The most pressing problem facing this country? Beef consumption.

Manmohan Singh recently commented on the results of a national survey by the Naandi Foundation that found that 42% of the children in this country are malnourished; he called it a national shame (that amounts to one out of every three malnourished children in the world). We’ve also recently learnt that the average Indian schoolkid fares slightly better than a Kyrgyz schoolkid at maths, science and reading. If this is news to you, it turns out you’ve just not been paying attention. The 2001 National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau report says pretty much the same thing. This was a decade ago. Yes, it’s good we’ve finally noticed, but that doesn’t make it news. The NNMB report also says that 37% of the adult population has a body-mass index (BMI) of below 18.5 – the clinical definition of chronic malnourishment. Moreover, the WHO’s definition of famine is that 40% of the population of a region be severely malnourished – Binayak Sen calls us a country living through a state of stable famine.

The above list, while shameful and depressing, isn’t even an exhaustive list of food-security related problems facing this country.

So what do you suppose the people running this country are most up in arms about? If you guessed cow-slaughter and how best to punish people who eat beef, you’re right. You may now award yourself a shameful bow. the people of Madhya Pradesh have given themselves a law banning all sale and possession of beef, with punishment that this country otherwise reserves only for its rapists and murderers. This in addition to Karnataka’s bill banning cow-slaughter which is now sure to also get the President’s assent (with presidents like these…). These laws allow police officers to raid and search premises on the suspicion that an offence may take place:

The Centre felt that raiding premises merely on the assumption that an offence is “likely” could be misused and recommended that such power be limited to cases when an offence had taken place or was taking place. The amended legislation has disregarded the recommendation.

The blatant disregard for minority opinion, civil liberty, and any trace of sense apart, this law affects the poor disproportionately – beef is the cheaper than almost any other meat. Calling this communal legislation is stating the obvious. Calling it legislating taste (a la Bill Maher) is more insightful, although it does nothing to help somebody being harassed by the local police officer for the suspicion of possession of beef.

Beef is now more contraband than a kilogram of ganja or 100 grams of hashish (punishment for possession of < 1kg ganja or < 100gms of hashish : Rs. 10,000 fine or 6 months in prison). Stash your beef away safely.

Dr. Binayak Sen at IISc

Concern – IISc, have managed to get Dr. Binayak Sen to come to IISc and give a talk – they call it ‘A Discussion with Binayak Sen’. The event is to be held in the Materials Engineering Auditorium today, Wednesday 18th January. It is quite something that people at IISc have done this. I of course will attend. It will be an honour to meet the man. I hope to get to ask him a question, the beginnings of an answer (a resolution, perhaps?) are already in my head.

There has been an ongoing debate on the institution of a Lokpal to curb corruption. Several protests, riots and fasts later, it is still predominantly an urban middle-class movement. The way you’d know that it is an urban-middle-class movement is by looking at what the definition of corruption being used amounts to: it deals merely with people being ticked off at having to pay their local venal government official. And while there is far too much of this for anybody’s liking, this says nothing at all about the staggering economic divide that exists in this country.

If every government office starts functioning honestly tomorrow, can we declare this country – one where half the people don’t have access to basic sanitation, where two out of five children are malnourished – free of corruption? Are these problems not symptomatic of the same malaise that also gives us epic-ally bad corruption ratings? Can we hope for a solution to the problem of corruption without bothering about the gaping class divide? Or can we hope to bridge the divide if we don’t allow for representation from the masses we seek to liberate (or, god forbid, the heathen we seek to civilise) ?

Like P. Sainath says, the hubris that is involved in assuming that a Nobel laureate is fit to decide policy for the governance of India is staggering.

I’m hoping Dr. Binayak Sen has something to say about the Lokpal debate.

NOTE: If you live on the JNC campus, special transport for this talk has been arranged. The bus leaves at 5pm.

(Non-vegetarian) Food for Thought

In the mid 20^th century, as the cities in America became increasingly multi-racial, middle class families that lived in the cities decided to up and go somewhere else. “White flight” is what the mass exodus of predominantly white middle class families from the cities in America to suburban and exurban regions is called.

As a result of white-flight, American suburbs became bubbles where people grew up not knowing the baggage of slavery that black America carries, if for no other reason than that there weren’t any black people around. This has the peculiar effect that for somebody who grew up in suburban America without encountering racism, affirmative action today seems like racism against white people.

