The Icarus Complex

Hate Speech? I Beg to Differ.

2011-12-08T19:44:00.000+05:30

According to India's Union Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Kapil Sibal, hate speech is the big issue due to which the government is moving to censor the Internet. The following graph, made from data made public by Google, shows removal requests made by the Indian government to Google, broken down on the basis of reason for removal. Google began classifying these requests on the basis of reason for removal only from the period July - December 2010, so there are only two data points for each category. Nevertheless, the true intention of the government is quite clear from the graph: 'hate speech' went down from 11 to 8, whereas 'government criticism' went up from 11 to a whopping 255 (more than 70% of all requests during January - June 2011). It is interesting to note that it was during this latter period that the anti-corruption movement started by Anna Hazare and others gained momentum, so it is probably correct to assume that more than the usual level of government criticism appeared online. This would then correlate with the increased number of removal requests for 'government criticism', but that still does not help Sibal's cause. The fact that the government did not identify more 'hate speech' online and request for their removal - if it really were the big problem, and the reason for governmental censoring - undermines any argument that this lawyer-turned-politician makes. Sorry, Sibal, but your case does not hold water.

God Kills Development, or Development Kills God

2011-09-13T14:16:00.000+05:30

Here is an interactive plot of Human Development Index (HDI) normalised with respect to the maximum, compared to the similarly normalised value of (number of places of worship / population) for Indian states. Source: Wikipedia/Census 2001 and 2011.

The orange line is a linear fit to the normalised HDI values, and it clearly shows a downward trend with increasing worship-place-to-people ratio. The state abbreviations are in a modified ISO 3166-2:IN format, starting with Chandigarh on the left to Jammu and Kashmir on the right. One notable outlier is Kerala (HDI = 0.868, or 1 in the plot), which seems to have achieved high human development in spite of religion (alternatively, Kerala seems to cling on to religion in spite of high human development).

Draw your own conclusion.

The Holy Grail of Personal Satisfaction

2011-09-01T19:26:00.000+05:30

When I was a kid, I wanted to be three things when I grew up - rich (the richest in the world), famous (the most famous), and an astrophysicist (the best, undoubtedly). A couple of decades later, I have achieved precisely - zero of these goals, with the probability of becoming at least two of the above not getting any bigger. So here's a graphic celebrating mediocrity, à la Indexed.

The New Devil's Dictionary

2011-04-29T20:36:00.001+05:30

Ambrose Bierce published The Cynic's Word Book in 1906. In 1911, it was retitled The Devil's Dictionary. A hundred years later, it is high time to add a few more words into this infamous tome, and to update a few definitions, to keep the contemporary flavour alive. Although I have tried to accommodate a general audience, some local usages have inevitably crept in, for which I apologise.

BIGOT, n. A person who says out loud what you wouldn't.

BLOG, v. The act of writing for free because nobody's willing to pay for it.

CREATIONISM, n. (American) Religion that can be taught in biology class.

FREE SPEECH, n. The right to say what you think, as long as it is accepted by those around you. -- compare BIGOT, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

HATE CRIME, n. (American) A crime perpetrated by heterosexual white Christian males.

HINDUTVA, n. (Indian) The philosophy of being proud of a name the Muslims^* gave you.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, n. An award given to terrorists, environmental activists, Chinese dissidents, and African Americans.

PATRIOTIC, adj. (Indian) TWEETing clichés on Independence Day and sharing advertising gimmicks on Facebook.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, n. The art of saying what people don't want to hear in a way that they don't mind.

RESERVATION, n. (Indian) A state policy implementing the age-old Indian belief that not all men are born equal. Some are born privileged, the rest are Brahmins.

REVOLUTION, n. A set of criminal acts of the people, by the people, for the people that results in the overthrow of secular governments and the rape of foreign female reporters.

SCIENCE, n. The faith-based institution of the twenty-first century layman.

SUSTAINABILITY, n. Not really defined, but if you are not doing it, you are a horrible person.

TEA PARTY, n. (American) A party of libertarians as far as personal tax is concerned, a party of authoritarians when it comes to personal liberty.

TWEET, v. BLOGging for people who don't have much to say.

^* Actually, the Persians.

RIP Sathya Sai Baba

2011-04-24T12:31:00.004+05:30

I am a fan of FSJ's poetry, so here's one in his style, mourning the demise of India's favourite charlatan, Sathya Sai Baba.

Rest In Peace, Sathya Sai Baba.
O sultan of sleight of hand,
O prince of prestidigitation,
O lord of legerdemain, you
Fooled millions into believing
That you are God, not a man.
Engineers, doctors, scientists,
Politicians, all flocked to you
In droves.
You abused numerous white men,
And their underage boys.
But I guess that's okay.
If they were stupid enough to
Get molested by you,
They probably deserved it,
The poor bastards!
You built numerous schools, even though
Your life was proof that
Education is overrated,
That you could be a scientist
And still be incapable of reasoning.
Sorcar, Jr. says you are nothing
But a parlour magician.
A bit unkind of him, I think.
After all, you made it bigger than
He did.
Now that you are dead,
I wonder who you will molest.
If what South Park has to say is
Anything to go by,
I'm sure you're having fun in Hell
With Satan, Saddam, and Gandhi.

Catholic Brahmins, Central Asian Jats, and Other Creatures

2011-04-03T12:34:00.011+05:30

Just as the 20th century, among other things, was the century of the computer revolution - starting with the invention of the transistor, and leading up to the spread of the personal computer and the Internet, the 21st century will be the century of a genetics revolution. Enabled by DNA-sequencing chips that can sequence DNA quickly and in an automated fashion, the first decade has already seen the rise of personal genomics services such as Family Tree DNA, deCODEme, 23andMe, and the like, not to mention public-participation research projects such as National Geographic's Genographic Project. For a small fee, these services sequence parts of your genome to figure out your ancestry and in some cases, disease risk. In this post, I shall dwell exclusively on genetic deduction of ancestry.

Human beings are prone to biases that we pick up throughout childhood and young adulthood. For some people, these prejudices are frozen into the brain for the rest of their lives. Some others, as they grow older, work to root out these unqualified judgements from their minds, by moving out of their comfort zone of set beliefs and taking into account new information that they possess. Unfortunately, even when the new information is quantifiable and verifiable data such as that provided by genetics, most people tend to interpret it to fit their theories, even if it is obviously against it. This tendency has the potential to be dangerous, as the Germans of the early 20th century demonstrated, on the basis of linguistic data (given, unlike genetic data, linguistic data is more open to interpretation).

A couple of less pernicious examples that I chanced across on 23andMe are the 'Catholic Brahmin' from Goa and the Jat individual who claims his ancestry is Central Asian. The former is a typical case, at least in Kerala, where people belonging to certain Christian denominations claim to be descendants of Brahmins converted by St. Thomas in the first century CE. I do not know about the bit about St. Thomas, but the Brahmin ancestry claim has some amount of truth to it. There are Christians who belong to the paternal haplogroup R1a1 and its subgroups, which are common among Brahmins in India. Unfortunately, all a haplogroup tells you is that there was one individual, on one extremal branch of your ancestry tree, that might have been a Brahmin. Depending on how farther back in time this individual existed, most of the person's ancestry may not be from the same ethnic group. For example, a man whose great-grandfather was the sole Brahmin in his ancestry would be one-eighth Brahmin. Now, assume that the legend of St. Thomas is true, and that there exists about 60 generations between the first convert and today's Christian. This man with only one Brahmin in his ancestry is then one-one million trillionth Brahmin (assuming a full binary tree), yet his genes would tell him he is an R1a1. Of course, human population has never been one million trillion at any point in time, our family trees are not as simple as binary trees, and I am cavilling here and citing only one extreme situation when it is probable that many of these people would have multiple Brahmin ancestors. I personally do not know anything about this particular Catholic on 23andMe, so I could be dead wrong, and both his or her parents could have been Brahmins. If not, he or she may be as much a 'Catholic Brahmin' as, say, a 'Catholic Sudra'. The point is that haplogroups tell you only a fraction of the story.

The other example is a person with a typical Punjabi name, who claims to be a Jat. If the incredible people at Wikipedia are to be believed, the Jats have been in what is now India from at least the 4th century CE. Assuming that they are descendants of the Indo-Scythians as Wikipedia tells us, who, in turn, are descendants of the Scythians (the Sakas), these peoples have been residents of the Indian subcontinent since about 1500 BC. According to this individual's profile page, he is of Central Asian ancestry, like the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and such. But if he chooses to go back 3500 years to claim Central Asian ancestry, should it not be more fair to his origins to go back 60,000 years instead, and call himself an African? Alas, many Indians prefer to see themselves as not belonging to India ab origine, but at the same time, prefer not to go so far back in time that they have to be considered related to the people of the Dark Continent. For much of the past few hundred years, it was a similar mentality that drove the search for a European urheimat - a piece of land that was, for a fleeting instant, the European homeland.

A related prejudice is the belief of many Brahmins that they are 'pure' Aryans. Of course, they are descendants of people who might have called themselves Aryans in an ethnic context, but like the Christian descendants of Brahmins, may no longer belong exactly to their ancestors' ethnicity. For example, the admixture analyses being done over at the Harappa Ancestry Project blog shows varying amounts of ancestral components for Brahmins from various parts of the country, including East Asian components that would otherwise not be expected.

For most people though, genetic testing seems to be reducing, or even eliminating, ethnic prejudices. It is good, for 'purebred' is a term that is better applied to dogs than men.

UPDATE: I have, in the past, been guilty of many of these prejudices myself, including the 'Central Asian origin' one, and the 'pure Aryan' one, just to make it clear that I do not consider myself above bigotry.

Calamities, Disasters, and Catastrophes

2011-03-25T11:38:00.000+05:30

'Japan seems to be heading towards a nuclear catastrophe... French Energy Minister Eric Besson Tuesday said in a radio interview.'
- 'French Minister: Japan Seems Headed Towards Nuclear Catastrophe', The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2011

'... that regulators have learned about the Japanese catastrophe indicated that...'
- 'Japan's catastrophe resonates at economic, regulatory and personal levels', The Washington Post, March 21, 2011

Calamities of nature, for many people, are events of great sorrow at loss that could not have been avoided. Strangely, it is not so for a very vocal group that includes news organisations and environmentalists. Reminding one of a wake of vultures on a dead branch of a fallen tree, their crooked beaks sniffing the air, waiting for - and encouraging - death, so that they can pick on the carcass of what was once a beautiful, living, organism, these entities see earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and landslides, as opportunities to push their meaningless agendas. Celebrating the earthquake and the tsunami that happened in Japan, and the crises at a few nuclear reactors that followed, one of the usual suspects, Greenpeace, is trying to rally the world against clean - and safe - nuclear power. Even if a technical fault or human error triggered a nuclear meltdown, such a call would not be justified, but at least I could understand the concerns of ordinary people prone to knee-jerk reactions. In the case of Japan, the Tohoku earthquake was a natural calamity of biblical proportions - the fourth largest ever recorded - that could not have been avoided, that left in its wake ruined facilities including TEPCO's nuclear reactors. Instead of admiring the engineering that made sure the reactor facilities were still standing - instead of having enriched uranium washing into homes - in spite of being pounded by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and 14-metre tall tsunami waves, these Luddites take pride, and see righteousness, in their perverted views of science and technology.

In their quest to influence the thinking of the masses, they rely on their Newspeak-ian language skills, cherry-picking words that convey a sense of doom. To prove my point, let us take a look at what Merriam-Webster has to say about the words 'calamity', 'disaster', and 'catastrophe'.

calamity: a state of deep distress or misery caused by major misfortune or loss
disaster: a sudden calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction
catastrophe: a momentous tragic event ranging from extreme misfortune to utter overthrow or ruin; utter failure

Having learnt the exact meanings of these words, let us now go back to the quoted statements from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, or almost any news article you could find on the subject and think about what the best word to choose to describe the events unfolding in Fukushima Prefecture is. 'Deep distress' is a definite yes; 'misery' may be acceptable with a stretch of the imagination; 'great damage, loss, or destruction' - there is some damage and loss, but there is nothing that could be described as destruction; 'momentous tragic event' with 'extreme misfortune' could probably be used to describe the tsunami, but remember, here we are talking about the nuclear reactors. As you can see, the only catastrophe ('utter failure') that is happening right now is in the heads of calamity howlers using the wrong words. For responsible people, 'crisis' is probably the best word to describe the situation.

In the worst case that a core meltdown does occur, it would still be a minor disaster. The world will not end. In my opinion, the last 'catastrophe' that happened on Earth was probably the event(s) that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. We have had plenty of calamities and disasters. Catastrophe, fortunately, is limited to the thin sheets of a tabloid.

Sustaining 'Sustainability'

2011-02-10T00:30:00.004+05:30

Ever since the sustainability bandwagon rolled into town, fuelled by bio-diesel from the Amazon basin and powered by a perpetual-motion engine, life has never been the same for me. My concern for the environment is so high that even when I do something as ordinary as taking a dump, I wonder, 'Is this sustainable?' Once I was so traumatised by sustainability that I did not go to the bathroom for a whole week. Imagine driving a Hummer through rush-hour traffic in the middle of New York with a full bladder and a cork up your derrière! Those days were terrible. After an excruciating visit to the doctor's followed by the longest visit to the bathroom, I decided to find out more about sustainability before blindly punishing myself.

What I found out blew my mind. Sustainability, apparently, is a method of using a resource without depleting it. Sustainability is a weapon to combat global catastrophes such as climate change and the Mayan calendar running out in 2012. Remember, Al Gore - having realised that environmental activism and investing in green futures is a much more sustainable activity than politics - had warned us about this a long time ago.

But all is not rosy with sustainability. It can have severe sociological repercussions. My close buddy Lance Armstrong once confided in me that the main reason for his break-up with Sheryl Crow was her decision not to use more than one square of toilet paper in one sitting. 'There's no way she's going to be my booty-call again,' Armstrong said categorically. The bastard - he'd rather be clean than sustainable! Like those people who flush the toilet every time they go to the bathroom.

In my opinion, the ill-effects of not being sustainable are so serious as to warrant ignoring minor drawbacks. Climate change pushes women into prostitution and Catholic clergy into paedophilia, it causes car accidents, outbreaks of pimples, and skydiving fatalities. It also is a by-product of the development of poor countries like India and China. The only solution to this is to become sustainable. So ignorant people like Bjørn Lomborg can say all the nonsense they want - like saving millions of people from the clutches of AIDS, malnutrition, poverty, and malaria are more important than planting trees - but it is a no-brainer that eradicating poverty and diseases does nothing to achieve sustainability!

To overcome ignorance, raising awareness about sustainability is very important. We need more researchers such as Rachel Pike, who 'fly all over the world' studying climate change, 'in order to make headlines' like 'The Day that Changed the Climate' (The Independent), only to raise awareness.

Having said this, I have a wonderful idea to save the planet. My idea is that taking a deep breath and refraining from exhaling is an excellent method of carbon sequestration. With the aid of such 'CO2 suckers', we can create a green, sustainable, healthy planet for our children. I propose that we start with Al Gore and Sheryl Crow.

Indian Writes 'Hello, World!' Program, Becomes Famous

2011-01-12T13:03:00.001+05:30

BANGALORE, January 12, 2011: Ram Kumar might seem like an average, living-with-parents 35-year-old Indian, but appearances can be deceptive. Mr. Kumar recently shot to fame for writing software that prints 'Hello, world!' onto the computer screen, setting a shining example for India in the eyes of the world.

Mr. Kumar was modest in his success. 'It was very challenging, but I could do this because I'm smart,' he said.

Indians all over the world are ecstatic. 'Proud of Ram Kumar. Proud to be an Indian,' Irrfffaz Khaannn tweeted from London. 'They should give him a Noble [sic] prize,' tweeted Neha Shetty from Toronto. 'It would have been even better had he printed "Hello, India!" instead of "Hello, world!",' Natwar Lal tweeted from New Delhi.

The Prime Minister has announced that Mr. Kumar will be awarded this year's Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian honour in India, and India's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Growing up, Mr. Kumar was a brilliant student who always ranked first in his class. 'He was a child prodigy,' Dasharath Kumar, Ram's father, said proudly. 'He could recall from memory all the numbers between 0 and 100.'

So what does the future hold for this Indian genius? 'My astrologer tells me this is a good time for my son,' a beaming Dasharath Kumar said. 'I'm planning to apply for a job at Google with a prototype of my code for adding two integers. I'm confident I'll get the job,' Mr. Kumar said. Well, we wish Mr. Kumar auspicious planetary positions, and kudos to him for flying the Tricolour high.

- ASININE (A Sensational INdIan News nEtwork)

Keeping (Some) Fear Alive

2010-10-30T16:33:00.002+05:30

The much-hyped 'Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear' is underway in Washington, DC, and the liberals of the country are agog with excitement. I watched a few minutes of the broadcast and saw Stephen Colbert trying to 'keep fear alive' by showing video clips of fear-mongering by Fox, MSNBC, et al. - featuring Muslims, homosexuals, abortions, aliens, flip-flops, and other bugbears as potential destroyers of the country. Conspicuously absent were the ones that do not get featured on Fox, such as climate change and genetically-modified food, bogeymen that traditionally terrorise the liberals' camp. In other words, 'restoring sanity' the way Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert see it, is not to ridicule all irrational fears, but just Republican fears.

Here, I have compiled a list of irrational fears of the general American population, classified in terms of the popular notions of 'conservatives' and 'liberals'. This list is in no way exhaustive.

Conservatives	Liberals
Muslims Homosexuals and other 'sexual deviants' 'Minorities' Stem cell therapy Abortion Cloning, genetic engineering of humans, etc.	Islamophobes Climate change catastrophe GM food Asteroids Nanoparticles Cloning, genetic engineering of humans, etc.

