Dynamics of the North East

At first glance Sanjoy Hazarika's book may seem rather dated. It gives a snapshot of the North Eastern states up to the early 1990s. 

Much of the turmoil described in the book has died down - insurgencies that roiled the North East for decades after independence has given way to a superlative push for development -  the new longest river bridge in India, 10,000km of new highways, railway links pushing further eastwards,  and ten new airports, a new impetus to the agriculture sector...all this has done much to integrate the region with the rest of the country. And yet, thanks to the recent troubles in Bangladesh, and the breakdown of trust and goodwill bodes ill for the seven sisters. 

This history of the seven sisters is a lot more complex than I expected. It also goes way beyond the unequal Treaty of Yandabo (1826) through which the British grabbed large swathes of Burma into British India.  The vast Brahmaputra valley has seen multiple invasions from the east of whom, perhaps the Ahoms lasted the longest.  Originally from the Shan region bordering Burma and China, the Ahoms conquered the area in the 13th century, adopted Hinduism, married into local communities and ruled for the next 600 years.  Even during this period it seems the tribes inhabiting the hills raided the plains but the rules were sanguine about pursuing them into the hills - 'can an elephant enter the hole of a rat?'

In terms of language and culture, a certain pecking order was imposed on this region. Soon after the British conquest of Assam, Bengali became the language of the courts and remained the official language till 1873. The Assamese in turn tried to impose their language on the hill states much to their resentment.

Partition of British India, tensions between India and Pakistan and  the creation of Bangladesh cut off the North East from its natural trading partners. The most accessible port at Chittagong went to Bangladesh even though it was located in Chakma region dominated by christian tribes. On top of this, power politics in North India forced the NE to subordinate it natural resources to states like Bihar. Petroleum extracted from Assam was sent in pipes all the way to Barauni refinery for processing!

Hazarika's book is a valuable record of the missed opportunities in the North East. It also provides a perspective on how the ongoing transformation of the seven sisters.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

- PIB Press Note on the North East 

- 

Singular Music

 

This is a collection of short-stories Murakami published in 2020. The title comes from the last story in the collection but the one I liked best is the one depicted on the cover - "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey"  / Ichininshō Tansū (一人称単数).

It is a story that brings together a number of elements I love about Japan - the inclination to experience nature, the everyday courtesy, openness to absorbing and improving upon foreign music, literature, food and technology. With some effort it seems even monkeys can improve themselves in Japan :)

As with most of his books, quite a few of stories in this collection revolve around music, mostly jazz or western classical. Many of these pieces are completely unfamiliar to me, so my way of indulging in immersive reading is to settle down with the book on my favourite chair with a drink, a bowl of snacks (if KakiPi is nor available, murukku or banana chips will do), and to play as background music one one of the pieces that appears in the storyline.

In this collection, no less than three stories have their titles that indicate which type of music is going to dominate the narrative - "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova", "With the Beatles" and "Carnaval". The last one comes with a specific recommendations - Schumann's Carnaval by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (Angel Records) or the one by Arthur Rubenstein (RCA  Records)!

An enjoyable, uplifting read.

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Music from 'First Person Singular' / Ichininshō Tansū (一人称単数):

• Jazz - Charlie Parker - Ornithology - the best of Bird
• Charlie Byrd - Corcovado (also a hill in Rio, Brazil - home to the statue of ‘Jesus the Redeemer’)
• Pharoah Sanders
• Miles David
• Art Pepper 
• Thelonious Monk
• Beethoven Piano Concerto 1 - 3rd movement 
• Middle-class music: Mantovani Orchestra -- Percy Faith -- Roger Williams -- Andy Williams -- Not Cole King
• Max Steiner - Theme from A Summer Place (Percy Faith Orchestra)
• Rolling Stones - “(I can't get no) Satisfaction"
• Byrd - “Mr.Trambourine Man”
• Temptations - “My Girl”
• Righteous Brothers - “You've lost that lovin’ feelin’
• Beach Boys - “Helping Rhonda”
• Diana Ross
• Supremes
• Classical - Bruckner - 7th symphony, 3rd movement / 9th symphony 
• Richard Strauss
• Prokofiev - Romeo and Juliet 
• Schumann - Carnaval -- by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (Angel records) or Arthur Rubenstein (RCA)
• Bach - Goldberg variations + well tempered clavier
• Beethoven - late piano sonatas + third Concerto 
• Folks Crusaders - “I only live twice”

Starting with Murakami

 

My first book for 2023 is a book Haruki Murakami wrote a few years ago - "Killing Commendatore" ((Japanese: 騎士団長殺し, Hepburn: Kishidanchō-goroshi).

