Root Privileges

Culture

The mission that was 110% successful

Caution: Satire.

On October 2, Kailash S., the chairman of the Indian Wonderful Research Organisation (IWRO), announced that the Moonyaan mission had become a 110% success. At an impromptu press conference organised inside the offices of India Day Before Yesterday, he said that the orbiter was performing exceptionally well and that a focus on its secondary scientific mission could only diminish the technological achievement that it represented.

Shortly after the lander, carrying a rover plus other scientific instruments, crashed on the Moon’s surface two weeks ago, Kailash had called the mission a “90-95% success”. One day after it became clear Moonyaan’s surface mission had ended for good and well after IWRO had added that the orbiter was on track to be operational for over five years, Kailash revised his assessment to 98%.

On the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, Kailash upgraded his score because despite the lander’s failure to touchdown, it had been able to descend from an altitude of 120 km to 2.1 km before a supposed thruster anomaly caused it to plummet instead of brake. “We have been analysing the mission in different ways and we have found that including this partially successful descent in our calculations provides a more accurate picture of Moonyaan’s achievement,” Kailash said to journalists.

When a member of a foreign publication prodded him saying that space doesn’t exactly reward nearness, Kailash replied, “I dedicate this mission to the Swachh Bharat mission, which has successfully ended open defecation in India today.” At this moment, Prime Minister A. Modern Nadir, who was sitting in front of him, turned around and hugged Kailash.

When another journalist, from BopIndia, had a follow-up question about whether the scientific mission of Moonyaan was relevant at all, Kailash responded that given the givens, the payloads onboard the orbiter had a responsibility to “work properly” or “otherwise they could harm the mission’s success and bring its success rate down to the anti-national neighbourhood of 100%”.

On all three occasions – September 7, September 22 and October 2 – India became the first country in the world as well as in history to achieve the success rates that it did in such a short span of time, in the context of a lunar mission. Thus, mission operators have their fingers crossed that the instruments won’t embarrass what has thus far been a historical technological performance with a corresponding scientific performance with returns of less than 110%.

Finally, while Moonyaan has elevated his profile, Kailash revealed his plan to take it even higher when he said the Heavenyaan mission would be good to go in the next 30 months. Heavenyaan is set to be India’s first human spaceflight programme and will aim to launch three astronauts to low-Earth orbit, have them spend a few days there, conducting small experiments, and return safely to Earth in a crew capsule first tested in 2014.

IWRO has already said it will test semi-cryogenic engines – to increase the payload capacity of its largest rocket so it can launch the crew capsule into space – it purchased from an eastern European nation this year. Considering all other components are nearly ready, including the astronauts who have managed with the nation’s help to become fully functioning adults, Heavenyaan is already 75% successful. Only 35% remains, Kailash said.

In financial terms, Heavenyaan is more than 10-times bigger than Moonyaan. Considering there has been some speculation that the latter’s lander couldn’t complete its descent because mission operators hadn’t undertaken sufficiently elaborate tests on Earth that could have anticipated the problem, observers have raised concerns about whether IWRO will skip tests and cut corners for Heavenyaan as well as for future interplanetary missions.

When alerted to these misgivings, Nadir snatched the mic and said, “What is testing? I will tell you. Testing is ‘T.E.S.T.’. ‘T’ stands for ‘thorough’. ‘E’ for ‘effort’. ‘S’ for ‘sans’. ‘T’ for ‘testing’. So what is ‘test’? It is ‘thorough effort sans testing’. It means that when you are building the satellite, you do it to the best of your ability without thinking about the results. Whatever will happen will happen. This is from the Bhagavad Gita. When you build your satellite to the best of your ability, why should you waste money on testing? We don’t have to spend money like NASA.”

Nadir’s quip was met with cheers in the hall. At this point, the presser concluded and the journalists were sent away to have tea and pakodas*.

*Idea for pakodas courtesy @pradx.

Sep 24, 2019
To fail with grace

This article has been republished on The Wire.

When the Vikram lander’s autonomous descent manoeuvre didn’t go as planned, scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) looked surprised and dejected at once in the mission control room in Bengaluru. There was the gentle, thoughtful reminder at the back of everyone’s minds, ready to prance at the first outward sign of sorrow, that the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter was still functional and whose scientific payload could still salvage the mission’s dignity.

But surrounding this quietude in all directions was a maelstrom of emotions, reflecting a spiritual struggle to make peace with what had just happened. The prime minister himself, in attendance at the centre for the potentially historic occasion, was stoic and offered words of courage to the gathered scientists, even a disquieting hug to ISRO chairman K. Sivan as the latter appeared to break down. His chevron of ministers is yet to speak but condolence is surely in the offing, suffixed with a commitment to continue with our great space programme.

Journalists are having a tough time as well. ISRO has been unsurprisingly silent about what it is doing right now, what it is finding out, etc. There is not even the public expression of disappointment, as if the organisation’s leaders believe cameras are only worth smiling in front of.

Notwithstanding the occasional news report drafted by journalists with special access to official information, there are three obvious courses of action at this juncture: wait in peace for ISRO to speak up, speculate and analyse responsibly or shout about how India is awesome. We have seen the last option exercised by the usual suspects on multiple occasions before but on this one, the loudness is also intercalated with sly attempts to recast the autonomous descent as a technology demonstrator – as if there was nothing of scientific value onboard – and with disingenuous reassurances that 95% of the mission had succeeded. Was all the hoopla just for the 5%?

