Sikkim - Hypertense Taxpayers?

A few days ago, an old friend, a physician, shared a graph that got me puzzled.

It showed an NHFS-5 graph plotting percentage of men with diabetes and hypertension across Indian states. While he was concerned about Kerala being represented as a large dot far ahead of all the other states on these two ailments, it was a smaller green dot caught my attention - Sikkim.

How did this tiny north-eastern Himalayan state full of people who always seemed so healthy, relaxed and friendly top the charts for hypertension in India? 

Maybe I was being nostalgic about a trek in Sikkim more than a decade ago, of endless bowls of Thukpa washed down with Dansberg beer. That was a business trip to the main hospital in Gangtok, and these lifestyle diseases certainly did not figure prominently then. What had changed over the years? - was this something to do with the diet? 

Another graph presents a different different picture. This one maps a state-wise per-capita collection of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), and the big surprise here is that Sikkim was the leading state with an average contribution of INR32,568 from each of its ~ 600,000 citizens!

Perhaps this is a pointer to the rapid industrialisation that has taken place in Sikkim over the past decades, with all its attendant health problems. Or maybe there is no correlation at all between these two unrelated  indicators.

One thing is for sure - the numbers need to be examined more closely.

Misheard: I Love Goat Cheese! :)

What happens when the sublime meets the ridiculous? Maybe one of the things you get is goat cheese.

Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren) is supposed to be one of the great compositions of western classical music. Written in the 13th century it was was famously set to music by the German composer, Carl Orff, in the 1930s and went on to become hugely popular as a score that set the mood for dramatic or cataclysmic situations. In India most people remember it as the background music for an advertisement featuring an aftershave lotion - Old Spice - with images of a surfer riding tumultuous waves, a pretty face, and a face splashed with a liquid that was supposed to be the 'mark of a man'.

Recently some creative genius on YouTube (or was it Tiktok?) posted a video with the title "You'll never listen to this song the same way again!". Sure enough it transforms this classic to a hilarious meme with these lyrics - 

I love goat cheese, Give me cookies!

They'll give us Gonorrhoea

This octopus, Let's give him boots!

Send him to North Korea!

As if to add to this cheerful confusion, a university choir has actually recorded  a performance  using these 'alternate' lyrics. So it takes a bit of digging to get the the original lyrics, and to figure out the specific lines that have been parodied. Perhaps these are the lines that go with the one who loves goat cheese - 

Sors salutis, et virtutis

michi nunc contraria,

est affectus, et defectus 

semper in angaria.

(English:  Fate is against me; in health and virtue, driven on and weighted down, always enslaved)

This is of course only one in a long series videos featuring misheard lyrics. There is one Russian folk song that has been doing the rounds as a Malayalam song, and Shakira's popular theme 2010 Football World Cup song, Waka-Waka, that does sound like Hindi slag for taking a bath at Charminar!

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* O'Fortuna - Misheard lyrics - https://youtu.be/pQEfxhvAy0c 

* Original - André Rieu - O'Fortuna - https://youtu.be/EJC-_j3SnXk 

* Original Lyrics + translation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Fortuna

* Story behind Carmina Burana - https://www.classicfm.com/composers/orff/guides/story-behind-orffs-carmina-burana/ 

* Russian song misheard in Kerala - https://youtu.be/_zEbRrV-flw

Revisited: Gupta Period Sculptures

Lighting changes everything. 

Last week I visited the Indian Museum in Kolkata after more than a decade, and I was struck by the way in which an improvement in the display of exhibits could bring about a qualitative change in the way people relate to them. It make you stop and observe more carefully, to spot variations in style that were missed out earlier, and to spend more time marvelling at the milieu, the social and cultural environment that enabled these artists to flourish. So much so that even a random visitor like me could begin to see clearly, for the first time, the differences between the various schools of art.

I was fascinated in particular by the earthliness and realism of sculptures created during a period that is known as the Golden Age of Indian Art - the Gupta Period (~ 100 to 500 CE). Quite unlike the idealised, supra-human versions of gods that are popular in modern iconography, here we see figures that look like  earthly, familiar, just like the the ordinary people who were walking past these exhibits in the museum. Sometimes the similarity is so striking it is hard to believe that these sculptures were created more than 1800 years ago!

Take for instance this panel of three pillars excavated from Bhuteshwara, near Mathura, in North India. On one side we have three lovely ladies  representing three Yakshis, and on the reverse you see scenes from the Jataka stories about the life of Bodhisatvas in their various incarnations.

Also unlike my visit a decade earlier, this time I was armed with the power of the internet on my mobile, so it did not take long to expand on the display tags, and learn that one panel depicted the Jataka tale  about Sibi, a king once celebrated for his righteousness.  This story is told in just three blocks on a single pillar - a little bird seeks refuge from a hawk, perched on the lap of the king; the hawk demands compensation from the king for having to give up its food, so the king cuts a part of his own to flesh to feed the hawk. 

The other two pillars seem to be from other stories though, featuring elephants and monkeys. Wonder where I could find some more details, not only about about the stories that have been sidelined here but also about the Gupta Period in general.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Indian Museum, Kolkata - Virtual Gallery -  https://indianmuseumkolkata.org/cmspages/virtual-gallery

* Google Arts and Culture - Life of Buddha in Indian Art - https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/the-life-of-buddha-in-indian-art/uwLycg_jrsTeKg

*  https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/38742 

 

Kolkata Diary

I am now in a South Kolkata state-of-mind. 

