Fixing the climate puzzle?

The trouble with prevailing emission reduction approaches is that even if these are put to use the global temperature will continue to rise, nullifying impact of such interventions at the global scale.

That the Earth is getting warmer slowly but surely and that there isn’t much the global climate negotiations have been able to achieve thus far, geo-engineering the planet to put a plug on rising temperature is beginning to gain serious currency. Despite its social, moral, technical and political pitfalls, discussions on creating stratospheric veil(s) to reduce influx of solar radiations has been projected as one of the most potent  options for slowing down the process of global warming.  

The Planet Remade
by Oliver Morton
Granta, London. Extent 428, Price £ 20

This concept is borne out of the harsh realization that there is not enough being done to cut down the global carbon emissions yet. Having risen from the pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million to a high of 400 parts per million today and with projections that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will double before the turn of the present century, options before the mankind are limited by the extent of its current technological prowess. Further, neither is our obsession with coal-fired power plants waning anytime soon nor are carbon-neutral technological options on offer as yet. Solar, wind and nuclear are possible decarbonizing substitutes but their scaling up poses a formidable challenge. Should the world decide to replace coal-based plants with nuclear power, it would need to build one large nuclear power plant per week for next two decades. And, if we were to think about solar instead, it would mean installing solar panels at the present rate for next fifteen decades. 

On top of it, the trouble with prevailing emission reduction approaches is that even if these are put to use the global temperature will continue to rise, nullifying any potential impact of such interventions at the global scale. It is here that Plan B of mimicking large volcanic eruptions, which inject huge quantities of sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the atmosphere, has been brought into consideration. Reference is made to the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo eruptions of June 1991 in the context of geo-engineering, which caused the average global surface air temperature to cool by about 0.5% between 1991 and 1992. What nature can do, mankind can do better! ‘Using the slowed warming as a breathing space in which to deploy more and better zero-emission technologies would be a good strategy,’ argues accomplished science writer Oliver Morton. Since the planet has been remade, is being remade, and will be remade in future, what stops science to take nature into its own realm?

It is a vexed question that cannot be clearly answered till the working of the earthsystem is understood in its entirety. That the natural system is anything but linear is at the root of getting a sense of geo-engineering predicament in affecting desired effect. Even the veil produced by Pinatubo has not been well understood, in terms of the total volume of volcanic dust it spewed into the atmosphere, the composition and size of different particles, and the interaction between them in space. Yet, Morton, after whom Asteroid 10716 has been named, examines the issue from diverse cultural and scientific perspectives in suggesting that geo-engineering be given more anticipatory consideration such that its impacts and implications are better understood.  

The Planet Remade is an authoritative take on the issue, backed by evidence on manipulating various natural cycles (viz., nitrogen, carbon and sulphur) as a precursor to taking a calculated risk with geo-engineering. To affect such a change at the planetary scale would warrant a governance mechanism that takes into account the geographical specificity of the unintended effects. Those who fear that geo-engineering will do more harm than good feel it on the ground that the atmosphere matters differently to people located in vulnerable areas like the shores and the deserts. Further, that the most powerful countries have the vested interest in manipulating the atmosphere in their favor. 

Morton is a stylish writer who organizes the text on a technical subject with such finesse that it makes for engaging reading. He presents multiple dimensions of the issue for an informed public debate. That geo-engineering solutions are likely to persist in the global policy arena; there is no choice but to take them seriously at all levels. Far from taking a position on whether or not geo-engineering is the solution, the author instead questions if ‘climate change’ itself is a problem in the first place. It is a complex relationship between the industrialized civilization and the earthsystem that is shaping up the formation of imagined catastrophes. The challenge and task is to use technology to convert the doomsday prediction to unabashed utopias.  It calls for a world order wherein people take care of the sky instead of taking control of the sky. 

Can Science Fix Climate Change?
 by Mike Hulme
Polity, UK. Extent 158, Price $12.95

Engineering the world’s climate by using global temperature as the control variable cannot secure the intended benefits.

Mike Hulme, a professor of Climate and Culture at London’s King’s College, holds no two opinions that the proposals to use stratospheric aerosols to cool the planet is inherently flawed and deeply undesirable, if not dangerous. Engineering the world’s climate by using global temperature as the control variable cannot secure the intended benefits for humans and the things that matter to them. Hulme’s argument is that the environmental, political, and psychological costs of designing global climate through aerosol injections overwhelmingly outweigh any assumed benefits.

Research studies show that it may not be possible to stabilize the climate in all regions simultaneously as regional diversity in the response to different levels of aerosol injection could make geo-engineering a difficult proposition. Hulme evaluates an array of geo-engineering technologies including orbital mirrors, ocean fertilization, carbon capture, and urban whitewashing in his assessment, and concludes that none of it is technically feasible to be up scaled at the planetary level. Add to it is the fact that the computer simulation models are far from accurate to determine possible risks of geo-engineering at a scale. There are limits to human knowledge afterall; our species is a product of evolution, not its author or controller.    

This slim volume argues that human-induced climate change is not the sort of problem that lends itself to technological end-of-pipe solutions. Instead, climate change is a ‘wicked problem’ and would need to be approached differently. Hulme suggests ‘climate pragmatism’ for reframing the problem of climate change: first, by decoupling the energy question from it and second, by recognizing that there are many different ways that alter the functioning of the atmosphere. Viewing the singular problem of climate change through the lens of climate pragmatism can lead the world to a three-pronged strategy: first, enhance social resilience to meteorological extremes; second, reduce emissions of atmospheric pollutants other than carbon dioxide as well, and third, meet the growing demand for energy in the world cheaply, reliably and sustainably. By suggesting climate pragmatism as an approach, the author seeks to advance human welfare and human development for fixing the climate change. 

Review of The Planet Remade was first published in Current Science, and Can Science Fix Climate Change review first appeared on AnthemEnviroExpertReviews.

The making of a global villain

While repeating itself, history does leave foot-marks of discerning patterns often ignored by the forces that coerce, invade, or conquer other societies.

There are no laws in history, and nor is history merely a string of facts. While repeating itself, history does leave footmarks of discerning patterns often ignored by the forces that coerce, invade, or conquer other societies. No wonder, each war surprises the invader as the society being attacked responds in unexpected ways. Clearly, power over people stretches beyond technological prowess and territorial control. The scars of humiliation it inflicts on the invaded societies resurface in unimaginable forms, often shocking the invader. Borne out of such pattern is the unexpected rise of the dreadful killers who have been indoctrinated to fight for the creation of an Islamic State. 

The Pulitzer Prize winning author Joby Warrick traces the roots of the leader who was a petty criminal in his early days in Jordon’s al-Jafr prison. Were it not for a general amnesty given to more than twenty-five hundred prisoners following the demise of King Hussein in 1999, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi would not have gained notoriety as the dreaded founding father of what is now known as the Islamic State or the ISIS. Returning home in 1993 after fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, Zarqawi had found a sense of purpose in confronting the perceived enemies of Islam, first in Jordon which had an uneasy alliance with the religious fundamentalists and later in Iraq where jihadist were at the receiving end of the powers that be.   

Black Flags offers a gripping narrative on a jihadist movement that emerged out from a concoction of political instability, sectarian conflict and armed intrusion in the middle east, and seeks to establish a caliphate whose zone of influence is projected to cover vast swathe of land across Northern Africa, Southern Europe and West Asia. Though prepared to start small, Zarqawi viewed himself as a modern incarnation of Nur ad-Din Zengi, the 12th Century warrior-prince, who had destroyed the imperialist forces in establishing a single sultanate extending from southern Turkey to the Nile River. By erroneously anointing him as the high priest of terrorism in 2003, identifying him as a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the US had only served Zarqawi’s cause by launching his career as one of the century’s great terrorist. 

