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Hula Hoop Hoopla

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 22 Mar 2014 15:28:00 +0000

The first time I heard Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” was at a classical music appreciation workshop at Rutgers. The instructor, a Music Professor, played a clip from the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” that featured a creative interpretation of the history of the hula hoop, one of the simplest toys ever sold and marketed—a hollow ring that can be twirled around the waist while performing a motion similar to that of a Hawaiian Hula dancer.

Although varieties of the hula hoop had been known to Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, the modern multi-coloured plastic version was born in 1958 and demonstrated to befuddled children in California playgrounds. This salesmanship resulted in a fad beyond imagination, with over 100 million hoops sold in the first year itself. The film version predictably employs a more artistic license, and offers a humorous lesson in the vagaries of demand and supply.

By a series of backroom machinations in “The Hudsucker Proxy”, the fate of the new chairman of a fictional toy company is closely intertwined with the success of hula hoop sales. As the toy fails to take off despite steep discounts, a store owner throws out his entire stock into a back alley. Miraculously one of the hoops takes a life of its own—escaping out into the sunlight and rolling through streets and sidewalks of an anonymous small town until it stops at the feet of a young boy playing truant from school. As the boy takes his first tentative step into the circle and discovers his natural talent, other students returning from school are awed by this spectacle and rush to the toy store as sales (and retail prices) begin to soar.

While the incredible voyage of the lone hoop is evocative of a vintage Dunlop tyre advertisement that stops before an unmindful child, scenes of hoop trundling are still commonplace in rural towns, where a child may be seen rolling a hoop (typically a bicycle tyre) along the ground with the aid of a stick. This game had acquired notoriety in Victorian London because of injuries caused to horses and pedestrians’ shins, and a high-profile campaign to eradicate the practice was initiated by Charles Babbage, the father of the modern computer.

The question is how much longer will today’s children be satisfied by the likes of hula hoops and flying discs (also known as Frisbee, which was invented by the same company that popularised the hula hoop). In an age where touchscreens have become ubiquitous, virtual versions of yesterday’s toys are available on mobile phones and one can foresee a future where the simplicity of these games would no longer be experienced in reality.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Hula hoop, hula hoop,
Everyone is playing
With the hula hoop.
Look at them spin
Trying to win
Anyone can play from three
To a hundred and ten.
Oh, what fun to see them rock
And to see them sway
Trying to keep the hula hoop
From slipping away.
If you rock when you should sway
It would fall to the ground
Then again, once again,
Spin it round and round.

Georgia Gibbs, The Hula Hoop Song

Heavy Metal Banned

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Jan 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Freakonomics, a work of non-fiction jointly written by a University of Chicago economist and a New York Times journalist became the surprise worldwide bestseller of 2005, having sold over 4 million copies to date in 35 different languages. Its unique selling proposition was the interpretation of cultural issues through the lens of economics and statistics.

One of the more provocative ideas expounded in the book is that the drop in crime rate in the United States in the nineteen-nineties was the result of the legalisation of abortion in 1973. The theory was that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals in later life, and the Supreme Court’s controversial Roe vs. Wade ruling made the termination of unwanted pregnancies accessible and affordable, reducing the number of criminals in the crucial 18 to 25 age-group two decades later.

The theory was unpopular with urban police forces who had hitherto been basking in the glory of having cut down crime, and were quick to clutch at the straw that this may have been a coincidence since correlation did not establish causality. The authors addressed the morality of equating crime with poor family planning by pointing to Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime in Romania, where the reverse act had been played out. The Stalinist dictator had banned abortion in 1966, doubling the birth-rate within a year, which soon resulted in a surplus of under-educated youth who were unsuitable for the job market. Ironically, this same generation ended up as Ceausescu’s judge, jury and executioner after the fall of communism in 1989.

Recent research has introduced one more contender for the title of crime-fighter in the United States. The new hypothesis claims that exposure to tetraethyl-lead (TEL), an additive used in petrol until the nineteen-seventies, results in juvenile delinquencies. Neurological studies have shown that the exposure to lead and other heavy metals have a permanent effect on intelligence and behaviour— impairing judgement and inhibiting control. Violent crime rates between the 1960s and 1990s followed the same pattern as the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, except being offset by about twenty-three years.

Early in the twentieth-century, General Motors (GM) was on the hunt for a chemical that could prevent knocking or pinging in internal combustion engines. Although their research laboratory, headed by Charles Kettering, had discovered that ethyl alcohol or ethanol possessed these properties, this was intentionally overlooked as its commercial potential was limited. Instead in 1922, Kettering approached Alfred Sloan, who was to become the company president the following year, with the discovery of TEL which was patentable and could bring them profit with every litre of petrol sold by any gas station in the country.

Despite knowledge of the deadliness of TEL, GM’s management decided to market it under the benign sounding name of “Ethyl”, a red-coloured fluid that would need to be added to petrol in a ratio of 1:1000. Over the years, the Ethyl cartel would repeatedly cover-up the deaths of workers in their plants from lead exposure, and even stage public relations meetings to hide the truth.

By the time the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency outlawed lead as an additive, millions of tonnes of TEL had already been burned in gasoline, much of which remains in the soil, air and water around us.

Ultimately this essay is not just about lead pollution, since time alone will prove if the theory linking TEL and crime can withstand the targeted arrows of criticism and cross-examination. Hidden beneath the surface is a darker tale of corporate greed and unbridled capitalism, a misadventure that has profitably polluted the world and forced a tragedy on generations to come. Two of the key perpetrators of this crime, Sloan and Kettering, went on to offer their patronage to a cancer research hospital in New York City (which bears their name today), perhaps to atone for their complicity in the poisoning of the planet.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Take another deeper breath,
Inhale invisible death.
Pollution fills the land and sky,
Forever you justify.
Take a deeper look and see,
Nothing's left to future seeds.
Icicles melt in the blood,
Ashes where there once was wood.

Machine Head, Elegy

Ditched by the Ditchers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 18:27:00 +0000

Few remember a sobriquet that had been designated on East India Company officers in the eighteenth century— “Ditchers”. Despite the negative connotations of the word, its origin had honourable intentions, namely a plan to surround early Calcutta by the Maratha Ditch, a seven-mile long dry moat to protect the city from being plundered by the marauding Marathas or bargis from western India.

While only three miles of the ditch had ever been excavated, its plan formed the backbone for the Circular Road that was constructed to fill up the ditch in 1799. This grand boulevard however broke away from the ditch in the city’s north-east, avoiding a peculiar detour around Halsibagan where the Pareshnath Jain Temples stand today.

Named after the 23rd Tirthankara of the Jain religion, this four-temple complex was built by Seth Badridas as an oasis of peace and tranquillity amidst the surrounding squalor and bustling hubbub of North Calcutta. The grandeur of the temple’s layout and landscaping is eclipsed by its lavish interior, decorated with Italian marble and Belgian glass. Pilgrims at the temple awe at an oil lamp in its sanctum sanctorum, burning continuously since 1867, unaware of the remarkable events that the hallowed grounds witnessed more than a century before the temple’s inception.

The entire Halsibagan locality was formerly the site of an extravagant garden-house belonging to Umichand (variously spelt as Omichand, Amin Chand and Amir Chand), a Sikh merchant from northern India who emerged as an important power-broker in the politics of eighteenth century Bengal. Although Umichand has been reduced to an obscure and tragic character in history’s retelling, his portly figure and luxuriant beard are remembered by children to this day in a common Bengali doggerel. Such was his relationship with the twin seats of power in the Nawab’s capital of Murshidabad and the East India Company in Calcutta, that the Maratha Ditch was rerouted around his property to protect his interests.

Umichand’s rise to power, prestige and immense wealth was occasioned by his lack of moral scruples, and an astute ability to sense in which direction the winds of fortune were blowing at any time. He had the dubious distinction of owning a second house in the “white” neighbourhood—the only Indian to do so at the time, and had a generous nature that is immortalised by a road in Calcutta named after one of the beneficiaries of his largesse: Free School Street.

After the 1756 Siege of Calcutta ended in favour of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah, Robert Clive was appointed by the Company to lead the campaign to recapture the city. As he embarked on a six-week sea voyage up from Madras, the Nawab’s 40,000-strong army made their way down from Murshidabad and pitched their tents in Umichand’s garden at Halsibagan. Unaware of the extent of protection provided by the Maratha Ditch, the ensuing battle ended with the Nawab’s retreat as Clive’s men wound around the incomplete moat and ambushed the Nawab’s army from behind.

This set the stage for the Battle of Plassey, where Umichand played a key role in the conspiracy to oust the Nawab by turning his general, Latif Khan, against him. The Company, meanwhile, persuaded Mir Jafar, the Nawab’s army chief, to defect and drew up a written treaty that ensured Jafar would be appointed the Nawab of Bengal, and that the spoils of war would be shared by the co-conspirators, including Umichand.

As four-fifths of the Nawab’s army (including wings led by Latif Khan and Mir Jafar) stood idle at Plassey, the Nawab was handed an ignominious defeat and Mir Jafar was crowned his successor. In its wake however, Clive flatly refused Umichand his legitimate share of the profits by admitting that he himself had forged the signature of Vice-Admiral Charles Watson on the agreement and that it was not worth the paper on which it was written.

Accounts differ about the effect of this injustice on Umichand, with some claiming that he went delirious at the betrayal and others pointing out that he re-insinuated himself with the new Nawab. What is known for a fact is that Umichand, the “Rothschild of his day”, believed in the Englishman’s code of honour (to his own detriment) and had left endowments in his will for both the Magdalen and Foundling Hospitals in London.

On the other hand, Clive went on to be awarded a peerage, and despite parliamentary inquiries into the Company’s practices, never had to pay a price for his treachery. The defeat of the Nawab at Plassey solidified the power of the East India Company in Bengal, forming the bedrock of Britain’s rule in India. So let it be reminded to chroniclers evoking the nostalgia of “Rule, Britannia!” and extolling the virtues of English fair-play, that the entire edifice of the British Raj was built on a lie.