Pallava Bagla of NDTV divined a fourth, it seems, shouting about inside the control centre demanding Sivan address the event’s attendees while being rude to those who did show up to answer. He has since apologised for his behaviour; credit where credit is due, etc. But as if to one up the BJP’s calculated ploys for public attention, a Congress spokesperson issues a fatwa for Bagla to be sacked for his actions.

Even others sport press credentials on their chests while clamouring for attention. Nationalism is very profitable and this is easily instrumentalised through TRP ratings, so you see men and women dressed in shiny suits in front of green screens talking about Indians someday walking on the Moon.

In the distance you can hear an even more rabid faction indistinguishable from the trolls and goblins of Twitter, motivated to push the #ProudOfIsro and #WorthlessPakistan trends with equal zest. If we have failed, its foot-soldiers seem to say, someone else must have fared even worse. If we still find ourselves at the doorsteps of the White Man’s elite clubs, there must be someone else languishing on the streets, ragged and utterly worthless.

The farther you are from the eye of the storm, the pettier the winds blow. We have forgotten how to fail with grace.

Sep 7, 2019
Review: ‘Mission Mangal’ (2019)
This review assumes Tanul Thakur’s review as a preamble.

There’s the argument that ISRO isn’t doing much by way of public outreach and trust in the media is at a low, and for many people – more than the most reliable sections of the media can possibly cover – Bollywood’s Mission Mangal could be the gateway to the Indian space programme. That we shouldn’t dump on the makers of Mission Mangal for setting up an ISRO-based script and Bollywoodifying it because the prerogative is theirs and it is not a mistake to have fictionalised bits of a story that was inspirational in less sensationalist ways.

And then there is the argument that Bollywood doesn’t function in a vacuum – indeed, anything but – and that it should respond responsibly to society’s problems by ensuring its biographical fare, at least, maintains a safe distance from problematic sociopolitical attitudes. That while creative freedom absolves artists of the responsibility to be historians, there’s such a thing as not making things worse, especially through an exercise of the poetic license that is less art and more commerce.

The question is: which position does Mission Mangal justify over the other?

I went into the cinema hall fully expecting the movie to be shite, but truth be told, Mission Mangal hangs in a trishanku swarga between the worlds of ‘not bad’ and ‘good’. The good parts don’t excuse the bad parts and the bad parts don’t drag the good parts down with them. To understand how, let’s start with the line between fact and fiction.

Mission Mangal‘s science communication is pretty good. As a result of the movie’s existence, thousands more people know about the gravitational slingshot (although the puri analogy did get a bit strained), line-of-sight signal transmission, solar-sailing and orbital capture now. Thousands more kind-of know the sort of questions scientists and engineers have to grapple with when designing and executing missions, although it would pay to remain wary of oversimplification. Indeed, thousands more also know – hopefully, at least – why some journalists’ rush to find and pin blame at the first hint of failure seems more rabid than stringent. This much is good.

However, almost everyone I managed to eavesdrop on believed the whole movie to be true whereas the movie’s own disclaimer at the start clarified that the movie was a fictionalised account for entertainment only. This is a problem because Mission Mangal also gets its science wrong in many places, almost always for dramatic effect. For just four examples: the PSLV is shown as a two-stage rocket instead of as a four-stage rocket; the Van Allen belt is depicted as a debris field instead of as a radiation belt; solar radiation pressure didn’t propel the Mars Orbiter Mission probe on its interplanetary journey; and its high-gain antenna isn’t made of a self-healing material.

More importantly, Mission Mangal gets the arguably more important circumstances surrounding the science all wrong. This is potentially more damaging.

There’s a lot of popular interest in space stuff in India these days. One big reason is that ISRO has undertaken a clump of high-profile missions that have made for easy mass communication. For example, it’s easier to sell why Chandrayaan 2 is awesome than to sell the AstroSat or the PSLV’s fourth-stage orbital platform. However, Mission Mangal sells the Mars Orbiter Mission by fictionalising different things about it to the point of being comically nationalistic.

The NASA hangover is unmistakable and unmistakably terrible. Mission Mangal‘s villain, so to speak, is a senior scientist of Indian origin from NASA who doesn’t want the Mars Orbiter Mission to succeed – so much so that the narrative often comes dangerously close to justifying the mission in terms of showing this man up. In fact, there are two instances when the movie brazenly crosses the line: to show up NASA Man, and once where the mission is rejustified in terms of beating China to be the first Asian country to have a probe in orbit around Mars. This takes away from the mission’s actual purpose: to be a technology-demonstrator, period.

This brings us to the next issue. Mission Mangal swings like a pendulum between characterising the mission as one of science and as one of technology. The film’s scriptwriters possibly conflated the satellite design and rocket launch teams for simplicity’s sake, but that has also meant Mission Mangal often pays an inordinate amount of attention towards the mission’s science goals, which weren’t very serious to begin with.

This is a problem because it’s important to remember that the Mars Orbiter Mission wasn’t a scientific mission. This also shows itself when the narrative quietly, and successfully, glosses over the fact that the mission probe was designed to fit a smaller rocket, and whose launch was undertaken at the behest of political as much as technological interests, instead of engineers building the rocket around the payload, as might have been the case if this had been a scientific mission.