Zarqawi didn’t let the US down, unleashing a reign of terror with his signature act of beheading the American hostage Nick Berg in 2004. The images he posted in the cyber space made him an icon and hero to many thousands of young men and women who saw him as avenging the Muslim nation for centuries of perceived humiliations and defeats. At one time, hard-core jihadist had streamed into Iraq at a rate of 100 to 150 a month to join ‘the sheikh of the slaughterers’. So persisting has been his charisma that years after Zarqawi’s death in the US air strike in 2006, support has continued to pour in from as many as 86 countries in support of the cause. As much a blow by blow account of the unleashed savagery, Black Flags is a study of the multiple-personality disorder afflicting this terrorist mastermind. 

Could deep personal insecurities and shattering religious guilt lead an ordinary convict on an arduous journey of death and destruction? Could the combination of American jets and the Arab jails be the fertile grounds for the jihadist to germinate? Could it be the strategic failure of the ruling elites and the invading forces that helped raise the black banners of violent dissent? Using his reporting skills, Warrick creates a revealing portrait of the man and his enduring legacy. In doing so, he draws heavily on Zarqawi’s personal immediacy with three important persons: Basel al-Sabha, the doctor who had treated Zarqawi in prison; Abu Haytham, the Jordan’s intelligence service officer who had trailed Zarqawi in his early years; and Nada Bakos, a young CIA officer who was the agency’s top expert on Zarqawi.  

There are many what-if moments in the absorbing thriller that lends credence to the widespread impression that by corralling Islamist radicals and ordinary Iraqis in the lawless desert pen, US officials have inadvertently created a ‘jihadi university’ that allows the Islamist ideas to pass from one generation of fighters to the next.  Had it not been for the US invasion of Iraq, the Islamic State’s current butcher, Dr. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, would likely to have lived out his years as a college professor. Instead, he joined the ‘jihadi university’ to keep Zarqawi’s black flags fluttering with a current monetary worth of over half a billion dollars. 

While many believe that the idea of the Islamic state has as much chance of survival as an ice cream cone in the desert, Baghdadi instead believes that raising the caliphate’s ancient banner would make righteous Muslims fall into line. Will they or will they not, the world is at the cross-roads of its most defining moment in history.   

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
by Joby Warrick
Bantam Books, London
Extent: 344, Price: Rs 699 

This review was first published in Deccan Herald on November 27, 2016.

Is cash a monetary curse?

A tax regime is incompatible with peoples’ perception of living in a truly democratic society, posing a challenge to balance an individual’s right to privacy with society’s need to enforce regulations!

Cash has undoubtedly proven a curse, irrespective of its color, for those who have been queuing up at the bank counters following the recent currency demonetization in India. The unprecedented cash crunch has made many wonder if cashless is the better way to the future? It may indeed be but despite the proliferation of alternate payment mechanisms – plastic currency and electronic cash transfer – unprecedented amount of paper currency is floating around worldwide. Most people like cash, holding Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead words ‘Money is coined liberty.’

If going paperless was the best option, developed economies would have phased out paper currency several years ago. Instead, citizens across both developed and developing economies have yet to give up fascination for cash-in-hand. In contrast to per capita holding of $4,200 in the US, average Indian holds an equivalent of $171 in cash. Half of this cash remains unaccounted for, beyond the purview of regular tax reporting. No surprise, therefore, that even the US looses $500 billion annually by way of tax evasion despite a well-developed tax regime.

Since information on the ‘underground economy’ remains obscure, efforts to dig it out have not been successful either. Across the world as a percentage of GDP the underground economy continues to garner a significant share. If it is a low of 7.1 per cent in the US, it is as high as 17.9 per cent in Belgium. Worldwide, underground economy averages 14 percent of GDP. Even a country like Sweden, which has witnessed a dramatic drop in cash usage, has not been able to cut down on its underground economy from the present 15 per cent of its GDP. Underground economy has remained an unresolved global phenomenon.

Making a case for going cashless to address the malaise, Harvard University Professor Kenneth Rogoff argues that there is need to have a hard look at its implications before taking a plunge. While maintaining privacy of paper currency in small transactions is critical for a large population, phasing out large-denomination notes can pave the way towards a cashless society in future. For this reason, the European Central Bank has stopped printing the 500-euro note.

To reduce mountains of cash floating all around, many European countries including Germany and Belgium have proposed a cap on the size of retail cash payments. But they have learnt that tax evasion is a much larger issue since 25 percent or more of all cash never gets tendered in any tax swoop. Is going cashless the answer? It may indeed be unless it gets demonstrated at a scale. Rogoff wonders if smaller advanced economies like Japan, whose currency is not used internationally, would take a lead in going cashless! Regulatory challenges would need to be addressed upfront before pulling paper currency out from circulation, though.

While governments’ aim is to recover tax, people tend to avoid falling into the tax-trap. Since the general notion is that ‘big fish’ evade tax nets, even law-abiding citizens see opportunity in evading paying tax. Come to think of it, no one wants to live in a society where rules are rigidly enforced. At a socio-psychological level, however, a tax regime is incompatible with peoples’ perception of living in a truly democratic society. Therefore, the mounting challenge is to balance an individual’s right to privacy with society’s need to enforce its laws and regulations.

Rogoff is seized of the prevailing fascination for cash, and yet makes a convincing case for advanced economies to start phasing out paper currency. Though the world is still far from creating a cashless regime, the fact that cash fuels crime and corruption is at the core of the argument. It is, however, another matter that crime syndicates often circumvent the legal economy, and corruption has ways of reinventing itself because it predates paper currency.        

Putting cashless system into operation poses formidable challenges. The Curse of Cash takes a hard look at multiple implications of phasing out currency notes. How can something as antiquated as paper currency really matter when the total value of all financial assets dwarfs the total value of cash? After all, paper currency is but a zero-interest rate bond. Therefore phasing out paper currency, or charging negative interest rates on cash, remains an emotionally charged issue. On top, will the central banks surrender their monopoly over cash supplies without missing out on their key role to deliver growth and financial stability?

Phasing out paper currency may seem the simplest approach to clearing the path for tax regime to account for every penny in circulation, but the task is to first bring informal economy under the purview of the formal system. Further, any plan to drastically scale back the use of cash needs to provide heavily subsidized, basic debit card accounts for low-income individuals belonging to the informal economy. Raising challenging questions, this book provides thoughtful insights on a subject that is likely to engage monetary policy arena for time to come.

The Curse of Cash 
by Kenneth S. Rogoff
Princeton University Press, UK
Extent: 283. Price: US$17.49

Behind the curves

With gender stereotyping deeply embedded in our society, women’s self-esteem is traditionally assumed to be determined by how they perceive themselves in the eyes of others.

It may be an adult mind’s preoccupation and a voyeuristic notion that ‘women take more time to dress because they have to slow down on curves’, but for Cambridge University’s reproductive biologist David Bainbridge, the female curve is a work of evolution and biology. Women are the only females in the animal kingdom to have curvaceous bodies. Were it not so, the modern society’s obsession with the female form would not have adorned billboards, magazine covers and museum artefacts.

Being curvaceous adds to women’s public image and societal performance, and a heavy price is often paid to keep the curves in desired shape. With gender stereotyping deeply embedded in our society, women’s self-esteem is traditionally assumed to be determined by how they perceive themselves in the eyes of others.

