The Vinay Health Home in the heart of Thakurdwar (which in many ways means the heart of Bombay) is an excellent place to get excellent Maharashtrian eats. My favourite is a concoction filled with green peas, which I will gladly eat anywhere, anytime, maybe even any amount.
On my last visit there, I pored -- as I am wont to do -- over the menu. These were the different sections in it, all transcribed from the Devanagari:
* Marhatmola Vinay
* Dakshin "Mukhi" Vinay
* Pharali Vinay
* Jain Vinay
* Chatpatith Vinay
* Vinay Sandwiches
* Toasty Tasty Vinay
* Thodkyath Mahatvache
* Garmagaram Vinay
* Vinaycha Thanda Mamla
* Rasbharit Vinay
* Vinay Milk Shake
* Vinay Icecream Milk Shake
* Vinay Falooda
* Vinayche Shakahari Icecream Vhariety
So I have two questions.
One, why is it that we spell it "Vinay", but we spell it "Vhariety"? (Believe it or not, this is a serious question. I really want to know).
Two, why is one section and that section alone spared from being labelled "Vinay" ("Thodkyath Mahatvache" -- which I shall freely translate as "A Few Important Things")?
August 31, 2010
August 30, 2010
My kingdom for that key, reprise
Given that tomorrow is a Blackberry deadline here in India, I thought I'd re-post this essay I did a few years ago in this space. Perhaps it might help explain Blackberry's dilemma for those who don't understand why it's a dilemma.
***
Just for fun, the wife once sent me an email message in code. I was intrigued. How had she done it? Meaning, how was I supposed to decipher and read it? I didn't want to wait to ask her, that would be too easy. Could I figure the code out for myself?
I managed it in the end, experimenting with the few clues the coded message offered. Swelling with code-breaking pride, I promptly made up what I thought was a more difficult code and dashed off a reply. The lady cracked it far faster than I had hers. So much for pride.
Of course, codes have long been used for more serious purposes than idle husbands trying unsuccessfully to outwit alert wives. Cryptography, the science of encoding and decoding messages, is a rigorous scientific pursuit by itself. In wartime, much energy goes into two efforts: making sure your communication is secure and trying to decode the enemy's. This is so crucial that the side that does a better job will usually win the war.
Till 1976, coding relied on secret keys. You use such a key to convert the message, usually called "plaintext" by cryptographers, into the "ciphertext" that is transmitted. At the other end, the same key is used to decode the ciphertext back into plaintext. The key can be a mere transposition of letters ("b" for "a", "c" for "b" and so on), variations of which are what my wife and I used; or a mechanism using pages in some agreed book; or any number of other possibilities.
But here's the crux of such a method: for communication to work, both parties have to agree on a key.
This turns out to be the flaw in the whole system. To thwart people intent on breaking the code (cryptographers are known to call them "attackers"), keys must be relatively complex, and must themselves be communicated between sender and receiver. That means they can get stolen or lost, or counterfeited by the enemy to confuse, or they may even arrive after the ciphertext itself. Sender and receiver have to find a communication channel they can trust -- a secure phone line, a reliable courier -- merely to get the key transmitted. How do you get around these problems?
In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellmann of Stanford University answered that question by attacking its root: by doing away with the idea of secrecy itself. They proposed a public key coding system, in which the sender and receiver never have to agree on a secret key. Two years later, three researchers at MIT, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, demonstrated such a public key system; it has become known as the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adelman) system.
Without a doubt, the public key system is the most significant and influential advance in modern cryptography. In 2002, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman were awarded the Turing Award -- computer science's greatest prize -- for the RSA system.
Public key systems rely on a simple mathematical idea: some functions are much easier performed in one direction than the other. For example, it's not too difficult to figure out that when you multiply 7, 11 and 13, the answer is 1001. But what if I asked you: "Which three distinct numbers produce 1001 when multiplied?" That harder problem will take you, or even a computer, much longer to solve.
With numbers much larger than 1001, this time difference becomes significant. Eventually, the slower direction of these "one-way functions" takes so long that it is effectively impossible to solve. If you took two prime numbers that are each 100 digits long, a computer could multiply them quite easily to produce another number about 200 digits long. But if you gave it that 200-digit number and ask it to find the two 100-digit factors, how long would it take? Not seconds or minutes, but perhaps years. Centuries. In effect, this is impossible.
So RSA works something like this. Let's say Shabnam wants to receive coded messages. She picks two secret prime numbers, preferably big ones, and multiplies them. She does some further manipulation to come up with two more numbers. She announces that her personal public key is the product of the primes and one of these two additional numbers. The third number remains her private key.
Monideepa, who wants to send Shabnam a coded message, uses Shabnam's public key in a formula to encrypt her plaintext. When Shabnam receives Monideepa's ciphertext, she uses her private key in another formula that restores the plaintext. Of course, Shabnam never reveals the two secret primes to anyone.
In theory, this is not a secure system: given an indefinite amount of time, attacker Pappu could take Shabnam's public key and calculate the two numbers that produced it. But of course, Pappu doesn't have indefinite time. Long before he found Shabnam's primes, he would be dead. So Shabnam's key is safe, Monideepa's message cannot be read; the RSA system is secure.
This was a giant leap: RSA opened up the possibility of cheap, yet completely secure communication available to all.
Which, of course, was a red flag to governments around the globe, many of whom want to listen in on what their citizens, or other governments, say to each other. In the USA, this governmental unease over public key cryptography led to an effort to produce a government-approved coding system, based on a secret encryption algorithm called Skipjack. The US government proposed that Skipjack would be built into communication devices that needed to be secure.
Naturally this met with much outrage and eventually the US government declassified Skipjack.
And I've always thought it a delicious aside to the whole RSA story that within a day -- yes, a day -- two researchers had substantially decoded Skipjack itself, and one of those two researchers was Adi Shamir.
Meanwhile, I have here two 100-digit primes. One of them is 4557898123798712347234898920109927481232347798726198764691200283623897221029374283764823764138973668. ... Hmm, what'd I do with the other one?
Just for fun, the wife once sent me an email message in code. I was intrigued. How had she done it? Meaning, how was I supposed to decipher and read it? I didn't want to wait to ask her, that would be too easy. Could I figure the code out for myself?
I managed it in the end, experimenting with the few clues the coded message offered. Swelling with code-breaking pride, I promptly made up what I thought was a more difficult code and dashed off a reply. The lady cracked it far faster than I had hers. So much for pride.
Of course, codes have long been used for more serious purposes than idle husbands trying unsuccessfully to outwit alert wives. Cryptography, the science of encoding and decoding messages, is a rigorous scientific pursuit by itself. In wartime, much energy goes into two efforts: making sure your communication is secure and trying to decode the enemy's. This is so crucial that the side that does a better job will usually win the war.
Till 1976, coding relied on secret keys. You use such a key to convert the message, usually called "plaintext" by cryptographers, into the "ciphertext" that is transmitted. At the other end, the same key is used to decode the ciphertext back into plaintext. The key can be a mere transposition of letters ("b" for "a", "c" for "b" and so on), variations of which are what my wife and I used; or a mechanism using pages in some agreed book; or any number of other possibilities.
But here's the crux of such a method: for communication to work, both parties have to agree on a key.
This turns out to be the flaw in the whole system. To thwart people intent on breaking the code (cryptographers are known to call them "attackers"), keys must be relatively complex, and must themselves be communicated between sender and receiver. That means they can get stolen or lost, or counterfeited by the enemy to confuse, or they may even arrive after the ciphertext itself. Sender and receiver have to find a communication channel they can trust -- a secure phone line, a reliable courier -- merely to get the key transmitted. How do you get around these problems?
In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellmann of Stanford University answered that question by attacking its root: by doing away with the idea of secrecy itself. They proposed a public key coding system, in which the sender and receiver never have to agree on a secret key. Two years later, three researchers at MIT, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, demonstrated such a public key system; it has become known as the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adelman) system.
Without a doubt, the public key system is the most significant and influential advance in modern cryptography. In 2002, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman were awarded the Turing Award -- computer science's greatest prize -- for the RSA system.
Public key systems rely on a simple mathematical idea: some functions are much easier performed in one direction than the other. For example, it's not too difficult to figure out that when you multiply 7, 11 and 13, the answer is 1001. But what if I asked you: "Which three distinct numbers produce 1001 when multiplied?" That harder problem will take you, or even a computer, much longer to solve.
With numbers much larger than 1001, this time difference becomes significant. Eventually, the slower direction of these "one-way functions" takes so long that it is effectively impossible to solve. If you took two prime numbers that are each 100 digits long, a computer could multiply them quite easily to produce another number about 200 digits long. But if you gave it that 200-digit number and ask it to find the two 100-digit factors, how long would it take? Not seconds or minutes, but perhaps years. Centuries. In effect, this is impossible.
So RSA works something like this. Let's say Shabnam wants to receive coded messages. She picks two secret prime numbers, preferably big ones, and multiplies them. She does some further manipulation to come up with two more numbers. She announces that her personal public key is the product of the primes and one of these two additional numbers. The third number remains her private key.
Monideepa, who wants to send Shabnam a coded message, uses Shabnam's public key in a formula to encrypt her plaintext. When Shabnam receives Monideepa's ciphertext, she uses her private key in another formula that restores the plaintext. Of course, Shabnam never reveals the two secret primes to anyone.
In theory, this is not a secure system: given an indefinite amount of time, attacker Pappu could take Shabnam's public key and calculate the two numbers that produced it. But of course, Pappu doesn't have indefinite time. Long before he found Shabnam's primes, he would be dead. So Shabnam's key is safe, Monideepa's message cannot be read; the RSA system is secure.
This was a giant leap: RSA opened up the possibility of cheap, yet completely secure communication available to all.
Which, of course, was a red flag to governments around the globe, many of whom want to listen in on what their citizens, or other governments, say to each other. In the USA, this governmental unease over public key cryptography led to an effort to produce a government-approved coding system, based on a secret encryption algorithm called Skipjack. The US government proposed that Skipjack would be built into communication devices that needed to be secure.
Naturally this met with much outrage and eventually the US government declassified Skipjack.
And I've always thought it a delicious aside to the whole RSA story that within a day -- yes, a day -- two researchers had substantially decoded Skipjack itself, and one of those two researchers was Adi Shamir.
Meanwhile, I have here two 100-digit primes. One of them is 4557898123798712347234898920109927481232347798726198764691200283623897221029374283764823764138973668. ... Hmm, what'd I do with the other one?
August 27, 2010
Morariu
I don't know too many Romanian names. One I do know, since I'm something of a tennis nut, is "Morariu". Corina Morariu played pro tennis through the 1990s, achieving her best results in doubles. In 2001, she was diagnosed with leukaemia and nearly died; but amazingly, she made a full recovery and returned to the pro circuit before retiring in 2007.
So when I heard the name Morariu in Leh a few days ago, I immediately thought of tennis, and this inspiring survivor.
Only, it was another Morariu: Catalin his name.
Catalin Constantin Morariu is a 35-year-old Romanian mountaineer and hiker. In 2005, he climbed the world's 14th-highest mountain, 8013 metre Shishapangma in Tibet. In early August this year, he and four friends, including a 32 year-old Danish woman called Henrietta, travelled to Ladakh for some days of hiking. On August 5, they pitched their tents in the hamlet of Sku, in the Markha valley.
That night, disaster struck in various parts of Ladakh. A cloudburst sent wet and massive destruction into Leh, Phyang, Choglamsar, Saboo and other places. And to Sku. The water swept away the Romanian group. Three of them managed to save themselves by hanging on to some rocks. They saw Catalin clinging to a tree. When the water receded, they found Henrietta's body, took her to a nearby monastery and eventually took her home to Denmark.
They did not find Catalin.
I know all this because of a German woman who was at the same hotel I was at in Leh. An old Ladakh hand, she runs a website about her work there. An uncle of Catalin's lives in Germany. He ran across her site on the Web and left her a note asking if she could find out what had happened to Catalin. Two of us at the hotel (oddly, both named "Dilip") offered to help, but we drew blanks.
I did not have time, before my departure, to investigate any more.
But I did stop for a chat with the founder of a travel agency in Leh. Since his agency has been around for years, various foreign embassies asked him to help find out what had happened to their citizens missing in Ladakh after the flood. In the case of a young Frenchwoman, he found out that the police, unable to identify her, had buried her body in a remote village. He sent out a team that exhumed her body and brought her to Leh, via raft and then road.
This man told me he had heard of a tall Romanian, unidentified, whose body the police had similarly buried in Sku. I left for Bombay early the next morning. I've left whatever information I had for the German woman to work with.
Sometime soon, I hope to hear that Catalin Morariu is home in Romania. If that body is really his, my thoughts are with his sadly bereaved parents.
So when I heard the name Morariu in Leh a few days ago, I immediately thought of tennis, and this inspiring survivor.
Only, it was another Morariu: Catalin his name.
Catalin Constantin Morariu is a 35-year-old Romanian mountaineer and hiker. In 2005, he climbed the world's 14th-highest mountain, 8013 metre Shishapangma in Tibet. In early August this year, he and four friends, including a 32 year-old Danish woman called Henrietta, travelled to Ladakh for some days of hiking. On August 5, they pitched their tents in the hamlet of Sku, in the Markha valley.
That night, disaster struck in various parts of Ladakh. A cloudburst sent wet and massive destruction into Leh, Phyang, Choglamsar, Saboo and other places. And to Sku. The water swept away the Romanian group. Three of them managed to save themselves by hanging on to some rocks. They saw Catalin clinging to a tree. When the water receded, they found Henrietta's body, took her to a nearby monastery and eventually took her home to Denmark.
They did not find Catalin.
I know all this because of a German woman who was at the same hotel I was at in Leh. An old Ladakh hand, she runs a website about her work there. An uncle of Catalin's lives in Germany. He ran across her site on the Web and left her a note asking if she could find out what had happened to Catalin. Two of us at the hotel (oddly, both named "Dilip") offered to help, but we drew blanks.
I did not have time, before my departure, to investigate any more.
But I did stop for a chat with the founder of a travel agency in Leh. Since his agency has been around for years, various foreign embassies asked him to help find out what had happened to their citizens missing in Ladakh after the flood. In the case of a young Frenchwoman, he found out that the police, unable to identify her, had buried her body in a remote village. He sent out a team that exhumed her body and brought her to Leh, via raft and then road.
This man told me he had heard of a tall Romanian, unidentified, whose body the police had similarly buried in Sku. I left for Bombay early the next morning. I've left whatever information I had for the German woman to work with.
Sometime soon, I hope to hear that Catalin Morariu is home in Romania. If that body is really his, my thoughts are with his sadly bereaved parents.
Mark in Delhi
Last week on the 18th of August, I proclaim ...
Wrong film, sorry. (Which one?)
But on the 18th of August, there was a discussion around my book Roadrunner at the American Center in New Delhi. The writers Manjula Padmanabhan and Stephen Alter were the invited panelists, and Michael Pelletier of the US Embassy led the discussion. I've had a number of these events over the last several months (as some of you who've followed this space might remember), and this was one of the more stimulating ones. There were about 70 people who braved the Delhi traffic and rain to attend, several of them asked interesting questions and some stayed to chat afterwards. Thank you, all.