Future scientific missions need to set a higher bar about what they’re prepared to accomplish – something many of us easily forget in the urge to thump our chests over the low cost. Indeed, Mission Mangal celebrates this as well without once mentioning the idea of frugal engineering, and all this accomplishes is to cast us as a people who make do, and our space programme as not hungering for big budgets.

This, in turn, brings us to the third issue. What kind of people are we? What is this compulsion to go it alone, and what is this specious sense of shame about borrowing technologies and mission designs from other countries that have undertaken these missions before us? ‘Make in India’ may make sense with sectors like manufacturing or fabrication but whence the need to vilify asking for a bit of help? Mission Mangal takes this a step further when the idea to use a plastic-aluminium composite for the satellite bus is traced to a moment of inspiration: that ISRO could help save the planet by using up its plastic. It shouldn’t have to be so hard to be a taker, considering ISRO did have NASA’s help in real-life, but the movie precludes such opportunities by erecting NASA as ISRO’s enemy.

But here’s the thing: When the Mars Orbiter Mission probe achieved orbital capture at Mars at the film’s climax, it felt great and not in a jingoistic way, at least not obviously so. I wasn’t following the lyrics of the background track and I have been feeling this way about missions long before the film came along, but it wouldn’t be amiss to say the film succeeded on this count.

It’s hard to judge Mission Mangal by adding points for the things it got right and subtracting points for the things it didn’t because, holistically, I am unable to shake off the feeling that I am glad this movie got made, at least from the PoV of a mediaperson that frequently reports on the Indian space progragge. Mission Mangal is a good romp, thanks in no small part to Vidya Balan (and as Pradeep Mohandas pointed out in his review, no thanks to the scriptwriters’ as well as Akshay Kumar’s mangled portrayal of how a scientist at ISRO behaves.)

I’m sure there’s lots to be said for the depiction of its crew of female scientists as well but I will defer to the judgment of smarter people on this one. For example, Rajvi Desai’s review in The Swaddle notes that the women scientists in the film, with the exception of Balan, are only shown doing superfluous things while Kumar gets to have all the smart ideas. Tanisha Bagchi writes in The Quint that the film has its women fighting ludicrous battles in an effort to portray them as being strong.

Ultimately, Mission Mangal wouldn’t have been made if not for the nationalism surrounding it – the nationalism bestowed of late upon the Indian space programme by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the profitability bestowed upon nationalism by the business-politics nexus. It is a mess but – without playing down its problematic portrayal of women and scientists – the film is hardly the worst thing to come of it.

In fact, if you are yet to watch the film but are going to, try imagining you are in the late 1990s and that Mission Mangal is a half-gritty, endearing-in-parts sci-fi flick about a bunch of Hindi-speaking people in Bangalore trying to launch a probe to Mars. However, if you – like me – are unable to leave reality behind, watch it, enjoy it, and then fact-check it.

Miscellaneous remarks
1. Mission Mangal frequently attempts to assuage the audience that it doesn’t glorify Hinduism but these overtures are feeble compared to the presence of a pundit performing religious rituals within the Mission Control Centre itself. Make no mistake, this is a Hindu film.
2. Akshay Kumar makes a not-so-eccentric entrance but there is a noticeable quirk about him that draws the following remark from a colleague: “These genius scientists are always a little crazy.” It made me sit up because these exact words have been used to exonerate the actions of scientists who sexually harassed women – all the way from Richard Feynman (by no means the first) to Lawrence Krauss (by no means the last).
Aug 17, 2019
Review: Oblivion (2013)

Spoilers ahead

Just watched Oblivion (2013), starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman and Jamie Lannister. It was a collection of tropes strung together.

Sweeping, desolate landscapes intercalated with sleek metallic machines. Lots of smoke and vapour. Use of spartan colour palette. Another example: Arrival.

Music like it’s by Vangelis but dressed up for the 21st century, raw, poverty of tones. Another example: Blade Runner 2049.

A fascist dystopia at work, post-Earth, protagonist a member of a hierarchical organisation, made to repeat catchphrase as symbol of compliance. Another example: 1984.

Pre-war souvenirs stowed away in secret lockers together with personal memorabilia. Memories are taboo. Another example: Equilibrium.

Why do people go to war with classic rock tracks playing? Why does no one remember electronic music? Another example: Star Trek: Beyond.

Unexpected interlopers disrupt a life thought peaceful and perfect, introduce chaos, restore memories and demand you switch sides. Another example: Captain Marvel.

Why you? Because you’re curious, you ask questions. You’re The One chosen to lead the people to victory. Another example: I, Robot.

The world is dangerous, you’re told. Repeatedly. But you walk past all warning signs and enter the radiation zone. It isn’t deadly at all. Another example: Portal 2.

Retaliation begins, often at the rebel stronghold and spreading outwards. There are painful skirmishes. Another example: Man of Steel.

But the rebels are secretly working on a Trojan horse, a powerful weapon that can be used only once. Another example: Armageddon.

The sleight of hand works and enemy stronghold is blown to bits from within, but a hero + inspiring-speech-guy perish. Another example: Prometheus.

The thing is, Oblivion was entertaining to watch because it didn’t pretend it was trying to escape any of these tropes, instead diving headlong into them.

