Day 137: Book Excerpt: Engines Of Change

Railroads for India were proposed initially in the mid-1830s. Fifteen years of promotion and debate ensued until key decisions in favor of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (hereafter GIPR) and the East Indian Railway (hereafter EIR) were made in March 1849. Thus, finally, railroad building in Britain’s largest imperial possession began in 1850. The ceremonial turning of the first sod for the GIPR occurred at Bombay on October 31, 1850. Work on what became the main railroad in Bengal and in the Gangetic Valley, the EIR, began near Calcutta in 1851.

In 1853, the governor-general of India, Lord Dalhousie (in office 1848–1856) laid out a comprehensive plan for the development of the trunk lines. The capable, hard-working, and assertive Dalhousie was a committed technological modernizer. His political responsibilities before he went to India had made him familiar with British railroads. Dalhousie later claimed he had unleashed in India the “great engines of social improvement, which the sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to Western nations—I mean Railways, uniform Postage, and the Electric Telegraph.”

Dalhousie’s influential, lengthy (216 pages handwritten in a sprawling, bold hand) memorandum—a “minute” in the language of the day—deserves close study. It provided justifications and guidelines for the system of railroads that was developed in South Asia under British auspices in the third quarter of the 19th century. The governor-general emphasized the political and military benefits railroads would provide. “Immeasurable” advantages would accrue to a colonial administration composed of a “comparative handful” of British administrators and soldiers scattered over the subcontinent. Railroads would enable Britain “to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point in as many days as it would now require months, and to an extent which at present is physically impossible.”

Dalhousie also noted the “commercial and social advantages” of railroads. These advantages included an increase in trade between India and Britain: more Indian “produce,” including raw cotton, would be transported to Britain, and more manufactured British goods would be sold in India. Railroads would encourage enterprise, multiply production, facilitate the discovery of latent resources, increase national wealth, and encourage “progress in social improvement” similar to that which occurred in Europe and the United States of America.

The hardheaded Dalhousie stressed the political, military, and economic benefits accruing largely to Britain, to the Anglo-Indian connection, and to the colonial regime. He sought to influence calculating decision makers in London: his political masters, and also potential British investors from whom the bulk of the financing for India’s railroads had to be obtained. Thus, in the 1850s and for many decades, India’s railroads were conceived and executed as a colonial project. British authorities, with little input from Indians, decided when and where lines would be built—and a good deal more. India’s railroads were meant to serve British interests first and foremost, among which military and administrative security and economic benefits were central. The interests of Indians were incidental although, as represented in the writings of Dalhousie and many Britons, the progressive consequences for India of the railroads was a self-evident truth: an assertion accepted then as later by many Indians even though Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj (1921) about the railroads’ contribution to the British control of India. Gandhi, in fact, went further. He denounced railroads as “evil” since “good travels at a snail’s pace.”

Gandhi was a central figure in the Indian struggle for independence from 1919 to his assassination in 1948. His views on railroads, however, were not widely accepted—and he himself used railroads to travel across India in the nationalist cause. Most nationalists’ denunciation of the railroads came to focus on the ways in which the system operated and on the British dominance of the upper echelons of the workforce: railroads per se and their progressive presence were not questioned. More typical of Indian views held in the 1870s (and in the 1970s) were those of Framjee Vicajee who published a forty-four page pamphlet titled Political and Social Effects of Railways in India (1875). The pamphlet praised the many interconnected, progressive changes railroads had set in motion across South Asia, “the great economical and social changes, due partly to railways and partly to other instruments of civilization” through which India was “silently passing.”

~~Engines Of Change: The Railroads That Made India -by- Ian J. Kerr

Day 136: Book Excerpt: The Chaos Imperative

Letters started pouring in to Switzerland’s University of Bern from physicists all over Europe with questions and praise. Some came from the most esteemed scientists of the day. The letters were addressed to one Albert Einstein, who a number of months earlier had published his theory of relativity. But what the letter writers didn’t know was that Einstein didn’t work at the university. The physicists knew that he lived in Bern and just assumed he was a professor at the university there.

In fact, Einstein had nothing to do with the university. He was a patent clerk. A government worker had turned the world of physics upside down.

We all know the story of how Einstein, at a young age, made stunning advances in physics. Most of us also have heard that Einstein was a poor student and was able to make his pioneering discoveries in physics despite being completely divorced from academia.

It was almost too extraordinary to believe. A twenty-six-year-old emerges seemingly out of nowhere with a scientific theory that changes the world. That alone would have been unprecedented. But ten years later Einstein once again revolutionized physics, reinventing our understanding of gravity. Today Einstein’s name is virtually synonymous with genius.

The explanation that most of us have grown up with for Einstein’s breakthroughs is that Einstein had such a brilliant and unusual mind that he—almost magically, in a stroke of insight—saw the universe in a whole new way.
In trying to understand Einstein’s unique genius, scientists over the years initially focused on the structural nature of his brain. Einstein had such an extraordinary mind, scientists reasoned, that there must be something fundamentally different about his brain.

When Einstein died in 1953, coroner Thomas Harvey removed what had become the most famous brain in history as a matter of course; it was a regular part of the autopsy procedure. What he did next, however—putting the brain in a jar of formaldehyde, slipping the jar into a bag, and walking off with it—was not. But Harvey believed it was his duty to science and to the world to preserve Einstein’s brain in order to let researchers study it and unlock the secrets of his mind.

In the succeeding years, neuroscientists, or neuroanatomists, as they used to be called, asked Harvey for certain sections of the brain in a race to pinpoint exactly which part of Einstein’s brain was so unique.

Scientists found that Einstein had a higher-than-average concentration of neurons in the part of the brain responsible for mathematical thinking. This seemed like a promising lead. The problem with this finding, however, was that Einstein wasn’t exceptionally gifted in math. His first wife, Mileva Maric, used to check all his calculations and correct them. And while Einstein was far more accomplished in math than your average English—or math—major, his discoveries weren’t really mathematical breakthroughs. Instead, his theories of relativity reconceptualized our notions of time and space. They were more a new set of ways of looking at the universe, supported by the math, than a set of complex mathematical formulas.

Another scientist, Marian C. Diamond, discovered that Einstein had more glial cells than average. Glial cells make up the myelin layer that insulates the brain’s axons, speeding up communication between the neurons. They also function as a distribution system, bringing energy to the neurons while removing waste.

However, only in one area of Einstein’s brain was the difference in glial cells statistically significant. And since Einstein’s brain was older than the other brains Diamond compared it against, and glial cells continue to divide as we age, it was only natural that Einstein had more of them. So while his glial network conceivably could have had something to do with his genius, we simply cannot know its impact for certain.
On and on went the physiological investigations. Scientists discovered that Einstein’s brain was wider than average. On the other hand, it also weighed less than average.

In the end, the studies on Einstein’s brain proved compromised in many ways and yielded no real insight into his genius. The reality is that each of us has unique idiosyncrasies in the makeup of our brain.

Even Einstein didn’t think it was his brain that made him who he was. He once commented that the gap between what the public thought of his intellectual prowess and the reality was “grotesque.”

But if it wasn’t his brain that made the difference, what did set Einstein apart? And what does Einstein’s genius have to do with chaos?

At the University of Zurich at the turn of the twentieth century, rows of well-dressed students would have been taking copious notes, smoking, and tackling complex formulas. One student who likely would not have been in the room, however, was Einstein, who was inclined to skip class and hang out in the coffeehouses on the Bahnhofstrasse, talking about new ideas in physics with the café crowd.

In the summer, while other physics students were working in labs or helping professors publish papers, Einstein hiked the beautiful trails of the Appenzell District in the Alps. It was as if his entire year were one big, unstructured interlude.

And that is our first clue to Einstein’s genius. To all appearances, Einstein was a slacker. Granted, he was a slacker obsessed with theoretical physics, but he was a slacker nonetheless.

He couldn’t be bothered to go to class. He engendered so little confidence in his academic abilities that one of his instructors suggested he give up studying physics altogether. In a great bit of irony, when graduation rolled around, Einstein was the only unemployed member of the class of 1900. His father, Hermann, tried to call in favors to get his son a job, but to no avail.

Imagine his poor mother’s desperate concern: “You have to start going to class.” “What happened to the intelligent young man I knew?” “You know, if you worked harder, you’d be surprised by how much progress you could make.”

It’s easy to sympathize with his parents’ likely responses. Einstein’s seemingly dilettante behavior would have driven most parents to distraction.

But his parents’ misgivings were for naught. What Einstein was actually doing was exercising a very special part of his brain.

Most of us tend to have clearly defined ideas about what makes up the road to success. We value discipline and diligence, hard work, and the idea of “paying your dues.” Unstructured time just “hanging out” is for teenagers with too much time on their hands, we think, and for surfer bums. Most of us need to pay attention, study hard, and learn.

But that’s not what Einstein did at all. As we’ll see, Einstein followed a specific process in developing his ideas—one intimately related to the chaos imperative. It is one that arguably led to his extraordinary and unpredictable brilliance. And it is one that each of us can tap into as well.

