Friday, October 09, 2009

Obama's Plot To Take My Nobel Away


It is well known that I truly deserve the Nobel Prize. And yet, it was snatched away from me and given to Barak Obama. I think its a plot against me. I can only say this, I don't see one reason why Barak Obama should get the Nobel Prize (apart from talking a lot). I can give two solid reasons why I am a truly deserving candidate for the nobel prize:
1. I am a vegetarian
2. I don't smoke and provide revenue to tobacco companies

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Smoking Ban


About six months ago, I was with friends, dining at a the Blue Spice at Koramangala. It was after the smoking ban had come into effect. However, people continued to smoke in that restaurant - I was especially annoyed as people were smoking in the table next to me. I summoned the manager of the hotel, and pointed out to him that smoking in restaurants are not allowed, he shamelessly told me, in not the exact words I am going to use, that people will smoke in his restaurant and I can fuck off.
While the smoking ban in most cities in India remains unenforced, data has come in from countries in Europe about just how effective a properly enforced smoking ban can be. Research points out that in countries in which smoking was banned in public places including bars, the number of heart attacks reduced by 17% in the first year of enforcement of the ban alone, and after three years, the number of heart attacks had reduced by 36%. Yes, we are talking about actual number of heart attacks, not *risk* of heart attacks as most studies of effects of tobacco suggest. The research also suggests that it was not just smokers who became more healthy, the number of heart attacks went down among non-smokers as well. This is proof of the effects of second hand smoke, and adds concrete to the argument of a mandatory smoking ban. Of course, the tobacco lobby will rubbish this, tomorrow.
It is about time that India's smoking ban was enforced, and the provisions were changed so as to make it more effective. Some of the things that I would do if I were to write this law are
1. Make the owner of a restaurant/head of an establishment responsible for ensuring that smoking is not allowed in the restaurant/establishment
2. If there is proof of smoking in the restaurant/establishment, the person responsible for ensuring compliance to the law should face both an imprisonment and fine (without fail)
3. Allow police to act against such a person and take him into custody based on an FIR
4. Allow photographic evidence in courts to prove that the ban was not enforced in the establishment/restaurant.
Right now, the smoking ban appears like a law without teeth. The most that the authorities will do is to enforce a fine on the smoker. I think the onus has to be passed from the smokers to the owners, and a fine is not enough to enforce the law. For owners of restaurants, the fine is a paltry sum to pay compared to the business loss they might have by not allowing smoking (hookah bars will close down, and Mochas will see half the business they usually do). A provision for imprisonment, in my opinion, will give this law sufficient teeth to be enforced.

Economy Vs. Environment


I always suspected that economy-for-profit can never be a good thing for the planet, or almost always, as current economic models (ones that completely neglect the human factor) usually fail when humans bend the system.
This report from treehugger talks about the carbon emissions in the US going down by 9% in the last two years because of the depression, in-spite of no significant deliberate action taken to reduce it.
I know this doesn't prove my suspicion. It is not even an example of my suspicion. But it is an example of the negation of the relation I suspect applies here ("a good economy is bad for the planet" negates to "a bad economy is good for the planet").
This just makes me a little bit more convinced about my suspicion.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Hard Times: Coketown Woes


The following is copy of the Gene Hashmi's (Greenpeace) email appeal:

In October 2007, Al Gore accepted his Nobel Prize with the words: "I can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants."

At precisely the same moment, six Greenpeace activists -- one of them six weeks pregnant at the time -- entered a highly-secure coal-power plant and defaced one of its chimneys. Retribution was swift. We were arrested and sent to jail and, nearly two years later, the incredulous charges against us are yet to be dropped. Our case, unreported by the media, drags on in court.



My daughter Johanna was four years old when I went to jail for that crime. She's six years old now. In these two years, instead of shutting down coal-power plants, our government has been building more of them.

The unfair part is, the people building these coal-power plants won't be around when climate catastrophe finally hits us. They won't be running from refugee camp to refugee camp. They won't be escaping hunger and drought and famine and disease, but Johanna will.

