Shunya's Notes

The Giant Tortoises of Galapagos

Tortoises are land-dwelling turtles. They are exclusively terrestrial and vegetarian reptiles. In folklore they represent slowness, determination, and long life. Though found all over the world, the majority of the 40-odd living species are confined to Africa and Madagascar. They are characterized by high, domed shells; heavy, elephant-like hind legs; and hard-scaled forelegs.*

 

The largest of them, the giant tortoises—with shell lengths (measured along the curve) up to 1.3 m (4.25 ft) and weights up to 180 kg (400 lbs)—are now rare or extinct because they were slaughtered for meat, or their habitats were destroyed by people, or due to the introduction of non-native animals (pigs, goats, rats, etc.) that prey on the young or compete for food. Of the giant tortoises native to about thirty islands in the Indian Ocean, all are extinct except on South Aldabra Island. The 10 to 15 Galápagos tortoises, commonly considered races (or sub-species) of the species Geochelone Elephantopus, are either severely depleted or extinct.*

 

The most famous giant tortoise of Galápagos is Solitario Jorge (Lonesome George), who, for many decades, has been the last surviving member of his sub-species, a fact that evokes lots of heartfelt sympathy from most visitors to the islands. A $10K bounty has been offered to zoos to furnish his kind of female. Kept at a research station in Puerto Ayora, he has so far rebuffed all potential mates from other sub-species. Since a giant tortoise's lifespan averages 150 years or so, Solitario Jorge, now in his 80s, has limited time left to propagate his race. In fact, given that a tortoise’s sexual organs atrophy from lack of use, it may already be too late.

 

The most celebrated naturalist, writer, and observer of these animals was Charles Darwin, who visited Galápagos in the 1830s and did a good deal of the foundational work that became the basis of his revolutionary book, The Origin of Species. Below is an excerpt from the field notes he kept on his extraordinary five-year journey, The Voyage of the Beagle (1831-36).

   

As I was walking along, I met two large tortoises, each of which must have weighted at least two hundred pounds: one was eating a piece of cactus, and as I approached, it started at me and slowly stalked away; the other gave a deep hiss, and drew in its head. These huge reptiles, surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs, and large cacti, seemed to my fancy like some antediluvian animals. The few dull-coloured birds cared no more for me, than they did for the great tortoises.

 

The Beagle proceeded to Charles Island. This archipelago has long been frequented, first by the buccaneers, and latterly by whalers, but it is only within the last six years, that a small colony has been established here. The inhabitants are between two and three hundred in number ... nearly all people of colour ... banished for political crimes from the Republic of the Equator, of which Quito is the capital … although complaining of poverty, [they] obtain, without much trouble, the means of subsistence. In the woods there are many wild pigs and goats; but the staple article of animal food is supplied by the tortoises. Their numbers have of course been greatly reduced ... but the people yet count on two days' hunting giving them food for the rest of the week. It is said that formerly single vessels have taken away as many as seven hundred, and that the ship's company of a frigate some years since brought down in one day two hundred tortoises to the beach.

   

... I have already shown, from the numbers which have been caught in a single day, how very numerous they must be. Some grow to an immense size: [a man] told us that he had seen several so large, that it required six or eight men to lift them ... and that some had afforded as much as two-hundred pounds of meat ... [In one region,] we lived entirely upon tortoise meat: the breast plate roasted (as the gauchos do carne con cuero), with the flesh on it, is very good; and the young tortoises make excellent soup; but otherwise the meat to my taste is indifferent.

 

... I was always amused when overtaking one of these great monsters, as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly, the instant I passed, it would draw in its head and legs, and uttering a deep hiss fall to the ground with a heavy sound as if struck dead. I frequently got on their backs, and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away; – but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.

 

* Paragraph source: Encyclopedia Britannica 2004

Omar Khayyam of Persia

In his lifetime, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) achieved great fame as a master of philosophy, jurisprudence, history, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. The Great Seljuq Empire owed the reform of its calendar to him. The result was the Jalali era (named after Jalal-ud-din, one of the kings)—'a computation of time,' wrote Gibbon, 'which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian [calendar].' He measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days, a number improved to 365.242196 days only in the 19th century and the current measure is 365.242190 days.