One issue with eBooks - for better or worse - is the fact that it does not give you a let you get discouraged by the size of a book. This one has over 700 pages - not the regular, non-serial, Murakami but certainly not the sort I would pick up in a hardcopy format. Yet it is just the sort or engaging, fluid prose that keeps you flicking from one chapter to another, until you reach a point when it all seems to end rather abruptly, as though the author himself got bored of stretching the narrative for so long.

I have not yet reached the end though. Like a piece of chocolate that you keep in your pocket,  and keep nibbling on it every now and then, to make it last long, I read Murakami's to slowly discover perspectives I am not too familiar with - food, classical music, and, this time, the world of painters and paintings.

It is worth it. 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Commendatore

* Review - WP 2018 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Commendatore

* Discussion - https://sevencircumstances.com/2019/05/17/an-idea-that-asks-to-be-murdered-killing-commendatore-by-haruki-murakami/

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)

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

Slavery - Not So Long Ago

 I got my first introduction to the concept of Slavery a few decades ago,  from Alex Haley's book, "Roots". 

This book not only left a lasting impression about this dehumanised life of Kunta Kinte, but also a notion that slavery was something that was the white man created to obtain cheap labour for his plantations in the New World - a rather naive view in which slaves were snatched from Africa, packed like sardines into ships, and sold to sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas.

I did come across other references to slavery in the distant past. The history of Islamic invasions across the Indus River, the enslavement of 'infidels' in their thousands by the Ghaznivid and Ghorid sultanates, as a result of which an entire mountain range got the name Hindu-kush, or 'killer of Hindus', because a large number of Indian slaves had perished while being driven across the central Afghan mountains, to the slave supermarkets of Central Asia. 

That was, of course, the distant past. The most recent news of slavery came from the Middle East with reports of what ISIS or Al Qaida had been doing to the Yazidis and other ethic minorities in Iraq and Syria. Except for this aberration of sorts, my rather simplistic view has been overturned by the book - "Slavery in South Asia" by Richard Eaton and Indrani Chatterjee.

This book is a compilation of essays focusing on different parts of India across the ages.  It now turns out that far from being a rarity, slavery has always been an integral part of empire building in India. 

If the ISIS enslavement of Yazidi women is shocking, you should read about what the Cholas did with captured women for centuries. They developed military slavery to such an institution that captured women were systematically organised into "Velam s", to serve as breeding machines for future soldiers. A practice that has been meticulously recorded in temple inscriptions both by the victors and the vanquished - especially the Pandas and Chalukyas.

Another surprise was the extent to which foreign slaves were brought into India. Mongol invasions (starting 1222 CE) had destroyed the social and economic fabric of the area around the Caspian Sea, and children were being traded for a pittance. So Central Asian raiders to India had entire battalions made of such slaves, and trusted them more than their own sons. Some of these slave-boys went on to become Sultans themselves, starting with Qutub-al-Din Aybak, Iltutmish and Balban, all of whom were slaves of Turkish origin.

Religious sanction, of course, provided just the impetus for a practice that would surely have been hard to accept morally. The Koran was - and is - quite unambiguous - 

"When ye encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads, until ye have made a great slaughter among them; and bind them in bonds; ad wither give them a free discussion afterwards, or extract a ransom; until the war shall have laid down its arms. -- Sura 47:4-5 in The Koran

"Tarikh-i-Firuzshahi" gives the standard value of a 'working girl' as fixed between 5 and 12 tankas, a singing girl between 20-40 tankas...a handsome slave-boy between 20-30 tankas, a working man between 10-15 while "ill-favoured" boys were priced at 7-8 tankas.