AFTERTHOUGHT

It is not altogether fashionable now for the guide to dwell on the events that took place in this remote corner of Calcutta. . . . But he will certainly extoll the beauties of the Jain temples, and deservedly so, for they are magnificent. And if, as you wander round this enchanting place, you imagine how once the Maratha Ditch cut right through the gardens, that it was here the Nabob walked alone and made his plans which were to result in the fall of the impregnable city of Calcutta, your daydreams will no doubt be gently interrupted by the melodious voice of the guide, determined to perform his function correctly. Like all good guides, he will tell you in the words of the latest guide-book that Omichand’s gardens remain without doubt ‘one of the prettiest spots in the whole of Calcutta’.

He will be absolutely right, for nature has a habit of outlasting history.

Noel Barber, The Black Hole of Calcutta

Poems by the Sun Lion

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 17 May 2013 03:46:00 +0000

1875 was an exciting year in Indian literary circles. A prominent Calcutta-based journal of arts and literature, Bharati, was to begin serial publication of a hitherto undiscovered treasure trove of poems by an unknown seventeenth century poet, Bhanusimha. Written in Brajabuli, a dead dialect of Bengali favoured by Vaishnava bhakti poets, the poems portrayed love and longing through the songs of Lord Krishna’s lover Radha and her fictional confidante Bhanu.

More poems were unearthed and published over the next few years until a compilation of twenty-one poems was published in 1884. Curiously, a short biography of Bhanusimha by Rabindranath Tagore appeared in the journal Navajivana to coincide with the launch of this anthology. In its discussion of Bhanusimha’s provenance, it stated mockingly “there is a rumor spread among several of our dear friends and relatives to the effect that Bhanusimha, that ‘Sun Lion’, illumined this world with his effulgence by taking birth in the Christian year of 1861.”

As Tagore himself was born in 1861, the tongue-in-cheek essay made it clear that the Bhanusimha poems started as an elaborate pastiche by fourteen-year-old Rabindranath. Stung by embarrassment at their gullibility, the scholarly establishment quickly turned their focus on the precociousness of the young poet, hailing him as a literary successor to Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenth century English poet who forged medieval poetry at the age of twelve.

To overlook Bhanusimha’s poems as a spoof or parody, however, would be a grave misjudgement. Not only is it pitch-perfect in its invocation of Brajabuli, but its sentiments reveal a mystical mind that was far mature for its age and foreshadowed future writings like Gitanjali and Naivedya. Almost all the poems in this short collection surround the pain of viraha, or separation, from one’s beloved—Radha’s unrequited yearning for Krishna here is an allegory for the soul’s longing for union with an equally elusive God.

The poems could also reflect Tagore’s relationship with his coeval muse, Kadambari Devi. Wife of Rabindranath’s elder brother Jyotirindranath, Kadambari had an important influence on Tagore’s life, inspiring his poetry and encouraging their publication, and partly filling the void left by his mother’s early demise. While contemporary critics belatedly recognised that Tagore’s pseudonym Bhanu was a synonym for Rabi, it was less known that Kadambari used to affectionately call him by the name Bhanu. The compilation was dedicated to Kadambari Devi, although she did not live to see its publication.

Much like Leonardo da Vinci, who refused to separate himself from Mona Lisa during his lifetime, Tagore remained fascinated with his childhood Bhanusimha poems, revising them frequently—even a few months before his death—suggesting that they had a deep personal meaning for him and, in the process, causing them to neatly bookend his bountiful literary career.

AFTERTHOUGHT

We write long books where no page perhaps has any quality to make writing a pleasure, being confident in some general design, just as we fight and make money and fill our heads with politics—all dull things in the doing—while Mr. Tagore, like the Indian civilisation itself, has been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity.

William Butler Yeats, Introduction to Gitanjali

Unfit for a King

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 01:29:00 +0000

An unobservant reader casually flipping through newspaper pages in the last couple of months may be excused for thinking that the fossil of a giant centipede had recently been unearthed. In reality, archaeologists from the University of Leicester had dug up a city parking lot and discovered a mutilated skeleton with multiple blows to the head and severe scoliosis of the spine. After extensive carbon dating and mitochondrial DNA testing, experts were able to conclude that the remains belonged to King Richard III of England, who ruled the country between 1483 and 1485.

So how did this medieval monarch end up in such an inglorious resting place instead of Westminster Abbey? The death of Richard III, the last English king to die in battle, ushered in the Tudor dynasty. As is often the wont with civil wars, the slain king was humiliated with a rain of blows inflicted on his dead body which was then stripped bare to reveal his deformity, before being buried hastily at Greyfriars Church in Leicester. The Church was destroyed after the Reformation and its exact location was lost to the ravages of time, until enthusiasts from the "Richard III Society" were able to determine its spot and lobbied the city to excavate the grounds.

It is said that history is written by the victors, and nowhere has this been more true than in the case of King Richard III. His successor, King Henry VIII, encouraged his court historians to besmirch the reputation of his predecessor in order to strengthen his own position. One of these writers, Thomas More, took this instruction to heart and produced a tome titled "The History of King Richard III" which compiled every unverifiable rumour into a thrilling narrative, tying his physical deformities to moral deficiencies. As this account became the official chronicle of the period, it became a rich source of material for later writers, including the most influential of them all— William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's "Richard III", which starts with the immemorial lines "Now is the winter of our discontent", proceeds to vilify the late king as an ugly hunchback whose reign was defined by murder, intrigue and betrayal, some of which is undoubtedly true. Visitors to the Tower of London (which also houses the Koh-i-Noor diamond) have heard the story of the "Princes in the Tower"— two young princes, who were potential claimants to the throne, were allegedly killed prior to coronation at the behest of Richard III. While such activity was not unheard of in the Middle Ages, thespians through the ages have regaled audiences with the Shakespearean interpretation of this complex character, unwittingly conspiring to immortalise the King as a ruthless crookback.

While it remains to be seen if the reputation of Richard III is restored, this archaeological discovery will remind future readers that historical plays reflect the prejudices of the time, and echoes Oscar Wilde's insightful belief that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life". A king who bravely led his army on horseback with the discomfort of such a pronounced spinal curvature deserves more than just a modicum of our respect.

AFTERTHOUGHT

"Leading on my fierce companions," cried he, "over storm and brine,
I have fought and I have conquered! Where was glory like to mine?"
Loudly all the courtiers echoed: "Where is glory like to thine?"
"What avail me all my kingdoms? Weary am I now and old;
Those fair sons I have begotten, long to see me dead and cold;
Would I were, and quiet buried, underneath the silent mould!

William Makepeace Thackeray, King Canute

Velvet Underground

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 16:30:00 +0000

Anyone who has visited the Catacombs of Rome or Alexandria’s necropolis would associate underground dwelling with death. The sight of such a subterranean ossuary may have caused many a sleepless night, with the eerie sight of human skulls accentuating the claustrophobic darkness.

Yet in many of the world’s biggest metropolises, there are communities of people who choose to live underground, either because they cannot afford to live otherwise, or to escape the demands of society and the tentacles of law. The most famous of these urban myths surrounds the plight of the so-called “mole people” living in the subway and utility tunnels below New York City. Ever since Jennifer Toth’s somewhat fantastic book made its appearance, there have been spirited debates over the facts presented and the size and scale of these communities.

Surface world pedestrians in most major cities seldom realise the sheer variety of activities in progress below the ground: beside the ubiquitous sewers and subway tunnels, gas, telephone and electrical lines, there are often canals and quarries, crypts and bank vaults, wine-cellars and surreptitious night-clubs. One of the greatest subterranean surprises is a perfectly preserved City Hall subway station in Manhattan-- inaugurated in 1904, this unusually elegant station with arches, skylights and brass chandeliers, was sealed in 1945 after the steep curve was deemed unsafe for longer carriages.

National Geographic drew international attention to "cataphiles" (catacomb-lovers) when it featured the catacombs of Paris on its cover in February 2011. Prohibition and "catacops" (catacomb-police) have not deterred the adventurous from entering quarries through forgotten doorways and find their way to the catacombs through roads less travelled by— indeed a group of young men recently completed a perilous 22-kilometre trek from the southern to the northern edge of the Left Bank, a three-day troglodytic adventure that ended through a manhole cover outside a fashionable café, shocking its sidewalk patrons.

One only needs to turn to the year 802,701 AD to see how belief in the anti-social (rather than the unsocial) inhabiting the underworld has perpetuated. In H G Wells' science-fiction novel, The Time Machine, mankind has evolved into two distinct species in this distant future— uncurious humans and ape-like Morlocks. Although Wells had become a Darwinian atheist in adulthood, true to the original Christian concept of Hell, he housed the murderous Morlocks in the depths of the underground.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Behold! Human beings living in an underground den. Like ourselves, they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

Plato, The Republic

Philly’s Philistines

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 14:55:00 +0000

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC is considered one of the world’s finest research and museum complexes. It was founded from a bequest by British scientist James Smithson, who donated his substantial fortunes to a country he had never visited, since he felt he was never accepted by English society as a result of his illegitimate parentage.

An American who would have sympathised with the plight of Smithson is Albert Barnes. Son of a butcher, the young Barnes rose by the stint of his own effort to become a physician, although he soon discovered a passion for chemistry. Having partnered with a German scientist who developed Argyrol, a silver nucleinate solution to prevent gonorrheal blindness in the pre-antibiotics era, Barnes became a millionaire when he successfully marketed the product to hospitals for use on newborn infants. With serendipitous foresight, he then sold his stake in the company mere months before the stock market crash of 1929.

Even while stewarding his company, Barnes had begun investing his plentiful profits and spare time into educating himself in philosophy and the arts, and buying priceless paintings at bargain prices from Europeans devastated by the first world war. His interests lay in post-Impressionist and pre-Modern art, and by 1922 he had created the Barnes Foundation to house his private collection and serve as an exclusive learning centre. He exhibited some of this art at the request of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts the following year, but was universally condemned by the media for his taste. Barnes attributed this criticism to his lack of social pedigree, and this incident became the source of his increasingly eccentric and misanthropic nature.

Over the years, Barnes collected 181 works by Renoir, 69 by Cézanne and 59 pieces of art by Matisse, as well as significant numbers of paintings by Picasso, van Gogh and Modigliani (whom he is credited with discovering) among others, an assortment valued at twenty-five billion dollars today. The paintings were lined up next to and above one another in twenty-three galleries in a converted arboretum in Lower Marion, a suburb of Philadelphia. The haphazard arrangement of his galleries may appear idiosyncratic by the sanitised standards of art museums, but it reflected Barnes’ subjective identification of underlying themes that unified the jumble of paintings across different eras and genres. His famous distrust and disdain for celebrities and socialites led him to personally screen all visitors and only admit minds that he felt were uncontaminated by conventional rules of art.