It's for her sake, and for the sake of all children, that ordinary citizens like you and me must go beyond empty talk, and take direct action against climate change.

Why direct action? Because patient petitioning through the "proper channels" isn't working. Our Prime Minister has ignored over 50,000 people like you who have asked him for a Renewable Energy Law. He talked of climate change in his Independence Day speech, but has shown no sign that he intends to match his words with deeds.

It was to make climate change his No.1 priority that six of us went to jail. This is our story. I hope when you read it, you too will be inspired to act, and succeed where we failed.

Monday, July 20, 2009

A Shakespearean Mahabharata with Peter Brook


While I give credit to Peter Brook for managing the difficult task of compressing the essentials of the Mahabharata into a five hour movie, the movie-drama left me desiring a lot more. For a Westerner to make a play out of the Mahabharata was always going to be difficult, and though Brook undoubtedly put in a lot of effort into it, it was far from perfect.

Peter Brook's idea of starring international artists impressed me. Brook's idea was to give the impression that he was not telling the story of just a couple of kingdoms of India, but the story of the entire world. Indeed, the anthropological distribution of India must have been a lot diverse before the 400-800 year span during which the Mahabharata was composed. India must have had a lot of different tribes - Huns, Sakas, Kushanas etc., each with different a physique and a different facial feature. However, having an international cast does have its challenges - some of which Brook made no attempts at overcoming. The least he could have done was to give his actors a short course on Sanskrit pronounciation. In fact, the pronounciation of Indian names was so bad, that at one point of the play, that even the person who wrote the official sub-titles for the DVD wasn't able to understand it - the actor was uttering Bramha's name, while the sub-title read Rama.

We can forgive Peter Brook on the grounds that the primary spectators he was targetting were all Westerners, more used to Brook's Shakespearean productions. Indeed, it hardly seemed like an Indian tale, rather like an attempt at creating a Shakespearean drama. Soliloquis, short and long, filled the play. Amba's apparition to Bhishma reminded one of the Apparition of his father seen by Hamlet. At times, the costume was reminiscent of the Greek tragedies. And indeed, in crafting Karna's character, Brook may have attempted a half-hearted Shakespearan tragedy. While all of the above may be pardonable, what, in my view is unpardonable, was that Brook tried to so much make a Shakespearean play out of the Mahabharata that he even inserted Shakespeare like crude humour into his play. This is something I find completely unjustifiable - Shakespeare had to insert crude humour into his plays for the benefit of the groundlings of the Globe and Blackfrairs, but Brook's receivers are likely to be more educated.

There is some fresh breath in this play, that is a welcome break from the stale air of most of the Indian productions of Mahabharata. The costumes are more simple, less gaudy and more realistic. Most of the battle was dramatized without resort to the bitter-tasting computer graphics. Karna's tragedy is very well highlighted - something many reproductions of the Mahabharata failed to do (especially CR's Mahabharata).

While it is common for directors to take liberty with Shakespeare's plays, whether pardonable or not, hacking and hewing what Shakespeare wrote, bending the plot a little here and there, cutting a few lines there, a scene here, a soliloquy there; such twisting and turning of an epic like the Mahabharata may not be acceptable and may be seen as a cardinal sin. After all, aren't you trying to tell an ancient tale to a Western audience who has never heard it? And if this is the case, then is it not your duty to be factually correct? I was shocked to see that in his play it was Vyasa, and not Vidura (in fact Vidura hadn't been introduced at all - obviously, Brook didn't want to confuse his Western audience with too many characters, and made do with whatever characters he already had), and this is unforgivable.

Another shortcoming of this play was that it failed to depict that the Mahabharata was not just a war between the Kauravas and Pandavas, but it was a war in which the entire Indian nation took part - right from Afghanistan (Gandhara) to Manipur and Burma. I feel that depicting this aspect was very important, as this was something that could have touched a chord in the hearts of the Western audience Brook was targeting, since his audience would have experienced something similar during the first and second world wars. In fact, this book wouldn't be called the Mahabharata (or Great India) if the entire Indian sub-continent hadn't taken part in it. Mahabharata not only tells (allegorically) the political history of India, but also tells the social and economic history, and while Brook covered a part of the political history, covering the socio-economic history in a five hour production was near impossible and he can't be blamed for not covering it.