Alauddin Khilji had a slave general with a name that combined his price-tag - Malik Kafur Hazar Dinari. He had been captured during a raid into Gujarat and went on to become an army commander who not only stopped the Mongol invasions in the early 1300s but also plundered the kingdoms of deep south - the Kakatiyas, Hoysalas and Pandyas.

Each time there was a successful raid into India, so many people were enslaved and taken away that prices nosedived, and the slave markets collapsed. Ibn Battuta was quite pleased at the bargain rates for which he got slave boys and girls in Delhi; All the Mughals traded Indian slaves for horses from Uzbekistan; Nadir Shah took so many slaves and wealth back to Persia that he did have to tax his countrymen for a few years.

Then we have the amazing Ethiopian slaves, purchased from African kings and Arabs in exchange for Indian textiles. These "Habshis" and "Sidis" formed military backbone of the Deccan Sultanates. So much so that one of them - Malik Ambar - became the de facto king of Ahmednagar and employed among his many Maratha commanders, the father of a boy who was to become Chattrapati Shivaji!

Did the practice of slavery end after the British took over India? Not quite. A British monarch himself requisitioned for "two pairs of slave dwarfs" from India for his entertainment. In the North East of India the practice of slavery continued to the basis for recruiting soldiers into the British Indian Army. 

During the 1800s, more than four rounds of severe famines had ensured that thousands of men, women and children were forced to become slaves under the "Chawmman" system wherein they owed their chiefs for payments for board, or price of food. So when the British wanted cannon-fodder for the trench-wars in Europe, these men were readily signed up by their village chiefs. 

It was only after the First World War that the 1919 Convention of Saint Germain-en-Laye affirmed international desire to secure complete suppression of slavery. This was lated taken affirmed by the League of Nations and then, the United Nations.

This book is a sobering reminder that the dreadful past is a lot more recent that we imagine.

Kabul - A City Under Attack...Yet Again

 

Kabul has been on my mind all day today.

It started with a trickle, with a photos-app reminding me that exactly one year ago, I had taken some pics of an office commute that took me across a hill to Jamal Mena. The narrow road had snaked past a large fuel-storage facility, past water-tankers supplying houses tightly packed on the hillside, across the ridge to a lovely green cityscape that stretched from Kabul University to mountains of Paghman.

Towards noon, news of an attack on Kabul University starting appearing on Twitter. For the rest of the day I was checking on friends working and staying around Jamal Mena - they were all safe but by evening reports said, "At least 50 students including 5 professors, 4 members of Kabul University Police, including a policewoman killed."

Is there no end to the violence inflicted on Afghanistan? 

Perhaps the answer to this question lies outside Afghanistan because it has been decades since the Afghans had some real control over their own affairs. During the days of the "Great Game" the British said that the king must return, and so he returned to play the role of an unwilling puppet. A couple of centuries later a Pakistani General said "Kabul must burn!", and so not only Kabul but the whole country was burnt so that the Soviets could be forced out. 

"The Bear Trap", written by Mohammad Yousaf, a former IGI general,  in charge of ISIs Afghanistan operations, gives a detailed account of how a few individuals, backed a 'superpower' can destroy a country in a few years.  From 1984, through 1987, over 80,000 Mujahideen went through ISIs training camps, hundreds of thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition were distributed for operations in all the 29 provinces in Afghanistan. These operations killed over 13,000 Soviet soldiers and wounded some 35,000. during nine years of bitter fighting.

As fighting raged in the countryside, Kabul's population shot up from 750,000 to over 2 million in 1985, most of whom were crammed into into tents on the outskirts of the city. 

Gen. Yousaf was quite clear that neither ISI nor his mujahids would have been able to sustain the fight if it did not have a steady flow of money and modern equipment:

As I was about to discover, nothing moves, in peace or war, without money. The Mujahideen could achieve nothing without financial support. No matter how brilliant my strategy might be, the implementation depended on the availability of a vast reservoir of cash with which to arm, train and move my forces. Almost half this money originated from the US taxpayer, with the remainder coming from the Saudi Arabian government or right Arab individuals.

As the Soviets started leaving Afghanistan, USA realised that a radical islamist government was not in its interest, so they kept the Taliban away from Kabul as long as they could.