The Barnes Foundation, which was left with an endowment of over nine million dollars, was entrusted with delivering lectures on the appreciation of art that improved upon the techniques in use by traditional schools. In his final will and testament, Barnes forbade the art in his collection from being sold or loaned to other museums— in fact, even the arrangement of the paintings was not to be changed!

Ten years after his death in 1951, in response to negative publicity initiated by the Philadelphia Inquirer over the foundation’s tax status, the galleries were finally opened to the public on a limited basis. As the Foundation’s income stagnated because of imprudent investments, museums in Philadelphia and unscrupulous members of the board (the majority of whom were required to be nominated from impoverished Lincoln University as a final affront to the more famous universities and museums in the area) began to lobby the government to fund a relocation of the collection in exchange for material benefit and personal prestige to themselves. A recent documentary, “The Art of the Steal”, captures the behind-the-scenes chicanery by a nexus of politicians and private organisations that resulted in a court ruling in favor of moving the collection to Philadelphia by 2012.

While this decision runs contrary to the express wishes of Albert Barnes, the controversy raises an academic conundrum over the purpose of art, private and public. Barnes may have been too restrictive in his admission of art enthusiasts (rejected applicants include T S Eliot, Le Corbusier and Walter Chrysler Jr.); however, he did stand as a bulwark against the commercialisation of art museums, where a gift shop is often granted as much importance as the actual gallery. While art has certainly become more accessible due to the tireless efforts of public art museums and various educational programmes, for a vast number of attendees the thrill appears to lie in the number of masterworks they are able to photograph.

This dichotomy would have been an interesting subject for English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was hired by Barnes as a lecturer during World War II— a time when the destitute pacifist’s political views made him virtually unemployable in the United States. Russell’s talks on philosophy at the Barnes Foundation formed the basis of his celebrated Nobel Prize winning work, “A History of Western Philosophy”, whose royalties kept him in relative prosperity for the rest of his life.

AFTERTHOUGHT

And then you get an artist says he doesn't want to paint at all,
He takes an empty canvas and sticks it on the wall;
The birds of a feather, all the phonies and all of the fakes,
While the dealers they get together and decide who gets the breaks.

Dire Straits, In the Gallery

Desolation Row

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 03:55:00 +0000

Chrysler Corporation’s recent “Made in Detroit” advertisement campaign is both a nostalgic appeal to the patriotism of American buyers and a feeble attempt to restore the image of Motor City, the birthplace of the automobile industry. In recent years, Detroit has been the subject of countless books and exhibitions sensationalising the ruins of its former majesty, as it declined from being the country’s fifth largest city to a battered shell of its former self.

Like motorists attracted to an accident scene, visitors (real and online) have been flocking in the thousands to gape at the gory glory of its abandoned churches and theaters, deserted libraries and high-rise buildings. And yet, are we not surrounded by the ruins of history all around us? Are not signs of urban decay hidden just beneath the surface of our immediate surroundings? Do we not encounter the ghosts of beautiful bungalows torn down to make way for ugly utilitarian flats?

I have walked the streets of Liverpool, past boarded up boarding-houses awaiting demolition, like death-row inmates who have been denied clemency. As the gateway to cross-Atlantic commerce (including the lucrative slave trade), almost half of the world’s business used to pass through the city’s port, a function that has limited relevance two centuries later. Today, despite brave attempts to reinvent it as the European capital of culture, it peddles primarily in its past.

I have walked the streets of Newark, marvelling at abandoned drawbridges left to rust because their sale as scrap metal would not recover the cost of dismantling them. Once the biggest center of manufacturing industry around New York, organised crime and race riots have taken their toll on the rapid loss of people and businesses. Today, a handful of companies stand amidst the sprawl, providing the city with a tattered fig-leaf of respectability.

I have walked the streets of Howrah, tripping on unused tram-lines that stick out like the ribs of an emaciated corpse. Once the hinterland of the second city of the British Empire, it has long since seen trade decline as its river silted up and unionism and lethargy sounded the death-knell to its symbiotic city, Calcutta. Today, the conversion of its old mills and factories into warehouses and cold-storage units is celebrated with a zeal that reflects an absence of pride in its history.

There is death and desolation all around us, albeit masked by shiny structures in their place. And while politicians wax poetic at the inauguration of these state-of-the-art projects, it is just a matter of time until, abandoned and despised, they too are tossed into the dustbin of history for the next new thing.

AFTERTHOUGHT

There are places I remember
All my life:
Though some have changed—
Some forever not for better.
Some have gone and some remain.

The Beatles, In My Life

Death of a Book Salesman

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:45:00 +0000

When Holly Golightly’s mood brooded with the mean reds in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (feeling blue would be all too plebeian), she used to take a taxi to the jewellery chain’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue to calm her nerves. For those of us who are not fortunate to be either living in Manhattan or be enamoured by diamonds, a similar feeling of relaxation and yearning, mixed with a sense of security and wonder, may be achieved by entering a bookshop and browsing through the volumes on display.

Sadly, the recent bankruptcy of the Borders chain of bookstores has all but driven the once venerable book business another step closer to extinction. It will probably survive as a relic of the past—doomed to a mythical corner of Diagon Alley, surviving at the mercy of a miniscule minority of aficionados known as bibliophiles. As a young student in Washington DC, it was a weekly ritual to walk the longer route to the Metro station just to pass the display windows of Olsson’s Books and Records, the Nordic-sounding independent bookstore that is now gone but not forgotten.

It is ironical that Borders (and other big chains) themselves grew by displacing neighbourhood bookstores through a combination of undercutting them on prices, offering a warehouse worth of options, and attracting the curious with incidental merchandise (games and toys, calendars and coffee) that have a much greater mark-up. In the process they successfully completed the commoditisation of books as a volume-driven trade, a phenomenon that threatens to defy geographical boundaries. While trying to recount the delight of serendipitous searches at used book stores lining Calcutta’s College Street, I was interrupted by an expatriate who boasted that stores in his shiny new city sell used books by weight.

While the advent of electronic books is a temporary injunction against the disappearance of reading (economists agree that Borders may have survived if it had been more agile in embracing the digital bandwagon), the book publishing business is doomed if it is unable to adapt to this new age. Although the profit margin on a physical book is about a tenth of its electronic counterpart, the current volume of book sales to libraries and students more than compensates for this inequality. From this position of hubris, conventional publishers see digital books as a disruption to their monopoly (since it lowers the cost for a new entrant), imperilling the world with counterfeited copies. However, much like iTunes capitalised on the sale of single digital songs rather than an entire music album, the book business must also discover their silver bullet to guide them to a solvent future.

And that would be sufficient cause to keep the mean reds at bay, both from our minds and from their ledgers.

AFTERTHOUGHT

No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion picture, and in old friends: look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Armenian Connection

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 10:48:00 +0000

One would expect an Armenian College in the heart of Calcutta to stick out like a sore thumb. Yet, its presence (complete with a sign affirming the birth of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray within its ramparts) affords no great surprise to the teeming thousands passing its gates everyday. The famed rugby team of the Armenian College is considered as much a part of the city’s identity as Armenian Ghat on the Hooghly River.

Traces of Armenian influence are sprinkled all over the old city, including the popular Globe and New Empire theatres, established by Armenian families or khojas. The long stretch of Armenian Street in Central Calcutta offers a hint to the preferred haunts of this proud community of bankers and merchants who primarily came as economic migrants from Persia in the seventeenth century. Although the opulence of their thriving era is not readily visible, the city’s premier Grand Hotel traces its pedigree back to Arathoon Stephen, a refugee-turned-millionaire from Armenia, who also constructed Stephen Court, the luxury apartment building on Park Street that was ravaged by fire earlier this year.

It takes considerable more effort to locate the Armenian Church, which dates back to 1724, making it the oldest existing place of Christian worship in Calcutta today. It nestles amidst the serpentine sweep of Old Chinabazaar Street, a locale that has not seen sunlight in a hundred years giving an effect of being frozen in time: the narrow lane is home to wholesale stores specialising in pots and pans, and the cobblestoned path is jostled by coolies with impossible loads balanced precariously on their heads, and bheesties straight from the pages of Kipling’s Gunga Din carrying plastic containers of water (instead of goat-skin pouches) as the only concession to the passage of time. The dome of the Church suddenly appears as an incongruent apparition and its grounds form a haven of peace in the middle of bustling commerce. A tombstone in the churchyard marking the resting place of “Rezabeebeh, wife of the Late Charitable Sookias who departed from this world to life eternal on the 11th July 1630 A.D.” is symbolic of its antiquity.

Anglo-Saxon commentators who express surprise at an Armenian settlement prior to the East India Company’s self-proclaimed foundation of Calcutta in 1690 are willfully ignorant of the city’s history. After all, the firman (royal decree) issued by Mughal Emperor Farrukhsiyar in 1698 allowing the British to collect rent from the three villages that constituted Calcutta (in lieu of a paltry sixteen thousand rupees) was negotiated for the East India Company by Khojah Israel Sarhad, a childhood friend of the Emperor. It was this same Khojah Sarhad, along with another Armenian merchant Khojah Manur, who were instrumental in leading the Surman embassy in 1715 that laid the foundation of British rule in India.

Iris Macfarlane’s steady deconstruction of the Black Hole myth refers to Armenians as “tied by religion to the West, and by loyalty to nobody” because of their role in selling India to the British. While it is true that the conspiracy to betray the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey included Mir Jafar and his Armenian co-conspirator Khojah Wajid, it is not fair to point fingers at any single community. In the heady days of early trade with the British, the lure of the lucre superseded all other interests for the mercantile class, especially since the true designs of the East India Company had not yet become apparent. While the Armenian community in India flourished under British rule— running trading companies, shipping lines, coal mines, publishing houses, real estate developments and hotels— their numbers started dwindling after India’s independence.