In an entertaining analysis, superimposing cutting-edge behavioural science over evolutionary biology, Bainbridge lays the foundation of ‘curvology’, which has yet to gain recognition as an exact science. Yet, he draws some compelling inferences. Why are women locked in a prison of self-surveillance, enchained by the idea that they must view their bodies as others view them? Why do women experience body-dissatisfaction as reflected in their innate desire to alter their curves? Not only gender psychology but women’s biology conspires against them, argues Bainbridge, which keeps their body shape and body image under consistent change. Trapped in this biological reality, women often feel torn between the body they live in and the body they must aspire for. After all, physical attractiveness determines women’s social dominance.

Opinions are likely to be divided on this matter, as not every woman will subscribe to such analogy. However, studies indicate that some 60 per cent women experience increased body-dissatisfaction — and are ever-eager to reshape their curves. Added to this is the most confusing question: Why do some women volunteer to suffer bouts of starvation to have a specific body weight and shape? Curvology provides multiple insights to this conundrum: how the female form evolved, how human mind views it, and how the world at large influences the body-mind dichotomy.

The female body is a biological marvel. Even after evolving over several million years, the woman’s body has yet to gain a definitive shape as it keeps reconstructing. Research indicates that not only girls accumulate fat twice as fast as boys; averaging 27 per cent adipose tissue compared to 14 per cent in boys, they continue to keep it unevenly distributed across distinct storage spots in the body. That this is done to negotiate specific requirements during puberty, reproduction and post-natal period is evident, but it isn’t yet clear why these storage spots become curvaceous hotspots for the probing eyes.

It is here that the author enters a contentious territory. Says he, “Male visual fixation on female form seems to have contributed to evolution of curves, meaning thereby that sexual selection has worked hands-in-glove with natural selection.” It may sound politically incorrect but Darwin too had found that his theory of natural selection was inadequate to explain the reason for peacocks to carry the inordinate weight of feathers on their tails. He had thus stumbled upon the idea of sexual selection, which posits that despite outweighed disadvantage, colourful feathers provided an advantage in the competition for mates.

Loaded with complex and unnerving facts, Curvology is a study of one of the most complex species on this planet. We seem to know enough about women, and yet remain adequately ignorant. For instance, why do the breasts of women remain swollen throughout whereas in other mammals, like chimpanzees and gorillas, the mammary glands only swell with pregnancy?

Some of this trivia cries out for further explanation. While an unsubstantiated case for male desire sculpting women’s bodies has been made, it is surprising that, for women, it does not seem to matter as much. Surveys indicate that women apply their cosmetic war-paint to impress other women, and not men. Some feminist writers have even argued that society’s body-chauvinism is the woman’s own creation. Yet, there cannot be two opinions that the age-old power of female body shape continues to be stronger than ever before.

The book leaves the reader craving for more: why women love and hate those curves, desire them and reject them, feel valued and devalued because of them? At the end, it is clear that there is no perfect female body shape, except the one that doesn’t exist.

Curvology
by David Bainbridge
Portobello Books, UK
Extent: 227, Price: £9.99 

This review was first published in the Hindu BusinessLine on Nov 12, 2016.

The Ways of Healing in India

For a country that spends less than 4% of its GDP on healthcare, even war-torn Afghanistan spends 8%, its financially-constrained healthcare system has left millions of people to fend for their own healthy survival.

‘India is everything they say it is,’ and still, ‘has nothing’. Its billion plus population may have only one medical doctor per 100,000, but there are varied prescriptions for disease prevention and control to choose from.  From folk, spiritual, herbal or ritual approaches to ayurveda, yoga, siddha, homeopathy and naturopathy techniques, there is one for every pocket and faith. How people get treated is as much a reflection of their social and economic status as their unstinted faith in the chosen system of health care. Why people are drawn to such alternatives is the leading question Aarthi Prasad, whose maternal grandfather was an Ayurvedic doctor and secretary to the Chopra Committee set up shortly after Independence in 1946-48 to chart the way forward for Indian healthcare, seeks to explore the many faces of medicine in her journey across modern India. 

For a country that spends less than 4% of its GDP on healthcare, even war-torn Afghanistan spends 8%, its financially-constrained healthcare system has left millions of people to fend for their own healthy survival. It is quite simply economic folly for a country to sacrifice its people, and leave them vulnerable to exploitation by quacks and fake doctors who dispense medicines, antibiotics and steroids in a grossly unregulated health sector. Reports of people dying at the hands of such untrained practitioners with dubious qualifications are a common occurrence. On the other extreme, there are social entrepreneurs who have seized the situation to create modules of effective healthcare delivery for the poor that the state and many overseas governments have begun to emulate. That there exists a range of possibilities amidst the healthcare gloom, other than just increasing the number of trained medical doctors, is the central message emanating from In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room.   

In eight well-written chapters, Prasad takes the reader through the maze of health care challenges that are being confronted on a daily basis by a range of health innovators. From a traditional healer who knows the medicinal value of every plant he finds to a group of women who are working together to address mental illness in country’s mega-slum, and from an asthma healer who prescribes swallowing a live fish to a group of doctors who are taking community health system to tribal living in remote jungle, the author treks the length and breadth of the country to provide a unique perspective on health and survival in one of the most fascinating country in the world. The author, however, concludes that capturing the breadth and diversity of the practice of medicine in India is immense in its scope, as the provision of generating such knowledge dates back to several millennia in the country.

But can such good Samaritan efforts be enough to transform the inadequately resourced and underfunded state health sector? Nagging as the question may be, the answer lies in the realization that ‘people have to be the actors and advocates in order to make a difference’. Each of the health innovators featured in the book are optimistic about connecting with right people to influence government resources in the right direction. Though adoption of learning from non-state actors’ initiatives is often frustratingly slow, the trickle-down effect is being observed in few isolated cases. Drs Abhay and Rani Bang’s community-care initiative, called SEARCH, in the jungle of naxalite-infested Gadchiroli in Maharashtra caught the attention of the Indian government only after it was taken up in Nepal, Bangladesh, Malawi, Zambia and Ethiopia. 

The message that comes across from the initiative is loud and clear: reduce unnecessary pressure on the beleaguered health infrastructure albeit government hospitals and take health-care instead to the people by targeting areas that have least of such facilities. Else, reaching out to nearly 800 million people with poor access to healthcare, given that India’s doctor-patient ration is 1:2000, will remain a distant dream. Nothing could be more evident than the plight of 700,000 people confined within 535 acres in world’s second largest slum Dharavi in Mumbai, which is home to a random assortment of skin, mental and venereal diseases. 

What’s more, learnt Prasad, while sick men are taken to a hospital, woman in the same situation is just given a dose of simple painkillers and allowed to suffer in the most inhospitable slum dwelling. Gender discrimination is shocking feature of life in slums, wife-beating, abandonment and divorce are common. Were it not for the timely counseling by the dedicated team of SNEHA, an initiative set-up by social psychology Nayreen Daruwala, women would have been bereft of much needed psychological therapy which is often reserved for upward mobile urban population.

With a PhD in molecular genetics and an interdisciplinary research engagement at London’s University College, Prasad delves into the technological divide afflicting country’s health sector to reveal how a strategic merging the traditional with the modern system of medicine can help credible healthcare reach out to the culturally and economically diverse population of the country. The pluralist culture of medicine is both a bane and boon, she argues. It is, however, another matter that it has taken decades for the government to harness synergy between different systems of medicine. The Chopra Committee had long recommended ‘synthesis of Indian and western medicines is not only possible but practicable’, but at that time modern medicine was considered the basis for development in the new India. 