Then came 9/11, Osama bin Laden, and the Americans returned to bomb the Taliban out of the country. Then then tried to force-feed democracy a country that has always been a diet of strict autocracy. The Taliban simply said, "You have the watches, but we have the time."   The waiting game seems to have ended this year. 

Over two decades of relative peace and quiet is now being lost again to the sounds of gunfire in universities, assassinations, and street bombings.

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* Kabul University Attack 2020 - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-university/death-toll-from-kabul-university-attack-rises-to-at-least-35-as-anger-grows-idUSKBN27J178?il=0

* Book - The Bear Trap -  https://www.amazon.in/Bear-Trap-Afghanistans-Untold-Story/dp/0850522676

Fighting on the Himalayan Ridges

Thousands of Indian soldiers are now perched on the freezing ridges of Ladakh. With China continuing with its expansionist "salami-slicing" of borderlands, lakes and islands, with no signs of letting up even in the midst of a pandemic, these soldiers are likely to stay put for the rest of the winter.

How do fighting units sustain themselves through some of the toughest physical terrains? How do they deal with the long stretches of silence and boredom? What keeps them going? I was looking for a book that would dwell on questions like these, and that is how I ended up with Sabastien Junger's "War".

It is a short, sharp book which reminds you that you should not judge a book by its cover. The book cover you see here is not the one favoured by the publishers which has a close-up shot of a single eye on an effeminate, clean-shaven face. I thought this one was more apt for the story of one platoon in one valley of southern Afghanistan.

This is the story of KOP - Korengal Outpost in Kunar Province. Its a place where the deep valleys and high mountains provide an ideal cover for Pakistan-trained Taliban to infiltrate into Afghanistan, and in 2007 Junger stays out there with a platoon that is trying to prevent this infiltration. 

This is a battlefield where codes of honour clash. When a US patrol gets ambushed one of the survivors, a soldier named Luttrel, staggers badly wounded into a mountain village with the Taliban at his heels. He survives because "The people of Sabray were obliged to protect Luttrell under an honor code called 'lokhay warkawal' (?), which holds that anyone who comes to your doorstep begging for help must be cared no matter that the cost to the community." 

The Taliban, on the other hand, know that battles can be won when the villagers are made to suffer at the hands of the "enemy", the "infidel". Their strategy is to lure NATO forces to accidentally killing so many civilians that they lose the fight for the human terrain. The physical terrain would inevitably follow.

There is irony in the imbalance of military hardware. The Americans can call in their Apache helicopter gunships with 30mm chain guns, their drones, 155mm howitzers and AC-130 gunships, but thermal signatures can be blurred by Taliban fighters wrapped in blankets on a warm rock, and a flock of crows can give away the position of US soldiers. 

This brings you to a glimpse of the cost of war - "A javelin shoulder-fired rocket costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes war seem winnable."

Then there is the X-Factor that motivates smaller fighting units - "Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they are looking for. Not killing, necessarily, but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defence of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you've been exposed to it, there is almost nothing else that you'd rather do."

"In a crude sense the job of the young men is to undertake the work that their fathers are too old for, and the current generation of American fathers has decided that a certain six-mile-long valley in Kumar province needs to be brought under military control. Nearly 50 US soldiers have died carrying out those orders. I'm not saying that's a lot or a little, but the cost does need to be acknowledged."

The situation in Ladakh now is of course vastly different - especially the human terrain. Unlike US troops in Afghanistan seeking legitimacy and acknowledgement from a wider world, this is a place where a conquered people - the Tibetans - are looking for ways to settle scores with the Communist Party of China. This will be a different kind of fight on the ridges.

Power, Prosperity and Poverty

This one is was long overdue. I have been meaning to put down my thoughts about this much-recommended book for a few weeks now. "Why Nations Fail - The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty", was first published more than eight years ago but I managed to finish it only during this ongoing Covid-19 lockdown.

The book covers a broad sweep of history and geography to make its central point -  the importance of institutions. Starting with Nogales a city that sits astride on the border between USA and Mexico the authors point out to the stark difference in levels of development (the average US citizen is 7x more prosperous) The Mexican side apparently is stuck with the extractive, authoritarian institutions inherited from the Spanish while the North American side developed inclusive, democratic institutions , which, in the long run, have clearly made up for the lack of gold and silver mines.