Today only about a hundred Armenians live in Calcutta, leading private lives outside the glare of sensationalism and publicity. Faith is the social glue that binds them together, and according to the curator at the Church, the pews are filled with extended family members as well as visiting scholars during the Sunday service. Despite being descendants of the first Christian state (according to the Bible, Noah’s Ark came to rest in Armenia after the flood), the Armenian community in India have never indulged in proselytising efforts, an act that must be marvelled in an age when religion, that most personal covenant between Man and God, has been reduced to a commodity susceptible to barter and coercion.

AFTERTHOUGHT

If you ever want to lose some time
Just take off, there’s no risk
If you ever want to disappear
Just take off, and think of this:
Armenia, city in the sky
Armenia, city in the sky.
The sky is glass, the sea is brown
And everyone is upside-down.

The Who, Armenia City in the Sky

Current Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 23 May 2010 03:04:00 +0000

The 2006 mystery thriller, The Prestige, had an unlikely protagonist: David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. He is portrayed as a passionate, if eccentric, scientist leading a monastic life in Colorado Springs surrounded by an advanced model of his magnifying transmitter. While the film depicts this as a teleportation device; in reality, his experiments dealt with the wireless transmission of electrical power. In the course of his experiments, like Jagadish Bose in Calcutta, Tesla successfully transmitted radio waves over the ether, well before Guglielmo Marconi did.

However, Tesla’s everlasting contribution to modern life was the development of alternating current (AC) to replace the then-prevalent system of direct current (DC). As an employee of the Edison Machine Works in West Orange, New Jersey, his blueprints were not received very kindly by Thomas Edison who had invested heavily in DC power. Edison was a self-taught man and brute-force experimenter (hence his memorable quote about genius being one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration) who had a brilliant mind for envisioning mechanical tools like the typewriter, gramophone and kinetograph for recording motion. However, the intricacies of alternating current required a more intimate understanding of the properties of electromagnetic waves, and to his lasting regret, he allowed Tesla to walk out of his company.

George Westinghouse, another American entrepreneur, was more willing to consider Tesla’s idea of effectively transmitting high voltage AC over long distances and using step-down transformers near a customer’s premises. Edison’s General Electric (GE), on the other hand, faced a nineteenth century version of the last-mile-problem, and had to install DC generating plants within a mile of the customer load to compensate for line losses. Thus began the War of Currents between Westinghouse Electric and General Electric.

Edison personally participated in a negative publicity campaign to badmouth AC; this included spreading disinformation on safety, and publicly electrocuting farm animals. He also funded the development of a primitive electric chair that employed AC, and tried to popularize the term “Westinghoused” for being electrocuted to death (predating the practice of using a trademark, like Google, as a verb by a century!). This episode cast a dark pall on the life of Edison, who was otherwise an outstanding humanitarian promoting the employment of women, and was considerate enough to install a piano in the servants’ dining room in his estate at Glenmont.

The battle was finally decided during the Chicago World Fair in 1893, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World. The organizers (who had previously designed New York’s Central Park and the iconic Flatiron Building) wanted to dazzle attendees with an exhibit that would reflect the flamboyance of the age. General Electric put forward a bid to power all electric exhibits and light up Edison’s incandescent light-bulbs at a cost of $1.8 million. Westinghouse’s counteroffer using three-phase AC for induction motors, primitive fluorescent lamps and power for the world’s first Ferris Wheel came in under $400,000. Even though GE attempted to reduce their bid, they could not match the efficiencies of Tesla’s transmission, thereby conceding to the public that AC would be the wave of the future.

Chicago in 1893 did “bestride the narrow world/ Like a Colossus”, and Swami Vivekananda’s eloquent speech at the Parliament of World Religions had an electrifying effect on the people of that era. Tesla himself was so influenced by Vedic philosophy that he used Sanskrit names for some of his subsequent inventions. Sadly, neither Tesla nor Edison was awarded a Nobel Prize for their contributions to science. Such was the animosity and antagonism between these two pioneers that they both refused to accept the award if the other received it first, and also rejected the possibility of ever sharing the prize. However, the precursor to today’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) honoured Tesla with the highest award it offered in the field of electrical engineering: ironically, it was called the Edison Medal.

AFTERTHOUGHT

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And darkness was upon the face of the deep; this was due to a malfunction at the Lots Road Power Station.

And God said, Let there be light; and there was light, but Eastern Electricity Board said that He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.

And God saw the light and it was good; He saw the quarterly bill and that was not good.

Spike Milligan, The Bible According to Spike Milligan

Melody to Malady

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:53:00 +0000

Scientists’ recent analysis of Tutankhamen’s blood and DNA is likely to cast a pall on Egyptian tour-guides at the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. For decades they have conjured up conspiracy theories involving accident, betrayal and deceit that led to the boy-king’s untimely death at the tender age of nineteen. Unfortunately, the results released this month suggest a more mundane cause—the onset of malaria on the Pharaoh’s already weak constitution.

Although this may be the first recorded instance of malaria, it is by no means the last. Today malaria accounts for between one and three million fatalities every year, a majority of which occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Health and aid agencies (including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, started by the Washington wonder who may well be remembered by posterity for his philanthropy) have waged an incessant, but losing, battle against the humble mosquito that carries this disease.

Man’s sleeping hours are the most vulnerable for mosquito bites, and the simplest form of protection is the regular use of mosquito nets. My earliest memory of this “room within a room” is that of sheer bewilderment as one had to quickly slide into the safety of this white shroud— however, its practicality became almost immediately evident as the near-invisible gossamer layer allowed sleep to overpower the orchestral refrain of blood-thirsty mosquitoes who could be heard but not felt. Although mosquito nets are freely distributed to combat the disease in areas where it is most prevalent, poverty has often led the nylon nets to be used for other purposes like catching fish.

The word ‘malaria’ is derived from the Italian phrase for “bad air” as it was initially thought to be caused by breathing in the humid and polluted air of marshy tropical regions. The fact that malaria is transmitted by the female Anopheles mosquito was discovered by Sir Ronald Ross in Calcutta in 1898, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts in 1902. This was however not the last time that malaria featured in the citation for the Nobel Prize for Medicine—the 1927 award celebrated the discovery that artificially induced malaria could cure syphilis in its advanced stages!

Amitav Ghosh’s early novel The Calcutta Chromosome is a gripping amalgam of historical facts and futuristic fiction that follows young Ronald Ross, a directionless officer of the Indian Medical Service with ambitions of becoming a writer, as he stumbles his way to the relationship between mosquitoes and malaria. The 20th of August is today celebrated as World Mosquito Day in honour of Ross’s dissection in 1897 of a mosquito that revealed malaria parasites growing inside the insect’s tissues.

Ross continued his experiments in a small laboratory created for him within the ramparts of Calcutta’s Presidency General Hospital. Although he left in 1899, having accepted an offer from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, his one-storeyed cottage continues to be used as an outpatient centre for inoculating local residents against malaria and dengue fever. A few feet away, a brass plaque commemorates Ross’s epic discovery with immortal lines from the part-time poet’s pen: “I know this little thing, A myriad men will save. O death where is thy sting? Thy victory O grave?”

AFTERTHOUGHT

Away with a pæan of derision,
You winged blood-drop.

Can I not overtake you ?
Are you one too many for me,
Winged Victory ?
Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?

D H Lawrence, The Mosquito

Calcutta Kaleidoscope

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:59:00 +0000

The recent death of Patrick Swayze resulted in a predictable retrospective of his films on television, including the less well-known “City of Joy”. A monicker bestowed upon Calcutta by Dominique Lapierre to celebrate the optimism of the city, the label was reduced to a mockery in the movie, as Calcutta is portrayed as a cesspool of poverty, corruption and disease.

So engrained is this clichéd view in the minds of travellers that a majority of visitors from abroad are content to make a quick pilgrimage to the Missionaries of Charity en route to a connecting flight to more exotic destinations. When my friend recently invited some of her American colleagues to visit Calcutta, she was shocked not to find a detailed travel guide on the Internet to plan their holiday.

With the above objective in mind, this uncharacteristically long essay will endeavour to introduce the salient sights of this history-steeped city, once known as the second city of the British Empire, to the interested visitor with a day to spare.

The tour begins at Park Street, a major thoroughfare familiar to food and music aficionados. At its intersection with Lower Circular Road, formerly the site of the Maratha Ditch, stands the European Burial Ground (now called the South Park Street Cemetery) marking the very edge of the old White Town. A walk through the well-maintained grounds sheltered by mango trees is like a journey through time, as elaborate mausoleums and monuments dating back to the early eighteenth century bear silent testimony to centuries of change outside. Of particular interest are the tombs of Sir William Jones (scholar extraordinaire and founder of the Asiatic Society), Henry Derozio (firebrand teacher and founder of the Young Bengal movement), Robert Kyd (distinguished botanist and founder of the Botanical Gardens across the Hooghly river), Charles Stuart (whose sepulchre is a curious amalgamation of Christian and Hindu styles), and the young Rose Aylmer (whose untimely death from an excess of pineapples inspired his lover-poet, Walter Savage Landor, to pen his most famous lines).

A westward drive down Park Street will allow fleeting glimpses of the Archbishop’s House, St Xavier’s School, the majestic Queen’s Mansion, The Bengal Club (one-time residence of Lord Macaulay) and The Asiatic Society, until the Chowringhee intersection brings to sight the vast and sprawling Maidan (referred to as Calcutta’s lungs). Driving past it into Cathedral Road juxtaposes budding photographers in an enviable position between the Victoria Memorial on the right and the St Paul’s Cathedral on the left. Completed in 1921, the Victoria Memorial is a virtual obituary to the British Empire with a veritable treasure-house of Victorian memorabilia inside the museum, and a graveyard of viceregal statues in the garden outside.

Turning right beyond the Academy of Fine Arts and Rabindra Sadan places one beside the Presidency General Hospital where Roland Ross conducted his malaria research that landed him the 1902 Nobel Prize for Medicine. An alcove in the wall on the left commemorates his contribution, a stone’s throw away from his research laboratory. Passing by the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, one can take a quick glance at the National Library through Belvedere Road on the left, the former residence of Warren Hastings. Turning right before the ramp to Vidyasagar Setu (the ultra-modern Second Hooghly Bridge), one reaches Strand Road and the beautiful Prinsep Memorial. Dedicated to the assay-master and Indologist who decoded the Brahmi script, the Parthenon-like structure overlooks the circular rail and Prinsep Ghat that offers splendid views of both bridges on a clear day.

