“Elon Musk Grimaced”

 

“Elon Musk Grimaced”

I am having fun thinking about how a libertarian may start a long novel, in the template forged by Ayn Rand, in her third and fourth novels−The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.   

The opening sentences are considered, by libertarians, as iconic, “Howard Roark laughed,” which was followed by, “Who is John Galt?”

Perhaps you are not aware or you refused to be sucked into enjoying the circus that is the US Presidency under, the second instalment, Donald J. Trump−good for you.

Everyone who is anyone at all is most keen on what others say, not about himself or herself, about someone else, because that is where the lode can be found, extracted, manipulated and leveraged. This is how politics sustains itself, looking for cracks through which worms may wriggle out. And, those who endorse DJT in his haphazard ways−Republican Congressman− are, in my opinion, such soulless characters. Maybe I insulted the worms. I apologize.

The US President Harry S. Truman famously wanted a one-armed economist as he was tired of advice that started, “on the one hand ...”, and ended, “on the other hand...”. Trump is very smart as he has collected people around him who only repeat what he says. Never a doubt in his mind, as there is never a second hand.

Oops, I made an error. It is not what Trump says, but what Elon Musk wanted to say or said. Musk wanted to ride the coat-tail of politicians, in particular the gullible Trump, to scale new heights in becoming wealthier and wealthier with no end in sight. If you saw the clip where he speaks, with his toddler son bestride his shoulders, in the Oval Office, where none other than the POTUS has ever addressed the WH press corps, to my knowledge. That is Musk’s version of riding the coat-tail!

This is where Muck is different than either Roark or Galt. One of them wanted nothing to do with society, which must include politics. Ayn Rand missed a trick; she did not imagine anyone like Musk who exploits the system to abuse it.

Never mind, Ayn Rand−she must be in Libertarians’ Paradise−would be more than willing to write the foreword for the upcoming auto-biography (ghost written by one of his acolytes) of Elon Musk.

I am offering the opening statement: “Elon Musk grimaced.”

That grimace was occasioned by the terrible loss in the election, by 10% points for a seat on the State Supreme Court of Wisconsin Trump and Musk supported candidate suffered. Musk handed out million dollar checks to two voters to campaign for the ultimate loser; vote-buying is not the preserve of elections in Third World countries (I know this category has been abolished. Even so, the situation has remained the same).

This should be the beginning of the end, at the very beginning of Musk’s biography. The wins notched by the Republican candidates  for the House seats in Florida, by a much reduced margin than what Trump scored in those Congressional districts, is a warning shot across the bow, the talking heads on TV are saying, except those on Fox News.

Trump has been warned. Check that. Musk has been warned. Hence the grimace.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Nuclear Devices, Tunnels, Canals, Fission or Fusion, Waste, Disasters

 

Nuclear Devices, Tunnels, Canals, Fission or Fusion, Waste, Disasters

It was some day in May, 1974, we, students of engineering staying in hostels, were busy preparing for our end-semester examinations in our study cocoons, each to their own. There was a sudden uproar in the corridors. We popped out to see what excited our classmates so much. It was nothing big.

Earlier that day India had detonated its first nuclear device, an atomic bomb, of perhaps Lilliputian size. We heard it from BBC Overseas Service. We really could not care, as we were bringing up the rear, after the US, UK, USSR, France, and China, not necessarily in that order. More importantly, we were ready to go home after slogging through sixteen weeks of academic torture.

When we returned after the summer break, the talking heads in the hostel were butting heads about the nuclear test: good or bad, good use or waste of money, did we do that merely to scare Pakistan, have we really arrived on the global nuclear stage, how would China assess the value of the test for India, and so on. I clearly remember that the government controlled news media (AIR and DD) projected the test as much required and trumpeted how such a capability would come to accelerate India’s path on the development curve.

A year later, the grouping the Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG) banned export of fuel and technology to India. No worry, said the Indian scientists, we have abundant Thorium, another radioactive material that will do.

We will blast tunnels for laying railway lines and shorten distances across the continental size nation through a series of micro-nuclear devices, will do something similar for roads also, and what about canals to transfer water from basin to basin – all done at the push of a button. Nuclear energy is cheap and safe. No need to worry about nuclear waste disposal. We have a long sea shore, after all. I fell for it, the blinkers-on technocrat that I was becoming.

Now it is nearly 51 years since. What have been the civilian uses of nuclear explosions in India that I was gung-ho about? Zero. The test was named Pokhran 1, after a second test was conducted, Pokhran 2, so unimaginative. Pokhran 2 was more than two–a cluster of four fission tests and one fusion test, the hydrogen bomb; the hydrogen bomb claim was disputed by the US. In 1998, when Pokhran 2 came about, Prime Minister Vajpayee was in the lead, I was no longer the babe in the woods that I was in 1974. Unfortunately, I did not find the middle way and I became a know-it-all in my mind and in the minds of most others who have known me.

Enough about me and I return to the nuclear tests. I saw that in more than twenty years, nuclear energy contribution to our energy requirement was minuscule, 3% in 1998. The much touted Fast Breeder Reactor was developing slowly; I wonder why the name had not been changed to Slow Breeder Reactor!

Check that. I know, no matter how slowly the technology is developed, it would remain a Fast Breeder Reactor, meaning something else entirely, like how fast neutrons move within the core. About Thorium mining, I had no idea, and I would leave it at that.

We have to import nuclear power technology from the huge multinational commercial players, and that is not an easy job. One of the main reasons is that the promoters seek complete indemnity. This is par for the course, he who has the technology calls the shot.

In the middle of all this, nuclear power lost its sheen, as no one was ready to adopt the orphan–the issue of nuclear waste disposal, and a few other wake-up calls, like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi disasters.

And, fusion technology has been on the horizon for more than three decades, from more than three decades till now.