We are shown similar patterns in the rest of South America, Europe (England vs. France), Russia, Africa (Congo, Ghana and Ethiopia), Turkey, the Koreas and China. The amazing extent to Spanish exploitation ("Economienda") in South America came as a revelation. I never knew, for instance, about the extent to which the indigenous people were forced out of their towns and villages into "Reducciones" to serve Spain's greed for silver and gold.

It seems an Inca labour institution called "Mit'a" ('a turn' in Quechua) was revived to cover about 200,000 miles wherein 1/7th of male populations from the Reductions were required to work in the mines at Potosi. On top of the "Repartimiento" system for distribution of goods involved forced sale of goods to locals at prices determined by the Spaniards, and under "Trajin" (the burden), indigenous people were forced to substitute for pack animals, for carrying goods within the country.

While stressing on the importance of inclusive institutions, the authors admit that "No two societies create the same institutions; they will have distinct custom, different systems of property rights and different ways of sharing wealth."

You also realise that much has changed since the time this book was conceived. Under Donald Trump USA is no longer the inclusive, equitable country it used to be. And then we have a completely new set of unknown thrown up by the Covid-19 pandemic and mass surveillance programs. Perhaps it is time to revisit the arguments presented in "Why Nations Fail".

Ribosomes - Making Sense of Blobology

This is not a book I would ever pick on an impulse. The cover itself  is quite intimidating - a confusing, colorful blob of tangled ribbons. On first glance it looks like a tome for the lab nerds, for those seeped in structural biology, the followers of specialized science journals, and certainly not the general reader.

I picked this book only because on the dark cover, I noticed blurps from three writers I admire - Siddharth Mukherjee, Richard Dawkins and Bill Bryson. The stock comment ' I could not put this book down' from one of them pointed towards the possibility the book could be read - and understood - by folks like me, those who are not specialists but merely curious.

I was not at all disappointed.  The author,Venki Ramakrishnan is the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and his book, "Gene Machine" is a personal story of a physicist turned biologist who helped decipher the secrets of the Ribosome.  Even if the topic sounds esoteric, the book is a down-to-earth narrative of a boy from Baroda who made it big.

Yet it is not the typical story of a south Indian vegetarian in USA. You get the impression of a adventurous, outgoing guy riding a series of lucky breaks. Perhaps the first of these came through a HoD at Baroda-U who got a letter from Ohio University seeking prospective students. Nineteen year old Venki is then offered a graduate scholarship without the usual GRE scores. He lands up in the America in the midst of the anti-war protests of 1971, and immediately after graduation, gets married to Vera Rosenberry, a talented illustrator of children's books, and a single mother.

In the initial chapters, Venki has a nice way of explaining his work with analogies. In the late 70s everybody knew that the ribosomes were responsible for protein synthesis, but nobody knew how -

"Imagine you are a Martian peering at the earth from above. You observe tiny objects on the surface that move mainly in straight lines, ocassionally turning at right angles...you could tell tht they consume hydrocarbons and emit carbon dioxide along with some pollutants and some heat. But you have absolutely no idea what these objects are, let alone how they work. Only by knowing the detailed construction of the object would you be able to see that it is made of hundreds of components that work together and that it has an engine connected to a crankshaft that make the wheels turn..."

Venki's search takes him from the university to his first job with the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee and then to Brookhaven on the East Coast. Along the way, X-ray crystallography becomes the main tool for deciphering the structure of the various complicated components of the ribosome at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, UK.

The book also helps you catch a glimpse into the petty politics of those engaged in cutting edge science, of the walled garden that is open only to those from 'elite' institutions, and the manner in which the race for a Nobel Prize brings out the worst in many scientists.

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LINKS

Good Reads - Gene Machine - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39088590-gene-machine

One Day in the Gulag

A hot summer evening in NCR Delhi, sitting on the terrace with a mug of hot coffee, a bowl of banana-chips, and a book: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

What could be be more incongruous?

