Filter Coffee

Filter Coffee has moved

2009-10-01T09:19:00Z

Filter Coffee, along with all of Livemint's blogs has moved to a new Wordpress platform. Visit http://blog.livemint.com/filter-coffee/ for more on literature, science, travel and culture or simply click here. Also don't forget to update your RSS feed readers and tell all your friends!

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R-E-S-P-E-C-T

2009-08-23T06:04:00Z

Much like its American counterpart, the unraveling of the Indian equivalent of the Republican Party continues apace. Jaswant Singh was expelled on August 19, because he wrote a book in which he allegedly says that Jinnah was demonized by India, while it was Nehru, Patel et al who were actually responsible for partition.

Taking a cue from their national leadership, the powers that be in the Gujarat state government have seen it fit to ban the book in that state because "...it contains defamatory references regarding Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who is considered the architect of the (sic) modern India..." Thus, a hoary tradition has been kept alive in this Mother of Traditional Societies with Age Old Cultural Values. A tradition that started perhaps with the ban on Midnight's Children (have there been earlier instances?), and continued with actual bans on books about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, about Shivaji and by Taslima Nareen (to list a few). The number of mainstream demands for bans of "offensive" publications is large enough that the assistance of a comma or two are needed to express the number. Throw in the demands on movies, documentaries, paintings, songs and suchlike, we enter the realm of scientific notation!

What is it with us and this almost reflexive demand to ban the expression of thoughts and ideas that we don't like the sound of? Are our identities so fragile that they risk shattering at the slightest sign of contrasting "offensive" ideologies or viewpoints? In a liberal democracy, the freedom of expression is a right that is non-negotiable(1), and the freedom for you to express your opinions comes at a price, namely that others symmetrically free to air their views. Without this reciprocal arrangement, it becomes impossible for old ideas to be questioned and new ways of thinking and doing things to be brought about.

One of the standard responses to this position is that no matter what, one should "give respect" to other people's strongly held opinions and deeply cherished beliefs, and that if something one says or writes could "cause offense", that something is a valid candidate for legal proscription. Somehow, this "respecting" everyone and everything theme has fused into our "value system", whatever that is.

Testicles.

It is one thing to respect someone's right to have an opinion and to express it (hello Francois, even if you didn't utter one of your most oft-quoted sayings), and quite another thing to actually respect them or the opinion itself. There are tons of people around us who cling onto ideas and opinions that range from the sad and mildly harmful (believers in astrology, for example) to the despicable (caste, gender, what have you...). These are friends and family, people who we love, admire, and are essential parts of our lives. We ought to respect them for that which is worthy of respect ("I wish I could sing like him.", "I wish I could do partial differential equations in my head like her."), and have the freedom to say without fear or coercion what we don't agree with ("WTBleep! You won't shake hands with XYZ because he is a Dalit?! Shame on you." etc.)

Perhaps the problem is with the word "respect" itself, which is overloaded with layer after layer of meaning. The philosopher Simon Blackburn wrote a longish piece (25 odd pages, PDF) in which he rather nicely addresses this point. It started off with him being asked to join in a small religious observance (something many of us have been subject to before, surely) before a meal, and when he refused, the dinner atmosphere became markedly strained. This started off a train of thought that culminated in the paper at hand.

'Respect', of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden. The word seems to span a spectrum from simply not interfering, passing by on the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference. This makes it uniquely well-placed for ideological purposes. People may start out by insisting on respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call respect creep sets in, where the request for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellowfeeling, or esteem, and finally deference and reverence. In the limit, unless you let me take over your mind and your life, you are not showing proper respect for my religious or ideological convictions.

We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds. Or, if it is to our advantage that they have false beliefs, as in a game of poker, and we am poised to profit from them, we may be wickedly pleased that they are taken in...I shall not in this essay dwell on the infirmity of 'anything goes' postmodernism.

So take a chill pill (or modakam as the case may be, Happy Vinayaka Chaturthi), people. Please don't kill yourself (or others) 'respecting' everything under the sun, or for 'disrespecting' ditto. Let's not be such small-minded, insecure, twits that someone with a differing opinion has our collective knickers in collective twists. Respect the right things (i.e. things I respect, of course. A manifesto will be supplied on request (and a fee).), and let's hope that in a few generations our great-(repeat n times, n>3)-grandchildren will live in a place where the mind is without fear, where the head is held high (2), and where they won't feel the utterly irrational need to ask a non-existent Parent to facilitate and expedite things for them.

(1) Note that I am referring mostly to the freedom to express opinions, please don't throw Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. at me!

(2) Please save all jokes about plate tectonics and continental drifts for the after party.

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Swine Flu Over The Cuckoo's Nest

2009-08-16T13:08:00Z

That was going to be our team name for the Landmark Quiz that happened yesterday evening at the Music Academy in Chennai, until we changed it for highly obscure strategic reasons. We were quite lucky to scrape through to the Chennai finals, and then even luckier to sneak into the national finals by finishing second in the Chennai round. In the finals, order, balance and sanity were restored to the Universe and we came 6th or 7th per usual. Certain unmentionable person (who ceaselessly berates me about channeling quiz questions in this blog while concurrently writing a "blog" that consists entirely of quizzes) did very well indeed and won the whole thing. Expect to see highly annoying posts on how Rs. x0,000 in Landmark vouchers can be spent on that "blog".

There was a very real danger that the quizzes wouldn't happen because of the new H1N1 visa that seems to have been introduced in the recent past. Attendance was a bit thinner than previous years, but people still showed up in impressive quantities. Many team names were variations on the pigs flying theme, there were a couple of questions on it in the quiz and everyone had a jolly good laugh whenever there was a swine flu joke (but furtively looked very carefully at their neighbours to see if they looked like biological weapns). The organizers did their bit by handing out masks at the door to everyone, and at one point looking at the audience from the stage, it seemed like we were in some unscrupulous and gigantic operation theatre that had sold tickets to the public, for the pleasure of watching the finalists get skewered by the very learned and very classy Dr. Navin Jayakumar.

If it wasn't bad enough that the flu sounds like a visa category, things get hopelessly confused when the recommended mask happens to share its name with a popular mobile phone model. Some grumpy Google servers somewhere are probably sitting and cussing as searches for "N95" pour in and now suddenly they don't know which one is being sought.

The swine flu pandemic first made news in March in Mexico. The whole world emitted a collective high pitched screech at the time, health agencies went into overdrive and everyone was aflutter. Things quietened down a bit for several weeks while the world seemed to take a (N95 screened) deep breath, before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that it was a pandemic, and that there was diddly-squat that could be done about it. What I could not understand was how did they decide that this thing had achieved the critical mass it needed to make the spread unstoppable? What changed, how do these things grow and evolve?

Enter scientists! The very curiously named Dr. Robert Smith? (yes, the '?' is part of his name!) seems to work on the bleeding edge of the mathematics of infectious disease. Like the good scientists they are, Dr. Smith and his colleagues have written a paper (PDF) titled When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection. The abstract reads:

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

Fantastic stuff. How can it not be when the first line reads, "A zombie is a reanimated human corpse that feeds on living human flesh." and then goes on to such things as:

In addition, we assume the birth rate is a constant, K. Zombies move to the removed class upon being ‘defeated’. This can be done by removing the head or destroying the brain of the zombie (parameter ). We also assume that zombies do not attack/defeat other zombies. Thus, the basic model is given by

S' = PI - BetaSZ - DeltaS
Z' = BetaSZ + GammaR - AlphaSZ
R' = DeltaS + AlphaSZ - GammaR

This model is illustrated in Figure 1.