I liked the way the play ended profoundly referring to the final illusion. Most Indian productions would have saffronized this, but not being trained earlier, allowed Brook to interpret this in a broader sense.
You have known neither paradise nor hell. Here there is no happiness, no punishment, no family, no enemies. Rise in tranquility. This is the last illusion.

Brook's exploitation of the Rabindra Sangeet style of music is also interesting and adds a charm to the production.

There weren't many Indian actors in the production - in fact only one who had a major role - Mallika Sarabhai played Draupadi. Her performance was marked with a couple of brilliant scenes, but the rest of it was mediocre. There were good performances from the characters of Krishna, Duryodhana, Yudhishthira, Arjuna, Gandhari, and Karna (aided by fluent soliloquies, the best of all).

At the end, I'd like to say that it was not a bad attempt, but Brook's Shakespearean legacy let him down. He could have done a lot better, had he not tried to invent a Shakeaspearan drama out of the Mahabharata.

Monday, July 13, 2009

This little froggy took a big leap,
This little froggy took a small,
This little froggy leaped sideways,
And this little froggy not at all,
And this little froggy went,
hippity, hippity, hippity hop, all the way home.

In Bengali, the word for mushroom translates literally to Frog's Umbrella. I remember reading books as a child, with pictures of a frog under a mushroom. The pity is that my children may only see frogs in their alphabet books, as most species of frogs are now critically endangered, and many totally extinct.

In 2007, David Attenborough, shooting for the BBC series "Life in Cold Blood" in 2007, visited the last breeding site of the very beautiful and once abundant golden frog in Panama. Fighting time, the scientists studying the golden frog for years waited for the shooting to complete, before removing the last of the golden frogs from the wild and transporting them to a special facility.

A story that appeared in the National Geographic Magazine in April 2009 really moved me. I will paste verbatim an extract from it which made me really sad:
A slender man with a camper's stubble and a soft demeanor squats at the side of pond number 100, bordered by stoic rock walls and edged with pink mountain heather and tangled grasses. Vance Vredenburg is a biologist at San Francisco State University, and he's been studying the mountain yellow-legged frog for 13 years, slumming in a tent on the mountainside for weeks at a time as he monitors 80 different study lakes. Today, mosquito net balled up around his neck, he contemplates ten dead frogs, stiff-legged, white bellies going soft in the sun.

"It wasn't long ago when you walked along the bank of this pond," he recalls, "a frog leapt at every other step. You'd see hundreds of them alive and well, soaking in the sun in a writhing mass." But in 2005, when the biologist hiked up to his camp anticipating another season of long-term studies, "there were dead frogs everywhere. Frogs I'd been working with for years, that I'd tagged and followed through their lives, all dead. I sat down on the ground and cried."

The rest of the article can be read here.

While man has been partially responsible for this mass extinction of amphibians, which are the most ancient of all back-boned animals, by destroying their habitat, the major contribution to this extinction comes from a fungal infection. The fungus called Chytridiomycosis infects the skin of the frogs, hindering their breathing, and choking them to death (frogs breathe through their skins). The fungus is so potent that it has spread to all continents; more than 170 species have already been wiped out by this fungus; more than 1900 species are on the verge of extinction due to this fungus.

The virus first appeared in the African clawed frogs, which have developed a resistance to the fungus due to the presence of anti-biotic producing pro-biotic bacteria in their skin. In the last few decades, the African clawed frog was transported all over the world in large numbers, which could be one of the reasons for this amphibian epidemic. As most frogs around the world had never been exposed to the fungus, thereby having developed no genetic resistance to the fungus, they quickly succumbed to the fungus. Another theory suggests that the fungus suddenly increased in virulence, which the frogs were unable to cope up with. However, the former argument sounds stronger. Carrying species from one continent to another in jet planes has never been a good idea, and we have seen many times in the past the environmental ramifications of such alien introductions.