 

He not only discovered a general method of extracting roots of an arbitrary high degree, but his Algebra contains the first complete treatment of the solution of cubic equations which he did by means of conic sections. He was also part of the Islamic tradition of investigating Euclid and his parallel postulate. Arguing that ratios should be regarded as 'ideal numbers,' he conceived a much broader system of numbers than used since Greek antiquity, that of the positive real numbers. In many such areas, he furthered the remarkable work of al-Beruni. Commissioned to build an observatory in the city of Esfahan, he led a team of astronomers to do so.

   

Omar Khayyam ('Tentmaker', possibly his father's profession) was not only a top-notch mathematician but also a major poet. The world today knows him for his quatrains, the Rubaiyat. Besides the social attitudes of the times, they reveal a sensitive, intelligent, humble, gently-mocking yet good-humored man, skeptical of divine providence and certainty of truth, wistful of an ever-present evanescence, mystical in one, lamenting human ignorance in another. Many of his 500 or so quatrains celebrate wine, exhorting all those who take themselves too seriously to partake of it while time permits. He "chooses to put his faith in a joyful appreciation of the fleeting and sensuous beauties of the material world. The idyllic nature of the modest pleasures he celebrates, however, cannot dispel his honest and straightforward brooding over fundamental metaphysical questions."*

 

Khayyam was attached to the court of the Seljuks—of Khorasan, later of Baghdad, Samarkand and Esfahan as well—and lived amidst political turbulence interspersed with quiet periods. His ideas frequently attracted flak from the growing religious conservatism of Sunni Turks. According to Professor Iraj Bashiri, Khayyam—synthesizing the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, the neo-Platonian al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna)—believed that  

 

“God had created the world but … [it] had been a necessity for God and, therefore, inevitable. The stages leading to the creation of matter followed each other as night follows day … This ascription of limits to the power of the Almighty is the most startling notion in Khayyam's Quatrains. It jolts the unwary reader out of the routine of orthodox thinking and places him or her in the uncomfortable position of the unwilling blasphemer. Yet, Khayyam's God is more real and approachable than the fearful Creator of orthodoxy … [he] formally rejects the Creator/creature relationship for a cause and effect relationship … God becomes the cause of a necessary creation … that develops of its own accord, and at its own pace. A number of Khayyam's quatrains concentrate on what religion teaches about the powers of the Almighty and … the limitations of that power.” * 

 

Here are ten sample quatrains (translated by EH Whinfield).

 

O unenlightened race of humankind,
Ye are a nothing, built on empty wind!
Yea, a mere nothing, hovering in the abyss,
A void before you, and a void behind!

 

All my companions, one by one died
With Angel of Death they now reside
In the banquette of life same wine we tried
A few cups back, they fell to the side.

   

Some are thoughtful on their way
Some are doubtful, so they pray.
I hear the hidden voice that may
Shout, "Both paths lead astray."

 

The secrets eternal neither you know nor I
And answers to the riddle neither you know nor I
Behind the veil there is much talk about us, why
When the veil falls, neither you remain nor I.

 

Drinking wine is my travail
Till my body is dead and stale
At my grave site all shall hail
Odor of wine shall prevail.

 

Heed not the Sunna, nor the law divine;
If to the poor his portion you assign,
And never injure one, nor yet abuse,
I guarantee you heaven, and now some wine!

 

Slaves of vain wisdom and philosophy,
Who toil at Being and Nonentity,
Parching your brains till they are like dry grapes,
Be wise in time, and drink grapejuice like me!

 

You, who in carnal lusts your time employ,
Wearing your precious spirit with annoy,
Know that these things you set your heart upon
Sooner or later must the soul destroy!