There is an analogy to be drawn between this effect of white flight and what has happened in the Indian context. For people of my generation who have grown up in educated households in India’s cities, casteism is an alien concept. Nobody in my family cares what caste my friend I’ve brought home for lunch is from. Caste simply isn’t something that we use to define people. It is easy for somebody who has grown up in an environment such as this to forget the emotional baggage that centuries of untouchability carries.

In consequence, regardless of how disproportionate the representation of the upper castes in high office, positions of power, and wealth and education in this country gets, people who have grown up in cities in our generation will see caste-based reservation as ‘reverse-casteism’ – casteism against the upper castes. Centuries of history are relegated to the friendly neighbourhood liberal historian’s next textbook.

A recent incident demonstrates this all too well for my comfort. There has been a demand that non-vegetarian food that is cooked on the JNC campus be cooked in a separate kitchen, and served in separate utensils. If that sounds unbelievable, I know the feeling. The most troubling part about this demand is that it has nothing to do, even ostensibly, with hygiene or taste but with how some people find the very idea of non-vegetarian food icky.

Vegetarianism in India is by and large handed to people by virtue of what religion and/or caste they happen to belong to (or happen to have belonged to: I know people who no longer identify with either the religion or the caste that they were given into by birth, but retain their vegetarianism). The ickiness that people feel about non-vegetarian food is, therefore, also given to them. More pertinently, how far people are willing to go to relieve themselves of this discomfort is symptomatic of their having grown up in the bubbles that are affluent upper-caste households in India’s cities. (It could of course be that people say these things because they don’t care all that much about political correctness. The argument I’m making is nevertheless valid because most people do care about political correctness.)

My beef (ha!) with this sort of thing isn’t limited to demands that separate utensils be used for non-vegetarian food in a common canteen. It’s actually deeper than that. I remember a demand in college that a separate vegetarian-only mess be created on campus. There were more than enough people willing to join this mess for the caterer to run the mess profitably. Some of us saw a problem with letting people seal themselves away from all diversity of creed, and with subsidising this process with public money. That I couldn’t have articulated why I thought the vegetarian-only mess was a bad idea (even) as well as I can now didn’t stop me from trying. It did, however, stop me from succeeding.

People enter college as adolescents; the education one gets is supposed to convert them into adults capable of critical thought, able to act their role in society. College should be a place where people make friends with people from other cultural and social backgrounds, where people learn to think beyond the ponds they’ve grown up to think the world of. Grad-school should be much more so.

Whether the demand is that people be allowed to cloister themselves into parochial groups that shun diversity or that all traces of diversity be sidelined even in the common environment, the effects are the same. There is nothing anti- or extra- legal about these demands, especially if there isn’t any public money involved. However, as public policy, they must be discouraged as strenuously as possible. A society that loses its diversity has nothing left to lose.

If the demand that separate utensils be used to cook non-vegetarian food were nothing more than a request that gravies of different types not be put together, one might be inclined to agree. But calling it that would be to call the American invasion of Iraq an attempt to free the Iraqi people: however plausible or otherwise you think the cover-story is, you just know that it isn’t the whole story.

Where does this end? Is there a line here which we are sure will not be crossed? If today we allow for non-vegetarian food to be cooked and served separately because some people can’t stand non-vegetarian food, what stops us from asking tomorrow that people eating non-vegetarian food not sit at the same tables as others? It will never get to that point, you might say, and I’d agree – at that point, nobody could deny that this was untouchability.

The point of being educated and in an institution of higher learning, surely, is to realise that this is what is happening, and to do it now.

Am I back?

Sort of…

My last post was well over a year ago. I hope to come back to blogging in the near future, although I will still not put blogging front and centre in life. Several things have happened in 2011, which I will hopefully get opportunities to get to.

We’ll start with something I wrote in response to a demand that non-vegetarian food be segregated in JNC’s student hostel.

Binayak Sen, the traitor.

I had no intention of writing something on the blog this soon after the last post. Something’s happened, however, that I’ve tried to not get worked up about, and failed – miserably. Apart from being a one-off then, this post is also going to be an outpouring. I apologise if it isn’t as well-written as it can be.

A court in Raipur convicted Dr. Binayak Sen of treason and sentenced him to life in prison. The doctor, a gold medallist at CMC Vellore, and a paediatrician who works to provide healthcare to people in the least developed parts of Chattisgarh, and who is also the Vice-President of the PUCL, was charged with treason for carrying messages from a naxal leader to the maoists. That the charges are completely bogus would be an understatement. That Binayak Sen is being hounded by a police state that wants to enforce the draconian act that is the inland version of the AFSPA is plain for everybody to see.

And see it people do.