As you can see, there is very little overlap, except for certain things like human cloning. I figure a new political party that taps into and fosters the fear of human cloning will easily sweep elections in the United States. Nixon was right, after all.

Free Speech Comes With Fine Print

2010-10-24T10:51:00.003+05:30

Ever notice there are more Islamophobe-phobes than there are Islamophobes? One guy makes a remark construed by many to be Islamophobic, and ten guys jump on him, tie him up, and rip his guts out. It is true in other cases too, such as those related to the so-called 'climate change' enterprise. In astronomy, one does not hear proponents of modified Newtonian dynamics being labelled 'dark matter deniers', but Gore-forbid, if you happen to be a climate scientist proposing alternative theories on global warming, be ready to be called a 'climate change denier' and shunned by the rest of the community, not to mention the lay population.

Human rights in the twenty-first century, at least when it comes to free speech, has not changed much since our days hunting wildebeest in the African savannah. Back in the day, the people at the receiving end of public wrath were those of the likes of Socrates, Copernicus, and Galileo, whereas now, it is Ian Wilmut, Michael Griffin, and Juan Williams.

(A quick diversion: For those who have trouble understanding English, let me make it easy for you: Williams never said people in Muslim garb were a security threat in air travel; it is the fact that 'they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims' that causes him to get worried, and that is a valid worry. It is the fact that many Muslims put religion above nationality that is the root of international Islamic terrorism - compare, say, Brazil crying foul over Pakistan's treatment of Christians with Muslims in India castigating Israel for their treatment of the Palestinians.)

The strangest thing is that it is the so-called liberal, human-rights-loving section of the population that takes great alacrity in this witch-hunt against political in-correctness. The same people who damn China for curtailing free speech indulge in criticism (which is okay), censorship, and bullying (both of which are not) when it comes to certain topics. I guess, for these people, free speech is great, as long as you do not say what they do not want to hear.

Acronyms 101

2010-10-13T19:21:00.000+05:30

Those who have read an older post of mine, 'What's in a (Full) Name?', are aware of my disdain towards the unnecessary creation/use of acronyms. But what annoys me even more than an unnecessary acronym is an incorrect one. If you are an Indian, you probably know what I am talking about. If you do not, this post requires your immediate perusal.

I know this comes a little late in the day, but the acronym for 'Commonwealth Games' - if at all it should need one - is 'CG', and not 'CWG'. As you can see, the 'w' is not capitalised in 'Commonwealth', and therefore, should not be promoted in the abbreviation. I understand the need for efficiency, by which I mean laziness, but I would imagine 'CG 2010' to suit that need much better than the one in currency. If you have an uncontrollable urge to include the 'w' in the short form, please use lower case.

Thank you.

The Great Indian Inferiority Complex

2010-07-03T23:23:00.002+05:30

'Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It's a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal [American] Indian like a nigger, kike, wop or spic.'
- Chief White Halfoat, Catch-22, Joseph Heller

Holiday patriots and Facebook activists from India recently got a cause worth fighting for - Joel Stein's satirical article, 'My Own Private India' that appears in Time magazine this week. In the article, Joel Stein draws a humourous picture of how his hometown of Edison, NJ transformed from 'mostly white' to 'home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the US', how the Pizza Hut made way for an Indian sweets shop, and how white children stopped having places 'to learn crime' from and got dorky neighbourhood kids to play Dungeons & Dragons with. Indians, as expected, got offended, accused Stein of racism, and gave their fingers a lot of exercise over the keyboard; the same Indians who regularly call Americans stupid, and not in jest.

Apart from showing the lack of a sense of humour that seems to be afflicting the majority of Indians, this event also brings to light a deeper cause of concern - ignorance. Firstly, not all Indians belong to the same race, or ethnicity. For example, I have had my DNA analysed and have found out that I have a paternal ancestry that I share with only 30% of northern Indian men and 10% of southern Indian men - a far cry from the common Indian belief that there are only two races in the country, 'North Indians' and 'South Indians'. Secondly, if you consider the Stone Age system of racial classification in use in the United States, everyone from the Indian subcontinent fall under the same race, in which case Joel Stein, having made fun of only Indians and not Pakistanis or Bangladeshis or others, is not being racist because he made fun of only a section of the 'South Asians', and not all of them. So, technically, Stein should not be called a 'racist', but a 'nationalist'.

Racism, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. For many, it stems from a deep-seated inferiority complex. I understand that it is a big deal to expect most people to analyse anything objectively, but the least they can do is to have a sense of humour. The ability to laugh at oneself is a sign of one's own confidence, and to quote a friend, a sign of having got over the 'need to be pampered'. Till then, fellow Indians, the joke is on us.

The End of War

2010-06-21T00:34:00.000+05:30

'The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,
"What are those?"
"Soldiers."
"What are soldiers?"
"They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill
as many of the other side as he can."
The girl held still and studied.
"Do you know... I know something?"
"Yes, what is it you know?"
"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."'
- Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes, 1936

The little girl was right. But war would end not because there would be no people left to fight, but, surprisingly, because people would not want to.

When the South Korean corvette ROKS Cheonan sank in the Yellow Sea on 26 March 2010, killing 46 of the 104 on board, the result of what was most likely a North Korean torpedo attack, South Korea and the rest of the world vociferously cried foul, but did not consider it a casus belli. Sure, they were all wary of China, who brushed off the matter saying there was not enough evidence to prove the South Korean accusation. But perhaps they were wary of something bigger - the prospect of losing their wallets.

Ever since the technological revolutions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, people have been finding unprecedented opportunities to make money. The economic failures of the past few years, starting with the dotcom bust of 2000 to the recent subprime mortgage crisis have made people increasingly wary of losing their source of wealth. Governments all over the world acknowledge the fact that a devastating war can shatter the economic paradise they live in, causing everyone to shun war, no matter how outrageous the provocation. The only people willing to wage war now are Islamic terrorists, who have no government of their own and hence no economy to protect, and the rogue state of North Korea, the only country in the world controlled by a single man. I doubt if even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants war, for all his loud-mouthed bravado.

The fact that the economy takes precedence over nationalism was evident in the aftermath of the bloody siege of Mumbai in 2008, when Pakistani terrorists ran amok in India's financial capital, massacring almost 200 people. The only battles India fought with Pakistan in the wake of the attack were verbal ones. Vengeance, it seems, is an expensive proposition.

Of course, at this point it should be noted that I am making a distinction between 'war' and 'armed conflict'. What is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places in the world today can hardly be termed war. The last big war I can think of is the Gulf War that happened two decades ago.

This might very well be the end of war. Looks like greed that begot war in the first place has killed its own progeny.

Muhammad Rules. Literally.

2010-04-25T02:45:00.000+05:30

There is irrefutable evidence that the biggest religion in the world is Islam, not Christianity.

An adherent of a religion, by definition, obeys the tenets set in its holy book. The Hindu scriptures denounce the slaughter of cows, Buddhist teachings renounce violence of any kind, and the Bible preaches charity. A conservative Hindu not only does not eat cow meat, but considers cow slaughter a sacrilege of the highest order. Christians or Muslims, of course, are not obliged to refrain from eating cow meat, and they indulge in it with much gusto. Conservative Buddhists do not engage in violence, but Christians, Muslims, and Hindus do. The Qur'an deems sacrilege the display of any image of the prophet Muhammad. Muslims all over the world follow it devoutly. The converse - a person who adheres to a holy book practises the religion preached by that book - also holds true.

Comedy Central's recent censoring of South Park's representation of Muhammad conclusively shows that the people who run the channel adhere to the Qur'an, thereby making them Muslim, even though they probably have Christian names. But it is not just the people who run Comedy Central - during the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005, newspapers in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and India, among others, refused to reprint the controversial cartoons. Most Indians support Maqbool Fida Hussain drawing and displaying the Hindu goddess Saraswati in the nude, and abhor the reprinting of the controversial drawings of Muhammad. Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses is banned in India for its purported blasphemy towards Islam. South Park's creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker received death threats after they brought back Muhammad in their two-hundredth episode, leading Comedy Central to bowdlerise the next episode. The South Park Studios website, which, until the recent controversy, used to stream the pre-9/11 episode Super Best Friends in which Muhammad makes his first (uncensored) appearance, now just shows a terse message in its stead.

Since it turns out that the majority of the people on this planet stick to the rules set forth in the Qur'an, it stands to reason that this must be a Muslim world. What Christianity achieved in centuries of diligent missionary work, a few mujahideen have achieved in just a few decades. The scimitar, after all, is more powerful than the pen.

[For the non-Muslim minority, May 20, 2010 has been declared the first annual 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day'. So mark the day on your calendar, take out your pen and imagination, and draw an image of the awesome prophet. After all, it is a free country, right? Right?]

Setting Constellation

2010-02-02T20:42:00.001+05:30

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky must be turning in his grave now.

Barack Obama has proposed eliminating funding for NASA's Constellation program, and with it, managed to smother not just the United States', but mankind's ambitions to go beyond Earth orbit. What NASA will do now is to develop technology to take us down the 'Flexible Path' to such exotic locations as the Lagrange points. What humans would do there beyond what they do routinely at the ISS is something only Obama and Charles Bolden, in their sagely wisdom, envision. It also seems as if NASA will develop commercial spacecraft. If you do not realise what this means, imagine DARPA developing networking protocols today. Obama should pay a visit to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico some day.

George W. Bush, for all his perceived faults, was a visionary no less than John F. Kennedy when it came to space exploration. It was under Bush-appointed Administrator Michael Griffin that NASA began the ambitious Constellation program to develop space vehicles to go to Earth orbit (yes), the Moon, and Mars. Five years and $8 billion later, Obama, in the name of change, has decided to kill the program. Sorry, folks, I do not subscribe to the commonly-held belief that Obama is a saint. He is a megalomaniac for all that I care; a self-appointed messiah who has to 'fix' everything he sees.

So much for hope, Obama. Thank you for screwing up humanity's future.

Welcome to the Avian Network

2009-11-07T01:24:00.001+05:30

When David Waitzman published the April Fools' Day RFC, RFC 1149 ('A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers') in 1990, and later the improved RFC 2549 ('IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service'), I doubt if he would have imagined whether someone would actually implement the protocol. From a CNET article that appeared in 2001, I learnt that someone had actually tried it out, and came to the conclusion that 'taking an hour and 42 minutes to transfer a 64-byte packet of information makes the pigeon network about 5 trillion times slower than today's cutting-edge 40 Gigabit-per-second optical fiber networks'. Recent improvements in carrier pigeon technology, along with sloppiness on the part of traditional Internet Service Providers, could potentially make the above statement obsolete.

IP over Avian Carriers researchers have overcome the data rate bottleneck by replacing rolled paper on which data was printed with USB memory devices, and in two instances in the last two months, demonstrated a much higher data rate than that achieved by ADSL. In September of this year, Winston the Pigeon flew from Howick to Durban in South Africa - a distance of about 80km - with a 4GB USB memory device, clocking about 2 hours for the entire data transfer (including copying to a PC at the receiving end) - in the same time the ISP Telkom's ADSL network managed to move only about 4% of the data.

Last month, a pigeon in Australia carried 700MB of data from Tarana to Prospect in New South Wales - a distance of about 132km - in about 1 hour 5 minutes (excluding copying of the data). The ISP Telstra's internet connection timed out, leaving the transfer incomplete. It is reported that when the data transfer was initiated, the estimated time for completion was pegged at 4 to 9 hours.

As a proto-astronomer (and otherwise), it is highly disturbing to me that South Africa and Australia are facing network issues. The South African Large Telescope (SALT), an 11m optical telescope, is about 18 km from the nearest fibre optic cable, forcing astronomers to carry data by road. South Africa and Australia also happen to be the prime candidates for the upcoming Square Kilometre Array - the largest radio telescope ever built. The miserable performance of Internet Service Providers in these countries leads to questions about their governments' commitment to connectivity.

Anyway, it looks like humanity is coming full circle as far as communication is concerned. With due apologies to Cisco, welcome to a network where anything is possible. Welcome to the avian network.

Checking In to 'Hotel America'

2009-08-05T11:13:00.001+05:30

'...Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway; I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell...'

- The Eagles, 'Hotel California'

For a person standing outside the great steel-and-concrete façade of America, the country is a collection of shimmering lights strung together in the shapes of his desires. Where I come from, the hype is so high, the lure so irresistible, that the first question you encounter when you tell someone that you are going to America is whether you will ever return.

Sure, the United States is definitely a land of convenience and comfort orders of magnitude above what one finds in India. One of the first things I did after getting my student visa was to lease a single-bedroom apartment near my university campus, and I did that without having to get off my seat in front of the computer. My landowners have a website on which they have put up details of the apartment, including photographs of every room. I leased the apartment with as little an effort as the submission of a form on their website and a phone call. Try doing this in Bangalore.

On the contrary, if anyone thinks America is the epitome of human development, the tragic case of Kara Neumann proves otherwise. Dale Neumann was convicted last Saturday of second-degree reckless homicide for letting his eleven-year-old diabetic daughter die as her family crowded around her and prayed, instead of calling for a doctor. For a country at the forefront of clinical research, where the average life expectancy is more than 78 years, to let a child die of such primitive beliefs calls for much introspection. It is true that America is a country of high technology, scientific achievement, and a rational psyche, but America is also a country of superstition, religion, and a perverse sense of morality - the latter, as demonstrated by the slaying of Dr. George Tiller who ran an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas, in May this year.

The United States is the land of the 'American Dream', which was coined and defined by James Truslow Adams as '...a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position'. Over the past few centuries, America has been the land people turned to, for a variety of reasons - to escape religious and racial persecution, to start a new life, to strike it rich. No other nation in modern times has had this enviable position.

Paradoxically, the United States is also the land where the sanctity of merit is being shattered even as I write this. I had been under the assumption that factoring ethnicity into university admissions and government jobs was endemic only in India, until I came across the euphemistically-named 'affirmative action' policy. When Sonia Sotomayor becomes a justice of the Supreme Court, it would perhaps be more of affirmative action in action, than the American Dream. Sotomayor, who calls herself an 'affirmative action baby', claims that her standardised test scores were not up to the mark, and that she was accepted at Princeton and Yale only because the admissions committee overlooked it. Sotomayor attributed the reason for getting scores lower than that of her non-Hispanic white classmates to her ethnicity and the 'cultural biases' innate to the testing scheme. '...that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that,' she once said. 'There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.' However, for reasons that are not very clear, her test scores have not been made public.

I find it hard to believe that standardised tests designed by Americans could be biased more against certain ethnicities within the United States, but completely unbiased towards the Indians and the Chinese. I had thought my GRE score of 1490 was good until, just a week later, an Indian, female friend of mine got 1600 out of 1600. Maybe I am not exposed to America that well, maybe I lack insight, but from where I am standing, I just cannot see any cultural or gender biases in standardised tests.

Sotomayor's affirmation that these tests are biased fail in light of another statistical study conducted during and after the latest American presidential election. According to research on what is being called the 'Obama effect', the performance gap between whites and African-Americans 'disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election'. Researchers attribute it to the fact that African-Americans were inspired by the success of a coloured person. Perhaps this is what the traditionally-oppressed ethnicities in America needed all along - inspiration, and not 'affirmative action'.

In spite of all its drawbacks, the United States and its Lady Liberty continue to shine the beacon of promise on the thousands that reach its shores every year. There, a child might die of superstition, but hope does survive; dreams do get realised.

As someone standing on the threshold to this edifice, America's shimmering lights still shine brightly through the haze of sociocultural irrationality. The promise of livin' it up there lures me to stop for the night.

[This post is something of a response to an article written by the BBC's North America editor Justin Webb as a parting shot, on leaving the United States. Webb writes, 'If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because - being American - you believe you can change it... If you are willing to chance your arm, if you back yourself, if you want to live the life, America is still the place to be. Drive out on Route 17 and take a chance!']

What's in a (Full) Name?

2009-08-04T13:04:00.000+05:30

Indians are a lazy bunch. The heights of Indian laziness can be found in the way people refer to roads, locations, and designations. The most famous example of a road name that was shrunk so that it would take less effort to speak is the ubiquitous 'MG Road', which for those who have not thought about it, stands for 'Mahatma Gandhi Road'. Almost every town in India has an MG Road, and I was not surprised when I found one in the small town of Gauribidanur in the heart of Karnataka. I suspected whether some law existed whereby every town must have a road named after the 'Father of the Nation'. This reaction was greeted by laughter, and I was told that the name in question stood for 'Madhugiri-Gauribidanur Road'. I was apalled.

Near to where I used to live and work in Bangalore, there was a place called 'RT Nagar'. I had not given much thought to this name, like so many other abbreviated place names in the country, but I could not resist surprise when I once drove past the 'Rabindranath Tagore Nagar' police station. They could have shortened it to 'Tagore Nagar' instead of 'RT Nagar'. Similarly, they could have called the aforementioned road 'Gandhi Road', instead of the inane 'MG Road'. I mean, we do not hear people referring to Gandhi as MG when they are not talking about the road, do we? I suspect the people of 'Bengaluru' would have shortened the name further to 'MGR', but for the fact that Maruthur Gopalan Ramachandran was the Chief Minister ('CM'!) of the neighbouring Tamil-speaking state.

Most recently, I was stupefied when I read about someone in the navy hilariously designated the 'C-in-C'! Googling for the term revealed nothing but results about the programming language. But when I googled for 'C-in-C indian navy', I found that it stood for 'Commander-in-Chief'. It seems even disciplined navy officers are not spared the laziness bug.