It didn’t even avoid the ultra-Freudian finale; this isn’t to say I enjoyed the implied violence, only that Oblivion was happy to be unoriginal except in style. To quote from the review on RogerEbert.com:

If nothing else, “Oblivion” will go down in film history as the movie where Tom Cruise pilots a white, sperm-shaped craft into a giant space uterus. The scene is more interesting to describe than it is to watch. Cruise’s sperm-ship enters through an airlock that resembles a geometrized vulva. He arrives inside a massive chamber lined with egg-like glass bubbles. At the center of the chamber is a pulsating, sentient triangle that is also supposed to be some kind of mother figure. Cruise must destroy the mother triangle and her space uterus in order to save the Earth.

Aug 4, 2019
Anil Ananthaswamy in conversation with Anita Nair
I attended an event at the Bangalore International Centre yesterday, Anita Nair in conversation with Anil Ananthaswamy about narrative non-fiction. Anil spoke for 45-55 minutes about what it was like to write his first book, The Edge of Physics (2010), and the different kinds of decisions he had to make as the narrator to keep the book interesting and engaging. Then Anita and Anil had a conversation for 30 minutes about the challenges of constructing narratives in fiction and non-fiction, followed by a short Q&A.

I quite enjoyed the evening because, though it was the third or maybe fourth time I have heard Anil speak about his books, the highlight every time has been the questions people have asked about them and his answers. This occasion was no different; in fact, Anita – who is an accomplished writer of fiction (whose books have been translated into 31 languages, as I and others in the audience discovered yesterday) – was particularly engaging. She was able to focus on the differences and the overlaps between the two kinds of exercises that I personally found illuminating.

The following are some of my notes from their conversation, together with my takes:

§ When Anita asked Anil how he chooses what to write, he said his decisions are almost always driven by curiosity. I thought that is a wonderful place to be in if you are a non-fiction writer: to have the liberty to pursue the stories that interest you, beyond considerations of marketability and the economics of feature-publishing. Anil has been a science journalist for two decades and there is little surprise as to how he got to this place. Nonetheless, his comment merits thinking about how writers and journalists balance the pull of their curiosity with the push(back) of the more pragmatic aspects of their vocation.

§ A quote about science writing from Tim Bradford, former science editor of The Guardian, that Anil recalled: “Never overestimate what the reader knows, never underestimate the reader’s intelligence”. In other words, the difference between you and your readers is simply the amount of information; if presented right, they likely possess the cognitive and intellectual faculties to process it.

§ Anil mentioned (in response to an audience-member’s question, I think) that all three of his books are geared towards making the reader understand what the major unanswered questions (in the respective fields: cosmology, neuroscience, quantum mechanics) are and aren’t concerned with providing a resolution at the end. He had already mentioned towards the close of his talk that he is principally concerned with the bigger picture and getting a grip on where we all come from, etc., but I have never asked him if he consciously set out to write books like this or if the books simply reflect his own curiosity-driven pursuit to understand our universe, so to speak.

Edit: I asked him over email and he said, “I think it’s more a reflection of my own pursuit – the topics that interest me seem to be those for which we are at the cusp of some understanding.”

§ Through Two Doors At Once, Anil’s third book, tracks how our understanding of quantum mechanics evolved by examining multiple iterations of a single experiment created over 200 years ago. Late last year, I prepared to excerpt a few pages from the book for The Wire Science when I realised that this was harder to do the farther I got away from the first chapter (final excerpt here). This was because of the book’s extremely linear narrative; the superlative is warranted because each chapter builds on concepts carefully erected in the previous one, so it would have been nearly impossible for you to start the book from the tenth chapter and understand what was going on. This is partly due to the counterintuitive and complicated nature of quantum mechanics and partly to the author’s decision to frame the narrative around one experiment.

Anil pointed out yesterday that this was in contrast to both The Edge of Physics and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2016), his second book, which follow what I like to call the radial narrative: each chapter begins at the centre of a circle and moves along the radius towards the circumference. But the next chapter doesn’t begin at the circumference; it begins at the centre again, reasserting the theme of the book and moving along another tack to a different point on the circumference. This way, it is possible for the reader to open the book on chapter 10 and understand what is going on; the author is less railroaded and has more room to explore different interpretations of the book’s theme; and editors like me have more portions to consider excerpting from.

§ My favourite part of the conversation was when Anita and Anil were springboarding off of the ideas discussed in his second book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, which examines how – to rephrase Anil – the body and the mind work together to construct the sense of self. Anil does this with a quest through different neurocognitive conditions that affect the mind in unique ways, providing insights into where the person’s sense of ‘I’ could be located in the brain.

I should mention here that this was an interesting passage of conversation but, for the same reason, one in which my neurons were going berserk and I don’t clearly remember how one part connected to another now. However, I do know that the following things were discussed:
- Anita said that this journey of discovery (in Anil’s book) parallels her own when she is writing a novel. As the work of writing the book progresses, Anita the author gets more and more into the character’s skin so that she can write convincingly about the character’s actions and motivations. However, this process can be uniquely painful when the character molests a child, for example; according to Anita, it felt worse when she was able to make the transition from herself to her character, the child-molester, and slip back out almost effortlessly.
- This was related to a question about the narrative growing its own legs and, every now and then, leading the author away in unintended directions. Anil said that in his case, it was a factor of how much reporting he had done. That is, the more knowledge and perspectives he had available, the more ideas he could explore in the same story. He also said that such narrative drift (my words) is more likely to happen in fiction than in non-fiction.
This is fascinating. It probably happens more with fiction because the rationale is that it is easier to invent than to infer, and because reality offers to railroad the author in non-fiction. However, narrative drift may not necessarily be more likely in fiction-writing. This is because, in my view, fiction also places a bigger premium on the author’s self-imposed limitations on inventiveness, since Occam’s razor applies equally to both forms of writing. And with fiction, unrestrained inventiveness imposes a greater cost on the story’s readability and even interestingness than unrestrained inference imposes on non-fiction-writing. I am curious to know, therefore, the different causes of narrative drift in fiction and (long-form) non-fiction – assuming there are differences – and how much time authors spend working against them.