No wonder, no tunnels have been bored (?) using nuclear blasts, no cuts in highways have been executed using nuclear blasts, the power generated through nuclear fission–fast breeder or not–has not nudged in percentage terms, no nuclear power company wants to absorb in its balance sheet the risks associated with nuclear power generation, no one has figured out how to dispose of the spent fuel from nuclear reactors, and other issues I am not aware of.

So, now I am not babe in the woods but a know-it-all. Things have not changed just as in harnessing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Mere words.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

 

 

I am Old

 

I am Old

Not earth shattering news, yet the way it was delivered to me put me in a funk. I get my newspaper not very early in the morning, only between 8:00 and 8:30. This suits me fine as I do not stir out of bed till 7:30.

In The Hindu, the newspaper I get, somewhere in the inside pages (opposite to the Editorial?) there is a small piece under bold headline, “FROM THE ARCHIVES”, per the editor, interesting snippets as reported in the paper from 50 years and 100 years earlier on that date. Some days I read them, but most days I do not. It just could have been that Saturn moved into my birth astrological sign on that date, and the evil planet forced me to read the 50-years-ago piece.

It was a news item that struck a chord with me, not very strong as I do not remember now what it said.

That was 50 years ago! I AM OLD.

That evening I went for my usual walk mostly along the sleepy-streets of the town of Srirangam (it is not easy finding six kilometres of such streets, but I have found). Yet, I did not sleep walk and that is as well because the traffic that does ply on these streets is mostly two-wheelers that do not care for pedestrians. I distinctly remember that my pace was slower, less than hundred steps a minute (the usual pace – 116 steps per minute if I am not disturbed in my semi-urban trek; I am sort of particular about this).

It meant, and it could have meant only one thing–I have internalized the fact that I am old. It was brought to me by the daily newspaper. I will stick with it as I am a sucker for punishment!

Though a jolt it was, I knew I can live with it. For how long, I would not dare to speculate.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Things Shaheed Bhagat Singh Wrote and What They Mean to Me

 

Things Shaheed Bhagat Singh Wrote and What They Mean to Me

The following are culled from an anthology of Bhagat Singh’s writings as given in Why I am an atheist? What they mean to me is at the minuscule level of my comprehension. Bhagat Singh was not a littérateur, but his anthology appears to be by one. If I am wrong in my judgment, so be it.

Dive in …

‘They can crush my body, but they will not be able to crush my spirit’

What would “spirit” mean to an atheist that Bhagat Singh was? Not a surprise, he was also a rationalist. An unbeatable combination of negation of a deity and the so-called “inner flame”, the soul. The way I see it, the “spirit” Bhagat Singh mentions is the set of ideals he has lived by, in his very short life span of 23 years. Merely 23 years. How did he get to be what he was at such a young age?

His “spirit” must have been floating like a butterfly; and it also stung anyone who came near him. Ask Cassius Clay who became Muhammad Ali. Also because, Bhagat Singh willingly entered the boxing ring, as he was ready as he ever was going to be.

‘Philosophy is the outcome of human weakness or limitation of knowledge’

Bhagat Singh has quoted someone saying the above who still dared not deny the existence of God. This did not sit well with Bhagat Singh. The context is where he seeks any kind of proof or confirmation of belief in God bringing into the world what he was then seeking or would soon be, release from the “yoke of serfdom”.

I am not sure I understand, even in the context in which Bhagat Singh wrote this or how I read it, the human weakness he refers to; the limitation of knowledge is OK. The only escape valve is that man abhors uncertainty and he desperately wants to find it, through God, a concept that is more uncertain than anything else one can think of, he must have decided.

About 500 years ago, in Europe, philosophy was what drove people of courage into finding any level of certainty. Socrates did not venture there, nor did the Buddha, both more than two thousand years earlier. The Buddha, indeed, eschewed philosophy altogether, but sought and found a way to reduce suffering a man, any man experiences. What did surprise me was that Bhagat Singh had not mentioned in his writings chosen in this anthology, anything about the Buddha. Had he done it elsewhere? Give him the benefit of doubt.

‘I am a man and nothing more. None can claim to be more’

This statement took me by a storm, for its piercing honesty and humility. It is not for him alone but for everyone ever born, he is claiming that a man (a human being) is no more than that. He did not, ever, pronounce himself ‘Shaheed’, as he could not have! An honorific given to a martyr, who is dead fighting for a cause, after all. What is he saying in clear terms?

A human being cannot give in to temptations that veer him away from the personal morality that he has developed within himself, after he has studied the issue to his satisfaction. This could be incomplete, even be wrong, but it is what it is at a given time, his conviction.

There is nothing more to a man, I hear him saying.

Indeed, such an understanding is what led me to the life of the Buddha (to the little I am aware of) to seek a parallel. The Buddha left his life of luxury, his wife, and his infant son seeking for himself a truer knowledge than the one he was imparted. This is almost precisely the same with Bhagat Singh and it come out in stark relief in what he wrote to his father (another of his writing in the anthology). He writes to his father, “My life is not so precious, at least to me, as you may probably think it to be.” Such a thought that gives the lie to the importance of ancestors is almost explicitly forbidden in our “ancestor-venerating” society.

‘Study to enable yourself to face the arguments advanced by the opposition. Study to arm yourself with arguments in favor of your cult.’

There was a time I used to attend student debates held in the university in the evenings, and I, in a conversation on the sidelines, initiated a conversation with the faculty member who was in charge, asking him about how he prepares the students, both sides. It is the crux of the conversation that came to my mind when I read the quoted sentences. You should, of course, be thorough with the points of your arguments, but while that is necessary, it is not sufficient. To avoid being bull-dozed by your opposite number from surprising directions, you also need to bone up on the points of the people who are seated opposite to you. This is not a deep point in the statement, but the sting is in the tail, the word “cult”.

Bhagat Singh is beyond invading your mind space unannounced. He would rather you do it yourself. His position is a “cult”, not quite a fully developed “religion”, like Scientology on which I had posted, (as though any religion at any point is fully developed!). He then gives a few points in a debating strategy: Be nimble in your mind. Think on your feet. Be prepared. Do not be cocky. Most important of all, be respectful to the opposition. All of the above are inside the word “cult” that is antipodal to all the suggestions.