It took nearly six decades before the government could create the Ministry of AYUSH, which covers the practice of Ayurveda, Yoga, Siddha, Unani, Homeopathy and Naturopathy, to bring these practices in the mainstream of health care in the country that has long practiced all these form in one way or the other. Need it be said in a country where, according to the World Health Organization, seventy per cent of the population still accesses traditional treatments. And, it is no less revealing that AYUSH hospitals now offer 62,000 beds backed an army of 785,000 health workers. Without doubt, traditional medicine could be most desirable add-on to modern medicine in reaching out to teeming millions with affordable health care.

Full of interesting revelations and intriguing insights, In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room captures the sound bites from the by-lanes of healthcare have-nots. It is country where unflinching faith in magic and medicine flows in an unholy alliance, leading to unsubstantiated assertions like: ‘I prayed to goddess and my wife was cured of TB’. While the cause-effect relationship of such claim may concern a doctor, it matters least to the person whose wife eventually got cured. Such cultural diversity beseeches a system of medicine that is as close to the skin as it is to the soul of its people. 

Aarthi Prasad deserves credit for bringing selected stories from the country’s vast healthcare landscape to life. The writing is superb; the non-fiction story telling format doesn’t miss out on the minutest of details. A reader can’t escape the disgusting stench as the author wades through the filthy water in slums of Dharavi and nor can one miss the exquisite ambiance of the up-market cosmetic surgery clinic as the author engages in discussion on the emerging market of plastic surgery in the country. The author rightly concludes that the challenges and solutions to the health of this great nation are not as diaphanous as it may seem. It calls for a pluralistic understanding of the society and its people. 

In The Bonesetters’s Waiting Room
by Aarthi Prasad
Hachette. New Delhi, 2016
Extent 214 pp, Price: Rs 499 

First published in Biblio: A Review of Books, Sept-Nov 2016

Home is where the market is!

The universal market places, automotive teller machines and chain coffee shops give a false sense of home, and an unrealistic identity.

With increasing mobility and near homogeneity of living spaces ‘home is where the heart is’ is but a reflection of the market. With the same corporations not only invading but in many cases constituting the public space we live in or tend to occupy, the sense of ‘home’ has seemingly been suppressed in favor of a false home that makes us think we are wise and know who we are, while we are in fact utterly lost. The universal market places, automotive teller machines and chain coffee shops give a false sense of home, and an unrealistic identity. 

Conversely, it is a kind of ‘homelessness’ that does not reflect who we are in relation to the places in which we live, because it is more of the same. At a philosophical level, it can be interpreted as a crisis, since all values are gone and, as a result, we have nothing to hold on to. The only thing we hold on to is: what do the celebrities wear, what car our neighbor drives, what brand of mobile phone our friends carry, and so on. Such loss of sense has plunged us into a vicious trap of environmental, immigration, and survival crisis. 

Using Nietzsche’s philosophy to diagnose this unique form of ‘homelessness’, Gerard Kuperus  argues that for lack of any real groundings in the places where we live are ultimately unsustainable and dangerous. Development has turned a majority of humans into nomads, who end up solidifying and commercializing the places around them, As a consequence, this nomadism does not seek a transformation of ourselves, but rather a transformation of the places that we move to and from. Rooted in this are the crisis of our times, we create our home by immunizing ‘ourselves’ from the ‘other’, both humans and the environment. In practical terms, we allow only as much of both. While fewer people are allowed ‘in’ to provide essential household services, a small amount of nature in the form of potted plants is allowed ‘in’ and around our homes to reflect our control over it.      

This perceived notion of home leads people to act with disdain against both living and inaminate objects.  Economic values, according to Kuperus, dictate what we should do in relationship to one another, and to the places that we live in. This is better understood in the context of building a dam: an engineer wants to build a dam because the technology is available whereas an ecologist wants to restore the river instead. While the engineer incorporates nature in the human realm by taming it, the ecologist reacts by immunizing nature from us. Both the mindset of the engineer and that of the ecologist are driven by certain ideas about what should be, and what should not be. Even the ecologist who campaigns to protect the river considers it as a natural entity, the ‘other’ that must be preserved for the ecological services it offers. 

When is a river part of our collective home, integrated with human existence? Addressing this question using diverse philosophical strands, Gerard Kuperus, a professor of environment philosophy at the University of San Francisco, proposes an eco-politics that interfaces a unity of humans within nature. The idea of the interface can be the model for a new eco-politics in which human and non-human actants alike co-exist by acting and re-acting.  It is within this interface that we can find or recover a sense of home.  

Esoteric as it may sound, the proposition has a distinct practicability to it. Using philosophical expositions of Heidegger, Delueze and Guattari, the author seeks a paradigm shift in our relationships with ecology. While it is important to remind ourselves that we are losing eco-systems at an alarming rate, our restoration efforts are nowhere close to keeping pace with it. Perhaps the shift in approach would mean that if we re-store or re-create a forest, we allow more people to live in it and not otherwise. Only by blurring boundaries of what we call home can the otherness of others be integrated into it. 

Loaded with philosophical intrigues, Kuperus gives a wake-up call to think differently, about ourselves, our relationship to other people, and to the places around us. It is a source book to think further on re-inventing our relationships, of letting go the notion of household, of belonging and invasion, of native and stranger to address some of the social and environmental challenges of our times. The challenge is to find ourselves in the wild and the wild in ourselves. Unless the otherness of the other is made part of human existence, we will continue to be distanced from what indeed should be called a home. Else, home will remain an extension of the ‘market’. 

Ecopolitical Homelessness
by Gerard Kuperus
Routledge, London
Extent: 173, Price:  $102  

An abridged version has appeared in AnthemEnviroExpertsReviews. 

Mathematics may be akin to cooking

Cooking and math may have begun as simple and useful crafts but these have evolved into complex and pleasurable arts today.

Could there be any similarity between mathematics and cookery? Neither do cooks deal in numbers nor do mathematicians indulge in recipes. Why search for similarity when there is none, one might wonder. Afterall, no one eats numbers and neither can anyone order the square root of a muffin. Is it as linear as that or are we missing out on something more vital? Jim Henle, a Professor of Mathematics at Smith College, thinks we often miss tantalizing similarities between the two – both intimidate novices, both pose difficulties, and both celebrate champions. Further, mathematicians and cooks have similar dreams, similar fears, and similar guilty secrets. 

It may be hard for someone who is average in mathematics and rarely ventures into the kitchen to concur with such similarities. Yet, it can hardly be denied that both mathematicians and chefs solve ‘problems’. While Chefs create new and wonderful dishes, mathematicians create new and fascinating formulae. Called fusion, both of them bring together two or more old things to create something that’s new. Cuisines are anything but fusion of the old and new - flavors, ingredients, techniques. So, is mathematics! Come to think of it, algebra was borne out of calculus. The original problems of calculus – calculating areas, constructing tangents – were considered geometric till algebra was applied to get out of them. That could easily be a mathematical cuisine.

Every cuisine is a work of mathematics, though. Sample this: a puff pastry is but a single layer of butter surrounded by dough to begin with. The combination is then rolled out, and folded in three, creating three layers of butter within four layers of dough. This is quite obvious! The unobvious is once it gets folded further, say three more times. Each time the number of layers of butter is tripled: 9 layers, 27 layers, 81 layers. As a consequence, it creates 10, 28 and 82 layers of dough. For the chef, the numbers of layers are significant as these reflect in ultimate appearance and taste of the puff pastry, for a mathematician it is the fun of creating 82 layers of dough in just four operations with implications beyond sheer numbers.     

