Exploring Life

Columbia's Last Flight from The Atlantic by William Langewiesche

2011-08-31T01:46:00.000+05:30

Space flight is known to be a risky business, but during the minutes before dawn last February 1, as the doomed shuttle Columbia began to descend into the upper atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, only a handful of people—a few engineers deep inside of NASA—worried that the vehicle and its seven souls might actually come to grief. It was the responsibility of NASA's managers to hear those suspicions, and from top to bottom they failed. After the fact, that's easy to see. But in fairness to those whose reputations have now been sacrificed, seventeen years and eighty-nine shuttle flights had passed since the Challenger explosion, and within the agency a new generation had risen that was smart, perhaps, but also unwise—confined by NASA's walls and routines, and vulnerable to the self-satisfaction that inevitably had set in.

Moreover, this mission was a yawn—a low-priority "science" flight forced onto NASA by Congress and postponed for two years because of a more pressing schedule of construction deliveries to the International Space Station. The truth is, it had finally been launched as much to clear the books as to add to human knowledge, and it had gone nowhere except into low Earth orbit, around the globe every ninety minutes for sixteen days, carrying the first Israeli astronaut, and performing a string of experiments, many of which, like the shuttle program itself, seemed to suffer from something of a make-work character—the examination of dust in the Middle East (by the Israeli, of course); the ever popular ozone study; experiments designed by schoolchildren in six countries to observe the effect of weightlessness on spiders, silkworms, and other creatures; an exercise in "astroculture" involving the extraction of essential oils from rose and rice flowers, which was said to hold promise for new perfumes; and so forth. No doubt some good science was done too—particularly pertaining to space flight itself—though none of it was so urgent that it could not have been performed later, under better circumstances, in the under-booked International Space Station. The astronauts aboard the shuttle were smart and accomplished people, and they were deeply committed to human space flight and exploration. They were also team players, by intense selection, and nothing if not wise to the game. From orbit one of them had radioed, "The science we're doing here is great, and it's fantastic. It's leading-edge." Others had dutifully reported that the planet seems beautiful, fragile, and borderless when seen from such altitudes, and they had expressed their hopes in English and Hebrew for world peace. It was Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread, standard NASA fare. On the ground so little attention was being paid that even the radars that could have been directed upward to track the Columbia's re-entry into the atmosphere—from Vandenberg Air Force Base, or White Sands Missile Range—were sleeping. As a result, no radar record of the breakup exists—only of the metal rain that drifted down over East Texas, and eventually came into the view of air-traffic control.

Along the route, however, stood small numbers of shuttle enthusiasts, who had gotten up early with their video cameras and had arrayed themselves on hills or away from city lights to record the spectacle of what promised to be a beautiful display. The shuttle came into view, on track and on schedule, just after 5:53 Pacific time, crossing the California coast at about 15,000 mph in the superthin air 230,000 feet above the Russian River, northwest of San Francisco. It was first picked up on video by a Lockheed engineer in suburban Fairfield, who recorded a bright meteor passing almost directly overhead, not the shuttle itself but the sheath of hot gases around it, and the long, luminous tail of ionized air known as plasma. Only later, after the engineer heard about the accident on television, did he check his tape and realize that he had recorded what appeared to be two pieces coming off the Columbia in quick succession, like little flares in its wake. Those pieces were recorded by others as well, along with the third, fourth, and fifth "debris events" that are known to have occurred during the sixty seconds that it took the shuttle to cross California. From the top of Mount Hamilton, southeast of San Francisco, another engineer, the former president of the Peninsula Astronomical Society, caught all five events on tape but, again, did not realize it until afterward. He later said, "I'd seen four re-entries before this one. When we saw it, we did note that it was a little brighter and a little bit whiter in color than it normally is. It's normally a pink-magenta color. But you know, it wasn't so different that it really flagged us as something wrong. With the naked eye we didn't see the particles coming off."

One minute after the Columbia left California, as it neared southwestern Utah, the trouble was becoming more obvious to observers on the ground. There had been a bright flash earlier over Nevada, and now debris came off that was large enough to cause multiple secondary plasma trails. North of the Grand Canyon, in Saint George, Utah, a man and his grown son climbed onto a ridge above the county hospital, hoping for the sort of view they had seen several years before, of a fireball going by. It was a sight they remembered as "really neat." This time was different, though. The son, who was videotaping, started yelling, "Jesus, Dad, there's stuff falling off!" and the father saw it too, with his naked eyes.

The Columbia was flying on autopilot, as is usual, and though it continued to lay flares in its wake, the astronauts aboard remained blissfully unaware of the trouble they were in. They passed smoothly into dawn above the Arizona border, and sailed across the Navajo reservation and on over Albuquerque, before coming to the Texas Panhandle on a perfect descent profile, slowing through 13,400 mph at 210,000 feet five minutes after having crossed the California coastline. Nineteen seconds later, at 7:58:38 central time, they got the first sign of something being a little out of the ordinary: it was a cockpit indication of low tire pressures on the left main landing gear. This was not quite a trivial matter. A blown or deflated main tire would pose serious risks during the rollout after landing, including loss of lateral control and the possibility that the nose would slam down, conceivably leading to a catastrophic breakup on the ground. These scenarios were known, and had been simulated and debated in the inner world of NASA, leading some to believe that the best of the imperfect choices in such a case might be for the crew to bail out—an alternative available only below 30,000 feet and 220 mph of dynamic airspeed.

Nonetheless, for Columbia's pilots it was reasonable to assume for the moment that the indication of low pressure was due to a problem with the sensors rather than with the tires themselves, and that the teams of Mission Control engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center, in Houston, would be able to sort through the mass of automatically transmitted data—the so-called telemetry, which was far more complete than what was available in the cockpit—and to draw the correct conclusion. The reverse side of failures in a machine as complex as the shuttle is that most of them can be worked around, or turn out to be small. In other words, there was no reason for alarm. After a short delay the Columbia's commander, Rick Husband, calmly radioed to Mission Control, "And, ah, Houston ..." Sheathed in hot atmospheric gases, the shuttle was slowing through 13,100 mph at 205,000 feet.

Houston did not clearly hear the call.

With the scheduled touchdown now only about fifteen minutes ahead, it was a busy time at Mission Control. Weather reports were coming in from the landing site at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. Radar tracking of the shuttle, like the final accurate ground-based navigation, had not yet begun. Sitting at their specialized positions, and monitoring the numbers displayed on the consoles, a few of the flight controllers had begun to sense, just barely, that something was going seriously wrong. The worry was not quite coherent yet. One of the controllers later told me that it amounted to an inexplicable bad feeling in his gut. But it was undeniable nonetheless. For the previous few minutes, since about the time when the shuttle had passed from California to Nevada, Jeff Kling, an engineer who was working the mechanical-systems position known as MMACS (pronounced Macs), had witnessed a swarm of erratic indications and sensor failures. The pattern was disconcerting because of the lack of common circuitry that could easily explain the pattern of such failures—a single box that could be blamed.

Kling had been bantering good-naturedly on an intercom with one of his team, a technician sitting in one of the adjoining back rooms and monitoring the telemetry, when the technician noted a strange failure of temperature transducers on a hydraulic return line. The technician said, "We've had some hydraulic 'ducers go off-scale low."

Kling had seen the same indications. He said, "Well, I guess!"

The technician said, "What in the world?"

Kling said, "This is not funny. On the left side."

The technician confirmed, "On the left side ..."

Now Kling got onto the main control-room intercom to the lead controller on duty, known as the flight director, a man named Leroy Cain. In the jargon-laced language of the control room Kling said, "Flight, Macs."

Cain said, "Go ahead, Macs."

"FYI, I've just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle, hydraulic return temperatures. Two of them on system one, and one in each of systems two and three."

Cain said, "Four hyd return temps?"

Kling answered, "To the left outboard and left inboard elevon."

"Okay, is there anything common to them? DSC or MDM or anything? I mean, you're telling me you lost them all at exactly the same time?"

"No, not exactly. They were within probably four or five seconds of each other."

Cain struggled to assess the meaning. "Okay, where are those ... where is that instrumentation located?"

Kling continued to hear from his back-room team. He said, "All four of them are located in the aft part of the left wing, right in front of the elevons ... elevon actuators. And there is no commonality."

Cain repeated, "No commonality."

But all the failing instruments were in the left wing. The possible significance of this was not lost on Cain: during the launch a piece of solid foam had broken off from the shuttle's external fuel tank, and at high speed had smashed into the left wing; after minimal consideration the shuttle program managers (who stood above Mission Control in the NASA hierarchy) had dismissed the incident as essentially unthreatening. Like almost everyone else at NASA, Cain had taken the managers at their word—and he still did. Nonetheless, the strange cluster of left-wing failures was an ominous development. Kling had more-specific reasons for concern. In a wonkish, engineering way he had discussed with his team the telemetry they might observe if a hole allowed hot gases into the wing during re-entry, and had come up with a profile eerily close to what was happening now. Still, he maintained the expected detachment.

Cain continued to worry the problem. He asked for reassurance from his "guidance, navigation, and control" man, Mike Sarafin. "Everything look good to you, control and rates and everything is nominal, right?"

Sarafin said, "Control's been stable through the rolls that we've done so far, Flight. We have good trims. I don't see anything out of the ordinary."

Cain directed his attention back to Kling: "All other indications for your hydraulic systems indications are good?"

"They're all good. We've had good quantities all the way across."

Cain said, "And the other temps are normal?"

"The other temps are normal, yes, sir." He meant only those that the telemetry allowed him to see.

Cain said, "And when you say you lost these, are you saying they went to zero ..."

"All four of them are off-scale low."

"... or off-scale low?"

Kling said, "And they were all staggered. They were, like I said, within several seconds of each other."

Cain said, "Okay."

But it wasn't okay. Within seconds the Columbia had crossed into Texas and the left-tire-pressure indications were dropping, as observed also by the cockpit crew. Kling's informal model of catastrophe had predicted just such indications, whether from blown tires or wire breaks. The end was now coming very fast.

Kling said, "Flight, Macs."

Cain said, "Go."

"We just lost tire pressure on the left outboard and left inboard, both tires."

Cain said, "Copy."

At that moment, twenty-three seconds after 7:59 local time, the Mission Control consoles stopped receiving telemetry updates, for reasons unknown. The astronaut sitting beside Cain, and serving as the Mission Control communicator, radioed, "And Columbia, Houston, we see your tire-pressure messages, and we did not copy your last call."

At the same time, on the control-room intercom, Cain was talking again to Kling. He said, "Is it instrumentation, Macs? Gotta be."

Kling said, "Flight, Macs, those are also off-scale low."

From the speeding shuttle Rick Husband—Air Force test pilot, religious, good family man, always wanted to be an astronaut—began to answer the communicator. He said, "Roger, ah," and was cut off on a word that began with "buh ..."

It turned out to be the Columbia's last voice transmission. Brief communication breaks, however, are not abnormal during re-entries, and this one raised no immediate concern in Houston.

People on the ground in Dallas suddenly knew more than the flight controllers in Houston. Four seconds after eight they saw a large piece leave the orbiter and fall away. The shuttle was starting to come apart. It continued intermittently to send telemetry, which though not immediately displayed at Mission Control was captured by NASA computers and later discovered; the story it told was that multiple systems were failing. In quick succession two additional chunks fell off.

Down in the control room Cain said, "And there's no commonality between all these tire-pressure instrumentations and the hydraulic return instrumentations?"

High in the sky near Dallas the Columbia's main body began to break up. It crackled and boomed, and made a loud rumble.

Kling said, "No, sir, there's not. We've also lost the nose-gear down talkback, and right-main-gear down talkback."

"Nose-gear and right-main-gear down talkbacks?"

"Yes, sir."

At Fort Hood, Texas, two Dutch military pilots who were training in an Apache attack helicopter locked on to the breakup with their optics and videotaped three bright objects—the main rocket engines—flying eastward in formation, among other, smaller pieces and their contrails.

Referring to the loss of communications, one minute after the main-body breakup, Laura Hoppe, the flight controller responsible for the communications systems, said to Cain, "I didn't expect, uh, this bad of a hit on comm."

Cain asked another controller about a planned switchover to a ground-based radio ahead, "How far are we from UHF? Is that two-minute clock good?"

Kling, also, was hanging on to hope. He said, "Flight, Macs."

Cain said, "Macs?"

Kling said, "On the tire pressures, we did see them go erratic for a little bit before they went away, so I do believe it's instrumentation."

"Okay."

At about that time the debris began to hit the ground. It fell in thousands of pieces along a swath ten miles wide and 300 miles long, across East Texas and into Louisiana. There were many stories later. Some of the debris whistled down through the leaves of trees and smacked into a pond where a man was fishing. Another piece went right through a backyard trampoline, evoking a mother's lament: "Those damned kids ..." Still another piece hit the window of a moving car, startling the driver. The heaviest parts flew the farthest. An 800-pound piece of engine hit the ground in Fort Polk, Louisiana, doing 1,400 mph. A 600-pound piece landed nearby. Thousands of people began to call in, swamping the 911 dispatchers with reports of sonic booms and metal falling out of the sky. No one, however, was hit. This would be surprising were it not for the fact, so visible from above, that the world is still a sparsely populated place.

In Houston the controllers maintained discipline, and continued preparing for the landing, even as they received word that the Merritt Island radar, in Florida, which should by now have started tracking the inbound craft, was picking up only false targets. Shuttles arrive on time or they don't arrive at all. But, repeatedly, the communicator radioed, "Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check," as if he might still hear a reply. Then, at thirteen minutes past the hour, precisely when the Columbia should have been passing overhead the runway before circling down for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center, a phone call came in from an off-duty controller who had just seen a video broadcast by a Dallas television station of multiple contrails in the sky. When Cain heard the news, he paused, and then put the contingency plan into effect. To the ground-control officer he said, "GC, Flight."

"Flight, GC."

"Lock the doors."

"Copy."

The controllers were stunned, but lacked the time to contemplate the horror of what had just happened. Under Cain's direction they set about collecting numbers, writing notes, and closing out their logs, for the investigation that was certain to follow. The mood in the room was somber and focused. Only the most basic facts were known: the Columbia had broken up at 200,000 feet doing 12,738 mph, and the crew could not possibly have survived. Ron Dittemore, the shuttle program manager, would be talking to reporters later that day, and he needed numbers and information. At some point sandwiches were brought in and consumed. Like the priests who harvest faith at the bedsides of the dying, grief counselors showed up too, but they were not much used.

Cain insisted on control-room discipline. He said, "No phone calls off site outside of this room. Our discussions are on these loops—the recorded DVIS loops only. No data, no phone calls, no transmissions anywhere, into or out."

Later this was taken by some critics to be a typical NASA reaction—insular, furtive, overcontrolling. And it may indeed have reflected certain aspects of what had become of the agency's culture. But it was also, more simply, a rule-book procedure meant to stabilize and preserve the crucial last data. The room was being frozen as a crime scene might be. Somewhere inside NASA something had obviously gone very wrong—and it made sense to start looking for the evidence here and now.

Less than an hour later, at 10:00 a.m. eastern time, a retired four-star admiral named Hal Gehman met his brother at a lawyer's office in Williamsburg, Virginia. At the age of sixty, Gehman was a tall, slim, silver-haired man with an unlined face and soft eyes. Dressed in civilian clothes, standing straight but not stiffly so, he had an accessible, unassuming manner that contrasted with the rank and power he had achieved. After an inauspicious start as a mediocre engineering student in the Penn State Naval ROTC program ("Top four fifths of the class," he liked to say), he had skippered a patrol boat through the thick of the Vietnam War and gone on to become an experienced sea captain, the commander of a carrier battle group, vice-chief of the Navy, and finally nato Atlantic commander and head of the U.S. Joint Forces Command. Upon his retirement, in 2000, from the sixth-ranked position in the U.S. military, he had given all that up with apparent ease. He had enjoyed a good career in the Navy, but he enjoyed his civilian life now too. He was a rare sort of man—startlingly intelligent beneath his guileless exterior, personally satisfied, and quite genuinely untroubled. He lived in Norfolk in a pleasant house that he had recently remodeled; he loved his wife, his grown children, his mother and father, and all his siblings. He had an old Volkswagen bug convertible, robin's-egg blue, that he had bought from another admiral. He had a modest thirty-four-foot sloop, which he enjoyed sailing in the Chesapeake, though its sails were worn out and he wanted to replace its icebox with a twelve-volt refrigeration unit. He was a patriot, of course, but not a reactionary. He called himself a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. His life as he described it was the product of convention. It was also the product of a strict personal code. He chose not to work with any company doing business with the Department of Defense. He liked power, but understood its limitations. He did not care to be famous or rich. He represented the American establishment at its best.

In the lawyer's office in Williamsburg his brother told him that the Columbia had been lost. Gehman had driven there with his radio off and so he had not heard. He asked a few questions, and absorbed the information without much reaction. He did not follow the space program and, like most Americans, had not been aware that a mission was under way. He spent an hour with the lawyer on routine family business. When he emerged, he saw that messages had been left on his cell phone, but because the coverage was poor, he could not retrieve them; only later, while driving home on the interstate, was he finally able to connect. To his surprise, among mundane messages he found an urgent request to call the deputy administrator of NASA, a man he had not heard of before, named Fred Gregory. Like a good American, Gehman made the call while speeding down the highway. Gregory, a former shuttle commander, said, "Have you heard the news?"

Gehman said, "Only secondhand."

Gregory filled him in on what little was known, and explained that part of NASA's contingency plan, instituted after the Challenger disaster of 1986, was the activation of a standing "interagency" investigation board. By original design the board consisted of seven high-ranking civilian and military officials who were pre-selected mechanically on the basis of job titles—the institutional slots that they filled. For the Columbia, the names were now known: the board would consist of three Air Force generals, John Barry, Kenneth Hess, and Duane Deal; a Navy admiral, Stephen Turcotte; a NASA research director, G. Scott Hubbard; and two senior civil-aviation officials, James Hallock and Steven Wallace. Though only two of these men knew much about NASA or the space shuttle, in various ways each of them was familiar with the complexities of large-scale, high-risk activities. Most of them also had strong personalities. To be effective they would require even stronger management. Gregory said that it was NASA's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, who wanted Gehman to come in as chairman to lead the work. Gehman was not immune to the compliment, but he was cautious. He had met O'Keefe briefly years before, but did not know him. He wanted to make sure he wasn't being suckered into a NASA sideshow.

O'Keefe was an able member of Washington's revolving-door caste, a former congressional staffer and budget specialist—and a longtime protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney—who through the force of his competence and Republican connections had briefly landed the position of Secretary of the Navy in the early 1990s. He had suffered academic banishment through the Clinton era, but under the current administration had re-emerged as a deputy at the Office of Management and Budget, where he had been assigned to tackle the difficult problem of NASA's cost overruns and lack of delivery, particularly in the Space Station program. It is hard to know what he thought when he was handed the treacherous position of NASA administrator. Inside Washington, NASA's reputation had sunk so low that some of O'Keefe's former congressional colleagues snickered that Cheney was trying to kill his own man off. But O'Keefe was not a space crusader, as some earlier NASA administrators had been, and he was not about to pick up the fallen banners of the visionaries and try to lead the way forward; he was a tough, level-headed money man, grounded in the realities of Washington, D.C., and sent in on a mission to bring discipline to NASA's budget and performance before moving on. NASA's true believers called him a carpetbagger and resented the schedule pressures that he brought to bear, but in fairness he was a professional manager, and NASA needed one.

O'Keefe had been at NASA for just over a year when the Columbia self-destructed. He was in Florida standing at the landing site beside one of his deputies, a former shuttle commander named William Readdy. At 9:05 eastern time, ten minutes before the scheduled landing, Readdy got word that communications with the shuttle, which had been lost, had not been re-established; O'Keefe noticed that Readdy's face went blank. At 9:10 Readdy opened a book to check a time sequence. He said, "We should have heard the sonic booms by now. There's something really wrong." By 9:29 O'Keefe had activated the full-blown contingency plan. When word got to the White House, the executive staff ducked quickly into defensive positions: President Bush would grieve alongside the families and say the right things about carrying on, but rather than involving himself by appointing an independent presidential commission, as Ronald Reagan had in response to the Challenger accident, he would keep his distance by expressing faith in NASA's ability to find the cause. In other words, this baby was going to be dropped squarely onto O'Keefe's lap. The White House approved Gehman's appointment to lead what would essentially be NASA's investigation—but O'Keefe could expect little further communication. There was a chance that the President would not even want to receive the final report directly but would ask that it be deposited more discreetly in the White House in-box. He had problems bigger than space on his mind.

Nonetheless, that morning in his car Gehman realized that even with a lukewarm White House endorsement, the position that NASA was offering, if handled correctly, would allow for a significant inquiry into the accident. Gregory made it clear that Gehman would have the full support of NASA's engineers and technical resources in unraveling the physical mysteries of the accident—what actually had happened to the Columbia out there in its sheath of fire at 200,000 feet. Moreover, Gehman was confident that if the investigation had to go further, into why this accident had occurred, he had the experience necessary to sort through the human complexities of NASA and emerge with useful answers that might result in reform. This may have been overconfident of him, and to some extent utopian, but it was not entirely blind: he had been through big investigations before, most recently two years earlier, just after leaving the Navy, when he and a retired Army general named William Crouch had led an inquiry into the loss of seventeen sailors aboard the USS Cole, the destroyer that was attacked and nearly sunk by suicide terrorists in Yemen in October of 2000. Their report found fundamental errors in the functioning of the military command structure, and issued recommendations (largely classified) that are in effect today. The success of the Cole investigation was one of the arguments that Gregory used on him now. Gehman did not disagree, but he wanted to be very clear. He said, "I know you've got a piece of paper in front of you. Does it say that I'm not an aviator?"

Gregory said, "We don't need an aviator here. We need an investigator."

And so, driving down the highway to Norfolk, Gehman accepted the job. When he got home, he told his wife that he was a federal employee again and that there wouldn't be much sailing in the spring. That afternoon and evening, as the faxes and phone calls came in, he began to exercise control of the process, if only in his own mind, concluding that the board's charter as originally written by NASA would have to be strengthened and expanded, and that its name should immediately be changed from the absurd International Space Station and Space Shuttle Mishap Interagency Investigations Board (the ISSSSMIIB) to the more workable Columbia Accident Investigation Board, or CAIB, which could be pronounced in one syllable, as Cabe.

NASA initially did not resist any of his suggestions. Gregory advised Gehman to head to Barksdale Air Force Base, in Shreveport, Louisiana, where the wreckage was being collected. As Gehman began to explore airline connections, word came that a NASA executive jet, a Gulfstream, would be dispatched to carry him, along with several other board members, directly to Barksdale. The jet arrived in Norfolk on Sunday afternoon, the day after the accident. One of the members already aboard was Steven Wallace, the head of accident investigations for the FAA. Wallace is a second-generation pilot, an athletic, tightly wound man with wide experience in government and a skeptical view of the powerful. He later told me that when Gehman got on the airplane, he was dressed in a business suit, and that, having introduced himself, he explained that they might run into the press, and if they did, he would handle things. This raised some questions about Gehman's motivations (and indeed Gehman turned out to enjoy the limelight), but as Wallace soon discovered, grandstanding was not what Gehman was about. As the Gulfstream proceeded toward Louisiana, Gehman rolled up his sleeves and, sitting at the table in the back of the airplane, began to ask for the thoughts and perspectives of the board members there—not about what might have happened to the Columbia but about how best to find out. It was the start of what would become an intense seven-month relationship. It was obvious that Gehman was truly listening to the ideas, and that he was capable of integrating them quickly and productively into his own thoughts. By the end of the flight even Wallace was growing impressed.