‘The coalition amongst religious preachers and possessors of power brought forth jails, gallows, knouts [Russian whips] and these theories’

Merely note what he fails to mention about religion – it did not bring forth love, morality, honesty, basically anything to do with the positive side of humanity. Then, how did these elements come forth in the world that humans inhabit? For this to be tentatively explained, one has to reach for Darwin’s take on Natural Selection, as detailed by Richard Dawkins, the foremost neo-Darwinist. One particular instance that Dawkins cites has stayed with me.

One individual in a herd of deer, as soon as it notices a predator in the neighborhood, jumps high. Why? Two ways to think on the matter. One, it signals to the predator, “Look I can jump this high and run equally fast … you are not going to get me … focus on the weaklings in the herd”. Two, it signals its comrades in the herd, “Look folks, this is an early warning …there is a predator nearby … run, run …”

Any religion takes the first: The predator is not the atheist, whom we may safely ignore, but another religion with meaningless and weak anchors. We can safely sacrifice them to the predator.

Hence, “religious preachers…” in the plural.

That is about the limit of my ability to exercise my brain cells. I stop here. Another day, another post, perhaps.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

The Multipleitis Disease

 

The Multipleitis Disease

“…citing multiple people …” (my emphasis)

Journalists are afflicted with the disease mentioned in the heading–Multipleitis. And, MS Word is the carrier for this disease. I know. I am typing the full name of the disease, multipleit is, and the software changes it to, multipleit is, as it has earlier in this sentence.

Only when I bang hard and multiple times (the editor, if I had one, would have/should have struck multiple and rewrote the phrase as “…bang hard repeatedly…”) on the keys in the keyboard, MS Word wakes up and gives me the permission to type what I wish to type, multipleitis. Ha, ha … I finally got what I wanted, no matter MS Word disapproves of my usage by underlining the offending word with a squiggly line.

In my wordsmithy, I use simple words like “many” in place of “multiple”. An example: as I drove from Tejpur to Guwahati, I saw so many children, many of them girls, going to school, I felt the nation is on the right track. If I am afflicted by multipleitis (copy pasted from above, again with the red squiggly line) I would have written, as most journalists do these days, “I saw multiple children, multiple of them girls, going to school … Yuk, yuk, I was vomiting even as I typed the alternative.

I admit that "multiple" is more indicative of a numerical measure, like one time, twice ...multiple times, as compared to many (does not differentiate between two times and a dozen times, for example). Then, I have a another alternative for you: "a number of times". I would like a derivative of multiple, "multiplicity" that calmost means uncounted/uncountable, more the former than the latter. That is it, of course, beyond the multiplication tables, the proper place for use of a derivative of the root word, "multiple". 

The opening line of this post is from The Guardian, a newspaper I go to everyday without fail, indeed many times to check for updates and new material. For it to have fallen ill with multipleitis, I bury my face in my hands. I have no idea how to cure this disease. Perhaps I would approach the US Food and Drug Administration and plead with them many times to find an antidote.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Why CND as a Tattoo?

 

Why CND as a Tattoo?

Let me start with what CND is – Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Its symbol is given below that will anchor this very short post.

This represents, as I read,   the semaphore signals for N and D (railway engineers must be able to make sense of the above).

I see this symbol somewhere in the body parts of two cricket players in the Indian Professional League (IPL). I would not name them.

If these two players have seriously thought about what the symbol stands for, I bow down to them in total surrender and respect. Yet, I might make a case for how they could take the campaign for it ever so slightly forward, even as you and I know that nothing will come of it. IPL players do so many things that bring no tangible benefits in the here and now. Then, putting in a word for CND in the myriad interviews they give prior to (at the toss, if nowhere else), during and after the game would be appreciated.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Slogans Do Not Bring about Lasting Changes

 

Slogans Do Not Bring about Lasting Changes

An explanation at the outset. I do not shy away from using the word “sex” when it is most appropriate. Sex discrimination is based on chromosomes; gender discrimination is based on a person’s gender identity and expression (earlier, it used to be confined to English grammar). In this post, which is a critique of an opinion piece in the daily newspaper, I am taking the more definitive issue (a more objective one?); hence, it will be sex discrimination through and through.

I read an opinion piece that pins the issue of sex discrimination in public dialogue in India on political campaign slogans. This is barking up the wrong tree. I contend that slogans have an extremely short shelf-life, and hence, the yoke of social change should not be tied to them (mixed metaphor; so be it).

The opinion piece is nearly 40% on the history of campaign slogans, and the best part of it is that none of those slogans have shown the capacity to even direct social mores in a desirable direction. For example, Indira Gandhi’s Garibi Hatao did not hataoe the garibi! Indeed, measuring poverty started showing progress more by changing the definition of poverty! Perhaps, a political compulsion?

I remember the DMK promised three measures of rice (approximately five eighths of a measure is one kilogram) per one rupee in the State Assembly elections in the late 1960s. They rode that slogan to power, but upon assuming power, found out that the government coffers did not accommodate that promise. The slogan vanished and people were offered two measures for one rupee (you may check the above). People were happy that they got something!

The above is not to deny the emphasis, made all too briefly, on how politics and politicians, male or female it does not seem to matter, promote highly patriarchy–supporting slogans. Do catchphrases create or establish political identities? If at all they do, they are ephemeral, unless they are self–serving for the groups that leverage them.

Yes, as the writer points out, some of these catchy slogans are brain vomit. The writer, however, goes overboard when she decontextualizes the slogan that, in English reads, “Save the girl child, educate the girl child”.

The slogan does not mean that daughters need saving–this is precisely and explicitly the writer says; rather, the slogan offers an alternate reality–and it has had an unusually longer shelf-life– that educated girls can “bring home the bacon”, the line that projected a woman who smoked Virginia Slims, in the 1950s and 1960s! Some feminists took issue with the given English phrase, saying that the woman has not been relieved from her other household chores even as augmenting the income of the family is loaded on to her shoulder. The point is any slogan could always be taken exception to if the discussion is taken to represent a social movement. Slogans, then, will engender their own opposites. The result is zero-loss, zero-gain.