The self-taught cook-cum-gourmet mathematician makes it clear that cooking can be as much fun as mathematics, and vice versa. The bottom line is that if you are an avid cook, you can do math. And, if you are a successful mathematician, you can cook. What if you are neither of these two? It is so because neither does our education inculcate mathematical preparedness in us nor do our mothers coax us to try our hands at the frying pan. To be able to engage in either of the two subjects, argues Henle, one ought to be playful and fun-loving in life. Simply put, if you have fun doing something you will keep doing it. And, if you keep doing something you will get better at it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of both mathematics and cooking. 

The Proof and the Pudding is a non serious book on a serious subject; half of the book is filled with recipes while the other half is devoted to mathematics. The author finds perfect escape in pursuing his culinary skills to recreate the magic of mathematics in loafs of breads and layers of cheese. The lessons he draws are cross-cutting, and may not relate directly to either math or cooking. Enjoyment in failure holds the key to get good at any creative endeavor. Both math and cooking can help in being bad at something and yet be able to cross the dead ends. 

Exploring the two subjects from diverse perspectives viz., vanity, sloth, parsimony, lust, and gluttony, Henle finds amazing similarities in both math and cooking. But it doesn’t stop him from drawing mathematical parallels on aesthetic features like elegance, simplicity, complexity and usefulness common to both. If a recipe could be elegant, so could be a mathematical formula. From sticky buns to fennel pizza, and from cheese sandwich to vegetarian cassoulet, there is one for every taste that the self-taught cook could dish out with its associated mathematical proof using games, doodles, puzzles or card tricks. Afterall, the proof of the pudding lies in its taste. 

Cooking and math may have begun as simple and useful crafts but these have evolved into complex and pleasurable arts today. Ironically, while chefs have attained higher social recognition, mathematicians are still languishing in obscurity. No wonder, Henle makes a case for mathematicians to be chefs. Else, the glaring dissimilarity will continue to linger with Chicken tikka persisting over Euclidian geometry. Is it because mathematics exists in our minds and doesn’t deliver anything on the plate? 

The Proof and the Pudding
by Jim Henle
Princeton University Press, UK
Extent: 164, Price: US$26.95

This write-up was first published in Current Science, issue dated Sept 25, 2016.

No, I'm just looking!

Is the iconic secret agent transforming both as a figure of desire as well as the figure who desires?

The sensuous secret agent is past 50, and is not done yet. With its all twenty-four releases under Eon productions, Ian Fleming’s iconic James Bond with a pre-script 007 has continued to seduce women as if there is no tomorrow. Providing a visual guarantee of the maleness of the secret agent, from Dr. No to Spectre, the female characters have been treated with disdain by James Bond. No wonder, Bond has been personified as a guilt-free voyeur with a license to seduce and bed women, and if need be kill them too. Without doubt, the legacy of the most-wanted secret service agent has been built at the expense of women of all hues.

How has a character, who has been accused of sexism, endeared itself on the silver screen for five decades? Having studied the James Bond franchise for over a decade, Lisa Funnell has come up with a nuanced but complex understanding of gender, sexuality and female representation in the immensely successful series. Pulling contributions from over two dozen established and emerging scholars, the compilation provides breadth and depth that goes beyond the assumption that the masculine genre of action is created by and for men. In reality, however, Bond has been scripted both as a figure of desire as well as the figure who desires. More than mere beautiful objects, the Bond girls from Ursula Andress to Monica Balucci, have given momentum to the story with their often underrated skills in armed combat and espionage knowledge. 

Funnell, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, has often been asked how being a woman and feminist has she followed aggressive heterosexual masculinity and consequent suppression of women by James Bond. Positioning herself in the complex space defined by the patriarchal nature of film, she discounts the problematic nature of the films in favor of consumption of male culture which defines female fandom. Why should gendering of consumptive practices work to delimit pleasure? In the Bond fantasy world, both good and bad women, have a pivotal role to play in furthering the narrative. These characters can easily be viewed as symbols rather than individuals, their position being a reflection of their disposable physical attributes as mere functions of the narrative. No surprise, therefore, that the Bond girl is usually characterized as being independent and willful. 

Does it mean the Bond stories reflect a progressive view of women’s sexuality? On the contrary, the manner in which James Bond ends-up possessing the girl(s) reflects a traditional, and culturally problematic, male fantasy of women’s sexuality. Sample the iconic scene of rising Ursula Andress out of the surf in a white bikini in Dr. No. ‘What are you doing here? Looking for shells?’ she asks. Without missing the gaze, Bond replies: ‘No, I’m just looking’. Sigmund Freud would view such ‘gaze’ from the notion of scopophila, creating a voyeuristic viewing situation in the darkness of the theatre. In drawing greater sexual freedom for women, Ian Fleming extracted greater sexual opportunities for men. And, it has paid dividends at the box-office.   

The social consequences of the perpetuation of gender stereotypes have far from clearly understood, and neither has it been easy given the complex nature of patriarchy and feminism. The book explores tensions between the progressive and the conservative viewpoints, offering scholarly perspectives on the representation of women in the franchise. 

There is an interesting twist to the tale, though. The first Bond novel was published in the same year as the launch of Playboy, lending credence to the assumption that the story emerged in the context of mass-market pornography. It captured the emerging consumptive characteristic of post-war Western Europe and North America. And, there hasn’t been any looking back since then. If graphic account of sex wasn’t enough, the Bond girls were given sexually suggestive names - the most risqué and famous being Pussy Galore, played by Honor Blackman in Goldfinger (1964). Plenty O’Toole and Octopussy were other sexually suggestive names for Bond girls in the series. 

Ever since the iconic character was created, socio-political developments have shaped the depiction of women in the franchise. The book captures the influence of feministic undercurrents on the franchise through the decades, and makes for serious scholarly reading. The most significant change being the transformation of Playboy in recent months. With the magazine having started covering its girls, so has James Bond responded by bedding few women than his predecessors. Spectre, the latest Bond flick, has Daniel Craig in more serious romantic relationship.   

For His Eyes Only
by Lisa Funnell (Ed)
Wallflower Press, UK
Extent: 309, Price: $30  

This review was first published in Deccan Herald on Aug 28, 2016.

The inability to think of the unthinkable

Public response to climate change is caught between the polarities of widespread denial and overt activism.

Like tigers in the Sundarbans, where the beast remains elusive but not its footmarks, climate change is seemingly everywhere and yet found nowhere. Despite its improbable though astoundingly real occurrences, the climatic events have been restricted to our fleeting consciousness. So far, only 19 countries have inked the non-binding Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C. All this is taking place while social media has made climate change research a part of the public discourse. The aim is to trigger action towards a credible policy response. Far from it. Discomforting as it may be, the eerie silence around the dangers of climate change has come to rest on the skewed awareness that we are all living in a ‘new normal’.

Amitav Ghosh questions this notion and our inability to think about the lurking dangers of climate change, and challenges the uniform expectations rooted in the ‘regularity of bourgeois life’. Need it be said that unstinted faith in such perceived regularity has driven the modern world to the point of derangement. It follows that we cannot recognize the environmental problems created by our way of life. As every individual is incentivized to improve his or her standard of living and the state is driven by the capitalist model of double-digit growth, what will drive us to exit the comfort zone of this ‘new normal’ remains a vexed question.