But Gehman was in some ways also naive, formed as he had been by investigative experience within the military, in which much of the work proceeds behind closed doors, and conflict of interest is not a big concern. The Columbia investigation, he discovered, was going to be a very different thing. Attacks against the caib began on the second day, and by midweek, as the board moved from Shreveport to Houston to set up shop, they showed no signs of easing. Congress in particular was thundering that Gehman was a captive investigator, that his report would be a whitewash, and that the White House should replace the caib with a Challenger-style presidential commission. This came as a surprise to Gehman, who had assumed that he could just go about his business but who now realized that he would have to accommodate these concerns if the final report was to have any credibility at all. Later he said to me, "I didn't go in thinking about it, but as I began to hear the independence thing—'You can't have a panel appointed by NASA investigating itself!'—I realized I'd better deal with Congress." He did this at first mainly by listening on the phone. "They told me what I had to do to build my credibility. I didn't invent it—they told me. They also said, 'We hate NASA. We don't trust them. Their culture is no good. And their cost accounting is no good.' And I said, 'Okay.'"

More than that, Gehman came to realize that it was the elected representatives in Congress—and neither O'Keefe nor NASA—who constituted the caib's real constituency, and that their concerns were legitimate. As a result of this, along with a growing understanding of the depth and complexity of the work at hand, he forced through a series of changes, establishing a congressional-liaison office, gaining an independent budget (ultimately of about $20 million), wresting the report from O'Keefe's control, re-writing the stated mission to include the finding of "root causes and circumstances," and hiring an additional five board members, all civilians of unimpeachable reputation: the retired Electric Boat boss Roger Tetrault, the former astronaut Sally Ride, the Nobel-laureate physicist Douglas Osheroff, the aerodynamicist and former Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall, and the historian and space-policy expert John Logsdon. Afterward, the loudest criticism faded away. Still, Gehman's political judgment was not perfect. He allowed the new civilian members to be brought on through the NASA payroll (at prorated annual salaries of $134,000)—a strange lapse under the circumstances, and one that led to superficial accusations that the caib remained captive. The Orlando Sentinel ran a story about the lack of public access to the caib's interviews under the ambiguous headline "board paid to ensure secrecy." The idea evoked laughter among some of the investigators, who knew the inquiry's direction. But unnecessary damage was done.

Equally unnecessary was Gehman's habit of referring to O'Keefe as "Sean," a clubbish mannerism that led people to conclude, erroneously, that the two men were friends. In fact their relationship was strained, if polite. Gehman told me that he had never asked for the full story behind his selection on the morning of the accident—maybe because it would have been impossible to know the unvarnished truth. Certainly, though, O'Keefe had had little opportunity to contemplate his choice. By quick view Gehman was a steady hand and a good establishment man who could lend the gravitas of his four stars to this occasion; he was also, of course, one of the men behind the Cole investigation. O'Keefe later told me that he had read the Cole report during his stint as a professor, but that he remembered it best as the subject of a case study presented by one of his academic colleagues as an example of a narrowly focused investigation that, correctly, had not widened beyond its original mandate. This was true, but a poor predictor of Gehman as a man. His Cole investigation had not widened (for instance, into assigning individual blame) for the simple reason that other investigations, by the Navy and the FBI, were already covering that ground. Instead, Gehman and Crouch had gone deep, and relentlessly so. The result was a document that bluntly questioned current American dogma, identified arrogance in the command structure, and critiqued U.S. military assumptions about the terrorist threat. The tone was frank. For example, while expressing understanding of the diplomatic utility of labeling terrorists as "criminals," the report warned against buying into that language, or into the parallel idea that these terrorists were "cowards." When, later, I expressed my surprise at his freedom of expression, Gehman did not deny that people have recently been decried as traitors for less. But freedom of expression was clearly his habit: he spoke to me just as openly about the failures of his cherished Navy, of Congress, and increasingly of NASA.

When I mentioned this character trait to one of the new board members, Sheila Widnall, she laughed and said she'd seen it before inside the Pentagon, and that people just didn't understand the highest level of the U.S. military. These officers are indeed the establishment, she said, but they are so convinced of the greatness of the American construct that they will willingly tear at its components in the belief that its failures can be squarely addressed. Almost all of the current generation of senior leaders have also been through the soul-searching that followed the defeat in Vietnam.

O'Keefe had his own understanding of the establishment, and it was probably sophisticated, but he clearly did not anticipate Gehman's rebellion. By the end of the second week, as Gehman established an independent relationship with Congress and began to break through the boundaries initially drawn by NASA, it became clear that O'Keefe was losing control. He maintained a brave front of wanting a thorough inquiry, but it was said that privately he was angry. The tensions came to the surface toward the end of February, at about the same time that Gehman insisted, over O'Keefe's resistance, that the full report ultimately be made available to the public. The caib was expanding to a staff of about 120 people, many of them professional accident investigators and technical experts who could support the core board members. They were working seven days a week out of temporary office space in the sprawling wasteland of South Houston, just off the property of the Johnson Space Center. One morning several of the board members came in to see Gehman, and warned him that the caib was headed for a "shipwreck."

Gehman knew what they meant. In the days following the accident O'Keefe had established an internal Mishap Investigation Team, whose job was to work closely with the caib, essentially as staff, and whose members—bizarrely—included some of the decision-makers most closely involved with the Columbia's final flight. The team was led by Linda Ham, a razor-sharp manager in the shuttle program, whose actions during the flight would eventually be singled out as an egregious example of NASA's failings. Gehman did not know that yet, but it dawned on him that Ham was in a position to filter the inbound NASA reports, and he remembered a recent three-hour briefing that she had run with an iron hand, allowing little room for spontaneous exploration. He realized that she and the others would have to leave the caib, and he wrote a careful letter to O'Keefe in Washington, requesting their immediate removal. It is a measure of the insularity at the Johnson Space Center that NASA did not gracefully acquiesce. Ham and another manager, Ralph Roe, in particular reacted badly. In Gehman's office, alternately in anger and tears, they refused to leave, accusing Gehman of impugning their integrity and asking him how they were supposed to explain their dismissal to others. Gehman suggested to them what Congress had insisted to him—that people simply cannot investigate themselves. Civics 101. Once stated, it seems like an obvious principle.

O'Keefe had a master's degree in public administration, but he disagreed. It was odd. He had not been with the agency long enough to be infected by its insularity, and as he later promised Congress, he was willing—no, eager—to identify and punish any of his NASA subordinates who could be held responsible for the accident. Nonetheless, he decided to defy Gehman, and he announced that his people would remain in place. It was an ill-considered move. Gehman simply went public with his letter, posting it on the caib Web site. Gehman understood that O'Keefe felt betrayed—"stabbed in the back" was the word going around—but NASA had left him no choice. O'Keefe surrendered. Ham and the others were reassigned, and the Mishap Investigation Team was disbanded, replaced by NASA staffers who had not been involved in the Columbia's flight and would be more likely to cooperate with the caib's investigators. The board was never able to overcome completely the whiff of collusion that had accompanied its birth, but Gehman had won a significant fight, even if it meant that he and "Sean" would not be friends.

The space shuttle is the most audacious flying machine ever built, an engineering fantasy made real. Before each flight it stands vertically on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, as the core component of a rocket assembly 184 feet tall. The shuttle itself, which is also known as the orbiter, is a winged vehicle roughly the size of a DC-9, with three main rocket engines in the tail, a large unpressurized cargo bay in the midsection, and a cramped two-level crew compartment in the nose. It is attached to a huge external tank containing liquid fuel for the three main engines. That tank in turn is attached to two solid-fuel rockets, known as boosters, which flank the assembly and bear its full weight on the launch pad. Just before the launch, the weight is about 4.5 million pounds, 90 percent of which is fuel. It is a dramatic time, ripe with anticipation; the shuttle vents vapors like a breathing thing; the ground crews pull away until finally no one is left; the air seems unusually quiet.

Typically there are seven astronauts aboard. Four of them sit in the cockpit, and three on the lower level, in the living quarters known as the mid-deck. Because of the shuttle's vertical position, their seats are effectively rotated backward 90 degrees, so they are sitting on their backs, feeling their own weight in a way that tends to emphasize gravity's pull. At the front of the cockpit, positioned closer to the instrument panel than is necessary for the typical astronaut's six-foot frame, the commander and the pilot can look straight ahead into space. They are highly trained. They know exactly what they are getting into. Sometimes they have waited years for this moment to arrive.

The launch window may be just a few minutes wide. It is ruled by orbital mechanics, and defined by the track and position of the destination—usually now the unfinished International Space Station. Six seconds before liftoff the three main engines are ignited and throttled up to 100 percent power, producing more than a million pounds of thrust. The shuttle responds with what is known as "the twang," swaying several feet in the direction of the external tank and then swaying back. This is felt in the cockpit. The noise inside is not very loud. If the computers show that the main engines are operating correctly, the solid rocket boosters ignite. The boosters are ferocious devices—the same sort of monsters that upon failure blew the Challenger apart. Each of them produces three million pounds of thrust. Once ignited, they cannot be shut off or throttled back. The shuttle lifts off. It accelerates fast enough to clear the launch tower doing about 100 mph, though it is so large that seen from the outside, it appears to be climbing slowly.

The flying is done entirely by autopilot unless something goes wrong. Within seconds the assembly rotates and aims on course, tilting slightly off the vertical and rolling so that the orbiter is inverted beneath the external tank. Although the vibrations are heavy enough to blur the instruments, the acceleration amounts to only about 2.5 Gs—a mild sensation of heaviness pressing the astronauts back into their seats. After about forty seconds the shuttle accelerates through Mach 1, 760 mph, at about 17,000 feet, climbing nearly straight up. Eighty seconds later, with the shuttle doing about 3,400 mph and approaching 150,000 feet, the crew can feel the thrust from the solid rocket boosters begin to tail off. Just afterward, with a bright flash and a loud explosion heard inside the orbiter, the rocket boosters separate from the main tank; they continue to travel upward on a ballistic path to 220,000 feet before falling back and parachuting into the sea. Now powered by the main engines alone, the ride turns smooth, and the forces settle down to about 1 G.

One pilot described the sensations to me on the simplest level. He said, "First it's like, 'Hey, this is a rough ride!' and then, 'Hey, I'm on an electric train!' and then, 'Hey, this train's starting to go pretty darned fast!'" Speed is the ultimate goal of the launch sequence. Having climbed steeply into ultra-thin air, the shuttle gently pitches over until it is flying nearly parallel to Earth, inverted under the external tank, and thrusting at full power. Six minutes after launch, at about 356,000 feet, the shuttle is doing around 9,200 mph, which is fast, but only about half the speed required to sustain an orbit. It therefore begins a shallow dive, during which it gains speed at the rate of 1,000 mph every twenty seconds—an acceleration so fast that it presses the shuttle against its 3 G limit, and the engines have to be briefly throttled back. At 10,300 mph the shuttle rolls to a head-up position. Passing through 15,000 mph, it begins to climb again, still accelerating at 3 Gs, until, seconds later, in the near vacuum of space, it achieves orbital velocity, or 17,500 mph. The plumes from the main engines wrap forward and dance across the cockpit windows, making light at night like that of Saint Elmo's fire. Only eight and a half minutes have passed since the launch. The main engines are extinguished, and the external tank is jettisoned. The shuttle is in orbit. After further maneuvering it assumes its standard attitude, flying inverted in relation to Earth and tail first as it proceeds around the globe.

For the astronauts aboard, the uphill flight would amount to little more than an interesting ride were it not for the possibility of failures. That possibility, however, is very real, and as a result the launch is a critical and complicated operation, demanding close teamwork, tight coordination with Mission Control, and above all extreme concentration—a quality often confused with coolness under fire. I was given a taste of this by an active shuttle commander named Michael Bloomfield, who had me strap in beside him in NASA's full-motion simulator in Houston, and take a realistic run from the launch pad into space. Bloomfield is a former Air Force test pilot who has flown three shuttle missions. He had been assigned to assist the caib, and had been watching the investigation with mixed emotions—hopeful that some effects might be positive, but concerned as well that the inquiry might veer into formalism without sufficiently taking into account the radical nature of space flight, or the basic truth that every layer of procedure and equipment comes at a cost, often unpredictable. Bloomfield called this the "risk versus risk" tradeoff, and made it real not by defending NASA against specific criticisms but by immersing me, a pilot myself, in the challenges of normal operations.

Much of what he showed me was of the what-if variety, the essence not only of simulator work but also of the crew's real-world thinking. For instance, during the launch, as the shuttle rockets upward on autopilot, the pilots and flight controllers pass through a succession of mental gates, related to various combinations of main-engine failures, at various altitudes and speeds. The options and resulting maneuvers are complicated, ranging from a quick return to the launch site, to a series of tight arrivals at select runways up the eastern seaboard, to transatlantic glides, and finally even an "abort into orbit"—an escape route used by a Challenger crew in 1985 after a single main-engine failure. Such failures allow little time to make the right decision. As Bloomfield and I climbed away from Earth, tilted onto our backs, he occasionally asked the operators to freeze the simulation so that he could unfold his thoughts to me. Though the choices were clear, the relative risks were rarely so obvious. It was a deep view into the most intense sort of flying.

After we arrived in space, we continued to talk. One of the gates for engine failure during the climb to the Space Station stands at Mach 21.8 (14,900 mph), the last point allowed for a "high energy" arrival into Gander, Newfoundland, and the start of the emergency transatlantic track for Shannon, Ireland. An abort at that point provides no easy solution. The problem with Gander is how to bleed off excess energy before the landing (Bloomfield called this "a take-all-your-brain-cells type of flying"), whereas the problem with Shannon is just the opposite—how to stretch the glide. Bloomfield told me that immediately before his last space flight, in the spring of 2002, his crew and a Mission Control team had gone through a full-dress simulation during which the orbiter had lost all three engines by Mach 21.7 (less than 100 mph from the decision speed). Confident in his ability to fly the more difficult Canadian arrival, Bloomfield, from the cockpit of the simulator, radioed, "We're going high-energy into Gander."

Mission Control answered, "Negative," and called for Shannon instead.

Bloomfield looked over at his right-seat pilot and said, "I think we oughta go to Gander. What do you think?"

"Yeah."

Bloomfield radioed back: "No, we think we oughta go to Gander."

Mission Control was emphatic. "Negative. We see you having enough energy to make Shannon."

As commander, Bloomfield had formal authority for the decision, but Mission Control, with its expert teams and wealth of data, was expressing a strong opinion, so he acquiesced. Acquiescence is standard in such cases, and usually it works out for the best. Bloomfield had enormous respect for the expertise and competence of Mission Control. He was also well aware of errors he had made in the past, despite superior advice or instructions from the flight controllers. This time, however, it turned out that two of the flight controllers had not communicated correctly with each other, and that the judgment of Mission Control therefore was wrong. Lacking the energy to reach Shannon, the simulator went into the ocean well short of the airport. The incident caused a disturbance inside the Johnson Space Center, particularly because of the long-standing struggle for the possession of data (and ultimately control) between the pilots in flight and the engineers at their consoles. Nevertheless, the two groups worked together, hammered out the problems, and the next day flew the same simulator profile successfully. But that was not the point of Bloomfield's story. Rather, it was that these calls are hard to make, and that mistakes—whether his or the controllers'—may become obvious only after it is too late.

For all its realism, the simulator cannot duplicate the gravity load of the climb, or the lack of it at the top. The transition to weightlessness is abrupt, and all the more dramatic because it occurs at the end of the 3 G acceleration: when the main engines cut off, the crew gets the impression of going over an edge and suddenly dropping into a free fall. That impression is completely accurate. In fact the term zero gravity (0 G), which is loosely used to describe the orbital environment, refers to physical acceleration, and does not mean that Earth's gravitational pull has somehow gone away. Far from it: the diminution of gravitational pull that comes with distance is small at these low-orbit altitudes (perhaps 200 miles above the surface), and the shuttle is indeed now falling—about like a stone dropped off a cliff. The fall does not, of course, diminish the shuttle's mass (if it bumps the Space Station, it does so with tremendous force), but it does make the vehicle and everything inside it very nearly weightless. The orbital part of the trick is that though the shuttle is dropping like a stone, it is also progressing across Earth's surface so fast (17,500 mph) that its path matches (roughly) the curvature of the globe. In other words, as it plummets toward the ground, the ground keeps getting out of its way. Like the orbits of all other satellites, and of the Space Station, and of the Moon as well, its flight is nothing but an unrestricted free fall around and around the world.

To help the astronauts adapt to weightlessness, the quarters are designed with a conventional floor-down orientation. This isn't quite so obvious as it might seem, since the shuttle flies inverted in orbit. "Down" therefore is toward outer space—and the view from the cockpit windows just happens to be of Earth sliding by from behind and overhead. The crews are encouraged to live and work with their heads "up" nonetheless. It is even recommended that they use the ladder while passing through the hatch between the two levels, and that they "descend" from the cockpit to the mid-deck feet first. Those sorts of cautions rarely prevail against the temptations of weightlessness. After Bloomfield's last flight one of his crew commented that they had all been swimming around "like eels in a can." Or like superhumans, as the case may be. It's true that there are frustrations: if you try to throw a switch without first anchoring your body, the switch will throw you. On the other hand, once you are anchored, you can shift multi-ton masses with your fingertips. You can also fly without wings, perform unlimited flips, or simply float for a while, resting in midair. Weightlessness is bad for the bones, but good for the soul. I asked Bloomfield how it had felt to experience gravity again. He said he remembered the first time, after coming to a stop on the runway in Florida, when he picked up a small plastic checklist in the cockpit and thought, "Man, this is so heavy!" He looked at me and said, "Gravity sucks."

And orbital flight clearly does not. The ride is smooth. When the cabin ventilation is turned off, as it must be once a day to exchange the carbon dioxide scrubbers, the silence is absolute. The smell inside the shuttle is distinctly metallic, unless someone has just come in from a spacewalk, after which the quarters are permeated for a while with "the smell of space," a pungent burned odor that some compare to that of seared meat, and that Bloomfield describes as closer to the smell of a torch on steel. The dominant sensation, other than weightlessness, is of the speed across the ground. Bloomfield said, "From California to New York in ten minutes, around the world once in ninety minutes—I mean, we're moving." He told me that he took to loitering in the cockpit at the end of the workdays, just for the view. By floating forward above the instrument panel and wrapping his legs around one of the pilot seats, he could position his face so close to the front windshield that the structure of the shuttle would seem to disappear.

The view from there was etched into his memory as a continuous loop. In brief, he said: It's night and you're coming up on California, with that clearly defined coastline, and you can see all the lights all the way from Tijuana to San Francisco, and then it's behind you, and you spot Las Vegas and its neon-lit Strip, which you barely have time to identify before you move across the Rockies, with their helter-skelter of towns, and then across the Plains, with its monotony of look-alike wheels and spokes of light, until you come to Chicago and its lakefront, from which point you can see past Detroit and Cleveland all the way to New York. These are big cities, you think. And because you grew up on a farm in Michigan, played football there in high school, and still know it like a home, you pick out Ann Arbor and Flint, and the place where I-75 joins U.S. Highway 23, and you get down to within a couple of miles of your house before zip, you're gone. Zip goes Cleveland, and zip New York, and then you're out over the Atlantic beyond Maine, looking back down the eastern seaboard all the way past Washington, D.C. Ten minutes later you come up on Europe, and you hardly have time to think that London is a sprawl, France is an orderly display, the Alps are the Rockies again, and Italy is indeed a boot. Over Sicily you peer down into Etna's crater, into the glow of molten rock on Earth's inside, and then you are crossing Africa, where the few lights you see are not yellow but orange, like open flames. Past the Equator and beyond Madagascar you come to a zone of gray between the blackness of the night and the bright blue of the day. At the center of that zone is a narrow pink slice, which is the atmospheric dawn as seen from above. Daylight is for the oceans—first the Indian and then the Pacific, which is very, very large. Atolls appear with coral reefs and turquoise lagoons, but mostly what you see is cloud and open water. Then the pink slice of sunset passes below, and the night, and soon afterward you come again to California, though at another point on the coast, because ninety minutes have passed since you were last here, and during that time the world has revolved beneath you.

Ultimately the shuttle must return to Earth and land. The problem then is what to do with the vast amount of physical energy that has been invested in it—almost all the calories once contained in the nearly four million pounds of rocket fuel that was used to shove the shuttle into orbit. Some of that energy now resides in the vehicle's altitude, but most resides in its speed. The re-entry is a descent to a landing, yes, but primarily it is a giant deceleration, during which atmospheric resistance is used to convert velocity into heat, and to slow the shuttle by roughly 17,000 mph, so that it finally passes overhead the runway in Florida at airline speeds, and circles down to touch the ground at a well tamed 224 mph or less. Once the shuttle is on the runway, the drag chute and brakes take care of the rest.

The re-entry is a one-way ride that cannot be stopped once it has begun. The opening move occurs while the shuttle is still proceeding tail first and inverted, halfway around the world from the runway, high above the Indian Ocean. It is a simple thing, a brief burn by the twin orbital maneuvering rockets against the direction of flight, which slows the shuttle by perhaps 200 mph. That reduction is enough. The shuttle continues to free-fall as it has in orbit, but it now lacks the speed to match the curvature of Earth, so the ground no longer gets out of its way. By the time it reaches the start of the atmosphere, the "entry interface" at 400,000 feet, it has gently flipped itself around so that it is right-side up and pointed for Florida, but with its nose held 40 degrees higher than the angle of the descent path. The effect of this so-called angle of attack (which technically refers to the wings, not the nose) is to create drag, and to shield the shuttle's internal structures from the intense re-entry heat by cocking the vehicle up to greet the atmosphere with leading edges made of heat-resistant carbon-composite panels, and with 24,305 insulating surface tiles, each one unique, which are glued primarily to the vehicle's underside. To regulate the sink and drag (and to control the heating), the shuttle goes through a program of sweeping S-turns, banking as steeply as 80 degrees to one side and then the other, tilting its lift vector and digging into the atmosphere. The thinking is done by redundant computers, which use onboard inertial sensing systems to gauge the shuttle's position, altitude, descent rate, and speed. The flying is done by autopilot. The cockpit crews and mission controllers play the role of observers, albeit extremely interested ones who are ready to intervene should something go wrong. In a basic sense, therefore, the re-entry is a mirror image of the launch and climb, decompressed to forty-five minutes instead of eight, but with the added complication that it will finish with the need for a landing.

Bloomfield took me through it in simulation, the two of us sitting in the cockpit to watch while an experienced flight crew and full Mission Control team brought the shuttle in from the de-orbit burn to the touchdown, dealing with a complexity of cascading system failures. Of course, in reality the automation usually performs faultlessly, and the shuttle proceeds to Florida right on track, and down the center of the desired descent profile. Bloomfield expressed surprise at how well the magic had worked on his own flights. Because he had launched on high-inclination orbits to the Russian station Mir and the International Space Station, he had not flown a Columbia-style re-entry over the United States, but had descended across Central America instead. He said, "You look down over Central America, and you're so low that you can see the forests! You think, 'There's no way we're going to make it to Florida!' Then you cross the west coast of Florida, and you look inside, and you're still doing Mach 5, and you think, 'There's no way we're going to slow in time!'" But you do. Mach 5 is 3,500 mph. At that point the shuttle is at 117,000 feet, about 140 miles out. At Mach 2.5, or 1,650 mph, it is at 81,000 feet, about sixty miles out. At that point the crew activates the head-up displays, which project see-through flight guidance into the field of vision through the windshield. When the shuttle slows below the speed of sound, it shudders as the shock waves shift. By tradition if not necessity, the commander then takes over from the autopilot, and flies the rest of the arrival manually, using the control stick.