Former CJIs AM Ahmadi and VN Khare have said the verdict is stupid, in so many words. Amnesty International has called the verdict a dangerous precedent. The point that ‘sedition’ or, as one reporter and apparently the judge who handed down the verdict put it, ‘rajdroh’ is a relic from a different age at best, violates the freedom of speech that the constitution purports to guarantee, and is used whenever convenient has also been made.

The doctor’s statement before the court is a hallmark of his – and I could not mean this more of anybody else – nobleness.

And then this happens: the Union Minister for Law, Veerappa Moily, chastises the former judges who expressed concerns about the sentence meted out to Binayak Sen. The minister’s argument:

[...]such utterances could influence the judiciary and create “confusion” [...] one must “bow down” before the verdict unless it is set aside by a higher court. [...] Persons who have held very responsible position in the judiciary, they will have to consider that their statements can tomorrow influence the mind of a judge or a magistrate. He will think that a former judge of a High Court or the Supreme Court or a chief justice is commenting upon this, then should I give a judgement. To that extent, it may influence the independent mind of a judge, which will not be fair. It will not be just[.]

It will not be ‘just’ that people speak out against a judgement that is not only brutal, but also lacking legal merit. At least until a higher court sets aside the verdict. Because these pesky people who point out the umpteen number of ways the judgement is stupid might make a better judge realise exactly how stupid the judgement is. How can that be allowed?

And, just to be sure, this business in jurisprudence of consulting the opinions of former judges on similar cases? It’s called legal precedent. Maybe the minister should look it up.

Oh, and if the higher court happens to cite “the collective conscience of the society” that “will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender”, tough luck, I guess. We wouldn’t want to unjustly and unfairly influence the legal process, would we?

An announcement and an apology

The following is entirely off-the-cuff; so I fully expect it to sound like blabbering. I haven’t been writing here too often of late. I have been otherwise occupied, let’s say. There’s been somewhat of a steady decline in how much I write here, and I see no point in making the blog a link-collection. There’s a lot I want to write about which I don’t think I’ll do justice.

This, then, will be the last post until I get some things at work sorted out. Which, if it happens, I don’t expect will take inordinately long. It’s another matter if it doesn’t happen at all; but then the blog will be the least of my concerns. You are welcome to think of this as a winter hiatus. With that out of the way…

I read about this work from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), which is quite inventive. A bunch of people from the electronics and the agriculture departments have come together to use the Tobacco Mosaic Virus to create high-performance batteries. Technically, they’re only using the outer shell of the virus, which like most interesting things today is nano-sized.

They coat the outer shell with nickel and use the tenfold increase in surface area over a plane surface that happens because of this to act as the current carrier in a battery. These batteries will be smaller for the same power output, and can be scaled up to meet large demands, they say. They also expect this type of battery to be longer lasting, and cheaper to produce. I haven’t put in any links here, but the story is from PhysOrg, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find it.

I thank you for reading. I hope to be back soon.

The Aliens have sprouted!

I took this picture a while ago. I thought the ‘craters’ looked suspicious and everything, but didn’t do anything about it:

[aliens]

[/aliens]

You see, this is what happens when you see a problem but do nothing about it. The only thing needed for aliens to start to sprout is for good people to do nothing!

[sprouting]

[/sprouting]

Do it yourself: Laptop powered dawn

The human brain is considered the most complicated object in the universe, with its 100 billion neurons and more (possible) connections than the number of elementary particles in the known universe. It should surprise nobody, then, that the process by which this organ of seemingly infinite complexity refreshes itself, reboots as it were, is also very well studied. I allude, of course, to sleep.

I will not say anything about sleep itself here; one because I don’t know nearly enough to even start, and two, because I want the liberty, today,  of not having to get everything factually right. So take this as a disclaimer that the following is just something interesting that I’ve observed with myself that I think you can repeat, but that I make no other claims.

That the brain is never fully ‘off’, that it never fully shuts down, is well-known. The brain is responsive to external stimuli even during sleep. This is how, for example, an alarm clock can awaken you. This is also how you can get ‘used to’ an alarm clock – if you don’t ‘want’ to get up someday, your brain is capable of ignoring the wails of the alarm clock. (Incidentally, I think this usually happens using some sort of confabulation. Go look up ‘confabulation‘ in the context of neuroscience!)

The following is an experiment that you can try on yourself when you feel like it. You will need to have a regular sleep cycle for this to work, though. I apologise if that rules out pretty much anybody who reads this blog! Anyway, if you have a regular sleep cycle, and sleep in a room which has some sort of window by which sunlight can get in, at dawn, this should work for you. This is a nice way of seeing how the brain responds to external stimuli even when one might think it has shut itself down.