Continuing north on Strand Road along the expansive grounds of the new Fort William on the right, one passes the Gwalior Memorial (mockingly called the Pepperpot) on the left. In the distant east across the Maidan is visible the city’s colonial skyline that earned her the sobriquet City of Palaces. In the middle, proudly stands the Ochterlony Monument, a minaret that borrows elements from Egyptian, Syrian and Turkish architecture. A right turn on Auckland Road takes one around the Eden Gardens stadium, the Mecca of Indian cricket, towards the grounds of the Governor House and the beginning of the commercial centre of the city. Esplanade Row West separates the State Legislative House from the Town Hall, the latter being the venue of several public coronations (including Tagore’s Nobel Prize felicitation) and site of Jagadish Bose’s pathbreaking demonstration of wireless microwave communications. Further ahead is the grand Gothic architecture of the Calcutta High Court.

A quick walk through Old Post Office Street brings one to St John’s Church, standing on the former site of Calcutta’s oldest cemetery. While visitors marvel at the ancient pipe organ, stained glass windows and Johann Zoffani’s “The Last Supper”, the real draw is the graveyard that houses the mausoleum of Job Charnock, the East India Company trader credited with founding the city of Calcutta in 1690 from the three villages of Sutanuti, Kolikata and Gobindapur. Also tucked away in a corner is Lord Curzon’s replica of Holwell’s Memorial to the Black Hole victims.

Continuing north on Council House Street allows the General Post Office to be visible on the left, the site of the original Fort William, while north of the Red Tank stands the daunting red-bricked Writers’ Building, the heart of the West Bengal Government’s administrative branch. Turning right on Dalhousie North offers a closer view of this Corinthian façade that hides the Kafkaesque bureaucracy within, as well as the rebuilt St Andrew’s Church that was damaged in the Calcutta siege of 1756. As Dalhousie morphs into Bowbazar Street, the buildings appear to loom a little taller as the streets become narrower, marking the entrance to the original Black Town of Calcutta.

A left turn on College Street brings one to the academic hub of the city, with the renowned institutions of Calcutta Medical College, the University of Calcutta and Presidency College standing almost shoulder to shoulder. An obligatory stop at the famous Coffee House at Albert Hall chronicles the midpoint of the day tour. Despite attempts to renew its ambience, the Coffee House (which has played host to Bengali intellectuals ranging from Satyajit Ray to Amartya Sen) still retains the laissez-faire spirit of its past, with white-turbaned waiters serving non-descript food through a maze of cigarette smoke and chairs to groups of students and artists locked in ardent and animated adda. After a walk through the rows of book stalls hiding nuggets of old and rare documents, one would make their way to Central Avenue to the singular site of the Marble Palace, home of Raja Rajendra Mullick’s family.

Geoffrey Moorhouse’s description of the collection inside as “vast quantities of Victorian bric-a-brac that look as if they were scavenged in job lots from the Portobello Road on a series of damp Saturday afternoons in October” does grave injustice to the mystifying collection of gold clocks, Reubens masterpieces and floor-to-ceiling Belgian mirrors, but does offer a glimpse of Bengali babu culture during the height of the British Raj.

Emerging from the shadows of the claustrophobic collection into the open grounds housing a private zoo, the visitor can head westward towards Chitpore Road, Calcutta’s oldest and longest road, that was once the sole connector of Sutanuti with the Kali temple south of Gobindapur. Today Chitpore Road is one of the busiest arteries in the city, and probably just as narrow—each passing tram along the cobblestoned street throws the chaotic traffic into complete disarray. In the distance, the peaks of the Howrah Bridge (the world’s longest cantilever) play hide-and-seek between the elegant roofs of nineteenth century manors that have seen better days. A few yards to the north is the entrance to Jorasanko Thakurbari, the family residence of Rabindranath Tagore. Maintained by the Rabindra Bharati University, the house evokes the time and traditions of the doyen of Bengal’s renaissance, with many of the rooms preserved the way it was during the poet’s lifetime. Parts of the mansion have been converted into an art museum, while family portraits and rare photographs adorn the walls of other halls.

Time and interest permitting, a quick walk through the houses of the landed gentry of yore in the Pathuriaghata area is a memorable experience, both as an indicator of the accumulated wealth of the past and as a pointer to its transience. Jadulal Mullick’s house on the corner of Pathuriaghata Street (where the mystic and philosopher Ramakrishna Paramhamsa once entered into a spiritual trance) stands as a stark reminder of the ravages of time and fate—the dilapidated garage filled with odds-and-ends once used to house twelve Rolls Royces, although the owner’s preferred mode of transport was a carriage drawn by a pair of zebras from his stable! The narrow lane yields one treasure after another, as huge mansions owned by the Mullicks and the Tagores and the Ghoshes with open courtyards and Ionic columns show up in the unlikeliest corners. But nothing prepares one for the sad sight of the remains of the Tagore Castle, an idiosyncratic tower with turrets inspired by the Windsor Castle—the once elegant building has been so altered and overbuilt in the last fifty years that the beautifully structured balustrades and clock-tower now stand out as oddities.

Venturing further north along Chitpore Road brings one to the famous potters’ colony of Kumartuli. A walk through the narrow lanes and marketplace reveals talented artisans working on rows of life-sized clay deities and busts of the cultural heroes of the day. Built on a foundation of straw and painted carefully by the aged hands of experience, these creations find pride of place in the Durga Puja every autumn when they are worshipped for four days before being immersed in the river in the metaphorical tradition of dust-to-dust.

A return to the heart of the city via Strand Bank Road passes the Nimtala Ghat crematorium, the imposing Old Silver Mint and the famed flower market at Armenian Ghat. The journey ends at the Millennium Park which offers a memorable view of the setting sun over the Hooghly, as the much-maligned city with a million disparate moving parts heals itself for another unpredictable day that would once again confound doomsayers and seem to violate all known laws of nature.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Thus the midday halt of Charnock—more's the pity!
Grew a City.
As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed,
So it spread.
Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built,
On the silt.
Palace, byre, hovel—poverty and pride—
Side by side.

Rudyard Kipling, Tale of Two Cities

Fall of the Mighty

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:10:00 +0000

Ford Motors’ Pinto lives on in automobile infamy not just because it was prone to fiery explosions upon rear-end collisions, but because a 1968 internal memorandum directed the company to live with the design defect as it would cost $121 million to modify the fuel tank, but only an estimated $49 million to compensate future victims.

The evolution of cars from the earliest horseless carriages to a modern vehicle with over 20,000 physical parts is one of wonder and respect. However, the industry has had its inevitable share of bad apples, with designs that have been arrogant, unstable or fragile. The latest to join the Hall of Shame is Toyota Motors who have been forced to recall 9 million vehicles worldwide in less than a year because of flaws with their accelerator pedal and braking system.

Although the gradual decline of General Motors in the last decade paved the path for Toyota to rise to the coveted position of the world’s largest auto-maker, its reign at the summit is likely to be short-lived. With the company having to suspend the sale of eight of its models, the impact is already being felt in the plummeting resale value of Toyota and Lexus models, while rival car companies are attempting to mask their schadenfreude by offering incentives to lure Toyota owners into their showrooms. More importantly, the damage to its brand (built on the twin ideals of quality and reliability) is likely to take longer to recover. A problematic car-part is forgivable in itself, but a company’s denial and obfuscation from a position of hubris is more difficult to forget.

The current unravelling of Toyota’s alleged cover-up is in sharp contrast to the contrition it displayed when defects surfaced with its Lexus 400 launch in 1989. Granted that there are instances when a problem lies with the operator of the vehicle (as in the manufactured scandal with the Audi 5000 in the 1980s), a company’s first line of defence should never be to blame the driver. Toyota’s incompetence in handling the recalls is a case study for what not to do in the face of crisis. It also invalidates Toyota’s kaizen (“continuous improvement”) philosophy, which empowers any worker to halt the assembly line if a flaw is detected, in a culture where loyalty, conformity and discipline are considered synonymous.

While Toyota will have its hands full in the coming months repairing vehicles and restoring its reputation, it will hopefully be a wake-up call for complacent companies who sacrifice innovation and imagination upon hitting a winning formula, and remind them not to take customers for granted.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Five stages of decline:
1. Hubris born of success,
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more,
3. Denial of risk and peril,
4. Grasping for salvation,
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death.

Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall

Holwell’s Monumental Hoax

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:49:00 +0000

John Zephaniah Holwell was a learned but lonely man. A surgeon by training and a magistrate by profession, the 45-year old Irishman had increased the revenue of the British East India Company by rooting out corruption and abuse that the Company's merchants indulged in. This did not win him too many friends among his compatriots, and he lived in an isolated alcove beside the Burial Ground at the southern edge of Calcutta’s White Town.

A half-century after Job Charnock's discovery of the city, Calcutta was still going through growing pains. East Indiaman ships brought in droves of young enterprising Englishmen to this fabled land, attracted by promises of wealth and fortune, but their arrival was typically met with disappointment. With enthusiasm sacrificed to dreary book-keeping, energy dissipated by the burning sun, and movements restricted to the one-square mile area around Fort William (for fear of thugs and tigers), most succumbed to tropical diseases or the temptation to return to their homeland. The few who remained would rise by dint of perseverance to a more exalted position within the Company, operate a private business on the side, and be able to afford luxuries like servants on a scale that would be unimaginable in England.

Holwell's main source of frustration was Roger Drake, the young Acting Governor of Calcutta who was less qualified than himself in all respects. Having being promoted to this position simply because he was the seniormost Company official in the city, Drake's personality was not suited for any rank of leadership. Vain and irresolute, he would compensate for his shortcomings with a disdain for advice and an obstinate assertion of authority. This often led to catastrophic results, as when he offered political asylum to Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah's rival to the throne of Murshidabad. Not surprisingly, this invited the wrath of the Nawab who, already disturbed by the Company’s fortifications, was itching for a reason to rid his land of the “hatmen”.