Bloomfield invited me to fly some simulated arrivals myself, and prompted me while I staggered around for a few landings—overhead the Kennedy Space Center at 30,000 feet with the runway and the coastal estuaries in sight below, banking left into a tight, plunging energy-management turn, rolling out onto final approach at 11,000 feet, following an extraordinarily steep, 18-degree glide slope at 345 mph, speed brakes on, pitching up through a "pre-flare" at 2,000 feet to flatten the descent, landing gear out at 300 feet, touching down on the main wheels with some skips and bumps, then drag chute out, nose gear gently down, and brakes on. My efforts were crude, and greatly assisted by Bloomfield, but they gave me an impression of the shuttle as a solid, beautifully balanced flying machine that in thick air, at the end, is responsive and not difficult to handle—if everything goes just right. Bloomfield agreed. Moreover, years have passed in which everything did go just right—leaving the pilots to work on the finesse of their touchdowns, whether they were two knots fast, or 100 feet long. Bloomfield said, "When you come back and you land, the engineers will pull out their charts and they'll say things like 'The boundary layer tripped on the left wing before the right one. Did you feel anything?' And the answer is always 'Well ... no. It was an incredibly smooth ride all the way down.'" But then, on the morning of February 1, something went really wrong—something too radical for simulation, that offered the pilots no chance to fly—and the Columbia lay scattered for 300 miles across the ground.

The foam did it. That much was suspected from the start, and all the evidence converged on it as the caib's investigation proceeded through the months that followed. The foam was dense and dry; it was the brownish-orange coating applied to the outside of the shuttle's large external tank to insulate the extreme cold of the rocket fuels inside from the warmth and moisture of the air. Eighty-two seconds after liftoff, as the Columbia was accelerating through 1,500 mph, a piece of that foam—about nineteen inches long by eleven inches wide, weighing about 1.7 pounds—broke off from the external tank and collided with the left wing at about 545 mph. Cameras near the launch site recorded the event—though the images when viewed the following day provided insufficient detail to know the exact impact point, or the consequences. The caib's investigation ultimately found that a gaping hole about ten inches across had been punched into the wing's leading edge, and that sixteen days later the hole allowed the hot gases of the re-entry to penetrate the wing and consume it from the inside. Through enormous effort this would be discovered and verified beyond doubt. It was important nonetheless to explore the alternatives. In an effort closely supervised by the caib, groups of NASA engineers created several thousand flow charts, one for each scenario that could conceivably have led to the re-entry breakup. The thinking was rigorous. For a scenario to be "closed," meaning set aside, absolute proof had to be found (usually physical or mathematical) that this particular explanation did not apply: there was no cockpit fire, no flight-control malfunction, no act of terrorism or sabotage that had taken the shuttle down. Unexpected vulnerabilities were found during this process, and even after the investigation was formally concluded, in late August, more than a hundred scenarios remained technically open, because they could not positively be closed. For lack of evidence to the contrary, for instance, neither bird strikes nor micrometeorite impacts could be completely ruled out.

But for all their willingness to explore less likely alternatives, many of NASA's managers remained stubbornly closed-minded on the subject of foam. From the earliest telemetric data it was known that intense heat inside the left wing had destroyed the Columbia, and that such heat could have gotten there only through a hole. The connection between the hole and the foam strike was loosely circumstantial at first, but it required serious consideration none-theless. NASA balked at going down that road. Its reasons were not rational and scientific but, rather, complex and cultural, and they turned out to be closely related to the errors that had led to the accident in the first place: simply put, it had become a matter of faith within NASA that foam strikes—which were a known problem—could not cause mortal damage to the shuttle. Sean O'Keefe, who was badly advised by his NASA lieutenants, made unwise public statements deriding the "foamologists"; and even Ron Dittemore, NASA's technically expert shuttle program manager, joined in with categorical denials.

At the caib, Gehman, who was not unsympathetic to NASA, watched these reactions with growing skepticism and a sense of déjà vu. Over his years in the Navy, and as a result of the Cole inquiry, he had become something of a student of large organizations under stress. To me he said, "It has been scorched into my mind that bureaucracies will do anything to defend themselves. It's not evil—it's just a natural reaction of bureaucracies, and since NASA is a bureaucracy, I expect the same out of them. As we go through the investigation, I've been looking for signs where the system is trying to defend itself." Of those signs the most obvious was this display of blind faith by an organization dependent on its engineering cool; NASA, in its absolute certainty, was unintentionally signaling the very problem that it had. Gehman had seen such certainty proved wrong too many times, and he told me that he was not about to get "rolled by the system," as he had been rolled before. He said, "Now when I hear NASA telling me things like 'Gotta be true!' or 'We know this to be true!' all my alarm bells go off ... Without hurting anybody's feelings, or squashing people's egos, we're having to say, 'We're sorry, but we're not accepting that answer.'"

That was the form that the physical investigation took on, with hundreds of NASA engineers and technicians doing most of the detailed work, and the caib watching closely and increasingly stepping in. Despite what Gehman said, it was inevitable that feelings got hurt and egos squashed—and indeed that serious damage to people's lives and careers was inflicted. At the NASA facilities dedicated to shuttle operations (Alabama for rockets, Florida for launch and landing, Texas for management and mission control) the caib investigators were seen as invaders of sorts, unwelcome strangers arriving to pass judgment on people's good-faith efforts. On the ground level, where the detailed analysis was being done, there was active resistance at first, with some NASA engineers openly refusing to cooperate, or to allow access to records and technical documents that had not been pre-approved for release. Gehman had to intervene. One of the toughest and most experienced of the caib investigators later told me he had a gut sense that NASA continued to hide relevant information, and that it does so to this day. But cooperation between the two groups gradually improved as friendships were made, and the intellectual challenges posed by the inquiry began to predominate over fears about what had happened or what might follow. As so often occurs, it was on an informal basis that information flowed best, and that much of the truth was discovered.

Board member Steven Wallace described the investigation not as a linear path but as a picture that gradually filled in. Or as a jigsaw puzzle. The search for debris began the first day, and soon swelled to include more than 25,000 people, at a cost of well over $300 million. NASA received 1,459 debris reports, including some from nearly every state in the union, and also from Canada, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. Discounting the geographic extremes, there was still a lot to follow up on. Though the amateur videos showed pieces separating from the shuttle along the entire path over the United States, and though search parties backtracked all the way to the Pacific coast in the hope of finding evidence of the breakup's triggering mechanism, the westernmost piece found on the ground was a left-wing tile that landed near a town called Littlefield, in the Texas Panhandle. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the wreckage lay under the main breakup, from south of Dallas eastward across the rugged, snake-infested brushland of East Texas and into Louisiana; and that is where most of the search took place. The best work was done on foot, by tough and dedicated crews who walked in tight lines across several thousand square miles. Their effort became something of a close sampling of the American landscape, turning up all sorts of odds and ends, including a few apparent murder victims, plenty of junked cars, and the occasional clandestine meth lab. More to the point, it also turned up crew remains and more than 84,000 pieces of the Columbia, which, at 84,900 pounds, accounted for 38 percent of the vehicle's dry weight. Certain pieces that had splashed into the murky waters of lakes and reservoirs were never found. It was presumed that most if not all the remaining pieces had been vaporized by the heat of re-entry, either before or after the breakup.

Some of the shuttle's contents survived intact. For instance, a vacuum cleaner still worked, as did some computers and printers and a Medtronic Tono-Pen, used to measure ocular pressure. A group of worms from one of the science experiments not only survived but continued to multiply. Most of the debris, however, was a twisted mess. The recovered pieces were meticulously plotted and tagged, and transported to a hangar at the Kennedy Space Center, where the wing remnants were laid out in correct position on the floor, and what had been found of the left wing's reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) leading edge was reconstructed in a transparent Plexiglas mold—though with large gaps where pieces were missing. The hangar was a quiet, poignant, intensely focused place, with many of the same NASA technicians who had prepared the Columbia for flight now involved in the sad task of handling its ruins. The assembly and analysis went on through the spring. One of the principal caib agents there was an affable Air Force pilot named Patrick Goodman, an experienced accident investigator who had made both friends and enemies at NASA for the directness of his approach. When I first met him, outside the hangar on a typically warm and sunny Florida day, he explained some of the details that I had just seen on the inside—heat-eroded tiles, burned skin and structure, and aluminum slag that had emerged in molten form from inside the left wing, and had been deposited onto the aft rocket pods. The evidence was complicated because it resulted from combinations of heat, physical forces, and wildly varying airflows that had occurred before, during, and after the main-body breakup, but for Goodman it was beginning to read like a map. He had faith. He said, "We know what we have on the ground. It's the truth. The debris is the truth, if we can only figure out what it's saying. It's not a theoretical model. It exists." Equally important was the debris that did not exist, most significantly large parts of the left wing, including the lower part of a section of the RCC leading edge, a point known as Panel Eight, which was approximately where the launch cameras showed that the foam had hit. Goodman said, "We look at what we don't have. What we do have. What's on what we have. We start from there, and try to work backwards up the timeline, always trying to see the previous significant event." He called this "looking uphill." It was like a movie run in reverse, with the found pieces springing off the ground and flying upward to a point of reassembly above Dallas, and then the Columbia, looking nearly whole, flying tail-first toward California, picking up the Littlefield tile as it goes, and then higher again, through entry interface over the Pacific, through orbits flown in reverse, inverted but nose first, and then back down toward Earth, picking up the external tank and the solid rocket boosters during the descent, and settling tail-first with rockets roaring, until just before a vertical touchdown a spray of pulverized foam appears below, pulls together at the left-wing leading edge, and rises to lodge itself firmly on the side of the external tank.

The foam did it.

There was plenty of other evidence, too. After the accident the Air Force dug up routine radar surveillance tapes that upon close inspection showed a small object floating alongside the Columbia on the second day of its mission. The object slowly drifted away and disappeared from view. Subsequent testing of radar profiles and ballistic coefficients for a multitude of objects found a match for only one—a fragment of RCC panel of at least 140 square inches. The match never quite passed muster as proof, but investigators presumed that the object was a piece of the leading edge, that it had been shoved into the inside of the wing by the impact of the foam, and that during maneuvering in orbit it had floated free. The picture by now was rapidly filling in.

But the best evidence was numerical. It so happened that because the Columbia was the first of the operational shuttles, it was equipped with hundreds of additional engineering sensors that fed into an onboard data-collection device, a box known as a modular auxiliary data system, or mads recorder, that was normally used for postflight analysis of the vehicle's performance. During the initial debris search this box was not found, but such was its potential importance that after careful calculation of its likely ballistic path, another search was mounted, and on March 19 it was discovered—lying in full view on ground that had been gone over before. The really surprising thing was its condition. Though the recorder was not designed to be crash-proof, and used Mylar tape that was vulnerable to heat, it had survived the breakup and fall completely intact, as had the data that it contained, the most interesting of which pertained to heat rises and sequential sensor failures inside the left wing. When combined with the telemetric data that already existed, and with calculations of the size and location of the sort of hole that might have been punched through the leading edge by the foam, the new data allowed for a good fit with computational models of the theoretical airflow and heat propagation inside the left wing, and it steered the investigation to an inevitable conclusion that the breach must have been in the RCC at Panel Eight.

By early summer the picture was clear. Though strictly speaking the case was circumstantial, the evidence against the foam was so persuasive that there remained no reasonable doubt about the physical cause of the accident. As a result, Gehman gave serious consideration to NASA's request to call off a planned test of the launch incident, during which a piece of foam would be carefully fired at a fully rigged RCC Panel Eight. NASA's argument against the test had some merit: the leading-edge panels (forty-four per shuttle) are custom-made, $700,000 components, each one different from the others, and the testing would require the use of the last spare Panel Eight in the entire fleet. NASA said that it couldn't afford the waste, and Gehman was inclined to agree, precisely because he felt that breaking the panel would prove nothing that hadn't already been amply proved. By a twist of fate it was the sole NASA member of the caib, the quiet, cerebral, earnestly scientific Scott Hubbard, who insisted that the test proceed. Hubbard was one of the original seven board members. At the time of the accident he had just become the director of NASA's Ames Research Center, in California. Months later now, in the wake of Gehman's rebellion, and with the caib aggressively moving beyond the physical causes and into the organizational ones, he found himself in the tricky position of collaborating with a group that many of his own people at NASA saw as the enemy. Hubbard, however, had an almost childlike belief in doing the right thing, and having been given this unfortunate job, he was determined to see it through correctly. Owing to the closeness of his ties to NASA, he understood an aspect of the situation that others might have overlooked: despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many people at NASA continued stubbornly to believe that the foam strike on launch could not have caused the Columbia's destruction. Hubbard argued that if NASA was to have any chance of self-reform, these people would have to be confronted with reality, not in abstraction but in the most tangible way possible. Gehman found the argument convincing, and so the foam shot proceeded.

The work was done in San Antonio, using a compressed-nitrogen gun with a thirty-five-foot barrel, normally used to fire dead chickens—real and artificial—against aircraft structures in bird-strike certification tests. NASA approached the test kicking and screaming all the way, insisting, for instance, that the shot be used primarily to validate an earlier debris-strike model (the so-called Crater model of strikes against the underside tiles) that had been used for decision-making during the flight, and was now known to be irrelevant. Indeed, it was because of NASA obstructionism—and specifically the illogical insistence by some of the NASA rocket engineers that the chunk of foam that had hit the wing was significantly smaller (and therefore lighter) than the video and film record showed it to be—that the caib and Scott Hubbard finally took direct control of the testing. There was in fact a series of foam shots, increasingly realistic according to the evolving analysis of the actual strike, that raised the stakes from a glancing blow against the underside tiles to steeper-angle hits directly against leading-edge panels. The second to last shot was a 22-degree hit against the bottom of Panel Six: it produced some cracks and other damage deemed too small to explain the shuttle's loss. Afterward there was some smugness at NASA, and even Sean O'Keefe, who again was badly advised, weighed in on the matter, belittling the damage. But the shot against Panel Six was not yet the real thing. That was saved for the precious Panel Eight, in a test that was painstakingly designed to duplicate (conservatively) the actual impact against the Columbia's left wing, assuming a rotational "clocking angle" 30 degrees off vertical for the piece of foam. Among the engineers who gathered to watch were many of those still living in denial. The gun fired, and the foam hit the panel at a 25-degree relative angle at about 500 mph. Immediately afterward an audible gasp went through the crowd. The foam had knocked a hole in the RCC large enough to allow people to put their heads through. Hubbard told me that some of the NASA people were close to tears. Gehman had stayed away in order to avoid the appearance of gloating. He could not keep the satisfaction out of his voice, however, when later he said to me, "Their whole house of cards came falling down."

NASA's house was by then what this investigation was really all about. The caib discovered that on the morning of January 17, the day after the launch, the low-level engineers at the Kennedy Space Center whose job was to review the launch videos and film were immediately concerned by the size and speed of the foam that had struck the shuttle. As expected of them, they compiled the imagery and disseminated it by e-mail to various shuttle engineers and managers—most significantly those in charge of the shuttle program at the Johnson Space Center. Realizing that their blurred or otherwise inadequate pictures showed nothing of the damage that might have been inflicted, and anticipating the need for such information by others, the engineers at Kennedy then went outside normal channels and on their own initiative approached the Department of Defense with a request that secret military satellites or ground-based high-resolution cameras be used to photograph the shuttle in orbit. After a delay of several days for the back-channel request to get through, the Air Force proved glad to oblige, and made the first moves to honor the request. Such images would probably have shown a large hole in the left wing—but they were never taken.

When news of the foam strike arrived in Houston, it did not seem to be crucially important. Though foam was not supposed to shed from the external tank, and the shuttle was not designed to withstand its impacts, falling foam had plagued the shuttle from the start, and indeed had caused damage on most missions. The falling foam was usually popcorn sized, too small to cause more than superficial dents in the thermal protection tiles. The caib, however, discovered a history of more-serious cases. For example, in 1988 the shuttle Atlantis took a heavy hit, seen by the launch cameras eighty-five seconds into the climb, nearly the same point at which the Columbia strike occurred. On the second day of the Atlantis flight Houston asked the crew to inspect the vehicle's underside with a video camera on a robotic arm (which the Columbia did not have). The commander, Robert "Hoot" Gibson, told the caib that the belly looked as if it had been blasted with shotgun fire. The Atlantis returned safely anyway, but afterward was found to have lost an entire tile, exposing its bare metal belly to the re-entry heat. It was lucky that the damage had happened in a place where a heavy aluminum plate covered the skin, Gibson said, because otherwise the belly might have been burned through.

Nonetheless, over the years foam strikes had come to be seen within NASA as an "in-family" problem, so familiar that even the most serious episodes seemed unthreatening and mundane. Douglas Osheroff, a normally good-humored Stanford physicist and Nobel laureate who joined the caib late, went around for months in a state of incredulity and dismay at what he was learning about NASA's operational logic. He told me that the shuttle managers acted as if they thought the frequency of the foam strikes had somehow reduced the danger that the impacts posed. His point was not that the managers really believed this but that after more than a hundred successful flights they had come blithely to accept the risk. He said, "The excitement that only exists when there is danger was kind of gone—even though the danger was not gone." And frankly, organizational and bureaucratic concerns weighed more heavily on the managers' minds. The most pressing of those concerns were the new performance goals imposed by Sean O'Keefe, and a tight sequence of flights leading up to a drop-dead date of February 19, 2004, for the completion of the International Space Station's "core." O'Keefe had made it clear that meeting this deadline was a test, and that the very future of NASA's human space-flight program was on the line.

From Osheroff's scientific perspective, deadlines based on completion of the International Space Station were inherently absurd. To me he said, "And what would the next goal be after that? Maybe we should bring our pets up there! 'I wonder how a Saint Bernard urinates in zero gravity!' NASA sold the International Space Station to Congress as a great science center—but most scientists just don't agree with that. We're thirty years from being able to go to Mars. Meanwhile, the only reason to have man in space is to study man in space. You can do that stuff—okay—and there are also some biology experiments that are kind of fun. I think we are learning things. But I would question any statement that you can come up with better drugs in orbit than you can on the ground, or that sort of thing. The truth is, the International Space Station has become a huge liability for NASA"—expensive to build, expensive to fly, expensive to resupply. "Now members of Congress are talking about letting its orbit decay—just letting it fall into the ocean. And it does turn out that orbital decay is a very good thing, because it means that near space is a self-cleaning place. I mean, garbage does not stay up there forever."

In other words, completion of the Space Station could provide a measure of NASA's performance only in the most immediate and superficial manner, and it was therefore an inherently poor reason for shuttle managers to be ignoring the foam strikes and proceeding at full speed. It was here that you could see the limitations of leadership without vision, and the consequences of putting an executive like O'Keefe in charge of an organization that needed more than mere discipline. This, however, was hardly an argument that the managers could use, or even in private allow themselves to articulate. If the Space Station was unimportant —and perhaps even a mistake—then one had to question the reason for the shuttle's existence in the first place. Like O'Keefe and the astronauts and NASA itself, the managers were trapped by a circular space policy thirty years in the making, and they had no choice but to strive to meet the timelines directly ahead. As a result, after the most recent Atlantis launch, in October of 2002, during which a chunk of foam from a particularly troublesome part of the external tank, known as the "bipod ramp," had dented one of the solid rocket boosters, shuttle managers formally decided during the post-flight review not to classify the incident as an "in-flight anomaly." This was the first time that a serious bipod-ramp incident had escaped such a classification. The decision allowed the following two launches to proceed on schedule. The second of those launches was the Columbia's, on January 16.

The videos of the foam strike reached Houston the next day, January 17. They made it clear that again the offending material had come from the area of the bipod ramp, that this time the foam was larger than ever before, that the impact had occurred later in the climb (meaning at higher speed), and that the wing had been hit, though exactly where was not clear. The astronauts were happily in orbit now, and had apparently not felt the impact, or been able to distinguish it from the heavy vibrations of the solid rocket boosters. In other words, they were unaware of any trouble. Responsibility for disposing of the incident lay with engineers on the ground, and specifically with the Mission Management Team, or MMT, whose purpose was to make decisions about the problems and unscripted events that inevitably arose during any flight. The MMT was a high-level group. In the Houston hierarchy it operated above the flight controllers in the Mission Control room, and just below the shuttle program manager, Ron Dittemore. Dittemore was traveling at the time, and has since retired. The MMT meetings were chaired by his protégé, the once rising Linda Ham, who has come to embody NASA's arrogance and insularity in many observers' minds. Ham is the same hard-charging manager who, with a colleague, later had to be forcefully separated from the caib's investigation. Within the strangely neutered engineering world of the Johnson Space Center, she was an intimidating figure, a youngish, attractive woman given to wearing revealing clothes, yet also known for a tough and domineering management style. Among the lower ranks she had a reputation for brooking no nonsense and being a little hard to talk to. She was not smooth. She was a woman struggling upward in a man's world. She was said to have a difficult personality.

As the head of the MMT, Ham responded to news of the foam strike as if it were just another item to be efficiently handled and then checked off the list: a water leak in the science lab, a radio communication failure, a foam strike on the left wing, okay, no safety-of-flight issues here—right? What's next? There was a trace of vanity in the way she ran her shows. She seemed to revel in her own briskness, in her knowledge of the shuttle systems, in her use of acronyms and the strange, stilted syntax of aerospace engineers. She was decisive, and very sure of her sense for what was important and what was not. Her style got the best of her on day six of the mission, January 21, when at a recorded MMT meeting she spoke just a few words too many, much to her later regret.

It was at the end of a report given by a mid-ranking engineer named Don McCormack, who summarized the progress of an ad hoc engineering group, called the Debris Assessment Team, that had been formed at a still lower level to analyze the foam strike. The analysis was being done primarily by Boeing engineers, who had dusted off the soon to be notorious Crater model, primarily to predict damage to the underwing tile. McCormack reported that little was yet resolved, that the quality of the Crater as a predictor was being judged against the known damage on earlier flights, and that some work was being done to explore the options should the analysis conclude that the Columbia had been badly wounded. After a brief exchange Ham cut him short, saying, "And I'm really ... I don't think there is much we can do, so it's not really a factor during the flight, since there is not much we can do about it." She was making assumptions, of course, and they were later proved to be completely wrong, but primarily she was just being efficient, and moving the meeting along. After the accident, when the transcript and audiotapes emerged, those words were taken out of context, and used to portray Ham as a villainous and almost inhumanly callous person, which she certainly was not. In fact, she was married to an astronaut, and was as concerned as anyone about the safety of the shuttle crews. This was a dangerous business, and she knew it all too well. But like her boss, Ron Dittemore, with whom she discussed the Columbia foam strike several times, she was so immersed in the closed world of shuttle management that she simply did not elevate the event—this "in-family" thing—to the level of concerns requiring action. She was intellectually arrogant, perhaps, and as a manager she failed abysmally. But neither she nor the others of her rank had the slightest suspicion that the Columbia might actually go down.

The frustration is that some people on lower levels were actively worried about that possibility, and they understood clearly that not enough was known about the effects of the foam strike on the wing, but they expressed their concerns mostly to one another, and for good reason, because on the few occasions when they tried to alert the decision-makers, NASA's management system overwhelmed them and allowed none of them to be heard. The question now, of course, is why.