Game Over

2009-05-19T17:10:00.004+05:30

The war in Sri Lanka is over. The terrorist organisation Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam has been decimated all the way up to its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran - a barbarian so ruthless that toward the end of his days, he started killing the Tamils for whom he was purportedly waging his war. Prabhakaran was responsible for more than 80,000 deaths over the past twenty six years and for holding the largest number of people ever held hostage anywhere in the world - eventually blowing many of them up using his zombie suicide bombers. What brings out his hypocrisy is the fact that they were all Tamils - the same people whose self-professed leader he was.

I am glad that the Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa resolutely refused to give in to the demands of opportunist politicians in the United Kingdom, India, and elsewhere, and went ahead all the way until Prabhakaran and his henchmen were dead, and ignorant Tamils the world over learnt their well-deserved lesson the hard way. David Miliband could convince the obtuse people who run India not to do anything about the bloody siege of Mumbai, but he had no luck whatsoever in Sri Lanka. When he did try, patriotic Sri Lankans burnt his effigy in Colombo. After the siege of Mumbai, the only things I remember burning was the Taj, the Trident, and the Indian flag in Karachi.

Sadly, now that the war is over without their demands being heeded, the European Union, the United Nations, UK, USA, and others want an 'inquiry' into the supposed 'human rights violations' done by Sri Lankan forces. As far as any sane person would see it, the only people who violated human rights in Sri Lanka are dead. Instead of congratulating Rajapaksa and the brave Sri Lankan soldiers, self-righteous fools all over the world are crying for more blood.

Anyway, I wish India too had a chief executive as bold as Rajapaksa, but unfortunately, as the recent election result shows, Gandhi and company is back in power. It seems Indians do not mind getting blown to smithereens by terrorists. Well, one does get what one deserves.

'The Name of the Rose' Meets 'Siddhartha'

2009-05-12T16:40:00.001+05:30

Biman Nath's debut novel Nothing is Blue is a story set in the 7th century CE, in the backdrop of the ancient Buddhist monastery and learning centre of Nalanda, in what is now the state of Bihar in India. The storyline follows the trials and tribulations of Ananda, a young man who joins the monastery as a samanera, a novice monk, and is assigned the task of being an assistant to the visiting Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang.

The central thread of the story is the clash of Tantric Buddhism (Tantrayana) with the more traditional forms of Buddhism - Hinayana and Mahayana - and how it affects the life of the protagonist. The novelist tells us that during the initial years of Tantrayana - before it became known and accepted as Vajrayana, the form of Buddhism practised by the Dalai Lama and his followers today - its practitioners were considered heretics by the purists, as they were idol worshippers and performed rituals that involved the consumption of meat and alcohol, and sexual intercourse. The direction of the story is set almost midway into the book, when Ananda makes enemies with Nalanda's secret practitioners of Tantrayana.

A secondary thread in the story is Ananda's empathy towards Shyamalata, a widow from a nearby village, which is marked by his struggle to subdue the human instincts that he had renounced as an ascetic when he joined the monastic order of the Buddha. But the most interesting thread in the story is anchored to fact - the error in the contemporary calendar system practised in what is now the Indian subcontinent, due to which time-keeping lagged behind the accurate Greek system, cumulatively adding up to an error of the order of days over a period of centuries. Biman Nath, who, in his article 'Medieval Mistake' which appeared in a March 2008 issue of Frontline, had dwelled on this interesting topic in detail, weaves it into his story, and Ananda is assigned the task of learning more about this astronomical problem to try to fix the calendar. But the Indian calendar was not fixed until 1957, when the Government of India adopted the reformed 'Indian National Calendar', which unfortunately, is not used outside Government organisations. The novel presents an interesting speculation as to why the much-needed reform did not happen in the 7th century CE despite Ananda's efforts.

If I may digress, the error in the Indian calendar, and its variations as followed in geographically distinct parts of the country, is the reason why the the Hindus of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh celebrated 2009's new year's day they call 'Ugadi' on March 27, and those of Kerala celebrated their new year's day 'Vishu' on April 14. The Assamese 'Bihu' and the Tamil equivalent was also celebrated around the same time. It has to be kept in mind that the new year's day is supposed to be the day of the vernal equinox, which was on March 20 this year. Since almost all Hindu festivals are tied to the almanac, this error causes all these festivals to be celebrated on the wrong days - a practice which mindless Hindus all over the world have been following for centuries, and essentially making fools of themselves.

HarperCollins India has done a poor job of proof-reading the book, as evidenced by the typos. There are a few lapses in narration that may be forgiven considering this is the author's first work of fiction. The historical material is well-researched and throws light on the murky history and science of medieval India.

Biman Nath's work is similar in some respects to Umberto Eco's famous novel, especially the fact that the backdrop of the novel is a monastery, and heresy is the prime mover of the story. Ananda's troubled mind reminds one of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. The similarity is superficial, though - Nothing is Blue is a unique novel and quite an interesting read.

Who the Hell is Pranab Mukherjee...

2009-03-01T12:12:00.004+05:30

... To ask Colombo to accept the LTTE's offer of a ceasefire? This guy has been giving unsolicited advice to the Sri Lankan government ever since the terrorist organisation Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had been showing signs of defeat. Is he trying to help the LTTE? Definitely looks like it.

Of course, Pranab Mukherjee, being the Minister of External Affairs of the Government of India, is just a mouthpiece of the sentiments of Sonia Gandhi's government. Why Sonia Gandhi's government? I fail to see a single print advertisement of the government in which Gandhi's photograph does not come along with (in most cases, before) the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's, which proves that Sonia Gandhi is not just the Chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) party coalition. But I digress. These people who claim to be governing the country cannot protect its citizens from foreign terrorists. Nor can they do anything to Pakistan which blatantly supports terrorism. The only thing these people have been doing ever since the siege of Mumbai was begging the Pakistani government to take action against terrorist organisations operating from there. Pakistan has categorically denied handing over the responsible people to India on grounds that there is no extradition treaty, and the Indian government seems to be happy about it. If I remember correctly, after 9/11, the United States went all the way to Afghanistan and sent the Taliban back to the stone age. In spite of all the bravado that Mukherjee, the Minister of Defence (or the lack thereof) A. K. Antony, and Singh made during those days ('all options are open', what a laugh!), the government seems smug about what it has done (or rather, not done) about the Mumbai massacre. And now they want the Sri Lankan government to do the same!

According to Mukherjee, the Indian government is of the opinion that rescuing civilians trapped in the Sri Lankan conflict zone requires 'the co-operation of the LTTE'. What is the Indian government's opinion on people trapped in the conflict zone in Darfur? I have never heard the Indian government being so vocal about the conflict in neighbouring Nepal! You would never hear Pranab Mukherjee say anything about those people because that would be a bad investment in time, as there is no prospect of returns in the form of votes. By condemning Israel, the Congress and the UPA can hope to get Muslim votes and by asking the Sri Lankan government to stop the war, they can hope to get Tamil votes. These unscrupulous bastards would have gone even further and condemned the Sri Lankan government, had it not been for the fact that the LTTE assassinated their former leader Rajiv Gandhi. And those geniuses who oppose the Bharatiya Janata Party say they do so because it is a communalist party!

The only thing the Sri Lankan Tamils share with Indian Tamils is the name. They are culturally and linguistically different, and more importantly, they are genetically closer to the Sinhalese than the Indian Tamils. There is no reason why Tamils in India should get agitated about the war in Sri Lanka. It just shows the level of ignorance and idiocy that is prevalent among the Indian supporters of the LTTE.

Giving even a minor foothold to the LTTE in the form of a ceasefire would jeopardise the Sri Lankan operation, and would lead to the LTTE becoming mainstream, much like what happened with the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in Kashmir, or the Al-Fatah in Palestine. Then in time, Velupillai Prabhakaran would get a Nobel Peace Prize that Mukherjee, Singh, and Gandhi would like to share.

The Language of Journalism

2009-02-25T23:35:00.001+05:30

The Indian media is one of the most sensationalist in the world, exaggerating minor incidents, engaging in so-called 'sting' reporting, and overkilling events with too much coverage. Perhaps they just play to the voyeur in every Indian, or perhaps they nurture it, or perhaps both. Either way, it has reached the point where I have stopped watching news channels and stopped reading newspapers in my native language of Malayalam. The only newspaper I trust not to engage in unbearable sensationalism is The Hindu. But of late, even they have come close to overkilling Slumdog Millionaire.

A trend that has been seen lately, a thing that annoys me unendingly, is the referring to of terrorist attacks in India in the format 'day/month', as in '7/11' or '26/11'. The former refers to the Mumbai train bombings of 11 July 2006, while the latter to the recent siege of Mumbai. It is obviously an imitation of the bloody '9/11' (in the American 'month/date' format) attacks, wherein terrorists hijacked four planes, and managed to crash three of them on their targets, the World Trade Center twin towers and the Pentagon. India, like any other civilisation in the East, being an unabashed imitator of the United States of America, the Indian media wanted to imitate even the naming of a terrorist attack and convert it into some form of convention for nomenclature. What the Indian media forgets is that unlike the United States, India is hit by a terrorist attack every other month, so calling things 1/1, 1/3, 1/5, et cetera just serves to create confusion in the minds of the subscriber. For instance, a news report like 'Maharashtra ATS moves to resolve 7/11 mystery' (The Hindu, 22 February 2009) never ceases to baffle me as to what in the world the '7/11 mystery' is. I would guess that it could refer to a terrorist attack, but unless I read further, I would not know that they were in fact referring to the Mumbai train bombings of 2006. One thing that especially boils my blood is the fact that the media refers to the four-day siege of Mumbai as '26/11', as if it was just a one-day happening. Unwittingly, the witless scribes in the Indian media are undermining the gravity of that bloody massacre.

In general, newspapers are intended for certain markets, certain sections of the society. For example, in the United Kingdom, newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mirror are tabloids that are meant for people who would rather read about celebrities than things more important, and The Daily Telegraph is a broadsheet that primarily address the latter than the former. The British writer Jeffrey Archer, in his short story The Grass is Always Greener presents the thoughts of people on a corporate ladder, from the receptionist to the CEO, one morning as they read their favourite newspaper. I do not recall details, but the receptionist reads a mass-market tabloid, the accountant reads a middle-market tabloid, all the way to the CEO, who reads a quality broadsheet. Unfortunately in India, this does not hold true and one can see CEOs clutching The Times of India on their way to work, which is essentially a tabloid in the guise of a broadsheet.

Anyway, irrespective of physical dimensions and choice of news, reporting quality is something that most newspapers lack in this country, and the reader has to put up with such gems of originality as '7/11' and '26/11'.

Let Us Celebrate Indian Culture

2009-02-14T00:00:00.005+05:30

This Valentine's Day, let us display our solidarity with all those right-wing Hindu fanatics by celebrating 'Indian culture'. If you love Indian culture, in addition to molesting women in a pub, please do:

Help a ten-year-old get married
Pray to a monkey
Get a Khajuraho poster for your living room
Sleep with a horse
Push a widow into her husband's funeral pyre
Rely on two-thousand-year-old planetary positions to predict your future
Reaffirm your faith in fake gurus
Gift a copy of the Kama Sutra
Pray to a twenty-armed tongue-wagging monstrosity
Rely on two-thousand-year-old planetary positions to choose a spouse
Get molested by a fake guru
Pray to a penis

Have I missed out anything?

The Foundations of Science Fiction

2009-02-02T00:50:00.001+05:30

'Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.'
- Isaac Asimov

If there is anything I could consider more important than science, it is science fiction. A science fiction writer does as much service to humanity as a scientist or an engineer, if not more. He prepares the world for the future. Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park and Steven Spielberg's 1993 film version, telling the story of dinosaurs brought back to life, effectively laid the foundations for cloning in the minds of the people - even of those who were not science fiction aficionados. In 1996, when Dolly, the most famous sheep in history was born - cloned - at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, humanity was ready for it. Granted that Jurassic Park told the story of a scientific application gone awry, and the creators of Dolly faced a barrage of criticism from the ethics police; but it goes to show that science fiction has the power to influence people with regard to the future - be it in a positive, or sometimes, unfortunately, in a negative way. If I may digress, cloning is on the verge of becoming mainstream, fortunately. A few months ago, the Mammoth Genome Project at Penn State reported the very first sequencing of the DNA of an extinct species. More recently, Penn State scientists claimed the sequencing of the DNA of the Tasmanian tiger, a species extinct since 1936. But in the first instance of an extinct species being resurrected, Spanish researchers have recently succeeded in cloning the Pyrenean ibex, the last of whose ilk died in 2000. There is no doubt in my mind that the first cloned human will be born in the near future.

Even though science fiction can reveal a prophetic vision of the future, human limitations invariably dilute it. Isaac Asimov, perhaps the most famous and one of the most prolific of all science fiction writers, was no exception. Foundation, the first of what is perhaps his most famous series of novels, tells the story of a human civilisation spanning the entire Galaxy, in a future so far away that humans have forgotten their original planet. A new branch of science known as 'psychohistory' predicts the descent of the civilisation into anarchy, and plans are hatched to shorten the inevitable era of decrepitude.

The idea behind Foundation was developed in the 1940s and early 1950s, and this fact is very evident to the reader, one of the sources being the instances of technological demonstration present in the stories. A human selling taxi tickets made of paper, money in the form of metal coins, newspapers, teleported messages on paper stationery, and microfilms give away contemporary influences on Asimov's work. In spite of being a futurist, it was impossible for Asimov to dream up digital electronics, plastic money, and the Internet at the time. Another thing that reveals human society at the time of publication of Foundation is the status of women depicted in it. There is only a single female character in the book, that too someone who 'was sacrificed for policy to an unsavoury marriage', and there is mention of 'housewives'. Anyone living in the twenty-first century can see that, at least in developed countries and the modernised parts of the developing world, as a rule, women enjoy as much social status as men do. It is hard to imagine a future in which women do not play as much of a role as men in the daily businesses of civilisation. It is also hard to imagine the institution of marriage lasting into the far future.

But these are minor details of little consequence. The greatness of Foundation is its insight on human nature and the course of history, and the lessons on the utility of religion and the sanctity of science*. This is what science fiction is meant to do. Even if the roots of science fiction cling to the present, taking its nourishment from today's science and technology, its purpose is to reach a higher level of enlightenment from which to hold a beacon to humanity's relentless march through time.

^* Not the other way around.

NXTrasensory Perception

2009-01-31T00:49:00.001+05:30

After more than a year of disuse, lying inside a blue LEGO-brick-shaped holdall, my LEGO Mindstorms NXT robotics kit was finally taken out. I built my first robot - and a new blog to go with it. I present: NXTrasensory Perception, a blog where I will be uploading my latest NXT creations, along with building instructions, and the programs which bring the robot to life.

Check it out.

Astronaut, Cosmonaut, and Whatnot

2009-01-21T11:30:00.000+05:30

It has been almost half a century since the first human space traveller orbited our planet. When twenty-seven-year-old Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin flew aboard the Vostok 1, he became the first of what the Russians called the 'cosmonauts'. Less than a month after Gagarin's flight, Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr. became the first American in space and was called an 'astronaut'. The Chinese call their space travellers 'astronauts', but the international media self-importantly christened them 'taikonauts', whatever that means. In the future, more nations will put humans in space, and I wonder what the media would call them. Would they be 'astronauts' or something specific to their country of origin? Would Cuban 'castronauts' orbit our planet? Would Somalian 'piranauts' try to hijack spaceships? Only time will tell.

Besieged, Bullied, But Nonchalant

2009-01-13T00:40:00.001+05:30

The Sri Lankan government has made decisive steps to crack down on the terrorist organisation Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and is on its way to reclaiming all of the government's lost territories. The 'Tamil Tigers', as they are lovingly called by ignorant Tamils in India and hatefully called by the rest of the world, are fast becoming extinct.

More than four thousand kilometres away, on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Israel has made decisive forays into the terrorist organisation Hamas' strongholds in Gaza Strip. After about a week of intense air attacks, Israeli tanks and infantry have moved into Palestinian soil, hopefully to exterminate the last of the Hamas terrorists.

But three thousand kilometres to the east of Gaza Strip, in the strip of land known as Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, and in the neighbouring rogue state of Pakistan, terrorists belonging to a multitude of Islamic organisations - from the Lashkar-e-Taiba to the Al-Qaida and the 'students' of terror, the Taliban - find solace of refuge, impunity of sanctuary, and aura of heroism. Starting on the 26th of November 2008, a group of just ten Pakistanis trained in urban warfare, laid siege to the Indian city of Mumbai for four long days, holding back the entire Indian police and military establishment, culminating in the death of almost two hundred people. For a strong Indian leadership, the siege of Mumbai would have been a casus belli, but almost two months later, the weak authorities are still begging Pakistan for the arrest of the people responsible for the carnage. In the meantime, Pakistanis burned the Indian flag in Karachi, a Pakistani senator talked of slapping sanctions on India, and the mullahs of the country partied till early mornings, drunk on the spoils of jihad.

Pakistan has been in existence for more than sixty years, and the world knows that the Pakistan government never stands by its words. Pakistan is the archetypal rogue state - born on the streets of religious bigotry; raised by alms (and arms) thrown in its direction by unscrupulous uncles like China, Iran, and North Korea, not to mention the United States; stealing nuclear technology; shopping in the chor bazaars (thieves' markets) in the back alleys of Central Asia; being recalcitrant in a way only a bastard street kid can be, throwing Molotov cocktails at neighbours' parties, getting consumed in its own fire of hatred. Yet, the neighbours - us - fail to teach it a lesson that it will remember for the rest of its life. The people who run this country are good for nothing. When countries like the United States, Russia, Israel, and Sri Lanka have absolutely no inhibitions in making the enemy pay, the shameless sissies in the government make the entire population of the country suffer. More than anything else, what India needs is a strong-willed government - a government with the guts to take on the enemy and a spine to be decisive at that. Until India gets that, we have to be resigned to be living in the shadow of constant threat and the fear of gruesome death.