Yesterday, I got a note from someone called Mark Klassen. He said he had been in the front row at the event, bought my book at the end and read it over the next few days. When he finished, he wrote a post about it on his blog. It's a remarkably thoughtful examination of some things I wrote about.
I'll say no more. Take a look: War and peace in my Delhi life (the second section of the post is about my book).
Wrong film, sorry. (Which one?)
But on the 18th of August, there was a discussion around my book Roadrunner at the American Center in New Delhi. The writers Manjula Padmanabhan and Stephen Alter were the invited panelists, and Michael Pelletier of the US Embassy led the discussion. I've had a number of these events over the last several months (as some of you who've followed this space might remember), and this was one of the more stimulating ones. There were about 70 people who braved the Delhi traffic and rain to attend, several of them asked interesting questions and some stayed to chat afterwards. Thank you, all.
Yesterday, I got a note from someone called Mark Klassen. He said he had been in the front row at the event, bought my book at the end and read it over the next few days. When he finished, he wrote a post about it on his blog. It's a remarkably thoughtful examination of some things I wrote about.
I'll say no more. Take a look: War and peace in my Delhi life (the second section of the post is about my book).
Impressions of a flood
As I mentioned earlier, internet access was difficult in Leh, and it seemed blogger.com was particularly hard to reach. I did manage to put out a number of tweets, you know what those are. Now that I'm back in broadband country, I thought I'd put some of those tweets (edited some for coherence and relevance and because I no longer am constrained by the number 140) up here as one post. Might give you a taste of what it was like in Leh.
***
In Leh with minimal Web access. The destruction is something fierce, yet there's utter normalcy in places that are unaffected. In that sense, it brings back memories of Tamil Nadu during the tsunami.
I realize that when you look at the edge of the road where a bridge has been washed away, or indeed the road itself, that edge looks like a bitten biscuit. In a week, I saw more biscuits than I might want. And walking to a destroyed bridge near Phyang, west of Leh, I pass three connected vertebrae lying in my path. Probably cattle, or a dog? But in this time, this place, I wonder.
Orissa cyclone '99: plenty of fields destroyed by seawater flooding in. Ladakh '10: plenty of fields destroyed by floodwater and boulders from the mountains. Same difference, to me.
Standing in the hospital in Leh, across the valley over the town of Stok is a vast black cloud, looks like it is pouring rain on Stok. Friend there whom I call laughs at my worry, tells me it's only drizzling.
In more than one flood-damaged Ladakh place, metal rods from the innards of destroyed buildings rise from the ground like tall strands of grass.
Signs 200 metres apart on the Leh-Srinagar highway read thus: "Rajma Rice Available Here", and "Salvage". We turn off onto a dirt road that leads up to a stony plateau. Between damaged huts on this plateau sits a damaged Maruti 800 with "Lynyrd Skynyrd" painted on back. I expect to hear "Gimme Three Step" any moment. Meanwhile, the 16 Border Roads Task Force says it is the "Only Unit in Guinness Book of World Records." No time to find out why -- does anyone know? For the highest motorable road in the world? Also, I won't tell you where in Leh I found a sign saying "Please After Close The Door", and this in large letters about 150 m away: "URINE".
A three-storey building was destroyed by the flood, its roof lies 50 metres away. Lying on the roof when I walk past is a drenched and thick book, titled "The Aim of Life". Ironies everywhere. Several of us gather on Sunday morning to clean up a Leh playground that's buried in mud. Digging, lifting. Then a JCB joins in the fun. Its operator's tee reads "Trophies of Bygone Era". Appropriate. Maybe irony as well.
The cleanup crew included five or six teenage boys, and the rest all much older. Nobody in their 20s, 30s or 40s. Puzzling. Also working steadily in the cleanup was a German grandmother, picking up sticks and boards with her bare hands. Reminded me of Ram's squirrel. In fact, most of the cleanup happened with bare sets of hands. Any fear of rust/nails/dirt/wood splinters, if there at all, was not apparent to me.
Lunch on Monday is at an elegant Leh eatery. I liked it and its owners, who sat to chat, a lot. Their business has been badly hit because of the flood (which was why they had the time to chat). I return on Wednesday for a late lunch and more conversation. When I am done, they refuse to charge me. Another day, a taxi driver called Asif wants Rs 80 for a trip I need to make. I have a Rs 100 note. He has no change. So he tells me, you keep it. If we meet again, give me the Rs 80. Specifically because he had been so generous, I looked for and found him for two more trips I needed to do.
On the other hand: I bought half a kilo of apricots from a woman on the pavement. Tried another seller for another half kilo, and this woman would not let me pick out the ones I wanted -- said I would spoil them. So she lost my business.
In truth, the impact of this disaster on Ladakh's economy is massive, and so there's lots of resentment over the media coverage. But here's an example of the impact: one small shop in the tourist strip that I visited, King Arts, would do Rs 40,000 to Rs 50,000 of sales every day. After the flood, that came down to Rs 4000 a day. (The day I visited, I contributed Rs 1000 of that). The owner told me he was closing up and going to Goa, where he also has a store.
Lots of sad stories that I hear, about the disaster. A man jumped into a truck with his baby, then stretched out his hand to pull his wife aboard. But before she could grab his hand, she was washed away. Another couple with their 2.5 month-old baby clung to a gate in neck-high water. The gate crumbled. Desperate, they threw their baby to a nun on the first floor above them. After catching the kid, she lowered sheets for them to climb up to safety.
The Ladakh Scouts Regimental Centre lost three men, washed away while on guard duty. A bridge on the Leh-Srinagar highway near their post was also washed away, but within a day, the Army was able to put up a temporary Bailey bridge there.
Not so easy to replace soldiers.
In Leh with minimal Web access. The destruction is something fierce, yet there's utter normalcy in places that are unaffected. In that sense, it brings back memories of Tamil Nadu during the tsunami.
I realize that when you look at the edge of the road where a bridge has been washed away, or indeed the road itself, that edge looks like a bitten biscuit. In a week, I saw more biscuits than I might want. And walking to a destroyed bridge near Phyang, west of Leh, I pass three connected vertebrae lying in my path. Probably cattle, or a dog? But in this time, this place, I wonder.
Orissa cyclone '99: plenty of fields destroyed by seawater flooding in. Ladakh '10: plenty of fields destroyed by floodwater and boulders from the mountains. Same difference, to me.
Standing in the hospital in Leh, across the valley over the town of Stok is a vast black cloud, looks like it is pouring rain on Stok. Friend there whom I call laughs at my worry, tells me it's only drizzling.
In more than one flood-damaged Ladakh place, metal rods from the innards of destroyed buildings rise from the ground like tall strands of grass.
Signs 200 metres apart on the Leh-Srinagar highway read thus: "Rajma Rice Available Here", and "Salvage". We turn off onto a dirt road that leads up to a stony plateau. Between damaged huts on this plateau sits a damaged Maruti 800 with "Lynyrd Skynyrd" painted on back. I expect to hear "Gimme Three Step" any moment. Meanwhile, the 16 Border Roads Task Force says it is the "Only Unit in Guinness Book of World Records." No time to find out why -- does anyone know? For the highest motorable road in the world? Also, I won't tell you where in Leh I found a sign saying "Please After Close The Door", and this in large letters about 150 m away: "URINE".
A three-storey building was destroyed by the flood, its roof lies 50 metres away. Lying on the roof when I walk past is a drenched and thick book, titled "The Aim of Life". Ironies everywhere. Several of us gather on Sunday morning to clean up a Leh playground that's buried in mud. Digging, lifting. Then a JCB joins in the fun. Its operator's tee reads "Trophies of Bygone Era". Appropriate. Maybe irony as well.
The cleanup crew included five or six teenage boys, and the rest all much older. Nobody in their 20s, 30s or 40s. Puzzling. Also working steadily in the cleanup was a German grandmother, picking up sticks and boards with her bare hands. Reminded me of Ram's squirrel. In fact, most of the cleanup happened with bare sets of hands. Any fear of rust/nails/dirt/wood splinters, if there at all, was not apparent to me.
Lunch on Monday is at an elegant Leh eatery. I liked it and its owners, who sat to chat, a lot. Their business has been badly hit because of the flood (which was why they had the time to chat). I return on Wednesday for a late lunch and more conversation. When I am done, they refuse to charge me. Another day, a taxi driver called Asif wants Rs 80 for a trip I need to make. I have a Rs 100 note. He has no change. So he tells me, you keep it. If we meet again, give me the Rs 80. Specifically because he had been so generous, I looked for and found him for two more trips I needed to do.
On the other hand: I bought half a kilo of apricots from a woman on the pavement. Tried another seller for another half kilo, and this woman would not let me pick out the ones I wanted -- said I would spoil them. So she lost my business.
In truth, the impact of this disaster on Ladakh's economy is massive, and so there's lots of resentment over the media coverage. But here's an example of the impact: one small shop in the tourist strip that I visited, King Arts, would do Rs 40,000 to Rs 50,000 of sales every day. After the flood, that came down to Rs 4000 a day. (The day I visited, I contributed Rs 1000 of that). The owner told me he was closing up and going to Goa, where he also has a store.
Lots of sad stories that I hear, about the disaster. A man jumped into a truck with his baby, then stretched out his hand to pull his wife aboard. But before she could grab his hand, she was washed away. Another couple with their 2.5 month-old baby clung to a gate in neck-high water. The gate crumbled. Desperate, they threw their baby to a nun on the first floor above them. After catching the kid, she lowered sheets for them to climb up to safety.
The Ladakh Scouts Regimental Centre lost three men, washed away while on guard duty. A bridge on the Leh-Srinagar highway near their post was also washed away, but within a day, the Army was able to put up a temporary Bailey bridge there.
Not so easy to replace soldiers.
August 26, 2010
Car, attitude
A week in Leh with very limited access to the Web, and for some reason, all three times I did get access, reaching blogger.com was like watching grass grow. I did manage one post (see below), but had to postpone doing any more about Leh till my return. We'll see what I manage now.
In the meantime, rediff.com published the second episode in a column I am doing there. Please check Bigger the car, bigger the attitude.
Comments welcome. Money too.
In the meantime, rediff.com published the second episode in a column I am doing there. Please check Bigger the car, bigger the attitude.
Comments welcome. Money too.
August 21, 2010
The mention of rain
In Choglamsar village just 10 minutes east of Leh, I'm standing on what looks like a riverbed. There are ruined houses on either side, but this is a riverbed: stones and boulders stretching gently uphill from where I stand nearly all the way to the hills in the distance. This is a riverbed.
Or is it? Tsering Sandrup, standing next to me and next to his brother's house, points out to me the remains of the small verandah the house used to have. It projects into this riverbed. He tells me softly, there used to be houses packed tightly all the way where you see these stones. The water came down that way and took all the houses away.
It is a riverbed of sorts now. Before August 5, it wasn't.
I came over to meet Tsering because standing here in Choglamsar and letting my mind boggle at the destruction, I see dark brown mud fly out of an opening in a runied house, almost at ground level. I realize that there's a man in there, digging with a shovel at the mud that had nearly inundated the house, flinging out shovelfuls through the front door: the top of this front door is now at my knee level. That's how much mud came through, on the edge of this river of massive boulders.
The man in there is Tsering's brother, dressed in blue and panting from his efforts. So far he and Tsering and their two wives have managed to rescue: an amplifier, a TV set-top box, a carpet, two thermos flasks and a notebook. Still the brother digs, while Tsering takes a break to catch his breath.
There was light rain earlier that evening of August 5, says Tsering. Then the heavy rain, about midnight. Luckily for his family, this particular house was empty that evening: he and his brother and his sister-in-law and their kids havd gone to another village to spend the night. His wife was here though, in someone else's house for the night, and she ran before the water and all night and until 5 in the morning. He made desperate attempts to phone and come all through August 6, and was only able to find her the next morning, when someone told him she had found shelter on top of a nearby hill and someone else got through to her on the phone. By late that day, the family ha got together again.
More than can be said for many other Choglamsar families: the stories are of 100+ deaths here. Looking at this riverbed, I can believe it.
Tsering says everyone still feels frightened by the whole calamity. "Baarish ke naam se bahut dar hai" (We are frightened by even the mention of rain), he says.
As if on cue, heavy drops begin to fall on us.
Or is it? Tsering Sandrup, standing next to me and next to his brother's house, points out to me the remains of the small verandah the house used to have. It projects into this riverbed. He tells me softly, there used to be houses packed tightly all the way where you see these stones. The water came down that way and took all the houses away.
It is a riverbed of sorts now. Before August 5, it wasn't.
I came over to meet Tsering because standing here in Choglamsar and letting my mind boggle at the destruction, I see dark brown mud fly out of an opening in a runied house, almost at ground level. I realize that there's a man in there, digging with a shovel at the mud that had nearly inundated the house, flinging out shovelfuls through the front door: the top of this front door is now at my knee level. That's how much mud came through, on the edge of this river of massive boulders.
The man in there is Tsering's brother, dressed in blue and panting from his efforts. So far he and Tsering and their two wives have managed to rescue: an amplifier, a TV set-top box, a carpet, two thermos flasks and a notebook. Still the brother digs, while Tsering takes a break to catch his breath.
There was light rain earlier that evening of August 5, says Tsering. Then the heavy rain, about midnight. Luckily for his family, this particular house was empty that evening: he and his brother and his sister-in-law and their kids havd gone to another village to spend the night. His wife was here though, in someone else's house for the night, and she ran before the water and all night and until 5 in the morning. He made desperate attempts to phone and come all through August 6, and was only able to find her the next morning, when someone told him she had found shelter on top of a nearby hill and someone else got through to her on the phone. By late that day, the family ha got together again.
More than can be said for many other Choglamsar families: the stories are of 100+ deaths here. Looking at this riverbed, I can believe it.
Tsering says everyone still feels frightened by the whole calamity. "Baarish ke naam se bahut dar hai" (We are frightened by even the mention of rain), he says.
As if on cue, heavy drops begin to fall on us.
August 19, 2010
Contest break
The Great Roadrunner Contest has run through three episodes now. See the questions, and the answers and the stories behind, here.
With deep regret and utmost sorrow, I hereby announce that the Contest has reached its heavenly abode ... oops, wrong announcement.
No, the Contest now takes a break for about a week. I am traipsing off to Leh in a matter of hours and am there for a week. As far as I know, web access there is something between difficult and nonexistent. So I look forward to resuming the contest towards the end of this month.
Till then, don't do anything I wouldn't do.
Sorry, wrong announcement again. Do plenty of things I wouldn't do.
With deep regret and utmost sorrow, I hereby announce that the Contest has reached its heavenly abode ... oops, wrong announcement.
No, the Contest now takes a break for about a week. I am traipsing off to Leh in a matter of hours and am there for a week. As far as I know, web access there is something between difficult and nonexistent. So I look forward to resuming the contest towards the end of this month.
Till then, don't do anything I wouldn't do.