Being a celebrated story-teller himself, Ghosh wonders why climate change has not been taken seriously by fiction writers and literary journals. Although the subject has figured obliquely in his own writings, he contends that a broad imaginative failure arising out of a personal predilection to climate change has prevented writers from negotiating the currents of global warming. The Great Derangement is thus a call for writers to pull climate change out from the realm of scientific research into the literary domain such that contemporary culture may find it easy to deal with it. After all, the climate crisis is as much a crisis of culture as a crisis of the imagination, an inability to think about the ‘unthinkable’.

There is a difficulty in accepting such consideration. Research shows that people do not learn about climate change through personal experience or act on the issue unless it evokes strong visceral reactions. Why would people think about climate change, which involves thoughts on death and their own mortality? Most individuals rarely take seriously even predictions on water scarcity. No wonder then that a film like The Day After Tomorrow, with its depiction of glacial meltdown leading to a submerged Manhattan, served merely as action-movie entertainment and did not lead to serious climate discourse among movie-goers.   

The literary mainstream too has remained on the margins of the crises and has been restrained on the forest fires, cloudbursts, tornadoes and tsunamis that have been pounding our world with ferocious regularity. As public response to climate change is caught between the polarities of widespread denial and overt activism -- which is also under surveillance by the military-industrial complex -- literary minds do have the power to free society from the shackles of cultural cognition and motivated reasoning. Ghosh argues that there can be no compelling period in human history to recognize the urgency for such an engagement.

The Great Derangement views the history and politics of climate change through personal stories. It is a refreshing take on a subject that has just about moved from the post-scientific consensus stage to a pre-social one. Scientific knowledge in itself is never socially or politically inert, particularly when it prompts changes in people’s beliefs or actions. However, it takes time for social acceptance to emerge. Only by acknowledging and addressing this underlying subtext of climate change can the cultural schism be bridged.

The author’s anxiety on the subject of climate change comes through clearly in this erudite narrative. But science does not have the final word when it comes to bringing about a shift in our culture practices. Even the scientific ‘proof’ of a causal connection between smoking and lung cancer has been hard to establish. Science can only describe the problem; it is for cultural processes to guide social and political change. Rather than forcing people to acquiesce, the better goal would be to prepare society to address the full scope of the climate change issue.

Written with ecological passion and literary flavour, The Great Derangement is an absorbing narrative on the subject, the impact of which is getting closer with each passing day. Shorn of scientific jargon, it is an interesting exposition on the most urgent task of our time.

First published in The Hindustan Times dated Aug 27, 2016.

The voice of the vanquished

It is human nature to find everything about the victors virtuously rosy, and everything about the vanquished a vicious black.

Mythology and history have often been unkind to the losers, as these are either written by the victors or by those who eulogize their heroes. Over time, such exaggerations acquire a reality of their own, told and retold as the ‘truth’ of the times. After all, it is human nature to find everything about the victors virtuously rosy, and everything about the vanquished a vicious black. And, the vanquished are forever the whipping boys of posterity, as the Kauravas have been since the days of the Mahabharata. And, the title of the chief villain of the epic war has been bestowed on Duryodhana, the eldest among the hundred siblings borne to the blind King Dhritarashtra. Rarely has anyone questioned the veracity of the story, which has been passed on from one generation to other. But if the narrative strength of the epic lies in its multiple renderings, should Duryodhana not be given a chance to make a case for himself? 

Known to constitute the ruling and the military elite, it is ridiculous to assume that the kshatriya parents would knowingly consider Duryodhana as a chosen name for their child, as it means the one who makes wrong use of weapons. In reality, the crown prince of Hastinapur could not have any other name but Suyodhana, the one who is adept at wielding weapons. And, there is hardly any account of him proving it otherwise. It seems the chronicler of the epic saga chose to identify the crown prince otherwise, a name that eased in anointing devious sub-plots aimed to demean his character. Subjecting mythological facts to logical reasoning, V Raghunathan brings the much maligned prince to life to narrate his side of the story in Duryodhana. 

Candid in his confession, the protagonist argues that if the Pandavas were as good as they have been painted to be then the Kauravas had their share of good deeds as well.  The epic war is stated to be the handiwork of Duryodhana whereas in reality it was on account of the Pandavas staking unsubstantiated claim to the throne, while none of the brothers were sons of Pandu as the scheming Kunti had made everybody believe. Sage Vyasa had himself put the facts across in the epic: Yama, Vayu and Indra were the respective fathers of Yudhistra, Bhima and Arjun whereas the younger two Pandavas, Nakula and Sahadev – born to Pandu’s second wife Madri – were also not sired by Pandu but by the renowned physician twins, the Ashwini Kumaras. Given the non-Kuru lineage, Duryodhana had a far greater right to reject such devious claim than the Pandavas ever had to make that claim in the first place. 

It is tough not to believe Duryodhana who brings the already known facts to light. In doing so, the protagonist builds a compelling case for the version of the epic being flawed because the facts were misrepresented to disfavor the Kauravas. It is equally true that the story may not have been fascinating had it been painted merely in white and black. The Mahabharata is not one story, but there is story within a story and each character is not what it may seem to be. Fact and fiction blend flawlessly, making it quite a task to separate the grain from the chaff. 

It is often believed that just because Krishna fought on the side of the Pandavas, they must have been in the right. If that be so, why did Krishna’s elder brother Balaram, along with many other noble souls like Karna and Jarasandha chose to side with the Kauravas if they were pure evil? Presiding deity he might be but Krishna had his share of ‘grey’ in the epic when he had partnered with Bhima and Arjun to murder Jarasandha by stealth. Duryodhana equates his attempt to kill Pandavas with Jarasandha’s murder as pre-emptive strikes for the protection of their respective kingdoms, but wonders why his attempt was singled out as a crime?    

Duryodhana’s version of the epic is iconoclastic, engaging the reader's attention to the bygone characters and incidents from a fresh perspective. The idea is not to rewrite the great epic but to pick essential lessons from it. Says Duryodhana: ‘We might ascribe disproportionate credit or disgrace to ourselves for our successes and failures whereas the truth is that, we are bit actors in a grand scheme of random events.’ Afterall, like the Pandavas, Duryodhana and his kin were the product of their times over which they had little control.

Duryodhana leaves the reader with a volley of intriguing questions to ponder over. Was it my fault if Yudhisthira chose not to heed his brothers’ advice against accepting the invitation for a game of chauper? Was it my fault if Yudhisthira considered his wife to be his property (though it belonged to his other four brothers) and wagered her in the game of dice? Was it my fault if Shakuni was a better player of chauper than Yudhisthira? Am I to be faulted for winning back Indraprastha by strategic statecraft rather than open warfare?  Why history doesn’t credit me for upholding the personal liberty of the Pandavas by sending them to exile? Why I’m not being credited for letting Draupati her freedom with her good-for-nothing husbands? 

The Mahabharata has been told and retold for thousands of years. The epic has engaged readers and scholars to understand the story from the perspectives of its secondary characters. V. Raghunathan makes a convincing case from Duryodhana’s perspective, which is highly absorbing and immensely thought-provoking.  It adds yet another dimension to the labyrinth that is the Mahabharata, 

Duryodhana
by V Raghunathan
HarperCollins, New Delhi
Extent: 307, Price: Rs 350  

This write-up was first published in Speaking Tree dated Aug 7, 2016.          

Of paradox and possibility

While the collective power of many small (apolitical) efforts to bring about change is acknowledged, what gets missed out is the fact that development is inherently a political process.