It took me a couple of days to get used this, and it is so, so different from the mental framework you need elsewhere in North India. For starters, you don't wake up to smoggy, cold mornings, wondering whether it is safe to take in a deep breath. The air is relatively cleaner, the sun rises earlier, and ebb and flow of social interactions is lot more relaxed, friendlier and jovial.

Thanks to the Covid lockdowns, I had not been in this city for more than two years, and I wondered how things had changed in the interim.

As has been my habit for more than a decade now, I started my day around 05:45am with a walk to the lake, aka Rabindra Sarobar. The streets were slowly coming to life in the twilight - flower sellers stringing up garlands, milk-vans doing rounds of the kirana shops, and sweepers cleaning up the roads, oblivious of protests from crows and sparrows. Further down from Dhakuria, on both sides of the narrow roads of Jodhpur Park, people filled up water from roadside taps, sipped chai at tiny dhabas, or bargained with the fish-vendors.  

Everything seemed just the way it was before, until i crossed the railway lines I found my usual entrance to the Lake Park barred by a locked gate. This was new - why had they closed this particular entrance to the park? I went across to a group of men sitting under a tree and asked them if there was another open gate nearby. A portly, bearded old man just laughed and said, "Andar jana he? - bas tapki maaro!" (want to get in? just hop across!) :)

Turns out that the gate was designed for doing a tapki, with easy, well-worn footholds for climbing across the 10ft gate. Welcome back to Kolkata, I said to myself, a place where unreasonable rules are meant to be broken.

Another unreasonable rule that is always broken in Kolkata is about footpaths. They are not exclusively for pedestrians. Here footpaths are an egalitarian public space meant for anybody who seeks a livelihood, and pedestrians get just enough space to file past the shops. On the busiest streets it is quite normal to see more than half the footpath width taken up by an endless row of tiny shops, and eateries. This has been going on for so long that even trees adapt themselves to the shape of these little shops, as is the case with this teashop enveloped by a banyan tree near the Jadavpur University crossing.

The hustle and bustle at these shops is a bit misleading though. People are still recovering from the Covid lockdowns. "People mostly come to just look at the wares", said one shopkeeper at Gariahat market, "It is a lucky day when we manage to sell half of what we used to sell before covid!". The same sentiment was repeated at Bedwin Rolls, an eatery famous for its mutton rolls but there is nothing remotely mutton on the menu now. "At INR 800+ a kilo, we just cannot afford it...usually a kilo works out to be enough for 10-12 rolls, but each would have to be priced at INR 150 for us to make a profit...and nobody wants a mutton roll at that price."

Unlike in NCR Delhi, few shops have had to close down entirely. Most of the small shopkeepers here seem to have adapted by changing the menu or product mix. There are more boards that display availability of oxygen and medicines, and, as expected, home-delivery services seem to be thriving now. For some reason jewellery shops are thriving too.  It seem the arrival of the big boys like JoyAlukkas, has had no impact on the numerous, tiny jewellery shops that dot the lanes of Dhakuria. Ditto for beauty saloons. The one nearest to us is "Rita's Parlour - Your Beauty is Our Duty"! :)

Yet, one big surprise is that hardly any shops accept digital payments. Again unlike in NCR, Tamil Nadu or Kerala, where just about every street vendor offers you the option of paying by PayTM, PhonePe or GooglePay, each and every shop I visited here insisted on a cash payment. 

Why is Kolkata / West Bengal bucking the national trend? 

Affordable eBikes

Something unusual happened today - I stopped to gawk at a bicycle. 

It was a mildly smoggy winter morning in Noida, and I was driving down one of those long, flat, tree-lined service roads running parallel to the expressway when I went past a man riding a bicycle. On the face of it this was nothing out of the ordinary - the bicycle was one of those black, clunky, mass-produced models and the man seemed like a factory employee, with his head covered in a muffler, a small bag on his back, going down the road - except for the fact that he was not pedalling his bicycle!

I did a double-take, noticed a neat white bracket behind his seat, and realised that this one was running on a battery - an ordinary bicycle in its new avatar as an electric bike.

Having never seen such a thing before, I pulled up a little ahead, and requested him to stop. The cyclist gladly obliged, and with the pleased look of a man accustomed to such attention, explained that he had got this fitting at a workshop in Badarpur, Delhi. It had cost him about INR 15,000 and that the battery lasted him quite comfortably for his 40 km commute everyday.

These units are manufactured by new company called Accelero Cycles India Ltd., and sold under the brandname "eBik". Founded by a youngster named Anant Jain, this startup aims to make 'affordable, eco-friendly, motorised mobility for everyone'. 

How will ACIL take on established companies like Hero Cycles which has come out with a range of electric bicycles under the brandname "Lectro"? Is there sufficient demand for retro-fitted budget cycles? Does the enterprise have a network of service centres? As of now not there is not much information about this company in the public domain. 

The answers to these questions may unfold in the days to come, but one thing is sure - as of now, the company has at least one happy brand ambassador on this side of Yamuna!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* eBik - https://ebik.in/product.html 

Celosia

 

A few decades ago, one of my professors used to be fond saying, "Nothing in nature exists without a purpose!".  His point was that while humans may not have figured it out yet, but every colour, texture, movement and behaviour in nature tells you a story of evolution and adaptation.

I keep thinking about this while looking at a solitary Celosia plant that has bloomed on our terrace. It started out in one form, and now, it looks completely different. It appeared unbidden, out of a forgotten corner, needing no special attention, and soon after the tiny saplings put on their striking variegated leaves, the squirrels found them tasty and ate up most of the new leaves. 