~~The Chaos Imperative: How Chance and Disruption Increase Innovation, Effectiveness and Success -by- Ori Brafman and Judah Pollack

Day 135: Book Excerpt: Sex Cells

The market for sex cells incorporates both financial compensation and the language of donation, a combination that appears oxymoronic at first glance. The reason that paid donation sounds so incongruous is the longstanding assumption that gifts and commodities are not only completely distinct from one another, but are also very different kinds of things. Arjun Appadurai traced this assumption among social scientists to the different legacies of Marcel Mauss and Karl Marx, providing the following summary.

Gifts, and the spirit of reciprocity, sociability, and spontaneity in which they are typically exchanged, usually are starkly opposed to the profit-oriented, self-centered, and calculated spirit that fires the circulation of commodities. Further, where gifts link things to persons and embed the flow of things in the flow of social relations, commodities are held to represent the drive—largely free of moral or cultural constraints—of goods for one another, a drive mediated by money and not by sociality.

In an echo of Zelizer’s argument, Appadurai considers this dichotomy to be an oversimplified depiction of economic life, and he has encouraged scholars to trace the social life of things. In particular, he underscores the possibility that the same thing can sometimes be both a gift and a commodity, albeit at different points in its trajectory. Lesley Sharp pushes this point further, drawing on research in organ donation to contend that multiple understandings of the same bodily good might be operating at the same time, especially in medical settings. For the deceased’s kin, a donated organ is a part of the family that lives on; for the recipient, it is a lifesaving gift; for the doctors, it is a valuable commodity that should not be “wasted” on an undeserving recipient. Sharp concludes, “The language of gift exchange may obscure capitalist forms of commodification. In other words, two models of commodification might be at work simultaneously, one more akin to Mauss’s understanding of the symbolically charged gift and reciprocity, the other to Marx’s notion of commodities as goods produced under the alienating conditions of capitalism.”

The question is whether these various understandings matter for the people whose bodies are being commodified. What happens when paid donation is considered to be more of a gift or more of a job? Shifting the focus from determining which things are actually gifts or actually commodities to comparing the use of gift rhetoric and commodity rhetoric makes possible an analysis of whether commodified exchange can be experienced in different ways.
The first possibility is that framing donation as a gift or a job makes no difference whatsoever. It is merely language that “obscures,” to use Sharp’s word, what is really going on. This is a common theoretical vision of bodily commodification, one that also appears in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ definition of it as “encompassing all capitalized economic relations between humans in which human bodies are the token of economic exchanges that are often masked by something else – love, altruism, pleasure, kindness.” These scholars echo the view of Titmuss and others that the monetary exchange is fundamental, that commodification is inherently objectifying and alienating, and calling it something else does nothing to change the experience of being paid for bodily goods.

The second possibility is that these gendered frames do have consequences. Given that gift exchange is traditionally associated with affective ties and reciprocity while commodified exchange is marked by contractual relations that conclude when payment is rendered, it is possible that even just the use of gift language evokes a sense of sociability, a sense of connection between donor and recipient that is more durable and lasting than would be expected given the monetary exchange. This is especially plausible in a market for genetic material, as eggs and sperm are purchased in the hopes of conceiving children. Our culture’s emphasis on biogenetic ties in defining kinship may mean that donors are considered more as family than as strangers.

However, forging such connections may result in the expectation that donors and recipients demonstrate care and concern for one another, a form of emotional work. Arlie Hochschild originally formulated the concept of “emotional labor” in her study comparing female flight attendants, who had to exhibit empathy for the customer’s every concern, with male debt collectors, who had to manufacture anger with debtors over the phone. Subsequent studies have revealed that these sorts of gendered expectations for emotional work appear in many kinds of employment, and they are based in large part on the cultural norms of nurturing femininity and distant masculinity discussed in the previous section.

More recent research on emotional labor suggests that it may be experienced as more than just coercive and alienating. In a study of nursing home workers, Steven Lopez finds that meaningful interactions can result from “organizational attempts to create hospitable conditions for the development of caring relationships between service providers and recipients.” This raises the possibility that instilling an emotional connection between gamete donor and recipient may forestall feelings of alienation, in that both parties are offered an alternative narrative to the stigmatized story of handing over cash for body parts.

Since the dominant assumption has been that bodily commodification is inherently and uniformly degrading, there has been relatively little empirical research on the experiences of those who participate in such markets, including the market for sex cells. There is a rich tradition of sociological and anthropological research on reproduction, some of which includes discussions of commodification, but most of it centers on pregnancy, abortion, and birth, so there is little known about men’s experiences in this realm. In general, there has been less concern about the commodification of men’s bodies.

~~Sex Cells- The Medical Market For Eggs And Sperm -by- Rene Almeling

Day 134: Book Excerpt: Alexander The Great

The retreat he inspired has always seemed sympathetic. Alexander’s eastern plans have not been well received by historians: many have argued that they never existed and some have maintained that all mentions of the Ganges, are best discarded as legend. Apart from the facts, these arguments assume that no sane man could have wished to go on; there are two sides to such a judgement, and only one finds its evidence in Greek accounts of the campaign. The kingdom of Magadha was powerful, certainly, but reports of its strength were no less fantastic than those of the legendary armies of Indian epic heroes, and however plentiful its elephants, it was passing through a painful old age. In native Jain tradition, Dhana Nanda, last of its kings, was long remembered as son of a common woman, born, therefore, outside the ruling caste and detested by many of his courtiers. In the epic book of Ceylon, he is said to have extorted heaps of gold from his subjects and hidden them, meanly, in the waters of the Ganges. Alexander, most remarkably, knew this perfectly well from his informants: Ksandrames, said Porus, was ‘merely the son of a barber’, and not only is a barber’s son a common Indian idiom for a feeble and low-born king, but it is exactly echoed in later Indian histories as a judgement on Dhana Nanda himself. The last of the Nanda dynasty had no firm hold on himself or on Magadha’s loyalties; like Cortes, Alexander had stood on the brink of an old civilization, rich but torn by internal discontent. The journey from the Beas to the Eastern Ocean would have lasted another three months down a royal road, and his officers knew it as clearly as he did. And yet they turned it down.

Only the future can prove what they missed. Within three years of Alexander’s death, a pretender arose in northern India, Chandragupta the Mauryan, who marshalled an army and made Magadha his own. Dhana Nanda was deposed, and ten years later Chandragupta was even pressing on the Punjab frontier, perhaps drawing help from its seditious highland tribesmen. In return for five hundred elephants, Alexander’s Asian successor Seleucus was forced to concede him the Indian provinces; Chandragupta returned to Palimbothra, where he heeded his minister Kautilya and ruled in state for another twenty years. Behind the wooden palisading of the palace he kept open court to Greek envoys, who would come by the royal road from Amritsar, admire his harem and stroll in gardens which seemed to have been his for a hundred years. When asked how he had done it, said the Greeks, Chandragupta would reply: ‘I watched Alexander when I was still a young man; Alexander,’ he explained, ‘had been within an ace of seizing India, because its king was so hated and despised, both for his character and his low birth.’

If an Indian imitator could do it, so too could his master ten years before: Dhana Nanda’s kingdom could have been set against itself and Alexander might yet have walked among Palimbothra’s peacocks, improved its fencing and enjoyed the fish-ponds on which the Indian princes had always learnt to sail. But not far from its gates the Ganges spreads into an estuary and glides beneath palm-trees through the banks of the silt-brown fields: it asks to be followed, and Alexander need only have done so for another six hundred miles, until he saw the sea-ehore opening before him and would have concluded, wrongly but poignantly, that at last he was near the edge of his world. The Eastern ocean was three months away, and the soldiers had refused it. The conquerer’s dream of the past few years was gone, when he knew too well that it could have come true.
...
The retreat from the Beas was a disappointment, not a danger. The men were not so much embittered as exhausted; as for the officers, none of them plotted to take advantage of their king’s defeat. For defeat it was, and the disgrace would far outweigh the negligible fears in Alexander’s mind. He would not easily live with such a rebuff to his sense of glory, the heart of his Homeric values. He reached the Jhelum, only to find that Bucephala had been washed away by the rains; worse, news came from the ladies’ quarters that Roxane’s first baby had miscarried.

Only Porus benefited from the new despair. The ‘seven nations and two thousand towns’ between the Jhelum and the Beas were added to his kingdom; they had lost their interest now that the march to the east had been cancelled. There was only one direction left which promised Alexander his required adventure. It would be ignominious to retrace his steps through the Hindu Kush; now, therefore, was the moment to put the ship timber to use and explore southwards down the Jhelum to the river Indus. It was not the safest route home, but as a link between the conquests in east and west, this waterway might prove invaluable. Though Alexander had at last discovered from the natives that the Indus would not bring him round into the Nile and Upper Egypt he may well have preferred to keep up this hope among his weary troopers.