The writer writes, “...slogans not only be backed by systemic changes, but also they disrupt traditional ways of thinking about women’s roles and possibilities.” This is where she goes wrong – a slogan is too flimsy to carry the assigned burden, particularly when at least women in certain stations in life themselves propagate traditional roles on to women.

If you saw a man making tea for himself and his wife in an advertisement that should not be marked by the wife’s raised eyebrow. This is an advertisement on TV now. She should be casual about it. Let men “cook the bacon”!

That is when systemic changes can have longer shelf-life.

Raghuram Ekambaram

I do not believe in astrology because ...

 

I do not believe in astrology because ...

... A couple of months ago I ignored my horoscope and that is precisely why  I tripped on the third of the six steps that leads from the street to the corridor in the apartment building in which I own an apartment and live in.

I will visit this incident later in this write-up.

In the astrology chart (to be called the almanac in this write-up) that South Indians (particularly TamBrahms) use, we have two non-planetary planets (no, that is not an error) that have a say in how a life proceeds. Only those who know how to use the positions of the nodes in the calculation of the details of the almanac can calculate/attest to the veracity of what it predicted for each individual. It is the above prediction that I do not believe in.

 The nodes are given the names Rahu and Kethu in the almanac and they are positioned precisely–and I mean, precisely–at 180^o, not a second less or more, to each other. This positioning is fixed and is of utmost importance in positioning the real planets. Both Rahu  and Kethu do walk around the different houses in the almanac always apart by 180^o. There is a reason for this, and not the one given in Hindu mythology, but the one through astronomy.

The apparent orbital plane of the Sun is projected onto the celestial sphere (there is a celestial equator on this sphere, which for an observer on the earth is also the equatorial plane of the earth itself) and the points of intersection with the celestial equator are the nodes mentioned earlier. That is how these nodes become the reference points for the motion of the planets between the various houses.

Planet Saturn is a slow mover, takes some thirty years to make one complete revolution around the Sun.­ The orbit of the earth, from the perspective of Saturn which is so far away, is piddling, and for all practical purposes, a point. That is why Saturn shifts from one zodiacal House to another every seven and a half years (approximate).

Now, Hindu astrologers found a way to make money through the ordered transition of Saturn from one House to another. The idea was to locate who ordered movement. Of course, one of the myriad Gods! The astrologers said, and today’s astrologers continue to say, “If Saturn resides in the house (astrological) you were born into at the time of your birth, then, you would suffer a lot, the first time. The next time round, it could be the opposite (note the indefinite “could”; hedging, the one thing the Hindu priestly class, to which I nominally belong and who has transformed himself into a native-gone-astray, is expert at). Divide 30 by 2.5 and what do you get? 12, the number of constellations (astrological signs) in the Zodiac! You cannot be tortured enough in two and a half years. Then, extend the duration of misery from the time Saturn enters the house prior to the one in which you were born to exits the one next to the same. That is, period of misfortune is trebled at two strokes. You get seven and a half years of misery!

Looking out into the cosmos from the earth, Saturn is visible and our astrologers, aided and abetted by our path breaking astronomers (some astronomers made themselves also as astrologers, merely to put food on the table!), also saw that Saturn sometimes take a retrograde motion, visiting the previous House ever so briefly. This is the worst harbinger of bad times. On and on ...

If you countered astrologers’ arguments on planets affecting any individuals life journey, you are posed the following: “Your science (it is always in the possessive, “Your science”, as though the interrogator has invalidated her science) says that ocean tides are due to the attraction of the moon over the waters, then why can the planets and stars not have similar effects, only more as the planets are surely bigger than the moon?”

My counter to that is, “Does the moon create a tide in a glass of water? Say the moon is in the eastern sky. Does the level of water in the glass tilt towards the moon?”: the implication is that the water level must be inclined in the glass! I need say no more.

Yet, let me say more. The tidal height in the Mediterranean Sea is not more than 10 cm. This indeed was the reason the Greeks, very far away from the Atlantic Ocean and with the narrow opening to it through the Gibraltar Strait, never did realize the phenomenon of tides, or even if they realized it, the variation in the sea level posed no danger to their seafarers (not ocean farers). Perhaps similar non-concerns (though not to the same extent, as the Persian Gulf is not aligned East-West as much as the Mediterranean Sea is), affected the shore dwellers along the Persian Gulf (the Strait of Hormuz, the point of entry).

If you wished to watch tides rise and fall, go to Haji Ali in Mumbai, go to Hazira particularly on the side of the Gulf of Khambet, in Gujarat and other places. Even Chennai beach offers a lesson on this.

It is for the readers, if they have not cottoned on to how tides are caused, to reach for some elementary school text books on geography.    

That Saturn is shifting/has shifted Houses–this is like shifting houses when you do not take the effort to remove cobwebs in one’s house this year, 2025 CE. And, that is a bonanza for the priestly class. Yes, Astrology classes are galore on the so-called spiritual channels!

And we boast that we are a people with a bullock-cart load of scientific temperament. Let us reach our destination, before Saturn shifts House next, Saturn’s interregnum extending for approximately two and a half years, or seven and a half years, choose your fancy.

Now, to return to the opening lines, I did not consult my horoscope before I went out and no wonder I hurt myself on the steps. Today, I would not be making that mistake.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Home Refrigerator and Non-Green Vegetable Purchases

Home Refrigerator and Non-Green Vegetable Purchases

Before readers misunderstand the heading, let me offer an explanation. This post is not about purchasing root vegetables (like potatoes, carrots, beetroot, sweet potatoes) and setting them out in the refrigerator at home–not done, of course.