The Need for God

2009-01-09T01:26:00.002+05:30

I had wanted to write this for a long time now, but somehow had it figured that this being such a clichéd topic, it was better for me not to venture into it. But two things happened today that made me think this is the right time to write this down.

For one, I read in today's newspaper about the Atheist Bus Campaign, a bus-borne-advertisement campaign 'distributing reassurance' in an otherwise god-fearing world. Created by television comedy writer and journalist Ariane Sherine and others, this campaign ridicules religious advertisements that appear on British buses, and that promise an after-life of torment in hell for folks who do not believe in Jesus Christ. (Thinking about it, I think Christian campaigns fail to impress many in today's world, where Muslim jihadists do a better job by promising torment in this life for the infidel, not just in the after-life. Any non-believer, being a sinner by definition, when faced with the immediate prospect of torment, would choose Islam to Christianity - at least he would be spared the scimitar.)

The second thing that happened today that caused me to post this, was my visit to the neighbourhood bookshop, where I saw something that I had to record.

Religion jokes. Do not take it too seriously. This chance arrangement of books on a bookshelf is proof that god does not exist. God does not throw dice, remember? For the benefit of theists without a sense of humour: I jest.

Now, something serious. At the risk of sounding like a crackpot, I would like to say that I have given much thought to the question of the existence of a supreme being, and my conclusions are as follows: 'God' is the creation of billions of years of evolution. The urge to believe in an omnipotent creature is a psychological weapon that protects humans from psychological conditions. It is a mechanism for the human mind to escape from guilt, sorrow, and fear, and an imaginary point onto which one could pin one's hopes; a self-help mechanism, if you will. As human beings evolve as a species, we will develop better psychological mechanisms that take care of the aforementioned emotions, and then there would be no need for believing. Atheism is a fight between biology and logic, which is why most people succumb to their biological needs, and remain believers. I would wager that believers, in general, lead a happier, albeit self-delusional life than atheists, because they rely on this tried-and-tested biological technique to achieve solace.

In summary, the need to believe in god is biological, and innate for complex intelligent species in one stage of their evolution. We are already seeing the evolution of our species in action, when we acknowledge that the number of atheists is increasing slowly but steadily. In the initial stages of this process, the driving force would just be the logic of a few individuals, later it would become a societal phenomenon - much like religion - and in the end, it would become apparent that it is in fact, a demonstration of the evolution of our species. We are already somewhere between the first and second stages, and it is only a matter of time before humanity becomes truly undivided, standing on the common ground and firm foundations of science.

There is no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

When In Rome

2009-01-04T15:41:00.000+05:30

I am an Indian living in India. I use my hand for eating, with the use of knives and forks being an exception. I have heard a few people expressing their dislike of having food with one's hands, instead of using cutlery. No-one has objected to my doing it so far, but if someone does, I have an answer ready: 'When I was living in Beijing, I used to use chopsticks.'

On the 1st of January 2009, a group of nine people, including eight US citizens, entered an AirTran flight in Arlington, Virginia, headed for Orlando, Florida. Eight of them were Muslims of South Asian descent, with the men wearing beards and the women, head scarves. One member of the group wondered aloud to his wife about the 'safest place to sit on an airplane', also mentioning that the jet engines were near his window, which was overheard by co-passengers. Feeling suspicious they alerted the crew. The air marshals on board informed the airport police, and finally, the pilot decided to postpone the flight, removing the group of nine, and screening all passengers again for security. The removed passengers had to be detained in custody and were released only after FBI agents cleared them of suspicion.

Apart from the inappropriateness of the statement made by the passengers - remarking on the safety aspects of sitting near the engine is not quite appropriate on a flight about to take off - the fact that they looked Muslim triggered the chain of events that led to these people from being removed from the flight. Given the paranoia induced by terrorism these days, not many can be senseless enough to make statements such as those made by the passengers on the AirTran flight or joke about bombs inside an aircraft or at an airport. There is no solution to obtuseness, and it is something that cuts across nationality, religion, or ethnicity. But there definitely is a solution to being seen as belonging to a certain community, which may - fortunately or unfortunately - help in situations like this, and that is to be secular, the way it is defined in the English language: religion should be practised in the privacy of one's home, and not exhibited.

Assimilation is one thing all immigrants - such as the family in the AirTran incident - should swear by. According to Dr. Abduljalil Sajid, chairman of the United Kingdom's Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmony, 'only 10% [of Muslim clerics in the UK] are well versed in English and 90% probably speak in their own mother tongue - Turkish, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic and so on'. I am surprised that these people, who wanted to live in Britain, did not want to learn the language and culture of the country. It is a dangerous trend if immigrants refuse to assimilate into the prevailing culture of a country and instead try to build closed communities to keep their culture intact.

In 2006, in the Netherlands, the then Minister of Justice, Jan Pieter Hendrik Donner remarked that there is a possibility of the Sharia law - the same kind of law that is practised in Saudi Arabia, where barbaric punishments like beheading is still legal - to be introduced in the country, if a significant fraction of the population favoured it. According to statistics from 2006, 5.8% of the Dutch population was Muslim, most of whom are immigrants or their descendants. This is expected to increase in the future. I would not be surprised if the Sharia is indeed introduced in Dutch law, because, as can be seen from examples from the United States to the United Kingdom, Muslims tend to herd together, live in secluded islands in the middle of modern societies, and refuse to assimilate. The proof of this tendency is India, where a significant portion of the descendants of Muslims who constituted invading Afghan hordes still live in island nations, almost a millennium after their arrival. I personally know someone from such a background, at whose home newspapers come censored with black ink, and television is taboo. I have seen Chinese taxi drivers who recognise Raj Kapoor, a Bollywood actor of the 1950s, and here was this fellow who had no clue who Bollywood actress and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai was!

Thankfully, not all countries are passive about the issue of immigrant assimilation. A quick search showed that religious symbols are still banned in France. I do not know about the level of assimilation immigrant Muslims undergo in French society, but the ban on the public display of religious symbols is a step in the right direction. All countries - especially those at the receiving end of immigration - should follow the French example, along with stricter measures such as language and cultural tests for everyone who wishes to immigrate.

People who purportedly vouch for human rights would no doubt cry foul against stricter immigration laws, but what they lack is the insight that as inalienable as rights are, there are certain duties that humans, as building blocks of society, are bound to perform. In case of conflict, it is the duty that should take precedence, and not the right. When in Rome, by all means, offer your namaz five times a day, but in everything else, be a Roman.

[This post was originally intended for Blogcritics, but someone there wanted me to re-write the article for dummies, or desperately wanted the article not to appear. Either way, I lost patience, so here it is.]

Old Ideas, Newspeak

2008-11-11T01:54:00.000+05:30

'There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable.'
- 'The Principles of Newspeak', Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

In his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell depicts a future in which humanity is enslaved by a totalitarian government which imposes on the population a new language - called 'Newspeak' - which is a scaled-down form of English minus words describing certain ideas such as those conveyed by 'freedom', 'equality', et cetera. The underlying principle of Newspeak is the strong form of the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that a person's thoughts are constrained by the vocabulary and grammar of his language. Of course, the strong form of this hypothesis is untrue - babies can think much before they pick up enough vocabulary to express their thoughts. Once someone asked me, being a Malayali who interacts with other Indians through a foreign language like English, which language I think in. My answer to that question was that I do not actually think in any language, thought is abstract in nature, and not bound by my vocabulary. How else would one explain it when sometimes one finds it difficult to express one's thoughts in words? Besides, conceptual neologism would not have existed if the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were true. Take for instance the name of this blog. Why neologism, language would not have existed had it not been for thought that preceded it! On the contrary, the weak form of this hypothesis is not quite untrue. It is known that choosing words wisely helps in making a point more effectively.

Thus, marketing ideas using the right words has been the most-sought skill of advertising companies and propagandists. During the recent U. S. presidential elections, when Sarah Palin was introduced as being 'pro-life', instead of being 'anti-abortion', it was the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that was leveraged. 'Anti-abortion' bears a negative, almost evil connotation that may not go down well with people. 'Pro-life' is no doubt the creation of a genius; it contains two positives - 'pro' and 'life'. Even though the literal meaning of the word is essentially obtuse - who is not pro-life? - when applied to the context of a sensitive issue like abortion, with the generally-held belief that foetuses are alive and are distinct from hands or legs or any other organ, it becomes a powerhouse mantra that brings upon the person thus qualified an aura of sainthood.

Another thing that comes to mind is the reason behind the renaming of 'global warming' to 'climate change' by environmentalists, a few years ago. Although there is a general warming trend, intermittent periods of cooling led the environmentalists to doubt whether the temperature of our planet would keep going up, or fall after some stage, or keep oscillating. It was then that some genius invented the ambiguous term 'climate change' which could be used for both warming and cooling, and it was thus ensured that the environmentalists would always be right. (For an interesting analysis of IPCC's predictions, visit Verification of IPCC Temperature Forecasts 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007.)

This is the Newspeak of our time. Big Brother in the guise of conservatives and environmentalists is thus polluting not just the English language, but the minds of the receptive populace. Nineteen eighty-four is not far into the future.

The World's Biggest Reality Show

2008-11-05T23:59:00.001+05:30

The world's biggest reality show came to a close today, with Barack Obama projected to win the United States presidential elections. This was a historic election with many firsts - the first 'black' U. S. president, the first president to have been born outside the mainland, the first time both the contenders were sitting senators, and what interested me the most in the whole hullabaloo - the first piece of news to be reported by a hologram.

Although the election of Obama, considered black by many, shatters the general notion held by a lot of people that Americans (or rather, American whites) are racist, it also brings up certain subtleties that cannot be easily reconciled. (I have always maintained that Americans could only be as racist as anybody else in the world. In fact, I have found Indians to be the most racist of all peoples.) For one, Obama is of mixed racial descent - his father was black, whereas his mother was white. His father was a Kenyan who was never a citizen of the United States, and who did not have any history of slavery in his inheritance. Obama was raised by his mother and white grandparents, and he went to Harvard Law School, which I would imagine to be predominantly white. So the only thing that actually relates him to the historically disadvantaged African-American community is the colour of his skin. In everything else, he is as white as John McCain. What I mean, of course, is that Obama does not represent the average blackspeaking African-American whose dream is yet to be realised, whose cheque is yet to be truly cashed. It remains to be seen if Obama will be able to change this situation.

Anyway, the election of Obama is definitely a change, although I do not think the magnitude of that change would be significant. What I do not understand is why Indians are so happy about the election results: black or white, as long as Obama is an American, and Americans work to realise the American dream, the rest of the world will hate them for it. There will be wars where American assets are at stake. There will be global policing. None of that is going to change, and in my opinion, should not. Those are responsibilities that come with power, and America is carrying it out as good as it can.

Sweet Justice

2008-10-05T21:41:00.001+05:30

Finally, Tata has decided to abandon its car factory in Singur, West Bengal, after months of violent protests by the Luddite Mamata Banerjee and her followers. The Communist Party of India's Marxist faction, which has been in power in West Bengal for around thirty years had to hang its figurative head in shame, and watch as convoys of lorries carrying equipment drove out of the factory gates. I am not against Tata's plans for the world's cheapest car, the Nano, which was supposed to have been manufactured at the Singur factory, nor am I a supporter of Banerjee, but I could not help laughing out loud in joy when I heard Tata's decision yesterday. What I was happy about was that justice was delivered, as the communist government of the state got a taste of their own medicine, which they had been doling out in other states of the country for the past few decades.

The prime example is Kerala, where the obtuseness of the people propel the communists to power after every rule by the Congress party, and vice versa. Whenever the Congress is in power, the communists would come out with anti-development activities such as strikes, and while they are in power, hardly anything gets done for development without much coaxing from the industry. If at all they could be commended for anything, as far as Kerala is concerned, it is that they do not encourage terrorists like Abdul Naser Madani as much as the Congress does.

I am sure Tata will not have any problem finding a site for its factory outside West Bengal, and that the Nano will be launched, if only a little late. The losers are, of course, the people of West Bengal, but they deserve it because of their support for both the communists as well as Mamata Banerjee.

Welcome to the New Iraq

2008-09-28T01:30:00.004+05:30

The sixth bomb blast to rock India this month struck New Delhi yesterday afternoon, killing a nine-year-old boy and injuring at least twenty-three people. This is the fiftieth bomb blast to hit the nation in the past five months (nine in Jaipur in May, nine in Bangalore and twenty-one in Ahmedabad in July, six in New Delhi this month). The situation in this country has become more or less like what Iraq underwent in the months after Saddam Hussein's fall, when anarchy prevailed. Welcome to the new Iraq.

A few news channels reported that both Manmohan Singh, who is the impotent Prime Minister of the country, and Sonia Gandhi, who happens to be his boss, have expressed 'shock' over the incident. As any dictionary of the English language would tell you, 'shock' means 'unpleasant surprise', and yesterday's bomb blast was far from a surprise. Indians have come to realise that we can expect at least ten bomb blasts a month, and if something starts meeting one's expectations, it stops being a surprise. In other words, Singh and Gandhi are either lying or are completely obtuse. I do not know about Gandhi, but it is hard to imagine an economist like Singh being an idiot, in which case he is lying through his teeth (and whiskers) to the people of this nation.

After nine blasts ripped through Bangalore, the city where I live, on 25th July and twenty-one in Ahmedabad just a day later, many people I know were quick to point out the obvious fact that both Karnataka and Gujarat were run by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party governments. The insinuation was that the BJP, of all people, perpetrated the bomb blasts! I found it amusing that when Congress-run New Delhi was bombed, no one mentioned who was (or rather, was not) in charge. There is something seriously flawed in the logic displayed by a majority of the people of this country, not to mention the fellows running the nation. Politicians (including those of the BJP when they were in control) have always been incompetent logicians. The prioritisation of short term gains drives these people, and causes the people of the country to suffer the consequences. The idea that Islamic fundamentalists are terrorising this nation and the rest of the world has become an axiom. Yet the people of this country refuse to acknowledge it and produce lame pseudo-secular excuses. Those who do acknowledge it, do so in private, for fear of being seen as anti-Muslim. Most of the people I know fall in this category. I hope each new bomb causes more people to come out in the open and accept the axiom of Islamic terrorism. Only when the numbers reach critical mass to cause politicians to rethink their electoral strategies will something be done to eradicate this scourge of the nation.

As for this scourge affecting the greater mankind, the solution is within the Muslim community. If Muslims do not want the world to become Taliban's Afghanistan, they have to stop being defensive when accused by others. A Bollywood film director, who was so insignificant that I did not care to memorise his name, once said something to the effect of 'the society will progress when films stop portraying terrorists as guys wearing beards'. Well, my two cents would be that the society will progress when terrorists stop being guys wearing beards. Until then, as far as India is concerned, it is lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate. I am sure Sonia Gandhi, née Edvige Antonia Albina Maino, would understand.

The Ethics of Photojournalism

2008-09-23T01:53:00.000+05:30

On the 4th of May, 2006 - a dull, smoggy day made even more pallid by the previous night's tiring (yet exciting) climb up the Huashan - I was in the Chinese city of Xi'an, on my last vacation in the country. My friends and I were visiting the Dàyàn Tǎ, the Big Goose Pagoda, which was built to house the Buddhist scriptures Xuan Zang brought back from his seventeen-year odyssey in India. Enervated as I was, I was on a bench on the promenade in front of the pagoda, waiting for a few of my friends to get back from their sight-seeing, idly handling my camera, looking over a few of the photos I had taken. It was then that I saw a most remarkable sight.

A toddler and an adult - presumably his father - were standing a short distance in front of me on the promenade. The father had kept a remote-controlled toy car on the ground and was trying to get the toddler to play with it. The toddler appeared totally disinterested, and was looking elsewhere even while holding the remote. A short distance behind them, an unkempt individual in tattered clothes and a boy of about seven in similar attire were standing, watching them with wide open eyes. I could try to explain their expressions if I could - but I do not think my lacklustre writing ability can give justice to what I still preserve in memory. Speaking of which, I come to the topic at hand.

I had my camera in hand, and for a fleeting instant, I thought I would raise it and take a picture. It would have been a very good photograph depicting economic contrast in this much talked-about country. A ghost of Wang Lung still living 'beneath the opulence of this city', 'in the foundations of poverty upon which it was laid'. Moreover it would have been a stark reminder of the misery of the human condition. The better-off child, who has a toy, does not want to play with it and looks elsewhere, whereas the poor man's child wants to play with the toy, but it is not his for that luxury. But I decided to let that pass, and wondered how professional photojournalists did it.

Each time I see photographs of people part of, or reacting to, a tragic event, I wonder how the guy could have gone up to them, casually raised his camera and started clicking. In this age of ethical policing, I am surprised how photojournalists enjoy impunity. But in spite of being the unethical, immoral, godless, selfish, cricket-hating beast that I am, I still cannot make myself do it.

Another Prediction Comes True

2008-09-20T02:27:00.002+05:30

Yet again, I had the last laugh. As I predicted in a previous post, the North Pole did not only not become free of ice this summer, but it did not even retreat as much as it had last year. So much for sensationalistic journalism, not to mention a big blow to the unemployed guys totting 'the end is neigh' placards, and all those self-important people out there vociferously arguing for carbon controls.