Back on the Jhelum more than 35,000 fresh soldiers from the west were waiting, raising the army’s strength to 120,000, a massive force by classical standards; they had also brought medical supplies and smart new suits of gold- and silver-plated armour. More important, they would raise morale. Eight hundred ships of various shapes and sizes were needed for the voyage down the Indus, but such was the energy of the newly equipped army that two months later the fleet was ready to be manned by the expert crews of Cypriots, Egyptians, Ionian Greeks and Phoenicians who had been following Alexander, as before they had followed the fortunes of the Persian kings. The journey downstream to the outer ocean could begin.

It is a commonplace of sermons and histories that powerful men are corrupted and pay for their licence by loneliness and growing insecurity. But in life, the wicked have a way of flourishing and not every despot ends more miserably than he began: power may turn a man’s head, but only the virtuous or the uninvolved insist that it must always cost him his soul. Inevitably, with Alexander this moral problem begins to be raised: thwarted, did he lose his judgement and turn on the methods of a textbook tyrant in his i solation? Failure will often show in a general’s style of leadership: he may no longer delegate his work, while refusing to take the blame for its consequences: he may be too exhausted to take a firm decision, too unsure to resist the meanest suspicions. It is only a legend that when Alexander heard from his philosopher Anaxarchus of the infinite number of possible worlds, he wept, reflected that he had not even conquered the one he knew. The need to justify a lost ambition can cause a man to over-reach; moralists, at least, might expect that Alexander’s first rebuff from his army would mark the loosening of his grip on reality.

History does not confirm that this was so. As no officer describes the mood of the king in council, it is impossible, as always, to divide the credit for the army’s actions between Alexander and his staff. Events, however, do not suggest autocracy or nervous indecision. Within two months, the entire fleet had been built from the felled timber, a tribute to the energy of officers and carpenters, and Alexander declared the enterprise open in characteristic style. After athletic games and musical competitions, he ordered animals for sacrifice to be given free to each platoon, ...

~~Alexander The Great -by- Robin Lane Fox

Day 133: Book Excerpt: Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees

From the beginning of my Indological studies, I have been quite convinced that Hindu society was much less divided ideologically, that the top and the bottom were not so utterly alien to each other, than was usually contended, particularly among anthropologists. Being myself of classical philosophical training, I could not imagine how to convince others, including anthropologists, of this belief, and I was prepared to say that, after all, it was a philosophical matter that should not be debated in scholarly circles, because everyone had his own opinion beforehand. I now think, however, the Hindu gods have been with me, and even more so the Hindu goddess.   

It was years ago, when I started studying the goddess both through texts and through fieldwork in South India, that my attention was drawn to a series of minor carnivorous gods who were all guardians and devotees of the goddess. Actually, although the texts taught me one side of the situation, fieldwork brought me another type of data which by and by started to make sense through my classical background. The more or less poor and local goddess temples I visited contained some lesser known deities who had the common property of being subordinate to the goddess. Quite by chance, I started in coastal Andhra and noticed in front of the so-called gramadevata,or village goddess temples one of these minor gods called Potu Raju. By now I have published a few small articles about him, and especially about his usual shape as a wooden stake and its similarity to the Vedic sacrificial stake, the yupa. I have since been interested in following this plastic motif of the post under different versions in different parts of South India, and I am preparing a book on the whole subject.
   
For the present I want to select two of these versions, but not    mainly from the viewpoint of the post, which in our present cases can no longer be so easily compared to the yupa, but from the angle of myth and ritual, which also introduces a number of classical references. The two versions are found in Mariyamman temples, one in the lower Kaveri basin mainly among temples on the north bank of the delta area, and the other in Kongunad. It is mainly the posts and rituals that differentiate the two, but these elements are both connected with mythic differences as well. Everywhere my visits to the temples were quite brief, and I never attended the festivals personally.
   
I shall discuss only two examples of the first category, which have in common at first sight an impalement stake in front of the temple. Mariyamman's shrine is always considered to be in the center of the village. Usually the local landlord caste is that of the Vanniyar, or exceptionally the Kallar.
   
The Valattur temple (Papanasam Taluk, Thanjavur District) is a Mariyamman temple, as usual facing east. It is trying to revive its traditions. The Kallar are the dominant caste. The festival takes place in the month of Cittirai (April-May). The Kallar informants, including the headman of the village, explain that Vaisnava and Smarta Brahmans live on the northern side of the temple, as do the Acari; all the Kallar live on the southern side. One Velalar family provides Mariyamman with a priest. In front of the temple are a balipitham 3and an impalement stake that served originally to impale Kattavarayan, that demon king who stole a Brahman woman. But Kattavarayan's friend, Cinnan, helped him out of the difficulty. A Cettithat is, one of those rich merchants who used formerly to be attacked and robbed of their goods by the Kallarpassed by the kalumaram (a high hook-swinging post and not the low one now there) and asked what it was. Cinnan advised him to climb it and see for himself. So the Cetti did, and Cinnan quickly impaled him. Soon after, some eagleskalakucameand plucked out his eyes. Since then the Cetti has been worshipped on the kalumaram as Kaluvutaiyan: the Master of the impalement stake.

We can bypass most of the ritual, but must note some characteristic details. Inside the temple mandapam are several painted wooden statues of Kattavarayan with his two wives, Kaluvutaiyan, Cinnan, and Karuppucami. There is a festival to the god Aiyanar that is celebrated at the same time as Mariyamman's in Cittirai. Some he-goats are offered both on Mariyamman's side and on Aiyanar's side, but in each case they are offered to the subordinate demon guardians, so that the distinction between the vegetarian Mariyamman and Aiyanar and the meat-eating demons is well marked. One or two days after the conclusion of the seventeen-day festival, there comes the day of "human sacrifice." This takes the form of kavati offerings, which are of three types: alaku-kavati,in which long needles (alaku)are stuck under the skin of those who stand under the vow; pal-kavati,in which a stick is carried on the shoulder with a pot of milk at each end; and ter-kavati,in which a tiny ter or rath (a war chariot) is drawn by a rope and a hook fixed under the skin of the offerer's back. These offerings are brought to the goddess at the end of a rather long walk. Kallar are non-vegetarian people. But they show all respect to the vegetarian diet of Mariyamman and Aiyanar, who are the protectors of their village. The "tortures" for which they take vows are of a rather mild type and do not seem to upset the goddess, though the needles and hooks are removed as soon as the votary arrives at the temple.   

One more thing: Kattavarayan seems to have some special link with the Kallar, because the latter spare him even though usually the impalement stake is meant for him as the one who stole a Brahman woman. The Kallar, although formerly a "criminal caste," regard themselves as Ksatriyas, because there are Kallar kings. Kattavarayan is also a Ksatriya, if we remember that he is the same as Arjuna Kartavirya, the oppressive king who stole the cow of the Brahman Jamadagni, whose wife Renuka is herself identical with Mariyamman. But this is not the only place where Kattavarayan is spared: it would be difficult to assume that he is forever sitting on the impalement stake and at the same time permanently staying with the goddess as her guardian and devotee. But the Tamil stories about Kattavarayan are very far from the epic and Puranic ones. One feature remains, though: he is still a warrior, and the cow turns into a Brahman woman in order to retain the classical pattern of distorted relations between Brahmans and Ksatriyas.

~~Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees -ed- Alf Hiltebeitel

Day 132: Book Excerpt: Brilliant Blunders

In his masterwork Principia, first published in 1687, Isaac Newton noted that “a globe of red hot iron equal to our earth, that is, about 40,000,000 feet in diameter, would scarcely cool in an equal number of days, or in above 50,000 years.” Realizing he could not easily square this result with his religious beliefs, Newton was quick to add, “But I suspect that the duration of heat may, on account of some latent causes, increase in a yet less proportion than that of the diameter; and I should be glad that the true proportion was investigated by experiments.”

Newton was not the only seventeenth-century scientist to think about this problem. The famous philosophers Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also discussed the cooling of the Earth from an initially molten state. However, the first person who appears to have taken seriously Newton’s advice about an experimental investigation—and who in addition was imaginative enough to attempt to use the cooling problem to estimate the age of the Earth—was the eighteenth-century mathematician and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.
Buffon was a truly prolific character who was not only an accomplished scientist but also a successful businessman. He is perhaps best known for the clarity and forcefulness with which he presented a new method for approaching nature. His monumental lifework, Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière (Natural History, General and Particular)—thirty-six-volumes of which were completed during his lifetime (with eight more published posthumously)—was read by most of the educated people of the day in Europe and North America. Buffon’s aim was to deal in succession with topics ranging from the solar system, the Earth, and the human race to the different kingdoms of living creatures.

In his mental excursion into the Earth’s physical past, Buffon assumed that the Earth started as a molten sphere after having been ejected from the Sun due to a collision with a comet. Then, in the true spirit of an experimentalist, he was not satisfied with a purely theoretical scenario—Buffon proceeded immediately to manufacture spheres of different diameters and to measure accurately the time it took them to cool down. From these experiments he estimated that the terrestrial globe solidified in 2,905 years and cooled down to its present temperature in 74,832 years, even though he suspected that the cooling time could be much longer.