Warms the cockles of your heart to know that we are in good hands, doesn't it? Of course, this paper is not unique in it's quirkiness. Dr. Jason Brown's paper has rendered yeoman service unto music buffs by solving the mystery behind that distinctive first chord of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. He used Fourier transforms to ferret out the fact that there must have been a piano somewhere in rock and roll's most famous guitar chord!

And though it's not in the same league of rigour and correctness as these two, Alice Shirrell Kaswell's extraordinary contribution to that ineluctable, ineffable Mystery of the Universe, Which Came First - The Chicken Or The Egg? is phenomenally informative and inspirational.

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On A Scale Of Five

2009-08-02T08:25:00Z

Which is finally a post about science, (tangentially)!

This blog started trying to be a "science" blog. Various lumpen elements like Simbu and Subbu came and hijacked the whole enterprise, and the science train more or less derailed. Until now. By some miracle (i.e. the Google RSS feed Reader), I am finally able to churn out a post that is on science, India, and music at one fell swoop.

Now anyone who has heard me sing knows that it is preferable to have their nails pulled out with pliers rather than go through that quaint ordeal. Nevertheless, ever so often I make brief and brave sallies into the world of music, on recconaissance missions, as it were. In the manner of some border-land raider, I will swoop through the field, and carry off whatever nuggets by way of song and music my frequency challenged (I know I'm colour blind, and I suspect I'm tone deaf) brain can accommodate.

In the mid-90s I discovered Western popular music for the first time, through a 3-4 day viewing of The Beatles Anthology in the hostel common room. That was pretty much it. Haven't really caught on to any other band or artiste ever since, only the odd song registers. In 2000, out of the loneliness that came from being lovesick, finishing the M.S. finally and moving to a new city, and a primeval urge to consume samosas on Sunday afternoons, I started attending the concerts that MITHAS organized regularly. In the middle of warm, muggy Sunday afternoons, I'd walk a mile and take the empty, rattling Red Line train to an equally deserted campus. It started off as a lame attempt to make new (hopefully female) friends, but somewhere along the line the music became more interesting, and I actually started paying attention to it.

Initially however, the stuff didn't make any sense. The mind was filled with fundamental questions. Why was this musical? What on earth was the tapping all about? What did bhesh mean? If I sit next to the young woman in the indigo sari, will I die from excitement? I cast about for answers, searched high and low, and finally found my own Vaadyaar in Shining Veshti, Ramesh Mahadevan.

Ramesh was famous, even legendary on the internet for his fantastically funny and insightful pieces on the desi grad student's struggles in the US, usually employing his most famous creation, Ajay Palvayanteeswaran. Quite apart from the funnies, he'd written a bunch of stuff on religion, politics, and suchlike that are all eminently readable. But his biggest contribution to my life is A Gentle Introduction to Karnatic Music. Here, for the first time, was South Indian classical music properly de-mystified in a manner that someone like me could parse.

Using the language of the desi engineering grad student, he unpackaged the whole edifice and laid bare the innards of an esoteric world. I lapped up this gushing torrent of information and before they could say Pallavoor Kunjakutta Marar, I was putting fundas on taalam to the likes of Kunnakudi. Everything I spew today on aarohaNam-avarohaNam and vaadi-vivaadi pretty much comes from there, and hasn't changed since.

One of the many many topics that "The Gentle Introduction" covers is the notion of scales and raagams. Somewhere buried in there is a funda that raagams have 5, 6, or 7 notes on the ascending part of the scale, and the ditto on the downstairs going side (yes, we lapse into this sort of language once in a while, bear with us.) A raagam which has a 5-5 structure is called an audava-audava raagam. Bear this in mind. This is where the science theme makes a grand entry.

The World Science Festival seems to be an annual New York City event that aims to take "science out of the laboratory and into the streets". Events include lectures, demonstrations, discussions etc. The advisors list reads like a who's who of science and science popularization authors. The festival is not without its detractors, partly because of the support it receives from the wealthy and influential Templeton Foundation which, it is alleged (among other things), tries to "fuse" science and religion and tries to find out how one casts light on the other (if that's at all possible). Indeed, the festival seemed to have a fair number of panels where theologians and their ilk are to be found sharing space with the scientists.

Be that as it may, on June 12 this year there was a remarkable demonstration (video) of how the notion of the pentatonic scale seems to be hard-wired into human beings. A pentatonic scale is one which has 5 notes (hello, audava!) per octave in contrast with a "standard" heptatonic 7-note scale. It is found in music from all over the world (sample: Celtic, West African, Hungarian, traditional Greek, Albanian, Indonesian gamelan, Chinese etc.), which may suggest how "fundamental" it is (or how globalized the world is). (There are other scales also, apparently. :)

In the video, Bobby McFerrin demonstrates just how fundamental the scale is. He sings a couple of notes, and the crowd automatically "fills" in the next note, without having to be "taught" the scale. It's a lovely video, well worth the 5 minutes you need to watch it. If someone who has the musical know-how can do the math and explain how this particular pentatonic scale fits in with the audava-audava from Carnatic, that will be lovely.

Speaking for myself, now it doesn't seem like a major coincidence that some of my favourite Carnatic and film pieces are in audava-audava raagams. Random sample: Shivaranjani (Mere Naina Saawan Bhaadon,Bahaaron Phool Barsaao), Hamsadhwani (the usual suspects), Hindolam (Saamajavaragamana) etc. The pentatonic makes a brief but significant appearance in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a sort of common communication platform between humans and aliens. Not suprising, wot?

(1) There is an audio companion to Mahadevan's opus and other lessons, thanks to Prof. Shivakumar.

(2) Rajan Parrikar's extensive writings on Hindustani raags and thaats, along with the audio clips are as compelling as Mahadevan's but a lot more technical. Sigh. Does anyone remember the days when the internet used to actually be rich in content?

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Potternama, by I. Feelin' Silly

2009-07-24T12:45:00Z

Hallelujah, the Lord be praised! The 17.63th Harry Potter movie is out. It is a tour de force of the cinematic oeuvre and delivers a coup de grace that is je ne sais quoi; the modus operandi of the cast and crew make it the sine qua non of the canon; its ersatz special effects alter your Weltanschauung and cinematify the zeitgeist; it will 我希望能与猪. In summary, it is hasta la vista to all your preconceptions about literature and film, and y tu mamá también.

In other words, I have not seen the movie or read the book, and so am supremely qualified to comment on the phenomena. Here is one of the random scenes from the franchise that has joined others in my craw.

Right at the beginning of The Order of the Phoenix, Harry is whisked away via afterburner equipped broomstick to a quiet London street. One of the flunkies incantates an incantation, and the houses start sliding away from each other, thereby exposing the house where the Order meets (in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the Secret Seven (the password for this week is 'onion rava masala', should you find your broomstick impaled self in the neighbourhood)). Watch Hari babu's face closely.

There is a look of utter astonishment and delight as this new and 'spectacular' magical treat is revealed to him. I axe you, you've spent the last the 4 books of your life doing such things as fighting dragons and basilisks; colliding head-on with flatporm no. 9 3/4; messing with the space time continuum and zipping from one location in the universe to another via Portkey; becoming a sort of Jal-andar Singh Gill and performing underwater rescues etc. Why the bleep is anything surprising any more? Why? A street full of sliding houses? This is jaw-dropping? Throw a bunch of civil engineers, a supply of barbiturates and rubber duckies, Shakira and a slide rule into a room for a week and see what we(1) come up with. That Worli turn at the end of the Bandra Worli Sealink, probably. That should cause some mandibles to encounter pavements. Or homeopathy. Or for that matter when you got around to snogging Cho Chweet. Sliding houses it seems, hmph!

While on the subject of Hari babu, here is a method that is calculated to make many devotees of the books foam gently at the mouth. Gently sidle up and say, "I'm a big fan. And isn't it great that we finally have movies that are better than the books." Works like a charm. This is the ultimate insult, it is after all axiomatic that in the case of no truly great book has the movie been better.