India is a land of paradox: if there is poverty amidst prosperity then hope can be traced amidst despair too. Despite being an increasingly unequal society that produces real victims and genuine tragedies on a daily basis, it inadvertently leaves people to create possibilities for their own emancipation as well. With humane development far distanced from a sizable population, individual creativity is innovating new pathways for leftovers of the society to tread on. For millions trapped in the downstream economy of deprivation, ordinary folks are scripting extraordinary tales of bringing basic elements - potable water, safe food, and fresh air - within peoples’ reach.

Elemental India is an inspiring journey through this landscape of paradox and possibilities, a compendium of stories weaved together to reflect the essence of pancha mahabhuta – five elements that constitute nature. Within the geographical bounties of the sub-continent, a wide array of fascinating survival options are being created by enterprising individuals and institutions to keep the ‘five elements’ in harmony. Embedded in this quest for alternatives are personal journeys of some of these individuals in search of a meaning of life.   

Umendra’s crusade for organic agriculture in Punjab; Kanhaiya’s relentless pursuit for water in Rajasthan; and Pinki’s tirade for women liberation in Bihar are few of those stories, offering counter narrative to the dominant discourse on development that hinges on industrialization. That there is an alternate way of life and an alternate approach to human development that doesn’t compromise on any of the five elements is the leitmotif of these stories. Meera Subramanian does not miss out on details while capturing the vignettes of change sweeping the country.

Inspiring as the stories may be, these remain on the margins of mainstream growth agenda of the state. One reason for this being so has to do with the very nature of these initiatives, as these occur outside the purview of the state by non-state actors.  Consequently, the state is under no obligation to integrate such products or processes in its institutional architecture. Need it be said that successive governments have often been hostile to the environmentalism of its times. 

Another reason for non-acknowledging such transformative stories has to do with the state’s obsession with double-digit economic growth, wherein ecological concerns are viewed as middle-class ‘lifestyle environmentalism’ aimed at stalling progress. With ‘Make in India’ being the current dictum of growth, it is quite unlikely if equity and ecological concerns will merit any serious consideration in the prevailing political-economy of development.    

Unlike most first generation non-resident Indians, the author carries compassion for country’s rich culture and its intrinsic value system. With a stint at one of the environmental non-profits in the US, she has developed empathy for deprived people and appreciation for bottom-up change. Building on her investigative analysis, she argues in favor of a new economy that neither loses sight of the last man nor country’s irreplaceable natural resources. 

Having been privy to most stories and people featured in the book, I am both at an advantage and a disadvantage as a reviewer. The advantage is that one can quickly relate to the stories, and the disadvantage being that one closely understands their unresolved complexities. While the collective power of many small efforts (largely apolitical) to bring about change is acknowledged, what gets missed out is the fact that development is inherently a political process. How two divergent forces can be made to enter into a dialogue has remained a vexed question?   

No surprise, therefore, that the author toes the predictable line of argument in renewing her hopes that small stories have the potential to trigger big change, towards a secure, sustainable, and prosperous future. The issue of scale has remained unaddressed, though.

In addition to making an interesting reading, Elemental India is a grim reminder on the challenges confronting the country, and gives a timely call to the policy planners to evolve an intrinsic Indian model of development which is more proactive and permanent. Neither Nehru’s monolithic top-down industrialization nor Gandhi’s austere agrarian model can suit the changing India, which is young and aspiring. It needs a new script for change that draws the best from both, capitalizing on its human and natural resources. 

Elemental India
by Meera Subramanian
Harper Litmus, New Delhi
Extent: 340, Price: Rs 599

This review was first published in The Hindustan Times dated July 23, 2016.

A bone-dry dystopia

To keep some fountains running while million others survive on ‘hydration packs’ is the worst form of inequality that human civilization could usher in the name of progress. 

With searing discontent among citizens and conflicts brewing among states, the world is fast heading towards a water-less future. As huge areas across the globe dry up and with a billion people without access to safe water, the world might indeed be standing on a precipice. In his fictional world, which may not be far from the emerging reality, Paolo Bacigalupi imagines a bone-dry dystopia where water is the most prized possession. Private armies are deployed to lay control over water of the Colorado River, as lawyers engage in court-room battles to win shady deals. It is an electrifying vision of the future where lawlessness and violence is the order of the day, with the states fighting over shared waters of the river as enshrined in a treaty drawn nearly a century ago. ‘I say we send our troops up to Colorado, that’s our water they are holding’. It is people seeking to take advantage of people. 

The Water Knife is a novel of discomforting possibilities of a piped resource and a packaged product, as water has come to mean for a vast majority of the population. Today, a sizeable chunk of population thrives on borrowed water. Else, how Las Vegas – a city that should have dried up and blown away – would have survived?  There could be nothing more shocking for those who are robbed of their water to serve the interests of lush mini-worlds hundreds of miles away. To keep some fountains running while million others survive on ‘hydration packs’ is the worst form of inequality that human civilization could usher in the name of progress. 

Bacigalupi has come a long way from his multi award-winning debut The Windup Girl. Regarded as deftly plotted and evocative, it was set in a future Thailand wherein its cast of characters scours the region in search of new food resources to tackle the impact of climate change. Having tackled a futuristic subject yet again, some critics consider him a climate-fiction or cli-fi writer. That indeed he is, as he excavates the shape of human future based on research and trends that are rapidly defining our world in The Water Knife. Each of the three leading characters in the novel: Angel, the cunning fixer; Lucy, the tireless journalist; and Maria, protecting native rights are caught up in their own world of alterations and confabulations. 

Midway through the engaging narrative, one gets a sense that the future battles over water may indeed be between over-populated cities, tossing up refugees who may have to bribe border police to cross over as illegal immigrants. Some people have to bleed so other people could drink. As one character puts it without any remorse: ‘Live by gun and die by the gun. You make a living cutting people’s water, at some point, the scales got to balance you out.’ Is it the price unsuspecting masses will end up paying for being part of the original sin of robbing others of their legitimate water rights? Or, will such a scenario force people to become water-wise?

It is a book of a grim future where accusations fly like free-floating dust particles in the desert. “If we weren’t wasting so much water on farming, we’d be fine’, goes one argument. But if you cut off farms, you get dust storms,’ counters the other. While fingers are pointed at one another, none of them points back at themselves.  It is the river like Colorado, more than a thousand mile of free flow from the canyons of Utah to the blue Pacific, which is at the receiving end of such follies – obstructed and diverted to make deserts bloom without a drop of water hitting its delta. Even reservoirs dry up, forcing Texan refugees into water-pampered Phoenix.

Bacigalupi lives in Colorado, close to the plot of his novel, lending credence and seriousness to the emerging issues of a water-stressed world. ‘What people will call us when archaeologists dig us up in another couple of thousand years?’ May be there is no one left to dig us up or maybe they’ll just say this was the ‘Dry Age’ in history. The Water Knife is a serious book about a twisted fictional landscape, hinting at the price we may end-up paying for our collective stupidity. 

The Water Knife
by Paolo Bacigalupi
Orbit Books, USA
Extent: 386, Price: £20

This review was first published in Deccan Herald on July 17, 2016. 

A metaphor of life and renewal

The B-2 Stealth Bomber built at a whopping cost of $2 billion apiece have taken inspiration from the flying-wing design of the Javan cucumber seeds.

