheelchairs; they were elderly, clearly sick, and their faces had a resigned and faded look to them. Their faces told also of the passage of time: seconds had become minutes and minutes hours, yet they were still waiting. If sicker patients arrive, they tend to preferred, thus increasing the waits for less sick patients. But assessments of sickness are to some extent subjective, inevitably so.

The main emergency area – entered from the waiting area through double doors – was a world apart. It was a buzz of activity and felt surreal. Constant activity and motion: like a video on fast-forward. There was a central square, the inner portion of which consisted of staff working hastily with computers, records, paperwork. On the outside, doctors, nurses, assistants swirled around immobile beds with prostate patients. These beds are supposed to be in rooms, but to create capacity, beds had been added to the hallway. Monitors displayed constantly changing information: how much time each patient had been in the ER, whether the tests that had been ordered had returned, which resident or doctor was assigned to the patient. The charge nurse, who was in charge of operations, had tough decisions to make. Whom to admit next? Which nurse to assign to which patient? Should another bed be added to the already overcrowded hallway?

The staff, even though busy constantly attending to something, seemed cheerful enough; their cheer was much needed, considering the bleak faces of the patients.

Patients, once they are treated, are either discharged or admitted to the nearby Baystate Hospital. And here too there is a crunch. Hospital beds are a scarce resource, and generally there is no availability. So the patients continue to wait in ER beds, effectively denying beds to other patients waiting for hours for treatment in the waiting area. Such as the elderly patients I'd seen upon entering, waiting in wheelchairs and with tormented looks.

So it goes. Emergency rooms are not supposed to be pleasant places. The nurses and doctors who work there know there is no room for sentimentalism. Work just needs to be done. But ERs are also a barometer of the larger issues that ail a healthcare system. The US healthcare system is badly fragmented and inefficient; and a large part of the cost is borne by ERs.

Elections in Ghana

Ghana, the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence - in 1957 - will have elections this coming week. After what happened in Kenya in December last year - that country too was regarded as stable until elections - and in Zimbabwe earlier this year, there might be some apprehension. Ghana also has recently discovered oil, always a problem - just look at neighboring Nigeria, whose oil wealth has been its bane.



(Video, via Ethan Zuckerman.)

But Ghana, everyone is saying, is different. Democracy has taken deep root there; the media and reporting scene is vibrant, the election commission strong. And the vote counting system - going by what this article says - is remarkably transparent:

During elections radio stations like the capital's JoyFM dispatch staff armed with mobile phones around the country.

The correspondent gives continuous live updates and reports by mobile phone to their media "election headquarters".

Once results are collated at the constituency, in the presence of party officials and electoral officers, the radio stations rapidly compile the results, broadcast them and a clear picture of the outcome is available within 24 hours.

The process has become too fast for old-fashioned election shenanigans.

JoyFM takes this a step further and publishes the results on the internet, thereby making it virtually impossible for a government to fiddle with results during a deliberate delay in their release by a government-controlled electoral commission as is the case elsewhere in Africa.

That's quite impressive; with such accountability, everything should be fine next week. Still, there will always be some some tension; besides the race is close. Fingers will be crossed.

New York Times: Best 10 books of the year

It's that time of the year. Everyone has their own list of best books, and the New York Times has put up what it thinks is best. Toni Morrison's A Mercy is there, so is Joseph O Neill's Netherland, and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth; in non-fiction, Patrick French's comprehensive biography of VS Naipaul, The World is What it is.

Innovation and improvisation in a constrained environment

At Ethan Zuckerman’s blog, My Heart’s In Accra, I came across this remarkable post. It’s all about how the scarcity of resources engenders creative solutions. Some of this creativity is evident in developing countries, where hardware odds and ends are put to unexpected use, or new devices developed from readily available materials. Here are two examples.

1. A pot-in-pot refrigerator

Suppose you are in a developing country with a hot climate. You lack reliable electricity, and a generator is too expensive. Suppose you sell fruits and vegetables. How do you keep your produce from rotting in the heat; how do you prevent it from being swarmed by flies?

The answer: a refrigerator, under $2, made only of earthen pots.

(Figure from here)

The idea seems similar to the earthen pots I used to have wonderfully cool water from in India. Still, this is different. There are two pots involved – it’s a pot-in-pot system – and the apparatus is a lot more versatile. It can store peppers, eggplant, spinach, and they can stay edible for up to twelve days; sometimes even longer. The Nigerian Mohammed Bah Abba, from a family of pot-makers, is credited with the invention. Details:

To the surprise of many, the world’s cheapest refrigerator costs less than $2 dollars to make, uses minimal resources to produce and runs completely without electricity. It’s called a zeer pot, or the pot-in-pot and was developed by Mohammed Bah Abba, who realized that he could put the second law of thermodynamics and transpiration to work for him. The zeer pot, is actually two earthenware pots (I’m assuming they are both unglazed), one pot smaller than the other. The smaller pot is put inside the bigger pot, and the space in-between them is filled with sand. The sand is made wet with water (twice a day) and a wet towel is put on top of the two pots to keep warm air from entering the interior. As water in the sand evaporates through the surface of the outer pot, it carries heat, drawing it away from the inner core, thus cooling the inside of the inner pot which can be filled with soft-drinks, water, fresh fruit, vegetables or even meat. A damp cloth placed on top keeps the inside pot away from hot air. In this way, fresh produce can be kept for long periods of time without the need for electricity, or camping coolers made high embodied energy. Tomatoes and peppers will last for up to three weeks, and African spinach, or rocket, which normally would spoil after just a day in the intense African heat, can and will remain edible for up to twelve days. Eggplants will keep for up to 27 days instead of three. It can even be used for storing sorghum and millets for a long time since it protects from humidity, thus preventing fungi from developing. The zeer will keep water (and other liquid beverages) at about 15 degrees Celsius, and even meat can be kept fresh for long periods.

The new technology is now being used by farmers at the market. Fresh produce is kept inside, with just a couple fresh items displayed on the damp towel resting on top. In this way, most of the produce is kept hidden away from both warm air and insects. In the past, all produce was displayed in the open air, attracting flies resulting in stomach disease such as dysentery. Now food can be kept fresh for longer and kept away from flies...even miles away from electricity or ice.

(Figure from here)

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2. Pedal-powering a knife-sharpener

The pot-in-pot cooler is something new, designed and produced from readily available local materials. Now consider how something as simple and commonplace as a bicycle can be used, yes, for getting from one place to another, but also for a very different trade: knife sharpening.

Bikes are, as Zuckerman says,

“a platform that’s seen perhaps the most innovation in Africa. With a little bit of hacking, you can turn a bicycle into a cargo vehicle, loading it down with frightening quantities of bananas. Add a wheeled cart behind and a bicycle is an ambulance. Add a tiny one-stroke engine and it’s a motorbike, capable of propelling the rider over long distances… and she can start pedaling when she runs out of gas. In Uganda, bicycles become phone booths, with wireless phones attached to metal boxes mounted on the handlebars.”

But using a bike for knife sharpening has an altogether different appeal. It is remarkably simple and intuitive, as most improvisations often are. And it reminded me of something from my school days in India, in Ahmadabad and Nagpur.

My parents bought me a large, rather cumbersome black bicycle; I believe it was one of those hardy Hero bicycles. Others – I envied them – used colorful, pink and red ones, the BSA SLRs, with a side stand. This last detail about side stands is important. Mine didn’t have a side stand: the stand went symmetrically over the back wheel; you had to pull the weight of bicycle backwards to park it. The delightful thing about this feature was that you could sit and pedal in parked position, and the wheel would spin without the bicycle moving. It was always a pleasure to pedal like this, just for timepass.



But the power generated by the pedaling can be put to good use. And so it has been:

Bikes get really interesting when you let them change function. In my single favorite video on Afrigadget, Peter Kahugu shows off his knife-sharpening bicycle in Nairobi. I love the video because I owned the same damned bicycle when I lived in Ghana in 1993. It’s a heavy, Indian-made beast, but it’s indestructible, and has some cool features. One useful feature is a huge kickstand that surrounds the back wheel. This lets you park the bike with the rear wheel off the ground… which allows you to ride the bike and spin the rear wheel without the bike going anywhere.

That’s the key to Peter’s business, as he uses the power of that back wheel to turn a belt which turns a grindstone mounted on the handlebar… which lets Peter sharpen knives and scissors, a trade that pays him a solid wage, roughly $10 a day. His business is entirely portable, which lets him bring his services to his clients. And he can take his tools home at the end of the day. The bicycle is still a transport tool, but it’s also a power generation tool.

(Figure from here.)

Interesting, isn’t it? In India, I remember the knife-sharpener coming once in six months or so, checking if we had any work for him. I remember him riding a bicycle; I remember also the steady hum of his sharpener. But did he use the same system described above for generating power? I don’t seem to recall very clearly.

But Indian readers - maybe you have a better recollection?

Attacks in Mumbai - again

Came back from a road trip, to learn the horrifying news about Mumbai. Varnam provides some useful links; Amit Varma writes about his experience. And Sonia Faleiro writes a moving piece. Both Amit and Sonia were very close to where some of the shooting happened. I was also glad to hear that my friend Chandrahas is safe.

Salil Tripathi has a piece in the Far Eastern Economic Review. And his son, the 19-year old Udayan Tripathi, has a beautiful essay on the attacks, quoted by that inexhaustible blogger, Prem Panicker, who himself has a series of links and updates (if access to his blog is spotty, press refresh enough times and you'll get there). And from the WSJ: India's antiterror blunders. And more: Suketu Mehta, author of one of the best books about Mumbai, Maximum City, in the New York Times; and Desipundit aggregates a number of updates and provides links to more articles and essays.