Or try this, which I once attempted on a Delhi-Hyderabad flight after having to sit beside a particularly aggravating teenaged person who went on and on her cellphone after the Fasten Seat Belts sign had come on, and then went on talk back at the stewardess who very politely asked her to clam up. She was clutching what seemed to be a mint copy the last and (I am sure) super-engrossing climactic book of the series in her pseudopoda.

After we settled down, I turned to her and said, "I see you're reading The Deathly Hallows.(2)"

"Yes, yes, ooooooooooooooooo i'm sssssoooooooooooooo excited, I wonder how it will turn out."

"Oh please, allow me. Basically Fred Weasley dies. Snape, who was in love with Harry's mom when they were young, dies. Voldemort is killed, of course. Harry marries Ginny and they have 3 children. Ron marries Hermione. Dumbledore comes back, like Mithrandir, for the apocalyptic Battle of Hogwarts. You've heard of Mithrandir, no? Anything else you care to know? I can look up Wikipedia on my phone, which I will turn on in violation of airline regulations, just for your sake."

For the rest of the flight, there was blissful silence. Anyway, that's how the scene played in my head.

Which brings us (sorry) to SPOILER ALERTs.

One of these days, I am going to write a post that goes like so:

I watched (SPOILER ALERT) The Sixth Sense last night. It is one of the most exciting and scary movies I've seen in a long time. I didn't even know that the director (SPOILER ALERT) M. Night Syamalan was of Indian origin. Such a great movie, it is incredible how well he handled the suspense and tension. You know, I didn't realize till the last scene that the Bruce Willis character was also a ghost. The closest thing I've seen is the way the Kajol character totally unexpectedly turns out to be the villainess in Gupt. Great return on a (SPOILER ALERT) Rs. 150 investment... And so on.

(1) Yes, it does say '...what we come up with.'. Why do you think Shakira is in this fantasy?

(2). We've attempted a screenplay.

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That Constitution Thingy

2009-07-12T16:57:00Z

It's been a remarkable couple of weeks for the country. On July 2nd, the Delhi High Court struck down sections of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalised certain consensual sexual acts between adults by stating that they were "against the order of nature". This must be a truly remarkable event in the history of Indian jurisprudence. On the personal front, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts when the state legalized same-sex marriages and can remember May 17, 2004 when there was a crowd (by US standards!) outside City Hall. Some of them were people applying for licenses, some were from the press, and some were merely there to celebrate a rare and precious civil liberties victory. July 2nd, 2009 in Chennai felt very similar, inside my head, even if there wasn't a crowd dancing on the streets.

Anyway, that is all mostly beside the point. The Delhi HC's judgement received pretty much the expected response from the usual suspects. The liberals loved it, the conservatives and some religious heads seem to disagree (even if it is in mostly incoherent and apoplectic ways), and it probably scarcely registered in the consciousness of the <$2 per day income aam aadmis. Much newsprint, TV and radio coverage, and internet bandwidth has been expended in the last two days on the pros on cons of this landmark, and a visit to your neighbourhood search engine should reveal all.

So for the purposes of this post, I will try and dabble in constitutional law, one of the several areas (including mathematics, music, sports, colour discrimination) in which I am equally competent (meaning zilch). For a much more comprehensive review by someone who actually knows what he is talking about, see here. Some of the more understated but perhaps most crucial aspects of the Naz Foundation vs Government of NCT of Delhi are to be found in the actual text (PDF) of the judgement. One of the most striking features is how the HC repeatedly uses the framework of the Indian Constitution to justify its position.

The defendants (i.e. the Government) argued that Section 377 "...was responding to the values and morals of the time in the Indian society..." Further, they apparently argued that "Social and sexual mores in foreign countries cannot justify de-criminalisation of homosexuality in India." and that "...in western societies the morality standards are not as high as in India." The judgement goes on to cite several cases from abroad pertaining to the legalisation of gay sex, and cases from India dealing with privacy as a fundamental right etc. and then makes this remarkable statement:

Thus popular morality or public disapproval of certain acts is not a valid justification for restriction of the fundamental rights under Article 21. Popular morality, as distinct from a constitutional morality derived from constitutional values, is based on shifting and subjecting notions of right and wrong. If there is any type of “morality” that can pass the test of compelling state interest, it must be “constitutional” morality and not public morality...The argument of the learned ASG that public morality of homosexual conduct might open floodgates of delinquent behaviour is not founded upon any substantive material, even from such jurisdictions where sodomy laws have been abolished. Insofar as basis of this argument is concerned, as pointed out by Wolfenden Committee, it is often no more than the expression of revulsion against what is regarded as unnatural, sinful or disgusting. Moral indignation, howsoever strong, is not a valid basis for overriding individuals's fundamental rights of dignity and privacy.In our scheme of things, constitutional morality must outweigh the argument of public morality, even if it be the majoritarian view.

Quite apart from it's unambiguous statement on individual rights, what is interesting is that nowhere in the judgement did the court feel the need to cite anything older than the constitution (or the Constituent Assembly) to justify its stand. There is no pleading of the inclusiveness-of-Indian-culture-for-the-last-47,000-years and depiction-of-homosexuality-in-Indian-culture-for-the-last-47,000-years variety to justify its stand. The judges seem to say, "Here is the Constitution. Here is how we interpret it, and here is why. You no likey-likey? Too bad." Such a refreshing contrast from the Supreme Court judgement in the Afzal Guru case where it stated that the "...collective conscience of the society..." demanded the ritual murder of the accused. Ambedkar emphasized this primacy of individual rights over "collective morality" when in a Constituent Assembly debate he said:

It is said that the new Constitution should have been drafted on the ancient Hindu model of a State and that instead of incorporating Western theories the new Constitution should have been raised and built upon village Panchayats and District Panchayats. There are others who have taken a more extreme view. They do not want any Central or Provincial Governments. They just want India to contain so many village Governments. I hold that these village republics have been the ruination of India. I am therefore surprised that those who condemn Provincialism and communalism should come forward as champions of the village.What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? I am glad that the Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit.

Strong stuff, wot?

The constitution itself is a remarkable document. With 395 articles, 12 schedules and 94 amendments, it may verily be the only constitution in the world today that you can use not only to buttress your arguments, but also to physically bludgeon your opponent with if she proves to be excessively annoying. It borrows from all over the world, and yet is unique, idiosyncratic and somehow distinctly Indian. It seems to be a tricky beast at the best of times, and it's nothing short of a wonder that for nearly 60 years the document and the republic have somehow managed to keep each other bumbling along in hopefully the right general direction.

While the Naz Foundation judgement will go down in history, there have been other cases in the past that have been equally or perhaps even more important. These are the Roe v. Wades and the Brown v. Board of Educations of Indian law. In Kesavananda Bharati vs The State of Kerala, the Supreme Court held that the judiciary could review and strike down amendments to the constitution made by Parliament which conflict with or seek to alter the basic structure of the constitution. This seems to be a bit of a 2-edged sword.

My very very very rudimentary understanding of this is that it is closely tied up with the right to property. (See here for one way of looking at things.) At its heart the conflict was about the following: One of the promises held out by an independent India was the creation of a more egalitarian society with the abolishment of feudal land ownership. To do this, the government would have to take land from the zamindars and re-distribute it. But the zamindars could use the new republic's constitution to point out that this would violate their fundamental right to property, and the courts would agree. So something called the Ninth Schedule was created, into which were put laws that allowed the government to do this sort of land reform, without those actions being subject to judicial review. In Kesavananda Bharati, the SC tried to fight back and say that there was some stuff that could not be touched, even by Parliament.

Another landmark is Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, in which the SC "expanded the scope and content of the right to life and liberty by introducing the concept substantive due process to Indian law."