Sorry, wrong announcement again. Do plenty of things I wouldn't do.
August 18, 2010
My friend for life
Bombay-Delhi train journey, sleeper class on the Golden Temple Mail, some impressions. Maybe more later.
* Two men on berths near me are playing nonstop with their phones. One uses a stylus whose cap he carefully unscrews and carefully hangs on his finger, then taps furiously at the screen for hours on end. He calls his wife thrice through the journey, speaks to her in speedy Marathi, but for some inexplicable reason puts her on speakerphone. Thus it is that all of us in the compartment, and possibly some outside, find out that she paid Rs 320 for some sari blouses, she bought some mutton, her reaction to his suggestion that she should not sleep in the afternoon ("I shouldn't?") and her reaction to being told that he had just eaten a cucumber ("Be careful!").
The other man stares for long periods at his phone screen, which has a thick green arrow making circles, with the words "Please wait" above it. He's waiting, that's for sure.
* Woman and her grown son sit next to me. When it's sleeping time, she tells him to change his shirt. He refuses, but she gets up and digs a striped beige one out of their bag anyway. He says, "that's too short, that's very short", but takes it anyway and changes into it. On him, it is exactly the same length as the dark blue one he has taken off. The blue one, he folds carefully, then uses it to wipe the surface of the table near the window, spreads it on the table, leans his elbows on the shirt and looks around expectantly.
His mother produces dinner, also from their bag.
* Ratlam station is swarming with men in light green uniforms with white shoes. The uniforms say "Eureka Forbes", "Clean Train Station", "CTS" and "Your Friend For Life". (Who's my friend for life: Eureka Forbes? The station? The man in the uniform?)
Some of them mop our compartment, telling us curtly to get out of the way. Others mill around outside. On a parallel track is a goods train made up of those cylindrical coaches, marked "Not to be Loose Shunted" and "Fit For Vegetable Oil". One of the CTS Friends for Life walks deliberately over the tracks to this train and pees on its wheels.
* The cylindrical cars all look identical to me. Nearly all say "Capacity 70000 litres". Except one, which says "Capacity 69800 litres". What makes this one 200 litres smaller?
* Nagda station has a stall that's called "SIK and SUN'S". While I'm trying to decipher that, I note that the small structure next to it has two signs. The first says "Main Power Sub Station", spelled out exactly like that, but in Devanagari. The second says "Accident Relief Medical Equipment Scale II", spelled out in English.
* Nagda is where several college buddies spent six forlorn (I think) months as apprentices at a company. I visited them once in that time. So when I passed through Nagda this time, I fired off text messages to two of them to say I was thinking of them there. One wrote back thus: "Ah, mammaries! Does the place still smell of bowel vapours?"
Forlorn, I think.
* Two men on berths near me are playing nonstop with their phones. One uses a stylus whose cap he carefully unscrews and carefully hangs on his finger, then taps furiously at the screen for hours on end. He calls his wife thrice through the journey, speaks to her in speedy Marathi, but for some inexplicable reason puts her on speakerphone. Thus it is that all of us in the compartment, and possibly some outside, find out that she paid Rs 320 for some sari blouses, she bought some mutton, her reaction to his suggestion that she should not sleep in the afternoon ("I shouldn't?") and her reaction to being told that he had just eaten a cucumber ("Be careful!").
The other man stares for long periods at his phone screen, which has a thick green arrow making circles, with the words "Please wait" above it. He's waiting, that's for sure.
* Woman and her grown son sit next to me. When it's sleeping time, she tells him to change his shirt. He refuses, but she gets up and digs a striped beige one out of their bag anyway. He says, "that's too short, that's very short", but takes it anyway and changes into it. On him, it is exactly the same length as the dark blue one he has taken off. The blue one, he folds carefully, then uses it to wipe the surface of the table near the window, spreads it on the table, leans his elbows on the shirt and looks around expectantly.
His mother produces dinner, also from their bag.
* Ratlam station is swarming with men in light green uniforms with white shoes. The uniforms say "Eureka Forbes", "Clean Train Station", "CTS" and "Your Friend For Life". (Who's my friend for life: Eureka Forbes? The station? The man in the uniform?)
Some of them mop our compartment, telling us curtly to get out of the way. Others mill around outside. On a parallel track is a goods train made up of those cylindrical coaches, marked "Not to be Loose Shunted" and "Fit For Vegetable Oil". One of the CTS Friends for Life walks deliberately over the tracks to this train and pees on its wheels.
* The cylindrical cars all look identical to me. Nearly all say "Capacity 70000 litres". Except one, which says "Capacity 69800 litres". What makes this one 200 litres smaller?
* Nagda station has a stall that's called "SIK and SUN'S". While I'm trying to decipher that, I note that the small structure next to it has two signs. The first says "Main Power Sub Station", spelled out exactly like that, but in Devanagari. The second says "Accident Relief Medical Equipment Scale II", spelled out in English.
* Nagda is where several college buddies spent six forlorn (I think) months as apprentices at a company. I visited them once in that time. So when I passed through Nagda this time, I fired off text messages to two of them to say I was thinking of them there. One wrote back thus: "Ah, mammaries! Does the place still smell of bowel vapours?"
Forlorn, I think.
Lo, the hero!
"But lo! He was a hero back home in Ukraine."
This gem is only one of the reasons to read this report about a certain no-ball. There are others, including "legally, the bowler did nothing wrong but it was the spirit of the game that took a mauling."
This gem is only one of the reasons to read this report about a certain no-ball. There are others, including "legally, the bowler did nothing wrong but it was the spirit of the game that took a mauling."
August 15, 2010
This morning below the flag
As I've done a few times before, I made my way to the nearby park early this morning, for the twice-a-year function to salute being Indian. The banner outside said the flag would be hoisted at 715am, so we left home at 705 and hurried over. As we neared the gate, we saw several people at attention and a man unfurling the flag, sending it up a white pole.
The clock above the gate, the park's own clock, said 710. Why would these people advertise a time and then hoist the flag several minutes before that advertised time?
When we got inside, a recorded version of the national anthem was struggling to be heard over the PA system. Something was wrong with the system, so all we could hear was a lot of crackling interrupted by the occasional couple of words from the anthem. So at one point, a woman standing next to the flagpole, visibly disgusted with the PA system, grabbed a mike and started singing the anthem.
But she started at the beginning, and the PA system was still belting out the crackles and now words from about two-thirds of the way through the anthem (I distinctly heard "Tava subha" about now). Also, she was a ghastly singer, her key completely awry, her pace about half that of the recording. Also, the mike she was using was connected to the same PA system, so her voice came and went (mercifully) in splutters of crackling too, as did the recording.
The overall impression, in those frantic few seconds, was complete cacophony. Luckily the crowd started singing the anthem, soft and dignified, and somebody had the sense to turn off the recording and the lady had the sense to shut up. But all through the singing, and I do mean all through, a man beside her waved his arms up and down, exhorting the crowd to sing louder. Luckily nobody paid him any attention. Halfway through the anthem, two men pushed past us at the back, pushed through the crowd causing a few people to stumble, and found place to stand right at the front. One took out a small camera and began photographing the flag and the lady.
Then we came to the last two lines of the anthem, and the woman suddenly grabbed the mike again and began bellowing into it: "Jana gana mangala …"
Once more, she was utterly off key, and in fact there was no discernible tune to her bellowing. Once more, the PA system acted up so we heard plenty of crackling; but she was screaming so hard that she didn't really need the mike anyway. Thus we came to the end of the anthem, whereupon she found another gear altogether and now thundered at us, three times, "Bharat Mata Ki Jai!", and three times, "Jai Hind!"
Some speeches started. We left. I noted that the guy waving his arms had finally stopped waving his arms.
And I wondered: where in this entire show -- apart from the time when the crowd sang the anthem quietly -- had there been a semblance of respect for freedom, for the flag, for Indians, for India?
The clock above the gate, the park's own clock, said 710. Why would these people advertise a time and then hoist the flag several minutes before that advertised time?
When we got inside, a recorded version of the national anthem was struggling to be heard over the PA system. Something was wrong with the system, so all we could hear was a lot of crackling interrupted by the occasional couple of words from the anthem. So at one point, a woman standing next to the flagpole, visibly disgusted with the PA system, grabbed a mike and started singing the anthem.
But she started at the beginning, and the PA system was still belting out the crackles and now words from about two-thirds of the way through the anthem (I distinctly heard "Tava subha" about now). Also, she was a ghastly singer, her key completely awry, her pace about half that of the recording. Also, the mike she was using was connected to the same PA system, so her voice came and went (mercifully) in splutters of crackling too, as did the recording.
The overall impression, in those frantic few seconds, was complete cacophony. Luckily the crowd started singing the anthem, soft and dignified, and somebody had the sense to turn off the recording and the lady had the sense to shut up. But all through the singing, and I do mean all through, a man beside her waved his arms up and down, exhorting the crowd to sing louder. Luckily nobody paid him any attention. Halfway through the anthem, two men pushed past us at the back, pushed through the crowd causing a few people to stumble, and found place to stand right at the front. One took out a small camera and began photographing the flag and the lady.
Then we came to the last two lines of the anthem, and the woman suddenly grabbed the mike again and began bellowing into it: "Jana gana mangala …"
Once more, she was utterly off key, and in fact there was no discernible tune to her bellowing. Once more, the PA system acted up so we heard plenty of crackling; but she was screaming so hard that she didn't really need the mike anyway. Thus we came to the end of the anthem, whereupon she found another gear altogether and now thundered at us, three times, "Bharat Mata Ki Jai!", and three times, "Jai Hind!"
Some speeches started. We left. I noted that the guy waving his arms had finally stopped waving his arms.
And I wondered: where in this entire show -- apart from the time when the crowd sang the anthem quietly -- had there been a semblance of respect for freedom, for the flag, for Indians, for India?
Honesty?
As buddy U, who sent me this last night, points out, "such self-professed honesty is rare."
To be free
As my country celebrates 63 years of freedom, here in no particular order are some (only some) things I want to be free of, things I want India to be free of:
* Reading about yet another case of great corruption every day in the papers.
* Reading about dishonour killings every day in the papers.
* The reality that of about 200 million households in this country, 120 million don't have toilets.
* The worry that educating my children's generation will be one long encounter with coaching classes aimed at one exam or another, rather than an effort to exercise and expand their minds.
* The immature hostility that greets even mildly critical mention of India or Indians.
* A readiness to turn mortals into gods simply because they play cricket, or act in films, or sing songs. Or indeed practice politics.
* Poverty so overwhelming that plenty of Indians cannot afford rice priced at two rupees a kilo.
* The idea that everything on the road, people most of all, is subordinate to the car.
* The need for an Indian, any Indian, to travel 200+ km for elementary healthcare, as I saw plenty of Indians doing in Chhattisgarh.
* The anger and resentment that characterize all sides of almost any issue we face, whether reservations or Maoists, delivering justice or SEZs.
* Car drivers who think they are required to speed up to prevent older Indians on foot from crossing the road in front of them.
* An apparent unwillingness to recognize the depth of human potential in this country and what realizing it to its fullest would do for India.
* Reading about yet another case of great corruption every day in the papers.
* Reading about dishonour killings every day in the papers.
* The reality that of about 200 million households in this country, 120 million don't have toilets.
* The worry that educating my children's generation will be one long encounter with coaching classes aimed at one exam or another, rather than an effort to exercise and expand their minds.
* The immature hostility that greets even mildly critical mention of India or Indians.
* A readiness to turn mortals into gods simply because they play cricket, or act in films, or sing songs. Or indeed practice politics.
* Poverty so overwhelming that plenty of Indians cannot afford rice priced at two rupees a kilo.
* The idea that everything on the road, people most of all, is subordinate to the car.
* The need for an Indian, any Indian, to travel 200+ km for elementary healthcare, as I saw plenty of Indians doing in Chhattisgarh.
* The anger and resentment that characterize all sides of almost any issue we face, whether reservations or Maoists, delivering justice or SEZs.
* Car drivers who think they are required to speed up to prevent older Indians on foot from crossing the road in front of them.
* An apparent unwillingness to recognize the depth of human potential in this country and what realizing it to its fullest would do for India.
August 12, 2010
GRC: Questions
Roadrunner Contest questions will appear in this post. Tweet your answer with my twitter id @DeathEndsFun and remember to also include the tag #DEFRR in your answer. Tweets posted 15 minutes after this question goes up are eligible to win. Good luck! (Other contest details here.)
Previous questions below
Sep 9 2010, Question 7: Three very well-known people were in Selma, Alabama on March 4 2007. (I was there too, but I'm not counting myself ...). Name at least two of them. Why were they there?
Question 7 won by @kingslyj! Congratulations!
The three well-known people (well, besides me) were Hilary and Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Hilary Clinton and Obama were then candidates for President. Here's the relevant paras from my book:
In Selma soon after Club Ebony, I have thoughts of Martin Luther King’s more famous dream. It’s the yearly commemoration of Bloody Sunday – 7 March 1965, when the police beat back a procession trying to march to Montgomery. This year, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton are in town to make campaign speeches and join the symbolic procession across the Edmund Pettus bridge to where the police swung batons in ‘65.
In the three hours to Obama’s speech at the Brown AME Church, I roam Selma. At a stall outside his home, Benson Webb tries genially to sell me a poster of the Pettus bridge, several unintelligible autographs on it. When he hears I’m from India, his eyes go round and big. “India? You come a LONG way, man!” When he hears I write, he lopes off and returns with an unmarked bridge poster. “If you a writer, I’m ‘on’ get YOU to sign right here, bro! You gon’ be famous man, and when I see that novel you gon’ write? I’m ‘on’ show people that sign a yours!”
Who am I kidding, it feels nice. I sign. Good man, Benson; love the rhythm in his words, wish I spoke like that.
One theme in Barack Obama’s speech is the distinction between what he calls the Moses and Joshua generations. “Moses”, referring broadly to the people – Rosa Parks, MLK, Malcolm X et al – who fought the battles of the ‘60s. It’s on those giant shoulders that Obama and his generation – the Joshua generation – stand today.
But there’s more to that message. In the Old Testament, Moses led the Israelite Exodus out of Egypt to Israel, but he himself never reached. He appointed his long-time apprentice Joshua to succeed him, then died. It was Joshua who led his people back into Israel, thus finishing the job that Moses could not.
Here’s Obama’s point: the struggle for civil rights did not end with the Moses generation of the 1960s. There’s still work to do. Registering voters, to start with – and indeed, that day in Selma more than one desk is draped with “Register to Vote” banners – but also in education, health care, and more. As it was left to Joshua to bring his people back to Israel, it is left to Obama’s Joshua generation to finish what the generation of the ‘60s started.
A simple message, but on many levels so powerful. There’s the idea of continuing the struggle. The imagery of passing the torch. The call to action. The idea of finding a passion, working at it.
As so often on my travels, I am thinking about India. Who calls to the Joshua generation in my home? Who speaks of the work that was left for us to finish by the giants of our past – Patel and Azad, Tilak, Ambedkar, Nehru? Or Gandhi, inspiration to King and an entire planet, his face on a poster Benson Webb has for sale?