Next courses of action: Read The Man Who Wasn’t There and A Cut-Like Wound.
Jul 30, 2019
The romance of us, as seen from the Moon

Note: This post was written before the Chandrayaan 2 launch, which happened at 2.43 pm IST today.

We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of walking on the Moon and we are excited about landing on the Moon for the first time.

These sentences are not out of chronological order nor are they false or mistaken. They are both true because the first ‘we’ and the second ‘we’ are not synonymous. They represent two different identities, and of the same individual if she is Indian: we – humans – are celebrating the 50th anniversary of walking on the Moon and we – Indians – are excited about landing on the Moon for the first time.

Neil Armstrong, the first human on the Moon, was moved by the sight of Earth beyond the satellite’s horizon, a blue-green orb cradled by long stretches of darkness on every side and which he could blot out by closing one eye and holding his thumb up. He saw no borders, no contested lines on land or water, but all of humanity occupying the surface of a tiny marble, with only each other for company in a very, very empty universe. Some have celebrated this as the unexpected legacy of Apollo 11: the birth of an image that inspires us to stay united. But this is much easier said than done, and not always for bad reasons.

Chandrayaan 2 is a case in point. Its very existence alerts us to our Indianness as separate from, rather a subset of, humanity. It reminds us gently that arbitrary lines do crisscross the face of Earth and that we Indians are decidedly on one side of some of those lines, as are the Americans, the Chinese, the French and the Russians. We may all seem to be in this together when seen from the Moon but we are not when seen from Earth, and this is perhaps the only vantage point that matters.

Armstrong’s comments were well ahead of his time, or even ours, because they dream of a world where one human going to the Moon is the same as all humans going to the Moon. It is a utopian reimagination of how spaceflight or even all of science works. It skips over some of the biggest problems assailing humanity today, instead suggesting the weight of loneliness our cosmos has imposed on Earth will alone suffice to bend the arc of justice down to where it belongs.

This will never happen. It is impossible to believe that it could if only because the arc of justice does not budge until it is acted upon by the very people it affects. It is impossible to believe humanity has been on the Moon when the only way a non-American person can get up there is by slogging it out through their own national space programmes. And this should be no surprise when it is impossible to overlook the inequities that mar the face of Earth, which seem no less invisible from the ground than they would be through the eyes of a white American man on the Moon.

Photo by Flickr on Pexels.com

Consider a scientist from the developing world. Let’s say he is a male, English-speaking middle-class Brahmin so we can set aside the ceaseless discrimination the scientific community’s non-male, non-Hindu/non-upper-caste, non-heterosexual, Indian-language-speaking members face for the sake of our discussion; of course, the picture has already been oversimplified. He has access to some instruments, a few good labs, not many good mentors, irregular funding, not enough travel grants, subpar employment prospects, insufficient access to journals, lives in a polluted city with uneven public transport, rising costs of living, less water to spare and rising medical bills.

If at this juncture we reinstate the less privileged Indian in this matrix, it becomes a near-chaotic picture of personal, social, economic and political problems. Even then, it is still only the substrate upon which international inequities – such as access to samples from other parts of India and the world, information published in journals that libraries can’t afford or exclusion from the editorial boards of scientific journals – will come to bear. Finally, there is climate change and its discomfiting history.

In this regard, there seems to be an awkward knot in our collective national imagination, at least in principle. It is as a confrontation between the reflex to celebrate the Apollo 11 mission and embrace the opportunity it affords to transcend for once the issues that divide us, and in the same moment acknowledge India’s impending first attempt to soft-land a suite of mostly passive instruments on the Moon. Art, music, cinema and fantasy could help unknot it.

(It might also help to remember that the romance of having a man on the Moon itself was the product of a perceived politico-ideological imbalance. And it was perceived so strongly that it disregarded overwhelming public opinion even as, over time, it began to invent justifications for itself through iffy economics and misplaced nostalgia.)

So then, who are we? Are we human or are we something else? If you were swayed by the messages of humanitarianism on July 16 and July 20, you were also reconceived by yourself as much as everyone else as an individual of the Homo sapiens of Earth. If you were swayed by the messages of nationalism on July 15 and perhaps will be on July 22, there will be no escaping the reminders of your Indianness.

However, it is not immediately clear how one could embrace both without situating them in a hierarchy of progression: our cultural-sexual-political-social-economic identity first, biological next, and envision the endeavours of humankind as a journey from one stage to the next, when one human walking on, say, Ganymede, will truly stand for all humans walking on Ganymede. But until then, for good or for bad, but mostly for good, we walk separate paths, acknowledge the lines between us and work to make them as invisible on the ground as they are from the Moon.

The Wire
July 22, 2019

Jul 22, 2019
The usefulness of good grammar

Why is good grammar important?