It's a fascinating tussle, this push-me pull-you thing that goes on between the constitution, parliament and the courts. Some "configurations" make sense, some cause a serious amount of internal conflict, and some are/were downright non-sensical. Another couple of centuries of a secular democratic republic, and we'll probably sort it out.

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The Saga of the Side Middle Berth

2009-07-05T11:13:00Z

Which was provoked by disturbing goings-on on the Charminar Express last night

Long, long ago in a land far, far away, there lived a dairy farmer. He and his friends were mesmerized by the magic of trains. Often, on hot summer days, they would gather near the doors of the air-conditioned compartments, hoping to catch a refreshing gust of cool air as the doors swung open and shut. When the coach attendant caught them, he would shoo them away. The farmer never forgot how cool and good the AC felt, and nor did he forget the treatment that was meted out to his friends.

Many decades later, Lalu Prasad Yadav became India's railways minister. Much Gangajal (and other unmentionables) had flowed under the impressive bridge at Patna, but the minister had not forgotten his encounters with the AC sleeper coaches all those years back. While he set about busily turning Indian Railways around from its slide into bankruptcy, Laluji made plans to make his dream of AC travel for the common man come true.

Or so goes one theory behind the fully air-conditioned Garib Rath superfasts that were introduced in 2005. Another theory holds that they were conceived to steal back the section of upper class rail passengers who had succumbed to the voluptuous overtures of the low cost airline boom. Like all legends, the truth is probably a heady cocktail of all of the above. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the seed of an idea for creating the Garib Raths for providing fully air-conditioned, cheap travel options to Indians who had hitherto been unable to afford this luxury, germinated in some cosy corner of the labyrinthine megalith that is Rail Bhavan.

The powers that be were acutely conscious that they would be accused of populism and pandering to the 'masses' if they came up with a cheap, loss making train that would have to be subsidized by receipts from other railway operations. Right from the beginning, the idea was to make sure that the trains would be profitable (like the Rajdhanis). So how do you take a Rajdhani Express, reduce the ticket price substantially, and yet keep the operation profitable? Simple! You have to carry more people.

Trantrantrantraaaaa...(and other fanfare). Enter the Dragon. This scorcher went by the name of Side Middle Berth (SMB. Or, in the interest of industrial quantities of cuteness, Simbu). Simbu suddenly meant that you could carry 9 more people in the same coach. Simbu was cool, Simbu was innovative, Simbu was the new kid on the block. It is rumored that the designers all dislocated their arms from paroxyms of a patting-oneself-on-the-back epidemic that briefly swept through their brotherhood and sisterhood.

At some point, someone must've gone, "Machaan! (Or Aila! Teri To! Edo! Orai! Dude! as the case may be) What is good for Garib Rath must surely be better for Sleeper Class!! Why don't we bung Simbus into SL coaches, and suddenly we can carry 81 people instead of 72!" Kaching kaching kaching! The cash register sound was like a siren song. Lo, and presto. Suddenly a whole new class of coaches started showing up, all souped up and Simbued.

The problems began from Day 0. The IRCTC website, which had been commissioned by Chanakya and inaugurated approximately in the period of Pulakesin II (and is now officially a UNESCO World Heritage Site), still assumed that you could only seat 72 people, and allotted seat numbers accordingly. Many an uncle (including this one), showed up in the compartment to find out that the comfy lower berth number 33 that they'd booked in the interest of their arthritic knee had mysteriously wafted upwards and was kissing the ceiling now. It became mandatory to take a look at the reservation chart to find what your new seat number (with promised lower berth) was. This was OK if you were in Howrah or Chennai Central and had all the time in the world, but if you were in Ankamali For Kaladi (I kid you not, this is a real station), you only had 13 milliseconds to do this.

Others (i.e. I) resorted to deriving complicated formulae to remember the new berth number. Issued in the general public interest under a Copyleft license:

Take old berth number (example 33).
Divide by 9 (=33/9 = 3.remainder)
Remainders are for WUSSES. Chuck the remainder.
Add quotient to original berth number (33 + 3 = 36)
Give Praise Unto The Mundoli

Quarrels erupted ("This is my berth!" "No, this is my berth!" "No, this is my birth!" "Hain ji?")

And this was only the start. Once you got the poor Simbu occupant on the train, you had to seat him somewhere. In the bygone era of equality and uniformity, it was 3 people to each long seat, facing each other fixedly for several hours. Now Simbu was inserted into one of the long seats. Disruptions in the space-time continuum! Inequality looms. The 3-seat fellows all suddenly acquired smug grins (Ha, ha! Look at those 4 unfortunates trying to fit on that slab, lucky us!). The 4-seat wallahs were apoplectic at the insertion of Simbu. They stare him down, and start moving their hands across their throats in a highly knife-like and suggestive manner. Poor Simbu became an uncomfortable outcast, trying to minimize his width (to fit in the seat), his height (to fit in the berth) and in general behaving like a touch-me-not.

So far, so good. Everyone has found their place, and made their peace. The train is careening into the night. Bedtime arrives. Now, the fellow who would normally be in the Side Upper Berth (SUB, obviously a.k.a Subbu), clambers onto the berth with the alacrity of a space monkey. The horror, the horror. Subbu finds that in order to accommodate Simbu, they've moved his berth closer to the ceiling. He can't sit up, and needs to constantly watch out lest he is decapitated by a very suspect, tetanus inducing fan that is hanging in front of his face. So now Subbu also hates Simbu, and makes dark plans for what devilry (involving fluids) he might do unto the sleeping form of the hapless Simbu, from his veritable Golan Heights of strategic advantage.

Simbu doesn't make a fuss, and quietly occupies his shelf in the rack. The lights are switched out, various expectoratory and other noises are heard. Soon, that comfortable and familiar silence of the Sleeper Class coach descends, punctuated by only the clickety-clack of metal wheels on metal points. Before the bastard in 41 starts snoring at 50 million decibels, as he inevitably will, you know it. (Sometimes I am that bastard, so please don't cuss too much).

It is 2 a.m. The rocking of the train has lulled the panic-stricken Simbu into a lap-of-mother type sleep. The rocking of the train has also resulted in Simbu starting an oscillatory rolling in his berth. Now in their infinite wisdom, those coach designers (of dislocated arms fame) did not move the light switches that we find between the 2 side seats (i.e. between Subbu's seat and Silambarasan's (i.e. Side Lower Berth) seat). Crucially, this switch is now athwartships of Simbu's gently oscillating backside.

In the old days, they had those massive metallic or Bakelite switches where you needed a team of horses (to pull the switch) and a Reynolds pen (to poke and jiggle the light/fan) before they would get going. As part of the Simbu innovations, they've replaced those switches with more 21st century avatars, which actually respond to feather touch. Alas, they didn't account for Simbu's gently rock-n'-rolling backside. At 2:30 in the morning, under the influence of the oscillatory impact, the fluorescent light starts to go on-off-on-off.

Now I'm not one to complain about a light flashing a couple of times. But absolutely, positively the last thing in the world I want is a Simbu-induced, fluorescent strobe light equipped, moving-at-100-kmph discotheque in front of my face at 2:30 in the morning, somewhere between Bapatla and Chirala. That is, without other expected accessories such as alcohol, recreational drugs, music, and pulsating, gyrating, nubile bodies all around.

But this is a delicate situation. One way to "handle" it is to...umm...reach out with one's hands and reposition the...err...oscillating rear end, but even in these heady post Section 377 days of freedom, some of us balk at this sort of thing. The other is to reach down from the upper berth and poke Simbu in the eye with one's big toe and wake him up (but not before toe is retracted) and thereby stopping the on-off. The third is to fill one's heart to the brim with the hatred of the Side Middle Berth, grit one's teeth and grin and bear it. Guess what we did.