 

Never in this false world on friends rely,
(I give this counsel confidentially);
Put up with pain, and seek no antidote;
Endure your grief, and ask no sympathy!

 

You know all secrets of this earthly sphere,
Why then remain a prey to empty fear?
You can not bend things to your will, but yet
Cheer up for the few moments you are here!

 

(More quatrains?) 

Al-Beruni's India

The first significant intrusion of Islam into India was led by Mahmud of Ghazni who, quite justifiably, lives in Indian history as a cruel and bloodthirsty fanatic, destroyer of temples, and plunderer of their wealth, but in his own dominion he was known as a patron of the arts, literature, and science (not unlike Genghis Khan who is a great and beloved hero in Mongolia today, gracing its currency, plazas, airports, etc.). He assembled in his court and the university he established at Ghazni (in modern Afghanistan) the greatest scholars and writers of the age.

 

One such scholar was al-Beruni (973-1048; another was Firdausi), "commissioned" by Mahmud of Ghazni to produce his monumental commentary on Indian philosophy and culture – Kitab fi tahqiq ma li'l-hind. “In his search for pure knowledge he is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds in Islamic history.”* Romila Thapar calls him "perhaps the finest intellect of central Asia ... His observations on Indian conditions, systems of knowledge, social norms, religion ... are probably the most incisive made by any visitor to India."

 

Born near modern Khiva in Uzbekistan, he possessed "a profound and original mind of encyclopedic scope ... conversant with Turkish, Persian, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Syriac (Armenian) in addition to the Arabic in which he wrote. He applied his talents in many fields of knowledge, excelling particularly in astronomy, mathematics, chronology, physics, medicine, mineralogy and history."*

     

Al-Beruni wrote his work on India to provide, in his own words, "the essential facts for any Muslim who wanted to converse with Hindus and to discuss with them questions of religion, science, or literature." He traveled in India for thirteen years, observing, questioning, studying. The result was a comprehensive exposition of Indian thought and society. "Not for nearly 800 years would any other writer match al-Beruni's profound understanding of almost all aspects of Indian life."*

   

He read the major Indian religious and astronomical texts; in his account he highlights choice parts of the Gita, the Upanishads, Patanjali, Puranas, the four Vedas, scientific texts (by Nagarjuna, Aryabhata, etc.), relating stories from Indian mythology to make his point. He also compares Indian thought to the Greek thought of Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Galen and others, and at times with Sufi teaching. Here is one of his observations on the Hindus of his day:    

 

"The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs. They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste among their own people, still much more, of course, from any foreigner ... Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khorasan and Persis, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they traveled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is."

 

His translator, Edward Sachau, observes:    

 

"To al-Beruni the Hindus were excellent philosophers, good mathematicians and astronomers, though [out of a certain self-confidence] he believes himself to be superior to them, and disdains to be put on a level with them. He does not conceal whatever he considers wrong and unpractical with them, but he duly appreciates their mental achievements ... and whenever he hits upon something that is noble and grand both in science and in practical life, he never fails to lay it before his readers with warm-hearted words of approbation. Speaking of the construction of the ponds at holy bathing-places, he says: “In this they have attained a very high degree of art, so that our people (the Muslims), when they see them, wonder at them, and are unable to describe them, much less to construct anything like them.”

 

Al-Beruni records some of the more egregious plundering by his boss, Mahmud of Ghazni (esp. at Mathura and Somnath); for obvious reasons he doesn't explicitly denounce it though his text betrays a definite sense of lament. He does say that Mahmud "utterly ruined the prosperity of the country", created a hatred of Muslims among the locals, and caused the Hindu sciences to retreat "far away from those parts of the country conquered by us" to places "where our hands cannot yet reach." Sachau also notes that "he dares not attack Islam, but he attacks the Arabs", reproaching the original Arabs for destroying the civilization of Persia.   