Government policies worldwide has helped this mass extinction of the amphibians. A few years ago, there was a massive plan to introduce fish into the pristine fish-less upstream waters of rivers. Trouts were introduced into these fish-less waters by dropping from airplanes (incidentally, many of these missed their mark, leaving fish rotting in the forests). This spelt doom for the frogs. Tadpoles are the primary food of trouts, and these tadpoles in these previously fish-less waters had no reason to develop defenses against fishes, and were consequently quickly eaten.

Some conservationist groups are trying to combat the virus (which, in some areas is spreading as quickly as 25 miles a month), by collecting frogs from the wild, and treating them with anti-fungal medicines. Other efforts are aimed at using the bacteria that protects the African clawed frog against the virus in combating the epidemic, but such research may take a while.

Indeed, the future does seem bleak for these amphibians, which are the oldest land-dwelling vertebrates. These amphibians, which saw the dinosaurs come and go, are facing the worst winter of their existence on the planet, and may not see another spring.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Since everybody is discussing homosexuality these days - reports of gay penguins exercising their right to adopt children and article 377 pottied, flushed and disinfected in everybody's mouth and in everybody's morning newspaper - why should I be left out. After all, I have a metabolic requirement to be cool too - and my blog needs to be more happenning (that, incidentally, was the word a friend used to describe what I was not when I told him that I spend most of my leisure hours at home pressing 'j' on google-reader instead of 'partying'. Well, that wasn't quite the word he used; the word he quite used used was 'socializing').

A few years ago, the news that the first homosexual tigers were observed in the wild, made it to the front page of the Times of India, and it seemed to have a sort of an appeal to wannabe post doctorates of the sort who ran an experiment on fifty or so couples feeding the husbands different diets on different weeks, and feeding the wives the resulting cum, and doing a regression line analysis plotting the taste of food of the men on the X-axis, and the taste of food (oopsie!) of the females on the Y-axis. (You may not believe me, and might like to check on this yourself, but it was a research project conducted by some university somewhere).

Tigers are mostly solitary creatures, and the chances of one of them finding a fuck may be small given their current population - thanks to project tiger and Chinese medicines - providing me enough justification to undermine the hullabaloo over Columbus' discovery of gay tigers.

A more recent non-human homosexual observation was made on a gay penguin couple. (Oopsie! Apologies. Blame that on an unconscious grammatical error, without any ill feeling towards the observer. The Corrected sentence should read something like, "Human observation of non-human homosexuals, aka gay penguins). BTW, just in case you are wondering if this has anything to do with 8mm films, they didn't go through the American Board of Film Certification to get themselves 13X rated. What made it even more interesting that the gay penguin couple adopted and raised a penguin chick.

Jokes aside, what is extraordinary about this incident is that these gay penguins shouldn't have had any difficulty in finding a mate of the other sex who was ready to copulate with them. Why, then, did they choose to remain gay?

I haven't been able to find the answer to this question, and I doubt if scientists have. But is this the only question to be answered? There are a couple more. Is homosexuality a product of the mind - a mere matter of taste (acquired or otherwise), or does it have a deeper genetic root? And if it does have a, either partial or total, genetic root, is it a wide-spread phenomena that happened throughout the history of higher animals to a certain percentage of the population, or was it always a stray phenomena arising out of genetic aberrations, which were to be soon eliminated out by natural selection?

Perhaps a clue might lie in this question. Is homosexuality totally meaningless in creatures in which fertilization is external, rather than internal? Have the plants, frogs or coral polyps found any parallels of the homosexuality which has been observed in us mammals, which we are yet to observe, recognize or understand?

Monday, June 08, 2009

When I made my decision to become a vegetarian more than twelve years ago, little did I know the environmental effects of my personal decision. At that time, the decision to turn a vegetarian was solely guided by my reluctance to cause pain to other animals for my food. Today, I realize that the decision I then made goes beyond what I could have imagined at that stage.