In the Indian mainstream media at least, it appears that readers won’t penalise reporters and editors for imperfect use of grammar and punctuation. To be clear, they will notice – and many will avoid – bad writing; at the same time, readers are unlikely to credit articles that got their grammar and punctuation pitch-perfect. In short, good grammar doesn’t seem to improve return-on-investment but bad grammar reduces it.

This isn’t surprising: English has always been much of India’s second language, especially among its middle class. The premium placed on perfect grammar is much lower than that placed on simply being fluent with the language at the intermediary level. In most instances, in fact, the value of better grammar is and remains an unknown-unknown.

However, what I like most about perfecting the use of grammar and punctuation is that doing so provides a sort of polish to the text that greatly improves its readability. This is somewhat like the attention Apple pays to the UX of its iPhones: it isn’t just that the hardware-software synergy is excellent or that the designs make the UI look exquisite; it is that, like good grammar, Apple ensures the tiniest details are in line with the overarching experiential philosophy, so that the user moves with equal ease through different parts of the phone. In the same way, without good grammar, the text becomes a bit of a bumpy ride.

It’s the cost of this bumpiness that seems to determine whether or not better grammar is linked to the publisher’s stature.

Within the iPhone metaphor, design perfection is closely associated with the iPhone’s reputation as a premium item, the same way the appropriate use of language is associated with publications like The Baffler and The New York Review of Books (but not The New Yorker, for reasons described here), which bank on literary as well as narrative correctness to appear, and read, classy.

However, this aesthetic is seemingly confined to mainstream publications in the West and, in India, to magazines that are okay with presenting the sort of English that is as classy to the discerning reader as it seems elitist to the one who hasn’t spent a lifetime among books. To the latter, text laden with the uneven use of grammar isn’t bumpy reading at all as much as something that reads just fine. So the publisher that publishes such writing isn’t penalised for it.

Then again, is it fair to judge grammar’s value according to its financial implications? It makes sense with iPhone and design: a flawed UX is quite likely to precipitate a decline in sales, and sales is what Apple – like any corporation – lives for. It also makes sense if you have a publisher like Times of India in mind. But how do things work at The Wire?

As with any nonprofit news publication that runs on donations from readers, good grammar and punctuation offer The Wire a way to render our articles more gratifying as long as the exercise remains cost-effective. But when it comes in the way of a more valuable target, such as higher volume, it becomes secondary if only because our resources are painfully finite. To prevent this from happening in the longer run, we must couple the quality of writing with the notion of public interest itself. So we come to the more important question: could good grammar be in the public interest?

At first, good grammar seems almost unnecessary, indulgent even, until you consider the connections between good writing and thinking. Being able to compose complex sentences anticipates room to compose complex thoughts and allows us to assimilate complex ideas. We may not need language itself to think, but insofar as we wish to instrumentalise the communication of complex ideas as a weapon against anti-intellectualism, we must become and remain fluent with how grammar and punctuation allow us to nearly exactly communicate semantic formations constructed by the mind.

In fact, it would be safe to dispense with the “nearly” as well: we cannot communicate ideas more complicated than what our language affords us. Therefore, the more versatile our language is and the better we are able to use it, the more opportunities we give ourselves to accommodate new ideas and fight against bad ones.

There are limitations, of course, such as with a lot of academic writing these days that is dense for density’s sake. But short of that, not making efforts to improve the way we use the rules of grammar and the opportunities of punctuation could mire us deeper and deeper, in a world becoming more vast by the day, in knowledge that is only becoming more stale and – as many scholars have recognised – in attitudes more anti-intellectual. Of course, not everything there is to learn has to be so complicated and most of us will almost certainly expend our lives still exploring the simpler realms, but in the overarching scheme, exposing ourselves to the more challenging aspects of language will equip us to go wherever we may as a society.

This is also an admittedly circuitous justification for the continued use of good grammar – given humankind’s now-famously short attention span – and one that we may not always remember on the level of the day-to-day. But just as with good grammar, the usefulness of good grammar only shows itself with prolonged use, and this should be easier to remember.

Jul 10, 2019
Fanning the flames

Housing an asylum seeker in a detention center costs $133 to $319 per day. Housing one in a tent city: $775 per day. Releasing them under community supervision or electronic monitoring: $4.50 per day. https://t.co/z9kQXfOByZ
— Vox (@voxdotcom) July 4, 2019

This is the second tweet I’m seeing phrased like this. It lacks context and is provocative, perhaps deliberately? It seems to encourage detention centres to find a cheaper way to house asylum seekers instead of saying this is bad no matter what the costs involved are. The article itself is better. On particularly hot and/or controversial topics, such as immigration, many people often tweet or post links to articles on the topic to be seen to be engaging with it instead of actually engaging with it (such as by reading it and then sharing their original comments).

Some publications like to take advantage of this because such behaviour promotes the article’s circulation, potentially exposing it to more readers and making it a part of social media conversations, or flame wars. It’s all neither right nor wrong but I think it’s unethical: feeding poorly qualified arguments to a mob is like fanning the flames, then basking in their warmth. Even if Vox isn’t deliberately doing that here, it’s careless to assume its tweet will be interpreted one way when it hasn’t provided the necessary context for that to happen.