That day in Selma, I’m on my feet for hours, standing and listening, eating a hamburger, shaking Bill Clinton’s hand and another that might have been Barack’s I’m not sure, walking with a crowd easily 10,000 strong through downtown Selma and over the Pettus bridge.
***
Sep 6 2010, Question 6: What large object stands outside the Battle Axe Officers' Mess in Jodhpur?
Question 6 won by @sumit15 (twitter handle). Congratulations!
The answer: a tank, more specifically a captured Pakistani tank. The reference is from a section in my book about visiting the Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona, where obsolete USAF planes are laid out in neat rows. I wondered why they were there, and what I found so fascinating about such a display. Then:
In truth, I would go out of my way for a display like Davis-Monthan in India, were there one to see. And in fact, I did once stop for something related, yet different and on a much smaller scale, outside the Battle Axe Officers' Mess (“Cut Hard, Cut Deep”) in Jodhpur. It's a sleek captured Pakistani tank, and it has this explanatory notice:
“This T59 tk is one of the 20 tks left behind by 22 Cav of Pak Army at Laungewala where Pak 51 Inf Bde GP attacked Coy one PL Posn of 23 Punjab on 05 Dec 1971. The attack was repulsed with hy losses in men and eqpt of Pak 51 Inf Bde Group. Maj KS Chandpuri of 23 Punjab was awarded MVC for his gallant action. This tk was captured intact and driven to Indian soil by Capt RS Khatri of 45 Cav.”
Ignore the peculiar sms-style military lingo, from nearly thirty years before the world had heard of sms. Displaying the enemy's captured weapons from a devastating victory must qualify as a slap in their face – the ancient Romans did it with captive officers, too – besides being still another telegraphed message to lay off. That victory at Laungewala holds a revered place in Indian military history. Just over a hundred Indian soldiers stood firm against nearly 3000 Pakistanis, destroying many tanks and beating back their attempt to invade. Several soldiers won awards for their valour during the rout. So a public display of one of those tanks, “captured intact”, serves well to rub Pakistani noses in it. Always a good thing to do if you're seeking to deter future attacks. The battle was even turned into a wildly successful Bollywood hit, Border. Also a good thing to do to the enemy, make a movie of their defeat.
Yet the most interesting thing about staring at this T59 in Jodhpur is that nearly four decades after the desert dust settled, Laungewala is mired in controversy. The army victory, claimed a retired air force officer who himself won an award in the battle, was a myth. It was Indian planes that “crushed the Pakistanis”, Major General Atma Singh told the Hindustan Times, not the hundred men on the ground. Worse: “no ground battle was fought and the army had merely rehearsed it on a sand model after the ceasefire to cover up the incompetence of senior military commanders.”
The claim of a decisive ground battle in Laungewala, said Singh, was “a mockery of army ethos.”
In March 2008, the Laungewala wrangle merited a cover story in Tehelka magazine. It quoted Air Marshal M. S. Bawa, who was a Wing Commander in charge of the Jaisalmer air base during the battle. Bawa said: “The Pakistani thrust was blunted entirely by air action alone.” This was echoed by one of the pilots who flew the IAF Hunters that day, R. N. Bali. More tellingly, it was also echoed in Pakistani accounts of the battle that Tehelka quotes.
Bawa had these scathing words to say about Major Chandpuri: “When I landed at Laungewala ... Chandpuri was hiding in the trench. ... [He] fell at my feet and thanked us for saving their lives. ... Let us not fake battles to earn medals.”
So much for what a forty year old T59 tank in Jodhpur stands for, so much for the stories it can tell: the real-life ones of betrayal and intrigue and valour rather than idealized good versus unfathomable evil. That’s why the Mahabharat grabs me more than the Ramayan. That’s why I prefer to gaze at Davis-Monthan’s silent display, or at this Jodhpur relic, than at the Republic Day parade.
***
Sep 3 2010, Question 5: What phenomenon does Jared Diamond discuss in his book Collapse that has something to do with a man called Shane Heath? What was Heath's partner's name?
Question 5 won by @UnnamedEntity (twitter handle). Congratulations!
The relevant paras from my book, explaining what Diamond was talking about, is below:
There was a huge forest fire here in 2000. Most of a decade later, tracts of charred and toppled trees are still everywhere, and in my mind I have an image of two young men in yellow shirts and blue helmets. Driving through Idaho yesterday on my way here, I had stopped beside one of the ubiquitous "Adopt-a-Highway" signs. This one had a photograph, a wreath and a sign: "In Memory of Jeff Allen and Shane Heath, Indianola Helitack." 24 and 22 respectively, these firefighters had been dropped into the middle of another great fire in 2003, to clear a spot for a helicopter to land. Overcome by smoke inhalation, they died.
As we walk today through the devastation of the fire in 2000, I can't stop thinking of Allen and Heath. In this part of the country, forest fires are a threat every summer, and men like these two are regularly called on to put their lives on the line to fight them.
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond writes about this very modern phenomenon. Starting in the early twentieth century, the Forest Service began trying to extinguish forest fires instead of letting them burn themselves out, because "it didn't want valuable timber to go up in smoke, nor people's homes and lives to be threatened." With improving technology, by the middle of the century this had become a successful policy. In retrospect, though, it became clear that "successful" might not be the right word. Instead of suppressed fires, writes Diamond, by the 1980s there were more and more ...
"... large forest fires that were essentially impossible to extinguish unless rain and low winds combined to help. [The] fire suppression policy was contributing to those big fires."
This had to do with the increased density of trees that would otherwise have not been part of the forest. In the past, explains Diamond, "natural fires caused by lightning ... played an important role in maintaining forest structure."
The upshot of these dilemmas is that the government ...
"... tolerates flammable forests and is forced to spend money unpredictably whenever a firefighting emergency arises: e.g. about $1.6 billion to fight the summer 2000 forest fires that burned 10,000 square miles."
And there's another issue too: homes. People so like the idea of living near or even in forests, they build homes there, even in areas prone to fires. When fires strike, they "expect the government to protect those homes against fires." During the great fire of 2000, says Diamond, some homeowners in the Bitterroot Valley wanted the Forest Service to "hire 12 big firefighting helicopters at a cost of $2000 per hour to save their homes by dropping water on them."
Is this a reasonable use of money? Of helicopters?
What about lives lost fighting fires, men like Jeff Allen and Shane Heath?
***
Aug 31 2010, Question 4: Bldg 98 in Marfa, Texas was once used to house Germans. Who were they (but note I'm not interested in their names)? And what was the famous nickname of their commanding officer?
Question 4 won by @prolificd (twitter handle). Congratulations!
Here's the story and more from my book (Mona is the owner of Bldg 98, and Erwin Rommel's nickname was "Desert Fox").
Intriguingly, Bldg 98 was once a space for German officer POWs from Rommel's Afrika Korps. Two of these POWs – Robert Hampel and Hans Joachim Press – spent their time here painting murals on the walls in pastel shades. There are scenes of west Texas, cowboys and campfires, and they are adorned with obviously German detail. One example, a stag that's only found in the Black Forest. Another mural has a lake with sailboats and a tiny town. When Mona first saw it, she thought it looked familiar. Then she recognized it as a lake in Germany where she went sailing as a child.
Hampel and Press must have liked spaghetti westerns, for some cowboys in their murals are decidedly Italian-looking. Mona tells a story about an Italian visitor to Bldg 98 who looked closely at the cowboy noses in particular and exclaimed: “No way are those Mexican or Texan or Indian noses! They're Italian!” As added proof, there's a bottle of chianti in the picture too. (Mona says, inexplicably: “the kind you put chicken blood in”.) Not a bottle easily found in West Texas.
There are stories outside the building too. The Fort is named for Brevet General David Russell, a Union officer during the Civil War who took over command on a battlefield in Virginia after his superior was killed. When such a transfer of leadership happens, you are a “Brevet” officer, a word derived from old French for “brief”. In Russell's case, it was tragically apt, because his term as General was brief indeed: minutes after he took command, Mona tells me, he was killed too.
The Fort used to be a cavalry outpost, until the Army moved on from its horse-borne days. Sadly, they decided then to destroy the animals. One horse, Louie, was buried in a large field across the road. Three days later, his distraught groom, Sergeant Hayes, went to Louie's grave and shot himself. And on that staple of every ghost story ever told, the full-moon night, you can see man and horse trotting about near the grave.
Mona tells me that she too had a close encounter with them, or something. When she was restoring the building, two of her workers quit in fright. For whenever they went to lunch and returned, there'd be footsteps trailing into the building, a straight line of them from the window that faced Louie's grave. Spooky stuff. To demonstrate what she's talking about, Mona walks across the room from the window in question, straight like an arrow.
Speaking of marks on the floor – those depressions in the floor in another room, Mona, what are those?
“What do you think?” she asks with a wide smile, and by now I'm primed to think ghosts made those too. But her explanation is far less exciting. Turns out they are impressions made by the stiletto heels that women wore to dances held here. No, make that far more exciting.
***
Aug 18 2010, Question 3: I visited Sturgis, South Dakota, for a huge gathering of bikers. Eating dinner with some folks at my campsite before I actually went to the rally, a woman asked me: "It's your first time here, right? Any idea what you're going to see?"
When I said "no, but please tell me", what was her one word reply that had everyone in splits?
Question 3 won by @Keerthikiran (twitter handle). Congratulations!
Here are the relevant lines from my book:
The evening of my first visit to the Sturgis bike rally, I dined with five fellow-campers – two couples and a single friend. All bikers. We introduced ourselves, and then one of the wives, Darlene, asked: “Your first time here, right? You have an idea what it's going to be like, what you're going to see?”
So I said: Actually, no. Tell me what I'm going to see, won't you?
She had a one-word reply. “Boobs.”
Turned out she wasn't entirely right, but not entirely wrong either. The bikini wash ladies, the Playboy models in painfully tight clothes, the women who strolled past wearing twinkling pasties and mesh tees ... Through my days in Sturgis, there was enough feminine flesh on display to delight an unabashed boobs watcher like me, yet also leave the voyeur in me thirsting for more. Thing about displays like that, they have a way of inducing such thirst. Never enough, you know? So while there were boobs to be seen, I can't claim that's my overwhelming impression of Sturgis. Not to the extent that it's what I would, in turn, tell a first-time visitor there to expect.
***
Aug 16 2010, Question 2: Casey Jones is not his real name. What is, and why was he called "Casey Jones"?
Question 2 won by @prsng (Twitter handle). Congratulations!
Casey Jones: his real name was John Luther Jones. He was a locomotive driver who died when his train crashed in Mississippi. He used to live in the town of Cayce, Kentucky, and that's why he was called "Casey" -- the point being that "Cayce" is pronounced not "Case" but "Casey".
Read all this and more in my book, or if you like in my account from when I visited Cayce in search of Casey, Junction.
***
Aug 12 2010, Question 1: What startled me about the Missouri monument in the Shiloh Military Park, Tennessee?
Question 1 won by @nihalparkar (Twitter handle)! The monument lists Missouri regiments who fought on both sides of the American Civil War (Union/North and Confederate/South). Read the story (and more) in this lecture I gave a month ago: Find our own Shiloh.
Previous questions below
Sep 9 2010, Question 7: Three very well-known people were in Selma, Alabama on March 4 2007. (I was there too, but I'm not counting myself ...). Name at least two of them. Why were they there?
Question 7 won by @kingslyj! Congratulations!
The three well-known people (well, besides me) were Hilary and Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Hilary Clinton and Obama were then candidates for President. Here's the relevant paras from my book:
In Selma soon after Club Ebony, I have thoughts of Martin Luther King’s more famous dream. It’s the yearly commemoration of Bloody Sunday – 7 March 1965, when the police beat back a procession trying to march to Montgomery. This year, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton are in town to make campaign speeches and join the symbolic procession across the Edmund Pettus bridge to where the police swung batons in ‘65.
In the three hours to Obama’s speech at the Brown AME Church, I roam Selma. At a stall outside his home, Benson Webb tries genially to sell me a poster of the Pettus bridge, several unintelligible autographs on it. When he hears I’m from India, his eyes go round and big. “India? You come a LONG way, man!” When he hears I write, he lopes off and returns with an unmarked bridge poster. “If you a writer, I’m ‘on’ get YOU to sign right here, bro! You gon’ be famous man, and when I see that novel you gon’ write? I’m ‘on’ show people that sign a yours!”
Who am I kidding, it feels nice. I sign. Good man, Benson; love the rhythm in his words, wish I spoke like that.
One theme in Barack Obama’s speech is the distinction between what he calls the Moses and Joshua generations. “Moses”, referring broadly to the people – Rosa Parks, MLK, Malcolm X et al – who fought the battles of the ‘60s. It’s on those giant shoulders that Obama and his generation – the Joshua generation – stand today.
But there’s more to that message. In the Old Testament, Moses led the Israelite Exodus out of Egypt to Israel, but he himself never reached. He appointed his long-time apprentice Joshua to succeed him, then died. It was Joshua who led his people back into Israel, thus finishing the job that Moses could not.
Here’s Obama’s point: the struggle for civil rights did not end with the Moses generation of the 1960s. There’s still work to do. Registering voters, to start with – and indeed, that day in Selma more than one desk is draped with “Register to Vote” banners – but also in education, health care, and more. As it was left to Joshua to bring his people back to Israel, it is left to Obama’s Joshua generation to finish what the generation of the ‘60s started.
A simple message, but on many levels so powerful. There’s the idea of continuing the struggle. The imagery of passing the torch. The call to action. The idea of finding a passion, working at it.
As so often on my travels, I am thinking about India. Who calls to the Joshua generation in my home? Who speaks of the work that was left for us to finish by the giants of our past – Patel and Azad, Tilak, Ambedkar, Nehru? Or Gandhi, inspiration to King and an entire planet, his face on a poster Benson Webb has for sale?
That day in Selma, I’m on my feet for hours, standing and listening, eating a hamburger, shaking Bill Clinton’s hand and another that might have been Barack’s I’m not sure, walking with a crowd easily 10,000 strong through downtown Selma and over the Pettus bridge.
Sep 6 2010, Question 6: What large object stands outside the Battle Axe Officers' Mess in Jodhpur?
Question 6 won by @sumit15 (twitter handle). Congratulations!
The answer: a tank, more specifically a captured Pakistani tank. The reference is from a section in my book about visiting the Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona, where obsolete USAF planes are laid out in neat rows. I wondered why they were there, and what I found so fascinating about such a display. Then:
In truth, I would go out of my way for a display like Davis-Monthan in India, were there one to see. And in fact, I did once stop for something related, yet different and on a much smaller scale, outside the Battle Axe Officers' Mess (“Cut Hard, Cut Deep”) in Jodhpur. It's a sleek captured Pakistani tank, and it has this explanatory notice:
“This T59 tk is one of the 20 tks left behind by 22 Cav of Pak Army at Laungewala where Pak 51 Inf Bde GP attacked Coy one PL Posn of 23 Punjab on 05 Dec 1971. The attack was repulsed with hy losses in men and eqpt of Pak 51 Inf Bde Group. Maj KS Chandpuri of 23 Punjab was awarded MVC for his gallant action. This tk was captured intact and driven to Indian soil by Capt RS Khatri of 45 Cav.”