A laptop is a good way of doing this, but I would wager that any light source whose intensity you can vary should work. Put your laptop facing you, preferably from the direction of the window in your room (you’ll see why shortly). You’ll have to arrange to have the display on throughout the night. You’ll have to also turn the brightness of the laptop display down as far as you can. If you do all this, you will see that you will consistently get up an hour or two earlier than you usually do (this is where the necessity that you have a regular sleep cycle comes in).

Do you see why?

Here’s the explanation I’ve cobbled up: at some point in the early morning, the ambient lighting in your room goes up beyond that you are used to getting up to. However, this happens earlier than usual because there’s already the light from the laptop. I usually get up at 7 am. If I keep my laptop on throughout the night at the lowest brightness setting, I can consistently get up at about 4:15.

Try it yourself and see if it works for you!

The end is not near, it’s here.

My interview for admission into the PhD programme at JNCASR was today, this morning, just now. You know what they say about deer in headlights? Yeah.

Anyway, there are always a good and a bad side to any story. The good side, in this case, is that the blog will be back to normal programming very soon. I will leave the bad side unsaid, and leave it to you to figure out what it is. As stopgap, here are a few things that might keep you occupied, until tomorrow, when ‘normal programming’ resumes.

1) Wikileaks, that truly noble organisation if there ever was one, is starting a mass-mirroring effort. The entire site is only a few GB in size, apparently, and people with servers can form a sort of cloud-server for the information that is going to be leaked. I got none of the other technical details, but perhaps you will. This is apart from grad students being warned not to bring up wikileaks on social networking sites, and after wikileaks was deserted by paypal, by amazon.com and by its DNS provider. [Hat Tip: Slashdot]

2) In less depressing news, it seems that electrons have ‘strength and honour’ too! I can now totally imagine the following to-and-fro:

- ‘Our switches will block out the flashlamp.’

- ‘Then we will fight in the shade!’

[/fuck electrons]

3) Here’s a really nice picture of the city of Paris. It’s from Black and White, who’ve taken it from somebody’s flickr page. I’ve linked the photo straight to the flickr page of the photographer.

Of Bongs and Tams

Stephen Fry has a characteristically witty and self-effacing take on people who write regularly for a column of some sort out of compulsion – monetary or otherwise. When you get lazy or simply have nothing else to talk about, or both, there is a tendency to fall into this trap of venting about something that just happened to irk you. Stephen Fry calls it pining for the milkman’s cheery whistle – it’s the sort of article that practically writes itself.

It’s the easiest thing to do, is to angrily rant about something trivial, that seems to trouble nobody but you, and which even you might find silly on a less-worked-up day. I am not being lazy here, but I am trying to get something written and to get on with studying StatMech for, well, for StatMech. I’ve always wanted to read StatMech and I’m finally getting to do it now. Anyway, back to the rant: What of Bongs and Tams, you ask? Completely mindful of the fact that this is going to sound like the dickishness of an absolute pillock, here it is.

I was on the (crowded) bus back to IISc from JNC, and there was this portly Bong fellow who bobbed on into the bus and to the seat right behind me. While this in itself would’ve been no problem but for the five seconds the bus shook a bit when he performed said bobbing-about, something else was. The fellow can’t be shut up. He has a million things to say. And he has absolutely no concept of an indoor voice*.

He’s twenty-five years old, for crying out loud. How old do you think somebody has to be before they learn that 100 dB is not how loud conversations inside a closed tin box have to be? How hard can it be to understand that not everybody on the fucking bus wants to know how much you liked the chicken curry? The moron has all the sense of privacy of a raw potato. Not only does he not care about you listening in on his conversation, he practically makes you listen.

I’ve seen this often enough with Bongs that I am going to make the (patently silly) generalisation that all Bongs are indoor-voice* impaired. The only other people who seem to be this way are Tams. They have no concept of an inside voice either. None. Adult men and women talking about things that nobody but they could possibly be interested in, at the top of their voices.

And to top it all, the traffic was murderous. I endured a full forty-five minutes of nonsense yelled in a voice that can’t charitably be compared with a frog’s croaking.

‘Double damn with an extra side-order of damn!’.

[hr]

---

[/hr]

 

* This is what happens when you let an article write itself. I meant ‘indoor’ voice, as in speech in a volume appropriate for an enclosed space, not ‘inside’ voice, as in schizophrenia.