 

Besides his work on India, "In his works on astronomy, he discussed with approval the theory of the Earth's rotation on its axis and made accurate calculations of latitude and longitude. In those on physics, he explained natural springs by the laws of hydrostatics and determined with remarkable accuracy the specific weight of 18 precious stones and metals. In his works on geography, he advanced the daring view that the valley of the Indus had once been a sea basin. In religion he was a Shi'ite Muslim, but with agnostic tendencies. His poetical works in the main seek to combine Greek wisdom and Islamic thought."* He also corresponded with the famous philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna). A lunar crater is named after him.

 

[Alberuni's India by Al-Beruni (973-1048) (Kitab fi tahqiq ma li'l-hind or simply, Ta'riqh al-hind), early 11th century, translated by Edward C. Sachau. Edited with introduction and notes by Ainslee T. Embree, The Norton Library, 1971. This is an abridged version - the complete version by Sachau spans two volumes and is really for the specialist. Al-Beruni is also spelled Alberuni and Al-Biruni.]

Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka

In Aug 2005, I visited a remarkable site in Madhya Pradesh, India: the prehistoric rock shelters and paintings at Bhimbetka, discovered in 1957-58 by Dr. Vishnu S. Wakankar. Of the nearly 750 rock shelters, 500 or so are adorned with paintings; about 15 are open to the public, though few come due to their relative remoteness and lack of public transportation. The site, 45 km from Bhopal, is at the foothills of the Vindhya mountains and is surrounded by forests of teak and sal that had grown lush green in the monsoon season.

 

Bhimbetka remained a center of human activity from the lower Paleolithic times—the oldest paintings are believed to be 12,000 years old (a disputed estimate); the more recent ones date from the first millennium BCE. One can plainly see that the same surface was often used by different peoples at different times.

 

The paintings depict scenes from the everyday life of ancient hunter-gatherers: hunting, riding, communal dances, warfare, drinking, childbirth, religious rites, initiation ceremonies, burials, etc. Animals depicted include elephants, horses, bisons, deer, sambhars, peacock, snake, etc. The mineral colors used are green, red, ochre, and white and are still remarkably vibrant.

 

The artistic traditions of many local villagers (adivasis) bear strikingly affinities to these rock paintings (see my covertly clicked museum displays of adivasi art down this Bhopal page). UNESCO declared Bhimbetka a World Heritage Site in 2003.

Global Democracy Index

The Economist magazine's intelligence unit has come up with a Democracy Index that rates 165 states and 2 territories on their democratic character. It examines 60 indicators across 5 broad categories: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.

Sweden emerges on top with eight European states in the top ten. USA, the oldest democarcy and its self-awoved messiah, only mustered the 17th spot, partly due to its eroding civil liberties. India, the largest democracy is ranked 35th, scoring its lowest marks on political participation and political culture. Notably, on both civil liberties and electoral process and pluralism, India scores better than the US.

Other notable ranks include Japan (20), UK (23), Italy (34), Brazil (42), Israel (47), Mexico (53), Indonesia (65), Palestine (79), Singapore (84), Turkey (88), Thailand  (90), Russia (102), Pakistan (113), China (138), S. Arabia (159), and N Korea (167). Check out the report, rankings, and the methodology.

On Personal Responsibility

(This is a follow on to my earlier post on our dignity and rights.)

 

The modern age has overseen a great expansion of our rights. Global disparities remain but there is no dearth of people who believe that rights are a good thing (at least for the social group they identify with most, be it based on race, nation, class, culture). Countless rights commissions and tribunals, as well as some NGOs and the media, strive to preserve or enhance them, often on behalf of strangers across the world and often with remarkably heartening results. Clearly, talk of rights is now chic but what about obligations and personal responsibility? What good is the former without the latter? People can demand rights from their government, but who gets to demand personal responsibility from the people? What happens when our exercise of rights and freedom get increasingly divorced from personal responsibility?