Ignore the peculiar sms-style military lingo, from nearly thirty years before the world had heard of sms. Displaying the enemy's captured weapons from a devastating victory must qualify as a slap in their face – the ancient Romans did it with captive officers, too – besides being still another telegraphed message to lay off. That victory at Laungewala holds a revered place in Indian military history. Just over a hundred Indian soldiers stood firm against nearly 3000 Pakistanis, destroying many tanks and beating back their attempt to invade. Several soldiers won awards for their valour during the rout. So a public display of one of those tanks, “captured intact”, serves well to rub Pakistani noses in it. Always a good thing to do if you're seeking to deter future attacks. The battle was even turned into a wildly successful Bollywood hit, Border. Also a good thing to do to the enemy, make a movie of their defeat.
Yet the most interesting thing about staring at this T59 in Jodhpur is that nearly four decades after the desert dust settled, Laungewala is mired in controversy. The army victory, claimed a retired air force officer who himself won an award in the battle, was a myth. It was Indian planes that “crushed the Pakistanis”, Major General Atma Singh told the Hindustan Times, not the hundred men on the ground. Worse: “no ground battle was fought and the army had merely rehearsed it on a sand model after the ceasefire to cover up the incompetence of senior military commanders.”
The claim of a decisive ground battle in Laungewala, said Singh, was “a mockery of army ethos.”
In March 2008, the Laungewala wrangle merited a cover story in Tehelka magazine. It quoted Air Marshal M. S. Bawa, who was a Wing Commander in charge of the Jaisalmer air base during the battle. Bawa said: “The Pakistani thrust was blunted entirely by air action alone.” This was echoed by one of the pilots who flew the IAF Hunters that day, R. N. Bali. More tellingly, it was also echoed in Pakistani accounts of the battle that Tehelka quotes.
Bawa had these scathing words to say about Major Chandpuri: “When I landed at Laungewala ... Chandpuri was hiding in the trench. ... [He] fell at my feet and thanked us for saving their lives. ... Let us not fake battles to earn medals.”
So much for what a forty year old T59 tank in Jodhpur stands for, so much for the stories it can tell: the real-life ones of betrayal and intrigue and valour rather than idealized good versus unfathomable evil. That’s why the Mahabharat grabs me more than the Ramayan. That’s why I prefer to gaze at Davis-Monthan’s silent display, or at this Jodhpur relic, than at the Republic Day parade.
Sep 3 2010, Question 5: What phenomenon does Jared Diamond discuss in his book Collapse that has something to do with a man called Shane Heath? What was Heath's partner's name?
Question 5 won by @UnnamedEntity (twitter handle). Congratulations!
The relevant paras from my book, explaining what Diamond was talking about, is below:
There was a huge forest fire here in 2000. Most of a decade later, tracts of charred and toppled trees are still everywhere, and in my mind I have an image of two young men in yellow shirts and blue helmets. Driving through Idaho yesterday on my way here, I had stopped beside one of the ubiquitous "Adopt-a-Highway" signs. This one had a photograph, a wreath and a sign: "In Memory of Jeff Allen and Shane Heath, Indianola Helitack." 24 and 22 respectively, these firefighters had been dropped into the middle of another great fire in 2003, to clear a spot for a helicopter to land. Overcome by smoke inhalation, they died.
As we walk today through the devastation of the fire in 2000, I can't stop thinking of Allen and Heath. In this part of the country, forest fires are a threat every summer, and men like these two are regularly called on to put their lives on the line to fight them.
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond writes about this very modern phenomenon. Starting in the early twentieth century, the Forest Service began trying to extinguish forest fires instead of letting them burn themselves out, because "it didn't want valuable timber to go up in smoke, nor people's homes and lives to be threatened." With improving technology, by the middle of the century this had become a successful policy. In retrospect, though, it became clear that "successful" might not be the right word. Instead of suppressed fires, writes Diamond, by the 1980s there were more and more ...
"... large forest fires that were essentially impossible to extinguish unless rain and low winds combined to help. [The] fire suppression policy was contributing to those big fires."
This had to do with the increased density of trees that would otherwise have not been part of the forest. In the past, explains Diamond, "natural fires caused by lightning ... played an important role in maintaining forest structure."
The upshot of these dilemmas is that the government ...
"... tolerates flammable forests and is forced to spend money unpredictably whenever a firefighting emergency arises: e.g. about $1.6 billion to fight the summer 2000 forest fires that burned 10,000 square miles."
And there's another issue too: homes. People so like the idea of living near or even in forests, they build homes there, even in areas prone to fires. When fires strike, they "expect the government to protect those homes against fires." During the great fire of 2000, says Diamond, some homeowners in the Bitterroot Valley wanted the Forest Service to "hire 12 big firefighting helicopters at a cost of $2000 per hour to save their homes by dropping water on them."
Is this a reasonable use of money? Of helicopters?
What about lives lost fighting fires, men like Jeff Allen and Shane Heath?
Aug 31 2010, Question 4: Bldg 98 in Marfa, Texas was once used to house Germans. Who were they (but note I'm not interested in their names)? And what was the famous nickname of their commanding officer?
Question 4 won by @prolificd (twitter handle). Congratulations!
Here's the story and more from my book (Mona is the owner of Bldg 98, and Erwin Rommel's nickname was "Desert Fox").
Intriguingly, Bldg 98 was once a space for German officer POWs from Rommel's Afrika Korps. Two of these POWs – Robert Hampel and Hans Joachim Press – spent their time here painting murals on the walls in pastel shades. There are scenes of west Texas, cowboys and campfires, and they are adorned with obviously German detail. One example, a stag that's only found in the Black Forest. Another mural has a lake with sailboats and a tiny town. When Mona first saw it, she thought it looked familiar. Then she recognized it as a lake in Germany where she went sailing as a child.
Hampel and Press must have liked spaghetti westerns, for some cowboys in their murals are decidedly Italian-looking. Mona tells a story about an Italian visitor to Bldg 98 who looked closely at the cowboy noses in particular and exclaimed: “No way are those Mexican or Texan or Indian noses! They're Italian!” As added proof, there's a bottle of chianti in the picture too. (Mona says, inexplicably: “the kind you put chicken blood in”.) Not a bottle easily found in West Texas.
There are stories outside the building too. The Fort is named for Brevet General David Russell, a Union officer during the Civil War who took over command on a battlefield in Virginia after his superior was killed. When such a transfer of leadership happens, you are a “Brevet” officer, a word derived from old French for “brief”. In Russell's case, it was tragically apt, because his term as General was brief indeed: minutes after he took command, Mona tells me, he was killed too.
The Fort used to be a cavalry outpost, until the Army moved on from its horse-borne days. Sadly, they decided then to destroy the animals. One horse, Louie, was buried in a large field across the road. Three days later, his distraught groom, Sergeant Hayes, went to Louie's grave and shot himself. And on that staple of every ghost story ever told, the full-moon night, you can see man and horse trotting about near the grave.
Mona tells me that she too had a close encounter with them, or something. When she was restoring the building, two of her workers quit in fright. For whenever they went to lunch and returned, there'd be footsteps trailing into the building, a straight line of them from the window that faced Louie's grave. Spooky stuff. To demonstrate what she's talking about, Mona walks across the room from the window in question, straight like an arrow.
Speaking of marks on the floor – those depressions in the floor in another room, Mona, what are those?
“What do you think?” she asks with a wide smile, and by now I'm primed to think ghosts made those too. But her explanation is far less exciting. Turns out they are impressions made by the stiletto heels that women wore to dances held here. No, make that far more exciting.
Aug 18 2010, Question 3: I visited Sturgis, South Dakota, for a huge gathering of bikers. Eating dinner with some folks at my campsite before I actually went to the rally, a woman asked me: "It's your first time here, right? Any idea what you're going to see?"
When I said "no, but please tell me", what was her one word reply that had everyone in splits?
Question 3 won by @Keerthikiran (twitter handle). Congratulations!
Here are the relevant lines from my book:
The evening of my first visit to the Sturgis bike rally, I dined with five fellow-campers – two couples and a single friend. All bikers. We introduced ourselves, and then one of the wives, Darlene, asked: “Your first time here, right? You have an idea what it's going to be like, what you're going to see?”
So I said: Actually, no. Tell me what I'm going to see, won't you?
She had a one-word reply. “Boobs.”
Turned out she wasn't entirely right, but not entirely wrong either. The bikini wash ladies, the Playboy models in painfully tight clothes, the women who strolled past wearing twinkling pasties and mesh tees ... Through my days in Sturgis, there was enough feminine flesh on display to delight an unabashed boobs watcher like me, yet also leave the voyeur in me thirsting for more. Thing about displays like that, they have a way of inducing such thirst. Never enough, you know? So while there were boobs to be seen, I can't claim that's my overwhelming impression of Sturgis. Not to the extent that it's what I would, in turn, tell a first-time visitor there to expect.
Aug 16 2010, Question 2: Casey Jones is not his real name. What is, and why was he called "Casey Jones"?
Question 2 won by @prsng (Twitter handle). Congratulations!
Casey Jones: his real name was John Luther Jones. He was a locomotive driver who died when his train crashed in Mississippi. He used to live in the town of Cayce, Kentucky, and that's why he was called "Casey" -- the point being that "Cayce" is pronounced not "Case" but "Casey".
Read all this and more in my book, or if you like in my account from when I visited Cayce in search of Casey, Junction.
Aug 12 2010, Question 1: What startled me about the Missouri monument in the Shiloh Military Park, Tennessee?
Question 1 won by @nihalparkar (Twitter handle)! The monument lists Missouri regiments who fought on both sides of the American Civil War (Union/North and Confederate/South). Read the story (and more) in this lecture I gave a month ago: Find our own Shiloh.
Ts and Hs
Imagine I'm a professor teaching the basics of probability. One day, I give the class this assignment: sit down at home, toss a coin a hundred times and write down each result, Heads or Tails. Bring me that sequence of Hs and Ts tomorrow.
Now I suspect most of the class is too lazy to toss a coin a hundred times. It's likely a lot of them will simply write out what looks like a random sequence of Hs and Ts and turn that in.
But I am almost sure that, with a quick look at each submitted sequence, I will be able to tell which ones were produced in this fake way, and which ones are actually a faithful record of a hundred coin tosses.
How do I tell the fake sequences from the genuine ones?
(Thanks to my charming cousin for reminding me of this last month.)
***
Kovendhan has a comment with the right answer: "In order to appear genuine, students will avoid long sequences (6 or more) of consecutive heads or tails. In reality, such long sequences almost always occur in long trials."
Which of course begs the bonus question: in a sequence of 100 coin tosses, what's the probability that there will be at least one sequence of 6 heads or tails?
All right, bonus question #2: what if I changed the "6" immediately above to "6 or more"?
Now I suspect most of the class is too lazy to toss a coin a hundred times. It's likely a lot of them will simply write out what looks like a random sequence of Hs and Ts and turn that in.
But I am almost sure that, with a quick look at each submitted sequence, I will be able to tell which ones were produced in this fake way, and which ones are actually a faithful record of a hundred coin tosses.
How do I tell the fake sequences from the genuine ones?
(Thanks to my charming cousin for reminding me of this last month.)
Kovendhan has a comment with the right answer: "In order to appear genuine, students will avoid long sequences (6 or more) of consecutive heads or tails. In reality, such long sequences almost always occur in long trials."
Which of course begs the bonus question: in a sequence of 100 coin tosses, what's the probability that there will be at least one sequence of 6 heads or tails?
All right, bonus question #2: what if I changed the "6" immediately above to "6 or more"?
Being Indian
The current issue of Business India (dated August 22) is an "I-Day Special". The cover story is "Proud to be Indian", and the tag line is "Indians today are comfortable being Indians, no matter where in the world they are."
(For at least the next few days, you can see the cover I'm talking about here.)
Something about that tag line gets me.
Here's the thing. I lived outside India for over ten years, through the '80s. I lived outside India again for three months in 2001. I travelled on my own outside India for over three months in 1991. I've travelled for shorter spells in various different parts of the globe. I've lived in India pretty much the rest of my young life, and travelled to various different parts of this country too.
Never once in all that stay and travel was I uncomfortable being Indian (whatever that means, anyway). Honestly, the thought didn't even occur to me.
This is hardly just me. I have innumerable Indian friends and relatives whose stories of stay and travel are broadly similar. I have never heard one of them say "You know what? I'm uncomfortable being Indian."
Over two years ago, I found Shobhaa De had said something on these lines to Tehelka: "Our self worth was in the doldrums, we used to shuffle around the world feeling ashamed of being Indians, holding out our begging bowls. The most radical change in India is our self-perception ... Today there is a new assertiveness. It's given us a spine."
I had much the same reaction then. In a column I wrote for the Hindustan Times, I asked (rhetorically, of course): "Who is this 'we' that 'shuffled around the world feeling ashamed of being Indians'?"
Similarly, who are the Indians who lived their lives feeling uncomfortable with being Indian? Who makes up this stuff about Indians feeling comfortable being Indian "today", implying that we felt uncomfortable being Indian yesterday?
Whoever you are, if you felt ashamed and uncomfortable, if you shuffled around the world carrying begging bowls, fine. But please don't presume that I felt the same way. On that count, please never speak for me.
(For at least the next few days, you can see the cover I'm talking about here.)
Something about that tag line gets me.
Here's the thing. I lived outside India for over ten years, through the '80s. I lived outside India again for three months in 2001. I travelled on my own outside India for over three months in 1991. I've travelled for shorter spells in various different parts of the globe. I've lived in India pretty much the rest of my young life, and travelled to various different parts of this country too.
Never once in all that stay and travel was I uncomfortable being Indian (whatever that means, anyway). Honestly, the thought didn't even occur to me.
This is hardly just me. I have innumerable Indian friends and relatives whose stories of stay and travel are broadly similar. I have never heard one of them say "You know what? I'm uncomfortable being Indian."
Over two years ago, I found Shobhaa De had said something on these lines to Tehelka: "Our self worth was in the doldrums, we used to shuffle around the world feeling ashamed of being Indians, holding out our begging bowls. The most radical change in India is our self-perception ... Today there is a new assertiveness. It's given us a spine."
I had much the same reaction then. In a column I wrote for the Hindustan Times, I asked (rhetorically, of course): "Who is this 'we' that 'shuffled around the world feeling ashamed of being Indians'?"
Similarly, who are the Indians who lived their lives feeling uncomfortable with being Indian? Who makes up this stuff about Indians feeling comfortable being Indian "today", implying that we felt uncomfortable being Indian yesterday?
Whoever you are, if you felt ashamed and uncomfortable, if you shuffled around the world carrying begging bowls, fine. But please don't presume that I felt the same way. On that count, please never speak for me.
August 11, 2010
The Great Roadrunner Contest
Here's your chance to win a signed copy of my Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America (HarperCollins India, 2009)! I mean, this is the book about which Pramod Nayar, writing in DNA, said this: "Indian travel writing, never a large or a particularly vibrant genre, comes of age in Dilip D’Souza’s Roadrunner."