The caib's search for answers began long before the technical details were resolved, and it ultimately involved hundreds of interviews and 50,000 pages of transcripts. The manner in which those interviews were conducted became a contentious issue, and it was arguably Gehman's biggest mistake. As a military man, advised by military men on the board, he decided to conduct the interviews according to a military model of safety probes, in which individual fault is not formally assigned, and the interviews themselves are "privileged," meaning forever sealed off from public view. It was understood that identities and deeds would not be protected from view, only individual testimonies to the caib, but serious critics cried foul nonetheless, and pointed out correctly that Gehman was using loopholes to escape sunshine laws that otherwise would have applied. Gehman believed that treating the testimony as privileged was necessary to encourage witnesses to talk, and to get to the bottom of the story, but the long-term effect of the investigation will be diminished as a result (for instance, by lack of access to the raw material by outside analysts), and there was widespread consensus among the experienced (largely civilian) investigators actually conducting the interviews that the promise of privacy was having little effect on what people were willing to say. These were not criminals they were talking to, or careful lawyers. For the most part they were sincere engineering types who were concerned about what had gone wrong, and would have been willing even without privacy to speak their minds. The truth, in other words, would have come out even in the brightest of sunshine.

The story that emerged was a sad and unnecessary one, involving arrogance, insularity, and bad luck allowed to run unchecked. On the seventh day of the flight, January 22, just as the Air Force began to move on the Kennedy engineers' back-channel request for photographs, Linda Ham heard to her surprise that this approach (which according to front-channel procedures would have required her approval) had been made. She immediately telephoned other high-level managers in Houston to see if any of them wanted to issue a formal "requirement" for imagery, and when they informed her that they did not, rather than exploring the question with the Kennedy engineers she simply terminated their request with the Department of Defense. This appears to have been a purely bureaucratic reaction. A NASA liaison officer then e-mailed an apology to Air Force personnel, assuring them that the shuttle was in "excellent shape," and explaining that a foam strike was "something that has happened before and is not considered to be a major problem." The officer continued, "The one problem that this has identified is the need for some additional coordination within NASA to assure that when a request is made it is done through the official channels." Months later one of the caib investigators who had followed this trail was still seething with anger at what had occurred. He said, "Because the problem was not identified in the traditional way—'Houston, we have a problem!'—well, then, 'Houston, we don't have a problem!' Because Houston didn't identify the problem."

But another part of Houston was doing just that. Unbeknownst to Ham and the shuttle management, the low-level engineers of the Debris Assessment Team had concluded that the launch films were not clear enough to indicate where the foam had hit, and particularly whether it had hit the underside tile or a leading-edge RCC panel. Rather than trying to run their calculations in the blind, they had decided that they should do the simple thing and have someone take a look for damage. They had already e-mailed one query to the engineering department, about the possibility of getting the astronauts themselves to take a short spacewalk and inspect the wing. It later turned out that this would have been safe and easy to do. That e-mail, however, was never answered. This time the Debris Assessment engineers decided on a still simpler solution—to ask the Department of Defense to take some high-resolution pictures. Ignorant of the fact that the Kennedy group had already made such a request, and that it had just been peevishly canceled, they sent out two requests of their own, directed, appropriately, to Ron Dittemore and Linda Ham, but through channels that were a little off-center, and happened to fail. Those channels were ones they had used in their regular work as engineers, outside the formal shuttle-management structure. By unfortunate circumstance, the request that came closest to getting through was intercepted by a mid-level employee (the assistant to an intended recipient, who was on vacation) who responded by informing the Debris Assessment engineers, more or less correctly, that Linda Ham had decided against Air Force imagery.

The confusion was now total, yet also nearly invisible—and within the suppressive culture of the human space-flight program, it had very little chance of making itself known. At the top of the tangle, neither Ron Dittemore nor Linda Ham ever learned that the Debris Assessment Team wanted pictures; at the bottom, the Debris Assessment engineers heard the "no" without suspecting that it was not an answer to their request. They were told to go back to the Crater model and numerical analysis, and as earnest, hardworking engineers (hardly rebels, these), they dutifully complied, all the while regretting the blind assumptions that they would have to make. Given the obvious potential for a catastrophe, one might expect that they would have gone directly to Linda Ham, on foot if necessary, to make the argument in person for a spacewalk or high-resolution photos. However, such were the constraints within the Johnson Space Center that they never dared. They later said that had they made a fuss about the shuttle, they might have been singled out for ridicule. They feared for their standing, and their careers.

The caib investigator who asked the engineers what conclusion they had drawn at the time from management's refusal later said to me, "They all thought, 'Well, none of us have a security clearance high enough to view any of this imagery.' They talked about this openly among themselves, and they figured one of three things:

"'One: The "no" means that management's already got photos, and the damage isn't too bad. They can't show us the photos, because we don't have the security clearance, and they can't tell us they have the photos, or tell us the damage isn't bad, because that tells us how accurate the photos are—and we don't have the security clearance. But wait a minute, if that's the case, then what're we doing here? Why are we doing the analysis? So no, that can't be right.

"'Okay, then, two: They already took the photos, and the damage is so severe that there's no hope for recovery. Well ... that can't be right either, because in that case, why are we doing the analysis?

"'Okay, then, three: They took the photos. They can't tell us they took the photos, and the photos don't give us clear definition. So we need to do the analysis. That's gotta be it!'"

What the Debris Assessment engineers could not imagine is that no photos had been taken, or ever would be—and essentially for lack of curiosity by NASA's imperious, self-convinced managers. What those managers in turn could not imagine was that people in their own house might really be concerned. The communication gap had nothing to do with security clearances, and it was complete.

Gehman explained the underlying realities to me. He said, "They claim that the culture in Houston is a 'badgeless society,' meaning it doesn't matter what you have on your badge—you're concerned about shuttle safety together. Well, that's all nice, but the truth is that it does matter what badge you're wearing. Look, if you really do have an organization that has free communication and open doors and all that kind of stuff, it takes a special kind of management to make it work. And we just don't see that management here. Oh, they say all the right things. 'We have open doors and e-mails, and anybody who sees a problem can raise his hand, blow a whistle, and stop the whole process.' But then when you look at how it really works, it's an incestuous, hierarchical system, with invisible rankings and a very strict informal chain of command. They all know that. So even though they've got all the trappings of communication, you don't actually find communication. It's very complex. But if a person brings an issue up, what caste he's in makes all the difference. Now, again, NASA will deny this, but if you talk to people, if you really listen to people, all the time you hear 'Well, I was afraid to speak up.' Boy, it comes across loud and clear. You listen to the meetings: 'Anybody got anything to say?' There are thirty people in the room, and slam! There's nothing. We have plenty of witness statements saying, 'If I had spoken up, it would have been at the cost of my job.' And if you're in the engineering department, you're a nobody."

One of the caib investigators told me that he asked Linda Ham, "As a manager, how do you seek out dissenting opinions?"

According to him, she answered, "Well, when I hear about them ..."

He interrupted. "Linda, by their very nature you may not hear about them."

"Well, when somebody comes forward and tells me about them."

"But Linda, what techniques do you use to get them?"

He told me she had no answer.

This was certainly not the sort of risk-versus-risk decision-making that Michael Bloomfield had in mind when he described the thinking behind his own shuttle flights.

At 7:00 a.m. on the ninth day, January 24, which was one week before the Columbia's scheduled re-entry, the engineers from the Debris Assessment Team formally presented the results of their numerical analysis to Linda Ham's intermediary, Don McCormack. The room was so crowded with concerned observers that some people stood in the hall, peering in. The fundamental purpose of the meeting would have been better served had the engineers been able to project a photograph of a damaged wing onto the screen, but, tragically, that was not to be. Instead they projected a typically crude PowerPoint summary, based on the results from the Crater model, with which they attempted to explain a nuanced position: first, that if the tile had been damaged, it had probably endured well enough to allow the Columbia to come home; and second, that for lack of information they had needed to make assumptions to reach that conclusion, and that troubling unknowns therefore limited the meaning of the results. The latter message seems to have been lost. Indeed, this particular PowerPoint presentation became a case study for Edward Tufte, the brilliant communications specialist from Yale, who in a subsequent booklet, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, tore into it for its dampening effect on clear expression and thought. The caib later joined in, describing the widespread use of PowerPoint within NASA as one of the obstacles to internal communication, and criticizing the Debris Assessment presentation for mechanically underplaying the uncertainties that remained.

Had the uncertainties been more strongly expressed as the central factor in question, the need to inspect the wing by spacewalk or photograph might have become obvious even to the shuttle managers. Still, the Mission Management Team seemed unprepared to hear nuance. Fixated on potential tile damage as the relevant question, assuming without good evidence that the RCC panels were strong enough to withstand a foam strike, subtly skewing the discussion away from catastrophic burn-through and toward the potential effects on turnaround times on the ground and how that might affect the all-important launch schedule, the shuttle managers were convinced that they had the situation as they defined it firmly under control.

At a regularly scheduled MMT meeting later that morning McCormack summarized the PowerPoint presentation for Linda Ham. He said, "The analysis is not complete. There is one case yet that they wish to run, but kind of just jumping to the conclusion of all that, they do show that [there is], obviously, a potential for significant tile damage here, but thermal analysis does not indicate that there is potential for a burn-through. I mean, there could be localized heating damage. There is ... obviously there is a lot of uncertainty in all this in terms of the size of the debris and where it hit and the angle of incidence."

Ham answered, "No burn-through means no catastrophic damage. And the localized heating damage would mean a tile replacement?"

"Right, it would mean possible impacts to turnaround repairs and that sort of thing, but we do not see any kind of safety-of-flight issue here yet in anything that we've looked at."

This was all too accurate in itself. Ham said, "And no safety of flight, no issue for this mission, nothing that we're going to do different. There may be a turnaround [delay]."

McCormack said, "Right. It could potentially [have] hit the RCC ... We don't see any issue if it hit the RCC ..."

The discussion returned to the tiles. Ham consulted with a tile specialist named Calvin Schomburg, who for days had been energetically making a case independent of the Debris Assessment analysis that a damaged tile would endure re-entry—and thereby adding, unintentionally, to the distractions and false assumptions of the management team. After a brief exchange Ham cut off further discussion with a quick summary for some people participating in the meeting by conference call, who were having trouble hearing the speakerphone. She said, "So, no safety-of-flight kind of issue. It's more of a turnaround issue similar to what we've had on other flights. That's it? All right, any questions on that?"

And there were not.

For reasons unexplained, when the official minutes of the meeting were written up and distributed (having been signed off on by Ham), all mention of the foam strike was omitted. This was days before the Columbia's re-entry, and seems to indicate sheer lack of attention to this subject, rather than any sort of cover-up.

The truth is that Linda Ham was as much a victim of NASA as were Columbia's astronauts, who were still doing their science experiments then, and free-falling in splendor around the planet. Her predicament had roots that went way back, nearly to the time of Ham's birth, and it involved not only the culture of the human space-flight program but also the White House, Congress, and NASA leadership over the past thirty years. Gehman understood this fully, and as the investigation drew to a close, he vowed to avoid merely going after the people who had been standing close to the accident when it occurred. The person standing closest was, of course, Linda Ham, and she will bear a burden for her mismanagement. But by the time spring turned to summer, and the caib moved its operation from Houston to Washington, D.C., Gehman had taken to saying, "Complex systems fail in complex ways," and he was determined that the caib's report would document the full range of NASA's mistakes. It did, and in clean, frank prose, using linked sentences and no PowerPoint displays.

As the report was released, on August 26, Mars came closer to Earth than it had in 60,000 years. Gehman told me that he continued to believe in the importance of America's human space-flight effort, and even of the return of the shuttle to flight—at least until a replacement with a clearer mission can be built and put into service. It was a quiet day in Washington, with Congress in recess and the President on vacation. Aides were coming from Capitol Hill to pick up several hundred copies of the report and begin planning hearings for the fall. The White House was receiving the report too, though keeping a cautious distance, as had been expected; it was said that the President might read an executive summary. Down in Houston, board members were handing copies to the astronauts, the managers, and the families of the dead.

Gehman was dressed in a suit, as he had been at the start of all this, seven months before. It was up to him now to drive over to NASA headquarters, in the southwest corner of the city, and deliver the report personally to Sean O'Keefe. I went along for the ride, as did the board member Sheila Widnall, who was there to lend Gehman some moral support. The car was driven by a Navy officer in whites. At no point since the accident had anyone at NASA stepped forward to accept personal responsibility for contributing to this accident—not Linda Ham, not Ron Dittemore, and certainly not Sean O'Keefe. However, the report in Gehman's hands (248 pages, full color, well bound) made responsibility very clear. This was not going to be a social visit. Indeed, it turned out to be extraordinarily tense. Gehman and Widnall strode up the carpeted hallways in a phalanx of anxious, dark-suited NASA staffers, who swung open the doors in advance and followed close on their heels. O'Keefe's office suite was practically imperial in its expense and splendor. High officials stood in small, nervous groups, murmuring. After a short delay O'Keefe appeared—a tall, balding, gray-haired man with stooped shoulders. He shook hands and ushered Gehman and Widnall into the privacy of his inner office. Ten minutes later they emerged. There was a short ceremony for NASA cameras, during which O'Keefe thanked Gehman for his important contribution, and then it was time to leave. As we drove away, I asked Gehman how it had been in there with O'Keefe.

He said "Stiff. Very stiff."

We talked about the future. The report had made a series of recommendations for getting the shuttle back into flight, and beyond that for beginning NASA's long and necessary process of reform. I knew that Gehman, along with much of the board, had volunteered to Congress to return in a year, to peer in deeply again, and to try to judge if progress had been made. I asked him how genuine he thought such progress could be, and he managed somehow to express hope, though skeptically.

By January 23, the Columbia's eighth day in orbit, the crew had solved a couple of minor system problems, and after a half day off, during which no doubt some of the astronauts took the opportunity for some global sightseeing, they were proceeding on schedule with their laboratory duties, and were in good spirits and health. They had been told nothing of the foam strike. Down in Houston, the flight controllers at Mission Control were aware of it, and they knew that the previous day Linda Ham had canceled the request for Air Force photographs. Confident that the issue would be satisfactorily resolved by the shuttle managers, they decided nonetheless to inform the flight crew by e-mail—if only because certain reporters at the Florida launch site had heard of it, and might ask questions at an upcoming press conference, a Public Affairs Office, or PAO, event. The e-mail was written by one of the lead flight controllers, in the standard, overly upbeat style. It was addressed to the pilots, Rick Husband and William McCool.

Under the subject line "info: Possible PAO Event Question," it read,

Rick and Willie,

You guys are doing a fantastic job staying on the timeline and accomplishing great science. Keep up the good work and let us know if there is anything that we can do better from an MCC/POCC standpoint.

There is one item that I would like to make you aware of for the upcoming PAO event ... This item is not even worth mentioning other than wanting to make sure that you are not surprised by it in a question from a reporter.

The e-mail then briefly explained what the launch pictures had shown—a hit from the bipod-ramp foam. A video clip was attached. The e-mail concluded,

Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry. That is all for now. It's a pleasure working with you every day.

The e-mail's content honestly reflected what was believed on the ground, though in a repackaged and highly simplified form. There was no mention of the inadequate quality of the pictures, of the large size of the foam, of the ongoing analysis, or of Linda Ham's decision against Air Force imagery. This was typical for Mission Control communications, a small example of a long-standing pattern of something like information-hoarding that was instinctive and a matter as much of style as of intent: the astronauts had been told of the strike, but almost as if they were children who didn't need to be involved in the grown-up conversation. Two days later, when Rick Husband answered the e-mail, he wrote, "Thanks a million!" and "Thanks for the great work!" and after making a little joke, that "Main Wing" could sound like a Chinese name, he signed off with an e-mail smile—:). He made no mention of the foam strike at all. And with that, as we now know, the crew's last chance for survival faded away.

Linda Ham was wrong. Had the hole in the leading edge been seen, actions could have been taken to try to save the astronauts' lives. The first would have been simply to buy some time. Assuming a starting point on the fifth day of the flight, NASA engineers subsequently calculated that by requiring the crew to rest and sleep, the mission could have been extended to a full month, to February 15. During that time the Atlantis, which was already being prepared for a scheduled March 1 launch, could have been processed more quickly by ground crews working around the clock, and made ready to go by February 10. If all had proceeded perfectly, there would have been a five-day window in which to blast off, join up with the Columbia, and transfer the stranded astronauts one by one to safety, by means of tethered spacewalks. Such a rescue would not have been easy, and it would have involved the possibility of another fatal foam strike and the loss of two shuttles instead of one; but in the risk-versus-risk world of space flight, veterans like Mike Bloomfield would immediately have volunteered, and NASA would have bet the farm.

The fallback would have been a desperate measure—a jury-rigged repair performed by the Columbia astronauts themselves. It would have required two spacewalkers to fill the hole with a combination of heavy tools and metal scraps scavenged from the crew compartment, and to supplement that mass with an ice bag shaped to the wing's leading edge. In theory, if much of the payload had been jettisoned, and luck was with the crew, such a repair might perhaps have endured a modified re-entry and allowed the astronauts to bail out at the standard 30,000 feet. The engineers who came up with this plan realized that in reality it would have been extremely dangerous, and might well have led to a high-speed burn-through and the loss of the crew. But anything would have been better than attempting a normal re-entry as it was actually flown.

The blessing, if one can be found, is that the astronauts remained unaware until nearly the end. A home video shot on board and found in the wreckage documented the relaxed mood in the cockpit as the shuttle descended through the entry interface at 400,000 feet, at 7:44:09 Houston time, northwest of Hawaii. The astronauts were drinking water in anticipation of gravity's redistributive effect on their bodies. The Columbia was flying at the standard 40-degree nose-up angle, with its wings level, and still doing nearly 17,000 mph; outside, though the air was ultra-thin and dynamic pressures were very low, the aerodynamic surfaces were beginning to move in conjunction with the array of control jets, which were doing the main work of maintaining the shuttle's attitude, and would throughout the re-entry. The astronauts commented like sightseers as sheets of fiery plasma began to pass by the windows.

The pilot, McCool, said, "Do you see it over my shoulder now, Laurel?"

Sitting behind him, the mission specialist Laurel Clark said, "I was filming. It doesn't show up nearly as much as the back."

McCool said to the Israeli payload specialist, Ilan Ramon, "It's going pretty good now. Ilan, it's really neat—it's a bright orange-yellow out over the nose, all around the nose."

The commander, Husband, said, "Wait until you start seeing the swirl patterns out your left or right windows."

McCool said, "Wow."

Husband said, "Looks like a blast furnace."

A few seconds later they began to feel gravity. Husband said, "Let's see here ... look at that."

McCool answered, "Yup, we're getting some Gs." As if it were unusual, he said, "I let go of the card, and it falls." Their instruments showed that they were experiencing one hundredth of a G. McCool looked out the window again. He said, "This is amazing. It's really getting, uh, fairly bright out there."

Husband said, "Yup. Yeah, you definitely don't want to be outside now."

The flight engineer, Kalpana Chawla, answered sardonically, "What—like we did before?" The crew laughed.

Outside, the situation was worse than they imagined. Normally, as a shuttle streaks through the upper atmosphere it heats the air immediately around it to temperatures as high as 10,000°, but largely because of the boundary layer—a sort of air cushion created by the leading edges—the actual surface temperatures are significantly lower, generally around 3,000°, which the vehicle is designed to withstand, if barely. The hole in the Columbia's leading edge, however, had locally undermined the boundary layer, and was now letting in a plume of superheated air that was cutting through insulation and working its way toward the inner recesses of the left wing. It is estimated that the plume may have been as hot as 8,000° near the RCC breach. The aluminum support structures inside the wing had a melting point of 1,200°, and they began to burn and give way.

The details of the left wing's failure are complex and technical, but the essentials are not difficult to understand. The wing was attacked by a snaking plume of hot gas, and eaten up from the inside. The consumption began when the shuttle was over the Pacific, and it grew worse over the United States. It included wire bundles leading from the sensors, which caused the data going into the MADS recorder and the telemetry going to Houston to fail in ways that only later made sense. At some point the plume blew right through the top of the left wing, and began to throw molten metal from the insides all over the aft rocket pods. At some point it burned its way into the left main gear well, but it did not explode the tires.

As drag increased on the left wing, the autopilot and combined flight-control systems at first easily compensated for the resulting tendency to roll and yaw to the left. By external appearance, therefore, the shuttle was doing its normal thing, banking first to the right and then to the left for the scheduled energy-management turns, and tracking perfectly down the descent profile for Florida. The speeds were good, the altitudes were good, and all systems were functioning correctly. From within the cockpit the ride appeared to be right.

By the time it got to Texas the Columbia had already proved itself a heroic flying machine, having endured for so long at hypersonic speeds with little left of the midsection inside its left wing, and the plume of hot gas still in there, alive, and eating it away. By now, however, the flight-control systems were nearing their limits. The breakup was associated with that. At 7:59:15 Mission Control noticed the sudden loss of tire pressure on the left gear as the damage rapidly progressed. This was followed by Houston's call "And Columbia, Houston, we see your tire-pressure messages, and we did not copy your last call," and at 7:59:32 by Columbia's final transmission, "Roger, ah, buh ..."

The Columbia was traveling at 12,738 mph, at 200,000 feet, and the dynamic pressures were building, with the wings "feeling" the air at about 170 mph. Now, suddenly, the bottom surface of the left wing began to cave upward into the interior void of melted and burned-through bracing and structure. As the curvature of the wing changed, the lift increased, causing the Columbia to want to roll violently to the right; at the same time, because of an increase in asymmetrical drag, it yawed violently to the left. The control systems went to their limits to maintain order, and all four right yaw jets on the tail fired simultaneously, but to no avail. At 8:00:19 the Columbia rolled over the top and went out of control.

The gyrations it followed were complex combinations of roll, yaw, and pitch, and looked something like an oscillating flat spin. They seem to have resulted in the vehicle's flying backwards. At one point the autopilot appears to have been switched off and then switched on again, as if Husband, an experienced test pilot, was trying to sort things out. The breakup lasted more than a minute. Not surprisingly, the left wing separated first. Afterward the tail, the right wing, and the main body came apart in what investigators later called a controlled sequence "right down the track." As had happened with the Challenger in 1986, the crew cabin broke off intact. It assumed a stable flying position, apparently nose high, and later disintegrated like a falling star across the East Texas sky.

The Article of Independence

2011-08-14T11:08:00.001+05:30

For a civilization and a sub-continent, it's not quite clear what the specific import of 1947 is.

I do not know where to place the specific importance in the long history of India of the acts of the British when they creepingly occupied India first and then suddenly left when things became a bit too hot to handle.

Human lives however are measured on the scale of human lifespans. So it matters a lot to people whether the last 50 years have been productive or fruitless years in the story of India.

And the India story over the past half century has been famously a mixed bag.

India started its journey exactly like Nehru said: a great civilization awakened from long years of sleep.

It has mostly been drifting since then. India can't make any singular claims of achievement that it can be proud of as a signature feat of all of humanity.

People of India are mostly interested in trivialities -- such as religion and their petty family lives.

What of the future? More of the same.

The Story of India — Salil Tripathi

2011-08-08T19:25:00.000+05:30

Here's the link:

http://seagullbooks.org/blog/2011/08/01/ganesha-dances/

Here's the complete text:

In the India in which I grew up, my father burned incense daily at the idol of Ganesha, the elephant-headed one who vanquishes evil, and my mother would keep the municipal water tap turned on at night, so that she would know when water would ‘arrive’ in our flat. Ganesha may or may not ward off evil, but the family needed water, and she would not leave anything to chance. The municipality ostensibly provided water 24 hours, but didn’t tell us that it meant 24 hours in a week, or sometimes, in a fortnight. If she kept the tap on, she would know the moment it would start to whisper and cough, and water would splutter, first as a trickle, then as a waterfall, and those sounds would wake her up, and she’d fill up the pots before others did, to make sure we’d have enough water.