To produce one kilogram of potatoes, a hundred litres of water is needed; to produce one kilogram of rice, four thousand litres; and to produce one kilogram of meat, thirteen thousand litres of water is required. The choice to turn a vegetarian helps the environment at a time where the world's fresh water reserves are running low. In most places, ground water, which is non-renewable, has already been over-exploited, mainly for agricultural use. Major rivers have been diverted for mega irrigation projects to the extent that one out of ten rivers of the world no longer flow to the sea. The state of the once vast Aral sea, now reduced greatly in size manifest what we have done with our fresh-water reserves.

With every extra cow grown, we put extra pressure on our atmosphere; the production and transport of huge quantities of livestock is something that the atmosphere can no longer bear. 95% of the world's soya bean produce is used to feed livestock. 50% of the world's agriculture trade is redirected towards livestock feed. The Cornell website gives us these shocking statistics that govern production of meat:

Animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy than production of plant protein while yielding animal protein that is only 1.4 times more nutritious for humans than the comparable amount of plant protein, according to the Cornell ecologist's analysis.

Tracking food animal production from the feed trough to the dinner table, Pimentel found broiler chickens to be the most efficient use of fossil energy, and beef, the least. Chicken meat production consumes energy in a 4:1 ratio to protein output; beef cattle production requires an energy input to protein output ratio of 54:1. (Lamb meat production is nearly as inefficient at 50:1, according to the ecologist's analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics. Other ratios range from 13:1 for turkey meat and 14:1 for milk protein to 17:1 for pork and 26:1 for eggs.)

Animal agriculture is a leading consumer of water resources in the United States, Pimentel noted. Grain-fed beef production takes 100,000 liters of water for every kilogram of food. Raising broiler chickens takes 3,500 liters of water to make a kilogram of meat. In comparison, soybean production uses 2,000 liters for kilogram of food produced; rice, 1,912; wheat, 900; and potatoes, 500 liters. "Water shortages already are severe in the Western and Southern United States and the situation is quickly becoming worse because of a rapidly growing U.S. population that requires more water for all of its needs, especially agriculture," Pimentel observed.

Livestock are directly or indirectly responsible for much of the soil erosion in the United States, the ecologist determined. On lands where feed grain is produced, soil loss averages 13 tons per hectare per year. Pasture lands are eroding at a slower pace, at an average of 6 tons per hectare per year. But erosion may exceed 100 tons on severely overgrazed pastures, and 54 percent of U.S. pasture land is being overgrazed.

"More than half the U.S. grain and nearly 40 percent of world grain is being fed to livestock rather than being consumed directly by humans," Pimentel said. "Although grain production is increasing in total, the per capita supply has been decreasing for more than a decade. Clearly, there is reason for concern in the future."


One billion people around the world today go hungry. The earth has enough land to produce crops to feed all these one billion hungry people if others reduce their consumption of meat.

Every-day more and more forest land is cleared to make way for agriculture, the produce of which is invariably redirected towards livestock-feed, production of oil, or bio-fuels. Only a few decades ago, Borneo was covered primarily by a diverse and rich rain-forest which should have been protected as a world heritage site and a biosphere reserve. Instead, 90% of Borneo's forests have been wiped out to make way for palm plantations to feed the growing demand for palm oil. It is unimaginable that we can turn a blind-eye to this and still live with a clear conscience.

Fish accounts as a staple food for one out of five people in the world. However, we have managed to over-exploit this very important resource. Seventy-five percent of the world's fishing grounds are over-exploited, thanks to modern fishing trawlers; fish nets that span hundreds of kilometres sweeping catching fish and other non-target species indiscriminately, the latter are then thrown back into the ocean, dead; and satellite assistance for location of shoals. Most of the large fish species have become extinct as the long time they take to grow into adults does not give them a time to regenerate in the presence of these titanic trawlers.