India at the Olympics

2008-08-31T10:53:00.006+05:30

I did not have the last laugh this time. My prediction went utterly wrong. For those who tuned in late, my prediction was that India would win only one medal in the Olympics, but India won an unprecedented three, including one gold. For a nation mired deep in the enslavement of the so-called sport of cricket, this is indeed a remarkable achievement. I have to concede that what we witnessed in Beijing may not have been a statistical fluke. Moreover, I apologise for having stated that the Indian contingent to the Olympics consisted of fifty-six losers. It actually consisted of fifty-three losers, and three winners.

I did a little high-school-level statistical analysis of the Indian performance in all the Olympic games so far, and found that as far as the total number of medals goes, Beijing 2008 was considerably outside the standard deviation (almost near three-sigma).

It is hard to imagine that athletes who are preparing for London would not be motivated by the kind of rewards that the Beijing medallists were given, in which case, this point on the graph would cease to be a mere probabilistic fluctuation. Let us wait, and watch.

One In a Billion

2008-08-11T22:12:00.001+05:30

Miraculously, within three days of the commencement of the Olympics, India won a medal - and that too, a gold! We have a new celebrity now - someone to elevate on a pedestal and sing encomiums for, someone to carry the national flag at London in 2012, someone to give tens of millions of rupees to in appreciation, only to throw dirt at when he fails to perform. Congratulations, Abhinav Bindra, you won yourself a huge responsibility.

Within a day of his win, Bindra has been promised at least 12.6 million rupees, as a quick glance through the first page of Google News reveals. The President is of the opinion that Bindra 'realised the dream of a billion of our people' by winning the medal. One billion people had to dream of winning one medal.

By the way, I read in many newspapers that the random Indian player at the Olympics 'disappointed, as expected'. If someone's performance is 'as expected', how does it become a disappointment? Indian sportspersons have been performing as expected every time, so we should never feel disappointed. In fact, it is Bindra who disappointed us by not finishing last!

Anyway, we have to wait till the Olympics is over to see if this was just another statistical fluke or a genuine improvement in Indian sports. But if you ask me, I would put my money on the former.

One World. One Dream. One Nation That Sucks.

2008-08-08T08:08:00.003+05:30

Another Olympics, another wastage of tax-payers' money. The government of India has decided to spend my hard-earned money in sending fifty-six incompetent people to participate in Beijing 2008. I am sure that, as usual, all of them will come back empty-handed. Actually, empty-handed is the wrong word: They would do their shopping, climb the Great Wall, party in Sanlitun - in short, blow away my tax money in enjoying themselves. Thanks to some statistical fluke, one of them may come back with a bronze medal.

In spite of being an Olympic veteran - this country has appeared at the Games twenty-one times - the last gold medal won by India was almost three decades ago. In contrast, two countries which made their first appearance at Atlanta in 1996, Azerbaijan and Burundi, have so far won three and one gold, respectively. I would not even bother comparing the Indian performance with that of China or the United States.

If people here are concerned only about cricket, why bother wasting that money? Taking all that cash and throwing it to the winds from the top of a building would turn out to be more useful to the people of the country than sending these losers on their vacation.

For the record, I'm rooting for China this Olympiad's Games. Go, China, go!

Of Bulls and Bears: The Bovine Effect

2008-07-15T01:49:00.001+05:30

It is not just in the stock market that bulls and bears rule the roost. Humans are so obsessed with these animals that they are affecting even policy-making. What am I talking about? Why, bovine flatulence and polar bear endangerment, of course!

Argentinian scientists have recently measured the amount of the potent greenhouse gas methane produced in the stomach of cows - and later emitted in burps or flatulence - as 800-1000 litres per cow per day. Argentina has about fifty five million such cows, and together they could emit thirty per cent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to the researchers. Now, given the fact that methane is '23 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere', we have a bigger cause of global warming than anything anthropogenic. (For the sake of polemic, one could say that cattle-rearing is also an anthropic activity, but then there would be no end to this.)

Of late, there has also been sensationalistic journalism in action, when a climatologist said that there is a fifty per cent chance that the North Pole would be free of ice this summer. The image conjured up by this statement is not of an ice-free 'point' (the pole) on the surface of the planet, but the entire Arctic region being free of ice. Such a situation would be catastrophic for the poor polar bears who inhabit the region, and we have to do something about it, right? Wrong. I can wager that no such thing is going to happen at the North Pole this summer, and like my successful predictions of such farcical events as Al Gore getting the Nobel Peace Prize, and India winning some cricket tournament, this prediction is also bound to turn out to be true. Some things are as predictable as Bollywood movies - you have seen one, you have seen them all.

Anyway, let us call this the 'bovine effect' - a bull farts in Argentina, and ice melts at the North Pole, drowning all the polar bears of the world in the Arctic Ocean.

I wish this happens at the stock market too.

The Legend of Alice Garden

2008-06-26T12:46:00.003+05:30

In the sprawling campus of the University of Pune is a park, which, for generations of students has been a favourite daytime haunt. In a corner of the park lies interred for the past hundred years or so, a lady by the name of Alice Richman. The park is popularly known as Alice Garden, for urban legend has it that this lady can be seen in Victorian attire on clear moonlit nights, taking a leisurely stroll around her place of repose.

Not far from this verdant grove is a school of philosophy, where men and women with a scientific bend of mind marvel at the celestial spheres, and while away their time painting impressive images of the heavens using computers and a program named after a mandrill. It so happened once that this place of scholarship was being visited by three students interested in taming the mandrill. Being scholars of science, they were highly rational and thus did not subscribe to the idea that nature would accommodate anything supernatural. They were contemptuous towards popular yarns of the patron ghost of the library, David - who incidentally, like Cher, does not possess a last name - and dismissed tales of the ghost at Alice Garden as the creations of an idle mind.

Thus it came as no surprise that this trio once decided to pay a visit to the park on a clear night with the full moon shining high in the sky, to debunk the legend of the apparition of Alice Garden. It was half past eleven - 'the very witching time of night' - when the three brave adventurers set off on their journey. The park was closed at this late hour, and as dark as a blackbody. Resisting the temptation to trespass, our protagonists decided to perambulate around the park. On their way, they came across the well-lit ladies' hostel of the university, guarded by a troop of pot-bellied guards. Opposite the hostel, toward the realm of Alice, they noticed a path cut across the grounds bordering the park, where it was still dark. The three hardy boys, having been brought up on a wholesome diet of The Hardy Boys - ventured into the darkness without so much as a blink, or a torch for that matter.

A shrill whistle broke the still air and our three heroes spun around in unison in a manner that put the Whirling Dervishes to shame, to face the hostel guards across the road. The guards cautioned them on the potential dangers awaiting them in the darkness, and advised that it behoved them to take the well-lit main road. Respecting their kind advice and thanking them for it, our brothers in bravery proceeded along the road. A few yards down the road, one of the protagonists looked at his timepiece and observed aloud that it was four minutes to midnight. It was then that they saw something strange.

What they saw was a very bright light coming from deep inside the park. As they looked on, they saw in the dim green light reflected by tree branches and leaves, the silhouette of a man, holding what appeared to be an emergency lamp. He was a little stooped over and appeared as if searching for something in the underbrush. As our heroes stood watching, one of the guards rode down on a scooter and enquired why they were still loitering around. They showed him what they saw, and the guard went pale as a sheet. He called out to his fellow guards, and the bravest among them came forward and blew his whistle. A response was heard coming from elsewhere inside the park, much closer to the road, and they saw a second man - a thug by all standards - walking out with an air of impunity which displayed itself in his gait, with his muscular arms ending in his trouser pockets, and the hidden fingers wrapped around the grip of a Smith & Wesson .45 Chief's Special. Behind him were others, as the challengers could fathom from the sound of footsteps. One of our original three, a person from the locality who understood Thugee mentality in these parts of the country, suggested that it behoved them to mind their own business and be on their way, now that whatever diabolicalness the thugs were up to was under the control of the guards. But another of the threesome, a relatively elderly gentleman, who, for most of his long life, was in a far-away land where university parks were less run over by gangsters, had no clue as to what Indian thugs were capable of, and insisted that they get to the bottom of the business. As the two others coaxed the geriatric to follow them, the thug, who by now was with the guards, called out to them to stop. Pretending that he was not loud enough, the three men kept walking toward the direction of their school.

A few hundred yards down the road, the same guard who had come to the trio in his scooter rode down again towards them, like a knight in shining armour, and informed them of their impotency in handling the thugs, who, as he reported were in hot pursuit of the three busybodies, with a dozen handguns, two Uzi submachine guns, and one bazooka.

The rest, as one of the three later said in a missive to a friend, is that they covered the kilometre to the safety of the school in a little less than 97.2 seconds, thereby setting a new world speed record, not to mention saving themselves from mortal agony. Hearing of this momentous achievement, Usain Bolt hung up his running shoes, and joined Puma as a consultant. The rationality of the three scholars took a hard beating from fear, and in the trauma that followed, they eschewed science for spirituality. The thugs were never heard of again, except once, when some rational being speculated that they might have been drunkards hunting for crabs in the pond inside the park, for a midnight snack after their nightly carouse.

To rephrase Washington Irving, the three men, however, who are the best judges of this matter, maintain to this day that they were not thugs, but spirits sent by Alice; and it is a favourite story often told about the neighbourhood round the winter evening fire. The park became more than ever an object of superstitious awe and was abandoned by all; and that may be the reason why the road has been altered of late years, so as to approach the ladies' hostel from a different direction. The park, being deserted, soon fell to decay, and was reported to be haunted by more ghosts than ever and the theatre aficionado, loitering homeward of a still summer evening, has often fancied strange fluorescent lights at a distance, shining brightly among the tranquil solitudes of Alice Garden.

Did You Use Your 'Power' Today?

2008-05-11T00:43:00.001+05:30

It was election day in Bangalore ('Bengaluru' for fanatics) today. The future of the state of Karnataka - at least for the next few years - will be decided partly today, and partly during the forthcoming phases of the election process. Not that anyone is expecting anything different, though.

The other day I had a huge argument with a few friends at work regarding an individual's franchise. My stand was, and continues to be, that an individual's franchise has zero value. It is the collective that decides who wins or loses. It is true that the collective is made up of individuals, ipso facto, when the number of individuals involved is large, the value of an individual's vote becomes negligible.

I have never voted in my life, except in a couple of college elections. The margins by which candidates win or lose in college elections is typically in the tens, and even single-digit margins cause no surprise. The reason for voting in the college elections was that the size of the collective was very small, hence my vote had more influence on the outcome. The realisation that I had the power to prevent the Communists motivated my decision to vote. When the Communists were drubbed in those elections, I felt contended that I had done some service to the college, and indirectly, to society.

An analogy may be useful here. Take the case of sky-diving. In 2007, 2.15 million people jumped out of aircraft in the United States. There were 18 deaths, which is about 0.0008% of all jumps. Due to these statistics, sky-diving is considered a safe recreational activity, and millions continue to take part in it. In other words, the occasional accident does happen, but since the sample space is so huge, the probability that one would get killed in such an accident is very low.

When it comes to voting, though, people think exactly the opposite way. Most people feel that in spite of the fact that millions of others vote, their single vote has power. Maybe there are a few who vote as a matter of principle, but their numbers are trivial. But for the rest, elections provide a huge surge of adrenalin. Raw power seems to flow in their veins as they wear their underwear outside their skin-tight trousers, don masks, and teleport to the voting booths. Then they press a blue button and go home.

The Status Quo Syndrome

2008-04-08T23:38:00.000+05:30

'He's but one man. One man alone cannot fight the future.'
- Conrad Strughold, on Special Agent Fox Mulder,
The X-Files

Well, not just one man, but an entire planet of men cannot fight the future. Yet we fight.

Human beings suffer from a strange condition - a condition which prevents people from accepting change without putting up resistance to it. This inertia against change, this status quo syndrome, manifests itself in many ways, the most popular one in currency being the fight against climate change. I will not dwell upon it here, as I have written much about it before.

Another popular manifestation of the status quo syndrome is conservationism. Can you believe that people are trying to conserve the giant panda when the individuals of the species themselves are no longer interested in mating? There is a mad rush to save the species of the world with utter disregard of the cause of decline. The only thing that these guys need to do is to collect the DNA of those species which are becoming extinct due to natural selection, and let them be. Why bother spending a fortune on stimulating sexual arousal in giant pandas?

When I was a recalcitrant teenager back in the late 1990s, I wanted to change the world. I guess that was natural, and is true for many of that age. But as one grows older, it seems he loses the desire for change. What I see now is a whole society wanting to prevent the world from changing. Even the Nobel Prize has been awarded for trying to prevent change. History has shown that we have been at it for a long time. Any new idea or technology is met with resistance from a significant fraction of the society, only to be adopted gradually; proponents of the idea are honoured and the people who opposed it looked down upon. Yet, the common man continues to provide futile resistance to anything new. Nuclear energy was once thought dangerous, genetic engineering is still considered a threat, and certain people are slowly gathering momentum against future technologies like nanotechnology. But in the end, we are powerless against the winds of change. As I mentioned in a past post, 'except for a few things like mass and energy, conservation is unnatural; change is what is natural to the universe'.

Do not fight the future. Embrace it.

Predicting the Future

2008-01-11T01:04:00.000+05:30

Predicting the future has always been a subject of my interest, and believe it or not, a pastime. Most recently, I predicted that Al Gore would win the Nobel Prize, and history has proved me right. I have also predicted the state of the human species a few million years into the future, but like the doomsday prophecies of environmentalists, cannot be validated now. By the time the predictions are invalidated, I, along with the environmentalists, would have long gone from the face of the planet.

Science fiction is something I love indulging in, and many such creations are set in times far into the future. When Back to the Future II was released in 1989, 2015 was a considerable number of years into the future. People driving flying cars in 2015 would not have seemed too far out for Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale at the time. But reflecting on it now, in 2008, we realise how realistic that was. The Back to the Future trilogy was not a set of serious films, but there have been serious works such as 2001: A Space Odyssey which ventured to predict what the future held. Seven years after the year 2001, we are yet to have a computer as intelligent as HAL 9000, or an operational manned lunar exploration program.

But what about scientific advancements happening before the predicted dates? The chances of such a thing happening seem abysmally low. We human beings are an overly optimistic lot.

But one thing is sure: Irrespective of when it happens, the future is a self-fulfilling prophecy; it is what one wants it to be.

A Gory Business

2007-10-17T22:56:00.000+05:30

'There is no proof that global warming is due to human activity. There is only a "consensus". This is what you get when Al Gore, having failed to become President, gets an Oscar, and sets his eyes on the Nobel Prize.'
- Let's Just Decide that the Climate is Changing, Shall We?, Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), two days after a UK judge ruled that Gore's 'documentary', An Inconvenient Truth, contained nine scientific errors - in other words, lies - and that it should not be screened in secondary schools in England and Wales without guidance. This settles the argument that An Inconvenient Truth is nothing more than environmentalist propaganda.

In all fairness, I have not watched An Inconvenient Truth, but I have watched trailers and read about it enough to get the gist of what Gore and the Greenpeace goons wanted people to buy. But I have watched Martin Durkin's documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, which is a truly scientific documentary which thwarts all the claims made in Gore's film. In a scene from Gore's drama, Gore walks across the stage, following two graphs - temperature and CO2 level which seem to correlate - and says, '... Now one thing that kind of jumps out at you is, "d-do they ever fit together?"' Amid the ignorant audience's laughter, Gore continues, '... most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard!' Well, it turns out the most ridiculous thing that Al Gore has ever heard is the truth - CO2 level follows temperature, not the other way round. Personally, I think Al Gore is no more an environmentalist than I am. An Inconvenient Truth was a failed politician's attempt at getting into the limelight which evaded him after the presidential election of 2000. In hindsight, Gore should now be feeling that failing to become President was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Environmentalism is the second most dangerous religion ever to form on Earth - no points for guessing the first. The followers of this new religion are so hard core that they do not even let the moderates among them live in peace. The other day, The Dilbert Blog pointed me to an interview of economist and environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg by a television showman. After Lomborg said what he had to say - in essence, that global warming is definitely anthropogenic, but people will adapt without being affected by any catastrophe, and that we should focus on making renewable energy production cheaper so that China and India can afford it - the show host Bill Maher and two other participants - Salman Rushdie and Rob Thomas - ridiculed Lomborg by accusing that he had said exactly the opposite of what he really said in front of them. This was probably the worst instance of bigotry and denial that anyone would have witnessed in supposedly civilised circles.

Coming back to the issue of the award, the Nobel Peace Prize is notorious for being given to shady characters. For example, in 1994, this award was given to the notorious terrorist and founder of the terrorist outfit Fatah, Yasser Arafat, who was the mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympics carnage, among others. Thus it comes as no surprise that the Nobel should be given to the former American Vice President and the UN's environmentalists. Al Gore and IPCC, bravo, you guys really deserve this award!

Masters of the Universe

2007-10-04T22:40:00.000+05:30

'The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.'
- Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935)

Fifty years ago, on this day, mankind made its first step outside its cradle. On 4 October 1957, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, an R-7, rose from the steppes of Central Asia on a pillar of hot gas, carrying with it what would become the icon of a new age - the Sputnik. The space age had dawned.

It all started about sixty thousand years ago, when something happened to our ancestors that changed the way they perceived the universe. As archaeological evidence shows, at that point of time, humans stopped using crude flint tools and started using sophisticated bone tools. We stepped out of Africa and colonised the planet. The journey of man that started sixty thousand years ago is still on. In the fifty years that have passed since that historic spaceflight, humans have colonised Earth orbit. We have visited the Moon many times. We have sent our scouts to every planet and dwarf planet in the Solar System except those outside the orbit of Pluto. Our spacecraft have attained the third cosmic velocity, and are almost in interstellar space. Our robotic explorers are roving on Mars. We have intercepted comets and asteroids. We have landed on an alien satellite. We have brought back to Earth space dust. We have seen the Sun in all its glory. We have peeked into the origins of the Universe with our eyes in the sky. We are the masters of the known Universe. What we have done so far is truly amazing; what is to be done, even more so.