This was when India was the poster child for aid agencies. More Indians probably knew about the US law PL 480, than most Americans: it sent surplus US wheat to India, thus preventing mass starvation. We weren’t badly off; we weren’t well off either. We had a home but no refrigerator, no car, no scooter and no telephone for a long time. We bought our first television some five years after my city had television.

We lived in an India of scarcities, where food had to be bought from the ration shop, Coca-Cola was considered a luxury and at one time the company was even asked to leave the country. It was an India where you queued up to buy milk, and waited—in our case, four years—to get a telephone line because the government was laying down the cables at the pace of a bullock cart.

We were told this happened because of the British, or because we had too many people; the government’s slogan for family planning gradually changed from ‘Do Ya Teen Bas’ (two or three children are enough) to ‘Doosra abhi nahi, teesra kabhi nahi’ (second child—not now; third child—never). When people refused to listen, they suffered: during an Emergency, the government forcibly sterilised thousands of people.

It was an India in which we were told to dream small dreams, make sacrifices for those without much. Those who had some, didn’t have much; they sought little and got less. India ambled along, at an elephantine pace, growing at two percent a year, the so-called Hindu rate of growth.

Then, in the manner of Philip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis, celebrating 1963, India had its moment: 1991.

Economic freedom began in nineteen ninety-one.

It was too late for some.

After the Rushdie ban and before the mosque was torn.

The economy was opened to foreign investment. Indians got to choose: between Coke and Pepsi, Visa and Mastercard, Airtel and Reliance mobile, Kolkata Knight Riders and Mumbai Indians, no longer only Fiat or Ambassador. And India got its swanky cars and blue jeans, microwave ovens and colour TV. For some, there was money for nothing—and chicks for free. Supermarkets opened. India had become the world’s biggest producer of milk; food overflowed in its granaries; there was bottled water for those who could buy; and women in Bhatinda told callers from London where they had to change trains to go from Peterborough to Portsmouth because of engineering works, or something like that; and men in Pune patiently helped Americans fix their laptops long distance. The Indian economy started to grow eight and nine percent a year. If India was an elephant, it had learned to dance; if it was a tiger, it was now un-caged.

And just as the Hindu rate of growth ceased being ‘Hindu’, India ceased being ‘India’ and increasingly became Hindu. As India jettisoned the socialism that Jawaharlal Nehru had bequeathed, and found no use for non-alignment—which had meant that India had kept what it thought was a neutral distance between the US and the USSR—Indians thought it was time to give up the third tenet that came with its independence: secularism.

For a deeply religious country like India, its secularism was different from the European version, where the state recognizes no religion, or the US version, where the state and the spiritual place—church, mosque, synagogue, or temple—are separate; India recognised all religions, worshipped every stone, as it were. And so the state allowed Hindus to divide property the way they wanted under Hindu personal law, and looked the other way while its feudal lords, the khaps, told lovelorn sons and daughters who they could marry; and India subsidised Muslims who wanted to go on the Hajj. Sikhs could carry little swords on an airplane, and even as irate academics wanted advertisements banned if they showed some skin, Jain priests could walk around naked if they wished. Assertive Hindus, who felt their identities were suppressed, wanted to change that. They objected to the state’s appeasement of minorities and wanted to rewrite history. They attacked mosques, killed those who got in their way, and destroyed art if they didn’t like what an artist did to their deities.

The world liked the new India that was open to business, but its rightward turn was not only economic. Hindu nationalists wanted a different India, an assertive, masculine, virile India, which would give up the pacifism of Gandhi and the poetry of Tagore, and embrace the martial valour of Shivaji and Subhas Chandra Bose.

As the world prepares to rearrange the furniture and seating order at the main table to make room for the newly-emerging powers—Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC)—in G20, the new global grouping of powerful nations, it is going to see a different India from the one it thought it knew. This is not only the India of Ravi Shankar’s sitar and Satyajit Ray’s cinema, or Sunil Gavaskar’s plodding 36 not out in 60 overs, or where RK Narayan writes about the sleepy village of Malgudi. Nor is it only the India of yoga and Hare Krishna, meditation and vegetarianism, the eternal Himalayas and the beaches of Goa. It is now the India of AR Rahman’s ‘Jai Ho’, which mixes Spanish beat with Bollywood thump; where Bollywood stars sell international brands and make films such as Love, Sex aur Dhokha; of Saurav Ganguly taking off his shirt at Lord’s after India records an improbably win against England; where Chetan Bhagat writes forgettable novels about urban angst in unreadable prose, and yet, like Dan Brown, laughs his way to the bank—come to think of it, he is a banker. It is a proud India, a can-do India. Its companies go about buying assets worldwide. The British came to India looking for tea, and the East India Company helped found an empire. Today, Tata owns Tetley Tea as well as Corus and Jaguar. And an Indian owns the East India Company. So there we are.

Over the next decades, this emergent India will be more visible. More jobs will fly out of Europe and the US to India. More stuff will be made in India and sold abroad. More Americans and Europeans will work under Indian managers, report to Indian companies. Even as the West recovers from the financial crisis, Indians ask, Crisis? What crisis?

More Indian films will be seen at multiplexes around the world; Hollywood will seek financing from India; Indian banks will mediate loans and transactions for companies worldwide. Mumbai and Shanghai stock exchanges will matter as much as London and New York.

What sort of an India will that be? Will it be an assertive nuclear power bullying its neighbours and threatening a stable international order? Will it try to become more Hindu and less Indian?

It’s easy to be pessimistic, but I feel otherwise. India’s genius has been its ability to synthesise. It blends things; it absorbs the foreign influence and makes it its own. It invents ‘American Chop Suey’ and ‘Gobi Manchurian’; it compels McDonald’s to offer alu tikki burgers in India. And it gets Starbucks to offer chai tea latte worldwide. It gets Madonna to sport a bindi and influences Julia Roberts, as the Beatles before her, to explore mysticism. It reminds the English that cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered in England.

Indians like being liked; some of them may say they want to be feared, but what they’ve sought is respect. Its economic might is earning India both in abundance. It will be fascinating to watch the trajectory India undertakes as it becomes economically even more powerful. Will its rightward tilt also mean a social and political rightward tilt? Or will its genius of synthesising and absorbing other influences prevail, making the whole world its family, or, as the father says in the UK television series Goodness Gracious Me, Indians discovered and invented everything?

If I knew the answer, I’d have been an astrologer. India has many of them. But India has many astronomers too; that’s what I like about India, and that India—of astronomers, not astrologers—is the one in which I place my faith. As the elephant dances, it might trip occasionally, and it might even slip, but it will find its feet. Ganesha, ultimately, preserves order and wishes the world well, as my father tells me. In a way, as several economic historians remind us, India is merely taking the place it had occupied in the world’s economy and politics some 600 years ago. It will be business as usual; we are returning to an older equilibrium. And India is an old country, at ease with its past even as it enjoys coexisting in several centuries

GETTING BIN LADEN from The New Yorker by Nicholas Schmidle

2011-08-01T22:22:00.002+05:30

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters ducked into an alpine valley and slipped, undetected, into Pakistani airspace. For more than sixty years, Pakistan’s military has maintained a state of high alert against its eastern neighbor, India. Because of this obsession, Pakistan’s “principal air defenses are all pointing east,” Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani Army and the author of “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within,” told me. Senior defense and Administration officials concur with this assessment, but a Pakistani senior military official, whom I reached at his office, in Rawalpindi, disagreed. “No one leaves their borders unattended,” he said. Though he declined to elaborate on the location or orientation of Pakistan’s radars—“It’s not where the radars are or aren’t”—he said that the American infiltration was the result of “technological gaps we have vis-à-vis the U.S.” The Black Hawks, each of which had two pilots and a crewman from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the Night Stalkers, had been modified to mask heat, noise, and movement; the copters’ exteriors had sharp, flat angles and were covered with radar-dampening “skin.”

The SEALs’ destination was a house in the small city of Abbottabad, which is about a hundred and twenty miles across the Pakistan border. Situated north of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, Abbottabad is in the foothills of the Pir Panjal Range, and is popular in the summertime with families seeking relief from the blistering heat farther south. Founded in 1853 by a British major named James Abbott, the city became the home of a prestigious military academy after the creation of Pakistan, in 1947. According to information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency, bin Laden was holed up on the third floor of a house in a one-acre compound just off Kakul Road in Bilal Town, a middle-class neighborhood less than a mile from the entrance to the academy. If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

The helicopters traversed Mohmand, one of Pakistan’s seven tribal areas, skirted the north of Peshawar, and continued due east. The commander of DEVGRU’s Red Squadron, whom I will call James, sat on the floor, squeezed among ten other SEALs, Ahmed, and Cairo. (The names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed.) James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

During the ninety-minute helicopter flight, James and his teammates rehearsed the operation in their heads. Since the autumn of 2001, they had rotated through Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa, at a brutal pace. At least three of the SEALs had participated in the sniper operation off the coast of Somalia, in April, 2009, that freed Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama, and left three pirates dead. In October, 2010, a DEVGRU team attempted to rescue Linda Norgrove, a Scottish aid worker who had been kidnapped in eastern Afghanistan by the Taliban. During a raid of a Taliban hideout, a SEAL tossed a grenade at an insurgent, not realizing that Norgrove was nearby. She died from the blast. The mistake haunted the SEALs who had been involved; three of them were subsequently expelled from DEVGRU.

The Abbottabad raid was not DEVGRU’s maiden venture into Pakistan, either. The team had surreptitiously entered the country on ten to twelve previous occasions, according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid. Most of those missions were forays into North and South Waziristan, where many military and intelligence analysts had thought that bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were hiding. (Only one such operation—the September, 2008, raid of Angoor Ada, a village in South Waziristan—has been widely reported.) Abbottabad was, by far, the farthest that DEVGRU had ventured into Pakistani territory. It also represented the team’s first serious attempt since late 2001 at killing “Crankshaft”—the target name that the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, had given bin Laden. Since escaping that winter during a battle in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan, bin Laden had defied American efforts to trace him. Indeed, it remains unclear how he ended up living in Abbottabad.

Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan.” Twenty-five additional SEALs from DEVGRU, pulled from a squadron stationed in Afghanistan, sat in the Chinooks that remained at the border; this “quick-reaction force” would be called into action only if the mission went seriously wrong. The third and fourth Chinooks were each outfitted with a pair of M134 Miniguns. They followed the Black Hawks’ initial flight path but landed at a predetermined point on a dry riverbed in a wide, unpopulated valley in northwest Pakistan. The nearest house was half a mile away. On the ground, the copters’ rotors were kept whirring while operatives monitored the surrounding hills for encroaching Pakistani helicopters or fighter jets. One of the Chinooks was carrying fuel bladders, in case the other aircraft needed to refill their tanks.

Meanwhile, the two Black Hawks were quickly approaching Abbottabad from the northwest, hiding behind the mountains on the northernmost edge of the city. Then the pilots banked right and went south along a ridge that marks Abbottabad’s eastern perimeter. When those hills tapered off, the pilots curled right again, toward the city center, and made their final approach.

During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered. Mark, a master chief petty officer and the ranking noncommissioned officer on the operation, crouched on one knee beside the open door of the lead helicopter. He and the eleven other SEALs on “helo one,” who were wearing gloves and had on night-vision goggles, were preparing to fast-rope into bin Laden’s yard. They waited for the crew chief to give the signal to throw the rope. But, as the pilot passed over the compound, pulled into a high hover, and began lowering the aircraft, he felt the Black Hawk getting away from him. He sensed that they were going to crash.

One month before the 2008 Presidential election, Obama, then a senator from Illinois, squared off in a debate against John McCain in an arena at Belmont University, in Nashville. A woman in the audience asked Obama if he would be willing to pursue Al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan, even if that meant invading an ally nation. He replied, “If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable, or unwilling, to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national-security priority.” McCain, who often criticized Obama for his naïveté on foreign-policy matters, characterized the promise as foolish, saying, “I’m not going to telegraph my punches.”

Four months after Obama entered the White House, Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., briefed the President on the agency’s latest programs and initiatives for tracking bin Laden. Obama was unimpressed. In June, 2009, he drafted a memo instructing Panetta to create a “detailed operation plan” for finding the Al Qaeda leader and to “ensure that we have expended every effort.” Most notably, the President intensified the C.I.A.’s classified drone program; there were more missile strikes inside Pakistan during Obama’s first year in office than in George W. Bush’s eight. The terrorists swiftly registered the impact: that July, CBS reported that a recent Al Qaeda communiqué had referred to “brave commanders” who had been “snatched away” and to “so many hidden homes [which] have been levelled.” The document blamed the “very grave” situation on spies who had “spread throughout the land like locusts.” Nevertheless, bin Laden’s trail remained cold.

In August, 2010, Panetta returned to the White House with better news. C.I.A. analysts believed that they had pinpointed bin Laden’s courier, a man in his early thirties named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Kuwaiti drove a white S.U.V. whose spare-tire cover was emblazoned with an image of a white rhino. The C.I.A. began tracking the vehicle. One day, a satellite captured images of the S.U.V. pulling into a large concrete compound in Abbottabad. Agents, determining that Kuwaiti was living there, used aerial surveillance to keep watch on the compound, which consisted of a three-story main house, a guesthouse, and a few outbuildings. They observed that residents of the compound burned their trash, instead of putting it out for collection, and concluded that the compound lacked a phone or an Internet connection. Kuwaiti and his brother came and went, but another man, living on the third floor, never left. When this third individual did venture outside, he stayed behind the compound’s walls. Some analysts speculated that the third man was bin Laden, and the agency dubbed him the Pacer.

Obama, though excited, was not yet prepared to order military action. John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President’s advisers began an “interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you’re going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there.” The C.I.A. intensified its intelligence-collection efforts, and, according to a recent report in the Guardian, a physician working for the agency conducted an immunization drive in Abbottabad, in the hope of acquiring DNA samples from bin Laden’s children. (No one in the compound ultimately received any immunizations.)

In late 2010, Obama ordered Panetta to begin exploring options for a military strike on the compound. Panetta contacted Vice-Admiral Bill McRaven, the SEAL in charge of JSOC. Traditionally, the Army has dominated the special-operations community, but in recent years the SEALs have become a more prominent presence; McRaven’s boss at the time of the raid, Eric Olson—the head of Special Operations Command, or SOCOM—is a Navy admiral who used to be a commander of DEVGRU. In January, 2011, McRaven asked a JSOC official named Brian, who had previously been a DEVGRU deputy commander, to present a raid plan. The next month, Brian, who has the all-American look of a high-school quarterback, moved into an unmarked office on the first floor of the C.I.A.’s printing plant, in Langley, Virginia. Brian covered the walls of the office with topographical maps and satellite images of the Abbottabad compound. He and half a dozen JSOC officers were formally attached to the Pakistan/Afghanistan department of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, but in practice they operated on their own. A senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. “Everything they were working on was closely held,” the official said.

The relationship between special-operations units and the C.I.A. dates back to the Vietnam War. But the line between the two communities has increasingly blurred as C.I.A. officers and military personnel have encountered one another on multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. “These people grew up together,” a senior Defense Department official told me. “We are in each other’s systems, we speak each other’s languages.” (Exemplifying this trend, General David H. Petraeus, the former commanding general in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now the incoming head of the C.I.A., and Panetta has taken over the Department of Defense.) The bin Laden mission—plotted at C.I.A. headquarters and authorized under C.I.A. legal statutes but conducted by Navy DEVGRU operators—brought the coöperation between the agency and the Pentagon to an even higher level. John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel at the C.I.A., said that the Abbottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC into a C.I.A. operation.”

On March 14th, Obama called his national-security advisers into the White House Situation Room and reviewed a spreadsheet listing possible courses of action against the Abbottabad compound. Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included coöperating with the Pakistani military; some did not. Obama decided against informing or working with Pakistan. “There was a real lack of confidence that the Pakistanis could keep this secret for more than a nanosecond,” a senior adviser to the President told me. At the end of the meeting, Obama instructed McRaven to proceed with planning the raid.

Brian invited James, the commander of DEVGRU’s Red Squadron, and Mark, the master chief petty officer, to join him at C.I.A. headquarters. They spent the next two and a half weeks considering ways to get inside bin Laden’s house. One option entailed flying helicopters to a spot outside Abbottabad and letting the team sneak into the city on foot. The risk of detection was high, however, and the SEALs would be tired by a long run to the compound. The planners had contemplated tunnelling in—or, at least, the possibility that bin Laden might tunnel out. But images provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency showed that there was standing water in the vicinity, suggesting that the compound sat in a flood basin. The water table was probably just below the surface, making tunnels highly unlikely. Eventually, the planners agreed that it made the most sense to fly directly into the compound. “Special operations is about doing what’s not expected, and probably the least expected thing here was that a helicopter would come in, drop guys on the roof, and land in the yard,” the special-operations officer said.

On March 29th, McRaven brought the plan to Obama. The President’s military advisers were divided. Some supported a raid, some an airstrike, and others wanted to hold off until the intelligence improved. Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault. Gates reminded his colleagues that he had been in the Situation Room of the Carter White House when military officials presented Eagle Claw—the 1980 Delta Force operation that aimed at rescuing American hostages in Tehran but resulted in a disastrous collision in the Iranian desert, killing eight American soldiers. “They said that was a pretty good idea, too,” Gates warned. He and General James Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, favored an airstrike by B-2 Spirit bombers. That option would avoid the risk of having American boots on the ground in Pakistan. But the Air Force then calculated that a payload of thirty-two smart bombs, each weighing two thousand pounds, would be required to penetrate thirty feet below ground, insuring that any bunkers would collapse. “That much ordnance going off would be the equivalent of an earthquake,” Cartwright told me. The prospect of flattening a Pakistani city made Obama pause. He shelved the B-2 option and directed McRaven to start rehearsing the raid.

Brian, James, and Mark selected a team of two dozen SEALs from Red Squadron and told them to report to a densely forested site in North Carolina for a training exercise on April 10th. (Red Squadron is one of four squadrons in DEVGRU, which has about three hundred operators in all.) None of the SEALs, besides James and Mark, were aware of the C.I.A. intelligence on bin Laden’s compound until a lieutenant commander walked into an office at the site. He found a two-star Army general from JSOC headquarters seated at a conference table with Brian, James, Mark, and several analysts from the C.I.A. This obviously wasn’t a training exercise. The lieutenant commander was promptly “read in.” A replica of the compound had been built at the site, with walls and chain-link fencing marking the layout of the compound. The team spent the next five days practicing maneuvers.

On April 18th, the DEVGRU squad flew to Nevada for another week of rehearsals. The practice site was a large government-owned stretch of desert with an elevation equivalent to the area surrounding Abbottabad. An extant building served as bin Laden’s house. Aircrews plotted out a path that paralleled the flight from Jalalabad to Abbottabad. Each night after sundown, drills commenced. Twelve SEALs, including Mark, boarded helo one. Eleven SEALs, Ahmed, and Cairo boarded helo two. The pilots flew in the dark, arrived at the simulated compound, and settled into a hover while the SEALs fast-roped down. Not everyone on the team was accustomed to helicopter assaults. Ahmed had been pulled from a desk job for the mission and had never descended a fast rope. He quickly learned the technique.

The assault plan was now honed. Helo one was to hover over the yard, drop two fast ropes, and let all twelve SEALs slide down into the yard. Helo two would fly to the northeast corner of the compound and let out Ahmed, Cairo, and four SEALs, who would monitor the perimeter of the building. The copter would then hover over the house, and James and the remaining six SEALs would shimmy down to the roof. As long as everything was cordial, Ahmed would hold curious neighbors at bay. The SEALs and the dog could assist more aggressively, if needed. Then, if bin Laden was proving difficult to find, Cairo could be sent into the house to search for false walls or hidden doors. “This wasn’t a hard op,” the special-operations officer told me. “It would be like hitting a target in McLean”—the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.

A planeload of guests arrived on the night of April 21st. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, along with Olson and McRaven, sat with C.I.A. personnel in a hangar as Brian, James, Mark, and the pilots presented a brief on the raid, which had been named Operation Neptune’s Spear. Despite JSOC’s lead role in Neptune’s Spear, the mission officially remained a C.I.A. covert operation. The covert approach allowed the White House to hide its involvement, if necessary. As the counterterrorism official put it recently, “If you land and everybody is out on a milk run, then you get the hell out and no one knows.” After describing the operation, the briefers fielded questions: What if a mob surrounded the compound? Were the SEALs prepared to shoot civilians? Olson, who received the Silver Star for valor during the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” episode, in Mogadishu, Somalia, worried that it could be politically catastrophic if a U.S. helicopter were shot down inside Pakistani territory. After an hour or so of questioning, the senior officers and intelligence analysts returned to Washington. Two days later, the SEALs flew back to Dam Neck, their base in Virginia.

On the night of Tuesday, April 26th, the SEAL team boarded a Boeing C-17 Globemaster at Naval Air Station Oceana, a few miles from Dam Neck. After a refuelling stop at Ramstein Air Base, in Germany, the C-17 continued to Bagram Airfield, north of Kabul. The SEALs spent a night in Bagram and moved to Jalalabad on Wednesday.

That day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent,” and added, “This was a circumstantial case.”

Panetta was mindful of the analysts’ doubts, but he believed that the intelligence was better than anything that the C.I.A. had gathered on bin Laden since his flight from Tora Bora. Late on Thursday afternoon, Panetta and the rest of the national-security team met with the President. For the next few nights, there would be virtually no moonlight over Abbottabad—the ideal condition for a raid. After that, it would be another month until the lunar cycle was in its darkest phase. Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.’s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The center’s director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. Yet, as Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, put it to me recently, the longer things dragged on, the greater the risk of a leak, “which would have upended the thing.” Obama adjourned the meeting just after 7 P.M. and said that he would sleep on it.

The next morning, the President met in the Map Room with Tom Donilon, his national-security adviser, Denis McDonough, a deputy adviser, and Brennan. Obama had decided to go with a DEVGRU assault, with McRaven choosing the night. It was too late for a Friday attack, and on Saturday there was excessive cloud cover. On Saturday afternoon, McRaven and Obama spoke on the phone, and McRaven said that the raid would occur on Sunday night. “Godspeed to you and your forces,” Obama told him. “Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service and the message that I personally will be following this mission very closely.”

On the morning of Sunday, May 1st, White House officials cancelled scheduled visits, ordered sandwich platters from Costco, and transformed the Situation Room into a war room. At eleven o’clock, Obama’s top advisers began gathering around a large conference table. A video link connected them to Panetta, at C.I.A. headquarters, and McRaven, in Afghanistan. (There were at least two other command centers, one inside the Pentagon and one inside the American Embassy in Islamabad.)

Brigadier General Marshall Webb, an assistant commander of JSOC, took a seat at the end of a lacquered table in a small adjoining office and turned on his laptop. He opened multiple chat windows that kept him, and the White House, connected with the other command teams. The office where Webb sat had the only video feed in the White House showing real-time footage of the target, which was being shot by an unarmed RQ 170 drone flying more than fifteen thousand feet above Abbottabad. The JSOC planners, determined to keep the operation as secret as possible, had decided against using additional fighters or bombers. “It just wasn’t worth it,” the special-operations officer told me. The SEALs were on their own.