Accomplished artists may have painted hundreds of verses on a kernel but the unwritten genetic instructions a seed carries makes it an indomitable botanical marvel. The ‘fierce energy’ a seed carries, as George Bernard Shaw would describe it, can help it explode into becoming any one of the estimated 352,000 kinds of plants that use seeds to reproduce, from humble mustard to mighty oak. Given our dependence on seeds, from morning till night, it can hardly be denied that humans might not have evolved in a world without seeds. 

Spread across five absorbing chapters, The Triumph of Seeds captures the traits and habits of seeds that have not only nourished mankind but have endured to sustain future human populations too. Despite rapid strides in seed science, seeds still remain the most prized possession of the national agencies and the inter-governmental organisations. No wonder, the first things to be moved out from war torn Aleppo in Syria were the seed vaults, shipped to a secure location in Norway. So secure are such locations that the National Seed Bank, on the edge of the Colorado State University, is designed to withstand earthquakes, blizzards and catastrophic fires, and will stay afloat should floods submerge the area.   

Conservation biologist Thor Hanson has put together an immensely readable and engrossing treatise on the history, biology, and evolution of one of the vegetal kingdom’s smartest inventions. That it preserves the future plant and within it is preserved the future of living beings is testimony to the seed’s fascinating evolution and incredible versatility. A seed is a package of versatile features: it embodies nourishment for the future plant but can use its flesh to lure potential distributors; and, it slumps into dormancy but can swing back to life at an opportune time. Seed is the past, present and future rolled into one tiniest pop – a metaphor for life and renewal.

What makes The Triumph of Seeds unique is the manner in which the subject has been given a multi-dimensional treatment, without making the narrative run into the cobweb of botanical jargons. From his own research on Central American tree almendro to his keen observations on South American coffee, Hanson has pieced together compelling stories on evolution of seeds such that the extraordinariness of seeds is not taken for granted. Most of what we consume, from cereals to vegetables, are seeds of some sort. From starch to proteins and from oil to saturated fats, seeds are incredible storehouse of a wide variety of energies. What makes seeds even more fascinating is the fact that despite such stored energies seeds can lie dormant for several centuries. A dormant date seed recovered from the ruins of Masada Fortress in Israel germinated after lying dormant for nearly 2,000 years. It sprang to life after planting and is now a 10-foot-tall palm tree.

Seeds might stay dormant but these are not dormant for ideas. While seeds and warfare may sound like odd bedfellows, the dropping of four small hand grenades from the cockpit of a reconnaissance plane during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 owed it to a type of seed. The airplane used on that historic incident was essentially a flying seed, scaled-up from the streamlined pips of a Javan cucumber. More recently, the B-2 Stealth Bomber built at a whopping cost of $2 billion apiece took inspiration from the flying-wing design of the same cucumber seeds. What is shocking, however, is that while the cucumber seeds evolved to spread life, the stealth bomber has the capacity to extinguish life instead. 

Given the progress in science albeit genetic manipulation of living organisms, the future of naturally occurring seeds could be anything but uncertain, a subject that Hanson seems unsettled about. That plant geneticists have the tools to add, delete, and alter the genetic traits of seeds, and that big corporations have the resources to monopolize production and distribution of seeds have tossed up serious moral and ethical questions of dealing with the global common pool of seeds. The development of infamous ‘terminator seeds’, the name given to genetically modified plants which produce sterile seeds, is against the very nature and rhythms of seeds, and stands to break the tangible connection from past to future. 

At this time when plant engineering is outpacing natural evolution, and when corporate interests are manipulating seeds to make profit, the world is passing through deep moral and cultural crises. Through this lively and intelligent book, Thor Hanson cautions that unless we remain watchful there will be more such canny transformations. If you love your popcorns and the cup of coffee, we each have an obligation to protect the seeds.

The Trumph of Seeds
by Thor Hansen
Basic Books, New York
Extent: 226, Price: US$26.99 

This review was first published in HinduBusinessLine weekend supplement BLink on June 4, 2016 and Current Science dated Aug 10, 2016             

Taming the mental monster

Women in the Middle East have begun to question those aspects of their culture that injures them in the name of religious protection. 

More often than not, prohibition of any kind triggers hidden human desires to surface with provocative force. It may vary across cultures but psychological response to imposed conditions is commonly associated with extreme behavior. Aptly fitting in this construct is the practice of misogyny, which invokes sexual violence against the other half. And, far from taming this mental monster the society instead burdens women with the responsibility for their own safety from sexual violence. 

Turning a personal tragedy into public outrage, Mona Eltahawy has given a call for a sexual revolution in the Middle-East – to rid the society from the practice of oppressing its women. Provocative as the title may be, Headscarves and Hymens is a book-length expansion of a controversial article, ‘Why They Hate Us’, she wrote for ‘Foreign Policy’ in 2012. It is a courageous narrative by a woman who was picked up by the police during street clashes in Cairo, sexually assaulted and brutally beaten until her left hand and right arm were broken. Rising like a phoenix from her battered self, Mona has used her personal experience to narrate the plight of women in the middle-east. 

If she were to use paint to indicate the places where her body was touched, groped, or grabbled without her consent even while wearing the hijab, says she, her entire torso, back and front, would be covered with color. And, she isn’t an exception! Over 99% of women in Egypt have experienced sexual harassment; in Tunisia some 47% of women have suffered domestic violence; and to top it all, at least alone 90% of married Egyptian women between the ages of 15 and 49 have undergone Female Genital Mutilation - a practice that continues to cause an unknown number of deaths. This and more, it is a painful narrative that can numb readers’ senses. 

Trapped in a state of perpetual victimhood, women are unlikely to publically accept their private struggles against the oppressive forces. No wonder, the ultra-conservative society in the middle-east has not only forced women to be cultural vectors, but has used their bodies as the medium upon which culture is engraved. The author despises such cultural indignation, and calls upon women to break their silence because ‘it is the power of women’s stories that can tear down the soundproof walls of home.’ Only by breaking the cycle of inter-generational transfer of victimhood, by suffering mothers to their daughters, can personal liberty become the political tool against oppression. The battles over women’s bodies can be won only by women. 

A toxic mix of culture and religion, promoted by the state, has allowed ultra-conservatism to be the leitmotif of women’s existence in the middle-east countries. Else, why would Saudi Arabian women of any age need the permission of a male legal guardian to travel, marry, work or access education. And, why would as many as 95 per cent of rape victims in Jordon marry their rapists to protect the families, and to preserve their reputation. Shockingly, such archaic practices are considered by many as beneficial to women. The silence of women seems deafening.

Mona wears her defiant attitude on her sleeves, and not on the head, because she considers headscarf a piece of cloth that reflects women’s status as separate and subservient. Hijab burdens women with expression of purity and modesty, she adds. Rarely is it been considered that women shoulder such socio-religious norms at an enormous cost to their intellectual and emotional self. And the enthusiasm with which the tiny membrane (hymen) is protected by families, religious authorities, lawmakers and security forces, women have let their bodies be controlled by others.

Headscarves and Hymens lends voice to several small but significant stories of rebellion, wherein women have begun to question those aspects of their culture that injures them in the name of religious protection. Violating the kingdom’s ban on female drivers by forty-seven Saudi women who took to the wheel in 1990 has been a story of inspiration across the region. However, change in itself is a slow process that will require a process of dialogue to challenge entrenched ideologies. That the silence is being broken, and that women struggling against the oppressive forces have begun to come out is a sure sign of change. Only when the victims seek liberation, can liberation be achieved. 

Headscarves and Hymens
by Mona Eltahawy
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London
Extent: 240, Price: Rs 799 

This review was first published in Deccan Herald on its issue dated March 20, 2016.