Eventually, however, it was not pure Newtonian physics that brought the problem of the Earth’s age into the limelight. The surge in the study of fossils in the eighteenth century convinced naturalists such as Georges Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and James Hutton that both the paleontological and the geological records required the operation of geological forces over exceedingly long periods of time. So long, in fact, that, as Hutton has put it, he found “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

In view of the increasing difficulty of trying to cram the entire history of the Earth into the biblical mere few thousand years, some of the more religiously inclined naturalists (but not only them) opted to rely on catastrophes such as floods as agents of rapid changes. If great expanses of time were to be denied, catastrophes appeared to be the only vehicle that could significantly shape the Earth’s surface almost instantaneously. To be sure, the distribution of marine fossils provided clear evidence for the action of flooding and glaciation in the Earth’s geological past, but many of the ardent catastrophists were at least partially motivated by their unwavering loyalty to the biblical text rather than by the scientific attestation. Richard Kirwan—one of the well-known chemists of the day—articulated this position clearly. Kirwan pitted Hutton directly against Moses in describing how dismayed he was to observe “how fatal the suspicion of the high antiquity of the globe has been to the credit of Mosaic history, and consequently to religion and morality.”

The situation started to change dramatically with the publication of Charles Lyell’s three-volume Principles of Geology in the years 1830–33. Lyell, who was also Charles Darwin’s close friend, made it clear that the catastrophist doctrine was far too frail to last as a compromise between science and theology. He decided to put aside the question of the origin of the Earth and to concentrate on its evolution. Lyell argued that the forces that sculpted the Earth—volcanism, sedimentation, erosion, and similar processes—remained essentially unchanged throughout the Earth’s history, both in their strength and in their nature. This was the idea of uniformitarianism that inspired Darwin’s concept of gradualism in the evolution of species. The basic premise was simple: If there was one thing that these slow-acting geological forces needed in order to have an appreciable effect, it was time. Lots of it. Lyell’s followers have almost abandoned the notion of a definite age altogether in favor of the rather vague “inconceivably vast” time. In other words, Lyell’s Earth was one that was almost in a steady state, with snail’s-pace changes operating over a nearly infinite time. This principle starkly contrasted with the theological estimates of some six thousand years.

To a certain extent, the world view of an immeasurably extended geological age permeated Darwin’s The Origin, even though Darwin’s own attempt to estimate the age of the Weald—the eroded valley stretching across the southeastern part of England—turned out to be disastrously flawed, and he eventually retracted it. Darwin envisaged for evolution a long sequence of phases, lasting perhaps ten million years each. There was, however, one important difference between Darwin’s stance and those of the geologists. While he indeed required long periods of time for evolution to run its course, he insisted on a directional “arrow of time”; he could not be satisfied with a steady state or a cyclical progression, since the concept of evolution gave time a clear trend. But a controversy was starting to brew. It was not between Darwin and Lyell personally, nor even between geology and biology in general, but between a champion of physics on one side and some geologists and biologists on the other. Enter one of the most eminent physicists of his time: William Thomson, later known as Lord Kelvin.
On April 28, 1862, Kelvin (then still Thomson) read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh a paper entitled “On the Secular Cooling of the Earth.” This paper followed closely on the heels of another article published just the month before, with the title “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat.” Thomson made clear from the opening sentence that this was not going to be just another forgettable technical essay. Here was a hard-line attack on the geologists’ assumption about the unchanging nature of the forces that had shaped the Earth:

For eighteen years it has pressed on my mind, that essential principles of Thermodynamics have been overlooked by those geologists who uncompromisingly oppose all paroxysmal hypotheses, and maintain not only that we have examples now before us, on the earth, of all the different actions by which its crust has been modified in geological history, but that these actions have never, or have not on the whole, been more violent in past time than they are at present.

While the phrase “pressed on my mind” was somewhat of an overdramatized exaggeration, it was certainly true that Kelvin’s first papers on the topics of heat conduction and the distribution of heat through the body of the Earth were written as early as 1844 (when he was a twenty-year-old student) and 1846, respectively. Even before his seventeenth birthday, Thomson succeeded in spotting a mistake in a paper on heat by an Edinburgh professor.

Kelvin’s point was simple: Measurements from mines and wells indicated that heat was flowing from the Earth’s interior to its surface, implying that the Earth was an initially hotter planet that was cooling. Consequently, Kelvin argued, unless some internal or external energy sources could be shown to compensate for the heat losses, clearly no steady state, or repeating, identical geological cycles, were possible.

~~Brilliant Blunders (From Darwin to Einstein) -by- Mario Livio

Day 131: Book Excerpt: Bob Dylan

The whole Bangla Desh set was premiered over the radio a few nights ago, neatly coinciding with the Indian Army’s rout of the West Pakistani forces and the liberation of the East, thus putting the sweet seal of history on the cause that launched this record in the first place. Three of us sat listening for an hour or more, though admittedly we weren’t as polite as the audience at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangla Desh at Madison Square Garden last August: we turned off the first half-hour of Ravi Shankar. Then the Harrison-Leon Russell-Mad Dogs & So On part began.

I found most of it dull, and after a bit the whole show began to bother me immensely. Admittedly the huge band was tight and well-rehearsed. Harrison sang with conviction and Eric Clapton was spectacular. OK, it was well-produced. Well-produced oatmeal.

Every other song seemed to be about one of three things: 1) God saving us. 2) This is the way God planned it. 3) Chant the name of the Lord and you’ll be free. (Nick Tosches has suggested that this course of action did not seem to be getting the people of Bangla Desh very far; nasty of him to bring that up.)
All of the devout rockers on Harrison’s stage seemed to be missing their own point. If this gibberish had any relation to reality, or even any internal consistency—perils of pantheism—then the same god that allowed this wonderful concert to take place was also raining hot death on the other side of the globe. To achieve some kind of spiritual balance, perhaps.

Well, it reminded me of Joseph Heller’s God, the Vicious Practical Joker. The songs chosen made a mockery of what the event was supposedly about—raising funds and world awareness for the plight of refugees from the war in East Pakistan and the fight for Bangladeshi independence—and I imagine this comes across much more blatantly on record than it did at the concert itself, since the electric presence of the stars doesn’t blank out any doubts in a mindless glow of being there with George, Ringo, and Bob Dylan. Which is nothing to sneeze at: I’d have liked to have been there too. But I wasn’t, and I have to take what I can get, along with the rest of the audience that wasn’t there either, and what I get is a feeling of being sold down the river, smothered by some of the silliest ideals of western civilization, and flattered by a superstar glitter that fails to hide the almost total emptiness of the production.

There’s a line in Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” where he warns, “Beware of maya,” maya being an Indian word for “veil of illusion”—and without even going into the fact that the avoidance of darkness is a perfect definition of illusion, it has to be said that a veil of illusion is precisely what this concert has to offer.

There are some exceptions to the bland sound, the horrible fake gospel shouts, and the silly songs. Leon Russell makes a valiant attempt to erase the pompous mood of the event, delivering a wild version of “Jumping Jack Flash,” braking into a long jive story that resolves itself into the Coasters’ “Youngblood” and finally edges out and roars back to where it began. That’s exciting, and as anomalous to the general drift of the concert as two other high points, Ringo’s “It Don’t Come Easy” and Dylan’s last number, “Just Like a Woman.” If the genius of this man seems occasional now, when it comes it is staggering, and nothing can touch it. Ah, Bob Dylan!

One of the best things about Dylan’s side of the set is that it can make you feel like a fan again. A Bob Dylan fan. It’s moving to hear George Harrison say, “I’d like to bring out a friend to us all, Mr. Bob Dylan,” and implicitly join in the cheers; to recognize, in yourself, the thrill the audience is experiencing; to delight in the applause that breaks in on the choruses they and you have publicly celebrated and privately cherished for years. In spite of the fact that the movie promises to be uniquely boring, I’ll be there to see how Ringo looks playing tambourine with Bob Dylan.

Dylan’s performance is steady, but most of his material seems just out of his reach, as if he couldn’t quite catch the emotional rhythm of the songs. But from the first notes of “Just Like a Woman,” it’s clear that something else is happening. Here he rises to one of the great performances of his career. He sings the song the way Hank Williams would sing it if he were still alive, with the ghostly chill of “Lost Highway.” It may well be the equal of anything he has ever done, and if it took him five years to regain the power he once had, then what matters is not how long it took, but that he has regained it. What began, some years ago, as a change in attitude, seems finally to have grown into a changed point of view, and an authentic, as opposed to a contrived, maturity.

His performance reveals nuances of emotion and commitment that do not even seem to be implied in the recording we know from Blonde on Blonde. What is absent from the song, now, is the sense of bitterness that emerged both as a complaint and contempt five years ago, and the performance here imposes an enormous agony on the simple matter of living through the day, until finally, in the last verse, it increases in intensity and Dylan’s voice is acting out a resistance to the calamity of life that stops a long way short of forgiveness.