When I was young, before I got to double digit age, my parents took me and my toddler brother to a temple and on the way back we stopped at the then large road-side vegetable shop. She would ask for, if I remember correct, quarter pound of green beans, half a pound of potatoes and a few more quarter pounds. But, that is not the point. What she would do, almost murmur to herself but ensuring my father heard, “green beans for Tuesday, cluster beans for Wednesday, broad beans for Thursday, potatoes for Friday (a break from beans!), okra (ladies fingers) for Saturday (if I had to go to school, half-a-day) ...”

She was, in a way, saying what the family would get to eat over the next four or five days and ensured that my father heard it! If he had any comments at all, it had to come in real time; if not, what she has said goes. She would haggle with the vendor, to the extent that six annas means thirty seven and not thirty eight paise! Yes, each paisa was worth something, in the early to mid 1960s!

My mother, in her own way and not realizing it, was Green before that word came into its current meaning. No refrigerator in our house and that mattered. She was forced to plan the consumption of vegetables at the time of their purchase, so that food waste was minimized.

I learned something new recently. In a newspaper opinion/commentary piece, I read the following: there is food loss, and then, there is food waste. The former arises due to “poor storage, transport and handling”, mostly in wholesale; the latter due to processes of manufacturing (I tend to think of it as processing), and retail to restaurant and households.  

We have a refrigerator in our house but my wife, steeped in the ways of mothers of 60+  years ago, still plans her cooking for the subsequent three or four days, when we go vegetable shopping. And, that drives me nuts!

I would much rather that we reduced the frequency of our trips to the vegetable market. This despite my love for observing people and eavesdropping on them for how their habit of haggling has not changed since the time of my mother! We are three in our family, and truth be told, I love vegetables, cooked medium (when I bite into a vegetable, I want to feel the crunchiness, like I am munching potato chips); the other two would rather have the vegetables cooked well, and I consume the most. Because we have a refrigerator, I want to buy half a kilo of each vegetable whereas my wife would insist on buying only half that.

The article I referred earlier throws down a number of statistics to quantitatively emphasize how food waste, as distinct from food loss, contributes to global heating (global warming was in the past; now, it is global heating).

Taking particular reference to household waste, the blame is justifiably attributed to “over-purchasing”, my half kilo of each vegetable v. my wife’s ¼ kilo of each; “improper meal planning”, full credit to my wife for front-loading day-wise meal planning on the way to or at the market, much to the amusement of the vendor; “limited storage”, with respect to the refrigerator, I feel we should limit ourselves to what and how efficiently we store what is needed to be stored, but my wife seeks a larger one, more power consumption; with respect to storage of rice, lentils etc. my wife is managing what we do have in terms of pantry-space, though not particularly cool; “cultural habits” of preparing food in excess of what can be consumed, and my wife scores maximum on this without the guests feeling underfed.   

Place my wife at the 95 percentile as regards minimizing our family’s contribution to global heating via food, and me at, say, 70 percentile or less. After reading the article, the next time I venture into the vegetable market, I would take a conscious and conscientious effort to increase my score, say, to 80 percentile.

Though the article is silent on food packaging, I would reduce the amount of store-bought crunchies (fancifully packaged at vacuum or otherwise) I frequently buy and rapidly consume, only to visit the store again. You see, I am not forced to limit myself exclusively to the items contributing to global heating that the article mentions. I am an individual agent and I will put that agency to use, good not just for me, but to a few more around me.

I wish to get closer to my wife. Yes, I am competitive, and so be it.

Raghuram Ekambaram 

The “Rarest of Rare Cases” Threshold for Death Penalty in India

 

The “Rarest of Rare Cases” Threshold for Death Penalty in India

I have not given much thought to death penalty recently. The probable reason is that I got interested in the big pictures; death penalty is for an individual, or for cohorts in the commission of a crime that resulted in the death of one or a few. Ignore 9/11 that killed more than 2,000. But, the perpetrators themselves perished.

For example, the perpetrators did survey set a house on fire with the lady and her children trapped inside in the state of Connecticut, US, many years ago. My big picture mentality, I am freeing myself from it now, refused to recognize the peril an individual faces. The point of this essay is there is more than one individual. I take the individual who is less analyzed, the criminal(s). 

Indian jurisprudence brings in a wishy-washy parameter, “rarest of the rare” cases for which an individual shall be condemned.

A woman (her real name was not disclosed but she became known as Nirbhaya, the “fearless”) was gang raped more than a decade ago in Delhi (per the reports I have read, her private parts were gored with a crow bar) and the incident shook the societal consciousness wide and deep across the nation. The perpetrators of this unconscionable violence were put to death except for the teen ager in the gang who was tried as a juvenile, and no death penalty for him. I have not read anything about him since. There could be a human interest story there, if it could be told sensitively.

While the sentence sated the blood-thirstiness of the society, none can guarantee that the frequency of such gruesome crimes will reduce.

Statisticians would know this: beyond a limit–a special kind of statistics comes into play; ask Prof. S. Varadhan of Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York, who worked on such things, large deviations, and was awarded the Abel Prize. That was not a filler sentence. The concept of large deviations has high relevance to Nirbhaya’s case. The case was so extraordinarily rare, its statistical deviation even among the annual reported rape cases in India (≈ 0.0031%), fall within the jurisprudential “rarest of rare” classification, I would suppose.

But statistics is not relevant in cases such as rape accompanied by gratuitous violence. The appropriate count is: One human being is one human being, of potential and actual achievements. Some of them may turn out to be bad apples, but that is an issue for statisticians, not for me as an individual, indeed for any individual.

Even given that, I still rebel at the idea of summary justice, the death penalty.   Arguments against death penalty are varied and none would go unscathed in any argument, legal or moral. The morally abhorrent, and in my perspective, intellectually severely unreasoned of the arguments for death penalty is about deterrence.

I dare my readers to find one person who intended to commit a rape when there was an opportunity, thought about hanging from the noose and shied away from the crime at the last instance. One cannot. The criminal has lost his bearing and has become intellectually incapable of reasoning at the very instant there is an intense demand on his mental faculty. A rape differs from all the other crimes in a couple of striking aspects: lack of empathy and self-awareness in the criminal.