The book describes a world quite difficult to imagine  - especially on a day when the temprature touched +46C! Bleak life within the Gulag - prison camps set in the barren, icy wastelands where the teperature dips to -41C; where the inmates are mostly those who offended the Soviet politial system, and are condemned to spend 10 to 20 years of their lives.   

It is appaling to even imagine a system that destroyed the lives of more than 10 million citizens for the most whimsical reasons. Many were prisoners of war who managed to escape Hitler's invading armies and return home only to be suspected of being counter-revolutionaries or spies. One man was sent as a military attache to Western Europe. After he returned back home, his patriotism and loyalty became suspect after he received a Christmas greeting from an aquaintance. This greeting landed him for 10 years in the Gulag.

The life of the protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Sukhov, is perhaps based that of the author himself who, as a young man, was arrested on the charges of 'making derogatory remarks about Stalin', and spent the next 8 years in labour camps: first in 'general' camps (Ust-Izhma?) with common criminals, and then later in Beria's 'special' camps for long-term prisoners. This book is set in one such camp in the region of Karaganda in Northern Kazakhstan.

Most prisoners did not survive their terms, and perished in the freezing labor camps. Chances of surviving aparently depended a lot on the team-leader of your unit:

"You've only to show a whip to a beaten dog. The frost was severe, but not as severe as the team leader...More depended on the work-report than on the work itself. A clever team-leader was the one who concentrated on the work-report. That is what kept the men fed. He had to prove that work which hadn't been done had been done, to turn jobs that were rated low to ones that were rated high. For this a team-leader had to have his head screwed on, and to be on the right side of the checkers. Their palms had to be greased too.."

Not an easy world to imagine while munching banana chips...  :(

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LINKS

* Book - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17125.One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich
*

Paz on India

It is interesing to view India through the eyes of Octavio Paz. 

A few days back, a tweet got me searching for the book "In Light of India" at the Dayal Singh Public Library. I had not heard of the book so when went across and mentioned the name of the author to Pankaj, the ever helpful librarian, he looked as though I had reminded him of along forgotten childhood memory. And when he pulled out the book from a corner bookshelf, I understood why. The last time anybody had borrowed this book was in 1997 - more than 20 years ago!

The book itself is a monograph of memories from 1954, the time when Paz was posted to India as a young diplomat. As can be expected, he reflects on the prevailing attitudes and biases of the time: an admiration for Nehru and the "secular" Congress party, and wariness towards the "Hindu nationalist" BJP; a sense of bewilderment over the cacophony of colors, smells that greet a visitor, and the diverse set of people who called themselves citizens of a newly minted republic. One has come to expect such reactions from visiting foreigners but Paz turns out to be slightly different.

Unlike the typical Western view of India what you get here is a unique view of a South American poet and traveller. India's caste system, for instance, is a puzzle he tries to decipher - how did it manage to survive two millennia of foreign invasions and proseletizing? 

"Castes... are not only cooperatives, such as ours, but also solidarity groups, genuine fraternities...this fabric of religious, economic, political, territorial, linguistic, and familial relations gives the castes their extraordinary solidity... Hinduism does not convert individuals; it absorbs communities and tribes, their gods and rites."

Paz notes the strong influence of Mesoamerica in India's cuisine - the word "chili" is of Nahuatl origin for the plant originally came from the Americas...- Another Mexican import "Chico-zapote" is called Chiku is North India and Sapota in the South!

He dives deep into classical Indian poetry and is amazed to find in Vidyakara's anthology of poetry, erotic poems written by Dharmakirti, a Buddhist philosopher and logician who lived in the 7th century.

Yet, Octavio Paz has his failings. The clarity with which he looks at India clouds up when he compares the influence of 'Western Civilization' on Latin America. In his view, the Spanish conquistadors did a great thing by uniting the various tribes in South America, and weaning them away from cycles of war and blood-sacrifice, and introducing to them a new religion in which "sacrifice of a god who became man and spilled his blood to redeem the world". Not a word about the massacre of the Mayans, Zapotecs, Aztecs and Teotihuacanians, or the systematic destruction of a unique civilization, its unique art and architecture, or of the shiploads of gold and silver looted and taken away to enrich Europe! 