 

As early as the 1920s, in a keenly observant and prophetic work, The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega y Gassett wrote that life in the modern West “as a program of possibilities [for all] is magnificent, exuberant, superior to all others known to history. But by the very fact that its scope is greater, it has overflowed all the channels, principles, norms, ideals handed down by tradition.” Furthermore, our age is stamped by the arrival of the self-satisfied, indocile, mass-man, a drifter without history, saved from the pre-modern age’s harsh life and exacting gods. He now sees no need to make real demands on himself, wants and receives as entitlement all the rights, freedoms and comforts of the modern age but accepts none of the obligations, limits and standards vital to civilized life. Even the modern professional who leads the mass-man behaves no better outside his narrow domain. Ortega y Gassett called this a “vertical invasion of the barbarians ... as if through the trapdoors ... the commonplace mind knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.” This may be why Kierkegaard cynically quipped: “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use.”

 

This drift in modern culture towards the least common denominator is perhaps why many perceive in it a strong sense of decadence. “We are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, [because they have nothing] to which to give themselves.”* Fearful of the worst, many artists and activists today adopt humorless, neo-luddite attitudes: modernity has ushered in a more abrasive social milieu; science and technology has given more power to man than he can handle with grace; they glorify the past out of postmodern nostalgia. But the imagined virtues of the past are only phantoms of our mind. We can learn from the past but we cannot go back to reclaim it; our unique age must find its own destiny. Let us recall this cautiously optimistic verse by the sixth century BCE Greek poet, Xenophanes of Colophon,

   

The gods did not enrich man

with a knowledge of all things

from the beginning of life.

Yet man seeks, and in time

invents what may be better.

Land of the Asiatic Lion

The only lions in the wild outside Africa are in the Western Indian state of Gujarat in the Sasan Gir Forest Reserve, created in 1913 and accorded sanctuary status in 1965. Hundreds of Asiatic lions have been bred here and now number close to 350. Other notable fauna includes leopard, wild pig, spotted deer, nilgai, four-horned antelope, and chinkara (a type of gazelle). A large water hole contains a few crocodiles. The sanctuary lies in a hilly region of dry scrubland. Spread over 1,295 sq km, its vegetation consists of teak with an admixture of deciduous trees, including sal (Shorea), dhak (Butea frondosa), and thorn forests. ♣

 

Lions were once plentiful in Asia, which explains their prevalence in folk stories like the Panchatantra. Even in the 19th century, they ranged from the Middle-East to Bihar. While the lion population at Gir has grown in recent years, they compete for habitat with 52 human settlements of various sizes inside the sanctuary. Livestock constitutes about 25% of the lion diet and this loss is tolerated by the locals (the dominant group is called Maldharis).

 

The locals include the Sidis of East African extraction (brought in as slave-soldiers by the royals of Junagarh?) who have now lived here for centuries as pastoralists and farmers. Though Indian in every other way, their music and dance still retain strong links to Africa (I saw a troupe of Sidis perform in Jaipur once). Most Sidis are Sufi Muslims and today live at the margins of Indian society (read more here).

 

A note to wildlife watchers: brace yourself for some cavalier, overzealous, and boisterous men who unfortunately serve as park rangers, drivers, and safari guides.

An MSc and a Ph.D

(An excerpt from an account of my travels in Jordan a few months before 9/11)

 

Two days earlier, on the bus from Amman to Petra, I met Mohammad, 27, and Zayed, 29. Muhammad wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, a moustache and a two-day stubble on his square face. Zayed, dressed in “business-casual” attire, had a slim, clean-shaven face. Both spoke a halting English. I initially mistook them for old friends but they had just met on the bus.

 

Muhammad sat closer to me across the isle so we started talking. He was going to the town of Al Shobak to interview for a teaching job at a government college. He had spent eight years in Baghdad, 1990–98, returning after an MSc in mathematics from Baghdad University. His master’s thesis was titled, “On the Equiconvergence Theorem of Eigen Function Expansion Associated with Ordinary Differential Equations of Third Order.” The last major work on this topic, he claimed, was done in 1907. But of second order only, he pointed out.