~~Bob Dylan -by- Greil Marcus

Day 130: Book Excerpt: Call Of the Everest

In the fall of 1984 I trudged northward across a broad, flat snowfield. Its highest point arose in the form of a stout wooden pillar, marking the border between Nepal and Tibet. This was the legendary Nangpa La, the 19,050-foot (5,800-meter) pass located in the shadow of Cho Oyu, a peak that rises to the west of Mount Everest. I tied a kata prayer scarf to a tangle of others on the post and recited Buddhist mantras common to Tibetans of the Tibetan Plateau and to the Sherpas of Nepal to the south. Retracing my steps, I caught a fragrance that blew in gently from the south: pine and juniper forests warmed by the sun, melded with dust and incense and wood smoke from the lowlands of Nepal and the Gangetic Plain of India.

Descending on the Nepal side of the border, I followed a maze of granite rubble that had been churned up and deposited on the glacier’s surface. Yaks can follow the scent left by previous caravans, but lone travelers must decode their way through the monochromatic scree. I found no sign of yak dung—every scrap had been thrown onto the loads of the yak trains for use as cooking fuel. And the cairns meant to mark the trail were just as the Tibetan traders had described them: imaginary piles of stones that moved and disappeared like phantoms.

The route over the Nangpa La has long been a conduit of history, trade, and culture for Tibetans and their Sherpa kin—the people of Everest. I was entering Khumbu, the Sherpas’ homeland—a region circumscribed by the headwater valleys that drain the Nangpa La and the south side of Mount Everest. Khumbu’s waters eventually merge into the Dudh Kosi River and flow toward India. One monk described the outline of Khumbu and its veins of rivers as “shaped like a flower bud about to bloom.”

Nearly 500 years ago, Sherpa legend says, hunting dogs belonging to a man named Kira Gombu Dorje chased a wild sheep across the Nangpa La. The dogs, in turn, were pursued by the hunter—the first Tibetan to settle in Khumbu’s fertile, temperate valleys. The south side’s greener pastures soon drew a pioneer community of shar-pa, “people of the east,” who became citizens of Nepal.

In winter, when farming and herding is relatively dormant in Tibet, people from the north side of Everest still climb over the Nangpa La. They are either traveling on Buddhist pilgrimage or as refugees from China, seeking opportunities in India or the West. Their bid to reach the outside world—by scaling the spine of the Himalaya—underscores the Tibetans’ irrepressible desire to experience the freedom that the Sherpas to the south enjoy.

THE SPIRIT OF KHUMBU

The Sherpas of Khumbu barely number more than 3,500, with a parallel population of 17,000 more in Solu, a region three days’ walk to the south. For at least a century these two enclaves, distinguished by subtle differences in dialect and dress, have been closely linked by marriage. From the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, the arcane laws of Nepal’s Rana oligarchy restricted trade with Tibet to men who lived in border districts. This made Khumbu husbands especially desirable to brides from Solu, by allowing their families to marry into a valuable trade connection.

But the Sherpas’ connection with Tibet was maintained as much for religion as it was for trade. Beginning in the early 1900s, many of the Khumbu Sherpas sent their boys north, back across the Nangpa La, for monastic training at the Buddhist monastery of Rongbuk, near Everest’s Base Camp on the Tibet side of the mountain. From this monastery the Sherpas drew much of their formal religious traditions.

Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Everest with Ed Hillary in 1953, grew up in the Tibetan village of Kharta, directly to the northeast of Everest. After studying briefly at Rongbuk, he crossed the Nangpa La, in the 1920s, and settled with his parents in the Khumbu village of Thame. At age 18, he left Khumbu to search for work in Darjiling—a hiring and staging point for foreign climbing expeditions to Everest.

Tenzing’s nephew Nawang Gombu—who climbed Everest with Jim Whittaker in 1963—also studied at Rongbuk for two years, until he could no longer endure the strict monastery regimen. One night he bundled up his clothes, sneaked out through the hole of a latrine, and walked over the Nangpa La to Khumbu.

The Cultural Revolution began in 1966—seven years after the uprising against the Chinese in Lhasa. During that chaotic period, the Rongbuk monastery was destroyed. Fortunately, most of Rongbuk’s arcane and colorful Buddhist traditions had already regerminated, with a distinctive flair, and were thriving in the Sherpa monasteries of Solu and Khumbu.

SACRED SITES

Below the Nangpa La lies no ordinary mountain valley. I was now descending into a beyul: one of several “hidden valleys” of refuge designated by Padmasambhava, the ninth-century “lotus-born” Indian saint, revered by the Sherpas as Guru Rinpoche, who subdued the often wrathful territorial deities of the mountains and converted them into defenders of the Buddhist faith.

In order to protect Buddhist beliefs and teachings during times of adversity, Guru Rinpoche’s female consort is believed to have hidden “treasure texts” in the valleys’ forests and hillsides. These sacred documents are time capsules, essentially. When revealed in future eras, devout people will be able to recover their faith and relearn the wisdom of the ancients.

These beyul are blessed with spiritual energy, and the Sherpas say that one should behave with reverence when passing through this sacred landscape. Here the karmic effects of one’s actions are magnified, and even impure thoughts should be avoided.

Sites of spiritual power are scattered throughout Khumbu: ancient meditation caves, “self-emanated” handprints and footprints impressed in rock, and curious snakelike intrusions that for Sherpas represent the lu serpent spirits. Small shrines and bamboo wands, adorned with prayer flags, are set up at springs, wells, and stream confluences—places graced by the nourishing flow of water. Villagers say that the rain from the sky and the water in their springs can dry up if these sites are defiled—for instance, if a lowlander were to slaughter a goat nearby and dress the meat in the water source. This offends the lu and can cause them to flee.
Khumbu’s harsh environment only seems to invigorate the Sherpas’ faith. Just as the Himalaya were formed by intersections and accretions of geologic material, the religion of the Sherpas is accretionary—a blend of shamanism, pre-Buddhism, and Bon and Tibetan Buddhism—while pantheons of clan gods and territorial deities lurk and cavort on the hillsides.

~~Call Of the Everest -by- Conrad Anker

Day 129: Book Excerpt: Future Crimes

Black-Box Algorithms and the Fallacy of Math Neutrality

One and one is two. Two plus two equals four. Basic, eternal, immutable math. The type of stuff we all learned in kindergarten. But there is another type of math—the math encoded in algorithms—formulas written by human beings and weighted to carry out their instructions, their decision analyses, and their biases. When your GPS device provides you with directions using narrow AI to process the request, it is making decisions for you about your route based on an instruction set somebody else has programmed. While there may be a hundred ways to get from your home to your office, your navigation system has selected one. What happened to the other ninety-nine? In a world run increasingly by algorithms, it is not an inconsequential question or a trifling point.

Today we have the following:
•  algorithmic trading on Wall Street (bots carry out stock buys and sells)
•  algorithmic criminal justice (red-light and speeding cameras determine infractions of the law)
•  algorithmic border control (an AI can flag you and your luggage for screening)
•  algorithmic credit scoring (your FICO score determines your creditworthiness)
•  algorithmic surveillance (CCTV cameras can identify unusual activity by computer vision analysis, and voice recognition can scan your phone calls for troublesome keywords)
•  algorithmic health care (whether or not your request to see a specialist or your insurance claim is approved)
•  algorithmic warfare (drones and other robots have the technical capacity to find, target, and kill without human intervention)
•  algorithmic dating (eHarmony and others promise to use math to find your soul mate and the perfect match)

Though the inventors of these algorithmic formulas might wish to suggest they are perfectly neutral, nothing could be further from the truth. Each algorithm is saturated with the profound human bias of the person or people who wrote the formula. But who governs these algorithms and how they behave in grooming us? We have no idea. They are black-box algorithms, shrouded in secrecy and often declared trade secrets, protected by intellectual property law. Just one algorithm alone—the FICO score—plays a major role in each American’s access to credit, whether or not you get a mortgage, and what your car loan rate will be. But nowhere is the formula published; indeed, it is a closely guarded secret, one that earns FICO hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But what if there is a mistake in the underlying data or the assumptions inherent in the algorithm? Too bad. You’re out of luck. The near-total lack of transparency in the algorithms that run the world means that we the people have no insight and no say into profoundly important decisions being made about us and for us. The increasingly concentrated power of algorithms in our society has gone unnoticed by most, but without insight and transparency into the algorithms running our world, there can be no accountability or true democracy. As a result, the twenty-first-century society we are building is becoming increasingly susceptible to manipulation by those who author and control the algorithms that pervade our lives.

We saw a blatant example of this abuse in mid-2014 when a study published by researchers at Facebook and Cornell University revealed that social networks can manipulate the emotions of their users simply by algorithmically altering what they see in the news feed. In a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, Facebook changed the update feeds of 700,000 of its users to show them either more sad or more happy news. The result? Users seeing more negative news felt worse and posted more negative things, the converse being true for those seeing the more happy news. The study’s conclusion: “Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” Facebook never explicitly notified the users affected (including children aged thirteen to eighteen) that they had been unwittingly selected for psychological experimentation. Nor did it take into account what existing mental health issues, such as depression or suicidality, users might already be facing before callously deciding to manipulate them toward greater sadness. Though Facebook updated its ToS to grant itself permission to “conduct research” after it had completed the study, many have argued that the social media giant’s activities amounted to human subjects research, a threshold that would have required prior ethical approval by an internal review board under federal regulations. Sadly, Facebook is not the only company to algorithmically treat its users like lab rats.