You know, you've got to read it. Own it. I'm telling you.
So: Every couple of days at 9am IST, I will ask a question (or some such) via a tweet on my twitter page @DeathEndsFun as well as on @kweezzz. When do I start? Watch for a tweet to announce that.
The questions may or may not have something to do with what's in the book, or its subject, but I will do my best to ask ones that can be answered without necessarily reading the book.
I will ask the question thus: it will be in this post on my blog, linked to via tweets on both @DeathEndsFun and @kweezzz. I will do it this way simply so I need not be constrained by the 140 character tweet limit in asking the question.
After I ask the question, I will wait 15 minutes. The first correct tweeted answer I get after that time (i.e. after the timestamp on the tweet that asks the question) wins a signed copy (it will be sent to you) of my "Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America". You must put my twitter handle @DeathEndsFun and the hash tag #DEFRR in your tweet. If the answer turns out to be too long for a tweet, I will give you an email address to send it to; the first answer there after that same time interval wins.
"Signed" means signed by me, in case you're wondering. Though you are welcome to sign it too, if you win it.
There are six more copies to be won (I've run this contest four times on my own Twitter page before I stumbled on @kweezzz) -- so there will be six episodes in this particular suspense serial. Hope you have fun, and good luck!
Questions? Leave a comment or a tweet.
Fine print follows.
Note 1: Unfortunately, we cannot send copies outside India. So if you are outside India and you participate and you win, you will have to give me an Indian address to send the copy to. (Though if you can't do that, let's talk, it's possible there might be a workaround. But win it first).
Note 3: There was no note 2.
Note 5: Pointless acronym explained: TLA = Three Letter Acronym.
Note 6: See note 3. And there was no note 4 too, in case you didn't notice.
Note 8.37: The End.
Have fun! That's an order.
You know, you've got to read it. Own it. I'm telling you.
So: Every couple of days at 9am IST, I will ask a question (or some such) via a tweet on my twitter page @DeathEndsFun as well as on @kweezzz. When do I start? Watch for a tweet to announce that.
The questions may or may not have something to do with what's in the book, or its subject, but I will do my best to ask ones that can be answered without necessarily reading the book.
I will ask the question thus: it will be in this post on my blog, linked to via tweets on both @DeathEndsFun and @kweezzz. I will do it this way simply so I need not be constrained by the 140 character tweet limit in asking the question.
After I ask the question, I will wait 15 minutes. The first correct tweeted answer I get after that time (i.e. after the timestamp on the tweet that asks the question) wins a signed copy (it will be sent to you) of my "Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America". You must put my twitter handle @DeathEndsFun and the hash tag #DEFRR in your tweet. If the answer turns out to be too long for a tweet, I will give you an email address to send it to; the first answer there after that same time interval wins.
"Signed" means signed by me, in case you're wondering. Though you are welcome to sign it too, if you win it.
There are six more copies to be won (I've run this contest four times on my own Twitter page before I stumbled on @kweezzz) -- so there will be six episodes in this particular suspense serial. Hope you have fun, and good luck!
Questions? Leave a comment or a tweet.
Fine print follows.
Note 1: Unfortunately, we cannot send copies outside India. So if you are outside India and you participate and you win, you will have to give me an Indian address to send the copy to. (Though if you can't do that, let's talk, it's possible there might be a workaround. But win it first).
Note 3: There was no note 2.
Note 5: Pointless acronym explained: TLA = Three Letter Acronym.
Note 6: See note 3. And there was no note 4 too, in case you didn't notice.
Note 8.37: The End.
Have fun! That's an order.
P and NP
I really hope Vinay Deolalikar takes away the $1M Clay prize. That's the heart speaking. I really doubt he will. That's the head speaking.
Perhaps you know that Deolalikar, a researcher at HP Labs (one of the most-respected research places in the world) has just claimed to have answered one of the knottiest open questions in computer science and mathematics, the P=NP problem. He claims P is not equal to NP. (This is not the place to attempt an explanation of what that means, but some of the links below attempt that, and if you leave a comment with your email I can give it a shot too).
He has made his proof available online (PDF, 650K). I am in no way competent to understand, far less judge, his paper, though plenty of mathematicians are at work examining it (Richard Lipton, for one.) But I will admit that I am, right off the bat, sceptical.
Why?
For one thing, Deolalikar says he worked alone, "without the knowledge of others". Mathematics, and indeed much of science, simply does not work that way any more. It nearly never happens that a scientist plugs away for years on his own and then produces a stunning new result. Science depends on collaboration and criticism and bouncing your ideas off your colleagues.
For another, the sciences are littered with the corpses of proofs offered for various hard problems. Fermat's Last Theorem, which Andrew Wiles famously solved in 1993, was one such. I began a post about Fermat with these lines: "For many years, Edmund Landau, a German mathematician, had a form letter that looked like this: "Dear Sir/Madam: Your proof of Fermat's Last Theorem has been received. The first mistake is on page _____, line _____." Landau would assign the job of filling in those blanks to one of his students. They must have been busy, because crank "proofs" of Fermat were something of a cottage industry; if I recall right, Orissa was a minor breeding ground for them."
There's more, and much of it's explained far better than I can by Scott Aaronson here (not about Deolalikar specifically). Aaronson, incidentally, has offered $200K of his own money on top of the Clay prize to Deolalikar if the proof stands.
Like I said, I hope to hell it does stand. If it does, it's a truly fabulous result. All of us who've studied some mathematics and computer science know something about P vs NP, about how complex an issue it is and yet how surprisingly beautiful, almost magnificently challenging it also is.
I'm trying to draw analogies here: If Deolalikar has solved it, it would be as if he came home from the 2012 Olympics with 50 individual gold medals; or as if he had found an easy way to beat gravity; or as if he had found a peaceful, lasting solution to the Kashmir issue. A proof of P vs NP would be exactly as earth-shaking as those.
And that's also why I am sceptical. Though I dearly wish I wasn't.
Perhaps you know that Deolalikar, a researcher at HP Labs (one of the most-respected research places in the world) has just claimed to have answered one of the knottiest open questions in computer science and mathematics, the P=NP problem. He claims P is not equal to NP. (This is not the place to attempt an explanation of what that means, but some of the links below attempt that, and if you leave a comment with your email I can give it a shot too).
He has made his proof available online (PDF, 650K). I am in no way competent to understand, far less judge, his paper, though plenty of mathematicians are at work examining it (Richard Lipton, for one.) But I will admit that I am, right off the bat, sceptical.
Why?
For one thing, Deolalikar says he worked alone, "without the knowledge of others". Mathematics, and indeed much of science, simply does not work that way any more. It nearly never happens that a scientist plugs away for years on his own and then produces a stunning new result. Science depends on collaboration and criticism and bouncing your ideas off your colleagues.
For another, the sciences are littered with the corpses of proofs offered for various hard problems. Fermat's Last Theorem, which Andrew Wiles famously solved in 1993, was one such. I began a post about Fermat with these lines: "For many years, Edmund Landau, a German mathematician, had a form letter that looked like this: "Dear Sir/Madam: Your proof of Fermat's Last Theorem has been received. The first mistake is on page _____, line _____." Landau would assign the job of filling in those blanks to one of his students. They must have been busy, because crank "proofs" of Fermat were something of a cottage industry; if I recall right, Orissa was a minor breeding ground for them."
There's more, and much of it's explained far better than I can by Scott Aaronson here (not about Deolalikar specifically). Aaronson, incidentally, has offered $200K of his own money on top of the Clay prize to Deolalikar if the proof stands.
Like I said, I hope to hell it does stand. If it does, it's a truly fabulous result. All of us who've studied some mathematics and computer science know something about P vs NP, about how complex an issue it is and yet how surprisingly beautiful, almost magnificently challenging it also is.
I'm trying to draw analogies here: If Deolalikar has solved it, it would be as if he came home from the 2012 Olympics with 50 individual gold medals; or as if he had found an easy way to beat gravity; or as if he had found a peaceful, lasting solution to the Kashmir issue. A proof of P vs NP would be exactly as earth-shaking as those.
And that's also why I am sceptical. Though I dearly wish I wasn't.
August 10, 2010
Out of disaster, hope
Amid all the tragic news about floods across Pakistan, Ladakh and China, here's one kind of silver lining: Leh disaster unites India and Pakistan.
All right, so it took a tragedy. Can we hope, through the flood, that both countries will build on this?
All right, so it took a tragedy. Can we hope, through the flood, that both countries will build on this?
August 09, 2010
Alone, or maybe not
Mention extra-terrestrial intelligence and most people will perk up and say "E.T.!", or maybe more likely in Bollywood-obsessed India, "Krrish!" (Forgive me, but what a painful movie). How firmly that ugly-but-cute puppet, or a perfectly muscled Hrithik Roshan, has been etched into our brains. So when we hear that there are people actually looking for signs from outer space of an intelligence other than ours -- assuming, for the time being, that we are intelligent -- it's almost amusing. What are they looking for, little green men? The Man in the Moon? Hrithik leaping from planet to planet?
Ha ha, but actually, none of those. The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a serious scientific endeavour that many dedicated researchers have pursued diligently for years. It's a pity to think of it in terms of images from films.
But when you do give SETI some serious thought, a fundamental question comes up right away: How do you go about doing it? Answering it turns out to be extraordinarily difficult.
A major problem is the unimaginably vast distances in space. Our known means of travel are far too slow for humans to bridge them. Even our speediest spacecrafts would take 40,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us on Earth. And we don't even know if there is any life, let alone intelligent life, in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri.
Some scientists have suggested that we find other means to power such a spacecraft than chemical fuels. They imagine one that will slowly accelerate to close to the speed of light. At that speed, it would reach Alpha Centauri in a little over 4 years -- which is how long it takes light to reach us from there. But the energy required for such a trip would be enough to supply India's electricity needs for at least 100,000 years. Who has that kind of money to spend on a spaceship?
Clearly, manned travel is a thoroughly impractical way to carry out SETI. What about sending out unmanned probes? A good idea, you might think, but where would we send them? In just our own corner of our own medium-sized galaxy, we have thousands of stars, and we have no idea which of them, if any, might harbour an ETI. So sending probes to each of those stars would be an enormously expensive project. Yes, who has that kind of money?
What about transmitting radio signals on our own? Clearly a better option than travel, there are people who have tried this. But it will be a long time before we get any kind of reply -- again, from Alpha Centauri alone we'd have to wait over 8 years for one, if it comes at all. Also, we have to listen constantly for that reply, hoping that when it comes, we will be able to filter it out of the random radio noise that fills space anyway.
For all these reasons, scientists have decided that listening for evidence of an ETI is a better strategy than sending out either spacecraft or signals.
But even just listening presents hard, fundamental problems to address. For one, where do we turn our ears?
We can start by aiming radio telescopes at nearby sun-like stars. There are about 1000 of these within 100 light years from us. We can search them carefully for even weak signals, then work outwards to stars that are more distant. Another possibility is to scan the entire sky slowly, looking only for strong signals. The proper SETI strategy is likely a mix of these two methods.
Still, these are just the mechanics of carrying out SETI. Once we start listening systematically, we're up against even more fascinating challenges: What exactly are we listening for? What kind of signal would we recognize as the transmission of intelligent beings? If we get one, how do we interpret it? Once we do, should we respond? How?
A candidate ETI signal would be obviously artificial, to distinguish it from radio noise. Perhaps it would be a pattern of pulses and spaces broadcast over a period long enough to leave us in no doubt that it was produced by intelligent beings.
What would it mean, though?
Speculation is easy, sure. But there are some things we might be able to deduce from such a signal. A good first guess would be to treat each pulse as a one and each space as a zero (or vice versa). That would give us a message coded in binary, the simplest number system we know. But what do we do with this stream of ones and zeros? All kinds of things, really. We might look for patterns in the stream, then see if we can hit upon a code that explains them. Or we might arrange the digits in a rectangle instead of a line. If this is what the ETI had intended for us to do, and if we can hit upon the right dimensions for the rectangle, the numbers might form a picture, or some other information, that tells us more about these beings and where they live.
This is a plausible enough way to proceed that we ourselves have sent out just such pictures. One went out from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (an awe-inspiring machine by itself, filling an entire valley) when it was inaugurated in 1974. We aimed that transmission at a cluster of stars in Hercules, where it will arrive in about 27,000 years. That is, let's not worry too much about getting a reply.
Several SETI efforts have used these ideas for years now, but they have found no candidate signals yet. Is that discouraging? Well, they have only searched a little over 0.01% of the sky. There's plenty of reason to keep hoping.
But assuming we receive an ETI message one day, what should we do then? To me, it seems entirely possible that political, religious or economic compulsions will keep us silent. We might even be scared of replying. But if we do find the imagination to reply, we will probably send back a similarly coded message on the same radio band, and then wait for another message from the ETI. With the exchange of a few such messages, we will work out a logical way to send information back and forth.
Of course, given the distances involved, this "conversation" will be extremely slow. Again, with an ETI near Alpha Centauri it would be eight years before we got a reply to our message. With further stars, those who hear the first ETI signal on Earth might be dead by the time the next one arrives.
The constraints of space and time are a serious barrier to direct contact with any intelligent galactic neighbours we might have. Talking to them will be a slow, tedious affair; meeting them will remain a dream.
So you might wonder: why do SETI at all? Ah, but that has to do with our perpetual wonder about the unknown. All through history we have set off to explore dark corners of the world. Today, when there are pretty much no dark corners left on this planet, we turn to space. How can we not stop to wonder: is there anybody out there? Are we unique? Are we alone?
Answering those questions poses totally new challenges that need totally new thinking. How can we travel faster than our painfully slow spacecrafts now manage? Can we find a better medium than radio waves to carry our messages? How do we send out a signal that will not seem threatening to an ETI?
What's fascinating about all this is that it makes us consider ourselves more closely. Do we have the patience, the vision, the courage, to sustain a long and frustrating SETI? If we can't resolve our own petty quarrels, how will we seem intelligent and friendly to an ETI? If we ignore lessons our own history teaches us, what will we learn from an ETI?
For me, this is the most compelling thing about SETI: that a search for something entirely outside our home planet, even our imaginations, eventually makes us look at ourselves anew. In the end, there's the greatest reason to do it at all.
Ha ha, but actually, none of those. The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a serious scientific endeavour that many dedicated researchers have pursued diligently for years. It's a pity to think of it in terms of images from films.
But when you do give SETI some serious thought, a fundamental question comes up right away: How do you go about doing it? Answering it turns out to be extraordinarily difficult.
A major problem is the unimaginably vast distances in space. Our known means of travel are far too slow for humans to bridge them. Even our speediest spacecrafts would take 40,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us on Earth. And we don't even know if there is any life, let alone intelligent life, in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri.
Some scientists have suggested that we find other means to power such a spacecraft than chemical fuels. They imagine one that will slowly accelerate to close to the speed of light. At that speed, it would reach Alpha Centauri in a little over 4 years -- which is how long it takes light to reach us from there. But the energy required for such a trip would be enough to supply India's electricity needs for at least 100,000 years. Who has that kind of money to spend on a spaceship?