To cut a long story long, the Side Middle Berth is a PHENOMENALLY bad idea. We have listed at least 4 reasons. Bad for Simbu, bad for Subbu, and for everyone who loves and cherishes Indian Railways. The good news is that there is talk that this sentiment has reached the highest echelons of Rail Mantralaya, and that steps are now being taken to possibly get rid of this obscenity. The bad news is that Simbu, who got this berth because of Tatkal in the first place, is now running around like a headless chicken on Platform 1 at Secunderabad, because he doesn't have a seat any more. If you see him, give him a hug.

PS It is noted that we've been highly gender un-neutral in this post and it's all "him" and "his" and all that, but may it be known by these presents that Simbu, Subbu and Silambarasan might equally have been Simbdoori, Subbulakshmi and Silombavardhini, without loss of generality.

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Michael Jackson (1958 - 2009)

2009-06-29T08:43:00Z

In which we discuss the dietary preferences of geese

Michael Jackson died last week. It was a hugely significant moment for me when I got the news, and my life has not been the same from that point forward. Mostly because for the first time ever, I got real news from Facebook before the BBC. Facebook also informed me that in his dotage, Harrison Ford forgot to lock the door of the fridge while shooting the next Indiana Jones movie at an unspecified location in North Korea, and was duly microwaved; that Jeff Goldblum was fried to a crisp while shooting for a film in New Zealand by a very annoyed Balrog that Peter Jackson forgot to pay; and that Emraan Hashmi and Himesh Reshamia, apart from being anagrams of each other, are actually the same person.

It was with great difficulty that I managed to separate fact from fiction, and it finally dawned on me that Mykellu Jacksonnu (this is his Telugu name) was no more. Status messages of several friends had references to the unfortunate event, and it was only then that I really became aware of how much he meant to so many people. In a show of empathy, I changed my status to "Who died?" which prompted questions about my paternity (a camel was mentioned) in 6 different languages from various "friends".

Only after Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook and Jackson moonwalked off this mortal coil did I realize how much a part of practically everyone's growing up he was, and even though he hasn't been in our faces lately, how entrenched he was in people's minds. All this came as a bit of a surprise to me, seeing as the only English songs I seem to have heard in the 80s were by Jim Reeves, Boney M, and their ilk. Jackson did not figure anywhere in the musical firmament.

Actually, that's not true. There was one place where MJ reigned supreme, and that was in the rarefied heights of Telugu (and Tamil) cinema. Jackson's popularity was an important part of the creative processes of a whole generation of lyricists, choreographers, and Dancing Superstars. At the height of his histrionic prowess, Megastar Chiranjeevi paid Jackson the ultimate compliment (imitation = most sincere form of flattery) by remaking Thriller. Of course, it's quite possible that things happened the other way round. In other words, I humbly request Megastar Fan Clubs Associations to please refrain from burning down my house. Jacksonu looksu and Jacksonu stepsu found their way into songs in movies such as Kokila and Sundarakanda (And many others. The names fail me, help!), and everyone with a jacket seemed to have forgotten how to take their feet off the ground. And who can forget Prabhu Deva unleashed in Chikku Bukku Railey and Urvasi Urvasi?

So it turns out after all, that Jackson was an important part of my life, and I hadn't realized it. And my friends were possibly right to bludgeon me on the head with Facebook and other things to point this out. The last time I felt non-trivially emotional about a musician's death was when I woke up one snowy New England morning to hear a dour voice on the radio announcing that George had died, and then they played Something. It was a fight-back-tears, lump-in-throat moment. And now I sort of understand what the MJ fan is feeling, Whacko Jacko allegations and skin pigment issues notwithstanding. Every time I come up with a snarky, "He's not the only legendary MJ, you know, there are others.", I bite my tongue, because this sort of thing hurts and it's the wrong time. Also partly because they could retort, "They're not the only legendary Beatles, you know, there are others...OK others...OK others...sort of."

For me, that band will always remain the band, no one even comes close in terms of creativity, influence, path-breaking-ness, angst. But even if his music didn't mean much to me directly, I guess MJ's legacy does. So we mark a moment's silence at Filter Coffee before moving onto more trivial and pleasant issues such as the plight of the scheduled tribes of Andhra Pradesh (upcoming).

P.S.: Just realized that I didn't touch upon the dietary preferences of geese at all. Or did I? Ah, in a nutshell, what I wanted to say, apropos of people's taste in Jackson's music, was that not necessarily is sauce for goose = sauce for gander. Finis.

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Queue Cutters and Line Jumpers - A Taxonomy

2009-06-20T12:45:00Z

Which was sparked by observation in local grocery store and is about culture, values and traditions

When the Truth dawns on them and taxonomists draw up the final hierarchy of living beings, it will read (from top to bottom) something like this: Megan Fox, atheists, other human beings, great apes, some primates...leeches, objectivists, tapeworms...monkeys, pigeons, the malarial parasite...people who jump lines and cut queues. Merely watching one of these last mentioned worthies in action is enough to give one a minor stroke, and set thoughts scampering in the forbidden direction of, "Hmm...maybe the concentration camp idea has some merit after all...".

Like all creatures, these ones too come in different sub-species and breeds. In this academically rigorous exercise, we attempt to identify individual sub-species and their traits.

What Line?

Commonly found lurking in supermarket checkout counters. Usually highly respectable in appearance, they materialize in ectoplasmic fashion at the head of the line and will somewhat plaintively try to butt in. Success rate depends entirely on the individual they pick to squeeze in front of. When it's pointed out that the 37,403 people standing in a single file linear manner didn't arrange themselves like that at random, the specimen usually emits a, "Oh, there's a line is there?" and quietly retreats to the end, perhaps imagining that the act actually worked. On the whole, a relatively harmless sort, that just needs a firm nudge in the right direction (i.e. back to the end).

Eyes Wide Shut

The relationship between these ones and their "What Line?" brethern (and cistern) is roughly the same as that between the Orcs and the Uruk-hai. It's not hard to believe that they came into being via a process involving tissue samples from the "What Line?" breed, vats of nutritive fluids (a la The Matrix) and electric cattle prods. They are far more aggressive and brazen, and their approach differs mainly in that they will confidently walk up to the checkout while jabbering on a cell phone or talking to a wing(wo)man and place their bag with great gusto on the counter. They will never make eye contact with any legitimate occupant of the line. When you grab them by the elbow and firmly propel them away, they act like nothing has happened, no sheepish apology, no acknowledgment of the existence of the Cosmos, nada. They simply go away, sometimes to other lines, once in a blue moon back to the end of the line, or perhaps more often just shoplift and buzz off. In a just world, their photographs would be hanging in police station notice boards.

Binary Fission

The Vishwamitras of the line cutting world (apropos of L'Affaire Trisanku), they use a cunning and devious ploy that depends for its success on (i) the person behind the counter feigning ignorance about the external world (ii) sufficient numbers of people lurking around looking for a line to join without actually being in one. They will approach the counter with tachyon velocity and queue up. If there are enough "free agents" (as described in (ii) above) floating around, they will quickly seize this opportunity to join the first one (palming off their guilt onto it). Before you can say "Sivasubramaniam Chandrasegarampillai" there are suddenly two lines at the counter where there was only one before. Usually at this point, the looks on the faces of the poor fruits in the original line bear close resemblance to those of Ramses II's charioteers on the bed of Red Sea, watching the last of the Israelites clambering onto dry land while an old man with a stick mumbles incantations.

The only way to squash this is once again for the person a the head of the legit line to use physical force (or the threat of it) to eject the offending entamoeba. Speed and ruthlessness are of essence here, both for the tachyon and for the people in the first line. Whoever acts decisively first usually wins.