The lack of algorithmic transparency, combined with an “in screen we trust” mentality, is dangerous. When big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things merge, as they are already doing, we will increasingly have physical objects acting on our behalf in 3-D space. Having an AI drive a robot that brews your morning coffee and makes breakfast sounds great. But if we recall the homicide in 1981 of Kenji Urada, the thirty-seven-year-old employee of Kawasaki who was crushed to death by a robot, things don’t always turn out so well. In Urada’s case, further investigation revealed it was the robot’s artificial intelligence algorithm that erroneously identified the man as a system blockage, a threat to the machine’s mission to be immediately dealt with. The robot calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to push “it” with its massive hydraulic arm into the nearby grinding machine, a decision that killed Urada instantly before the robot unceremoniously returned to its normal duties. Despite the obvious challenges, the exponential productivity boosts, dramatic cost savings, and rising profits attainable through artificial intelligence systems are so great there will be no turning back. AI is here to stay, and never one to miss an opportunity, Crime, Inc. is all over it.

~~Future Crimes -by- Marc Goodman

Day 128: Book Excerpt: India's Biggest Cover Up

Sugata Bose also joins the league of some extraordinary men—Jawaharlal Nehru, his minister Shah Nawaz, his friend GD Khosla and his ardent follower Shivraj Patil—in branding his own granduncle Suresh Bose a liar. All on the basis of a note created fraudulently by the government nominee on the committee. Blood is usually thicker than water, but political inclinations often dilute family ties. Sugata Bose should have known better that Suresh Bose had no need to change his mind about Subhas Bose’s assumed death after June 1956, as this “injustice league” propagated throughout the years. From the day one to his last, Suresh shared his elder brother’s, Sugata’s grandfather’s, views about their younger brother’s disappearance.

A few years ago Chandrachur and I met a former Gaimusho official in New Delhi. Tomoji Mutoh had in May 1956 liaised with the Shah Nawaz Committee and especially Suresh Bose. He told us that he accompanied Suresh Bose to the residence of Katanko Tojo, the widow of war-time Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. “He cried there. He said ‘my brother did not die’,” the retired official told us. Mutoh asked us to visit the Renkoji temple and see for ourselves how respectful the Japanese are towards “Chandra Bose’s ashes”. “Your respect for Netaji is not in doubt, and we are grateful for that,” we told him.

If he were alive today, Suresh Bose would have been greatly pained to see his own grandnephew terming his view as “rambling dissent”, borrowing the word “rambling” from GD Khosla. Suresh Bose was not an accomplished writer and at that he was not given enough documents or facilities to produce a slick report. But he did make some valid points and he did set a standard in probity and openness as he called upon the people to not to believe his dissent or the majority report until the Government had made public all relevant records.
There is no chance of misconstruing that the Harvard professor is so impartial and objective that he has not even spared his granduncle. Because in his zeal to back the government version, he has lauded someone who came closer to getting jailed for trying to vilify Subhas Chandra Bose and a friendly foreign nation which sacrificed thousands of its men in helping India attain freedom. This was GD Khosla, whom Sugata Bose describes as “eminent jurist”. Worse, Sugata makes libelous statements against Justice Mukherjee.

It is horrendous that a Bose family member should use a glowing term for a man who portrayed Subhas as an impractical hothead and a puppet of the Japanese in his report. This abhorring idea was not an aside but part and parcel of Khosla’s report. The Bose family dragged him to court and he could wriggle out only after rendering a written apology.

According to Prof Bose, Khosla’s report “fell victim to political partisan” whereas the Congress-led government “quite sensibly, rejected outright” the Mukherjee Commission's report. He is disheartened, as a Congressman at heart should be, that Indira Gandhi’s government which had been compelled to institute Khosla’s inquiry lost elections in 1977 and the Janata government set aside Khosla’s findings. Such unabashed whitewash makes me feel worried about the professor’s American students. Between September 1974, when Khosla Commission’s report was tabled in Parliament and 1977, when Moraraji Desai became Prime Minister, India had for most part been under an authoritarian rule. It was the biggest blot on Indian democracy, the best legacy of the British Raj. It was during this dark age, when prostitutes were paraded to create fervour in favour of the government and innumerable people were forcefully sterilised to stem India’s population boom, that Khosla’s report was finally approved in Parliament sans Opposition.

The people who fought against the Emergency were the people forming the “political partisan” against Khosla’s report.  They included politician Samar Guha, lawyer Gobinda Mukhoty—who went on to fight for justice for the victims of 1984 genocide—and journalist Barun Sengupta.

Disregarding the actual turn of events, Sugata Bose further writes that more than twenty years after Khosla’s report was rejected, “yet another” commission was appointed by the Government. There is no light what had led to all this momentous decision. The setting up of new commission was not a government decision per se; it just had to obey the order of the Calcutta High Court. Sugata Bose is giving his readers an impression as if the formation of the new commission was result of some governmental whim at a time when his favourite dispensation was out of power.

The facts of Khosla’s closeness to Nehru, his self-proclaimed disagreement with Bose during their student days in London, his writing the biography of Indira Gandhi during the period he was heading the Netaji Inquiry Commission and his churning out a book from his inquiry, the apology he rendered to the Bose family have not shaken Sugata’s faith in him. But His Majesty’s opponent describes Justice MK Mukherjee as “retired Bengali judge” to impute impartiality to him. Added to it is the disparaging remark that he “held court” and provided “a venue for increasingly fanciful stories”.

Sugata Bose goes on to allege that Mukherjee “himself harboured a preconceived notion”. He thinks it is proven by two factors: In October 2002, the commission had asked some Bose family members to provide blood samples for a DNA match with Bhagwanji of Faizabad. Then in 2010 Mukherjee was seen on TV, making an off-the-record remark filmed without his knowledge that he was sure that Bhagwanji was Netaji. The history professor adds that there is no evidence to back this theory and Mukherjee’s entertaining a “most preposterous” claim about Bhagwanji caused confusion among the public. His stray comments about the Mukherjee Commission occupy no more than two paras and just with these he has trashed an inquiry which lasted for six years and indicted the Government of India on several points.

As a non-Bengali who followed commission’s work closely, I am in a position to assert some facts. The Calcutta High Court judgment which directed the central government to form a commission was issued by then Chief Justice Prabha Shankar Mishra. It is the norm in India nowadays for the chief justices of the state high courts not to be hailing from those states. Things seem to have changed from the days when Lahore-born GD Khosla could have become Chief Justice of the Punjab High Court.

I had the opportunity to speak with retired Justice Mishra in New Delhi a few years ago. He told me that the main reason for his reaching that decision was the disclosure made by the Government that it itself was not sure of Bose’s death.

Justice Mukherjee’s name as the chairman of the new commission was recommended by the Chief Justice of India. Incidentally, I don't find Sugata Bose mentioning, much less underlining, in his book that Mukherjee is a former Supreme Court judge. He just sees a “Bengali” in him. It is as if Sugata Bose is taking a leaf out of GD Khosla’s book. The judge's personal papers, now kept at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, also reflect a similar parochial point of view. Even after a case was filed by the Bose family against him in Kolkata for trying to defame Subhas “to please patrons for largesse and assignments”, Khosla was unrepentant. He filed—and apparently later withdrew—a transfer petition in the Supreme Court in which he painted the entire matter as a Bengali issue. He described Prof Samar Guha “a prominent Bengali member of the Lok Sabha” and claimed that he did not expect to “receive a fair and impartial trial” in Kolkata, home to his sister, and had “every reason to apprehend physical danger and injury to himself in the event of the trial being held in West Bengal”.

Sugata Bose's description of Jutice Mukherjee a “Bengali judge” is a low blow. This is not how we look at our judges. Justice SH Kapadia is not a “Parsi judge”; he is the Chief Justice of India. We associate people who occupy or have occupied high offices with a particular region or religion only in the complimentary sense.

Sugata Bose was nowhere in sight when Justice Mukherjee examined the witnesses. Mukherjee put pointed, pertinent questions to probe whether or not the person standing in the witness corner possessed any evidence to back his statements. The former Supreme Court judge did not “held court”; he conducted proceedings according to the Commission of Inquiry Act.

Two of Sugata’s uncles that I have known, know it well because they didn’t have to let their imagination wander to visualize what had actually happened. Late Pradip Bose was there on some occasions, and Subrata Bose attended most of the commission’s public hearings. Later 43 members of the family, including these two cousins, issued a statement which expressed deep appreciation for “the arduous efforts” of “Mr Justice MK Mukherjee and his team in the commission”.