Obama returned to the White House at two o’clock, after playing nine holes of golf at Andrews Air Force Base. The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad thirty minutes later. Just before four o’clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad. Obama stood up. “I need to watch this,” he said, stepping across the hall into the small office and taking a seat alongside Webb. Vice-President Joseph Biden, Secretary Gates, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed him, as did anyone else who could fit into the office. On the office’s modestly sized LCD screen, helo one—grainy and black-and-white—appeared above the compound, then promptly ran into trouble.

When the helicopter began getting away from the pilot, he pulled back on the cyclic, which controls the pitch of the rotor blades, only to find the aircraft unresponsive. The high walls of the compound and the warm temperatures had caused the Black Hawk to descend inside its own rotor wash—a hazardous aerodynamic situation known as “settling with power.” In North Carolina, this potential problem had not become apparent, because the chain-link fencing used in rehearsals had allowed air to flow freely. A former helicopter pilot with extensive special-operations experience said of the pilot’s situation, “It’s pretty spooky—I’ve been in it myself. The only way to get out of it is to push the cyclic forward and fly out of this vertical silo you’re dropping through. That solution requires altitude. If you’re settling with power at two thousand feet, you’ve got plenty of time to recover. If you’re settling with power at fifty feet, you’re going to hit the ground.”

The pilot scrapped the plan to fast-rope and focussed on getting the aircraft down. He aimed for an animal pen in the western section of the compound. The SEALs on board braced themselves as the tail rotor swung around, scraping the security wall. The pilot jammed the nose forward to drive it into the dirt and prevent his aircraft from rolling onto its side. Cows, chickens, and rabbits scurried. With the Black Hawk pitched at a forty-five-degree angle astride the wall, the crew sent a distress call to the idling Chinooks.

James and the SEALs in helo two watched all this while hovering over the compound’s northeast corner. The second pilot, unsure whether his colleagues were taking fire or experiencing mechanical problems, ditched his plan to hover over the roof. Instead, he landed in a grassy field across the street from the house.

No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. Mark and his team were inside a downed helicopter at one corner, while James and his team were at the opposite end. The teams had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course.

“Eternity is defined as the time be tween when you see something go awry and that first voice report,” the special-operations officer said. The officials in Washington viewed the aerial footage and waited anxiously to hear a military communication. The senior adviser to the President compared the experience to watching “the climax of a movie.”

After a few minutes, the twelve SEALs inside helo one recovered their bearings and calmly relayed on the radio that they were proceeding with the raid. They had conducted so many operations over the past nine years that few things caught them off guard. In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the “Black Hawk Down” incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that “this was not one of three missions. This was one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night.” He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.” On the night of May 1st alone, special-operations forces based in Afghanistan conducted twelve other missions; according to the official, those operations captured or killed between fifteen and twenty targets. “Most of the missions take off and go left,” he said. “This one took off and went right.”

Minutes after hitting the ground, Mark and the other team members began streaming out the side doors of helo one. Mud sucked at their boots as they ran alongside a ten-foot-high wall that enclosed the animal pen. A three-man demolition unit hustled ahead to the pen’s closed metal gate, reached into bags containing explosives, and placed C-4 charges on the hinges. After a loud bang, the door fell open. The nine other SEALs rushed forward, ending up in an alleylike driveway with their backs to the house’s main entrance. They moved down the alley, silenced rifles pressed against their shoulders. Mark hung toward the rear as he established radio communications with the other team. At the end of the driveway, the Americans blew through yet another locked gate and stepped into a courtyard facing the guesthouse, where Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden’s courier, lived with his wife and four children.

Three SEALs in front broke off to clear the guesthouse as the remaining nine blasted through another gate and entered an inner courtyard, which faced the main house. When the smaller unit rounded the corner to face the doors of the guesthouse, they spotted Kuwaiti running inside to warn his wife and children. The Americans’ night-vision goggles cast the scene in pixellated shades of emerald green. Kuwaiti, wearing a white shalwar kameez, had grabbed a weapon and was coming back outside when the SEALs opened fire and killed him.

The nine other SEALs, including Mark, formed three-man units for clearing the inner courtyard. The Americans suspected that several more men were in the house: Kuwaiti’s thirty-three-year-old brother, Abrar; bin Laden’s sons Hamza and Khalid; and bin Laden himself. One SEAL unit had no sooner trod on the paved patio at the house’s front entrance when Abrar—a stocky, mustachioed man in a cream-colored shalwar kameez—appeared with an AK-47. He was shot in the chest and killed, as was his wife, Bushra, who was standing, unarmed, beside him.

Outside the compound’s walls, Ahmed, the translator, patrolled the dirt road in front of bin Laden’s house, as if he were a plainclothes Pakistani police officer. He looked the part, wearing a shalwar kameez atop a flak jacket. He, the dog Cairo, and four SEALs were responsible for closing off the perimeter of the house while James and six other SEALs—the contingent that was supposed to have dropped onto the roof—moved inside. For the team patrolling the perimeter, the first fifteen minutes passed without incident. Neighbors undoubtedly heard the low-flying helicopters, the sound of one crashing, and the sporadic explosions and gunfire that ensued, but nobody came outside. One local took note of the tumult in a Twitter post: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1 AM (is a rare event).”

Eventually, a few curious Pakistanis approached to inquire about the commotion on the other side of the wall. “Go back to your houses,” Ahmed said, in Pashto, as Cairo stood watch. “There is a security operation under way.” The locals went home, none of them suspecting that they had talked to an American. When journalists descended on Bilal Town in the coming days, one resident told a reporter, “I saw soldiers emerging from the helicopters and advancing toward the house. Some of them instructed us in chaste Pashto to turn off the lights and stay inside.”

Meanwhile, James, the squadron commander, had breached one wall, crossed a section of the yard covered with trellises, breached a second wall, and joined up with the SEALs from helo one, who were entering the ground floor of the house. What happened next is not precisely clear. “I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta said later, on “PBS NewsHour.”

Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone’s video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS. None of them had any previous knowledge of the house’s floor plan, and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections—on which this account is based—may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.

As Abrar’s children ran for cover, the SEALs began clearing the first floor of the main house, room by room. Though the Americans had thought that the house might be booby-trapped, the presence of kids at the compound suggested otherwise. “You can only be hyper-vigilant for so long,” the special-operations officer said. “Did bin Laden go to sleep every night thinking, The next night they’re coming? Of course not. Maybe for the first year or two. But not now.” Nevertheless, security precautions were in place. A locked metal gate blocked the base of the staircase leading to the second floor, making the downstairs room feel like a cage.

After blasting through the gate with C-4 charges, three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, craning his neck around the corner. He then appeared at the top of the staircase with an AK-47. Khalid, who wore a white T-shirt with an overstretched neckline and had short hair and a clipped beard, fired down at the Americans. (The counterterrorism official claims that Khalid was unarmed, though still a threat worth taking seriously. “You have an adult male, late at night, in the dark, coming down the stairs at you in an Al Qaeda house—your assumption is that you’re encountering a hostile.”) At least two of the SEALs shot back and killed Khalid. According to the booklets that the SEALs carried, up to five adult males were living inside the compound. Three of them were now dead; the fourth, bin Laden’s son Hamza, was not on the premises. The final person was bin Laden.

Before the mission commenced, the SEALs had created a checklist of code words that had a Native American theme. Each code word represented a different stage of the mission: leaving Jalalabad, entering Pakistan, approaching the compound, and so on. “Geronimo” was to signify that bin Laden had been found.

Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)

The Americans hurried toward the bedroom door. The first SEAL pushed it open. Two of bin Laden’s wives had placed themselves in front of him. Amal al-Fatah, bin Laden’s fifth wife, was screaming in Arabic. She motioned as if she were going to charge; the SEAL lowered his sights and shot her once, in the calf. Fearing that one or both women were wearing suicide jackets, he stepped forward, wrapped them in a bear hug, and drove them aside. He would almost certainly have been killed had they blown themselves up, but by blanketing them he would have absorbed some of the blast and potentially saved the two SEALs behind him. In the end, neither woman was wearing an explosive vest.

A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.” After a pause, he added, “Geronimo E.K.I.A.”—“enemy killed in action.”

Hearing this at the White House, Obama pursed his lips, and said solemnly, to no one in particular, “We got him.”

Relaxing his hold on bin Laden’s two wives, the first SEAL placed the women in flex cuffs and led them downstairs. Two of his colleagues, meanwhile, ran upstairs with a nylon body bag. They unfurled it, knelt down on either side of bin Laden, and placed the body inside the bag. Eighteen minutes had elapsed since the DEVGRU team landed. For the next twenty minutes, the mission shifted to an intelligence-gathering operation.

Four men scoured the second floor, plastic bags in hand, collecting flash drives, CDs, DVDs, and computer hardware from the room, which had served, in part, as bin Laden’s makeshift media studio. In the coming weeks, a C.I.A.-led task force examined the files and determined that bin Laden had remained far more involved in the operational activities of Al Qaeda than many American officials had thought. He had been developing plans to assassinate Obama and Petraeus, to pull off an extravagant September 11th anniversary attack, and to attack American trains. The SEALs also found an archive of digital pornography. “We find it on all these guys, whether they’re in Somalia, Iraq, or Afghanistan,” the special-operations officer said. Bin Laden’s gold-threaded robes, worn during his video addresses, hung behind a curtain in the media room.

Outside, the Americans corralled the women and children—each of them bound in flex cuffs—and had them sit against an exterior wall that faced the second, undamaged Black Hawk. The lone fluent Arabic speaker on the assault team questioned them. Nearly all the children were under the age of ten. They seemed to have no idea about the tenant upstairs, other than that he was “an old guy.” None of the women confirmed that the man was bin Laden, though one of them kept referring to him as “the sheikh.” When the rescue Chinook eventually arrived, a medic stepped out and knelt over the corpse. He injected a needle into bin Laden’s body and extracted two bone-marrow samples. More DNA was taken with swabs. One of the bone-marrow samples went into the Black Hawk. The other went into the Chinook, along with bin Laden’s body.

Next, the SEALs needed to destroy the damaged Black Hawk. The pilot, armed with a hammer that he kept for such situations, smashed the instrument panel, the radio, and the other classified fixtures inside the cockpit. Then the demolition unit took over. They placed explosives near the avionics system, the communications gear, the engine, and the rotor head. “You’re not going to hide the fact that it’s a helicopter,” the special-operations officer said. “But you want to make it unusable.” The SEALs placed extra C-4 charges under the carriage, rolled thermite grenades inside the copter’s body, and then backed up. Helo one burst into flames while the demolition team boarded the Chinook. The women and children, who were being left behind for the Pakistani authorities, looked puzzled, scared, and shocked as they watched the SEALs board the helicopters. Amal, bin Laden’s wife, continued her harangue. Then, as a giant fire burned inside the compound walls, the Americans flew away.

In the Situation Room, Obama said, “I’m not going to be happy until those guys get out safe.” After thirty-eight minutes inside the compound, the two SEAL teams had to make the long flight back to Afghanistan. The Black Hawk was low on gas, and needed to rendezvous with the Chinook at the refuelling point that was near the Afghan border—but still inside Pakistan. Filling the gas tank took twenty-five minutes. At one point, Biden, who had been fingering a rosary, turned to Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman. “We should all go to Mass tonight,” he said.

The helicopters landed back in Jalalabad around 3 A.M.; McRaven and the C.I.A. station chief met the team on the tarmac. A pair of SEALs unloaded the body bag and unzipped it so that McRaven and the C.I.A. officer could see bin Laden’s corpse with their own eyes. Photographs were taken of bin Laden’s face and then of his outstretched body. Bin Laden was believed to be about six feet four, but no one had a tape measure to confirm the body’s length. So one SEAL, who was six feet tall, lay beside the corpse: it measured roughly four inches longer than the American. Minutes later, McRaven appeared on the teleconference screen in the Situation Room and confirmed that bin Laden’s body was in the bag. The corpse was sent to Bagram.

All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea—a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of East Africa’s top Al Qaeda leaders; Nabhan’s corpse was then flown to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to deposit bin Laden’s remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin Laden’s relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any interest in taking the body? “Your plan sounds like a good one,” the Saudi replied.

At dawn, bin Laden was loaded into the belly of a flip-wing V-22 Osprey, accompanied by a JSOC liaison officer and a security detail of military police. The Osprey flew south, destined for the deck of the U.S.S. Carl Vinson—a thousand-foot-long nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Arabian Sea, off the Pakistani coast. The Americans, yet again, were about to traverse Pakistani airspace without permission. Some officials worried that the Pakistanis, stung by the humiliation of the unilateral raid in Abbottabad, might restrict the Osprey’s access. The airplane ultimately landed on the Vinson without incident.

Bin Laden’s body was washed, wrapped in a white burial shroud, weighted, and then slipped inside a bag. The process was done “in strict conformance with Islamic precepts and practices,” Brennan later told reporters. The JSOC liaison, the military-police contingent, and several sailors placed the shrouded body on an open-air elevator, and rode down with it to the lower level, which functions as a hangar for airplanes. From a height of between twenty and twenty-five feet above the waves, they heaved the corpse into the water.

Back in Abbottabad, residents of Bilal Town and dozens of journalists converged on bin Laden’s compound, and the morning light clarified some of the confusion from the previous night. Black soot from the detonated Black Hawk charred the wall of the animal pen. Part of the tail hung over the wall. It was clear that a military raid had taken place there. “I’m glad no one was hurt in the crash, but, on the other hand, I’m sort of glad we left the helicopter there,” the special-operations officer said. “It quiets the conspiracy mongers out there and instantly lends credibility. You believe everything else instantly, because there’s a helicopter sitting there.”

After the raid, Pakistan’s political leadership engaged in frantic damage control. In the Washington Post, President Asif Ali Zardari wrote that bin Laden “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone,” adding that “a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden.”

Pakistani military officials reacted more cynically. They arrested at least five Pakistanis for helping the C.I.A., including the physician who ran the immunization drive in Abbottabad. And several Pakistani media outlets, including the Nation—a jingoistic English-language newspaper that is considered a mouthpiece for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I.—published what they claimed was the name of the C.I.A.’s station chief in Islamabad. (Shireen Mazari, a former editor of the Nation, once told me, “Our interests and the Americans’ interests don’t coincide.”) The published name was incorrect, and the C.I.A. officer opted to stay.

The proximity of bin Laden’s house to the Pakistan Military Academy raised the possibility that the military, or the I.S.I., had helped protect bin Laden. How could Al Qaeda’s chief live so close to the academy without at least some officers knowing about it? Suspicion grew after the Times reported that at least one cell phone recovered from bin Laden’s house contained contacts for senior militants belonging to Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, a jihadi group that has had close ties to the I.S.I. Although American officials have stated that Pakistani officials must have helped bin Laden hide in Abbottabad, definitive evidence has not yet been presented.

Bin Laden’s death provided the White House with the symbolic victory it needed to begin phasing troops out of Afghanistan. Seven weeks later, Obama announced a timetable for withdrawal. Even so, U.S. counterterrorism activities inside Pakistan—that is, covert operations conducted by the C.I.A. and JSOC—are not expected to diminish anytime soon. Since May 2nd, there have been more than twenty drone strikes in North and South Waziristan, including one that allegedly killed Ilyas Kashmiri, a top Al Qaeda leader, while he was sipping tea in an apple orchard.

The success of the bin Laden raid has sparked a conversation inside military and intelligence circles: Are there other terrorists worth the risk of another helicopter assault in a Pakistani city? “There are people out there that, if we could find them, we would go after them,” Cartwright told me. He mentioned Ayman al-Zawahiri, the new leader of Al Qaeda, who is believed to be in Pakistan, and Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric in Yemen. Cartwright emphasized that “going after them” didn’t necessarily mean another DEVGRU raid. The special-operations officer spoke more boldly. He believes that a precedent has been set for more unilateral raids in the future. “Folks now realize we can weather it,” he said. The senior adviser to the President said that “penetrating other countries’ sovereign airspace covertly is something that’s always available for the right mission and the right gain.” Brennan told me, “The confidence we have in the capabilities of the U.S. military is, without a doubt, even stronger after this operation.”

On May 6th, Al Qaeda confirmed bin Laden’s death and released a statement congratulating “the Islamic nation” on “the martyrdom of its good son Osama.” The authors promised Americans that “their joy will turn to sorrow and their tears will mix with blood.” That day, President Obama travelled to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where the 160th is based, to meet the DEVGRU unit and the pilots who pulled off the raid. The SEALs, who had returned home from Afghanistan earlier in the week, flew in from Virginia. Biden, Tom Donilon, and a dozen other national-security advisers came along.

McRaven greeted Obama on the tarmac. (They had met at the White House a few days earlier—the President had presented McRaven with a tape measure.) McRaven led the President and his team into a one-story building on the other side of the base. They walked into a windowless room with shabby carpets, fluorescent lights, and three rows of metal folding chairs. McRaven, Brian, the pilots from the 160th, and James took turns briefing the President. They had set up a three-dimensional model of bin Laden’s compound on the floor and, waving a red laser pointer, traced their maneuvers inside. A satellite image of the compound was displayed on a wall, along with a map showing the flight routes into and out of Pakistan. The briefing lasted about thirty-five minutes. Obama wanted to know how Ahmed had kept locals at bay; he also inquired about the fallen Black Hawk and whether above-average temperatures in Abbottabad had contributed to the crash. (The Pentagon is conducting a formal investigation of the accident.)

When James, the squadron commander, spoke, he started by citing all the forward operating bases in eastern Afghanistan that had been named for SEALs killed in combat. “Everything we have done for the last ten years prepared us for this,” he told Obama. The President was “in awe of these guys,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser, who travelled with Obama, said. “It was an extraordinary base visit,” he added. “They knew he had staked his Presidency on this. He knew they staked their lives on it.”

As James talked about the raid, he mentioned Cairo’s role. “There was a dog?” Obama interrupted. James nodded and said that Cairo was in an adjoining room, muzzled, at the request of the Secret Service.

“I want to meet that dog,” Obama said.

“If you want to meet the dog, Mr. President, I advise you to bring treats,” James joked. Obama went over to pet Cairo, but the dog’s muzzle was left on.

Afterward, Obama and his advisers went into a second room, down the hall, where others involved in the raid—including logisticians, crew chiefs, and SEAL alternates—had assembled. Obama presented the team with a Presidential Unit Citation and said, “Our intelligence professionals did some amazing work. I had fifty-fifty confidence that bin Laden was there, but I had one-hundred-per-cent confidence in you guys. You are, literally, the finest small-fighting force that has ever existed in the world.” The raiding team then presented the President with an American flag that had been on board the rescue Chinook. Measuring three feet by five, the flag had been stretched, ironed, and framed. The SEALs and the pilots had signed it on the back; an inscription on the front read, “From the Joint Task Force Operation Neptune’s Spear, 01 May 2011: ‘For God and country. Geronimo.’ ” Obama promised to put the gift “somewhere private and meaningful to me.” Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.

Why My Father Hated India by Aatish Taseer from the Wall Street Journal

2011-07-25T17:31:00.000+05:30

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.
To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.
The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Every day at sunset, Indian and Pakistani guards on the Wagah border face off in a militaristic flag-lowering exercise called the Beating Retreat Ceremony. WSJ's Tom Wright reports on India's effort to tone down the bizarre display.

.Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.
This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.
But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.
In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.
.Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.
Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.
But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.
As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.
The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.
This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.
The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness

Krista and Tatiana Hogan from the New York Times

2011-07-18T18:00:00.000+05:30

It was bedtime for Krista and Tatiana Hogan, and the 4-year-old twin girls were doing what 4-year-olds everywhere do at bedtime. They were stalling, angling for more time awake. Their grandmother, Louise McKay, who lives with the girls and their parents in Vernon, a small city in British Columbia, was speaking to them in soothing tones, but the girls resorted to sleep-deferring classics of the toddler repertory. “I want one more hug!” Krista said to their grandmother, and then a few minutes later, they both called out to her, in unison, “I miss you!”

But in the dim light of their room, a night light casting faint, glowing stars and a moon on the ceiling, the girls also showed bedtime behavior that seemed distinctly theirs. The twins, who sleep in one specially built, oversize crib, lay on their stomachs, their bottoms in the air, looking at an open picture book on the mattress. Slowly and silently, in one synchronized movement, they pushed it under a blanket, then pulled it out again, then back under, over and over, seeming to mesmerize each other with the rhythm.

Suddenly the girls sat up again, with renewed energy, and Krista reached for a cup with a straw in the corner of the crib. “I am drinking really, really, really, really fast,” she announced and started to power-slurp her juice, her face screwed up with the effort. Tatiana was, as always, sitting beside her but not looking at her, and suddenly her eyes went wide. She put her hand right below her sternum, and then she uttered one small word that suggested a world of possibility: “Whoa!”

In any other set of twins, the natural conclusion about the two events — Krista’s drinking, Tatiana’s reaction — would be that they were coincidental: a gulp, a twinge, random simultaneous happenstance. But Krista and Tatiana are not like most other sets of twins. They are connected at their heads, where their skulls merge under a mass of shaggy brown bangs. The girls run and play and go down their backyard slide, but whatever they do, they do together, their heads forever inclined toward each other’s, their neck muscles strong and sinuous from a never-ending workout.

Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.

What actually happens in moments like the one I witnessed is, at this point, theoretical guesswork of the most fascinating order. No controlled studies have been done; because the girls are so young and because of the challenges involved in studying two conjoined heads, all the advanced imaging technology available has not yet been applied to their brains. Brain imaging is inscrutable enough that numerous neuroscientists, after seeing only one image of hundreds, were reluctant to confirm the specific neuro¬anatomy that Cochrane described; but many were inclined to believe, based on that one image, that the brains were most likely connected by a live wire that could allow for some connection of a nature previously unknown. A mere glimpse of that attenuated line between the two brains reduced accomplished neurologists to sputtering incredulities. “OMG!!” Todd Feinberg, a professor of clinical psychiatry and neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, wrote in an e-mail. “Absolutely fantastic. Unbelievable. Unprecedented as far as I know.” A neuroscientist in Kelowna, a city in British Columbia near Vernon, described their case as “ridiculously compelling.” Juliette Hukin, their pediatric neurologist at BC Children’s Hospital, who sees them about once a year, described their brain structure as “mind-blowing.”

An incomparable resource for neuroscientists interested in tracing neural pathways, in the malleability of the brain and in the construction of the self, Tatiana and Krista are also a study in the more expansive neural system of sociology: the feedback loop of how their family responds to difference, how the world outside the walls of their home responds to the family’s response and how the girls respond in turn. For now, for the most part, the girls are not treated as if they were, as one neuroscientist described them, “a new life form.” Although they rarely venture outside their home, they spend most days the way many preschoolers do, chasing after an uncle’s puppy or watching “Dora the Explorer” or testing their grandmother’s considerable patience as they play their private games at bedtime.

“Now I do it,” Tatiana said, reaching for the cup from which her sister was just drinking. She started to chug. Krista’s hand flew to her own stomach. “Whoa!” she said. The girls cracked up. Louise sighed. “Girls,” she said one more time. “It is time to settle down.”

When Felicia Simms found out about the unusual nature of her pregnancy, she was 20 years old with two small children, living on her own in a small apartment and relying on the Canadian welfare system for financial support. She still had an on-again, off-again relationship with the father of her first child, her high-school sweetheart, Brendan Hogan, but they often fought about his drinking and drug use, and he worked only sporadically, in construction or at a meatpacking plant. There are probably no two parents who would feel prepared to cope with such life-altering news, but Simms and Hogan did not have the benefit of significant resources to help them.

