Lab Rats : Mumbai terror

NSG commandos for CNR Rao?

Jacob Koshy — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:28:00 GMT

Assuming our politicians are a national treasure (from the number of security men they gather) how important are Nobel laureates? An ongoing conclave of Nobel laureates at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, had originally confirmed participation by 10 Nobel laureates, but six of them backed out, according to the organisers, due to the Mumbai terror attacks.

No doubt the place was swarming with private security guards diligently frisking, and thoroughly rummaging, every human and bag that entered the lecture halls, buit i've never seen scientists with a body guard escort. I did read that security, in general, improved at the Indian Institute of Science campus after its own terror attack but i'm quite sure eminent scientists such as CNR Rao or institute director P Balram, don't move around with gun toting commandos.

If politicians are protected because they are the representatives of the people, (or is there an economic reason that the cost of replacing a slain minister via elections, damage costs of ensuing riots, arson, looting, far exceeds that of providing a couple of security men) is there a cost we can put on scientists, or artists, or bankers for that matter?

Maybe scientists are expendable. After Newton/Leibnitz first invented calculus, anyone could learn it (and probably be better than them at it). A scientifically valid experiment, scientists say, is one whose results can be reproduced anywhere under the right conditions (so you don't need the original scientist after he has published his work). Who cares for the programmer after he's run the software?

Maybe even terrorists don't think of them as important enough to be killed. But given that we are moving towards being a knowledge economy, big ticket R&D moves out from government labs to industry, people are going to get more precious.

The prime minister's first public address in the calendar year is always about the importance of science and technology to India's progress, so obviously scientists are important. But are they important enough to be protected?

I believe great ideas are rare and hard to come by, and they are not necessarily, equally distributed in a population. The big get bigger and smart get smarter--that's one of the unfair truths of evolutionary biology. So a Ramanujan (the mathematician) comes once in a century, and if he were alive in today's terror-struck times, it may be worthwhile to get the best out of him while he's alive. Z security for them?

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MIT's candlelight vigil against Mumbai attacks

Seema Singh — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:21:00 GMT

Like several other places, it was a silent, somber protest to the gruesome Mumbai attacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus today evening. Gathered at the Killian Court (the heart of the campus where annual commencement exercises are held), students and faculty lit candles to "pray for the victims, salute heroes who fought to save lives and take a pledge to fight terror".

I too lit a candle. Standing next to me was a freshman from Mumbai, Ahmad Ali, and when I asked what this meant to him, he said, painfully: "A lot... I am from south Mumbai and stay 10 minutes away from Colaba."

Pics credit: Eliad Shmuel, MIT Hillel

But for many others who were neither from Mumbai nor India, the candles at the Killian Court tonight, which as one faculty pointed out, had last had such a ‘vigil' after 9/11, symbolized a bigger battle ahead.

As if to assuage the anger, vice chancellor Steven R Lerman was quick to add - "Please remember this is an act of an individual, not a group or a society. Let's mourn who lost their lives, condemn who did this and thank those who helped."

Not sure how far those calming words would go, given the outrage among people. My mailbox has a few mails that, of course in a rather unbecoming language, exhort the media to speak up. But I wonder when have the media not spoken up on such issues? After all, words go only that far; it's the men in khadi, the elected representatives, who need to act.

Traveling soon after the incident in a miserable state of mind, I was pleasantly surprised to see fellow travelers empathize with what happened back home. One senior MIT professor (of Indian origin), though visibly anxious, saw a silver lining: "When it comes to terrorism, India NOW has genuine sympathizers in the West."

I don't know about that, but I certainly found many in the flight from Bangalore to Boston.

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Reel life improbable villains in real life

Seema Singh — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 03:54:00 GMT

Past 36 hours have been the worst that many of us have seen in our life. The image of young lads firing indiscriminately in Mumbai seemed straight out of cinema, and sadly, international security experts and spy researchers say the once improbable villains in James Bond movies have become close to the "real life threats faced by modern security services".

Earlier this month, Richard J. Aldrich, professor of international security at University of Warwick, UK, was awarded a £447,000 grant for the largest ever research project to study the history of intelligence.

"Throughout the Cold War, Bond's villains looked improbable, but now life imitates art. Indeed, in the early 1990s as the Cold War came to a sudden end, real MI6 officers worried about redundancy. Their boss, the real "M", Sir Colin McColl reassured them that the end of the Cold War would be followed by a Hot Peace. He was quite right," said Aldrich after receiving the grant.

Aldrich thinks few writers captured the wave of the future with the insight of Ian Fleming, creator of the legendary secret agent James Bond. "His villains, drawn half a century ago, are truly the miscreants of globalization. Far fetched in the 1960s, they are now the stuff of reality. We need James Bond more than ever."

After each act of terror in India, there's a common refrain: failure of intelligence, security lapses. What is the future of Indian intelligence if we continue to fiddle with it?

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Mumbai calling, Mr Sibal

Jacob Koshy — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:36:00 GMT

A few days after the Jaipur blasts this year, (14th May) Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Science and Technology, scrambled a press conference where he told us about a technology that the government had imported from an American company for combating terror. The Central Electronics Limited, a government research organisation, was entrusted with the task of customizing this technology to Indian conditions. And what was this technology? " We can't tell you that right now. It's a very advanced, non-intrusive surveillance system and it's being tested in the New Delhi Railway station," the minister said. Piecing scraps of info from other officials around, I gathered it was some kind of Big Brother system--where cameras in public places would monitor people's movements, take pictures and pass those details onto to a central server. So I guess if you are sweaty faced and look particularly fidgety at the railway station, you're pictures are going to make its way to some policeman's computer monitor, with a blinking "suspected terrorist" tag on your pic, and soon you will have cops from all over swarming the place.) Other than divulging the cost of the technology, Rs 24 crore (He refused to tell us the American company involved) the presser was a waste of time. After the Delhi blasts (13th Sep) I again quizzed him on the technology. "Oh, we are testing it in the Delhi Cantonment. In the next few months, we'll tell you more about it." (That was the day, the minister launched the CSIR's Open Source Drug Discovery initiative. I called him up today, hoping for some kind of reaction to today's events. His personal secretary promised that my call would be returned. I'm still waiting. How many calls more, Mr Sibal?

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