Moral High(er) Ground

A simple algorithm is followed. "If number of things in my basket is less than or equal to the number of things in yours, I have a Divine Right to be ahead of you. Even if all you have in your basket is 15 milk packets." These are the Puritans, they have the courage of their convictions, they have no need for speed, they don't seek to avoid you, they are the Chosen. That swagger, that head held high, that halo-ish feeling, it's all part of the make-up. Through some stunningly evident logic (to them), since they are carrying fewer things, your time is not as valuable as theirs. The problem with ticking them off is that they sometimes manage to successfully behave as though you are the one at fault.

Urgent: Late for Train, Bus, Latest Episode Of Kyonki Sauce Bhi Kabhi Tamaatar Tha

Also an essentially moral tactic, it involves appealing to the sentiments of the people in the line. Someone is ill, so they have to get on this train or plane or whatever. By far the most difficult to deal with, because you can't help putting yourself in their position and imagining what you might've done. One hopes that they're sincere, and lets them be, most of the time. If they've been lying, I hope they spend the rest of their miserable lives transcribing Vogon poetry.

Proxy

"Do you see that small, tiny, absolutely infinitesimally microscopic piece of lint on the floor in front of you? Well, I put it there, and that's where I am in the line." Enough said. The small, tiny, absolutely infinitesimally microscopic piece of lint is sometimes another person. The Zeroeth Law of Queues says that it doesn't matter who spends time in the line, so you can bring a relay race team and do all kinds of interesting combinatorial optimization type things and possibly publish a paper into the bargain.

I Stood In This Line Once Already (17 Years Ago)

You are asked to believe without supporting evidence that the offender had inhabited this very line at a position that would've brought them to the counter at this very moment, except they had to go out to get change, "fresh" up, fight Godzilla, whatever. Nuke 'em.

Ignorance Is Bliss

This final category is perhaps the saddest of the lot, and not seen very often nowadays. They are people who genuinely have never faced lines in life before. Where they come from, the concept doesn't exist. Issues are settled with the clever use of bludgeons, and so they are completely flabbergasted to find highly esoteric computer science concepts like first-come-first-serve, last-in-first-out and so on in operation. They're usually the harmless sort, and with a little bit of explanation can be cajoled into toeing the line with the rest of us...

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"A Wednesday", On Capital Punishment, And On Being "Middle Class"

2009-06-15T05:28:00Z

This post must set some sort of record in that it's partly a movie review. Except the movie was released nearly a year back! Nevertheless, regardless of the hapless plight of the reader, we plough on. While talking to a friend last night, the conversation drifted to movies, and for some reason or the other, last year's thriller drama A Wednesday.

The film was moderately successful by box office standards, but has had a lasting impact on lots of viewers, including this one, for various reasons. Many people I know seemed to have really liked the movie, and in particular enjoyed the brand of vigilante justice that the protagonist dispenses. It's certainly not hard to see how it would appeal to a city and a country angered and frustrated by random acts of pre-meditated violence by a bunch of lunatics.

The good stuff first, however. I thought it was quite a well made movie technically speaking, kept everyone engrossed, and the cast did its job quite competently. It was timed extremely well and articulated the spirit of the time, for the people who enjoyed it.

I however remember disliking the movie intensely, and finding the audience's reaction to it (at a Hyderabad multi-plex) particularly disgusting. Most of the people I went to see the movie really liked it, a couple were ambivalent, and I think I was horrified. When we started talking about it yesterday, I had to struggle to remember why it evoked those feelings. It turns out that I've forgotten most of the intricacies of the plot and execution, and couple of concrete reasons for my distaste remain.

Due Process of Law

The first thing, and perhaps not the most siginifcant one, was that the film more or less advocates such things as skipping over legal procedure to sentence the alleged criminals, relying instead on the backing of "public opinion" and a televised "confession" of sorts. For every citizen who felt anger and helplessness in the face of the aftermath of terrorist violence televised into the comfort of their living rooms, there are probably tens if not hundreds of people who bear the brunt of violence done unto them either by dominant economic, political, or social groups and the state itself whose stories we very rarely hear about. If they all resorted to this brand of justice, life would get very interesting and very short for many of us. This was one problem with the whole premise of "A Wednesday".

Capital Punishment

This is an equally (if not much more) problematic issue. The film advocates (or at least has no problem with) capital punishment as a form of justice delivery. This can be argued about till the cows come home. There are whole ethical or moral grounds which destroy the case for the death penalty quite effectively, quite apart from the practical or technical reasons why it's an unjustifiable form of punishment. I've stated my case before, but very briefly the main issues are that

(i) it has no mechanism to "undo" the punishment if you find out after the execution that a mistake was committed (and legal history especially in the US is littered with cases where people were pulled off Death Row either because new evidence or new technology exonerated them many, many years after the crime)

(ii) its application is grossly unfair in that people who can't afford fancy legal services and can't "work" the system tend to be disproportionately represented on death row

(iii) its value as a crime deterrent is questionable (for every Saudi Arabia there is a Sweden etc.).

The Middle Class Thing

This isn't so much to do with the movie as with the way the audience reacted to it. The irony in the fact that an audience that paid Rs.150 to watch the show in a fancy multiplex in the heart of Hyderabad while munching on equally fancily priced popcorn and soda was apparently identifying with the aam aadmi was mind-boggling. A very cursory search threw up this possibly reliable source of income data, according to which, "The middle class currently numbers some 50 million people..." By middle class they mean people who earn between Rs. 2,00,000 and Rs. 10,00,000 every year. Assuming that only some fraction of this population has the capability and intent to fork out Rs. 150++ in a mall, our lusty cheering of the aam aadmi's rant and our ability to think that we are the aam aadmi just goes to show what a skewed view of the world the top 5% of us have. Of course, it also shows the film makers' skill in that they were able to identify this segment and tap into it quite effectively.

Apart from all this, "A Wednesday" is a great movie and is definitely worth watching.

P.S. A few reviews of the flick that I found interesting: Rediff's Elvis D'Silva likes the acting, dialogue and plot, but wasn't too happy some repetitiveness and "ham-handed moves". Baradwaj Rangan also mostly likes it, and again gives points for acting and plot, but does make the point that there is "...a rabble-rousing message perhaps..." not too subtly hidden. Ashley Tellis has a completely different take, and worries that the movie demonizes Muslims.

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The Indus Script Saga

2009-06-10T06:31:00Z

In the mad days around the elections, not too many people may have noticed a small storm in the blogosphere teacup that erupted a few weeks back. Like the old Phantom comics used to say, for those who came in late:

The Indus valley civilization flourished some ~~6000~~ 4000 (Thanks to Anand M. for pointing out the error.) years ago over a large part of what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan and northwestern India. It was one of the most advanced and urbanized civilizations of its time, and left us with quite a few enduring mysteries to chew on, including the mystery of the Indus script. In the 150 odd years since the ruins of Harappa were first described and samples of the Indus script started showing up on archeological finds (principally seals), no one has been able to figure out (a) whether it's a real language (b) if it is, what the script stands for.

Among the problems that make this hard are the fact that no one has a clue what the underlying language is (is it an early version of some Brahmi language, is it Dravidian, Aramaic, Martian?) is; the length of the inscriptions that have been found is very very short (about 5 signs on an average, imagine if most English sentences were 5 letters or words long!); and there isn't the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone that would help in matching the Indus script with the words from some known language of the time.

Quite apart from the debate on what family of languages the script belongs to, there is a serious disagreement on whether the script actually represents an underlying oral language, or is it merely a bunch of pictures or pictograms. There are at least 2 camps that make incompatible claims about it, and there has been much to-ing and fro-ing in the internet and elsewhere about this riddle.