The evening after her first prenatal checkup, Simms, who had just learned she was having twins, got a call from her doctor, asking her to come back the next day. Concerned, she brought along her mother, Louise, and a sister-in-law. There was no easy way to say this, the doctor said: the twins were conjoined. The room went silent. Then all three women wept. Simms has little recollection about what was going through her mind at that moment. She was not without a reference point: both Simms and her mother had been fascinated by documentaries about Lori and Reba Schappell, two sharp, functional women who are, at age 49, the oldest living female craniopagus twins in the United States. “I was just trying to process it,” Simms said.

The obstetrician informed her that one of her options was to terminate the pregnancy.“I didn’t even consider it,” Simms said, sitting at the dining-room table of her home in Vernon, a popular ski-resort town set in a region of British Columbia known for its emerald green lake and stunning mountain views. “I think I have a lot more respect for nature than a lot of other people.”

Now 25, Simms is a mother of five children: Rosa, 8; Christopher, 6; Tatiana and Krista; and Shaylee, who is 3, born a year and a half after the twins. They live together with their maternal grandparents, three cousins, an aunt and uncle and Hogan, who moved in with the family last year. When I met them, they resided in a tract house that had been subdivided into many rooms for senior living before the Hogan-McKay clan arrived. The family relies mostly on public assistance. Dinner sometimes seems to make it on the table only by some last-minute stroke of luck or resourcefulness.

Simms has always appreciated what she characterizes as her mother’s easygoing ways. It was Louise who paid for her first facial piercing, at age 12, and who accepted the news easily when she learned her daughter was pregnant three years later. “We were never normal,” Simms says, and “that was O.K.” She thinks that in some ways it was easier for her family to accept the idea of conjoined twins than it might have been for a family that was more conventional. They did not have to reinvent their sense of themselves, the image they presented to the world. “In my house growing up, everything didn’t have to be perfect,” she said. “I never had to be like everybody else, look like everybody else.”

Unless the twins are having a rare health crisis or are being followed by video cameras (the National Geographic Channel showed a documentary about them last year), they are part of the general background din of the house and a far less dominant issue than the pressing financial concerns. The adults of the family tend to congregate around the long dining-room table, where the girls’ grandmother runs both a delivery business and the household — directing drivers, calling out to the twins to stop teasing their little sister and planning dinner for everyone.

Simms has the same coloring and smoky eye makeup of the actress Kristen Stewart, and the movie “Twilight” plays in heavy rotation at their home. A fascination with the supernatural seemed to inform even how she thought about her unusual pregnancy. “A month before they were born, I had a dream of them being born that was completely the way it happened,” Simms said, sitting at the dining-room table. “I heard them crying in my dream just like they cried when they were born. I just knew they were going to be fine.”

By the time she delivered, the doctors were preparing her for the worst; social workers met with her about grief counseling. But Simms’s intuition was right: the twins were born healthy at 34 weeks, miraculously stable and in need of no major interventions. The girls stayed under observation at the hospital for two months, and soon Simms and Hogan faced another major decision — whether or not to separate them.

Cochrane, their neurosurgeon, consulted with other surgeons who have separated conjoined craniopagus twins, and the team concluded, based on their experience with that kind of surgery and their analysis of the CT scans, that separation would be extremely high risk.

“You’d have to have cut through too much normal tissue and split the thalami,” said James T. Goodrich, director of pediatric neuro¬surgery for Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx who was consulted on the case. “It would have potentially been lethal.”

Goodrich knows from experience how unpredictable and potentially dangerous any separation of craniopagus twins is likely to be. Beginning in 2003, he performed a series of operations to separate Clarence and Carl Aguirre, craniopagus conjoined twins who were 18 months old during the first operation. Although Goodrich proclaimed their futures bright at the time of the separation, and one of the two boys is indeed thriving, his brother eventually developed debilitating seizures; the boy, now 9, takes medication that impairs his alertness and cognition.

In the case of the Aguirre brothers, neither boy would likely have survived without the surgery, because the layout of their vascular systems put too much pressure on Clarence’s heart. In the case of Tatiana and Krista, however, Goodrich said, “Mother Nature, or whoever their God is, did not give them the other issues that are the problem with these kids — cardiac failure.” Although Tatiana does bear more of the burden of pumping blood for their two bodies, the vascular system is symmetrical enough that the doctors consider them relatively healthy. (Given the risks, the family opted not to separate the girls.)

From the very beginning, doctors wondered if the twins shared sensation; an early video shows one girl being pricked for a blood test as the other starts to cry, her face a perfect mirror image of her sister’s. A pacifier in one mouth seemed to soothe both crying babies.

Despite the interest of the scientific community, the girls, because of their age, have not experienced extensive investigation. “If one of them needs it for their health, by all means, they can do what they need to do,” said their step-grandfather, Doug McKay, who, like their grandmother, is very involved in the girls’ care. “But I’ll be damned if you’re going to poke and prod and experiment on them.”

Cochrane gives the family credit for being “able to play the hand they’ve been dealt . . . and to recognize that these kids are growing and developing. And that they’re not that different from normal kids.”

‘I have two pieces of paper,” Krista announced. The girls sat at a small table in the living room, drawing, their faces, as always, angled away from each other. Each had one piece of paper. So I was surprised by Krista’s certainty: She had two pieces of paper? “Yeah,” the girls affirmed in their frequent singsong unison, nodding together. It was one of those moments that a neurologist or psychologist or any curious observer could spend hours contemplating. Was Krista using “I” to refer to both her and her sister? Is Tatiana agreeing with her sister’s assessment at a cognitive level or uttering the same word simultaneously for reasons unknown to her?

Although the girls can run, play peekaboo, engage in finger play shoot’em-ups for 20-minute marathons and covet their older sister’s Zhu Zhu pets, they are both also developmentally delayed by about one year. Their delays do not surprise their doctors, given their unusual brains and the fact that the girls have been forced to develop skills other children have not.

A crayon drops to the floor, and I move to pick it up, imagining how laborious it would be for them to move away from the table as one, with Tatiana leaning awkwardly to allow her sister to crouch to the ground. When I reach for it, however, the crayon is not there. It is already in Krista’s hand, as if by magic. “My foot do it!” she tells me. Neither girl could draw the letter X, but if there were a standardized test for grasping with toes, the Hogan twins would surely come up in the 99th percentile.

The girls’ brains are so unusually formed that doctors could not predict what their development would be like: each girl has an unusually short corpus callosum, the neural band that allows the brain’s two cerebral hemispheres to communicate, and in each girl, the two cerebral hemispheres also differ in size, with Tatiana’s left sphere and Krista’s right significantly smaller than is typical. “The asymmetry raises intriguing questions about whether one can compensate for the other because of the brain bridge,” said Partha Mitra, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who studies brain architecture. The girls’ cognition may also be facing specific challenges that no others have experienced: some kind of confusing crosstalk that would require additional energy to filter and process. In addition to sorting out the usual sensory experiences of the world, the girls’ brains, their doctors believe, have been forced to adapt to sensations originating with the organs and body parts of someone else.

As fantastic as it sounds, there is little doubt in Cochrane’s mind that the girls share some sensory impressions. When they were 2 years old, he performed a study in which Krista’s eyes were covered and electrodes were glued to her scalp. While a strobe light flashed in Tatiana’s eyes, Krista was emitting a strong electric response from the occipital lobe, which is where images are assembled. The test also worked when the girls switched roles. The results were not published, and some neuroscientists believe that this kind of test, which measures changes in brain activity beneath the skull, is imprecise in determining what region of the brain is at play; but most would agree that any response in the other twin’s brain suggests, at a minimum, connectivity.

The explanation Cochrane proposes is surprisingly straightforward for so unusual an outcome: that visual input comes in through the retinas of one girl, reaches her thalamus, then takes two different courses, like electricity traveling along a wire that splits in two. In the girl who is looking at the strobe or a stuffed animal in her crib, the visual input continues on its usual pathways, one of which ends up in the visual cortex. In the case of the other girl, the visual stimulus would reach her thalamus via the thalamic bridge, and then travel up her own visual neural circuitry, ending up in the sophisticated processing centers of her own visual cortex. Now she has seen it, probably milliseconds after her sister has.

The results of the test did not surprise the family, who had long suspected that even when one girl’s vision was angled away from the television, she was laughing at the images flashing in front of her sister’s eyes. The sensory exchange, they believe, extends to the girls’ taste buds: Krista likes ketchup, and Tatiana does not, something the family discovered when Tatiana tried to scrape the condiment off her own tongue, even when she was not eating it.

Even knowing about the tests and what Cochrane believed, I listened to the family’s stories with some amount of skepticism. Perhaps they were imagining it or exaggerating for the sake of a good story. Then in one of the many idle moments of the five days I spent with the family, the girls were watching television, and I absent-mindedly gave Tatiana’s foot, which Krista could not see, a little tickle. She turned to me and smiled, and then Krista spoke: “Now do me,” she said. Had she felt the sensation but wanted the emotional experience of knowing that she, too, was receiving that kind of playful attention?

On another day, Simms picked up a thermometer that had been left on the kitchen table and, just for fun, placed it in Krista’s mouth. Almost immediately, Tatiana got a distant look in her eyes. “Not in mouth,” she said, sounding angry. Then she was quiet, and her focus seemed to tack hard. Her tongue, visible in her half-open mouth, was moving in an unusual way, curling. I wondered if I was imagining something. But Rosa, her 8-year-old sister, noticed it, too.

“Isn’t that weird?” she said, her own blue-green eyes wide. “Did you see? The way her tongue was curled? It was in Krista’s mouth, but Tatty’s tongue was doing that.”

Rosa paused for a moment, thinking about the imaginary thermometer, then changed the subject to tell me about the part she had in a school show, playing “the nerd sheep.” Just once, could a visitor’s attention be directed at her own extraordinary role in the world?

At first, the sight of their younger sister, Shaylee, walking freely past the girls, struck me as painful, a constant reminder of their own constraints, her liberty a moment-by-moment assertion of superiority. But over time, my sympathies switched: the twins’ unity was so strong I wondered if Shaylee felt she was somehow missing an essential part of herself. When the girls wanted to wash their hands in the sink, they worked as one, silently, to drag the bench over to the bathroom. More often than not, they both seemed to want to slither like snakes at the same moment, to roll a ball down a ramp to the television room, to drift toward the electric piano. But acceptance, rather than mutual desire, might be at play: the family often reminds them they have no choice but to compromise, and Simms believes they have a private logic for determining whose turn it is to decide their whereabouts.

In the Hogan-McKay family, the fantasy of twinship, of a loving double, runs strong. Simms insists that her daughter Shaylee is her perfect replica, identical in face and temperament — she calls her “my mini-me.” The girls’ older sister, the tiny, round-faced Rosa, told me that she and her cousin Shyann, who lives with her, “are like twins” — despite the fact that Shyann is much taller and a year older. And Christopher, a winsome 6-year-old with a Mohawk that matches his father’s, has been told that he had a twin who died in the womb. The remnants of the twin, the doctors told his mother, were absorbed into his body, leaving only an unusual hairy patch on his back that still remains, the soft fuzzy shadow of a life that might have been. “If I don’t feel like being me, I can switch to how my twin feels,” Christopher told me once, as he was playing a video game. “And if I’m mad, I can switch to how my twin feels. Then I can switch back to being me.”

Tatiana and Krista represent even more of a unity than the closest identical twins, and in a house where everyone’s attention is divided, the girls always have each other. Simms is the first to acknowledge that her relationship with the twins is different from those she has with her other children. “Rosa was my firstborn, so that’s always special,” she said, “and Christopher’s the only boy. And Shaylee, she’s my baby.” The twins, she says, are really “Nana’s girls,” partly because they bonded with their grandmother when Simms was going through her difficult pregnancy with Shaylee. If some other, more painful distinction is at play — a rejection of their difference or a sense of burden — that response is not apparent.

Though they frequently move in near synchrony, mirroring each other’s gestures, the girls clearly have different personalities. Simms says Tatiana is more lighthearted, that Krista is “more of the bully” — that she is moved to scratch or hit Tatiana in frustration more often than the reverse. And they look remarkably different, although they are thought to be identical. Tatiana’s heart and kidneys do more of the work for their bodies than Krista’s do, so she is smaller than her sister, frailer, diminutive like her fairy namesake; Krista has the round belly and cheeks of many a preschooler. Krista has a small dot of a red birthmark on her chest; Tatiana does not. Krista is allergic to canned corn; Tatiana is not. Even twinship, shared daily experiences and possibly shared sensory experiences do not render them one and the same.

When the girls were younger, they used to try to pull their heads away from each other, Simms told me. “And I would say to them, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” she said. “I just told them: ‘You girls are stuck. You’re stuck together.’ ” Sometimes the girls would offer up that information themselves. “I am stuck,” Krista told me one afternoon, pausing as she and her sister made their way back to the bathroom, where they wanted to play with the faucets. She tapped the portion of the head that she shares with her sister. And does she like being stuck? “I love I am stuck,” she said. She smiled. She had the dreamy look of someone romantically infatuated. “I love my lovely sissy,” she said. Later that day, Tatiana announced the same thing, but she sounded more distressed, confused: “I am stuck,” she said, a querulous look on her face. She was a girl sending a message in a bottle, or from a bottle, searching for some answer to the essential question of her mysterious, still-forming mind.

Later in the week, Simms was getting Tatiana and Krista dressed for a five-hour van ride on treacherous roads in the snow to Vancouver, where the girls had a series of doctors’ appointments. This time there was no fighting over the two different sweatshirts. On the rare occasions when the girls do fight, it’s painful to watch: they reach their fingers into each other’s mouths and eyes, scratching, slapping, hands simultaneously flying to their own cheeks to soothe the pain.

That morning, even though Krista grabbed initially at the pink hooded sweatshirt, she ceded it easily to Tatiana, and Krista settled for the gray. “I am in gray,” she said. “And I am in pink,” Tatiana said. Something about the clear distinction may have rung some bell in Krista’s mind. She looked at her mother. “I am just me,” she said. The sentiment — assertive and profound — was hardly out of her mouth before her sister echoed her. “I am just me,” Tatiana said.

The girls surely have a complicated conception of what they mean by “me.” If one girl sees an object with her eyes and the other sees it via that thalamic link, are they having a shared experience? If the two girls are unique individuals, then each girl’s experience of that stimulus would inevitably be different; they would be having a parallel experience, but not one they experienced in some kind of commingling of consciousness. But do they think of themselves as one when they speak in unison, as they often do, if only in short phrases? When their voices joined together, I sometimes felt a shift — to me, they became one complicated being who happened to have two sets of vocal cords, no less plausible a concept than each of us having two eyes. Then, just as quickly, the girls’ distinct minds would make their respective presences felt: Tatiana smiled at me while her sister fixated on the television, or Krista alone responded with a “Yeah?” to the call of her name.

Although each girl often used “I” when she spoke, I never heard either say “we,” for all their collaboration. It was as if even they seemed confused by how to think of themselves, with the right language perhaps eluding them at this stage of development, under these unusual circumstances — or maybe not existing at all. “It’s like they are one and two people at the same time,” said Feinberg, the professor of psychiatry and neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. What pronoun captures that?

The average person tends to fall back on the Enlightenment notion of the self — one mind, with privacy of thought and sensory experience — as a key characteristic of identity. That very impermeability is part of what makes the concept of the mind so challenging to researchers studying how it works, the neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio Damasio says in his book, “Self Comes to Mind.” “The fact that no one sees the minds of others, conscious or not, is especially mysterious,” he writes. We may be capable of guessing what others think, “but we cannot observe their minds, and only we ourselves can observe ours, from the inside, and through a rather narrow window.”

And yet here are two girls who can possibly — humbly, daily — feel what the other feels. Even that extraordinary dynamic would still put the girls on the continuum of connectivity that exists between ordinary humans. Some researchers believe that when we observe another person feeling, say, the prick of a pin, our neurons fire in a way that directly mimics the neurons firing in the person whom the pin actually pricks. So-called mirror neurons are thought to foster empathy, creating connections of which we are hardly aware but that bind us in some kind of mutual understanding at a neurological level.

Could the girls’ connection go beyond sensory impressions to higher thoughts, thoughts as simple as “I want water” or as complex as “I’m tired of ‘Good Night Moon’ ”? The family says that the girls often get up silently and suddenly and walk over to, say, a sippy cup, which Tatiana then immediately hands to Krista, who drinks from it. I did not witness any such incident; but if it happens as described, does one girl silently express her thirst to the other in the form of a higher thought? Does Tatiana somehow experience, instead, her sister’s basic sensation of thirst, but recognize it as originating elsewhere? Is the request whispered, inaudible or incomprehensible to anyone but the sister who is so closely linked?

The story of the girls drinking juice in the crib — one girl seeming to feel the other gulp — particularly intrigued Feinberg. “ ‘I felt Tatiana drink that,’ ” he said, musing on the idea of it. “Now, how crazy is that? I mean, seriously! This is beyond empathy — it’s like a metasensory experience. It’s like she has one consciousness and can witness another’s.”

As profound as it is to consider that each may witness the other’s consciousness, equally striking is their ability to maintain their individuality. In his book, “Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self,” Feinberg describes patients with various split-brain syndromes, cases in which the corpus callosum, the part of the brain that serves as a bridge connecting one hemisphere to the other, is severed. In one manifestation, a patient might find that one of his hands is at odds, or all-out war, with the other. The unruly hand might throw a spoon or tear up money — actions that do not originate with any desire of which the patient is aware. Yet aside from the alien hand, the patient still feels essentially like himself: such patients “act, feel and experience themselves as intact,” Feinberg writes. Feinberg says the brain labors to create a unity of experience, knitting together our partial selves via numerous cortical mechanisms into a unified whole, into a sense of self, a consistent feeling of individuality and agency.

That the girls each have clear distinction, despite what he considers to be the likely leakage of sensory impressions, was telling to Feinberg. “With the split brain, you essentially cut the brain in half, yet the person feels and acts as a whole,” Feinberg said. “In these girls, they’re linked, yet each acts as a whole. It’s like a force of nature — the brain wants to unify.”

To the family, questions about whether the girls are two or one are so absurd as to be insulting. They are “two normal little girls who happen to go through life sharing a bubble,” Simms said. The family sees their unusual neural connections as something “neat,” as Louise, the grandmother, puts it, providing fascinating moments they notice but hardly lie awake at night contemplating. Of far greater concern to them is the girls’ physical health. “Every day when I wake up and they’re still alive — that’s a good day,” Simms told me.

The trip to Vancouver for medical checkups in January was reassuring in most regards. Their cardiologist was pleased to report that Tatiana’s heart seemed better able to handle her disproportionate burden of blood pumping. Their ophthalmologist was less sanguine. The girls have significant eye problems; to strengthen their vision, they need to wear eye patches and glasses but at the time of the appointment had not been doing so daily. The doctor warned the family with some gravity that the girls each risk becoming legally blind in one eye.

In some ways, the girls have clearly benefited from the family’s relaxed approach to child rearing: no one coddles them, and the girls are happy, affectionate and confident. But the ophthalmologist was concerned that not enough attention was being paid to some details of their care, and the dentist had similar concerns. Tatiana’s teeth are in such bad shape that she is scheduled for surgery this summer.

When the girls were younger, each experienced several seizures, which medication has since controlled. At an appointment with Hukin, their neurologist, she asked if they had any episodes recently (they had not, in more than a year), then performed a few quick tests. She put a red crayon in front of Tatiana, a purple one in front of Krista, then asked them to name the color. “Blue,” Tatiana said. “Red,” Krista said. Did they simply not know their colors? “They’re switching them,” their grandmother said; Hukin agreed it was a possibility. Hukin pulled a stuffed animal out of a bag, a turkey, and handed it to Tatiana on her right side, so that Krista could not see. “Krista, do you know what Tatiana has in her hand?” she asked. Krista paused. “Robin?”

Hukin, at the time, said nothing more than “very good.” But she considered this close-enough answer extraordinary, she later told me, and took it as clinical support for the sensory connection that Cochrane’s EEG tests had revealed.

Over the course of the days I spent with them, I witnessed the girls do seemingly remarkable things: say the precise name of the toy that could only be seen through the eyes of her sister or point precisely, without looking, to the spot on her sister’s body where she was being touched. But other times, the theoretical connection seemed to fail them. The family believes that making the effort to “tune in” sometimes tires them out. It’s possible that they are developing in such a way that their brains are trying hard to filter out input that originates from the other girl’s body.

David Carmel, a cognitive neuroscientist at New York University, suggested that even when the girls deliver right answers, the phenomenon could be explained by something other than a neural bridge. “If they’re really close, through minute movements that one makes — maybe a typical movement her sister cannot see, but can feel — the other sister intuits the association. Maybe she associates her sister’s reaction with a robin they once liked, not a turkey.” The connection then might be scientifically mundane, but a marvel nonetheless to the casual observer.

For the girls, Vancouver represents the outside world: they go to the hospital, they run around a McDonald’s at the mall. They are beloved at the hotel where they normally stay — their “hotel home” they call it — and bring bathing suits so they can float in the pool. On this trip, they ran up and down the hallways of the hotel, their high, sweet voices ringing out, giggling and giddy with liberation. Guests might have looked for a half-second longer than they ordinarily would, but they invariably smiled at the sight of the girls’ evident glee, just as they would at any other two small children.

The second evening they were there, a man in the hotel bar came out to the lobby to talk to them — he was a twin himself, he said, and had to meet them. He and his colleague smiled at the girls, asked them some questions, pronounced them adorable and returned to their waiting drinks inside the bar. But when the girls ran by the bar again an hour later, the same man came out with tears in his eyes. He had obviously been thinking about them and their family and his own. The year before, he said, he had lost his adult son to suicide. “So tell the mother they are blessed,” he said.

The message, relayed to Simms in the hotel restaurant, where the family was dining, did not particularly faze her: people often share their family tragedies with her. Simms understands the impulse, but feels they are trying to empathize with someone whose feelings they do not actually understand. “They feel sorry for us,” Doug McKay, the girls’ step-grandfather, said. “But we feel like we got chosen out of millions of people to be their parents. That’s better than the lottery.”

As I watched the girls negotiate their occasionally conflicting impulses at dinner, I thought of how my friend Peter Freed, a neuroimager and assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia, explained their possible experience of each other: “It’s as though the secretaries of Goldman Sachs and Lazard Frères have decided, without their bosses’ permission, to share certain visitors and executive memos with each other.” The executives in charge — the parts of the brain more directly involved in decision-making — would inevitably become frustrated. Every time that executive next door makes a decision, the results are “subtly influencing or altering the information the other has to work with,” says Freed, who also writes a blog called Neuroself about the construction of the self in the brain.

The frustration of one executive was on full display as the evening wore on. The girls were tired. It was late for them. Someone ordered them chicken fingers, and Krista took a bite. Suddenly, Tatiana made a face. “It’s too yucky,” she said, starting to cry. The mayhem level went up a notch, and Tatiana crawled under the table, wailing, as Krista was trying to pull her back up by the force of her neck. Krista tried to put the chicken finger directly into Tatiana’s mouth. “Krista likes it!” she said. “It’s yummy!” Tatiana spit the food out, crying: “Let me hide! Let me hide!” She covered her mouth with her hand. “Don’t make her eat it, sweetie,” said their grandmother, as Doug sighed in frustration. “Sissy eat it!” Krista said again, trying to push it in Tatiana’s mouth. Krista started pulling her sister’s hair, and then both girls were crying. Tatiana’s futile declaration rose above the sounds of the restaurant. “I am getting out of here!” Tatiana sobbed. “Let me alone.”