If the world is a kaliedoscope, the designs and patterns seen by Paz are unique, but his book leaves you feeling a bit shortchanged, of expecting a real South American perspective, and finding instead, merely another European dressed in a poncho.

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LINKS

- GoodReads - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11708.In_Light_of_India

The Ivory Throne

I was not too keen on picking another 500 page tome. Having just finished "The Gene", I was looking for something lighter, something which did not have its notes and index running into a hundred pages.

I had almost set the book aside when I decided to flip through the book one last time. I saw a map of South India in the 1920s and an old sepia print titled "The Matriarchs of Mavelikkara", and got hooked.

"The Ivory Throne" by Manu Pillai is more than just the "Chronicles of the House of Travancore". It is a refreshing new way of looking at the history of a kingdom that has, so far,  seen only the fawning eulogies of erstwhile aristocrats, or the dismissive narratives of Marxist historians.

Pillai's attention is focused on the life and times of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi. While this is, no doubt, quite interesting, I find myself drawn back to an earlier phase when Kerala saw, within the span of one century (1400-1500), the influence of foreign ships coming from two different directions.

From the East came came Admiral Zheng who sailed from China to Calicut no less than seven times to during the period 1405 to 1430. His fleets had as many as 250 ships manned by 28,000 soldiers. Even after the Ming emperors decided to isolate themselves, there remained in Kerala a fairly large community of Chinese-Malayali's called Chinna Kribala, with one of its stat sailors a pirate named Chinali!

A few decades later, in July 1497, King Manuel of Portugal sent Vasco da Gama to find the fabled spice gardens of India, with a "distinctly expendable crew of convicts and criminals". Ten months later, he was trying to peddle baubles and trinkets at the court of the Zamorin, Manavikrama. Unable to break the Arab monopoly over the spice trade in the first instance, King Manuel sent an armada led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral in 1500.

The Zamorins of Calicut were obviously nor prepared for Cabral's persuasive methods. Stymied by the Arab traders, he decided to let his guns do the talking. A single day of bombardment from the sea, killed nearly 600 people, and then he went about playing one kingdom in Kerala against another.

Once the dust settled, the natives had their fill of internecine wars of attrition ("Kudipaka") while the Europeans had ended up with a trade monopoly, and then some more. It was not until Marthanda Varma took charge of Travancore in 1729 that things started to look up in this part of India.

"The Ivory Throne" leaves me wondering - when will we have more historians piece together this real history of Kerala? What are the secrets that continues to be locked in genetic markers and mitochondrial DNA of the Mallus who come in all colors, shapes and sizes?


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LINKS & REFERENCES

* Interview - The Hindu - http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/manu-s-pillai-zooms-in-on-the-life-of-maharani-sethu-lakshmi-bayi-in-his-debut-book/article7900248.ece

* Book - The Ivory Throne - http://www.amazon.in/Ivory-Throne-Chronicles-House-Travancore/dp/9351776425

Roaring and Bleating

Bharat Karnad launched his new book today: "Why India is not a Great Power (yet)".

I had been looking forward to this event ever since the CPR invitation hit my inbox. I had expected thisto be another of those dour events where folks landed up late, where a flunky praised the author and his book to the skies, the author read some excerpts, everbody clapped, chatted over some coffee and dispersed.

As expected, the event started 30 mts late, but everything else was refreshingly different. The author made some opening remarks, positioning himself as a military "hawk" and then went on to paint a dismal picture of India as a world-power-wannabe. An aspirant unable to muster the will, either to have a global vision, or to implement it. A lion in that bleeted like sheep, and acted like one.

Karnad's views on the subject are well known. Interestingly, while all the panelists agreed that it was a great piece of work, not one of the agreed with his conclusions. And the best part of it was that Karad had personally invited experts who had a diametrically  opposite world view.

Jairam Ramesh, a Congress-man and former minister in the UPA government, felt that Karnad had erred in equating military might with being a global power; Shiv Shankar Menon presented elegant and coherent agruments on why all the policy recommendations of the book were signs of a declining power, not a rising one; Adm. Raja Menon read out a note from which it was difficult to separate exerpts from his own views, and Maj.Gen Narasimhan thought that Karnad's conclusions were flawed because they were based on a limited interaction with those who knew better.