For one, the pictogram fans hold that all sufficiently advanced, literate civilizations made sure that they wrote loads and loads of stuff on non-perishable things like pots, stones, pyramids etc. (and not just on flimsy manuscripts), and it's just mind-boggling that there isn't a single such artifact from the Indus civilization. Au contraire one of the script advocates' claims is that it's well nigh impossible to create and sustain such an advanced level of urban civilization, without the use of writing for record keeping. Both arguments sound equally plausible. In passing, we note that the Inca civilization was huge and complicated, and seemed to do fine without a system of writing (although they did have a sophisticated way of record keeping via counting).

The latest bout of punching started in April this year, when a number of Indian scholars including (as far as I can tell) at least one historian, linguist and computer scientist, published a paper (paid download) in Science magazine. They used the methods from computer science and statistics to examine the known corpus of the script and compared it against other known languages (including programming languages) and concluded that in all probability it represents and underlying language. The paper goes so far as to say that the highest degree of correlation is with Old Tamil.

This was promptly refuted (PDF) by the pictogram folk, who not too subtly suggested that the authors of the paper have Tamil/Dravidian nationalist axes to grind, which explains their motivation. In the rarefied heights of historical studies and computer science, the equivalent of an Akshay-Kumar-unzipping-on-catwalk level controversy has been going on (all parties seem to have taken a breather for a bit to lick their wounds). There's a very useful post that gets into some detail on how exactly one can hope to determine from a random set of symbols whether we're looking at a language or not. There's an absorbing discussion in the comments section, if you have the time and appetite for this sort of thing.

As it stands, the baseline rally between the various factions continues. It doesn't seem like we're much closer to getting to the bottom of the mystery. One may wonder why the language of a people now dead 6 millenia should matter in this day and age. Alas, if things were only that simple. Given that there are so many conflicting groupings of people based on race, religion, caste, nationality, dietary preference and what not jostling for their "rightful" place in the world, we're only half a step away from one of these groups using historical "facts" to make claims that affect the present.

The Dravidian nationalist (her north Indian and western interlocutors will say) is just looking to fudge the data to prove that the Indian subcontinent was originally Dravidian, and that all the northies are "outsiders". The Hindu supremacists need to prove that the Indus civilization is a Sanskritic (or whatever) civilization, and thus show the continuity of our "hoary traditions" from time immemorial, not to mention prove that it all happened here first, and there was no Aryan migration/invasion into India. Western academia (say the pro-Aryans-germinated-in-India wallahs) just wants to belittle the contribution of "Indic" civilization to the world, and it's all a gigantic conspiracy to keep Hindus away from their rightful legacy.

Seems like the lay person can't do much other than remember that everyone has an axe to grind, and while one needn't reject everything everyone says out of hand as being motivated by extraneous, non-academic/scientific reasons, it's good to examine the evidence keeping in mind who is doing the analysis. Caveat emptor.

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Bangalored!

2009-06-06T09:42:00Z

When the outsourcing boom was at its peak, a new word entered the global lexicon - "Bangalored". An American (for example) is said to have been Bangalored if her company "restructured", terminated her, and moved the job overseas because it was more cost effective for the company.

But Bangalore itself had shown up in the lives of Americans (some of them, anyway) about 6 decades before the young Anands and Jahnavis of India transmogrified into Andys and Jennifers.

During the early hours of June 6 (i.e. today) 1944, the Allied powers launched Operation Overlord, a massive airborne and amphibious assault on Nazi occupied France. One Army Group, two armies, around twenty divisions, hundreds of regiments, thousands of ships, tens of thousands of landing craft, hundreds of thousands of troops, millions of rounds of high calibre ammunition, tens of millions of loaves of bread, hundreds of millions of rivets, and billions of blue blistering barnacles were involved in a meticulously planned operation. Yes, the barnacles were there just mostly to help us maintain the geometric progression.

In particular, the US 29th Infantry Division and a number of US Rangers found themselves on "Omaha" Beach, bloody Omaha as it was soon to be known. The beach was defended by the Wehrmacht 352nd Infantry Division. The defences were strong, behind ranks of barbed wire fencing, and had the benefit of being located on high ground, on bluffs (small cliffs) facing the water. The Rangers had to cut through the wire while being subjected to merciless fire, before being able to scale the cliffs. ~~The reason I know all this is because I have a Ph. D. in military history, with a specialization in amphibious landings of World War II~~. The reason I know all this is because I also have watched Saving Private Ryan.

As we all know, the Rangers were in a quandry. How to get past this apparently insurmountable obstacle? (Surmounting barbed wire is likely to make you very ticklish in certain parts of the anatomy which, being a wholesome blog for the entire family, we will not mention.)

Enter, the Dragon. Err...no. Enter, the Bangalore torpedo. Apparently these were simply long extensible pipes, with a quantity of high explosive at the business end, and a very nervous engineer at the other. The idea was to slide these through the barbed wire until they reached an optimum point, and then let the charge explode, causing gaps to be blown in the barrier. According to Wikipedia, according to a D-Day vet:

"The Bangalore Torpedo was 50 feet long and packed with 85 pounds of TNT, and you assembled it along the way - by hand. I'd love to meet the ass**** who invented it!"

The...err...paragon of gentlemanliness who invented it in 1912 was a Captain McClintock of the Madras Sappers and Miners, based in Bangalore. One couldn't very well scream, "Pass out the long-extensible-pipes-with-quantities-of-high-explosive-at-the-business-ends!!!" Makes for terrible screenplay. So they were simply got Bangalores.

And that's how, on this day 65 years ago, a bunch of sorry Wehrmacht ground troops got "Bangalored", without needing Andy and Jennifer to do the Bangaloring.

P.S.: Just to reinforce the point that one nation's "glorious history" is another people's saga of death and devastation. Something to thing about, eh?

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Upon My Word

2009-06-03T01:19:00Z

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

- Douglas Adams

Words have a way of creeping insiduously from the places where they were born into "mainstream" language. The interesting thing about Douglas Adams' quote above is the word 'deadline'. It's one of those words that we use almost unthinkingly practically every day. And yet, like many of its counterparts, it has an absorbing tale (tales, actually, in this case) behind it.

Apparently during the American Civil War, there was a literal line drawn in the ground, about 17 feet away outside a prison wall. Soldiers guarding prisoners were allowed to shoot and kill any prisoner who stepped beyond the "dead" line. A rather extreme, if possibly very effective way of maintaining law and order! The other story is much more boring, and has to do with a line on a printer's press beyond which even if there is type, it will not appear on the page. Nowadays I suppose depending on what the job at hand is, the deadline might appear to be of one or the other type! Neverthless, the point is that a word that meant something in a very restricted and specialized sense has gone on to mean something more or less completely different in a generalized way. This could happen within a language (like it did for 'deadline'), or across linguistic boundaries.

Since we're calling this blog Filter Coffee, let's take a gander at words closer to home that have migrated into other tongues. Our juggernaut begins at Puri, and tracing the eastern seaboard, we run into bandicoots and mongooses who have shifted homes from their aavakai biryani land into English. Down south, in Kaveri country, unlikely looking catamarans venture into the Bay of Bengal to come back with the day's catch, which the villagers will buy for cash, which will perhaps allow the fisherfolk to relax at the end of hard day's work with a cheroot! Meanwhile, their cousins on the other side of the peninsula are simbly eating jack fruits and making plans to go to Gelf!

If you thought this traffic in language was entirely one way, or that it was a thing of the past, you have another think coming. In the mid 1700s, the Marquis de Bussy-Castelnau led a French expeditionary force of sorts on a picnic from Pondicherry to the Northern Circars (today's north coastal Andhra Pradesh), which had been newly ceded to the French. His extra-curricular activities spread over a few months and a few famous battles ensured that his reputation soared. To the point where when children were naughty or cranky, mothers would whisper, "Don't be like that, or the boochodu will come." The use of boochodu synonymously with boogeyman is something that continued for generations, I even remember it being used on us as kids, and it's probably still in use. The story is somewhat apocryphal and hard to verify, but it is rather fascinating to think that a mother in Vijayawada today is probably trying to spook her kids using the name of a Frenchman dead 250 years.