Even in a Game Theory experiment, I do not believe a person assigned to the racist group would take up that position for a reasonable sum of money (not thousands of dollars) readily. Check that. There are enough in the Trump administration, including the President of the United States Donald J. Trump, his Cabinet members, and of course, his friend Elon Musk, who is from South Africa, the land of the Apartheid for nearly 50 years!

There appears to be a moral sub-stratum in this issue. I go out on a limb and say that such a sub-stratum has been effaced in the rapist.

This is the point on which I hang my opposition to death penalty, the presence or absence of the moral sub-stratum. Hanging a rapist, howsoever cruel the act may have been, cannot affect the mental state of another.

In the movie The Silence of the Lambs, a person who murders people and eats his victims is suborned to find another criminal who merely skins his for probing into the mentality of the latter. The movie does not seek to even probe what made the two criminals do the unspeakable things they did to their fellow humans (though in one, there is a hint, but not dwelt upon). The motivations, if that be the right word, for the two cannot be guaranteed to be the same, or even similar. That is the point.

I would cite one more movie scene. That could infuse some perspective in this debate. James Bond says (in the Daniel Craig starrer, Casino Royale,) “I thought one less bomb-maker in the world would be a good thing”, to which his boss points out, “... one bomb-maker ...hardly the big picture...”.

And, here is the big picture, the fact–Death penalty to one rapist is not a perspective on a large canvass. It is too sharply focussed. No one, I am claiming to speak for many millions, who wants death penalty to be abolished wants the rapist to roam the world free.  The suggested alternative is incarceration without the possibility of parole. The rapist can chew on his behaviour that put him where he is. I truly believe the death penalty is too easy a sentence for the rapist.    

There really has to be an external reason for such a switch to be flicked on. Death penalty can never deter a person from committing a rape. Europe, where rape is not punished by death, the instance of the crime is a fraction of what it is in the US and must be so in India too.

I would make the final point, an ironic one at that. For the “rarest of rare” case to become more common place so that the rationale for death penalty can be defenestrated, what do you need? More people to engage in such instances! “Rarest of rare” is no more that! Is that what we want? God forbid. The “rarest of rare” is a truly bad and sad yardstick. 

Remove death penalty from the statute books.

Raghuram Ekambaram

If only I Could Have Done an fMRI on Forest God ...

 

If only I Could Have Done an fMRI on Forest God ...

... I would have answered a philosophical conundrum.

If a tree fell in a forest and no one saw or heard it fall, did the tree really fall?

An unattributed (the unctuous The Hindu Bureau as the writer cuts no ice with me) article on March 23^rd says that fMRIs (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) done on infants four to 25 months old indicate that their seat of memory registers individual events (that is, I balanced myself today or I urinated in the temple this evening) but would not be able to recall these in later years.

These are the kinds of research that makes me bang my head against the wall. For an adult, balancing oneself standing is an automated response of the body to gravitation, the fact that the brain spent special effort sometime in the remote past is of no significance. Even an adult brain forgets events in the past; isn’t that why we load our Wedding Photo Album with photographs that we may not remember posing for, or post on Instagram the lunch you hosted for your friend at your neighbourhood greasy joint ... That event will–we have already decided–fade away (remember the movie Back to the Future), if not rapidly, at least by the time of the next lunch (if not your next wedding!).

What this kind of research does is create conclusions from half-baked hypotheses based on semi-literate research. Apparently it has been demonstrated that infants do carry imprints of what we could attribute to some sort of memory–conditioned responses, imitation, and recognition of familiar stimuli–but really not hippocampus–based memory of an adult.

Memory but not memory at all!

The scientists appear to give themselves an exit ramp – hippocampus may not be fully developed. If you would understand how research progresses, you recognised the next application of research funding–the time-history of the development of hippocampus!

That is a pretzel that I would avoid like the plague. I would prefer a scientist, when explaining her research says just, “This is what we observe; we need to do more studies to know what these results could possibly indicate.” The hint for more research is no more an implication. It is a full fledged begging-bowl statement.

The researchers used on infants methods designed for adults. Ouch! It could be the fault of The Hindu Bureau to skip mentioning whether the method was recalibrated for infants, and if so, how. Perhaps that is too much detail to offer in a mainstream newspaper, but the hint could have been given. There are details of the results on similar parameters, like the difference between infants of one year and those aged between 12 and 25 months.

Infants can encode episodic memory but cannot recall, because the hippocampus is developing.

To go back to the forest conundrum, someone was nearing the forest but could hear or see the tree falling only if she went slightly nearer.

How “slightly”? That is for further research!

The Forest God to be fMRIed soon.

Raghuram Ekambaram

  

Planning MS Excel Sheet v. Design MS Excel Sheet

 Planning MS Excel Sheet v. Design MS Excel Sheet

Engineers succeed not by being engineers all through their career. 

Their success is underwritten by movin-on-up to being a manager, not a technical manager but a project/program manager; better still, finance or corporate manager. They get good at planning using spread sheets, ignoring what the engineers say.

There was a time in the mid– to late ‘70s, I am talking about IIT Madras, when the second highest aspiration for graduating engineers was a seat at one of the then two Indian Institutes of Management, one at Joka (Calcutta; hadn’t yet been renamed Kolkata) and the other at Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the latter preferred over the former.

If the Post-Graduate Diploma in Business Management (what you got then in IIMs was not a degree, but merely a diploma,), was the second choice, what as the first? Going to the US, where after getting an MS, people switch to management degrees.

A classmate of mine in civil engineering did his MS at a US university, and promptly did his MBA at the same university. He has been with INTEL ever since.

My not-so-close relative, a metallurgist (semi-conductor industry) went to the US with a plum post and within a few years got himself a management degree, just to switch horses in midstream! No age old proverbs/adages for him!

What causes the above switch? Why do people undertake this transition from one-degree-one job to another-degree-another-job? Can it be merely the moolah?