The 200 kilometre distance between Murshidabad and Calcutta ordinarily took the best part of a month to travel, and progress was considerably slower when accompanied by 30,000 soldiers, 18,000 horses, 2,000 camels, 400 elephants and 80 pieces of cannon. Yet despite adequate warnings of the advance and news of a quick capitulation of the Company's outpost at Cossimbazar, Drake continued to believe that the Nawab would never have the courage to assault Fort William. In reality, the Old Fort was in a state of severe disrepair— the cannons were unused and rusted, the ammunition supply was damp and the Maratha Ditch surrounding Calcutta was shallow and incomplete.

In combination with Drake's dependence on two civilian cronies for military strategy, this ensured that the siege of Calcutta lasted only a couple of days, and in a shameful show of cowardice, Drake abandoned his men and escaped in a ship meant for the evacuation of European women and children. Holwell had no choice but to step into the shoes of the Governor, an opportunity he had long been thirsting for, but quickly realised that the Fort was indefensible. By the morning of 20th June 1756, the white flag of surrender had been hoisted, and Holwell's dreams of an honourable career appeared to have come to an ignoble end.

Siraj-ud-Daulah may have been intensely disliked by both his countrymen and his enemies, but he believed in following strict protocols of battle. That included respect for the defeated, and his only interest in the handful of captured Englishmen was to locate the Company’s treasure that he believed was hidden in the Fort. According to Holwell, the guards decided to take no chances with the prisoners overnight and locked them in the Black Hole room, a makeshift military prison within the Fort’s ramparts. The low-ceilinged cell with two barred windows did not provide sufficient ventilation for a roomful of soldiers, and the heat and humidity of a sultry pre-monsoon night conspired against a number of them as they dropped dead from their injuries and exhaustion.

This unfortunate episode wound up earning a position of mythology to generations of British students who learnt to rely on Holwell’s account of the Black Hole tragedy as an act of barbarism that could only be avenged by establishing an Empire in India. However, as research continues to show, Holwell fabricated much of the details related to the incident— including the number of Englishmen he claimed were enclosed (the Black Hole prison cannot physically fit 146 soldiers). Not only was this killing not reported in any other contemporary account, but Holwell’s testimony to the Company completely glossed over this apparent fact. It was only later in 1758, prior to his return to Calcutta as Governor of Bengal, that he chronicled these events as a “Genuine Narrative”, conferring heroic status on himself, and paid for the creation of an obelisk in memory of those killed on the infamous night. Holwell’s Monument listed only 48 names.

A lot of water has flowed down the Hooghly since then and Holwell’s Monument has long since been destroyed by a combination of the elements, lightning and neglect. During his tenure as Viceroy in the early twentieth century, Lord Curzon built a marble replica of the original obelisk and also marked the precise location of the Black Hole (a narrow alley between today’s General Post Office and the Calcutta Collectorate) with a black memorial tablet. Indian nationalist leaders lobbied for the removal of what they called imperialistic propaganda during the country’s freedom movement, and the damaged tablet was transferred to the neighbouring Postal Museum where it lies out of view in the curator’s office since the facts are still in dispute. Holwell’s Monument now stands in the graveyard of St John’s Church, overlooking the very spot where Holwell’s house once stood, ironically ensuring that his name has attained an immortality that he always craved.

AFTERTHOUGHT

The third July, 1940, is going to be observed in Bengal as Sirajuddowla Day—in honour of the last independent King of Bengal. The Holwell Monument is not merely an unwarranted stain on the memory of the Nawab, but has stood in the heart of Calcutta for the last 150 years or more as the symbol of our slavery and humiliation. That monument must now go.

Subhas Chandra Bose, Forward Bloc Journal

Second Class Language

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 16:57:00 +0000

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the first Minister of Education in independent India, was responsible for establishing the Indian School Certificate Examination (ISCE) as an alternative to the then prevalent Senior Cambridge school-leaving tests. Through the years, the Council for the ISCE has risen in rank to the position of the premier board of school education in India, providing a balanced curriculum that has kept up with the advancement in scientific concepts and social studies.

Unfortunately, all this modernity and forward thinking has come to a grinding halt with the Council’s decision to abolish the need to be successfully examined in a second language in order to graduate. Unlike other regional and central boards, the ISCE system considers English as the first language and requires the examinee to prove proficiency in a second language, typically the regional vernacular. According to the new proposal that will be effective from 2012, a passing grade will not be required in this second language.

Nobody can deny the importance of English as the lingua franca not only of India but of the world, and the ISCE’s emphasis on English as first language has always provided its students a competitive advantage vis-à-vis higher studies abroad, compared to other examination systems. However, it is as important for students to study their mother tongue, both as a means to instil a sense of pride in one’s language and also to expose themselves to the beauty of its literature. While the Council’s argument that they are not advocating the removal of second language studies may hold water in an ideal world, it would be naïve to assume that a high school student would master a subject that has no bearing on their examination grades.

Moreover, with this regressive step the Council appears to support Lord Macaulay’s misguided notion that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. Macaulay’s education policies in the nineteenth century had the effect of churning out literate Indians who were versed in English and Latin but scornful of their own mother tongues. It took the efforts of John Drinkwater Bethune and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar to promote and popularise the study of Indian languages at the school level.

It is said that those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat its mistakes. It is a folly to imagine that an all-round education is complete without learning to appreciate one’s language, and it is to be hoped that wisdom will prevail on the ISCE Council so they may undo their blunder before it is too late.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Ela Saraswati Mahi Tisro Devirmayo Bhuvaha Barhihi Seedantva Stridhaha.
[One should regularly worship one’s motherland, culture and mother tongue because they are the givers of happiness.]

Rig Veda, First Mandala, 13/9

Directionally Challenged

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:44:00 +0000

The old yarn about women nagging a lost husband to stop driving round in circles and ask for directions is becoming increasingly irrelevant in a GPS-powered world. While a built-in navigation system may still be prohibitively expensive, the downward cost spiral of GPS radios has ensured that they are embedded in many mobile phones or are sold as portable navigation devices that adorn the windscreens of automobiles.

Although the global positioning system was developed by the United States Department of Defense for military applications, the technology can now be used freely by anyone-- for scientific (cartography), commercial (CDMA time-synchronisation) or civilian (navigation) purposes. While the use of GPS for navigation has made driving to an unknown location much less of a chore, it has taken away the thrill of pre-planning and the visceral connection with paper maps, besides pushing websites like MapQuest to obsolescence.

Others argue that the dependence on GPS units has led to drivers becoming less aware of their surroundings (missing the wood for the trees), and it is not uncommon to be unable to recall what route had been taken to reach a particular destination. Only time will tell if this has a long-term effect on a human being’s sense of direction, which is surprisingly underdeveloped compared to many animals, birds and insects.

This may not have always been the case. Spatial cognition is remarkably powerful among the Kuuk Thaayorre aboriginal tribe of northern Australia. Not only are they always conscious of the four cardinal directions, but they use absolute (rather than relative) terms in their everyday language. So a Kuuk Thaayorre at a dinner-table is quite likely to say, “Please pass me the dish that is at the north-north-west far end.”

Researchers at Stanford University have recently published an interesting study on how language shapes the way people think. Based on data collected from around the world, they conclude that elements of grammar (whether inanimate objects or verbs are gender-sensitive, as in Russian or some Indian languages) or the idea of time has a bearing on one’s cognitive performance. For instance, the English-speaking world uses horizontal spatial metaphors to represent time (“the best is ahead of us”) , while time is represented by vertical metaphors in Mandarin (tomorrow is a “down-day”, while yesterday is an “up-day”). Similarly, duration of time is referred to by length in English, but by amount in Greek (“long meeting” vis-à-vis “big meeting”).

Interestingly, the connection between time and distance was invoked using Einstein’s Theory of Relativity by Percival Wilde in his adaptation of Fritz Karinthy’s play “The Refund”. The plot revolves around a smart but jobless man returning to his old school and demanding a refund for not being taught anything that would equip him for the real world. He offers to subject himself to an examination to prove his ignorance, and the teachers unite against him to justify all his answers as intelligent and correct, however contrived or nonsensical they may be (“the Thirty Years’ War lasted seven metres long”). Of course, if the play had been set in America (instead of Hungary), the protagonist could have simply hired a lawyer to advise him-- their moral compass rarely deviates from the road to riches.

AFTERTHOUGHT

I keep travelling around the bend
There was no beginning, there is no end
It wasn't born and never dies
There are no edges, there is no size.
But if you don't know where you're going
Any road will take you there.

George Harrison, Any Road

Rosemary's Apartment

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 13:17:00 +0000

The Dakota came to the forefront of the world's collective consciousness when Roman Polanski featured this turn-of-the-century apartment in his first American foray, Rosemary's Baby. Although the building's interior scenes were shot in a Hollywood set, the dark and forbidding exterior lent an appropriate tone to the horror film that remains a nail-biter even forty years later.

Unfortunately, the film did a grave disservice to the popular image of this unique German Renaissance building-- as one of New York's earliest luxury apartments, the Dakota was built in 1884 with engineering principles that were pioneering for its time. These included the use of sound-proofing (the walls are as thick as 28 inches), fire-proofing (to avoid the need for ugly fire-escapes), steam-powered lifts (with separate passenger elevators, service elevators and dumb-waiters), a central boiler room for steam heating and dynamos for electric lighting. The presence of an inner courtyard and the strategic positioning of hallways ensured an efficient play of natural air and light in the fifteen-foot high rooms, a far cry from the sinister and claustrophobic scenes in Rosemary's Baby.

The most fashionable addresses of the time were on the east side of Central Park bordering Fifth Avenue, and therefore the construction of the Dakota on the Upper West Side (which was then as remote and sparsely inhabited as the state of Dakota) was viewed by native residents with amused curiousity, a precursor to the east-side--west-side divide that continues to this day! The Dakota was the brainchild of Edward Clark, who made his fortune as a partner of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and was commonly referred to as "Clark's Folly" since it was believed nobody would want to live in an apartment, especially one with an outrageous two-storeyed roof that had gables, turrets, pyramids, towers, wrought-iron fences, chimneys and flagpoles. Yet, as the building neared completion, all sixty-five flats (ranging in size from four rooms to twenty rooms) had been rented out, and people came from all over to gawk at a building that stood as stately and self-assured as a fort, dominating the western skyline.

In fact, the fame of the building had spread beyond the country's shores. One celebrated incident surrounded the visit of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky to the Dakota flat of his music publisher Gustav Schirmer-- after visiting the roof overlooking the majestic Central Park, Tchaikovsky was left with the impression that the entire building was Schirmer's house and the Park was his private garden. He subsequently noted in his diary, "No wonder we composers are so poor"!