Clearly, manned travel is a thoroughly impractical way to carry out SETI. What about sending out unmanned probes? A good idea, you might think, but where would we send them? In just our own corner of our own medium-sized galaxy, we have thousands of stars, and we have no idea which of them, if any, might harbour an ETI. So sending probes to each of those stars would be an enormously expensive project. Yes, who has that kind of money?
What about transmitting radio signals on our own? Clearly a better option than travel, there are people who have tried this. But it will be a long time before we get any kind of reply -- again, from Alpha Centauri alone we'd have to wait over 8 years for one, if it comes at all. Also, we have to listen constantly for that reply, hoping that when it comes, we will be able to filter it out of the random radio noise that fills space anyway.
For all these reasons, scientists have decided that listening for evidence of an ETI is a better strategy than sending out either spacecraft or signals.
But even just listening presents hard, fundamental problems to address. For one, where do we turn our ears?
We can start by aiming radio telescopes at nearby sun-like stars. There are about 1000 of these within 100 light years from us. We can search them carefully for even weak signals, then work outwards to stars that are more distant. Another possibility is to scan the entire sky slowly, looking only for strong signals. The proper SETI strategy is likely a mix of these two methods.
Still, these are just the mechanics of carrying out SETI. Once we start listening systematically, we're up against even more fascinating challenges: What exactly are we listening for? What kind of signal would we recognize as the transmission of intelligent beings? If we get one, how do we interpret it? Once we do, should we respond? How?
A candidate ETI signal would be obviously artificial, to distinguish it from radio noise. Perhaps it would be a pattern of pulses and spaces broadcast over a period long enough to leave us in no doubt that it was produced by intelligent beings.
What would it mean, though?
Speculation is easy, sure. But there are some things we might be able to deduce from such a signal. A good first guess would be to treat each pulse as a one and each space as a zero (or vice versa). That would give us a message coded in binary, the simplest number system we know. But what do we do with this stream of ones and zeros? All kinds of things, really. We might look for patterns in the stream, then see if we can hit upon a code that explains them. Or we might arrange the digits in a rectangle instead of a line. If this is what the ETI had intended for us to do, and if we can hit upon the right dimensions for the rectangle, the numbers might form a picture, or some other information, that tells us more about these beings and where they live.
This is a plausible enough way to proceed that we ourselves have sent out just such pictures. One went out from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (an awe-inspiring machine by itself, filling an entire valley) when it was inaugurated in 1974. We aimed that transmission at a cluster of stars in Hercules, where it will arrive in about 27,000 years. That is, let's not worry too much about getting a reply.
Several SETI efforts have used these ideas for years now, but they have found no candidate signals yet. Is that discouraging? Well, they have only searched a little over 0.01% of the sky. There's plenty of reason to keep hoping.
But assuming we receive an ETI message one day, what should we do then? To me, it seems entirely possible that political, religious or economic compulsions will keep us silent. We might even be scared of replying. But if we do find the imagination to reply, we will probably send back a similarly coded message on the same radio band, and then wait for another message from the ETI. With the exchange of a few such messages, we will work out a logical way to send information back and forth.
Of course, given the distances involved, this "conversation" will be extremely slow. Again, with an ETI near Alpha Centauri it would be eight years before we got a reply to our message. With further stars, those who hear the first ETI signal on Earth might be dead by the time the next one arrives.
The constraints of space and time are a serious barrier to direct contact with any intelligent galactic neighbours we might have. Talking to them will be a slow, tedious affair; meeting them will remain a dream.
So you might wonder: why do SETI at all? Ah, but that has to do with our perpetual wonder about the unknown. All through history we have set off to explore dark corners of the world. Today, when there are pretty much no dark corners left on this planet, we turn to space. How can we not stop to wonder: is there anybody out there? Are we unique? Are we alone?
Answering those questions poses totally new challenges that need totally new thinking. How can we travel faster than our painfully slow spacecrafts now manage? Can we find a better medium than radio waves to carry our messages? How do we send out a signal that will not seem threatening to an ETI?
What's fascinating about all this is that it makes us consider ourselves more closely. Do we have the patience, the vision, the courage, to sustain a long and frustrating SETI? If we can't resolve our own petty quarrels, how will we seem intelligent and friendly to an ETI? If we ignore lessons our own history teaches us, what will we learn from an ETI?
For me, this is the most compelling thing about SETI: that a search for something entirely outside our home planet, even our imaginations, eventually makes us look at ourselves anew. In the end, there's the greatest reason to do it at all.
August 07, 2010
Meals ready, Marianne
Head over to my (sadly) fitfully updated travel blog, Our Judgement Free, for an essay I wrote about a recent drive south that appears in today's Mint.
Meals Ready, Marianne.
Your thoughts welcome.
Meals Ready, Marianne.
Your thoughts welcome.
August 06, 2010
Atul Setalvad, again
You may remember my tribute to Atul Setalvad from a few days ago. On the Bombay Bar Association website, my friend Gautam Patel has an eloquent obituary that gives you a picture not just of Atul, but maybe even of a era that, sadly, has passed.
Take a look.
Take a look.
August 05, 2010
Even closer together
"It is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our city even closer together, and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any ways consistent with Islam."
Mayor Bloomberg of NYC speaks up for the mosque near the WTC site. Read his speech here.
Mayor Bloomberg of NYC speaks up for the mosque near the WTC site. Read his speech here.
August 03, 2010
World class apart
What began as a series of tweets turned into a quick blog post ... and then I thought I should try to get the thoughts into print somewhere. So I worked on an essay that I sent to the Hindustan Times, and it is in print today.
Take a look: A world class apart.
It's been modified a bit as printed; if you'd like to read the original, please see below.
COmments, yes as usual, welcome.
***
News item:
"As part of the ongoing drive to beautify Delhi in view of the upcoming Commonwealth Games, the NDMC demolished last week nearly 5000 homes it described as 'old' and 'dilapidated'. These were located in areas such as South Extension I, Golf Links, Sujansingh Park, Shantiniketan, Moti Bagh and Karol Bagh. The residents were transported across the Yamuna river and left in camps there. Shri RM Khanna (65), resident of 5/15 Shantiniketan, one of the houses demolished, spoke to this correspondent: 'What are we to do here? My parents came from Pakistan in 1947 and my family built that house. Now the NDMC breaks it because they say it is ugly and has thrown us out of the city! Where do we turn?'
A spokesman for the Games Organizing Committee, speaking on condition of anonymity as he is not authorised to speak to the media, told this correspondent: 'We are expecting lakhs of visitors for the Games. Do they or do they not deserve to see a worldclass city free of these crumbling old houses?'"
All right, I made those two paragraphs up.
But change words around and it could very well be a report about events that have happened in Delhi in the runup to the Games. People have indeed been taken from their homes and deposited outside the city, the homes demolished because they are eyesores. Some markers of a trend: Last September, the city's Social Welfare Minister, Mangat Ram Singhal, kicked off a drive to prosecute beggars with this remark: "Before the 2010 Commonwealth Games, we want to finish the problem of beggary from Delhi." In March, the Independent reported: "Ahead of [the] Commonwealth Games, the [Delhi] government … has increased the number of mobile beggars' courts from one to three." It also mentions the prison 15 miles north of Delhi where this mobile justice dispatches beggars when convicted. Also in March, a report for the NGO SOS Children's Village had these sentences: "Thousands of shanty towns have also been flattened as part of the city's pre-games facelift, leaving countless more homeless. The Games village has been built on the site of a demolished shanty town."
None of the people who figure in those reports were residents of Shantiniketan or Sujansingh Park, as if you didn't know. They belong instead to the streets and slum colonies spread across our massive capital, the interstices and open spaces left in between existing Delhi and everything that's being constructed so rapidly for the Games. They disfigure the city, so they must go. We are building worldclass, you see. Who objects to removing the eyesores?
And yet imagine if my faked news item had been real. Which resident of Delhi would stand for large scale demolitions in the city's Golf Links or SouthExes? (Eyesores, let's be frank, as some of those areas are).
The crazy injustice of this, coupled with the now-daily revelations of Commonwealth shenanigans, is the reason I'm staying away from the Games. If the organizers fling out my fellow Indians, well, they fling out me as well.
But the other side to this gets me nearly as much. What is our fascination with this term "worldclass"? Why are we so in thrall to it?
There's so much here that I don't know where to start, so perhaps I'll start where I'm told many of the lakhs of Games tourists will begin their visit: Delhi airport's new Terminal 3. ("T3" it is).
Since it was opened for use, I've seen plenty of breathless coverage about the space and the airiness, the beauty and who-knows-what-else there. I have no doubt it's all true. I've also read several times that T3 can handle 33 (or is it 34? 37?) million passengers every year. Which is one of those numbers that's flung about to impress. Shorn of context, it sounds hugely impressive and you think, as you are meant to think: "worldclass!" In its glass and metal and aerobridged glory, with its 33 million passengers strolling about, T3, which I am yet to visit, must be one worldclass edifice.
But here's context, or perspective if you like. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, erring always on the conservative side, shows that Mumbai's VT station handles … take a guess now … 150 million passengers a year. Close to five times what T3 is projected to do. Now it seems to me that in its ability to handle this number alone, VT is certainly a worldclass transport hub. After all, how many do you know in the world like that? Yet correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe I have ever heard VT referred to as "worldclass".
And besides that, why is it that we will build a glitzy T3 for 33 million passengers, but will do zip for the 150 million users of VT? Why should that station not have glass and walkways, air conditioning and cleanliness? My wife was at VT the other morning to see off someone, and called me to report how "filthy" it was. Would we tolerate "filthy" for T3? Why do we tolerate it for VT?
Don't forget the other great train terminus in downtown Mumbai, Churchgate, where passenger numbers are similar. And in fact, the entire suburban train system in Mumbai carries something approaching 2 billion passengers a year. Twice the country's population, sixty times T3's capacity; I don't know any airport anywhere that handles that kind of load. Yet this city's commuters travel in brutal conditions that nobody shows any inclination to seriously address.
Why? If we can build the splendour of T3, why can we not do something to make train travel more comfortable? Worldclass?
I realize how futile a question that "why" is, oddly enough, at an apparently unrelated moment every morning. That's when a skinny woman in a sari walks down my street. She has a basket on wheels and she carries two pieces of cardboard. This is an employee of the richest Municipality in Asia, and she uses those two pieces of cardboard to pick up the trash and litter on the side of the road. The same woman has walked my street with those (same?) cardboard pieces for 10+ years now.
Is that worldclass? Should it be?
Building shiny T3s is, in the end, easy. I wish giving that woman something better than cardboard to pick up the trash with were as easy. Now that would be worldclass.
Take a look: A world class apart.
It's been modified a bit as printed; if you'd like to read the original, please see below.
COmments, yes as usual, welcome.
News item:
"As part of the ongoing drive to beautify Delhi in view of the upcoming Commonwealth Games, the NDMC demolished last week nearly 5000 homes it described as 'old' and 'dilapidated'. These were located in areas such as South Extension I, Golf Links, Sujansingh Park, Shantiniketan, Moti Bagh and Karol Bagh. The residents were transported across the Yamuna river and left in camps there. Shri RM Khanna (65), resident of 5/15 Shantiniketan, one of the houses demolished, spoke to this correspondent: 'What are we to do here? My parents came from Pakistan in 1947 and my family built that house. Now the NDMC breaks it because they say it is ugly and has thrown us out of the city! Where do we turn?'
A spokesman for the Games Organizing Committee, speaking on condition of anonymity as he is not authorised to speak to the media, told this correspondent: 'We are expecting lakhs of visitors for the Games. Do they or do they not deserve to see a worldclass city free of these crumbling old houses?'"
All right, I made those two paragraphs up.
But change words around and it could very well be a report about events that have happened in Delhi in the runup to the Games. People have indeed been taken from their homes and deposited outside the city, the homes demolished because they are eyesores. Some markers of a trend: Last September, the city's Social Welfare Minister, Mangat Ram Singhal, kicked off a drive to prosecute beggars with this remark: "Before the 2010 Commonwealth Games, we want to finish the problem of beggary from Delhi." In March, the Independent reported: "Ahead of [the] Commonwealth Games, the [Delhi] government … has increased the number of mobile beggars' courts from one to three." It also mentions the prison 15 miles north of Delhi where this mobile justice dispatches beggars when convicted. Also in March, a report for the NGO SOS Children's Village had these sentences: "Thousands of shanty towns have also been flattened as part of the city's pre-games facelift, leaving countless more homeless. The Games village has been built on the site of a demolished shanty town."
None of the people who figure in those reports were residents of Shantiniketan or Sujansingh Park, as if you didn't know. They belong instead to the streets and slum colonies spread across our massive capital, the interstices and open spaces left in between existing Delhi and everything that's being constructed so rapidly for the Games. They disfigure the city, so they must go. We are building worldclass, you see. Who objects to removing the eyesores?
And yet imagine if my faked news item had been real. Which resident of Delhi would stand for large scale demolitions in the city's Golf Links or SouthExes? (Eyesores, let's be frank, as some of those areas are).
The crazy injustice of this, coupled with the now-daily revelations of Commonwealth shenanigans, is the reason I'm staying away from the Games. If the organizers fling out my fellow Indians, well, they fling out me as well.
But the other side to this gets me nearly as much. What is our fascination with this term "worldclass"? Why are we so in thrall to it?
There's so much here that I don't know where to start, so perhaps I'll start where I'm told many of the lakhs of Games tourists will begin their visit: Delhi airport's new Terminal 3. ("T3" it is).
Since it was opened for use, I've seen plenty of breathless coverage about the space and the airiness, the beauty and who-knows-what-else there. I have no doubt it's all true. I've also read several times that T3 can handle 33 (or is it 34? 37?) million passengers every year. Which is one of those numbers that's flung about to impress. Shorn of context, it sounds hugely impressive and you think, as you are meant to think: "worldclass!" In its glass and metal and aerobridged glory, with its 33 million passengers strolling about, T3, which I am yet to visit, must be one worldclass edifice.
But here's context, or perspective if you like. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, erring always on the conservative side, shows that Mumbai's VT station handles … take a guess now … 150 million passengers a year. Close to five times what T3 is projected to do. Now it seems to me that in its ability to handle this number alone, VT is certainly a worldclass transport hub. After all, how many do you know in the world like that? Yet correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe I have ever heard VT referred to as "worldclass".
And besides that, why is it that we will build a glitzy T3 for 33 million passengers, but will do zip for the 150 million users of VT? Why should that station not have glass and walkways, air conditioning and cleanliness? My wife was at VT the other morning to see off someone, and called me to report how "filthy" it was. Would we tolerate "filthy" for T3? Why do we tolerate it for VT?
Don't forget the other great train terminus in downtown Mumbai, Churchgate, where passenger numbers are similar. And in fact, the entire suburban train system in Mumbai carries something approaching 2 billion passengers a year. Twice the country's population, sixty times T3's capacity; I don't know any airport anywhere that handles that kind of load. Yet this city's commuters travel in brutal conditions that nobody shows any inclination to seriously address.