It is only in the rarest of rare cases (the Indian Supreme Court’s metric for imposing death penalty) a manager pays the price for her incompetence. Aren’t their life made already in their, say, mid–thirties or a decade later?

Why it is hard to climb the corporate ladder if one sticks to core engineering expertise, while letting in managerial talent seep in only slowly and sideways? Because, this is a surmise, engineers become inured to taking orders from the managerial type. Managers ask questions, engineers try to provide answers that managers pretend not to understand.

“Oh, you want me to do this, of course, I would, sir.” Thinking to oneself, “My way is better in every aspect, but the manager is closer to the finance manager who is closer to the ...”, you look around yourself and tail off in your thoughts.

Yet, should something fail, the engineer is the bogeyman monster that made the mistake. The top man in engineering takes the fall, along with his junior cohorts if they are unlucky. I have been an eyewitness to this, in my career as an engineering manager in a design consultancy company.

 It is not quite a hypothetical, what with Elon Musk’s rockets having failed twice. As someone said, one is happenstance; twice is coincidence; thrice is enemy action. Musk, if the next rocket also blows up, God forbid (from an atheist, no less!), has to find someone to blame.

This post is not about Elon Musk, though there is boat load of things to write about. The ‘O’ ring in the Challenger shuttle disaster were not designed for the cold temperatures obtained at the launch pad on that day.

“...were not designed ...”. In active voice, “Engineers failed to account for the possibility of freezing temperatures (in Florida!) at the time of launch.” There are enough engineers up and down the hierarchy who would be called upon to share the blame. The top man, definitely a qualified manager, may also be fired by his/her bass, the shareholders of the company; but he/she has his/her rolodex. But, even if not, that is just one head to roll, as compared to many of engineers/technicians and such.

Engineers are an unprotected lot. No wonder, the profession drives away the capable. So, if one wished to build up a capable workforce of engineers up and down the hierarchy, one’s attention shall be on assigning responsibilities rationally. The critical thing is for the managers to listen to the time frame that the engineer assigns to his/her task.

You can rush things on a planning MS Excel sheet but not in the design Excel sheet.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Walter Cronkite is Turning in His Grave

 

Walter Cronkite is Turning in His Grave

I have had the experience of Walter Cronkite anchoring the newscast of CBS Evening News. It was nothing great, but perhaps with the authoritative (not necessarily truthful) “That’s the way it is ...” line ending the newscast, it could have made an impression on me, I admit. This was in the late 1970s.

I have been recently watching literally bucketful of YouTube videos of news anchors with an army of talking heads seated around what looked like King Arthur’s Round Table (a table, no doubt, but not round), during the US Presidential election of 2024 (not because of Kamala Harris, but more because of the “pussy grabbing” Donald J. Trump), the subsequent “transition” drama, Trump’s “enthroning” (as he sees it), and how he conspired, along with Elon Musk, to take hostage of the GOP.

The host of the round table starts off with what appears to be a question directed at one talking head, and the question goes on and on, taking a full four minutes (I have timed it). By the time the host turns their quizzical eyes towards the target, I am not sure the addressee remembers where the question started, all the topics it addressed, and must wonder how the final statement looks more like an assertion rather than a question.

But, do not forget that the addressee has come well equipped to find a response–any response–to the puzzle wrapped in verbiage. They too go off on their own versions of “Around the World in Eighty Days”. At the end of this, the puzzle remains wrapped, as tight as ever, and none the wiser. But, the TV producer is happy as they have filled in the time between the commercials.

Of course, there are multiple round tables, each seating its own knights­–Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, TKT–and each hour or half hour carrying its own King Arthur–Ari Melber, Jessica Tarlov, Chris Hayes, Harold Ford Jr.. Jim Axelrod, Errol Barnett–making the table truly  a merry-go-round. More the merrier, the Networks’ honchos scream!

I understand that times have changed and the current anchors are a different breed from those of earlier visage, and I am not talking about their face, hair etc. though on that Ted Koppel will beat every one, for my money! What I do mean is that today if you can string a paragraph long sentence that makes no sense, you are a news anchor on American TV! If you can put in dozens of fillers like ‘Um’, ‘Er’ ‘You know’ in a sentence, you are a news anchor on American TV! The same qualifications would also make you an expert on any topic that is “trending” at the time of the broadcast!

You should watch some of the news channels in India. None of them would have even heard how an interview should be. The questions must be short, but heavy enough to extract a long explanatory response that could lead the interviewer to the follow–up question. The hook in the line must be baited and not obvious, precisely prepared aided by thinking on one’s feet. The questions in the Indian news channels are precisely antipodal. They are long winded that are answered in a single syllable, not even a word.

This is what the shows’ producers prefer, as they sell their anchors as their prime products and neither the news nor the interviewees are valued that highly. This is the new ecosphere of television news that would make Walter Cronkite writhe in his grave, not just turn.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

Is Religion an Essential Scaffolding for Morality?

 

Is Religion an Essential Scaffolding for Morality?

 If morality is assigned to the whole of humanity, the subject matter would be so vast that this pea-sized brain cannot handle it. But, if morality is to be taken for adherents of one religion after another, I do not feel so diffident. So, it will be that, in this post.

The religions that I am aware of have many versions–for some of them running into thousands–and even lay people of one version of a particular religion would be in the dark about the other versions.  Therefore, I would confine myself to only a general or overall analysis, and discuss how religion guides morality, if it really does.

My first stop is, Scientism. I believe in science but I do not go too far (not an objective assessment) in my belief. But the religion of Scientism goes all the way on the slippery slope without exit ramps. I would explain.

I am convinced that science is always a half-way house. Always. It is like Zeno’s Paradox. I believe that Scientism’s claim that reality can be assessed only through the methods of science is less than partly true. Every time, for example, a major thesis is “proved”–like the existence of the God Particle, the Higgs Boson–more of the gaps in fundamental reality, or what physicists think they are, are revealed.