Or take the example of the German cruiser Emden. During the First World War, this plucky craft sailed all the way around the world and started lobbing shells at the terrified people of places like Madras and Penang. The shelling of Madras caused a severe sapping of British morale (and correspondingly lifted the hopes of people in the Indian freedom movement). Within a few months, emandan had become part of the local lingo. As in, "Hey, don't mess with that guy, he is an emandan." It's used even today, although not too many people probably remember that they have to thank Capt. Karl von Muller for allowing them this handy shortcut to describe their local strongman!

And that's the memo from the coffee house, for now.

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Bhaarat's Varsha

2009-05-23T08:40:00Z

Yes, I know, I've blogged about this before. But what to do ya, it's that time of the year and can't be avoided. Especially when you're sitting in salubrious Chennai and are basically a walking talking puddle. Anyway, this post is less about wet starlets and monsoon raaginis, and a lot more about history, geekiness, and Murugan Idli.

It all starts in the University of Cambridge. Actually it all starts with the Big Bang, but for the purposes of this post, we will begin with Cambridge. Until 1909, the third year nerd who topped the Mathematical Tripos exam was called Senior Wrangler. This was sort of like topping the IIT-JEE exam of those days. Your name was widely known, your photograph was published in papers, three or four tutorials sprung up overnight and claimed that you studied there, young nubile women/men, as the case may be, offered themselves to you etc. (Note to self: Never confuse fantasies with fact. Especially on this blog. There is absolutely no way I would've come first in JEE.) On the other hand, the fellow who came last was called the Wooden Spoon. He usually went off to be a mediocre civil engineer, until Livemint discovered his "talent", not to mention his joblessness.

Be that as it may, it has often been observed that even though Senior Wranglers topped the exam, many of them went on to achieve precisely nothing in the world of mathematics. Exceptions to this rule include such familiar names as Herschel (astronomer), Stokes (Navier's chaddy buddy, of equation fame), Littlewood (Hardy's chaddy buddy, which potentially has a totally different meaning given Hardy's inclinations, if you know what I mean) etc. Few people have heard of Sir Gilbert Carlton Walker, who was Senior Wrangler in 1889.

Sir Gilbert was an applied mathematician at Cambridge, when the powers that be decided to appoint him director-general of observatories in India in 1904. While here, he analyzed gigabytes of weather data and over 15 years, published the first descriptions of what is essentially El Niño, more properly the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Walker's goal was to predict monsoon failures, but he met only limited success on that front. The thing that makes him a pioneer however, is that post his work, meteorologists began to move beyond local observations and forecasting, and started approaching the climate problem from a more "macro" perspective. In the book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis attempts to show how a combination of ENSO-related famines in the late 19th century, and the influence of colonialism and capitalism increased rural poverty in India and elsewhere.

Anyone who is a chaos theoretician or has read Jurassic Park knows that weather is notoriously difficult to predict. Very small fluctuations in initial conditions (butterfly does pirouette in Tristan da Cunha) lead to utter unpredictability in final outcomes (Deccan Chargers make it to the IPL final, you get the drift). In the face of these daunting mathematical challenges and capricious natural phenomena, it falls to the worthies at the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to make their observations, run their mathematical simulations and models, examine their entrails, and play soothsayer to the rest of the nation. (Random aside: I have some very good Tamizh speaking friends who are excellent soothsayers themselves.)

Like everything else in this great and vast land, meteorology seems to have begun in ancient times (this page on the IMD website seems to have been written by eminent scientist Dr. Murali Manohar Joshi). During the Dark Ages (i.e. the period ending with Kalidasa's Meghadootam and beginning with the British era) when there was no such thing as weather in India, no one seems to have bothered with meteorology. The proper scientific study of weather was resumed with the setting up of observatories in India, and the introduction of such instruments as barometers and thermometers.

Today, the IMD has the enviable task of "predicting the monsoon". Research has so far not revealed exactly what model is currently in use, but it is safe to assume that they probably look at a wide range of factors and parameters to arrive at conclusions about Bhaarat's unpredictable Varsha. The best information we have is from the equine's oral orifice itself. Briefly, a 5-parameter Ensemble Statistical Forecasting System is used (with a +/- 5% model error) for data upto March. The parameters include North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature, Equatorial South Indian Ocean Sea Surface Temperature, East Asia Mean Sea Level Pressure, NW Europe Land Surface Air Temperature and Equatorial Pacific Warm Water Volume. One look at that list and you can see how the influence of Sir Gilbert's work is felt even today. Although given the utterly random things (northwest European land surface air temperature??!) that seem to affect the monsoon, one can't be blamed that they could probably just as easily have used the Per Kilogram Price Of Chicken In Beijing, Population Density Of Purple Moorhens In South Asia Between The Tropic Of Cancer And The Equator, Colour Of Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Latest Shawl and Number Of Clouds Visible In Kerala as parameters.

Jokes apart, this is a seriously big deal. Millions of lives and fates hinge on whether this damn thing shows up, shows up in time, and shows up in strength. No wonder that come late-May early-June, and eyes start to turn southwestward, and talk turns to rain. Somewhat hesitantly at first, perhaps afraid that uttering its name will displease it, and it won't show up punctually. You don't want to jinx the single most important event of the year. And even as I am trying to wrap up this already hopelessly rambling post, the signs are in the air. The IMD website says:

In view of strong cross equatorial flow and extension of its depth upto mid-tropospheric levels, persistent convection over Arabian Sea and adjoining peninsular India and Bay of Bengal and widespread rainfall activity over south Kerala for the last 4 days, India Meteorological Department declares onset of southwest monsoon over Kerala today, the 23rd May 2009.

And the sky outside is darkening, and I know it isn't the new curtains on my windows. It will rain. Aj mera jee kardaa. And this also.

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Renaissance

2009-05-18T06:53:00Z

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

-- From Manual of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan

What better way to start off a new blog than with a hi-falutin' sounding bon mot that only geeks of a certain bent of mind are likely to have come across. Nevertheless, Frank Herbert's epic Dune saga is not a bad point of reference to try and explain what this new and unique (yeah, right) blog will hopefully be all about. Just as Herbert manages to weave a story together from strands of science and technology, history, environmental and social issues, utter weirdness (what in the name of all that is decent is a sandworm?!), heroism, recreational drugs, hot people etc. I will try and pluck random filaments of thought out of my own incredibly exciting (impartial observers have used the phrases, "utterly insane", "stupefyingly weird" etc.) and oversized brain.

A few explanations are in order.

1. Some of these posts are from my other blog. Where I used to go by the name Ludwig, for reasons of overwhelming obscurity that we will not go into here. So if you see random references to "Ludwig", you know what's going on.

2. Which brings us rather smugly to point #2. See how I said, "...we will not go into here..." in #1 above. At some point, I started referring to myself using the royal "We" rather than the limp "I" and it's familiar, "me". Once again, the reasons are lost in the mists of time. Let us (me) not dig into old wounds. But now you know what that is all about.

3. I am told that I need to say 2 shabds "about me". Mostly harmless. (I know someone who will testify to this under oath.) If you really must have some critical piece of information about me that you can't find online, let it be known by these presents that I am, in fact, the Fake IPL Player.

Kidding. OK, I will elaborate on #3 at some point soon. Unfortunately, you will prefer that I was Fake IPL Player over the stupendously boring details of my otherwise humdrum life.

This looks like it's going to be fun! Here we come...

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