The Squirrels were of course not the only ones who found celosia so yummy.  It seems celosia and plants of the Amaranth family have long been consumed as vegetables in Asia, Africa and South America. So much so that in Nigeria celosia is called 'soko yokoto', meaning "make husbands fat and happy"!

On our terrace, the squirrels spared one single plant, and this is the one that has been changing costumes over the past four months, like a stage artist working overtime. Soon after the plant reached a foot high, a tiny bloom appeared which seemed to take away all the purple colour from the leaves. A month later, after the monsoons it became velvety and curly, spreading out wider to get the classic cockscomb look.

As of now the stem looks gaunt, but this bloom shows no signs of fading away. In fact it now seems to be in a mood to give back some colour back to its leaves, which now look narrow and spindle-like, a far cry from the rounded, multicoloured ones of the initial days.

Why does this plant go through such a transformation? Which are the insects it attracts as pollinators? 

As usual, when you try to figure out something, you only end up with more questions.. :P

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LINKS & REFERENCES

Celosia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celosia_argentea_var._cristata

Amaranth - super feed, super weed - https://www.phillyorchards.org/2018/04/17/amaranth-super-feed-super-weed/

Life and Beyond

 Call it a calculated conspiracy of algorithms but over the last week I watched two 'recommended' TED videos, each dealing with with dimensions of life and death.

The first one was by Isabel Stenzel Byrnes titled the "The Art of Saying Goodbye", and the second one by Nancy Trivellato on Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE).

Isabel describes her own harrowing experiences with Cystic Fibrosis, numerous encounters with the death, end-of-life issues, and organ donation. She also talks about her realisation that there is no right or wrong way to say goodbye to a loved one, and that grief is an art, a deeply intellectual and spiritual process of making sense of loss.

I was particularly touched by this description of grief by Isabel's friend, Christine:

"If you were to ask me what stage of grief I'm in, I would say denial, anger, fear, profound sadness...sequentially, and then all at once, and sometimes not at all."

The second TED video by Nancy Trivellato, a researcher from Brazil, begins with a question that has long been familiar to ancient Indian philosophers - "Is the reality we live in the actual reality?". The point being made here was that the 'reality' being presented to us by our sense organs give us, at best, only a small fraction of the many realities that exist in parallel. Nancy makes this point by presenting a set of photographs of the cosmos, each showing how instruments that detect different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum see the same slice of the night sky so differently.

However Nancy's talk is not about the EM spectrum or the cosmos but something more subtle. She describes how as a child she had an out-of-body experience of 'seeing' a beloved uncle on a hospital bed in Sao Paolo. He and his wife had gone there for a gall bladder operation without informing anybody and were quite astounded to hear the little girl describe his hospital room.

The common thread that runs through both these videos is that there is more to life and death, and dimensions of consciousness that needs our attention with tools that are beyond the reach of existing scientific instruments and conceptual frameworks. 

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* TED Video - "The Art of Saying Goodbye" (Isabel Byrnes) - https://youtu.be/Dkffpibi-Dc

* TED - Nancy Trivellato on OBE - https://youtu.be/NMBNZspmn7I

* The Power of Two - A Twin Triumph Over Cystic Fibrosis - https://www.amazon.com/Power-Two-Triumph-Cystic-Fibrosis/dp/0826217540 

The Gentle Way to Self-Defence

 

Today's Doodle honours Kano Jigoro, the 'Father of Modern Judo' on his 161st birth anniversary.

A series of neat panels illustrate the life of this remarkable man who developed the institutions that globalised Judo (柔道 lit. "gentle way"), to take it beyond the Samurai class, to make it an international olympic sport.

This also brought back memories of the University of Tsukuba where I had my first brush (and bruises, sprains and near dislocations!) with this remarkable art of self-defence. Memories of stepping into the airy, well-lit Budokan for the first time; the tatami-matted practice halls; the feel of coarse, stiff judo-gi outfit that would break your fingernails, and that peculiar smell of deodorants mixed with sweat, blood and dried. 

I had been amazed to see how men and women trained together, and how once a month,  the elite Tsukuba Blue Team held an open house with other enthusiasts. Olympic medallists sparred with schoolchildren on one side, and grandfathers teaching pigtailed grand-daughters on the other.

A portrait of Kano Sensei  and his many quotations lined a wall in the Budokan,  looking down on us with with his bemused, slightly bored expression, watching over various groups going through their paces - sparring, fighting, and learning how an opponents physical strength could be used against them.

Tsukuba University apparently grew from the educational institutions Kano set up a century earlier. Sometime during 2010 the university suddenly decided to replace the statue of a Greek hero with that of this venerable teacher. So imagine our surprise when during a visit to the post office, we looked up to find that in place of a naked, muscular European, stood a fully clothed statue of the man who repackaged Jujitsu into Judo for the world!

Perhaps it would have been more appropriate - and less expensive -  to have a sporty statue of his in front of the university Budokan or Sports Department, but then, when it comes to sentimental matters, the Japanese do not seem to believe in Kano Jigoro's dictum -  "Maximum efficiency with minimum effort" (精力善用 seiryoku zen'yō)!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* The pioneer of Judo  - https://www.tsukuba.ac.jp/en/about/history/kano/index.html

* The Olympic Movement and J Kano - https://www.joc.or.jp/english/historyjapan/kano_jigoro.html

Orion and Friends

It's 5:30AM and there is a nip in the air. You look out from the balcony and your gaze moves up from the empty roads, the streetlights, over the tree-tops, to one single bright star in the sky.