All through the wit, sarcasm and sage advise, the experts agreed on one point: There is not much  internal coherence within Government of India - each ministry and department has its own ideas on what constitutes "national interest", with many of them working at cross-purposes.

Like the 'Blind Men of Hindoostan', they all hold on to their own views and miss the elephant in the room.

Some interesting takeaways:

• Nehru, despite all proclamations on non-alignment gave the first go-ahead for the nuclear weapons program. This was part of a vision which withered away after 1964
• 23% of Indan Army budget goes towards maintaining armoured corpes. Two mountain divisions can be maintained for the cost of one armoured division;
• Despite all its war-games, the IAF was completely unprepared for Kargil. It had never envisaged a was on the Himalayan frontier. Even today, the focus remains on 'short, decisive' wars along the Western border, despite rising alarms about the Tibet border.
• Our military brass seeks approval from a Western audience, not its domestic stakeholders. It took an MIT case-study and GE's initiatives, for to realize the value of "frugal innovation";
• Everybody realises the need for a strong private sector reducing our dependence on imports but there is not sufficient motivation (read "trust"), to see this through.

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LINKS:

- OUP Book - http://www.oup.co.in/product/academic-general/politics/international-relations/207/why-india-is-not-great-power-yet/9780199459223

War - What is it Good For?

Why did Yugoslavia break-up?  According to a Croat "...we had lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to ensure that we loved each other very much".

Ian Morris's latest book takes this line of thinking way beyond the alleys of the former Yugoslavia to an analysis of war and conflict across history, and comes to a startling conclusion. According to him, War is good for humanity.

Large-scale, organised violence apparently makes way for extended periods of peace and prosperity. It encourages trade and economies of scale. At their height, the greatest of empires - the Roman in the West, the Han in China and the Mauryan in modern India and Pakistan - each covered about 1.5 - 2 million square miles, governed 30-60 million people.

For some reason, the technology that drove organised violence seems to have grown much faster in Eurasia than in the Americas. Sticks and stones gave way to swords, spears, war-horses, chariots, the composite bow, and then the great jump to cannons, fire-arms and missiles. Morris seems to agree with Jared Diamond's argument about latitudes in Guns, Germs and Steel.

Somehow his arguments seem to fall apart when it comes to explaining how warfare will evolve in the present context. How long can the American globocop control the world through its grip on the internet, and drones raining hellfire through joysticks held in Arizona?

As always, hindsight is 20:20.

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LINKS

* Amazon - Ian Morris - http://www.amazon.com/War-What-Good-For-Civilization/dp/0374286000 

* Review in the Telegraph -- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10786021/War-What-Is-It-Good-For-by-Ian-Morris-review.html 

Ashoka - Search for the Lost Emperor

Ashoka by Charles Allen.

This is the sort of book that makes you wonder what on earth Indian historians have been up to since 1947. Why is it that hardly any of them writes about our own history in a manner that is both engaging and scholarly?

We have all plodded through history in our school textbooks. We see Ashoka's royal insignia on every single coin and currency note we pass around, and yet, how many wonder about the kind of international effort that has gone in, to piece together the life and times of a king who ruled most of today's India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 300 years before Christ was born?

Charles Allen weaves a wonderful narrative based on ancient texts recovered from Sri Lanka, China, Persia, Myanmar, and, of course, India. In the end, he notes:

‘It is striking - even downright disheartening - how the quintessentially Indian monarch still fails to be accorded a wholehearted welcome in the land of his birth more than a century after he first emerged as a subject fit for a biography... 

The nation that adores Rama - the mythical hero - but has very little time for the real thing: the man who first forged India into a single nation state, and thus the real claim to be its founding father; the first ruler with a distinctive, identifiable voice; the pre-Gandhian pioneer of non-violence, the first proponent of conquest by moral force alone, whose words remain absolutely, unequivocally unique among rulers as a statement of governing principles.

Amazing book.

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LINKS / REFERNCES

* Review - Goodreads - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13220954-ashoka

* Allen, Charles (2012): ASHOKA, Little Brown, UK  -- Google Books - http://books.google.co.in/books?id=K4vHjbUtf_4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false