Over the years, and especially after the Dakota became a cooperative in 1961, residents have made innumerable renovations and reconstructions inside, pulling down walls to combine flats as well as dividing the high ceilings horizontally to erect lofts. Many architects feel that this may lead to an eventual weakening of the foundation, and efforts by the New York Landmarks Commission to assign it a heritage status have only succeeded in prohibiting changes to the building's façade. The haphazard changes to the interior have also resulted in corridors (and especially the labyrinths in the eighth and ninth floors) becoming confusing mazes, and old residents talk about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis ringing doorbells of wrong flats as a result of getting lost!

Of course, the Dakota lives on in infamy because of December 8, 1980. As John Lennon and Yoko Ono, arguably the building's most celebrated residents, returned home from a studio session late that night, a man emerged from the shadows of the main gate on West 72nd Street, and emptied bullet after bullet into Lennon's body. The Strawberry Field corner in Central Park, diagonally across from the couple's seventh floor flat, serves as a waking reminder of Lennon's legacy. But to hundreds of tourists who look up from this intimate alcove to the overbearing Dakota, the city's most elegant apartment house will forever be associated with the city's most dastardly and senseless crime.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Dakotans feel about the Dakota much the way, as it has been said, Bostonians feel about Boston: They believe in the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of the Dakota.

Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota

Labour of Love

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 05 May 2009 00:46:00 +0000

I met my niece when she was less than a day old. Swaddled in a striped pink-and-blue blanket that is peculiar to American hospitals, she was the picture of sweet contentment-- a delicate flower that had just bloomed and waiting to enjoy the attention and wonders of the wider world.

Different cultures have different ways to express the axiom that there can be no pleasure without pain. This truth, universal and eternal, is probably prejudiced against women. The excruciating pain that a mother has to undergo before, during, and after childbirth, is only matched by the ecstatic delight in setting her eyes on the newborn. Evolution has ensured that mothers forget most of their agony when they see their healthy baby for the first time, a phenomenon that is referred to as labour amnesia.

In contrast, the closest that a man comes to "suffering" is in certain tribes where the male member practices couvade to sympathise with his wife, although cynics rightfully see this exercise as a get-out-of-jail-free card to avoid the daily responsibilities of work. It is surprising that Nature should not have devised a more equitable way to democratise pain, especially for an age where women are increasingly joining the workforce and contributing to the homefront. Of course, given that the wheels of evolution (like the mills of the gods) grind exceedingly slow yet exceedingly fine, it may not be necessary for the male aborigines of Guiana to fake labour in a few thousand years.

What flits through a baby's mind is a subject that has been much disputed, without a definite conclusion being reached. The sense of wonderment in an infant's eyes (accentuated by their dominating pupils) is not surprising since they are experiencing new unfiltered sensations for the first time in their lives. What astonishes me (and helps retain faith in the mystery of life), however, is a newborn smiling in her sleep at some happy memories from her prenatal days. Our elders call it communicating with the gods, and indeed, when she wakes up to the present with a startle, her large eyes-- wise beyond their age-- appear to have been glimpsing ancient secrets of the unknown.

AFTERTHOUGHT

The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps-- does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumour that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dreams of a dew-washed morning-- the smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps.

Rabindranath Tagore, The Crescent Moon

Tortured Truth

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:16:00 +0000

On 15th July 1944, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that she believed "in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart". Circumstances went on to prove that her faith in the goodness of mankind was misplaced-- less than nine months later, at the age of sixteen, she was allowed to succumb to typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

While Anne's unwavering belief may be attributed to the innocence of youth, more seasoned individuals among us like to share a similar sentiment, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Whether it be early man's use of primitive tools to maintain supremacy among the clan (immortalised in Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of Arthur Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey"), or more sophisticated tactics employed in mass genocide, there appears to be a strong predilection in man to turn to the dark side.

One does not need to be a psychologist (or even its armchair version) to understand that the power over another person's will is the ultimate driver of this misbehaviour. Whether it be a bullying teenager at school, a dominant partner in an unhappy marriage, or a rogue nation throwing its weight around, the positive feedback loop leads the wielder to justify hostile and brutal acts as means to a desired end.

In a famous controlled experiment at Stanford University in 1971, a group of twenty-four healthy undergraduate students were selected to role-play the relationship between prison guards and prisoners. The students quickly adapted to their roles, but the experiment had to be terminated when it was observed that the "guards" were developing genuine sadistic tendencies that crossed the boundaries of accepted (and expected) behaviour causing emotional trauma to their "prisoners". The study thus needed an authority figure (in this case, the Professor) to guard the guards and prevent them from engaging in acts of lawlessness.

Is our self-righteous humanness just a defensive masquerade meant to protect our own selfish well-being? Is humanity a pretentious value that can be discarded whenever it becomes politically prudent? The darker side of human history suggests that the propensity for oppression lies hidden just below the surface, and only societal norms like laws and regulations prevent people from descending into moral anarchy. In the absence of this communal control, even children are not immune to acting out their darkest animal instincts, masterfully portrayed in William Golding's "Lord of the Flies".

And when a state accepts the use of heinous and inhuman acts as official policy, be it Nazi Germany during World War II or America today, it makes a mockery of the values that bind people and nations together. The Nuremberg trials went a long way in condemning the perpetrators of the holocaust; a similar hearing is needed now to punish policy-makers who took liberties with the law and approved the use of torture on prisoners of war.

AFTERTHOUGHT

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 1984

Bungle in the Jungle Habitat

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:02:00 +0000

As you make your way under the gigantic log structure at the entrance, erected to support the "Jungle Habitat" sign thirty-five years ago, a sharp pungent smell assaults the senses momentarily if only as a reminder of what the park once stood for. Nestled among the Norvin Green State Forest and bordered by the Greenwood Lake Airport, this safari-themed park was started by Warner Bros. in 1972 and contained over 1,500 animals, ranging from Indian elephants to Siberian tigers, roaming freely within its 800 acre property. Its twenty-six miles of paved road allowed vehicles to drive through, so that a car's windscreen was all that separated animal from prey.

Although the park had an estimated half-a-million visitors in its opening summer, its success was short-lived, and it closed its gates by the end of 1976. Reasons for its demise are varied and exaggerated, ranging from negative publicity surrounding a few isolated attacks (usually because of visitors not obeying posted rules) to the township shooting down a proposal to expand the park (the fact that traffic to this previously sleepy hamlet had spiked dramatically did not endear the park to local inhabitants). A similar Wild Safari still operates about a hundred miles south, but it is a much tamer version of the original Jungle Habitat, since only giraffes, zebras, deer and ostriches have unlimited access within its grounds.

Today the locked gates have a narrow opening on one side that allows people to squeeze through, and one occasionally comes across people walking their dogs or kids bicycling in gay abandon on a bright sunny day. The approach road rises sharply, offering a majestic view of single-engine aircrafts taking off in the west, and winds down half-a-mile to a 3,000 car parking lot with faded yellow markings on the ground. It also offers an eerie hint of something gone awry-- for the stillness of the spring air and the barrenness of the macadam clearing is not interrupted by a single vehicle.

Jungle Habitat also had a walk-through section that included a petting zoo, an aviary, an otter slide and a toy-train ride. Traces of these are still visible, although the wooden directions at trail intersections have had their lettering erased by the elements of nature. As one walks through the tunnels that once witnessed shrieks of delightful laughter from children experiencing a first echo, the only sound that pierces the silence today is that of a gurgling stream running by a crumbling ticket-office. Beyond it lies the collapsed aviary, an animal graveyard, and train lines in a clearing half-buried by dry leaves. It is oddly unnerving to lose oneself along the perfectly preserved paths, enveloped by a serene silence that accentuates the sensation of trespassing into a civilisation that met an untimely death, before being brought back to the present by the rude sound of returning aeroplanes.

Towns often preserve vestiges of questionable historical significance to build a feeling of pride and unity. Jungle Habitat does not fall into this category as it is not old enough to create its own mythology, and moreover because it has been allowed to fall into ruin. Yet, walking through its empty grounds, I felt a keen sense of living history around me, almost as if the simple act of shutting my eyes would transport me back in time and help spot an animal in the wild. As I exited past the visitors' kiosk, still adorning the corporate logo of a lion travelling on top of a Jeep, I could not help thinking that this was a park that even Time had forgotten all about.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free.
The herds are shut in byre and hut -
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
O hear the call! Good Hunting, All
That keep the Jungle Law!

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

Rekindling Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:36:00 +0000

Amazon's incarnation of the electronic book reader has made reading de rigueur again. Enthusiasts have long bemoaned the fact that reading would become the inevitable casualty of the turf wars waged by the movie and gaming industries, both of which were determined to conquer the limited leisure that society allows a full-time worker today. The decline in circulation of newspapers and magazines, budget cuts for public libraries and closures of mom-and-pop bookstores seemed to support the conclusion that readership in America is on a downward spiral.

Into such a bearish market had entered the electronic book reader, spearheaded by Amazon (with their global domination of titles) and Sony (with their unparalleled prowess in electronics design). And lo-and-behold, despite prohibitive prices and economic uncertainty, buyers have come streaming in to buy these plastic and metal wonders, attracted by their capability to store hundreds of titles and, increasingly, their natural ink-on-paper quality of display. In the process, the victim has been the familiarity of a printed page and the sensations it evokes-- the texture of paper against the skin, the evolving typefaces and illustrations that please the eye, and the delightful smell that overwhelms the olfactory senses.

There are good arguments in favour of going electronic-- saving trees, saving space, saving transportation-- and supporters have made all of them. Many point to the way Apple's music player revolutionised the music industry and conclude that electronic readers will similarly re-engage the reading public. However, this is a textbook case of comparing apples with oranges, and unless today's e-book readers evolve, it is unlikely that they will come close to replicating the success of the former.

Despite all its defects, Apple's music distribution system (through their iTunes store) introduced the concept of micropayments, allowing listeners to purchase a single song, instead of the entire album sold by traditional record stores. Even though the music industry would be loathe to admit it, this probably had a greater impact in reducing music piracy than the wanton lawsuits that record companies engaged in. No such parallel exists in the world of books-- it is not possible to legally download a favourite poem or a single copyrighted short story. Electronic book sellers have so far been aggressively undercutting the prices of electronic titles compared to their printed versions, but this phenomenon may very well be transient.