Which one is it? you wonder..

As your eyes get accustomed to the darkness, other less bright stars peek out through the haze, and a familiar pattern emerges - the three stars that make the belt, two for the dagger, another two pairs each for the shoulders and limbs... and Orion the Hunter emerges in all its glory. Then again on either side of the hunter two more bright stars - Aldebaran and Sirius marking the positions staked by the constellations Taurus and Canis Major.

We are now the Navaratri festival season, a period of nine nights when the moon transforms from a thin sliver barely visible in evening sky, to a bright autumn full-moon marking, not only two of the most important festivals in India, Dussehra and Diwali, but also the onset of winter.

I often wonder - why are our night skies filled with stellar patterns that carry mostly Latin names, with a few Arabic ones thrown in for variety? What did the ancients in India, South America or Australia make of these patterns in the night sky?

As Raj Vedam explains so well in his videos, ancient astronomers in India looked at the skies in a very different way, with oral traditions that record and mark the changing positions of the moon, planets and stars with almost obsessive detail. So much so that with modern software simulations it is possible to triangulate the time-period of certain historical events that could only have happened thousands of years ago. 

The Ecliptic, or the path taken by the sun to traverse the sky, is one of the key reference points. They observed that - "The moon appears on the eastern horizon at a different time every day, offset by about 48 minutes, agains a different backdrop of stars." Also, it was noticed that it takes 28 days for the moon to return to the same backdrop of stars. From this emerged a system based on Nakshatras and Raashis.

Nakshatra refers to the principal or brightest star in each segment of the night sky, formed by dividing the ecliptic into 27 segments of 13.33 degrees (13.3 * 27 = 360). As a mnemonic to remember the right sequence these stars were woven into mythology to represent 27 wives of the moon.

Similarly the 12 lunar months were made by dividing the sky into 12 segments of 30 degrees each (12 * 30 = 360), represented by the constellation in which the full moon made its appearance. These were called the Raashis.

So when the full moon appeared in Chittira Nakshatra (Spica in Virgo Constellation) it could immediately be understood that in that month, the sunrise took place 180 degrees opposite in Ashvini Nakshatra (Sheratan or Beta Arietis in the Aries constellation).

What about old familiar friend Orion and his companions? For some reason it seems ancient astronomers in India were not too keen on conjuring up figures from the stellar patterns. They highlighted only three stars in the Orion and Taurus constellations:

• Nakshatra no. 4 -   Rohini (Aldebaran in Taurus constellation)
• Nakshatra no. 5 - Makaram (Mintaka or Delta Orionis in Orion constellation)
• Nakshatra no. 6 - Thiruvathira (Betelgeuse in Orion constellation)

One big surprise is that in the subsequent 13.3 degree segment they completely ignored the brightest star in the sky, Sirius and instead selected Pollux (Gemini constellation) as Nakshatra no. 7. To put this in perspective, Pollux  or Beta Geminorium is an orange giant with a magnitude (brightness) of 1.1 while Sirius (Greek for 'scorching' and also called Alpha Canis Majoris) has a magnitude of - 1.5 which is about 2.5 times brighter!

Maybe there is something more to this that I am missing, but ignoring the brightest star in the sky! - you can't be Sirius! 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Orion Constellation - ultimate guide - https://www.planetguide.net/orion-constellation/

*  https://www.astrosoftware.com/SiriusNakshatra.htm

* Inca Astronomy - https://www.peruforless.com/blog/inca-astronomy/

The Sense of Smell

Remember this post about 'The Most Translated Books of the World'? 

Well, a few days ago, I decided to pick one of the few European books that I had not read in that collection - the most translated book from Germany -   Patrick Süskind's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer', which apparently has been translated into no less than 49 languages.

It seemed to deal with an interesting topic - the sense of smell - which is perhaps the most evocative of our sense perceptions, and one that often triggers a flood of memories. There is a certain agarbatti fragrance that instantly takes me back to my wonder years in Hyderabad, a childhood filled with sunny days squinting at floating kites, of playing and wandering about without a care in the world; The smell of musty books takes me to my grandfather's library in Kerala, of hours spent flipping through books I had been explicitly banned from reading (was that a trick to get me interested in books?). A couple of years ago when I landed up for my first UN assignment in Afghanistan, I kept wondering why buildings at Green Village reminded me so much of Tsukuba University in Japan, until it struck me that they were using a floor cleaner with the exact same fragrance! 

This book tells us the story of an orphan named Grenouille who was born in the 1700s and promptly discarded  in an offal heap at a slaughterhouse in Paris. The child grows up to discover that he has an unusual talent, an obsession for smells and odours as well as the ability to recreate them.  He first starts earning his keep as an apprentice at a tannery, then wheedles into a becoming an assistant to a leading perfumer in Paris, before becoming a serial killer who ultimately never gets punished for his crimes.

As expected, the narrative serves dollops of gyan on the art of making perfumes, but then goes overboard over their power to influence human behaviour: 

"Odours have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions or will. The persuasive power of an odour cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fill us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it... for people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving sounds. But they cannot escape scent. For scent is the brother of breath...

"There are scents that linger for decades. A cupboard rubbed with musk, a piece of leather drenched with cinnamon oil, a glob of ambergris, a cedar chest - they all possess virtual eternal olfactory life. While other things like lime oil, bergamot, jonquil and tuberose extracts, and many floral scents -- evaporate within a few hours if they are exposed to the air in a pure, unbound form."