~~India's Biggest Cover Up -by- Anuj Dhar

Day 127: Book Excerpt: The Japanese Mind

There are both positive and negative aspects to the functions of silence in Japan. To begin with, it is important to note exactly when Japanese people are silent. Silence occurs when people have nothing to say, of course, but it does not always mean that they have no ideas. Silence is commonly thought to indicate thoughtfulness or hesitation in trying to find a good way to communicate smoothly; therefore, even though people have something to say, they may not express everything that they have in mind and may leave their true intentions unspoken. This kind of silence is known as enryo-sasshi (i.e., reserve and restraint). In high-context Japanese culture (Hall, 1970), direct verbal expression, especially negative forms of communication such as anger, hate, refusal, disagreement, and defiance are avoided:

    Ideas and feelings that might hurt the other person or damage the general atmosphere when expressed are carefully sent back for reexamination in an internal self-feedback process. Only those ideas judged safe and vague are allowed to be sent out through the small exit that functions as a screen filter. This message-screening process . . . is enryo ; it makes the Japanese appear silent, vague, and awkward in communicating with superiors, strangers, and people from different cultures.

Japanese TV commercials provide a good illustration of enryosasshi in communication. In ads promoting pharmaceutical drugs, for example, it is common to have famous actors or TV personalities play the role of “warm family members” in promoting a medicine rather than to clearly explain its efficacy because this tends to be felt as “wordy” or “pushy” by Japanese consumers. People prefer being appealed to gradually in a more “feeling” atmosphere in Japanese forms of communication.

Japanese silence occurs not only in public but also in private interactions, particularly in conjugal relationships, because “[the couple] are in love but too embarrassed to express their feelings in speech”. Husbands and wives in Japan tend not to use overt verbal communication and try to understand each other by nonverbal means, especially when they attempt to express tender emotions (ibid.). Silence in this case may reflect their feelings of embarrassment caused by closeness or intimacy, or it may have to do with a specific Japanese way of thinking related to ishin denshin and enryo-sasshi. Silence thus functions as a kind of lubricating oil to create smoother communication because it can help to avoid hurting others and contributes to a peaceful and harmonious atmosphere, allowing people to overcome difficult situations in a calm and unhurried way.

On the other hand, silence can frequently cause misunderstandings, even in Japanese interactions. In fact, it is not unusual for people to feel irritated and impatient when they cannot understand each other because their expressions are too indirect to follow. It is also true that in Japan, actions or judgments tend to be delayed, so it often takes too much time to clarify the facts and solve problematic situations.

The Japanese may also be silent not only to avoid conflict with others but also to hurt someone or to keep them at a distance. When people feel angry or are in disagreement with others, they may not directly express their feelings but often just keep silent and ignore the other person. This behavior characterizes bullying, which has recently become a much more serious problem among Japanese children. If students see someone being bullied, they may not mention anything about the fact and just try to keep a distance from both the assailant and the victim, for fear of being mixed up in the bullying themselves. Similarly, in a train, if people recognize that someone is being molested, they may not say anything to help the victim, because they are afraid of disapproval for their forward behavior, or simply because they are apathetic. In short, silence also means defiance and indifference in Japanese life.

In addition, silence can function as a weapon to protect one’s position or to conceal facts when someone has done something wrong or feels guilty. For example, Japanese politicians, business executives, and school principals are known to resort to silence to hide unpalatable facts or evade their responsibilities. These attitudes reflect a Japanese value called kusai mono niwa futa (“to sweep the dirt under the carpet”), and not only people with special status but also ordinary Japanese often try to avoid facing up to negative situations.
Silence as a way of avoiding direct or potentially troublesome expression can thus function either positively or negatively. To create a relaxed and harmonious atmosphere, silence may play an important role in Japanese interactions, but it can also arise from less noble attitudes such as shirking responsibility, awkwardness, or apathy.

~~The Japanese Mind -ed- Roger J. Davies & Osamu Ikeno

Day 126: Book Excerpt: A Long Walk In The Himalaya

On a pre-1947 map of India’s north-west border with Tibet, the Hindustan–Tibet road is clearly marked by a dotted red line winding its way up the course of the Sutlej River. In the nineteenth century the road was one of the most important trade routes between India and Tibet. Coarsely woven blankets, tobacco, horseshoes, saddles and even firearms were carried north along the precipitous trails where they were traded for salt and the highly prized supplies of fine shawl wool, the pashm.

The main impediment to trade was the terrain. In places the trail was hardly suitable for laden porters let alone mule trains. Following the Gurkha wars in 1814–15 the British were keen to open up trade throughout the newly acquired territories between Shimla, Kinnaur and Tibet. However, although plans were drawn up at the time, it still took the British the best part of forty years, until 1854, to complete a trail suitable for commercial trade. ‘Does the Lord Sahib think the rocks are made of soft cheese?’ was a pointed and often-repeated remark, as the villagers toiled for months at a time to clear the huge landslides. To complete the trail, the authorities relied heavily on the system of beggar, literally forced labour. Like most rulers in the hills, the Raja of Rampur had long considered a man’s strength to be a physical asset indebted to the state. It was a system exploited to the hilt and one that continued in some Himalayan regions up until the turn of the twentieth century.

The trail was no more than a bridle path until the Indo–China border war of 1962. Only then was the strategic need for a road justified. Even now it is in constant need of repair, as anyone who travels along the highway in the late spring will testify.

I looked forward to completing a challenging circuit of the mountain region of Kinnaur. My route would involve one difficult pass crossing before wandering down the modern day Hindustan–Tibet road—now known as National Highway 22—to the region’s administrative headquarters at Rekong Peo. The ten-day stage would provide a link between the alpine pastures and Hindu farming villages—the Summer Rambler’s country—that I had followed for the past two weeks and the Trans-Himalayan regions that border Tibet. After completing the demanding circuit I would be within a month or so of reaching Manali.

From our camp to the north of the Rupin Pass (4540 metres) I could see all that lay ahead of me. Immediately opposite were the glistening summits of the Kinnaur Kailas Range. Below me the tiny alpine pastures give way to dark forests of deodar, spruce and pine. In the depths of the verdant Sangla Valley the rustic villages awaited the morning sun. The view certainly compensated for the previous day’s efforts.

To reach Kinnaur, Almas, Jeet and I, together with our team of porters from Sangri, had ascended the upper reaches of the secluded Rupin Valley. That’s when the weather had closed in. Ominous clouds had built up in the early morning as we set off to cross the Rupin Pass on the crest of the Dhaula Dhar Range. To reach the pass involved ploughing through deep snow before tackling a steep and exposed 200-metre rock gully.

At the base of the pass Almas and I took stock of the gully. ‘It looks OK,’ mused Almas, even though he had not been over the pass before, and neither had I so early in the season. I nodded, anxious not to undermine the confidence of the porters who were by now sitting on their loads smoking their bedis—the local cigarettes—as they waited for the signal to go. ‘You lead and I will follow with the porters,’ I suggested. With that, Almas headed up the last snow slope beneath the gully. After heaving himself up the first series of boulders Almas waited for the porters and me to follow. The lead porters experienced little difficulty in finding footholds for their rubber-soled boots on the boulders but the porters at the back were less confident. Without waiting for them Almas headed upwards taking the lead porters with him. Jeet also went on leaving me cursing and doing my best to encourage the younger porters with the heaviest loads. Although there was no technical climbing, no tenuous hand or footholds, one false step by the front runners could dislodge a rock the size of a house brick with horrifying results.

‘Wait!’ I implored, trying my best to ensure that no porter stood directly below another when ascending particularly treacherous sections where the rocks were covered in a thin coating of ice. Several times I held my breath as I waited and watched them negotiate the tricky sections. I could hear my heart pounding and felt the sweat dripping off my back. Looking up, I noticed that any suggestion of blue sky had by now disappeared; dark clouds billowed above and the temperature in the gully had dropped dramatically.

For many of the porters this was their first serious pass crossing and I could see by their expressions that this was not what they had expected. Strong, agile, yet inexperienced, they would look to me for directions as to when to start and when to rest—something that should have come naturally to them. At last, after the best part of an hour, I could see Almas waiting at what I assumed was the crest of the pass. ‘How much further?’ I bellowed but to no avail. He had not heard me. It was only a few minutes later that I heard the muffled whoops of encouragement of the lead porters. I knew then that we didn’t have far to go. Just below the pass I left the final porters to rest and headed up to Almas.

‘Glad we made it,’ I gasped. As the porters exchanged hugs of sheer relief at reaching the pass I tried to get my bearings. There was no familiar ridge or valley or even a glimpse of the mighty Kinnaur Kailas Range to the north. Thick swirling mist precluded any sense of elation. I could not see more than 5 metres in front of me. There was no possibility of any photographic opportunities; we could have been anywhere. After less than ten minutes on the pass we decided to head down. The porters slipped and slithered down the snow slopes. Rolls of thunder could be heard in the distance and there was sense of urgency to get down to camp without delay.

We just made it. Within minutes of establishing our camp the first heavy spots of rain hit our tents. Then the heavens opened, testing the waterproofing of my nylon dome tent and Jeet’s dhaba. Judging by the contented expressions of the porters their canvas tent was up to scratch. Muffled comments were followed by shrieks of laughter as the porters reminded each other that they were within a few hours of reaching the town of Sangla and completing their trek the next day.