The National Aerospace and Space Administration (NASA) has plans for sending men back to the Moon, to start a colony there, much like the International Space Station. We will achieve that target within the next few years. If everything goes well, we would have settled on Mars by the middle of this century, and by the turn of the twenty-second century, space would have become a suburb to the planet.

The entry of private players in the rocketship and space exploration business has given a big boost to humanity's astronomical ambitions. Many companies are sweating it out in the deserts of California and Nevada to go where no private company has gone before. They are building ships which will eventually take us to new worlds. The present situation is the same as in the Middle Ages when European explorers tried to discover a western route to India - the same thirst for exploration, the same lure of the unknown, the same frenzy of ship-building. Who will be the next Columbus?

Contrary to popular belief, the growing military competition between the United States of America and Russia in the field of space-based warfare can only mean good things. The Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests In The Atmosphere, In Outer Space And Under Water which was signed in 1963 should be modified, or even revoked so that the dreams we sung requiems for - Project Orion, Project Daedalus, Project Longshot, and the like - can be resurrected, to take us to other stellar systems.

Since time immemorial, men have been searching for their fortunes amongst the stars, for it is amongst the stars that our future lies. It is not just a matter of exploration or conquest, it is a matter of the survival of our species.

Honey, I Taught the Kids English

2007-09-30T16:18:00.000+05:30

'Where you going, ya?'

The shrill voice of the neighbour's five-year-old caught my attention, as I was walking back home from a failed attempt at buying a new motorcycle, the reason for which is a blog post in its own right, but which I will not publish, thanks to the heartening response I received for my previous entry titled 'Could You Please Do Your Work?', which ranged from verging on cautious support to the downright life-threatening. To come back to the topic at hand, and to translate what the aforementioned neighbour's kid was saying, he just wanted to know where his friend, who was the target of the enquiry, was going to. It took me a moment to realise that the kid was indeed speaking a language which I proudly list among known languages in whichever form asks for it, including my Orkut profile - no, not Chinese.

As we are all very aware, Indians, like the Chinese, and everyone else in the Orient, have this uncontrollable urge to copy anything Western. From wearing navel studs to breast implants, lifting stories and scenes from Hollywood movies to talking like one is acting in one, our admiration for anything and anyone foreign (including leaders of political parties) knows no bounds. This explains why an increasingly large number of Indian parents are making their children speak English as their primary language, rather than their mother tongue. Irrespective of whether they are Kashmiri or Tamil, Gujarati or Assamese, middle class to upper class parents in urban India, the visionaries that they are, strive to ensure that their children will not be constrained later in life by a lack of English language skills. And how.

The number of people in India who speak proper English is such a minority as to be qualified to demand reservations. Most of us in India speak what people have begun to call 'Indian English' - a veritable English pizza with toppings of Hindi and various regional languages. 'Indian English' is another subject worthy of having a blog entry of its own, and one is, in fact, in the draft stage. Now, there is no problem in wanting one's child to be good in English, a global language, but should it be at the cost of one's mother tongue? Even if parents insist that children speak English, should it be the convoluted, rude, ungrammatical, and uneducated-sounding Indian English, for heaven's sake? It should be kept in mind that I am not talking about accent or pronunciation, but grammar and the choice of words. For a sense of relativity, it is much like teaching the kids Lalu Prasad Yadav's Hindi instead of, say, Atal Bihari Vajpayee's.

The first language a child learns has tremendous influence on the way he thinks. Imposing a language in which even the parents are unable to articulate will put a debilitating limit on the children's thinking, articulation, and information-processing skills, in addition to other aspects of Sapir-Whorfian behavioural evolution. In other words, urban India is in danger of spawning a generation of confused, inarticulate souls.

We have to admire the Chinese in this respect, who insist that they would learn English only from native speakers of the language, even if the native speaker's previous employment was as an ice cream vendor in Central Park. Not surprisingly, the Chinese are getting good at the language, and not just in reading and writing, but in speaking with good pronunciation and stress - in other words, they are getting better than us in communicating in English. Until parents back home do something about what comes out of their kids' mouths, it is 'where you going, ya?' for a whole new generation.

Could You Please Do Your Work?

2007-09-24T23:57:00.000+05:30

Something happened today that most of the people in the world did not know about, and hardly cared about. India won some cricket tournament. I came to know about this because of a strange incident that happened at the gym today.

Usually, the gym is crowded, and it is not out of the ordinary that one has to wait for a machine to be free. But today was different. The only people who were present were the instructors, and a handful of badly-shaped people. One section of a wall of the gym is a glass partition, the other side of which is a lounge with a refreshments counter. Hung on the far side of the lounge, in view of the workout area, is a large LCD television. They were showing a game of cricket, and I figured out that it was the final of a tournament of a new kind of cricket. The game was being played between India and Pakistan.

Luckily for me, I finished most of my workout routine before the game got in full swing. As I was doing my last few stretches, I saw the whole set of instructors at the glass wall, staring at the TV. One lone person was trying to do some exercise on a machine, and he was finding it difficult to adjust something on it to his comfort. The usually-helpful instructors were totally indifferent to the poor fellow's plight. I was shocked hearing the man call his instructor and literally beg to him, 'Please show me how to adjust this and I won't disturb you any more!'

The kind of service one gets after paying a few tens of thousands of rupees, all in the name of a stupid game!

I think you must have got it now: I hate cricket. I think it is the most boring game ever invented (which explains why they are continuously changing the rules of the game). Golf, I feel, is a thousandfold more interesting. But almost everyone in the country adores cricket. I once thought that the problem must lie with me, that I do not enjoy a game most of the people in my country love. But then I realised that most of the people in the world hardly enjoy cricket. So I wonder who the problem lies with. India is one of just a handful of cricket-playing nations, and these people have the audacity to call their tournament the World Cup!

I knew India was going to win the tournament. In fact, I wanted to post a blog yesterday predicting it. Unfortunately, I did not get the time for it. The result was obvious to me because India and Pakistan are two countries who were knocked out in the first round of a previous tournament (another World Cup!), so it made sense that they enter the final of this new, shorter version of the game, so that it gets popularity in these markets. India, being a larger market, was the natural choice for being the winner. One should also keep in mind that India had recently won the Nehru Cup football tournament (not that anyone heard about it) and the Asia Cup hockey tournament, so there was a slight danger of losing market share. Now you might say that I am making this accusation because I hate cricket. My reply would be that the reason you are finding this incredulous is because you love cricket.

Cricket is the only game in which I hear commentators say the phrase 'good cricket' all the time. 'That is good cricket by whatzisname!' Has anyone ever heard any commentator say 'good football by Beckham' or 'good tennis by Federer'? It is as if these cricket-peddlers want to get an idea into the gullible minds of the spectators by repetition of the phrase. 'Good cricket', 'good cricket', 'cricket good', 'cricket is good'... A mass hypnosis.

I sometimes wonder why the very people who want to boycott foreign goods and change the British names of places are ironically fixated on a British game. What one would never hear from these hypocrites is a call for a ban on cricket, or voices of support for Indian games like kabaddi.

Anyway, the sole saving grace of today's game was that the road was deserted, and I could get back home in ten minutes, whereas the usual transit time is at least half an hour.

Purposes of the Pavement

2007-09-23T00:01:00.000+05:30

Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, in the preface to their book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, said that 'programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute'. My previous employer was fanatical about this comment, and my manager, an epitome of motivation, quite appositely e-mailed it to the team once, when everyone was working overnight to make the program work. By the way, it was the same fellow who's other inspirational comments included (after working till 7 AM that morning and managing to meet the deadline) 'you guys just slog, your work quality is pathetic', and (after giving an insultingly low raise purportedly because of resignation) 'this is for your valuable contribution to the company'. The people of Bangalore seem to have the same mentality when it comes to the pavement. Pavements here must have been laid out for a variety of different purposes, and only incidentally for pedestrians to walk on.

The uses pavements are put to in the city defies the imagination. A brief list based on my observations is given below.

The pavement is used for parking vehicles. Why spend money at the car park when you can park for free?
It is used by two-wheelers during slow traffic. They honk the horn impatiently at pedestrians as if their rightful path is being violated!
In upmarket residential areas such as Sadashivanagar and Indiranagar, the pavement is the extension of the house garden, complete with 'Do not step on the grass' signboards.
The pavement is the favourite pooping place of street dogs and the chosen pooping place for pet dogs. Why use a scooper when pedestrians' feet are sufficient to clean the footpath?

Walking through the pavement is just like playing Super Mario Bros., minus the points. People who are adept at rescuing Princess Peach would find it extremely easy to cover this obstacle course. For the rest, the road is the safer option.

Where Do You Want To Go Today?

2007-08-28T20:27:00.000+05:30

I am a huge fan of Lonely Planet. Some people say that 'LP', as it is affectionately called, is not the best travel guide series. I hardly care. I like the name, and the fact that they publish the most popular travel guides is reason enough for me to pick one up before embarking on any trip.

I have a mini-library of Lonely Planets in my possession. Even though my LP collection comprises of Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, and China, it is not representative of my excursions. I have been to Nepal and China, but not yet to Bhutan and Myanmar. Not a big deal, one would think. But to me, it is. Let me explain.

I had the time of my life doing a lot of travelling during the winter and spring of 2005-2006. I was in China at the time, and without the LP in my backpack. Yet I managed to visit quite a few places - Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, Shanghai, and Xi'an, besides exploring my base Beijing. Living in China transformed me into a traveller. On the flight back, craning my neck until my head touched the window pane, watching the muddy banks of a swollen Yellow River recede into the distance and get consumed by clouds, I promised myself that I would devote my life to the nomadic ways of my ancestors. One of the first things I did after settling down in Bangalore was to plan a trip. The first Lonely Planet I bought - Bhutan - was meant to aid me in this adventure. A year later, the guide still lies in my bookshelf, waiting for the traveller. The traveller, meanwhile, was busy planning other trips.

My second LP - Myanmar - was a gift from a friend, who thought I would like to go there, having seen me drooling over a Myanmar travelogue which appeared in a newspaper. Sure, I wanted to go to Myanmar, and still want to go, but I am unable to determine when I can, given the detailed plans I have already charted out for me for the next two years. Lonely Planet Nepal was a quick buy, and the only LP I bought after buying the tickets. The last LP I laid my hands on - China - was also a gift, from someone who understood my nostalgic yearning to go back to the land of the Han. Since I got it after my China trip, I could not use it, except for filling descriptions of locations for my old Flickr photos.

In spite of my failure in justifying my LP collection, I would like to get my hands on many other Lonely Planets as well, hopefully to get away with them. But the fear of being an armchair traveller stops me in my tracks.

Yet, each time I go to the book store, my eyes automatically locate the travel section, the shelves of blue books thick and thin, brimming with the promise of exotic lands with colours unseen, music unheard, tastes not relished, and experiences unfelt. Time stands still for a moment, as my mind roams the barren wastelands of the Gobi, the towering peaks of the Hindu Kush, the snow-covered summit of Uhuru, and the deep jungles of the Amazon. In an instant, I am transformed into a nomad, with a bag on my back and a camera in hand, and the book store transforms into the road. I look ahead, and the lure of my destination tickles my itchy feet. Therefore I travel.

Why Do Church Spires Need Lightning Arresters, and Other Questions

2007-08-16T20:43:00.000+05:30

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, some of the most perplexing questions to be thrown at the religious!

Why do church spires need lightning arresters? Does not God protect His own place of worship? Why are Hindu men required to be topless to enter temples in Kerala? More importantly, why are Hindu women not required to do so? Why do Muslims still feud among themselves over a fight that purportedly happened millennia ago?

Why does the Church display a stubborn resistance to science, in cases such as that of evolution, when history has shown that they were wrong every time they did it? Why do Hindu fundamentalists take offence at Maqbool Fida Husain painting the goddess Saraswati in the nude, when one of Hinduism's iconic landmarks, the temple complex at Khajuraho, display people, gods, and goddesses performing explicit sexual activity, including but not limited to fellatios, gang bangs, and even bestiality? Why do many Muslim men not want their wives to get some sunlight? More importantly, do they insist that they take vitamin D supplements?

Why do Christians believe in the Virgin Mary when they do not believe in Santa Claus? Why do the so-called 'lower castes' in the population of India want to enter temples and perform the rituals which are part of the culture of the so-called 'upper caste' people; in other words, why do they want to be associated with the so-called 'Hindu' culture when they have no reason to be? Why do Muslims have to run a country within a country by having their own laws and courts?

Why do Christians believe that prayer can be a potential cure, when placebos work better? Why do Hindus believe in re-incarnation when it does not make a difference? Why are Muslims inflicted with a herd mentality, always living in groups, no matter what part of the world they are in?

Why do Christians depend on missionaries, and Hindus depend on charismatic gurus, when Muslims depend on terrorists for proselytising?

Tell me why.

Let Us Thank the British

2007-08-15T00:46:00.000+05:30

It is Independence Day. It is the time of the year when television channels air patriotic programs, such as Roland Emmerich's Independence Day. It is the time of the year when the media is overwhelmed with patriotism, and the consumers suffer from an overdose of saffron, white, and green.

It has been sixty years since India became free from her British occupiers. For more than forty years after Independence, nothing much had happened in the country except for a few wars and the rearing of generations of corrupt people. But since the early 1990s when liberalisation was set in motion, India started becoming economically developed. A feeling mistaken for patriotism started seeping into the Indian psyche. Things that did not make a difference till half a century after independence started being taken as non-trivial. Politicians started campaigning for changing the names of places from the British-christened to the original local language versions. In what was essentially regionalism disguised as patriotism, Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, Calcutta became Kolkata, and Bangalore became Bengaluru. But the British-given name of the country still clings on, and no one seems to mind.

Recently, the Bar Council of India changed the prescribed form of addressing judges from 'my lord' to 'your honour', as they felt the former sounded 'colonial'. If they only started shedding all things colonial, they would have to attend court stark naked, as every single item of clothing they wear, from underwear to suits, capes, and collars, are relics of the colonial legacy. Come to think of it, they would not even have been advocates if not for the British.

The Independence Day week is the time of the year when people enumerate the cruelties of the British Raj, and the struggles of the freedom fighters. It is true that the British inflicted serious atrocities on the locals, such as the introduction of cricket. But it is our responsibility to be thankful of the advantages we have had because of them. As a responsible citizen of the country, I hereby thank the British for the following, in no particular order.

Unification: Let us thank the British for unifying our country from a collection of hundreds of princely states loosely bound by similar culture. The British did a better job of it than any 'Indian' emperor, or any other invader in history, be it the Greeks or the Afghans. If the subcontinent had been left to the Mughals, we would still be hundreds of small nations, inconsequential on the world stage.
Partition: Let us thank the British for Pakistan, not that they were the only ones responsible. If Pakistan were still in India, we would be richer by a few tens of millions of Islamic fundamentalists, and perceived as a threat to world peace. If the piece of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta now known as Bangladesh were still in India, we would be poorer each year in human life as well as money due to major floods.
English: Let us thank the British for this language. Besides being the catalyst for economic growth, and the advantage that India has over China, English is the one language which binds the country. Of course, some people would like to think that Hindi is our national language, but we all know it is as realistic as the typical Bollywood movie.
Democracy: Let us thank the British for our system of governance. Let us thank them, so that the same bunch of lawyers who advocate for shedding all things colonial have jobs at least, if not merit.
Fashion: Let us thank the British for the style of the clothes we wear. If it were not for them, we would still be wearing kaupina (breechcloth), dhoti, and turban.
Industry: Let us thank the British for the very first industries in the country. The only industry that would have been in the country if it were not for them, would be the handicrafts.
Exposure: Let us thank the British for helping us peek outside the well in which we were living. Thanks to the cultural transformations that happened during the British rule, Indians started going abroad and started seeing what the outside world was.
Defence: Let us thank the British for raising a large army, the precursor to one of the largest armies in the world, and training us in Western combat techniques. If not, we would still be waging (losing) battles, brandishing swords and spears.

Happy Independence Day!

Extinction

2007-08-09T11:27:00.000+05:30

The baiji, known in the English-speaking world as the Yangtze River Dolphin, is finally extinct. It is sad that a creature that shared our planet with us and our ancestors for the past twenty million years has disappeared. It is true that humans played a role in the extinction of this species, but do we really need to blame ourselves alone?

Lipotes vexillifer first appeared in the Chang Jiang river, also known as the Yangtze, around twenty million years ago. The earliest scientific survey of the baiji population was done in the 1950s, and the number was pegged at around 6000. Around 1960, China underwent what was termed by Mao and his men as the 'Great Leap Forward', which was the period when socialism was forced onto the common man, a precursor to the 'Cultural Revolution'. Until then, the baiji was a venerated symbol in Chinese culture. The 'Great Leap Forward' crushed symbolism, including that of the dolphin. Fishermen started hunting the baiji, and the population started dwindling. Later, during the rapid industrialisation of China, effluents were pumped into the Yangtze, which further accelerated the decline of the baiji population, culminating in the extinction of the species.

But was the extinction of the Yangtze River Dolphin entirely due to human activity? As the statistics from the 1950s shows, the number of dolphins before the decline in population was as low as 6000. For a river which is over 6000 kilometres long, one dolphin per kilometre length of the river seems to be uncomfortably low. Comparatively, the elephant, which is categorised as an endangered species by the IUCN Red List, is around 500,000 in number. The baiji, for all we know, was probably on the way out of Nature's list of selected species.