The book itself is fast-paced and describes Paris and France in a way that is not very different from Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables". In this storyline you travel from Paris southwards to the barren hills of Plomb du Cantal,  Montpellier, Grenoble and then to Grasse, north of Cannes.  

Yet, unlike Hugo's classic it descends into incredulous levels, like a pet peeve that has run amok, taking the story to a point where you just wonder - Why would anybody want to translate this book into so many languages? Is this really the most translatable book that German language has to offer? 

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REFERENCES

* Book - Süskind, Patrick (1985): "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer "

* The Smell of Evolution (NatGeo)

Under the Shadow of Covid: Train Journeys Across India

Paravur Kayal (lagoon), Kerala

Has the Covid Pandemic changed the way Indians travel? What has been the impact of the cascade of lockdowns  imposed across the country since March 2020?

An opportunity to seek answers to these questions presented itself a few weeks ago. A bunch of old friends had planned a get-together in Krishnagiri district of Tamil Nadu and it had been nearly two years since I met my folks in Kerala. So at short notice, I decided to travel across the country to these two states in the cheapest way possible: Second-Class Sleeper on the Indian Railways.

Thanks to the pandemic and the lockdowns that came with it I had grown nostalgic about the magic of unhurried traveling. The joy of settling down with a nice book on a long train journey, of watching the shifting landscapes float by, feeling the rush of wind through the open windows and the occasional explosive rush of a passing train, tasting different foods (and drinking the awful tea!) along the way; the chance to meet and travel with all sorts of different people... just about everything that seemed the opposite end of a lockdown spectrum :)

My two-week itinerary was fairly simple - a 2400km train ride to Bangalore (Train 06528), to be picked up by friends for a drive across the border from Karnataka to Krishnagiri district in Tamil Nadu. A couple of days later, another longer road trip to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, a week with the family, and finally,  the 3040km long rail journey (Train 02625) back to Delhi. 

Two train journeys ~ 5,500 km

Traveling under the shadow of an impending "third wave" of the pandemic, I had expected to see a lot of restrictions along the way. Sure enough, railway stations along the route were a lot less crowded than usual. This may have been because access to the platforms is now tightly controlled, visitors are no longer issued "platform tickets", nearly all hawkers were in designated uniforms and everybody was wearing a face-mask, at least to avoid getting penalised. 

However once the train rolled out of the platform in New Delhi, ticket examiners were not checking to see if passengers had been vaccinated. Hygiene and safety standards had improved though - cleaning of the coaches and mopping with disinfectants was more frequent, a couple of armed police officers patrolled up and down the trains, reminding everybody to keep the doors closed and even warning us to down the shutters and stay away from the windows at a place in Maharashtra because "children pelt stones in this area!".

All along the journey across multiple states, only at one station did RTPCR test results become an issue. At Bangalore Cantonment as soon as passengers disembarked, all of us were lined up for a quick health-check: 

"Are you coming from outside Karnataka? Where are you going? Do you have an RTPCR negative report? If not, what is your mobile number?"

Straight, simple questions. I had not taken an RTPCR test 72 hours prior to this journey. For a moment I though they were going to send me off to a week-long quarantine but quickly realised that this was just a precautionary measure. The staff who noted down my mobile number checked with the national database accessed through the CoWIN app. Once it was confirmed that I had taken both shots of the AZ-CovidShield vaccine, my destination details were logged in and swab samples were taken for an RTPCR test. By the time I stepped out of the railway station, a message had come in, reminding me of the precautions to be taken, and within the next 24 hours, I had a digital certificate confirming an RTPCR negative report - all for free! Totally understated, efficient and super impressive.

On both the long distance journeys - from Delhi to Bangalore and from Thiruvanantapuram back to Delhi - one big change was that there were very few people travelling all the way. On the onward trip, most of my co-passengers were migrant workers - mostly travelling from the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to serve factories, malls and the gig economy for sending money back home. There were also a few tech workers - interns or trainees taking up their assignments in Bangalore and discussing the finer points of Java and Python along the way.

The return journey from Kerala was quite different. Most of my travel companions from Kerala got off just across the state border in Coimbatore, an industrial city that attracts a lot of workers and students; those who boarded from Tamil Nadu were again traveling a short distance to Tirupati, a centre for pilgrimage. My coach was practically empty when it passed through the states of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh. 

The fear of Covid had transformed many of the landmark stations along the way. The famous stalls selling fresh fruit juice had disappeared from Vijayawada station; Chilly chicken was no longer on the menu at the Warangal station canteen. Hygiene seemed to have become an overriding concern - meals were now being sold in sealed plastic trays. Flexible pricing was also in - an egg biryani which cost INR 90 at 12:00 when the train reached Warangal would be available for INR 50 when the train reached Vijayawada a few hours later. If you were not in a hurry to pick up a packet as soon as the train stopped the price would go down still further to INR 40!

Another great transformation was the near seamless availability of broadband internet through the journey. Except for a few uninhabited areas of Telangana and Madhya Pradesh you can use the net to check the news feeds, catch up with old friends on WhatsApp, watch YouTube videos and, most importantly, see your own train moving across the country as a blue dot on Google Maps. This not only allows you to read up on the history and geography of the places you are passing through but also be well prepared to compose photographs of the fleeting yet stunningly beautiful landscapes of !ncredible India!