~~A Long Walk In The Himalaya -by- Garry Weare

Day 125: Book Excerpt: The Blood Telegram

Meanwhile, the press too kept up a drumbeat. Reporters snuck into East Pakistan, and the refugees in India brought with them terrible tales, which Pakistan could not censor. From Calcutta, the Indian army did what it could to encourage journalists to venture across the border into East Pakistan.
Bengalis were stunned to hear that some U.S. arms were still making their way to the Pakistan army. In the midst of the army’s terror, these fearful people got their news by radio. “Why are you sending the army more guns?” a Bengali bitterly asked a Washington Post reporter.

In London, the Sunday Times published a detailed and gruesome story by a Pakistani journalist, Anthony Mascarenhas, with the screaming headline GENOCIDE. Newsweek ran a horrific cover story. Village after village had been reduced to rubble, with stinking corpses. The magazine said that a quarter of a million Bengalis had died. It told of a three-year-old child and his teenage mother, both of them refugees: “They sat on ground made muddy by the steady drizzle of the summer rains. The baby’s stomach was grotesquely distended, his feet swollen, his arms no thicker than a man’s finger. His mother tried to coax him to eat some rice and dried fish. Finally, the baby mouthed the food feebly, wheezed—and died.”

Trying to blunt the impact of these terrible stories, Pakistan allowed in some foreign correspondents. Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, who had been expelled from Dacca in March, jumped at the chance. He remembers the Pakistan army’s contempt for Bengalis: “Even the officers in charge of these units would say, ‘You can’t trust these people, they’re low, they lie.’ ” The officers gave “no denials that they had just killed them.” He recalls, “You’d see places where they had marked little wooden houses as Hindus.” Survivors told him that the army would “come through yelling, ‘Are there any Hindus there?’ When they found out there were, they would kill them.” He concludes, “It was a genocide”—perhaps even a more clear case than Cambodia.

In the New York Times, Schanberg reported, “The Pakistani Army has painted big yellow ‘H’s’ on the Hindu shops still standing in this town.” Emphasizing the targeting of Hindus, he described “the hate and terror and fear” throughout the “conquered province.” Back in Dacca at last, Schanberg found the city “half-deserted,” with fresh loads of troops arriving daily from West Pakistan at the airport. Terrified merchants had taken down signs in the Bengali language and put up new ones in English, because they did not know Urdu. He wrote that foreign diplomats estimated that the army had killed at least two hundred thousand Bengalis.
...
George Harrison knew the uses of celebrity. The guitarist for the Beatles, who had broken up in 1970, was a soulful, confused, and tender-hearted man, but also an unexpectedly politically savvy operator.
Over the last few years, he had grown close with Ravi Shankar, the famed Indian musician. Harrison spent six weeks in India, gulping in lessons in the sitar and spirituality; sitar music popped up in classic Beatles songs like “Norwegian Wood.” Now, as the number of refugees in India soared into the millions, Shankar, a Bengali, asked Harrison for help with a benefit concert.

Other musicians spoke up too, such as Joan Baez, who wrote a mournful “Song of Bangladesh.” But Harrison had a practical purpose in mind—to raise some money, as he later explained, but mostly to raise awareness that Bengalis “were getting killed and wiped out, and there was a lot of countries were supporting Pakistan with armaments and stuff.” Since the concert was being held in New York, there was no doubt about which country in particular Harrison and his friends had in mind.

The Concert for Bangladesh was the first rock event for humanitarian relief—the precursor for shows like Live Aid in 1985, with all the attendant sincerity, vapidity, and showy self-righteousness. Harrison and his crew threw together the event at breakneck speed, choosing August 1 because it was the only date on which Madison Square Garden, in midtown Manhattan, was available. Two shows sold out fast to more than forty thousand fans.

Under the spotlights, in a cream suit with a hideous orange shirt, sporting shaggy hair and a huge scraggly beard, Harrison was a fervid countercultural figure to dumbfound the generals in Rawalpindi. With rather more adrenalized benevolence than comprehension, he ardently sang, “Bangla Desh, Bangla Desh / Such a great disaster, I don’t understand / But it sure looks like a mess / I’ve never known such distress.” Harrison had hastily assembled a scruffy all-star band from his old friends, including Ringo Starr on drums and Eric Clapton on guitar, although John Lennon and Paul McCartney never showed. Shankar and other Indian musicians played sitar to general puzzlement.
Of course, the eager young crowd came mainly for the music. But many of them knew about the horrors, and Shankar explained to the audience the misery of the Bengalis. In between freewheeling sets, the musicians showed devastating films of the refugee camps, with corpses and starving children. The Village Voice wrote, “How glorious—to be able to launder one’s conscience by laying out a few tax-deductible dollars to hear the biggies.”

After a series of blazing performances, Harrison had a rare surprise. “I’d like to bring out a friend of us all,” he told the startled crowd, “Mr. Bob Dylan.” This, the Village Voice raved, was the “real cortex-snapping moment.” Dylan—who had been largely in seclusion since a near-fatal motorcycle accident—appeared from the darkness, slight and unmistakable, in a jean jacket, with a guitar and a harmonica. After the pandemonium subsided, he blazed through thrillingly emotional renditions of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” As if aiming at Nixon, he sang passionately, “How many deaths will it take till he knows / Too many people have died?”

~~The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide -by- Gary J. Bass

Day 124: Book Excerpt: Mindless

When I first did research on Walmart’s workplace practices in the early 2000s, I came away convinced that Walmart was the most egregiously ruthless corporation in America. However, ten years later, there is a strong challenger for this dubious distinction—Amazon Corporation. Within the corporate world, Amazon now ranks with Apple as among the United States’ most esteemed businesses. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, came in second in the Harvard Business Review’s 2012 world rankings of admired CEOs, and Amazon was third in CNN’s 2012 list of the world’s most admired companies. Amazon is now a leading global seller not only of books but also of music and movie DVDs, video games, gift cards, cell phones, and magazine subscriptions. Like Walmart itself, Amazon combines state-of-the-art CBSs with human resource practices reminiscent of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Amazon equals Walmart in the use of monitoring technologies to track the minute-by-minute movements and performance of employees and in settings that go beyond the assembly line to include their movement between loading and unloading docks, between packing and unpacking stations, and to and from the miles of shelving at what Amazon calls its “fulfillment centers”—gigantic warehouses where goods ordered by Amazon’s online customers are sent by manufacturers and wholesalers, there to be shelved, packaged, and sent out again to the Amazon customer.

Amazon’s shop-floor processes are an extreme variant of Taylorism that Frederick Winslow Taylor himself, a near century after his death, would have no trouble recognizing. With this twenty-first-century Taylorism, management experts, scientific managers, take the basic workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and packaging of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the fastest way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks and make this “one best way” the process that employees must follow.

Amazon is also a truly global corporation in a way that Walmart has never been, and this globalism provides insights into how Amazon responds to workplaces beyond the United States that can follow different rules. In the past three years, the harsh side of Amazon has come to light in the United Kingdom and Germany as well as the United States, and Amazon’s contrasting conduct in America and Britain, on one side, and in Germany, on the other, reveals how the political economy of Germany is employee friendly in a way that those of the other two countries no longer are.

Amazon, like General Electric and Walmart, prides itself as a self-consciously ideological corporation, with Jeff Bezos and his senior executives proclaiming an “Amazon Way” that can illuminate the path forward for less innovative businesses. In December 2009 Mark Onetto, chief of operations and customer relations at Amazon and a close collaborator of Bezos, gave an hourlong lecture on the Amazon Way to master’s of business administration students at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Onetto is a disconcerting figure, because once he starts talking, style and substance are in sharp contrast. He is French born, and he still speaks with the rather faded insouciance of Maurice Chevalier and “Gay Paree,” and he makes much of this in his lecture. But there was nothing gay (in the traditional sense) or insouciant about the Amazon workplace that Onetto described for UVA’s MBA candidates.

Like most such corporate mission statements, Onetto’s uses a coded language that hides the harshness of his underlying message, which needs translation along with a hefty reality check. As with Walmart so at Amazon, there is a quasi-religious cult of the customer as an object of “trust” and “care”; Amazon “cares about the customer,” and “everything is driven” for him or her. Early in the lecture, Onetto quotes Bezos himself as saying, “I am not selling stuff. I am facilitating for my customers to buy what they need.”

Amazon’s larding of its customer cult with the moral language of “care” and “trust” comes with a strong dose of humbug because Amazon’s customers are principally valued by the corporation as mainstays of the bottom line, and not as vehicles for the fulfillment of personal relationships. There is still more humbug in the air because Amazon treats a second significant grouping of men and women with whom it has dealings—its employees—with the very opposite of care and trust. Amazon’s employees are almost completely absent from Onetto’s lecture, and they make their one major appearance when they too are wheeled in as devotees of the cult of the customer: “We make sure that every associate at Amazon is really a customercentric person, that cares about the customer.”

~~Mindless -by- Simon Head