Environmentalism denounces extinction as an unnatural event that should not happen, much like the Church denouncing homosexuality. Their idea is far from the truth. A good example are the dinosaurs, a famously extinct group of species. Billions of species have appeared and disappeared from the face of the Earth without any help from man. On the other hand, it is true that a very small fraction of our planet's flora and fauna has become extinct due to human activity. But how does one differentiate between the two? Should we spend money and time on conserving a species which is becoming extinct due to natural selection? Except for a few things like mass and energy, conservation is unnatural; change is what is natural to the universe.

Whether we like it or not, the future of the planet's animals is in the zoo, or a 'wildlife sanctuary' which is just an extended zoo. In the case of animals that are bound to become critically endangered or extinct, it might just be in a genetic zoo - a vial of DNA in a laboratory freezer.

Buying Perfume

2007-07-28T23:37:00.001+05:30

Everyone knows accompanying a girl on a shopping spree can be quite tedious. But accompanying a girl when she is shopping for perfume can be hazardous, as I found out some time ago.

I do not blame my friend; after all, it is female nature. I blame the rain for what happened. We had just endured an ordeal which was a movie involving a boy who rides a broomstick and an old man who wears his beard in a ponytail. We had reached the door of the shopping mall on our way out, when it started pouring cats and dogs.

'Let's go check out some perfumes,' she chirped. 'I want to buy perfume.'

My heart sank. 'Are you seriously going to buy perfume?' I protested. I had to discourage her somehow. 'How many times have you been to that place to buy perfume, sniffed the entire shop, and left without buying anything?'

'Once.'

'Okay. So how many times have you been to that place to buy perfume?'

'Once.'

'Yes!' I exclaimed, relieved. 'So whenever you have gone there to buy perfume, you have come back empty-handed!' My argument was logical and potent at that. I might have won the case. But it was not to be.

'Yeah, but this time I am going to buy something.' My heart sank again.

We started with Ralph Lauren. Spray on the smelling strip. Sniff it. Take a whiff of coffee beans. Spray on a fresh strip of paper. Sniff. Coffee beans. Spray. Sniff. Coffee beans. My eyes bulged out of their sockets, seeing the colossal amount of paper wasted. What do they do with that paper afterwards, the environmentalist in me wondered. Grim visions of a convoy of garbage trucks stuffed with smelling strips heading for the landfill appeared before me, and I broke into a cold sweat. For each product, the routine repeated, and with each iteration, she seemed to be less and less satisfied with the scent.

'Maybe you should buy this,' I suggested rather helpfully, pushing the bowl of coffee beans towards her. I sealed my lips when I got a glare in return.

The shop assistant sensed that he was on the brink of losing a customer and called a colleague of his to bail him out. 'How about Calvin Klein, madam?' she asked.

'Calvin Klein,' I whispered to my friend, à la Lorraine McFly in Back to the Future.

The smelling strip ritual repeated at least two dozen times more at the Calvin Klein counter. The shop assistant was getting agitated that my friend was not finding any perfume to her taste, uh, rather olfactory sense. After lingering around for a few more minutes, my friend asked, 'Do you have Cool Water?', and off we moved towards the Davidoff counter. The ritual began anew.

All this while, unbeknownst to me, the molecules of benzaldehyde and other toxic chemicals present in the perfumes were making their way through my nostrils into my lungs, and were dissolving in my bloodstream. I felt nauseated. My eyes started burning. I gasped for a breath of fresh air. I moved away from the counter with faltering steps, but discovered to my horror that the thing was everywhere. The molecules had random-walked to every corner of the shop! I was trapped.

Thankfully, before I heaved all over the place and passed out like a party-hopper on an overdose of Kahlúa, she had found a perfume that she liked, or rather, settled for. As the salesman thanked her profusely for buying it, as if she was his first customer in ten years, I made my way back to the counter to take a look at what she had bought. Suddenly the salesman beamed at me and said expectantly, 'How about perfume for you, sir?'

'Oh, can I have this, please?' I said, and seized the bowl of coffee beans from the counter top. I drank in the aroma of the coffee beans. Caffeine and cafestol spread inside my body and purged it of the effects of the perfume. 'Ah, heaven!' I cried out.

The Ralph Lauren and the Calvin Klein bottles still lie, for all that I know, where the storekeeper kept them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed store; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the perfume being sprayed about its smelling strips or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of the store assistant still ringing in my ears: 'How about Calvin Klein, madam?'^*

^* Rephrasing Robert Louis Stevenson.

Evolution

2007-07-26T12:22:00.000+05:30

What connects the dinosaurs, the ancient Greeks, and robotics? The answer is in this blog.

Tens of millions of years ago, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Many of the dinosaurs were gargantuan creatures, the largest of them probably being Bruhathkayosaurus, estimated to be about 40 metres long, and to weigh around 200 tonnes. (I had thought the Sanskrit-Greek name was a joke at first, but then further Googling led me to discover that it was not, and that this behemoth was discovered in Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu, India, by P. Yadagiri and K. Ayyasami in 1989. Their estimates of the size and weight of this giant, however, is based on incomplete fossil remains, which makes it difficult to be validated.) On the other hand, one of the smallest dinosaurs, the Parvicursor was as short as 2 feet in length. At the time of their discovery in early nineteenth century, dinosaurs were considered reptiles, as the christening indicates. But in the 1860s, the iconic feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx was discovered in the Solnhofen limestone beds in Bavaria, sparking off one of the longest scientific debates in history, the questions of whether dinosaurs were really reptiles, and whether birds evolved from dinosaurs. Since the 1990s, feathered dinosaur remains are being discovered in many parts of China in increasing frequency, lending more credence to the camp in favour of birds as descendants of the dinosaurs. It is amazing - descendants of the dinosaurs live in cages in our living rooms today!

It is not entirely surprising, though. As the recent New Scientist article 'Evolution: hacking back the tree of life' reports, the latest discoveries in phylogeny suggest that complex creatures evolving to become simpler is not an exception, as was considered before.

A few weeks ago, I read an article in The New Yorker titled 'Fragmentary Knowledge', on the ancient Greek astrolabe, the Antikythera Mechanism. This astronomical computer, dating back more than two millennia, was discovered in the 1900s off the coast of the island of Antikythera in the Ionian Sea. The ancient Greeks were a highly advanced people, and had made significant contributions to philosophy, mathematics, and engineering. Hero of Alexandria invented the earliest form of the steam engine many centuries before it powered the Industrial Revolution, in the first century AD. But unfortunately for mankind, he did not use it to make anything more useful than automatons, which were for all intents and purposes, toys. Many historians believe that, as the Greeks had slaves to do all the labour for them, they did not find it necessary to invent labour-saving machinery, thus precluding an Industrial Revolution, and a different course for the history of the human civilisation. The next three centuries witnessed the Romans taking over what was left of the Greek empire, the rise of Christianity, and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Greek technology, and hence the promise of a two-millennia-head-start on scientific advancement, was for ever lost to mankind.

In the twentieth century, industrial growth and the revolutionary growth of computing resources made the advent of robots inevitable. The first industrial robot, Unimate, was conceived and created in the 1950s by American inventor George Devol. Today, industrial robots are commonplace tools for automation, and the focus has shifted to creating humanoid robots. Honda, one of the pioneers in humanoid robot technology, created its first biped robot, the E0, in 1986. In the next two decades, Honda created about ten different robot models, the last of which is the highly advanced and tremendously popular ASIMO. I am sure that within the turn of the twenty-second century, humanoid robots would be as commonplace as cellphones are today, as slaves were in ancient Greece.

Once a working form of artificial intelligence has been incorporated into humanoid robots in the future, humans would not need to do much work. Our descendants would get more free time - time which they would spend on entertainment. Humans would engage in entertainment more than anything else - gambling in lunar casinos, bungee jumping from the space station, and so on. Our world would be a different place altogether. But would it be good for the survival of our species?

Once humans stop using their brains and their bodies, evolution would take them on a path that would eventually lead to a meeker, weaker, incompetent, and intellectually inferior species, a sub-human species. That would not be the day when the robots take over the controls. It would have happened hundreds of thousands of years earlier. But that would be the day when the robots realise that humans are not worth the entertainment they spend resources on. Tens of millions of years later, the robots that rule the Earth would study how that particular species of ape in the Siberian rain forest were once the inheritors of the planet. I would like to imagine that a section of the homo robotus species would campaign to protect homo inferiori from endangerment.

But Asimov's Laws of Robotics would have long been forgotten by then.

Happy?

2007-07-09T00:39:00.000+05:30

For the past few weeks, I had been plagued by chain e-mails, television and radio commercials, and print advertisements, besides television programs, and even the newscasts, imploring me to vote for Taj Mahal in the New 7 Wonders of the World online 'election'. For the record, I did not vote for Taj Mahal. I did not vote for anything else for that matter. The reason? I realised that New 7 Wonders of the World is a scam meant to fill the pockets of Bernard Weber and New7Wonders Foundation, besides advertisers, television channels, and telecom companies, emptying mine in the process.

One cannot consider an edifice a wonder just because it happens to be within one's borders. The whole campaign was a show of pseudo-nationalism catalysed by the machines of commercialism; it was not the voice of the human civilisation reacting in wonder at what it had created.

Disdain for the whole hullabaloo fuelled my curiosity to find out the results of the election. What I discovered did not surprise me. The wondrous pyramids of Egypt did not figure among the 'wonders'. Moreover, something unheard of - the archaeological site of Petra in Jordan - was in the list of 'winners'. This leads me to wonder: how many of the people who rallied for participation in this colossal waste of time, barring trivia junkies, will still remember these so-called wonders a few days from now. I am sure that for me, as for billions of people the world over, the pyramids of Egypt will definitely appear more wondrous than the Cristo Redentor statue, the dig at Petra, or even Machu Picchu can ever be.

Spurred by the runaway success of their program, the promoters have started another campaign - New 7 Wonders of Nature! But as of today, the web page of the New 7 Wonders of the World campaign remains to be updated even after the declaration of the election results, and still says that the results "will be announced... on... 07.07.07". Without wasting time on this done deal, they have probably gone on vacation to Rio with the money they have made making fools of millions of people. But most of those millions - like the supporters of Taj Mahal - are complacent, and happy at the fate of their favourite 'wonder'. Ignorance is truly bliss.

Good Ideas, Bad Timings

2007-06-26T20:34:00.000+05:30

I am a regular reader of Scott Adams' The Dilbert Blog. A few days ago, I read a blog post of his, titled Good Stories, in which he explained how he had a patentable idea, and how someone he met also had that idea, but how he later found out that it had already been patented. If it is a good story, I have ten good stories in my bag.

Back in 2002 when I was a sophomore in engineering school, I had a brilliant idea. My idea involved multiple satellites orbiting the Earth, equipped with high-resolution cameras, and a web service, using which registered users could 'buy time' on the satellites, and photograph locations whose latitudes and longitudes they entered on the web application's interface. Excited as I was, I caught hold of my friend Manu Ignatius, and did not stop until I ran out of saliva. The idea felt novel, but I was sceptical about its success, if implemented. It would cause a lot of problems related to national security, privacy, and a multitude of others. It was entirely another thing that, with my average computer skills and business-idea-pitching abilities, coupled with the fact that I was not studying at an IIT, I could never have pulled it off even if I had wanted to. Anyway, it was just one of many crazy ideas that kept popping up in my head every now and then, and as usual, I kept it in my mind's attic, hopeful to be recovered later when I had the capability to do it.

Meanwhile, a pint-sized start-up established in 2001 in Mountain View, California, calling themselves Keyhole Corporation, was working on something they called EarthViewer3D. The program relied on existing satellite imagery wrapped onto a bump-mapped Earth. Users could zoom in on any location they wanted to, and the images located in Keyhole's EarthServer would stream to the client machines. Users could even 'fly' over the locations they wanted to, saving the resulting stream of images as a video file. In 2004, Google, Inc. acquired Keyhole, EarthViewer3D became Google Earth, and I nearly jumped off a cliff. For that was when I, along with almost everyone else, heard of Keyhole and this innovative piece of software. I did not know whether to be happy or sad: happy, because my idea had proved its potential to make money; sad, because someone else had made the money.

A few months later, I joined Huawei Technologies, a Chinese communications behemoth. A few months into my job at Huawei, I got an in-house circular asking for patentable ideas that the company could use in their upcoming cellphone business. The good thing about it was that the engineers in the cellphones department would do the dirty work implementing it, while the patent would be in the name of whoever proposes the idea. It was a once-in-a-lifetime offer, and I did not want to pass it up. Immediately, lightning struck, and I had a phone in front of my mind's eye. It was an all-screen phone, in that the cover of the phone, keypad included, was LCD. Users could use the touch-screen keypad to change the phone's colour to match their dresses, besides making calls. I was sceptical about the feasibility of making such a phone, and in what would be the most stupid mistake of my life yet, I did not suggest the idea. When, in 2006, Apple came out with the iPhone, touch-screen keypad and all, I was the least excited person in the world. When I told my excited friends that it was no big deal, that I had that idea before Steve Jobs, I got cold, incredulous stares and rough shoulders.

Besides ideas with popular appeal like the ones mentioned above, I had ideas related to computer networking protocols, and being in Huawei's networking-equipment business, I had the perfect platform to realise them. In the two years in which I worked at Huawei, I started writing four seminal Internet-Drafts, which are precursors of the RFCs - the blueprints of the Internet - eventually completing just one of them. It turned out that three of my stillborn Internet-Drafts had been published before in some form. It did not help that the one that was finally submitted to the IETF (and still pending for review), was someone else's idea (a co-author's).

It happened today too. I had this idea of a page-ranking algorithm which search engines could use. A couple of minutes into my Googling to find out whether anyone else had thought of it before, I found a patent assigned to Microsoft Corporation, describing the same idea.

I have one more idea up my sleeve, and it is in the field of theoretical astrophysics. I will not get into the details here, but it involves light travelling at a speed greater than c. The only problem I face is a lack of enough knowledge in physics and mathematics to prove my theory. But after all the experiences that I have had, I am now pretty confident that by the time I learn enough physics and mathematics, someone would be counting his Nobel Prize money.

Incredible, but true. If you do not believe me, I will destroy you with a new kind of weapon which I have devised. I call it the nuclear bomb.

On Toilet Paper

2007-06-24T00:23:00.000+05:30

Did you know?

300 million people in the United States of America consume toilet paper worth $5.7 billion. 1.13 billion people in India consume toilet paper worth $7.7 million.

And what do these facts tell us? Sanitation in India is abysmal compared to that of the USA. Rather, this is the conclusion made by World Watch Institute, a self-proclaimed 'leading source of information on the interactions among key environmental, social, and economic trends'.

It is true that sanitation in India is abysmal compared to that of the USA, but considering toilet paper sales its measure, is a ridiculous proposition. The reason? Almost no one in India uses toilet paper for cleaning up. Indians who are right-handed use their left hands (and water!) for the purpose, which is why we consider eating with the left hand unclean. Why then, do Indians need $7.7 million-worth toilet paper? It is part of the accessories in toilet stalls in many commercial establishments in urban areas, and the price of toilet paper maybe high compared to that in the USA, as it is considered a luxury rather than a necessity.

The conclusions of World Watch Institute is a good example of ignorance about culture. Unless the subject of study is a purely scientific one, with no relation to human culture, raw figures do not provide enough information to draw conclusions. If people started taking Sheryl Crow seriously, World Watch Institute is bound to think that sanitation in the United States was reducing at an alarming rate!

What the Fuck is Political Correctness?

2007-06-18T01:23:00.000+05:30

Excuse the expletive, it was just so that you, the politically-correct reader, would sit up and take notice. Thank you. As for you, the politically-incorrect reader, you would not have minded it anyway.

Political correctness is a relatively recent phenomenon, so typical of our paranoid times. Although the murky roots of political correctness go back a long way to the left-leaning sections of early-twentieth-century society, it probably appeared in its present form in the 1980s in North America, Europe, and Australasia. This was a world in transformation - descendants of the African slaves and the few surviving indigenous people were getting integrated into the mainstream, sexuality was spilling out of the bedroom and onto tabletops and kitchen floors and public places, morality as always was in the poor guise of the guardian of culture, and leftist ideologies were infiltrating civilised society. It was in this world that political correctness began to be available - unsolicited - in packages politically-correctly labelled 'inclusive language'.

Consider the morphology associated with racism. The original 'negro' or the more derogatory term 'nigger' became 'black', and then 'African American'. Now 'nigger' is back in circulation among the n-, I mean, the African Americans, while it is taboo for others, except the Chinese, who refuse to budge, and continue using it as their favourite filler.

Other politically-correct terms that come to mind are 'differently-abled' or 'specially-abled' to refer to people suffering from mental retardation, irrespective of whether they have any 'different' or 'special' abilities. Those poor souls were originally called 'mentally-retarded', which followed the convoluted transformations of political correctness and became 'mentally-challenged', and then took on its present forms. I do not know how political correctness can make the near and dear ones of the people in question feel better. It is just a matter of time before 'blind' people become 'visually-challenged' and deaf people become 'audio-challenged'. 'Dumb', as you know, has for long been an offensive word.