Consider this. The plate on your table will be tasty. After-all, it contains the blood and flesh of so many humans who cannot afford to eat meat or grains, or drink safe water.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Modern economy believes that the construction and utilization of abstract forms of assets has a stabilizing effect on the economy, and such abstract entities, like money, shares, futures trading etc., have, over the years, been continuously invented and encouraged. The mechanism works very well, and hides most of the complexities that one would have to otherwise consider. It is much like the application of mathematics to physics or engineering. A simpler allegory would be the driving of a car - the driver knows how to operate the pedals, the steering wheel and the gear shaft, and the complex machinery below the bonnet takes care of the rest. It allows the driver to travel at 90 mph. Such speed, however, does not come without certain making certain compromises. If the car were to break down in the middle of a desert, or were it to crash into a static or dynamic object of considerable rigidity, the results could be cataclysmic. The more complex the machinery gets, the greater the number of points of failure, the lesser the idea the driver has on how to go about fixing the problem, and the more stranded in the middle of the desert he is. The faster he goes, the more devastating the crash is. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the world has witnessed numerous failures and crashes of this incredible economic automotive.

The source of all economies is the exploitation of the bountiful resources that mother Earth provides. There was a time when men were hunters or gatherers. Every man was a self sufficient entity who could complete all the tasks necessary for his survival. The survival closure - which we shall define as the quorum of the group which would ensure the survival of each member of the group - was the individual, or the, at max, the family. Once man formed communities, and each member of the community specialized in a certain trade, an individual could no longer survive by himself. The survival closure now grew to include the entire community. Of course, this made the community very efficient in the exploitation of the natural resources, so that all members of the community had plenty. The flip side to such communities was that it facilitated the spread of diseases, and the fabric of relationship between members of the community grew in complexity and crime and law were born.

Soon communities learned to trade articles - or rather barter them. Until now, man's only dealing was with physical entities. Nothing abstract, had, so far, been invented. Rich men were measured by the numbers of goat and the amount of stocked grain he held. The only arguably abstract notion was the idea of ownership itself. The number of people in the survival closure grew further to include a number of trading communities.

The earliest forms of currency were clams and other natural objects. The introduction of currency resulted in an interesting possibility. An individual or a community could now be rich on the basis of abstract items as opposed to physical items. Although this paved the way for better exploitation of resources, comparable pricing of tradable items, improved lifestyle and more leisure time to devote to activities other than those necessitated by survival, this invention had its own drawbacks. A rich community with no physical assets could easily starve to death; the price associated with food could change. Welcome inflation and speculation.

There was still one hurdle in the way explosive growth. There was no way one could become a millionaire. The act of storing a million clams could prove to be a rather arduous task. The problem was solved with the introduction of money, and subsequent concepts of debts, securities, loans, banks, shares, bonds, etc. Soon there was a big diversion in the way people lived. Tribal chiefs were replaced by emperors, plundering looting and colonization came into vogue, the tribal battles were replaced by organized wars between organized armies of countries. Slavery boomed. A class of people got richer and richer, and another class became poorer and poorer. The list of the unfortunate consequences just keeps growing.

However, without these abstract concepts of economy, man wouldn't have made a lot of the welcome progress he has made - especially scientific progress. Health care improvements have resulted in an increase of the life expectancy and a decline of infant mortality, resulting in a rise of the human population, which cascaded to the over exploitation of the once bountiful Earth, so much so, that today, the entire Resistance of life on this planet is threatened by global warming and a nuclear war.

All said and done, the old, so called, savage way to live by hunting and gathering, or the bartering ways of the red Indian economy wasn't so bad after all.

Of course, man cannot now go back to his ancient bartering ways - entropy can only increase, not decrease - but it would be interesting if bada babu got paid a cow for his services and chota babu a goat - goodbye inflation and economic depression. Lacking the skills, the babus would find it rather difficult to carry home and milk their salaries. Not that we would need the babus once the complex machinery of modern economy was exterminated.

However, since this is not possible, let us learn to live with the modern economy and its abstractions as it is by saying, as a prayer one hundred Hail Andersens and one hundred Hail Lehmanns.