The Covid Pandemic seems to have changed not only the way in which Indian Railways operates  but also reduced the sense of chaos and uncertainty associated with train travel. If this trend continues I will be looking forward to my next long distance train ride - maybe from Gujarat to the North Eastern states for a change!

Godavari River, Andhra Pradesh

Paddy fields, northern Andhra Pradesh

Windmill farms and cloudscapes, Tamil Nadu

Thiruvanthapuram Central Station, Kerala

Palm plantations, Tamil Nadu

Paddy fields in coastal Andhra Pradesh

Sunset across Wardha river, Maharashtra

Cattle grazing at Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh

Chambal Ravines, Madhya Pradesh

Zzz..

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Journey Map - https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/2/edit?mid=1SpiOwFl7nMqDxqKgqBYHsQ9ZiduMZ49u&usp=sharing 

* Kerala Express (02625) - https://www.cleartrip.com/trains/12625/

Sunny Days

 The precise shifting positions of the rising and setting sun through the year is a phenomenon observed thousands of years ago. The ancient Egyptians aligned their buildings - especially the pyramids - in such a way that sunlight entered the deepest passages only on certain days of the year, such as the summer equinox. The ancient Aztecs did the same, and so did the builders of Angkor Wat, and even the Padmanabha Swamy Temple in Kerala.

While it is relatively easy for communities that have lived at a particular location for many years to accurately predict the play of sunlight and shadows in their buildings through the year, the trick is to figure out how this would change in different parts of the globe. Consider this excerpt from an astronomy website - 

At 40°N latitude (Denver, Colorado / Beijing, China), the sun shifts 7° north. Since the sun's diameter equals 1/2 degrees, that means the sun has been traveling its own diameter (14 days x 1/2 degree = 7 degrees) northwards each day. At 60°N latitude (Fairbanks, Alaska / Siberia), the sun moves about 2 sun diameters or one degree daily.

How did they come to the conclusion that "the sun's diameter equals 1/2 degrees"? What exactly does this mean, especially when you consider the fact that the distance between the earth and the sun varies from summer to winter making it appear larger or smaller across the seasons? 

Things get a little more complicated here. Yet all this has been figured out with such amazing accuracy that we have websites that map the position of the sun to any given location on earth, any time of the year.

What we see here is a sun-path polar chart superimposed on an image from Google Maps. Each point on this is worked out by feeding in the local latitude in relation to the elevation of the sun and the time of day, for that location. For instance, Noida located at approx 28°N would see the sun at an elevation of 62° from the horizon  (90° - 28°) on equinox days (21 Mar., and 21 Sep.).

Solar Altitude (cc - Hartz ) 

This explains why cities located on or near the equator (eg., Singapore - 1.29°N) see very little variation in the position of the sun across seasons. So when a Singaporean stretches his neck to squint at the blazing sun right overhead on an equinox day, a Norwegian resident at the northern-most city in the world, Longyearbyne (78.22°N) would find the same mid-day sun hovering near the horizon all day!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

- https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/india/new-delhi?month=6&year=2021

- Noida coordinates - 28.5355° N, 77.3910° E

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/01/this-is-how-the-sun-moves-in-the-sky-throughout-the-year/?sh=c3af3c573037

- TED Talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm13Kq_E1ik

- https://www.sunearthtools.com/dp/tools/pos_sun.php

- https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/how-far-does-sun-move-on-your-horizon-each-day/

- Sun path - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_path

- https://www.syedshiyazmirza.com/2019/03/sree-padmanabhaswamy-temple-during.html

- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/fall-equinox-secret-pyramids-near-perfect-alignment-180968223/

- https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/five-ancient-sites-to-celebrate-the-spring-equinox

Books of the World

 

Every now and then the great circus of Whatsapp forwards comes up with a gem, and this is one of them. A beautifully illustrated poster on the "Most Translated Books of the World" by Preply.

A closer look at this tells you that some non-empirical method has been chosen for the selections here.  Perhaps they have excluded books of religious nature, or those that may may be categorised as 'adult literature'. How else can one explain the fact that Paramahamsa Yogananda's "The Autobiography of a Yogi" is listed as the most translated book from India over "The Bhagawad Gita" or "Kamasutra"?   

At least according to the referenced list compiled by Wikipedia, the most translated book from India is the Gita, followed by Isha Upanishad and Yogananda's book in the third place. 

The list has its surprises too. For instance I was surprised to learn that a book we studied at school, "My Name is Aram" by William Saroyan the top book from Armenia. Also Arthur Hailey's "Hotel" is listed as the most translated book from... the Bahamas! 

Minor quibbles aside this remains a beautiful piece of work. The books I have not yet read from this list should keep me busy for a while! :)

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NB: This is also the first time I am seeing a digital image presented in the <webP> format. At just over 600kB this seems to pack in a much more scalable image compared to JPEG or TIFF.  Seems to be an innovation from Google that uses a technique called predictive coding.

A Tragedy Live-Streamed

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"--Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

What has been happening at Kabul's HKIA airport from 15 August 2021 onwards has been surreal, incredulous and depressing all at the same time.

Having been through this airport many times, and seen the many layers of its heavily armed perimeter,  it was amazing to see how thousands of people managed to get past its gates, all the way to military aircraft on the runway. It has been a week now and thousands of people continue to remain there all day, blocking the approach roads, clambering atop aircrafts, sitting inside jet-engine air-vents, getting shot at by security guards, and getting killed in the resulting stampede.

Much has already been said about the levels of desperation and panic in parts of Kabul. What has come as a big surprise to me is that for a city that has been under blanket electronic and police surveillance for decades, mobile networks continue to function normally, streaming live video from people all over the place. 