No, my position is precisely skewed to the theists’ argument from “God of the gaps,” which stops further probing of reality. Science promotes such investigations, but differs from Scientism; science is confident that it can never get a solid grasp of reality, should such a thing existed.

One might say that my position is close enough to be tagged the Advaita Philosophy (non-dualism) that posits with certainty Maya, the illusion. I beg to differ, by the conditional phrase that ends the previous paragraph, to repeat: “...should such a thing existed.” Is multi-verse reality? It is not that we do not know, but we cannot know.

Scientism believes (this belief) belies the fundamental aspect of science. Hence, it is not science, but is religion. It promotes its own paths to morality, but has no purchase on the idea that it underpins morality.

The next religion I wish to analyse is Scientology. This is not a straw-man I am setting up to topple easily.

The picture below of a building associated with Scientology sports a Cross at the top. Then, it is religion!

My cousin, an IIT product (he set the goal for me), got his MS from Penn State University in Mechanical Engineering (his All India JEE rank was 32, and mine was 1493), and fell headlong into the abyss of Scientology. He tried to get me to follow his path and I successfully desisted (so, I am intelligent, after all, though my All India JEE rank resembled the ends of the bridal train that sweeps the church floor!). The above picture is the “corporate” HQ of Scientology, I believe. Its motto is a string of mumbo jumbo words–Dianetics, Engrams, Thetans– and nothing more than words that are pronounceable! Tom Cruise is a member. That could tell you about that institution–has talent and know how to make money!

For every Scientology, there are perhaps dozens of religious orders–scams (?)–in India. I am going to skip them.

Then, I come to Jewish religion, which with a long coastline (Trump is eyeing this as sites for his bound-to-fail casinos) is much in the news currently, all because its adherents are claiming that certain real estate, indeed almost the entire Levant, has been given permanently by a land deed to them by their God. I do not blame the Jews.

Indians of the past three decades or so do exactly what Israelites are doing, except that the former cannot claim any God-given authority. They make money abroad (the US, the UK, the Nordic countries, oil-rich Middle East) and buy land (plots mainly and build ostentatious, glass fronted (?) houses, not to live in them, but wait for land value to shoot up–mere speculative bubble building). No wonder, if you conducted a survey you would find the state of Israel finds favour among them, and also among those like me who missed the bus, but wistfully.

Basically, Jewish religion now seems to take pleasure in agreeing with what Shakespeare, an antisemite he must have been, wrote in Merchant of Venice!

Christianity. A perfect example of myths creating havoc. The schisms in Christianity is self-inflicted. Calvin and Martin Luther were Christians, but the movements they created divided the religion permanently. Then, within the Levant we have Syrian Maronites, and you travel eastward from Christianity’s birthplace, the Levant, and you come across, Greek Orthodox, then Russian Orthodox.  Anglicans (The Archbishop of Canterbury), and in the US, so many, Methodists, Baptists, Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and on and on. Every one of these divisions must have been created by one myth trying to transplant another and in the process mutating.

I know not much about Islam except that there are at least two steams, Sunni and Shia, within it. Are they divided by doctrinal issues or by other power seeking strategies/tactics? Yet, look at them through the lens of Iran-Iraq war of the late 1980s, or the Iraq “invasion” of Kuwait straddling the ‘80s and the ‘90s. Those wars were definitely not theological disputes going out of control, but down to capturing resources (read oil) and getting access to the high seas.

To be fair, one may wish to acknowledge that the UK did play mischief by creating Kuwait merely to deny Iraq a port on the waters of the Persian Gulf, as one reading of history points out. Even if Islam started out as an effort to endow the population with morality, it failed to do so in the far past (near to its beginning) and also in the near past (a little more than three decades ago).

Hinduism is almost beyond the pale in this discussion, yet I will try my hand at it. The religion is not a religion, its adherents say, but merely a way of life. This alternative definition is merely obfuscation, and not a good one at that. If it indeed is a way of life approved by it, then the way of life endorses caste with all its injustices. Its misogyny is no less positively endorsed. Its bias against the lower castes in terms of training and learning are stories/episodes in its epic, the Mahabharat–the story of Ekalavya, and also the curse visited upon Karna by Parasuram for not being a Brahmin. Some morality.

I can write much more but I would not know when or how to end. Hence, I end it here abruptly, merely pointing out that morality seems to play no part in Hinduisms scripture, its philosophy, its recitations (Mantras). Such instances can also be easily found in the other anchor, Ramayana. Hindus live multiple lives, and they have to, jumping from one branch to another.

Oh, that brings me to another episode, an epilogue: How Rama killed Vaali, the monkey king, from behind a tree.    Rama applies human morality (of those times perhaps, but definitely not enlightened and current) to monkeys; morality attributed falsely, inappropriately, shall we say? Indra, one of the supreme strong men in Rg Veda gets sequentially reduced in the following scriptures and ends up begging to be saved from his (not His, as must have been in the Rg Veda) whenever under threat. Is there a moral in it? I am playing hide-and-seek!

Jainism seems to me to be neither here nor there. I have visited Jain Temples (they are galore near Kanchipuram where I did my schooling) and it is confusion, with idols of Hindu Gods, prominently the Goddess Sarawathi. This is good, prominence to education, a good piece of morality!

But, I have taken a shine to Buddhism, not as it is being practised (so corrupted) but as taught by the Buddha (Siddhartha Gowthama), more appropriately as understood by me. The Buddha was not interested in metaphysics; merely wanted to reduce the suffering people felt as they went about their life. Is there any moral in it? I do not know. Can it be classified as a religion? I do not know.

Let that be.

Raghuram Ekambaram

P. S. You may choose to believe that I got all the above about the various religions, including Christianity, Jewish religion, and Islam, from the Net, but that would be false. Christianity and to somewhat lesser extent other religions, merely by their plurality, has fascinated me for over forty years. Much of what I have written is from my memory, and while I am reasonably confident that my memory has not failed me in the main, I do not vouch for what I have written here.