Jul 4, 2019
To understand Spivak

It is quite bizarre to read Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and be able to understand anything. It is even more bizarre to agree with her views about mundane things like the news or being a little anxious about having a job next year, to find out the toilet bowl is one of her stations of reading, to find out some NYT interviews just needn’t exist. Very every-day things. To be fair, this is only because I have only interacted with her work through her books, and many of them are quite inaccessible, even syntactically if not intellectually, to people outside literary theory.

So to read an interview of her and find her saying these very understandable, even relatable, things is… pleasantly surprising. Maybe it was silly of me to assume she wouldn’t be like everyone else, but you must admit that is hard to do when you can understand so little of that person’s work even as you are told that that work is awesome. I am sure there have been other interviews of her and maybe they were easy to read, too; I am taken by the one I am referring to, published by The Fabulist in December 2018, simply because it was the one I stumbled on.

Another thing I found notable about this interview (props to Nico Muhly, the interviewer) is that it highlighted, once more, the twilight of literary multilingualism among India’s (or among India-connected) public intellectuals.

NM: Is your reading practiced primarily in English?

GS: The large part of it is necessarily in English, but a good bit of it is in German. And of course a lot of it is in French. Bengali also, Bengali I read a good deal and I produce in Bengali. Which is, of course, something that people who know me only through my English material cannot really know. I give these huge talks. Like the Mystery of Democracy or the Poverty of Thinking. Also, sometimes to the left of the left. I also read a little bit in Hindi, very little, unfortunately. And of course my Greek and Latin are not good. Since I am a Europeanist I read a great deal, but I really hit my head against classical Greek and Latin. I read Sanskrit more easily. Narrative Sanskrit I can read without a dictionary. Philosophical Sanskrit I’m fine but I do find difficult: I in fact need someone to tell me. A dictionary is not enough. I have been studying Chinese for seventeen years. I speak and read simply and badly. For some years I had tutors. For the past decade or so I have taken a class.

Ram Guha had lectured in 2009:

For Gandhi, and for Tagore, the foreign language was a window into another culture, another civilisation, another way (or ways) of living in the world. For them, the command of a language other than their own was a way of simultaneously making themselves less parochial and their work more universal. Their readings and travels fed back into their own writing, thus bringing the world to Bengal and Gujarat, and (when they chose to wrote in the foreign language) Bengal and Gujarat to the world. Bilingualism was here a vehicle or something larger and more enduring – namely, multiculturalism.

In an obituary for Girish Karnad in News Laundry, Karthik Malli took after Guha to remind readers of Karnad’s place in this now-waning tradition.

… it’s important to remember that participation in the literary tradition of a certain language was contingent on numerous factors—geography and education, for example—and was not limited to the rigid, fixed dimension of one’s mother tongue, or the language one’s family spoke at home. Karnad’s life and work is a great example of this, and it is by no means an isolated example either.

He continues later:

In an essay, noted literary critic and translator of Telugu literature Velcheru Narayana Rao … lays the blame for the decline of India’s multilingual literati squarely at the feet of linguistic nationalism—the “nationalist identification of languages with regional populations”, as he puts it. Writers started taking pride in the supposed “purity” of their languages and traditions instead, ignoring histories of mutual borrowing and influence, he contends. He even goes so far as to argue that the concept of a mother tongue was an alien concept to Indians before linguistic nationalism took root.

Anyway, here are some choice excerpts from the Spivak interview I particularly enjoyed.

Yes, the problem begins when you think you know what’s going on.

Today there is a great deal of interest in online resources, in going behind the nineteenth- and twentieth-century linguistics where in order to establish a language as language, we have to box it in a box, and give it a name. Give it a grammar. Give it a vocabulary. Give it a thing. Give it a script. And a boundary. Cut it off from other languages. It’s absurd having to teach algebra, for example, in Bengali. Because these days they make up these very Sanskritic Bengali words for ‘equation’ and ‘formula.’

I’m not that interested in news; I have made myself read the New York Times and look at various channels on TV, etc. “I must be interested in the news,” I tell myself. It’s irresponsible not to be interested in the news, and so I make myself keep up.

The humanities have become useless. A corporatised educational system must trivialise the humanities because they are not a cash cow. … I say that the humanities at their best provide health care for a culture and can produce a general will for social justice.

At seventy-six I always have to appear young in my thinking. Even if I’m not.

I call reading “a prayer to be haunted”—a prayer to be haunted by the text.

I highly recommend you read the whole thing, if you haven’t already left this page, if only for the easy conviction with which Spivak speaks and how they illuminate her self. It will take no more than a few minutes of your life.

Jul 2, 2019
A religious environmentalism

June 5 was World Environment Day, which is presumably why an article entitled ‘Hindu roots of modern ‘ecology” was doing the rounds on Twitter, despite having been published in 2016. In the article, its author Viva Kermani writes,

Centuries before the appearance of the likes of Greenpeace, World Environment Day, and what is known as the environmental movement, the shruti (Vedas, Upanishads) and smruti (Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, other scriptures) instructed us that the animals and plants found in the land of Bharatavarsha are sacred; that like humans, our fellow creatures, including plants have consciousness; and therefore all aspects of nature are to be revered. This understanding, care and reverence towards the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Thus, there is ample evidence to show that the earliest messages of the importance of the environment and the need for ecological balance and harmony can be found in ancient Indic texts.