One particular video clip stands out.  This is a C-17 US military plane attempting to take off from Kabul airport. It is a monster of an aircraft - over 50m long, and capable of carrying over 275 tonnes, but here, as it lumbers on the runway, we see thousands of men were running alongside; some are waving cheerfully at the cameras, a few perched on the wheel carriages or flaps. Among them was one man in a dark Pathan suit, sitting precariously over on a winglet, looking intently looking into his mobile phone!

Incredibly, there is also a clip titled "Last video from the plane" in which we have a man in the same group recording the almost festive spirit of the group perched precariously there. Even as the jet engines rev up into a roar, he is talking a selfie shot, smiling into the camera, panning it around to show his companions waving cheerfully at his friends. Apache helicopters can be seen flying alongside, trying in vain to disperse the crowds. One can almost feel the wind lashing on on those faces, the roar jet engines drowning out the crowds. 

Then another phone records the C-17 taking off. As it climbs up sharply a few men can be seen slipping off and falling to their deaths. One was seen tangles in the concertina wires of a boundary wall, another spattered on a rooftop, and in yet another mobile, recording from inside the aircraft, the body of a man can be seen flailing in the winds, like a rag-doll stuck on a dumpster.

Not one of them would have survived. One can only imagine the levels of desperation and ignorance that led these men to their deaths. One wonders how the "last video" managed to reach FB and Twitter, and how many of them really thought they could get away sitting out there?

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LINKS

*  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/08/17/human-remains-found-c-17-wheel-well-after-takeoff-kabul/8170724002/

Gokhale's China

 Indians have been suckers for more than six decades. This was my main takeaway from Vijay Gokhale's recent book, "The Long Game - How the Chinese Negotiate with India".

In this elegantly written book, Gokhale traces the path taken by India-China relations from 1950 onwards - from the time when the government of India became one of the first to recognise the communist regime, of giving it a leg up to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council, through its military take-over of Tibet, escape of the Dalai Lama, the 1962 war, nuclear tests, all the way to the border dispute that festers to this day. 

All through this, the author may have wanted to show the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in favourable light but seems to have just the opposite effect. One gets the impression that even though the  IFS may have had some of our brightest officers, as an institution it was slow on the uptake, and, as far as China is concerned, it has been incapable of guiding the political leaders through a prudent course of action. 

One of our weaknesses is that we love to talk. Combine this with our lack of meticulous preparations, the ease with which we can be flattered and what you get is a long line of ineffective negotiators. The Chinese, on the other hand, were always better prepared, weighed each word that was spoken and recorded everything and clearly saw that our eagerness to please, to play the 'good neighbour', was a weakness that could be exploited to tie us down with unilateral commitments.

Over the years, it seems some Chinese tactics have become predictable -- setting the agenda by insisting on 'principles' that suit them; things that they do not want to discuss are stonewalled through silence or deemed "not ripe for settlement"; the interpreter ploy of pretending not to know a language to gain time to think through and formulate a response, etc..

We also seem to have realised that that Chinese diplomats are ideological agents of the communist party- not government representatives amenable to logic or reason. Also their leaders, who prefer to stay in the background to "save face" are actually thin-skinned, and that unsettling them by impugning their self-image and how they want the rest of the world to view them can work to the other side's advantage.

Gokhale laments that the dignified and gracious Chinese negotiators of the past have been replaced by the assertive 'wolf warriors' who tend to display aggression, arrogance, irritation and other disagreeable traits. 

Maybe this is just as well because we seem to be better at handling in-your-face aggression rather than the gentle art of gracious negotiations. 

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LINKS

* Gokhale, Vijay (2021): THE LONG GAME - How the Chinese Negotiate With India, Penguin- https://www.amazon.in/Long-Game-Chinese-Negotiate-India/dp/0670095605

Down the Road to Chaos?

Once again, Afghanistan has hit the headlines; once again for all the wrong reasons.

Unlike my earlier post which was written after the most recent attack on Kabul University, this one is triggered by a global event - the withdrawal of USA and its allies after over 20  years in Afghanistan. The withdrawal has enabled the Taliban to sweep across the country with almost daily reports of deaths in bombings, attacks and counterattacks. A sense of uncertainty about the country seems poised to spread across its borders, to the rest of South Asia and the world.

As someone with a bit of experience in Afghanistan(2018-19), I have been approached by friends for an opinion on how things are going to unfold in the months to come. This was my response in a WhatsApp group a few days ago:

Ethnic and tribal loyalties are becoming more important than the "Afghan" identity for surviving this crisis.

Did you see that clip where a Talib asks a man if he's a Hazara and then shoots him dead? The Hazaras will avenge that. The 22 commandos who were killed after they surrendered; the Afghan ambassadors daughter who got abducted in Islamabad today... these too will be avenged, and at the tribal level all this will fuel old blood-feuds on both sides of the Durand line.

About ~$10 billion of annual aid that drove the Afghan economy is now the turning off... resources are limited... people are losing jobs, schools and small businesses are closing down, families are getting split and displaced...a whole new generation is dealing with the jehadis and their insular, medieval mindset.

So far there is no sign of a strong unifying national leader,  so the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras (Shias) will fight against the talibs (mostly sunni Pashto)...and the Pashtos tribes will fight each other to control the border posts (tax revenue) and poppy fields.

The Pakistanis will of course try to push more of these displaced jehadis into Kashmir/India.