An enormous factor in the popularity of MP3 players was the ability to transfer one's personal music collection to the portable player with minimal cost (usually by expending time). With books, on the other hand, there is no simple way to digitise the contents, and existing owners would be forced to buy a digital copy of the same title should they desire to read it electronically. A similar problem had arisen with vinyl manufacturers in the wake of the MP3 player's popularity earlier this decade, and many record companies rose to the occasion by including a digital copy of the music with the vinyl album. Budget USB-based turntables were also introduced that allowed analogue music to be digitised. Unless the publishing industry adopts a similar creative approach (perhaps by tying up with Google who spent the last two years scanning and digitising books from twenty libraries worldwide), it would not address the hesitation of book-lovers to take the leap.

The ability to download music through a cellular or broadband connection meant that the music player was no longer tethered to the computer, and this had a huge effect in popularising portable players. In this respect, Amazon's devices hold a distinct advantage over Sony's in having an embedded wireless broadband card that allows books to be downloaded in seconds from anywhere in the United States (disclaimer: the author worked on this underlying wireless technology). However, in forcing the reader to buy exclusively from their website and imposing digital rights management (DRM), Amazon runs the risk of becoming a monopoly at a time when other industries are moving towards an open-source, system-agnostic environment. Ironically, Amazon had led the movement against Apple's practice of selling DRM-encoded music!

Finally, in the wake of the popularity of e-book readers, the publishing industry needs to re-evaluate their business model and borrow ideas from other prevailing media. Periodic distribution of free stories or book samples might generate enough interest in the reader to buy the entire book, either paper or digital (much like the effect of listening to a hit new song on the radio). Another practice could be to allow reading new books wirelessly on the reader without reserving the right to store it (similar to streaming music or video on the Internet). There is also an untapped market to "lend" a time-limited digital book at a fraction of the purchase price, along the lines of a video rental. This may also help tying devices to libraries other than Amazon's, who in turn could subsidise the cost of readers (like some newspaper conglomerates are reportedly planning).

Thus, unless the publishing industry and the device manufacturers come together and work on an open architecture of distribution and format, electronic book readers are likely to remain proud heirlooms of either the occasional traveller or the gadget geek. And having used a Sony Reader over several months, I can safely affirm with the rest of the reading public, that nothing is more satisfying than curling up in bed with the latest paperback, without worrying that the book may get destroyed if one accidentally dozes off!

AFTERTHOUGHT

Shelved rows of books warm and brighten the starkest room, and scattered single volumes reveal mental processes in progress, books in the act of consumption, abandoned but readily resumable, tomorrow or next year. By bedside and easy chair, books promise a cozy, swift and silent release from this world into another, with no current involved but the free and scarcely detectable crackle of brain cells. For ease of access and speed of storage, books are tough to beat.

John Updike, Books Unbound, Life Unravelled

Farewell to Anti-Intellectualism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 05:46:00 +0000

Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate who lost two successive runs for the President's Office in the 1950s, was once told by an admirer that he had the vote of every thinking American. To which he responded, "That is not enough-- I need a majority."

The end of the gruelling election season and the rise of its charismatic winner has restored faith in politics and justice among many Americans. While the world jubilates at the falling of racial barriers, a sizeable population is hopeful that the new president will usher in an era of American intellectualism that has all but disappeared under the current occupant of the White House.

Despite the fact that the United States arguably houses the largest number of top Universities, research laboratories and other academic institutions, one of the insults that has gained ground in the last several years is the misuse, and possible abuse, of the term "elite". In sociological circles, elitism is used to describe a minority group that enjoys privileged status, usually due to the possession of power or money. Americans are somewhat unique in also using the term to describe one's educational level, with these achievements being a source of mockery in political circles. The public's preference for folksy presidents who make good beer-companions explains why highly educated presidents like Nixon and Clinton routinely self-deprecated their laurels.

While it is tempting and somewhat simplistic to point towards the prevailing infotainment culture for the intellectual black-hole that American society finds itself in, even serious media cannot be absolved of their portion of blame. One of the oddest features of the American news media that strikes an outsider is their sense of bogus objectivity which assumes truth is always equidistant from two points, according equal importance to both sides of an argument regardless of their intrinsic merits. Effects of this variety of forced impartiality result in an environment where a literal interpretation of the Old Testament, for instance, is offered as a legitimate alternative to the scientific theory of evolution. Oversimplification of issues not only robs them of their complexities and associated human costs, but also paints a picture in garish black and white which is a far cry from the colourful image it is supposed to truthfully portray.

Only time will tell if the inauguration will be a precursor to a new age of intellectual curiousity, respect for the sciences and abandonment of dogma. Of course, intellectual ability does not equate to administrative skills, as evident from the disastrous presidency of Woodrow Wilson (formerly the president of Princeton University) and the ancient reign of Emperor Nero (who literally fiddled while Rome burnt to the ground). However, there is no harm in hoping that the fullest capacity of human intellect will no longer need to be sheltered in the shadows of academic buildings. And the election of the new president, who is undeniably black and unabashedly brainy, means that history has been made in more ways than meets the eye.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin'

Ramapo Trials

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 12:49:00 +0000

My first encounter with the Ramapo Indians was at the première of "Toxic Legacy" at the New Jersey Film Festival two summers ago. The documentary was produced by "The Record" to accompany the newspaper's exposé of Ford's complicity in contaminating the watersheds of northern New Jersey by dumping sludge and other industrial waste from their erstwhile Mahwah plant in the surrounding areas of Stag Hill, Hillburn and Ringwood. Coincidentally or not, all three towns have significant concentrations of these Native American Indians.

The 5000-people strong Ramapo community share their ancestry with Lenape Indians and Dutch soldiers who fought the colonists during the American Revolutionary War. After the defeat of the British, many of the mercenaries deserted their ranks and took refuge in the Ramapo mountains, where the inaccessible and inhospitable terrain shielded them from capture, but eventually isolated them from the frenetic pace of development in New York City, only thirty miles away. Although the Ramapo people formed the backbone of the mining activities that thrived in the Ringwood area, they still hold on to their traditional ways, such as fishing and hunting rabbits and deer. Their distrust of the "white man" has also been responsible for the myths circulating around them, including the pejorative use of the term "Jackson Whites" (allegedly a contraction of Jacks, or freed slaves, and Whites) in referring to them.

Even though the states of New Jersey and New York acknowledge the Ramapo as a Native American Indian tribe, they have not been granted federal recognition and all the benefits that accompany it, as a consequence of successful lobbying by big gambling interests. David Cohen's sympathetic study of the mountain people, while denying that they have direct Native Indian heritage, offers instances of the prejudice and discrimination that the Ramapo Indians have had to face, including segregated schools and churches as late as the mid-20th century. However, all these struggles pale into insignificance when compared to the injustice they have been meted out by unbridled corporate greed that has polluted their land and water. A visit to Peters Mine today, which had 17 levels and reached 2000 feet underground, is shocking not only because the huge honeycomb of shafts, tunnels and caverns has been stuffed with toxic paint sludge and automobile parts, but because it is a mere stone's throw away from the ramshackle company houses that are inhabited by the Ramapo Indians. Prolonged exposure to these pollutants has resulted in this community having a much higher incidence of cancer and asthma, even while the Environmental Protection Agency has declared the area off-bounds as a Superfund site.

The Ramapo mountain people, who had come out in full force to the film's screening, dominated the question-and-answer session with the director trying to unearth the truth behind successive mishandled government clean-up operations and repeated cover-ups by Ford. While it was heartbreaking to watch the families trying to come to terms with the greed and corruption that have wreaked havoc on their lives and livelihood, it also highlighted the need for another Erin Brockovich to take on the corporate behemoth that is responsible for this callous disregard of humanity and destruction of nature.

AFTERTHOUGHT

No, I'll not take the half,
Give me the whole sky! The far-flung earth!
Seas and rivers and mountain avalanches--
All these are mine! I'll accept no less!

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, No, I'll Not Take the Half

Godless Capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:48:00 +0000

Death, and taxes, have traditionally been the great levellers of society. This week, however, as news of laid-off Wall Street accountants dominated the airwaves, the vagaries of the economy emerged as a powerful equaliser of wealth. Faith in the free market may have been shaken by this financial crisis, but it also forces one to objectively reevaluate the culture of laissez-faire economics.

While frenzied fingers point in different directions to find a scapegoat, one is reminded of the old Nigerian saying that when one points a finger at somebody, there are three fingers pointing towards oneself. The current meltdown was orchestrated by the environment of deregulation that has been sweeping American markets for the last couple of decades. The theory was that competition would automatically convert a free-market into a fair-market, and a stable equilibrium would be maintained between the seller and the buyer, the employer and the employee, the lender and the borrower. Unfortunately, anybody remotely familiar with the tragedy of the commons knows that, without the supervision of a law-enforcer, human greed will always prioritise selfish gain over societal good.

The same is true for the free market. As is becoming increasingly clear, left to their own devices, the unregulated financial industry did not accomplish the goal of self-policing that would have provided long-term benefits to its employees, its shareholders and to society. On the contrary, the cumulative effect of years of malfeasance was so far-reaching that, ironically, big-government needed to be called in to save the day. Such an instance of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose would have been less likely in the presence of a government oversight body entrusted with the responsibility of raising flags for dicey transactions. Of course, a free market economy would allow a private company to make a risky investment, if it is approved by its board, but it should not expect to be saved by taxpayers if the deal sours.

Unfortunately, the ideology of deregulation is not just limited to the financial market. For instance, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, father of modern American capitalism, had argued for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration since, in his view, no private company would gamble with the health of its consumers. Although the FDA survived his campaign, years of budget cuts and gradual asphyxiation have rendered the watchdog as ineffective as a toothless tiger and the recent food contamination scandals demonstrate that faith in the moral compass of merchants is misplaced.

Paradoxically, most proponents of free markets, who dismiss the need for rules and regulations in the financial world, do not hesitate to sneer at a communist for believing that there is no need for a God who governs the lives of men.

AFTERTHOUGHT

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own.

Coldplay, Viva la Vida