Overall, Kermani argues that Hindus are essentially all environmentalists and that many species of plants and animals thrive in ~~India~~ Bharat because of Hindus’ reverential attitude towards them. The second argument is easier to swat away, especially when it shows itself as the following contention from the same article:

That India today is home to 70% of the world’s tigers – our country has some 2,500 tigers in the wild – is because the tiger is considered divine, a vahana of the Durga and present in any form of Durga iconography. Tigers have been wiped out in Java and Sumatra, the great islands of Indonesia across which, the majestic big cat once roamed freely, for Indonesia was once Hindu.

Kermani has clearly mixed up cause and effect here. Tigers don’t survive because they’re represented in Hindu iconography; they’re represented in our iconography because they were already here before the Hindus got here. More importantly, tiger populations in India are increasingly threatened by linear projects, mining activities, dams and river-interlinks. If the tiger was so important, shouldn’t the streets of Puri and Varanasi be swimming in Hindu protestors right now?

The reason Greenpeace and World Environment Day showed up was because religious importance alone is useless. It’s fine to claim primacy but to claim such primacy is also relevant is the problem. It’s not. What’s the point of repeatedly saying you invented something when clearly the invention doesn’t even work anymore? It’s hard to believe, as a result, that exercises of this nature are anything more than a form of intellectual indulgence. With some editing, they might be better served as messages of hope, inviting Hindus to look beyond the red herrings of Islamophobia and nationalism and towards sustainable living practices.

However, my issue with Kermani’s argument is deeper. While she makes a case for why Hinduism was also a very early first manifestation of environmentalism (albeit by placing the blame for our general ignorance of this factoid at the feet of Christianity), it’s not a useful environmentalism – nor is that of Greenpeace or, for that matter, the likes of PETA, etc.

Hinduism’s authority is scriptural; modern environmentalism’s authority is scientific, at least it should be. We shouldn’t have to pay attention to the needs of the non-human occupants of this world because a higher authority thinks so but because we know why it is important to do so. The centroid of our ecological morals should be located, at least in part, within humanist, social, naturalist and empirical frameworks, instead of taking sole recourse through divine proclamations that we’re not allowed to challenge, let alone overthrow.

Scriptural authority doesn’t allow our responsibilities as the alpha species on Earth to evolve with what we know. For example, it makes sense to destroy some members of an invasive species that have colonised foreign ecosystems (aided, often inadvertently, by human activities) before they displace and endanger their native counterparts. For another, it’s perfectly reasonable for forest-dwellers to cut trees down for firewood and other resources. However, Hinduism would condemn the man who does either of these things, at least according to Kermani.

She continues:

Even today, Bharat is blessed with a rich biodiversity, because of the spiritual connectedness that Hindus have with nature. That there exists sthala vriksham shows that trees were intimately associated with spiritual tradition (In Sanskrit, sthala is a place, especially a sacred place, and vriksh is tree). Every temple is associated with a tree and every tree is associated with a deity and a story. The more well-known examples of sthala vriksham include the Kadamba at the Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple in Madurai and the vanni tree (khejri in Hindi) at the Magudeshwara Temple at Kodumudi. The famous mango tree at the Ekambereshwara Temple at Kancheepuram is believed to be more than 3,000 years old!

These are as much places of worship as they are lightning rods for discriminating against the lower castes. Non-Brahmins are proscribed from reading the Indic texts that Kermani is so fond of quoting; during most of its existence, especially in the post-Vedic period, the tenets of Hinduism rendered the members of such castes to be socially dead and unfit to use Sanskrit (apart from perpetrating various other brutalities). Hinduism is not an inherently ecological religion; it is inherently discriminatory, and an environmentalism feeding and drawing from its practices will only exhibit the same afflictions.

But even if Hinduism had been a wholly inclusive religion, our sense of why it’s important to save our trees shouldn’t come from there. The practice of environmentalism has many stakeholders and they contest its purpose along different trajectories, according to different needs, their geographical locations, their cultural values, etc. In this muddle, which is necessary by design, it’s important that we are more adaptable than we are prescient, more equitable than munificent, and more progressive than prescriptive. These guidelines are as such antithetical to religion by definition.

Of course, this doesn’t mean one must reject all the environmental aspects of Hinduism, or any other religion for that matter; instead, Hindus’ views on what it means to be environmentalist mustn’t be limited by what Hinduism considers appropriate, although this isn’t likely to be the case.

If you’re wondering why I chose to write about an article that appeared on a website peddling the typical far-right pro-Hindutva viewpoint, it’s that this endorsement of Hinduism as an environment-friendly entity stems as much from among conservatives as liberals, and that as much as either group would like to assert Hinduism’s credentials in this regard, such ‘spiritual environmentalism’ is, at least in part, an oxymoron.

(One last point, on a different note: Kermani writes towards the end,

Today, under the principles of the Chaos Theory, the commonly known as the Butterfly Effect – where a creature as delicate as the butterfly, by flapping its wings, sets up a series of reactions, by first causing some changes in the atmosphere, can end up causing a storm. This is nothing, but the Hindu understanding of karma, that all actions are connected and are part of the universe and that our actions affect not just other humans, but also nature, of which we are a part.

As it happens, chaos theory is not just the butterfly effect, and the butterfly effect is not concerned with the interconnectedness of all things. Instead, it is a metaphorical example of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to their initial conditions. For example, the trajectory of a pendulum changes drastically over time even if its starting position is moved only slightly. In the same way, the tornado in the metaphor could have been precipitated by a distant butterfly flapping its wings as much as, say, an eagle high up in the sky.)

Jun 6, 2019