Sad days ahead 😞

I hope my rather simplistic assessment is wrong. I hope an amicable solution will be found to prevent a repeat of the devastation that visited Afghanistan two decades ago. I hope all the good work done by the UN and other international agencies - especially in primary education, infrastructure and agriculture - will not go down the drain.

And yet, an interview I saw recently seemed to confirm that this is going to be another long bloody struggle. A retired Pakistani general, Tariq Khan, a Pathan officer who led a government offensive against the "Pakistani Taliban" or TTP, seemed quite sure that the Taliban will take over Kabul in a few weeks because the city is already under a "soft siege" because supplies to the city - especially of fuel - is already being disrupted. While this may be true it is not clear if the Taliban have what it takes to dominate the rest of the country - especially non-Pashtun areas.

Unlike the Soviet occupation era when the mujahids had a strong backing in terms of armaments (USA) and petrodollars (Saudi Arabia), things are a lot more complicated now. This time, money is not so easily available; there is some in Afghanistan's biggest exports - Poppy - but the Taliban is known to be against it;  the non-Pashto groups are better armed and may not give up the cities without a bitter fight, and there seems to be little in terms of common ground between the countries that have a direct interest in the final outcome -- Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan, USA, Turkey, and India.

If the Taliban continue with their refusal to share power with people who represent half the country, what they ultimately get may be a Pyrrhic victory, and the peaceful silence of graveyards. This may not come as an explosion of a grenade with a missing pin but as a slow, painful descent to chaos. 

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LINKS & REFERENCES:

* 26 July 2021 - Turkey eyeing a new sphere of influence in Afghanistan - https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/868701-turkey-eyeing-for-new-sphere-of-influence-in-afghanistan

* 18 July 2021 - Gen. Tariq Khan's interview - https://youtu.be/Tb8hMrqBXP4

Experts vs. Dart-Throwing Monkeys

 

Statistics was never one of my favourite subjects. When faced with grades at the wrong end of the bell-curve, I would console myself with a quote attributed to Mark Twain - "There is lies, damn lies, and statistics"!

However, over the years, I have warmed-up to the subject - thanks largely to the stunning visualisations of Hans Rosling, and books like Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow". This post is about the latter. 

The nudge for this came about ten days ago when a friend posted a book recommendation with a quote by Richard Feynman - "The first rule in science is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool". The book in question was - "The power and paradox of self-deception" by Shankar Vedantam.

The first question that came to my mind was - Is this any different from the ideas described so well in Kahneman's book?  I went back to the book and found that he discussed not only all sorts of cognitive biases but also ways in which the intuitions of subject experts can be built into robust decision-making models.

What I like about Kahneman is that he is a practitioner who moved to academia. Unlike most ivory tower theorists, he served in the fledgeling Israeli Army in the 1950s, setting SoPs (still in use) for officer selection before moving to a university in USA, and winning the first Nobel prize for psychology/economics in 2002. 

Two of my key takeaways from this book were on Subjective Confidence and Intuitions vs. Formulas. Here are two quotes from the book on the topics which are perhaps best described in the author's own words. 

First, Subjective Confidence.

Facts that challenge...basic assumptions - and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self esteem - are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide base rate information that people generally ignore when it clashes with their personal impressions

We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers

In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than non-specialists...The reason is that a person who acquired more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. 

...Using an analogy from Isaish Berlin's essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" -

Hedgehogs "know one big thing" and have a theory about the world; they account for particular events within a coherent framework, bristle with impatience towards those who do not see things their way, and are confident about their forecasts. They are also especially reluctant to admit error. For hedgehogs, a failed prediction is almost always "off only on timing", or "very nearly right". They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what televisions producers like to see on their programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, make a good show.

Foxes, on the other hand, are complex thinkers. They don't believe that one big thing drives the march of history. Instead the foxes recognise that reality emerges from the interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes....Foxes are less likely to to be invited to participate in television debates.

On Intuitions vs. Formulas

Paul Meehl's book - "Clinical vs. Statistical prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of Evidence"...This 'disturbing little book' presented the results of 20 studies to examine whether Clinical Predictions based on the subjective impressions of trained professionals were more accurate than statistical predictions made by combining a few scores or ratings according to a rule... The formula was more accurate than 11 or 14 counsellors! It was proven again in other studies on violations of payroll, success in pilot training and criminal recidivism.

Princetown economist and wine lover Orley Ashenfelter shows us the compelling power of the power of simple statistics to outdo world renowned experts. Ashenfelter predicted the future value of Bordeaux wines based on info available the year they were made - he converted conventional knowledge into a statistical formula that predicts the price of wine based on three features of the weather - average temp over the summer growing months, the amount of rain at harvest, and the total rainfall during the previous winter.

A key conclusion... to maximise predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments

Does Vedanam's new book present any new ideas? I don't know yet. It does seem to me that path-breaking ideas presented in "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" may now be getting repackaged in newer books. Perhaps I am suffering from an anchoring bias, but I do believe Kahneman's book is something you need to have on your nearest bookshelf, as a constant reminder that there is more to this world than meets the eye, that intuitions can be trusted - but only to a certain extent. 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Cognitive Biases - https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-cognitive-bias-2794963

* Animated book summary - https://youtu.be/uqXVAo7dVRU

* The hedgehog and the fox - http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9981.pdf

* How Big Data can predict the wine of the century - https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2014/04/30/how-big-data-can-predict-the-wine-of-the-century/?sh=5f2c35c531a9