Another term which is quickly becoming notorious in politically-correct circles is 'Third World'. In newsrooms, corporate boardrooms, and ballrooms everywhere, the term 'developing world' is gaining currency. It is as if the 'developed world' has stopped its pursuits, and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Referring to a person when the gender is unknown has become pretty dicey. "If a voter elects to not choose a party ballot, the voter may select and vote the nonpartisan races." [The New Washington Primary Frequently Asked Questions] It would be politically incorrect to say "If a voter elects to not choose a party ballot, he may select and vote the nonpartisan races". Replacing 'he' with a repetition of 'the voter' is one way to come clean. The other, as was once practised, was to refer to the unknown person as 'she', irrespective of the fact that 'the person' may be either male or female. After struggling with 'he/she' and 'she/he', people got confused and tried 'they', even though the person in question was a singular entity. I am not sure what the status quo is, but as the website of the Washington Secretary of State suggests, reusing the subject is probably the way to go. Soon, the use of 'man' having the referential meaning of 'human', will be replaced by the gender-neutral 'person'. By the time NASA sends humans to the Moon and Mars, we would be calling it 'personned missions'. The superheroes of today will soon join hands with their surgeons in their quest to defeat the evil forces of gender bias. Superman and Spiderman would become 'Superperson' and 'Spiderperson', respectively, and He-Man would have to go one step further, and change his name to 'They-Person' or 'Person-Person'.

A more enlightened society of the future will surely ridicule this nincompoopery.

Or they will stop talking altogether.

Global Warming Claims Its Newest Victim

2007-06-08T00:14:00.000+05:30

The doomsday predictions are coming true. Global warming has claimed yet another victim.

On the morning of Thursday, the 31st of May, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin walked into a broadcasting studio of National Public Radio to be interviewed. Little did he realise that by the time he walked out, he would have become a marked man. As a reply to the question whether he is doubtful that global warming "is a problem that mankind has to wrestle with", Griffin replied:

"I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

This statement is unbiased (Griffin is unsure whether it is a problem or not), logical (there is no reason why he should assume that the present climate is optimal), and realistic (he questions the power of human beings to keep the climate unchanged). The proponents of global warming, a.k.a. 'climate change', were offended by Griffin's opinion. As expected, the NASA chief was castigated by the media. Griffin, a staunch supporter of a permanent human settlement on the Moon and manned missions to Mars, was called a Luddite! He has also been called ignorant and stupid. This shows just how intolerant the pro-global-warming camp is. Intolerance has always been the signature of bigots, be it the Nazis or Islamic fundamentalists. And like the Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists, environmentalists are also wrong, as time will tell.

Anyway, as of the present, Michael Griffin had to apologise. On Monday, in an internal meeting at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Griffin said that "unfortunately, this is an issue which has become far more political than technical, and it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it."

The NASA head, like many others before him, paid the price for heresy. For Griffin, freedom of speech proved mythical.

(Excerpts from the interview are courtesy of NPR. For the NPR story and more excerpts, point your browsers to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10571499.)

The New Evil Eye

2007-06-03T01:30:00.000+05:30

Many centuries ago, in the Mediterranean, a strange custom started appearing among the populace. People had started settling down after millennia of nomadic, pastoral life. Wealth was accumulating among some individuals, while it evaded the others. Disparity in prosperity was extant, and the stratification of society into multiple economic classes was emerging. The wealthier sections of the society feared for their fortune. Due to the scientific immaturity of the times, superstitions were rampant, one of which was the 'evil eye'. People believed that an envious gaze could bring misfortune, and used talismans and pictures of a staring eye to ward off the ominous evil eye.

Cut to the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, to Bangalore, the IT capital of India. A strange custom has started appearing among the people, especially the keepers of shops with large glass windows.

The rise of the Information Technology industry resulted in many changes to the cityscape and the zeitgeist of Bangalore. The IT industry helped the people involved make a lot of money. Due to the presence of a significant number of people with buying power, huge shopping malls, multiplex theatres, and other indicators of urban development started appearing. Meanwhile, the rise of the industry also resulted in the inflow of a large number of migrant workers to Bangalore, including me. This rise in the number of 'outsiders' was accompanied by a rise of bigotry in certain sections of the native Kannada-speaking population of the city. These people - intolerant, envious, and truculent they were - started demanding a higher status for Kannada. These demands included changing the names of cities and towns in the state from the British-christened to the original Kannada, more than half a century after independence, making Kannada the medium of instruction in schools, postponing the introduction of the English language to schoolchildren from first to third standard, and so on. This was accompanied by various outfits defacing billboards and name boards written only in English, ransacking theatres screening English and Hindi films, and pelting stones at shopping malls and offices of IT companies. (The actual reason for the violence is probably the economic disparity in the society, together with the false belief that the establishments that are targeted are primarily intended for the outsiders.) The last of their favourite pastimes, namely stone-throwing, has resulted in the appearance of a new kind of apotropaic talisman - the red-and-yellow Karnataka flag (they have a flag for the state!) flying in front of buildings and the poster of the late Kannada actor Rajkumar (who has a large fan-following in the state), stuck on glass windows. It is the evil eye, redux.

It is a shame that the shopkeepers of Bangalore have to show false support to the cause of these bigots to protect their properties. Even poor Rajkumar, who in his time was an advocate of Kannada, would not have imagined that his pictures would be used to protect mere panes of glass.

Let's Just Decide that the Climate is Changing, Shall We?

2007-04-25T23:12:00.000+05:30

The argument about global warming interests me greatly, primarily because it is about science. But unlike arguments like the 'Intelligent Design' skirmishes which are also about science, this argument is fought on both sides by intelligent people. Truly speaking, the case of our warming orb is not an argument anymore. Almost everyone is convinced that our planet is getting warmer, and a great many people believe it is because of us. But still there are a few people - like George Bush - who are doubtful whether we are capable enough to inflict such a large-scale damage on ourselves. I am one of them. But unlike George Bush, I do not stand to gain anything by taking sides with the anti-global-warming lobby. ExxonMobil has not started paying me for it - yet.

My stiff opposition to the environmentalists' claims of anthropogenic global warming does not mean I am a polluting and wasteful individual. I am a person of very small carbon footprint. I walk to work every day; I try as much as possible not to hire kerosene-guzzling, smoke-spewing autorickshaws; whenever possible, I reuse polythene bags while shopping; I do not litter even biodegradable material; I do not keep electrical devices switched on unnecessarily, in fact, I make it a point to switch them off when I see unnecessary usage; I do not keep taps running unnecessarily. My only contribution to the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere is the occasional and involuntary flatulence, to mitigate which I consume as less a quantity of potatoes as possible.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is coming out with yet another report which, like its predecessors, points the finger at human activity as the reason behind global warming. I do not think global warming is happening because of human activities. Like the Church when it rejected the heliocentric theory, the Church when it rejected racial equality, and the Church when it rejected Darwinism, I might also be one day proven wrong. But not today. In spite of what the environmentalists the world over have us believe, there is no 'scientific consensus' as yet on the cause of global warming. As Michael Crichton once put it, 'Consensus is the business of politics', not science. The conformance of views that is visible now is the result of serious threats to the scientific reputation of researchers who investigate alternative theories. Matthew Warren's article titled 'Rebels of the sun' which appeared in The Australian quotes Stewart Franks, an Associate Professor in Environmental Engineering at The University of Newcastle, as 'It's reached the point that anyone who offers an open mind publicly is basically criticised and put down'. Alternative explanations such as an increase in solar activity, a change in cloud cover and thus the albedo (reflectance) of the planet, and the like, are snubbed without any scientific backing. This is a grim scenario, and a very unscientific attitude.

I believe the climate is changing, as I can feel the searing heat when I walk to work everyday. I have started using sunscreen, which I would not have touched years ago. I can see that the monsoons are not what it used to be. What I do not believe is that human beings are capable of modifying the climate of our planet within the time frames that the pro-'consensus' groups mention in the multitude of reports, articles, and TV programs that they produce. Obviously, we are polluting the environment. Obviously, we are cutting down the rain forests. Obviously, we are spewing more and more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each passing day. But the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not changed in measurable scales. There is no proof that global warming is due to human activity. There is only a 'consensus'. This is what you get when Al Gore, having failed to become President, gets an Oscar, and sets his eyes on the Nobel Prize.

How can our scientists, who cannot accurately predict the temperature of your town two days from now, correctly predict the temperature fifty years from now? This might not be a scientifically sound question, as existing mathematical models may be more correct over long durations than shorter ones. But basing conclusions on inconclusive scientific evidence is highly pernicious and unprofessional, and it undermines the pillars of science. Let Al Gore stick to politics like George Bush does. Let Greenpeace carry out environmental terrorism. But scientists, please, just do science.

The Press was Ready for Vonnegut

2007-04-15T01:12:00.000+05:30

Kurt Vonnegut, the Indianapolis-born literary giant behind seminal 20th century novels "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Breakfast of Champions", died on (INSERT DAY) of (INSERT CAUSE OF DEATH).

This is the obituary that appeared on the website of Indianapolis Star, and cached by Google News. Now, I had heard a long time ago from my father, who is a journalist, that scribes would have the obituaries of almost every famous and infamous person all written out, so that when the time came, they just needed to update the date and the cause of death. I believed that, of course, as I saw that it was an efficient way to get the article ready without missing any important fact about the dead figure. But I had never imagined that I would get to see a template as such. Vonnegut had suffered brain damage a couple of weeks before his death, and Indianapolis Star had gotten the facts ready for the inevitability. But it looks like the newspaper published the obituary, forgetting to update the relevant details, and by the time they changed it, Google's robots had cached the page. This is what must have happened, more or less.

My Genetic Journey

2007-03-30T01:06:00.001+05:30

I have received the results of The Genographic Project. The result: I carry the M17 genetic marker, and thus belong to haplogroup R1a1.

The Genographic Project is a research partnership of National Geographic and IBM, supported by the Waitt Family Foundation. It is a landmark study of the journey of human beings from our roots in Africa to every corner of the world.

Archaeological evidence has fixed the origin of man - rather, the earliest fossils of homo sapiens sapiens - to be somewhere in the Horn of Africa. From this ancient Eden, man descended upon the rest of the world, spreading his reach to every corner. The routes that different groups of humans took determined the history of our civilisation and that of our planet. The clues as to the migratory routes of the ancient humans lies not in fossils and ruins along the way, but encoded in our own DNA. Now, a group of geneticists - harnessing the power of our collective biological memory - is helping write the story of our great migration from what was home, to what eventually would be.

My Y-chromosome analysis (intended to determine my paternal ancestry) results show that I belong to the haplogroup R1a1. I am one of the direct descendants of a man born 10,000 to 15,000 years ago in what is now Ukraine or southern Russia. The M17 genetic marker, which is the defining marker of this haplogroup, marks the Indo-Europeans who migrated from eastern Europe, in the direction of Central Asia. Today, around 40% of the men living in the regions ranging from the Czech Republic, across the Eurasian steppes to Siberia, and south throughout Central Asia, belong to this clan of the human family. 5-10% of West Asian men, including the people of western Iran, carry this marker. In eastern Iran, on the other hand, around 35% of men carry the M17 marker. In India, around 35% of men in Hindi-speaking populations, and around 10% of men in Dravidian-language-speaking populations, carry this genetic marker.

I was satisfied with the result, as it was consistent with my personal theories, that:

My ancestors came from Central Asia, a conclusion based upon linguistics - the language used (meaning 'understood', 'read', and 'written'; not to be confused with 'spoken') by my grandfather's generation and beyond was Sanskrit (संस्कृतम).
The caste system which has been extant in India for millennia put up a barrier for the intermingling of the locals and those who 'arrived from afar' ('Arya'/आर्य), and thus prevented to a large extent, the mixing of genetic pools.

(I am not a racist, as some people take me to be. If anyone thinks this reeks of racism, they are either perverts, or they suffer from an inferiority complex. The only thing I believe in is science. In that sense, I am a scientist.)

One day - some day - I will travel this ancient migratory route, tracing the footsteps of my ancestors, out of Africa, through West Asia, Central Asia, eastern Europe, and back through Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, all the way down to southern India. I will meet the people of those places - distant cousins of mine - and share a few thoughts with them, take a few snaps with them. This is the only pilgrimage I will ever be on.

Gandhi's Legacy

2007-02-13T21:08:00.000+05:30

It was a bandh in the state of Karnataka yesterday. For those lucky souls who have no idea what a bandh is, it is a form of protest in which a political party or a group of people with enough clout, either due to popular support or due to popular dread put forth a decree that no establishment, be it a shop, a school, or an office be open on a specified day, and that no vehicle be seen plying on the streets. This decree, if broken, would cause many a broken bone for the offender if he is lucky, and may result in his demise, if otherwise. His vehicle/shop/school/office would be wrecked/plundered beyond recognition. No questions asked. This form of protest is practised only in the Indian subcontinent, especially in India, a nation of a billion and counting, where terms like 'civil liberties', 'responsibility', and 'tax-payers' money' are quite meaningless.

The reason for the bandh is irrelevant as it is so common as to require one. The reason may seem grave, like a rise in the prices of vegetables, or maybe trivial, or even stupid, such as the death of an actor, or the execution of a dictator of a foreign country. (When an actor associated with a minor film industry in India died, Bangalore and many other parts of Karnataka were shut down forcefully, and offices which remained open were ransacked. Even more weird was the hartal - a synonym for bandh - declared by some outfits in the state of Kerala when Saddam Hussein - who obviously has no relationship with Kerala - was hanged, more than 3000 kilometres away, in Baghdad.)

It is quite disheartening that the people of a country which is still considered a part of the 'third world', a country which has so much to do to be developed and rich, indulge in acts that are pernicious to their own betterment. What is it that drives the people of this country to hooliganism to make the government meet their demands or just to vent their frustration? Why is it that the people of this nation which claims a heritage that is unmatched anywhere in the ancient world, resort to acts of vandalism?

The answer to these questions and more lies in the history of our country's struggle for freedom from the British.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, revered by many Indians as 'the Mahatma' ('the Great Soul'), was perhaps the pioneer of the bandh. His 'civil disobedience movement' against the incumbent British government was the forerunner of the acts of protest practised by many Indian organisations nowadays. While he was working as a barrister in South Africa during the turn of the twentieth century, he invented the 'civil disobedience' as a means to fight for the Indian community's rights. After teaching the South Africans the use of this powerful tool, he returned to India, and imparted his knowledge to his brethren here. Even though it is certain that this weapon of sorts caused considerable pain to the British, it is arguable whether they left India because of this struggle, or if it was just because post-war Great Britain found it economically infeasible to continue its operations here. Anyway, that is not what I am blogging about.

Whatever were the pros of this weapon of protest, it became a boomerang and came right back at us. Now everyone, from the right to the left of the political spectrum, jumps on the bandh bandwagon every now and then, resulting in not just inconvenience to millions of people, but monetary losses that range in the millions. The sad part is that the people who take out the protests, the people who stone street lights and shopping malls, are people who do not contribute in any way to the nation's progress. They do not belong to the category of people known as the 'tax payers'. They are the unemployed, rather, unemployable section of the society. They are the ones who never went to school, or went and dropped out. They are the ones who get employment not because of their merit, but because of thousands of years of history. They are the people who join trade unions, go on strikes, and finally help shut down their companies. But the horrifying part is that the people who fuel the mob fury belong to the educated section of the society. Eminent writers in Kannada exhort the people of their state to consider their language as the best in the world, and to treat other languages with disdain. The result: unemployable youth defacing English signs, autorickshaw drivers who paint their license plates in Kannada so that they can behave rudely with people who do not seem to know the language and get away with it, software engineers who do not mingle with colleagues who do not speak the language in cosmopolitan Bangalore. (The division of India into states based on languages must have seemed to be a great idea in the beginning, but it turns out it was not.)

It is a curable disease, if only the educated section of the society were keen on improving the situation, which, unfortunately, turns out not to be the case.

It is sad, but it is true. They say India will become a 'developed nation' by 2020. It is definitely an achievable target as far as numbers are concerned. But true development - the cultural upliftment of the society - is generations away. The people of this country have to learn to shed their prejudices and eliminate their hypocrisy. And not just learn to do it. We have to make it a habit, to treat everyone as equals. And not just a habit. It has to be so ingrained in our psyche that our prejudice-free deeds come out involuntarily. The sense of equality has to be as pervasive as the air we breathe. I am not a patriot, but the condition of this nation has to improve for its progress. Echoing the words of Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Chinese Days (And Nights) Part I: Beijing

2007-02-04T18:00:00.000+05:30

I arrived in Beijing on a Friday night, the 18th of November, 2005, after having been through more than four hours of flight delay and lost baggage procedure. The company-hired cabbie who came to pick me up yelled at me for being late, drove fast, and jumped the green light on more than one occasion, before dropping me in front of an apartment building and handing my room key to an Indian guy who was about to enter it, instructing him to take me to my room. After introductions, Ashok Holla took me to my room, taught me how to unlock the strange-looking lock with the stranger-looking key, and left to meet a friend of his, which was why he was there in the first place.

I immediately called up Akhil Chandran, my buddy from college and current colleague, who was in some other building in the same apartment complex. He came to pick me up, I took my only bag remaining with me, and left for his pad. I was hungry, and the neighbourhood KFC was the only place open in the vicinity, which is where we went, and I gorged on burgers and fries. When Akhil mentioned about the night scene of Beijing, the almost non-existence of which was a source of embitterment and a cause of boring weekend routines, I suggested, in spite of being tired, that we hit someplace, but was convinced that it was too late to go out, which I later learnt was a falsity - it was never too late to go out in Beijing.

But that was later.

Anyway, my first and very eventful day outside India thus came to a close. Little could I presage the events that would unravel in the months to come, and turning in for the night, tired as I was, I slept a deep, dreamless sleep.

Icarus

2006-12-11T01:11:00.000+05:30

The wings looked strong. Seagull feathers bound with thread and wax. With these, he could defy the force which imprisoned him on the earth. With these, he could rise up and above the world. They could carry him as high as the sun. He could, perhaps, touch Helios himself? What good are wings if not to fly, and what good is flight, if not to fly higher? If I don't touch the sun, thought Icarus, I might as well sink to the bottom of the sea. He threw his arms open to the winds blowing forth from the sea of Crete, spreading his wings. And he flew. Higher, and higher.