As would be true of any other two sisters, the girls’ relationship to each other and to their unusual connection is unpredictable. Their union could prove, as their grandmother predicts, a model of boundless, blissful empathy. The girls will show the world “true love,” she once said, tearing up. But their lives could also entail a barrage of confused impressions, with each girl having just enough of a sense of self to resent the intrusions of the other’s. Over time, would the girls increasingly tune out each other’s perceptions, with some kind of neural pruning doing the work that surgery could not? Or would some complicated, constant interplay of sensory input and response further fuse their personalities, rendering them ever more like one? Would they have any say in the matter?

Only one set of conjoined twins has ever made the adult choice to be separated, according to “One of Us,” a book by Alice Dreger that traces the history of cultural responses to conjoined twins. Ladan and Laleh Bijani were craniopagus twins who grew up in Iran. When they were 29, they were so desperate to live apart that they decided to take the 50-50 odds that they were given of surviving a separation. In 2003, in the hands of highly regarded surgeons in Singapore, they died after surgery. Despite the countless high-tech brain images they had produced, the surgeons were caught unaware by a major vein the women shared. They thought they had seen inside; but what they learned, tragically, was how little they knew about the union after all.

Tatiana and Krista will start kindergarten in the fall, their first major foray into the outside world. And their lives may soon change even more significantly if Chuck Harris, a talent manager who also manages the Schappells, has his way. Harris has been helping the family pursue a reality television show, not just about the girls (a detail upon which he insists) but also about the range of strong personalities living together in their small home. The decision to expose the girls to the gawkery of the American public is less fraught for the family than you might think — partly for financial reasons, but also because the girls are unlikely to have a normal childhood under any circumstances. The constant exposure, in some ways, would actually normalize them for the public, show them as they are, not as the people who pass them in malls perceive them.

The girls are used to showing off their tricks (so much so that at one point, Krista put her hand on my eyes and asked me to tell her what she was seeing). And they are infinitely proud of the small things they can do that were twice as challenging for them to learn as for someone who moves independently. They like to show how they can jump up and down, which they do like any other children, or climb into their crib, which they do like self-taught gymnasts.

The twins are most moving, however, when they are least aware of how profoundly different they are. One evening, shortly before the girls went to bed, I reached out and touched the tiny birthmark below Krista’s shoulder. “Don’t touch my pen mark,” Krista said. She touched the small dot of red and stroked it with her finger. Her sister, who has no birthmark there, stroked the same spot on her own body, in just the same way, drawing a line downward. She wore the same injured facial expression as her sister.

It seemed to me that at bedtime, the two girls were more like one than when they first arose, as if the labors of the day steadily eroded whatever barriers separated them. Sometimes Krista, the physically stronger of the two, seemed to morph before my eyes, no longer one of two, but instead, a sturdy girl carrying around an elaborate appendage she considered part of herself. Perhaps, in submitting, Tatiana felt a kind of relief, the kind we all feel when we cede control to someone we trust. But I also felt a sense of loss — where was Tatiana in all her totality in those moments?

The night I watched them doze off, both girls faced the bed, and then Tatiana started climbing up its side with her feet, using Krista as a kind of bracing post. From there, Krista jumped up to join her sister the usual way. Once their grandmother quieted the girls down in their oversize crib, they finally lay down on their backs. Each girl put an inner hand in her mouth, with four bent fingers, then let it fall back to her side. Each held a doll in her outer hand, threw it over her face and then pulled it away. They sighed simultaneously. Soon Krista was asleep; an instant later Tatiana was as well. They had both flung their inside arms up and over their own eyes, so that they were mirror images of each other at rest. Then Tatiana alone moved her arm away, and the girls drifted off for the night, to dream, together or apart, their secret dreams.

Beware!

2011-07-16T00:38:00.000+05:30

Penis cutting and cutters are in the news again ...

Take precautions men!

Also, if you thought your nice dog will sooner starve than eat your dead body (if you happen to die in your home and no one is around except the dog), well, think again.

Last Words: Rebecca Watson and Richard Dawkins

2011-07-15T16:48:00.001+05:30

Here’s the substance and sequence of events as I see it.

• Rebecca Watson had an elevator encounter that she felt uncomfortable with. She talked about it on her blog. She has every right to do so.

• PZ Myers picked it up on his blog. Thus far, this is like a conversation about dating techniques.

• Dawkins decides to get into this debate. He equates Watson’s experience with the great amount of suffering that women face in various countries including threats to their lives. Dawkins trivializes Watson’s experience as ‘zero-bad.’

• On the face of it, it seems like these are two distinct and unrelated issues and there’s no reason for anyone to compare these two experiences. Or is it?

• One is aware of problems such as date rape and various forms of sexual crimes which take place on campuses. Problems that are unique to the so-called advanced nations. Backward nations meanwhile are faced with the age-old issues: everything from killing female fetuses to killing female infants to injustices to young females to forced marriages to dowry harassment to death punishment for adultery, etc. I have clearly left out other forms of cruelty.

• Could it be that there’s something common in the male mindset which enables males to commit the first set of crimes in the rich countries and the second set of crimes in the poorer countries? It seems there’s after all some thread which links these two sets of crimes.

• So, Rebecca Watson’s encounter can be placed in the broader spectrum of persistent male mindsets. And then we can all conclusively agree that the elevator guy was egregiously in error. There’s after all a continuum from innocent offers of coffee to a situation where an acceptance of such an offer is construed to be an invitation to have sex. And when the female later makes it clear that the two matters are distinct, that often leads to misunderstanding, violence, and possibly rape.

• Dawkins erred in looking at it as an isolated incident and ignoring the historical baggage.

Privilege and other thoughts -- Rebecca Watson and Richard Dawkins on my mind

2011-07-12T07:44:00.001+05:30

When household robots are around in the future, I wonder how they will be designed.

Suppose, you want to have water. You can get it on your own.

Suppose you are busy and want someone else to bring it for you. You would request someone in your family to bring it -- Johnny, can you get me a glass of water, please?

You will not say -- hey, fucker, why don't you move your ass and get me some freaking water?

I would imagine Johnny won't be so pleased (and worse if it was your wife that you were addressing and not Johnny) if you adopted the second tone.

Now imagine you have that household robot. Would the robot be designed to respond the same way no matter how politely or impolitely you asked it for water? Or, may be, Hitachi or Honda will program it in such a manner that if you ask it for water in an impolite manner, it will coolly bring the water (hot) and splash it on your face.

Just a thought.

How do you prioritize your responses to these three problems:

children having to work thus losing their childhood,
young people defying various caste restrictions and getting married ... and then villagers decide to kill them and the couples get killed, and
women getting molested in crowded buses.

I wonder if I am privileged. I do not sleep on pavements or sidewalks at night. So many Indians in Mumbai and Delhi and elsewhere do. Clearly, I am privileged.

But I do not casually use a car or take a plane like the average American does. I am not privileged by American standards.

Are we clinically objective observers without any bias whatsoever who are able to give their opinions about events without any influence of their own life experience?

I am far from certain. I do not think I am such an impartial and objective observer. I do not think anyone is.

Which perhaps explains many things. Humans are capable of incredible cruelty as exemplified by the world wars and various riots in India and massacres elsewhere.

In a more narrow example, the reactions of people about the elevator incident involving Rebbecca Watson illustrates this point.

Rebbecca Watson had an incident inside an elevator which she did not like and she mentioned it on her blog.

Dawkins pointed out that this was a trivial matter compared to other great atrocities being faced by women elsewhere. Surely, everyone is aware of, for example, how people can be stoned to death in Taliban country.

Surely, feeling uncomfortable with a strange man in a confined space such as an elevator is trivial compared to great tragedies which are happening daily. It's a no-brainer. Everyone should realize this automatically and if anyone stresses this by pointing it out, he should not be branded a traitor, prick, misogynist, MCP, etc.

But we see exactly that happening. There's this great raging debate. It occurs to me that if people had a purely objective way of looking at the world, then, if people are capable of so much outrage over the elevator incident, then there would have been endless protests (may be even indefinite fasts, which has come back into fashion in India right now), about the stoning to death of people or the killing of couples in inter-caste marriages in Haryana.

But we do not see that happening. What gives?

The explanation is simple. The online community that is participating in the Watson vs. Dawkins debate so vigorously is immediately able to relate to the elevator incident but is quite alien to the tortures suffered by women under the Taliban.

It's a good thing that the Taliban is an exception in the 21st century and not the rule. So, much of the world finds the goings-on there to be difficult to relate to.

Then there's the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia. Clearly, women in Western countries can relate to that. But there's not the slightest danger of Western women themselves being deprived of their right to drive. If such a possibility were to be suggested, I am sure we would see such a protest as we have never seen in the history of the world.

Similarly, women in developed nations and the sliver of people in India who are well-educated face no danger whatsoever of living under Taliban rule. So, it's difficult for them to contemplate the horrors being inflicted on millions of women.

On the other hand, women do travel in congested buses. Women do use elevators and parking garages. Women do work in offices.

So, elevator etiquette has quite a lot of relevance for women. And so on.

Was Dawkins being absolutely fair and objective in pointing out that what Watson went through was trivial compared to the far worse sufferings of other women? Or was he showing his privileged position? Well, what about Rebbecca Watson? Is she not privileged as well compared to Saudi and Afghan women?

Rebecca Watson vs. Richard Dawkins

2011-07-11T21:50:00.001+05:30

I think 90 percent of males will side with Dawkins in this. And 90 percent females will agree with Rebecca. That seems to be just the nature of this particular debate.

This incident has sort of exposed some sort of a seismic fault-line in how males and females look at certain events.

To summarize the events as far as I know:

1) Rebecca had an awkward experience in an elevator and shared it with the world. She advised men that this is not how one should go about this.

I am wondering if Rebecca is a relationship expert or does she proffer relationship advice on her blog?

But since it's her blog, she is free to share her personal experiences.

2) Now Dawkins picks up Rebbeca's anecdote and belittles it. Clearly, he burnt his finger in doing so.

Dawkins' take on Rebecca's experience is interpreted by males and females. This is where all sorts of complexities enter into the picture.

When females talk about Rebecca's experience, they are also speaking from some personal experience of a similar nature. In the Western countries, well, I won't know too much about the problems faced by women growing up in those nations.

Indian women tend to have experience of some sort of unwelcome advances ... someone making comments or someone trying to take advantage of the situation in a crowded bus or something.

When females are commenting on this issue, their perspective is inevitably colored by their life experience.

Males bring their own life experience while looking at this issue. I don't know much about the struggles that Western men have to go through.

As far as Indian males, I could think of my own minor struggles. Some illiterate driver on the road honking the horn needlessly or someone playing the bully in a queue. While these events rankle us, we tend to try and forget them and move on.

I think males will look upon Rebecca's experience from that experience and find it essentially trivial.

Essentially, females are consciously or unconsciously extrapolating Rebecca's experience and saying that IT COULD HAVE BEEN MUCH WORSE.

And males are not making that extrapolation.

3) Then Dawkins gives his reaction and compares the incident to someone chewing gum in his vicinity. Women find this to be belittling.

May be, Dawkins could have made more of an effort and browsed him memory and thought of some incident where religious hecklers heckled him or some similar experience.

I think there's very little that Dawkins could have done that would mollify those who find it offensive in the first place that Dawkins compared her experience to that of others.

I am struck by how Rebecca has thought it fit to make an issue of a personal event. As Dawkins says, the incident itself was 'zero-bad.' It may have had the potential to be bad, for sure, but as it happened, the potential was not actually realized.

And now Rebecca finds herself as the latest lightning rod or fulcrum or a new Salman Rushdie with a fatwa on the head.

Over many years and decades, Dawkins has contributed to science, biology, and the debate about religion and god. I do not recall many instances where he made himself the center of these discussions.

I do not think that he has not been at the receiving end over all these years of various unpalatable things: perhaps a hate mail or a thousand of them, threats of physical violence against him, etc.

The same applies to Hitchens or Harris or PZ Myers.

Greta Christina contributes to the debate with her writings and incisive criticisms. I am sure she must have faced personal attacks as well.

Will Rebecca contribute to the debate with great writing or by recounting personal anecdotes.

Personally, I am perhaps not so much a misogynist as a misanthropist. I have been accurately described as such by friends who know me.

:)

My experience has been of helping females and then getting my own fingers burnt. My experience has been of female colleagues who complain that the AC was not working in the cab and a bunch of similar complaints. My experience has been of a female driver who turns the car left without looking thereby trying to push me off the road. I joke about it. I see horrible male drivers and realize that there is need for more traffic sense. I see males making jokes about their female colleagues behind their backs and I realize that there is lack of civilization.

I find shrillness unattractive.

Ultimate Bucket List

2011-07-09T03:56:00.000+05:30

Have one billion babies.
Travel 5 billion light years in every direction starting from Earth. But if you have seen one galaxy, you've seen 'em all.
Become a cheetah, an elephant, and a snake in my reincarnations ... oops, that will require me to die first. But anyway.
Touch the sun and burn my fingers ... oops, it's HOT!
Launch the space shuttle to the Moon with my bare hands ... remember how you launched those paper airplanes as a kid?
Dip my finger gingerly into a black hole ... oops, my finger tip just vanished!
Live to be one billion years old.

Mayawati as Prime Minister

2011-06-02T17:25:00.001+05:30

I think Mayawati is in many ways the likeliest person to become India's next Prime Minister. I see a fractious mandate being provided by the electorate in the next general election. I expect the regional leaders such as Jayalalitha and Mamta (not to mention Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, and Omar Farooq) to do well.

I am sure the ladies would love to support a female from the grassroots for the post of Prime Minster. It will be up to the big parties such as Congress and BJP to recognize people's mandate for what it is and perhaps choose to support a coalition of smaller parties at the center from outside.

This will of course reflect the reality of India's diversity where each state will have an individual voice in the running of the entire nation: a truly federal structure.

Mayawati has successfully Uttar Pradesh, one of the most complex Indian states. With this experience, she has shown that she is capable of engaging in the kind of deal-making that is essential to running India.

Let's remember that India is a democracy and not a meritocracy. If inexperienced Obama can get a shot at the U.S. Presidency because of his singular talent of oratory and Sarah Palin can dream of becoming President as well, Mayawati is surely entitled to having a shot at the top job in India. Considering the present occupant of the post, I won 't consider that a disgrace of any sort whatsoever to the office of the PM.

The Challenge of Being Learned in the Modern Age

2011-06-02T17:17:00.000+05:30

Clearly, this is a problem without a solution. We live in a world where knowledge is being created at an ever growing and ever increasing pace. In literature, there are the classics that are must reads. Then, there are modern masters who have written perceptively about recent times. Then there are the contemporary writers -- the ongoing literary endeavor to capture the human condition and place it within the context of the 21st century. One needs to read all of this. There's history. And science. Biographies and auto-biographies. At least, some of them must be read. So, how does one find the time to read them all.

For those involved in scientific work, the pace of change is even more nausea-inducing. Admittedly, different branches of Physics, for example, are at different stages. The Standard Model and Supersymmertry and String Theory have been the cutting edge in our understanding of particles and forces for a few decades now. However, observational astronomy is perhaps going through a golden age with astonishingly capable space-based observatories looking at and mapping the universe across the breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum. And the observations have certainly created challenges for astrophysicists to solve.

Electronics is going through revolutions in further miniaturization. Nanotechnology offers glimpses of truly astonishing machines and possibilities. The envelope is being extended everyday. Nobody who works in this field can afford to stand still for then he will fall behind as others move forward.

Biology is in its golden age too. Our understanding of genomes and biochemistry acquired in the 20th century will lead to astonishing, staggering possibilities in the 21st century.

When the capabilities and complexities of man-made computers will approach that of the human brain in the next 20 years, we will have arrived at a truly gigantic inflexion point in our technological history. It might then be possible to reduce all of human biology including human emotions to mere information processing. Immortality will be within easy grasp.

But mastering all this new found knowledge involves an astounding amount of learning for the scientists. Is the human brain capable of absorbing ever-increasing amounts of information?

To put things simply, if information keeps growing such that to be a cutting edge researcher, one has to absorb the knowledge contained in 100 PhD theses or generate 5 PhD theses of his own, would the human brain be able to keep up?

Do Advanced Civilizations Self-Destruct?

2011-06-02T17:04:00.000+05:30

I think it's quite possible or likely. With reference to our own civilization, I think of the near future, say a hundred years from now. I think we'll master the technology of nuclear fusion. There's no greater panacea for all our energy needs than fusion. So, we'll be tempted to build that ultimate fusion reactor, the ultimate power source that'll power an entire continent.

These reactors will of course generate enormous amounts of power. The major challenge lies in how to tame this suddenly generated energy and use it in a controlled fashion.

The margin for error in these endeavors will be very small. Something might go wrong in how the lasers are calibrated or the hydrogen fuel is measured or assembled and a catastrophic fusion reaction might ensue generating enough energy to blow a continent-sized hole on one side of planet Earth.

A Confession

2011-05-27T16:23:00.000+05:30

Heaven uses an open-source, Linux based email server.

Since Oprah is now over, let me confess on my blog. I've fathered three babies unbeknown to my imaginary wife. My co-conspirators were sequentially: my office intern, a member of my household staff, and inevitably, the proverbial (but quite literal) maid. The inspirations for these acts (and therefore the owners of authorial credit) are messers Clinton, Arnold, and DSK.

So, I'm giving them due acknowledgement. Also, thanking them for not copyrighting or trademarking these techniques. Instead, these are available to all those who seek to enjoy the benefits of democracy combined with atheism under the Creative Commons License.

Anyone can therefore use these techniques and modify them to suit their specific needs and then share the results with the world at large.

There. I've done it! Or is there more? Well, I just remembered a fourth baby that I had with the hot, young TV journo lady. That was inspired by Mr. Edwards. Ok. That's it.

Now I've confessed the great sin of my life. I'm completely CLEAN now. My soul is light as a feather ... or a size-zero model.

Do I need to go to the Ganga now for a holy dip? No. I think I'll skip that. The damn river is too dirty with human excrement ... not to mention rotting corpses of cows and humans.

Should I visit a dingy confession box? Well, my forefathers were not hot about Jesus and neither am I. No need to change a good, old tradition.

Anyway, I know that the gods are busy. Watching IPL of course. So, you can all take a break from making all your prayers. The gods have switched off their laptops. Closed their prayer mailbox. And disconnected that Internet cable.

Come on guys. Give the gods a break. Let them take a well-deserved vacation. What with the financial crisis and the recession in the U.S. and Greece and Europe, the gods have been particularly besieged with prayers from the desperate Americans and Europeans. And they're so difficult to please too, these white people!!!

But Indians. Bliss! An entirely different story. So easy to please! Always asking for one more baby. Give them a baby once in a while and they'll sleep, well, like the proverbial baby.

As for all the prayers from the IPL players, the poor guys don't know that the gods have made a pact amongst themselves. They'll not entertain any cricket-related prayers. It's not fair, you see. Do you want the gods to stoop so low as to be involved in betting? So, whatever results transpire are entirely due to the vagaries and uncertainties of the game of cricket itself. And any Earthly betting as may be happening on occasion.

So how do I know all this inside information? Well, as I hinted at the beginning, I've broken into the gods' email server.

Conjoined Twins

2011-05-25T20:54:00.001+05:30

This is so intriguing, ever fascinating and touching:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html/

I remember Laleh and Ladan Bijani and their surgery in Singapore and how that happened to go wrong.

A River Runs Through It

2011-05-23T19:58:00.002+05:30

A movie about fly fishing that somehow manages to make one ponder about what it means to be alive.

A kid who wants to grow up to be a fly fisherman. Another kid who wants to be a boxer.

A preacher who's devoted to his calling of inspiring and soothing his people through the power of words as revealed by his God. The kids grow up. The elder one turns into the responsible one while the younger is more adventurous. Love and a stable career are the ambitions for one. The other aspires to and enjoys taking life on.

But risk taking can exact grim reapings. One can get killed. This is almost inevitable. But perhaps that's precisely part of the allure of this kind of life.

In time, the kid grows old. And reflects on the meaning of it all. The river meanwhile is the one constant. What a wonderful metaphor for life a river is! Always flowing, never stopping. With hidden dangers lurking beneath the surface.

We are responsible for the decisions we make in our lives. The consequences are for us to bear. Life and people's decisions can be inexplicable at times.

But the larger truth to absorb is that we'll all be old. And dead. Some sooner. Some later. Those who die young can be like those bright burning huge stars that have short life spans. It's for those who live to be old to reflect and remember. To persist and persevere.

Follow me on Twitter: @sachi_bbsr

Terms of Endearment

2011-05-23T19:57:00.001+05:30

Can a movie make us think about life? Can a movie have anything to teach us about living life? One can pose these questions in relation to this movie. That already shows how much this movie has accomplished.

The movie stars Jack Nicholson as a retired bachelor much attracted to and interested in the opposite sex. It so happens that the character is that of a retired astronaut. Is that so far fetched? I don't know. In terms of physical appearance, there's nothing unusual about Jack that would somehow disqualify him from playing the part of an astronaut.

In fact, Jack takes quite a resemblance to one of the crew members of STS-134, the mission that is currently in space, the boyish looking Michael Fincke. Apart from this, I also think that there's some resemblance between Jack and the legendary Bob Crippen of STS-01.

Then there's Shirley MacLaine. An aging woman who's over-protective of her daughter and suspicious of the world at large, grown somewhat bitter with life with the passing of the years. Basically, she could be your average old lady.

The beautiful Debra Winger is a small town girl with typical family ambitions: get married and start a family. he world may have changed a lot now a days and those sort of ambitions to be a housewife might appear quaint in today's world, but it makes perfect sense in its own frame of reference. And like many impressionable young women, Debra falls in love with a handsome young English teacher who's good with words ... and ladies too. But it turns out that the teacher enjoys the perks of working at a co-ed. Surprise surprise!

Life moves on. Babies come along and romances bloom: some likely and some less likely.

Then the unexpected happens. Life turns upside down all of a sudden for these four people whose lives are so intertwined. And crises bring out our true character. The people who truly care ant to stand by you in a time of crisis. The opportunists soon go away.

The movie ends with the ending of a human life and the beginnings of other relationships. People move on. Always. Life moves on.

So this movie is quite like life. Remarkable and touching.

Follow me on Twitter: @sachi_bbsr

Rajneeti: A Stupendous Masterpiece

2011-05-23T19:52:00.000+05:30

When a director manages to combine the mythic heritage of the Mahabharata with the cauldron that is contemporary Indian politics, you inevitably get a searing saga.

Unlike the usual Bollywood movie, Rajneeti is painted on a broad canvas and events happen at a fast clip and the movie does not grow stale at any point.

From the start itself when it tells of a romance between an ageing idealist and a young protege, the movie somehow manages to acquire a mythic ambiance.

The movie moves on to scheming politicians and feuding family members, a romance that is one-sided, one brother who's only too trigger happy and the younger brother, who's a cool schemer, and Nana Patkar cool as always.

As we witness one planned murder after another, one is reminded of gangster country. But this is really the reality of life in politics in India and indeed, perhaps, the reality of life itself, in India.

I don't know why the movie did not garner greater accolades. May be, people are not ready to look reality in the eye.

Follow me on Twitter @sachi_bbsr

Imagining Immortality

2011-05-21T21:42:00.000+05:30

I am thinking of a scheme of how immortality might come to be real in the coming decades.

Perhaps, there will be storage tanks which will house millions upon millions of brains that will be alive and will be connected to a global network of news and everything.

When we are old, our brains will be put there and we will continue to live in a virtual sort of world or a mental world perhaps forever essentially being an observer.

Or, may be, we will have something like fish tanks in our homes where we will have the brains of our ancestors. Perhaps they will continue to live in our drawing rooms observing their progeny lead their daily lives.

How would that be like to have our grannies and granddaddies around? Or, at least, their brains.