Why? If we can build the splendour of T3, why can we not do something to make train travel more comfortable? Worldclass?
I realize how futile a question that "why" is, oddly enough, at an apparently unrelated moment every morning. That's when a skinny woman in a sari walks down my street. She has a basket on wheels and she carries two pieces of cardboard. This is an employee of the richest Municipality in Asia, and she uses those two pieces of cardboard to pick up the trash and litter on the side of the road. The same woman has walked my street with those (same?) cardboard pieces for 10+ years now.
Is that worldclass? Should it be?
Building shiny T3s is, in the end, easy. I wish giving that woman something better than cardboard to pick up the trash with were as easy. Now that would be worldclass.
August 01, 2010
The crane preens
In the July-August 2010 issue of HouseCalls magazine is the second of a series of essays I'm doing for them over the next few months. The site is one of those replicate-the-paper-experience gadgets that I don't much care for myself, but if you do, the essay is on page 60. Please read all else that's in the magazine too.
In any case, the essay is appended below. I called it "Where the whooping crane preens", but in print it is called "The Audacity!"
All comments welcome. Including yours.
(My previous effort for HouseCalls was about a man called Agassi and a friend called Gert. Read it here.)
***
On the beach in Alang in Gujarat, you see ships. I mean, ON the beach. These are behemoth seafaring vessels from around the world, driven up on to the sand, then pulled further up by hand, then teams of men swarm onto them like ants, breaking them into little pieces.
One of the world's great shipbreaking yards, Alang, and a visual marvel. Ships on the sand take some getting used to; did Troy look like this for ten ancient years? When I visited Alang, I was saddened by the conditions in which the men -- migrant labour from Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa -- live and work. I don't mean to underplay that at all. Yet what most struck me in Alang was something else: the audacity, if you like, of people who tear apart ships by hand.
I think a lot about audacity, even if I hadn't expected to do so with ships in Alang. I hadn't expected it later either, with -- of all things -- cranes in a small American town. But maybe that's the thing about audacity. You don't expect it.
In the early 1970s, my mother went to the American Center in Bombay to hear a couple of young scientists, George Archibald and Ron Sauey, who had recently graduated from Cornell University. To kick off their careers, Sauey's parents gave them the use of their Wisconsin horse farm. And on that farm, they had some cranes. E-I-E-I-O, with a squawk-squawk here and a squawk-squawk there, I'm sure.
But more seriously: on that farm in 1973, Archibald and Sauey established the International Crane Foundation, aiming to save several endangered species of cranes, one native to India. Reversing a slide to extinction is, by definition, an ambitious challenge. This one fascinated my mother, a dedicated birdwatcher who had some limited success in passing that passion on to her kids. So impressed was she with Archibald and Sauey's knowledge and zeal that she went and spoke to them. That conversation began years of correspondence between her and Sauey.
Through my teens, manila packets would arrive regularly at home, with "International Crane Foundation" printed in graceful black letters on the top left. They contained copies of the ICF newsletter, "The Brolga Bugle", which she had agreed to distribute in India. At a time when my reading comprised Biggles, Blyton and Bunter, I probably did not pore over the Brolga Bugle much. But I remember being always filled with wonder that in a far off town with the exotic name of Baraboo, Wisconsin, an entire Foundation worked to breed elegant birds with long necks. Even then, I thought there was something heroic about saving another species. Some day, I promised myself, I'm going to visit.
It took me over 30 years, and Ron Sauey died suddenly in 1987, leaving conservation circles devastated. But one morning in 2008, I found myself barreling down the highway to Baraboo. On a quiet road in the middle of gently rolling farmland, I turned into a nondescript gate, parked before a small low building, bought a ticket and walked through. Behind, several large enclosures for birds.
Did my filial duty first: called my mother from outside one of the enclosures to say, I'm here where I should have been 30 years ago. She was thrilled. I don't know if she heard them from half the world away, but the cranes were in lusty voice. Maybe they were thrilled too.
Then I roamed and met, more correctly saw and admired:
* Howard and Cassasin, white-naped cranes from Japan.
* Andrew and Hugh, Brolga cranes from Australia. They gave their name to the ICF newsletter, though these days it goes, prosaically, by just "The Bugle".
* Wazi and Slidell, black-crowned cranes from Nigeria. All crane-charm, this pair bellowed loudly at me. I smiled back.
And of course:
* Majnu and Chandni, Sarus cranes from India. Up to six feet tall, with an 8-foot wingspan, the Sarus is the world's tallest flying bird.
So the cranes were charming, if noisy, and so far, the ICF had been compelling and inspiring. But this is about audacity, and I was about to run full tilt into it. Last thing I expected.
The ICF's whooping crane enclosure is another low building, with several benches for visitors. That day, there was just one bird, a gorgeous white fellow preening and grooming only a few dozen feet from where I sat, stunned. For I had just watched a video. And out of the blue, in this spot about as far in every way from that surreal Gujarat beach as it is possible to get, Alang floated into my mind. Again, unexpected. Again, audacity.
Whooping cranes are native to North America. Some years ago, their population had dropped to the point that they looked unlikely to survive. Like with other cranes, the ICF has a breeding programme in place for them. It has worked, in the sense that they have managed to raise the birds in captivity. But then researchers came up against a problem they could not easily solve. For these are migratory animals. The seasonal imperative of migration is key to their survival, to their existence itself. Absent that, a captive-bred whooping crane population will soon be an extinct whooping crane population.
In the wild, cranes learn migration from parents who have migrated before them. This is just natural. It's not quite the same as my mother teaching me the joys of bird-watching; for delightful as that pastime is, it isn't quite fundamental to my existence. But that there are behaviours that are fundamental that I've learned from her, I have no doubt. Yet consider: had I grown up parent-less in an orphanage, how would I learn those behaviours from scratch, today?
How were these young whooping cranes to learn migration?
Simple. Some researchers decided to teach them.
To me, the idea itself is staggering, breathtakingly impudent.
After all, it's one thing to disembowel seafaring vessels by hand, astonishing as that is. It's a qualitatively different thing to teach another species an instinctive behaviour. It's as if we humans had forgotten how to smile, or have sex, and elephants decided to teach us. Exactly that staggering.
The video showed how it happened. (Migration. Not elephants teaching sex). Researchers dressed up as cranes, complete with hoods and gloves painted to resemble crane body parts. This was to accustom young birds to human presence during the window in their lives when they form strong parental bonds. Thus the fledgelings came to see the suited humans as parents; that is, they "imprinted" on the humans. That done, the crane-lets learned to fly behind a tiny aircraft piloted by one of the suits. That done, they flew behind that tiny aircraft, tracing the whooping crane migratory route in hops all the way from Wisconsin to Florida. We're talking close to 2000 km. On the way, they stopped in the backyards of families who spoke to the camera. Like a husband and wife in small-town North Carolina, bemused and amused by this benign, yet slightly surreal invasion of birds, plane and crane suits.
And the birds learned. Because come the next April, when the season turned in Florida, the cranes returned on their own to Wisconsin. To where they started from. Migrating again. Cranes, but now in full measure. Staggering.
So I sat on the bench, digesting the video and remembering Alang, watching the lone whooping crane, wondering how it had fared on the Florida yatra. And now I remembered some earnest friends in the corporate world. You know, management types. I've heard these guys talk about something they call BHAGs -- Big Hairy Audacious Goals. I would mentally wave this away as just another of the innumerable infernal acronyms management is overstuffed with. Still, I picked up enough about them to know that there's a compelling logic to BHAGs: be unafraid to think big, because that's when you achieve big as well.
Setting BHAGs and then reaching for them, the thinking goes, helps organizations find direction, grow and flourish. JFK's early 1960s call to his countrymen to land on the moon before the decade was out was certainly a BHAG. If it caught a nation's imagination, may I suggest similar big thinking in the goal researchers set themselves with the whooping crane: teach another species as fundamental and instinctive a thing as migration.
Talk about audacity. Unabashed, barefaced audacity. How delicious. How stirring. Here where a whooping crane preens, how it hits me in the face.
In any case, the essay is appended below. I called it "Where the whooping crane preens", but in print it is called "The Audacity!"
All comments welcome. Including yours.
(My previous effort for HouseCalls was about a man called Agassi and a friend called Gert. Read it here.)
On the beach in Alang in Gujarat, you see ships. I mean, ON the beach. These are behemoth seafaring vessels from around the world, driven up on to the sand, then pulled further up by hand, then teams of men swarm onto them like ants, breaking them into little pieces.
One of the world's great shipbreaking yards, Alang, and a visual marvel. Ships on the sand take some getting used to; did Troy look like this for ten ancient years? When I visited Alang, I was saddened by the conditions in which the men -- migrant labour from Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa -- live and work. I don't mean to underplay that at all. Yet what most struck me in Alang was something else: the audacity, if you like, of people who tear apart ships by hand.
I think a lot about audacity, even if I hadn't expected to do so with ships in Alang. I hadn't expected it later either, with -- of all things -- cranes in a small American town. But maybe that's the thing about audacity. You don't expect it.
In the early 1970s, my mother went to the American Center in Bombay to hear a couple of young scientists, George Archibald and Ron Sauey, who had recently graduated from Cornell University. To kick off their careers, Sauey's parents gave them the use of their Wisconsin horse farm. And on that farm, they had some cranes. E-I-E-I-O, with a squawk-squawk here and a squawk-squawk there, I'm sure.
But more seriously: on that farm in 1973, Archibald and Sauey established the International Crane Foundation, aiming to save several endangered species of cranes, one native to India. Reversing a slide to extinction is, by definition, an ambitious challenge. This one fascinated my mother, a dedicated birdwatcher who had some limited success in passing that passion on to her kids. So impressed was she with Archibald and Sauey's knowledge and zeal that she went and spoke to them. That conversation began years of correspondence between her and Sauey.
Through my teens, manila packets would arrive regularly at home, with "International Crane Foundation" printed in graceful black letters on the top left. They contained copies of the ICF newsletter, "The Brolga Bugle", which she had agreed to distribute in India. At a time when my reading comprised Biggles, Blyton and Bunter, I probably did not pore over the Brolga Bugle much. But I remember being always filled with wonder that in a far off town with the exotic name of Baraboo, Wisconsin, an entire Foundation worked to breed elegant birds with long necks. Even then, I thought there was something heroic about saving another species. Some day, I promised myself, I'm going to visit.
It took me over 30 years, and Ron Sauey died suddenly in 1987, leaving conservation circles devastated. But one morning in 2008, I found myself barreling down the highway to Baraboo. On a quiet road in the middle of gently rolling farmland, I turned into a nondescript gate, parked before a small low building, bought a ticket and walked through. Behind, several large enclosures for birds.
Did my filial duty first: called my mother from outside one of the enclosures to say, I'm here where I should have been 30 years ago. She was thrilled. I don't know if she heard them from half the world away, but the cranes were in lusty voice. Maybe they were thrilled too.
Then I roamed and met, more correctly saw and admired:
* Howard and Cassasin, white-naped cranes from Japan.
* Andrew and Hugh, Brolga cranes from Australia. They gave their name to the ICF newsletter, though these days it goes, prosaically, by just "The Bugle".
* Wazi and Slidell, black-crowned cranes from Nigeria. All crane-charm, this pair bellowed loudly at me. I smiled back.
And of course:
* Majnu and Chandni, Sarus cranes from India. Up to six feet tall, with an 8-foot wingspan, the Sarus is the world's tallest flying bird.
So the cranes were charming, if noisy, and so far, the ICF had been compelling and inspiring. But this is about audacity, and I was about to run full tilt into it. Last thing I expected.
The ICF's whooping crane enclosure is another low building, with several benches for visitors. That day, there was just one bird, a gorgeous white fellow preening and grooming only a few dozen feet from where I sat, stunned. For I had just watched a video. And out of the blue, in this spot about as far in every way from that surreal Gujarat beach as it is possible to get, Alang floated into my mind. Again, unexpected. Again, audacity.
Whooping cranes are native to North America. Some years ago, their population had dropped to the point that they looked unlikely to survive. Like with other cranes, the ICF has a breeding programme in place for them. It has worked, in the sense that they have managed to raise the birds in captivity. But then researchers came up against a problem they could not easily solve. For these are migratory animals. The seasonal imperative of migration is key to their survival, to their existence itself. Absent that, a captive-bred whooping crane population will soon be an extinct whooping crane population.
In the wild, cranes learn migration from parents who have migrated before them. This is just natural. It's not quite the same as my mother teaching me the joys of bird-watching; for delightful as that pastime is, it isn't quite fundamental to my existence. But that there are behaviours that are fundamental that I've learned from her, I have no doubt. Yet consider: had I grown up parent-less in an orphanage, how would I learn those behaviours from scratch, today?
How were these young whooping cranes to learn migration?
Simple. Some researchers decided to teach them.
To me, the idea itself is staggering, breathtakingly impudent.
After all, it's one thing to disembowel seafaring vessels by hand, astonishing as that is. It's a qualitatively different thing to teach another species an instinctive behaviour. It's as if we humans had forgotten how to smile, or have sex, and elephants decided to teach us. Exactly that staggering.
The video showed how it happened. (Migration. Not elephants teaching sex). Researchers dressed up as cranes, complete with hoods and gloves painted to resemble crane body parts. This was to accustom young birds to human presence during the window in their lives when they form strong parental bonds. Thus the fledgelings came to see the suited humans as parents; that is, they "imprinted" on the humans. That done, the crane-lets learned to fly behind a tiny aircraft piloted by one of the suits. That done, they flew behind that tiny aircraft, tracing the whooping crane migratory route in hops all the way from Wisconsin to Florida. We're talking close to 2000 km. On the way, they stopped in the backyards of families who spoke to the camera. Like a husband and wife in small-town North Carolina, bemused and amused by this benign, yet slightly surreal invasion of birds, plane and crane suits.
And the birds learned. Because come the next April, when the season turned in Florida, the cranes returned on their own to Wisconsin. To where they started from. Migrating again. Cranes, but now in full measure. Staggering.
So I sat on the bench, digesting the video and remembering Alang, watching the lone whooping crane, wondering how it had fared on the Florida yatra. And now I remembered some earnest friends in the corporate world. You know, management types. I've heard these guys talk about something they call BHAGs -- Big Hairy Audacious Goals. I would mentally wave this away as just another of the innumerable infernal acronyms management is overstuffed with. Still, I picked up enough about them to know that there's a compelling logic to BHAGs: be unafraid to think big, because that's when you achieve big as well.
Setting BHAGs and then reaching for them, the thinking goes, helps organizations find direction, grow and flourish. JFK's early 1960s call to his countrymen to land on the moon before the decade was out was certainly a BHAG. If it caught a nation's imagination, may I suggest similar big thinking in the goal researchers set themselves with the whooping crane: teach another species as fundamental and instinctive a thing as migration.
Talk about audacity. Unabashed, barefaced audacity. How delicious. How stirring. Here where a whooping crane preens, how it hits me in the face.
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