 

I mentioned two famous mathematicians of early Islam: Omar Khayyam and Alhazen. His face lit up; he also knew of al-Farabi, al-Beruni, and Avicenna. “Indians very strong in mathematics,” Muhammad said, looking at me admiringly. He knew that zero and the decimal system originated in India. I told him that the earliest epigraphic evidence of zero has been found in a central Indian city called Gwalior—for all practical purposes, the birthplace of zero. He responded with a blank stare—why did I offer this odd factoid? Somehow it didn’t occur to me to tell him that I grew up in Gwalior, or that the best response to my factoid so far has been, “Thank you for nothing!”

He was born close to the river Jordan near the Syrian border. For two years since his return from Baghdad, he has lived with his family in Irbid, unemployed. He had a few interviews but nothing worked out—too many applicants; unemployment is a major problem in Jordan. I asked if he liked to teach. He shrugged, he is clearly not enthused about it—it might bring in 70 JD ($100) per week, not enough to live on; even cigarettes would be a luxury—both Muhammad and Zayed got off to smoke at longer stops. “Travel not possible,” he said with a laugh. He had fond memories of Baghdad—inexpensive, nice people, culture and history. “But much suffering now,” he said, “because of America.” He admired Saddam Hussein for being the only Arab leader to stand up to America and Israel. The two have ganged-up to divide and conquer the Arabs, economically and politically. What is needed, he said, is Arab unity.

He is not religious, does not visit a mosque, but believes in a supreme being whose form we do not know. How about me? Do I believe in God? He may exist, I said, but I cannot be sure, nobody thus far has proved his existence—will the notion of proof resonate with him? But there must be a supreme being, he argued, how else to explain the logic of science? He struggled to express his thoughts in English, then gave up; he was not going to change my non-committal stance. Silently, I recited Protagoras, “I know nothing about the gods, either they are or they are not, or what are their shapes. For many things make certain knowledge impossible—the obscurity of the theme and the shortness of human life.”

A bit later, he inquired why I was still unmarried at thirty-three. I raised my right hand, palm facing in, and said, Insha’allah—the definitive response to such questions. He remained curious but shifted his focus: How much money did I make in America? Did I have an American girlfriend? How could I possibly like traveling alone? The landscape around the Desert Highway was, as one might expect, stark and sterile; almost eighty percent of Jordan is barren desert.

Zayed did a Ph.D in biology from a university in Dagestan, southwestern Russia, where he spent nine years. “Very beautiful place,” he said, “in the Greater Caucasus Range.” As I recall now, he translated the title of his dissertation as “Lipid Composition Change in the Brain and Blood in case of Hypothermia and Self-heating.” It turns out, he was going to the same college as Muhammad to interview for another teaching job. Also unemployed for two years, he too lived with family. There were many Indian students at his university in Dagestan. That surprised me; had middle-class Indians become that desperate to escape India?

Zayed had quietly listened to Muhammad admire Saddam Hussein. I then enquired about his own views. “Just like Hitler,” he chuckled, “someone should murder him.” Around then, the driver turned up the music and it became difficult to converse. Besides, they probably preferred a respite from exerting themselves in English for so long.

They got off on a dusty street and lit cigarettes. It was their first visit to Al Shobak and they knew no one. Two years of unemployment must have taken a toll. They both wore anxious expressions of young men at the start of their careers. I wished them luck, and tried to imagine their near-term lives if they got hired at the government college. An MSc in mathematics and a Ph.D in biology eking out a meager living in a dull town at the edge of the desert, in a one-room tenement dwelling, with little attachment to their profession, teaching uninterested students, yearning for female companionship, smoking their lungs out.

Servitors of the Divine Consciousness

In Jan '06, I visited Auroville for the second time (first in '96), but my interest was still purely anthropological. Yet again, Auroville—a township in Tamil Nadu founded in 1968 by the Mother (Mirra Alfassa), a French collaborator of Sri Aurobindo Ghose and a great believer in his teachings—struck me as an immensely audacious and, in many ways, a naively idealistic experiment.

 

The Mother had dreamed of a place where "all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities ... where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions." Auroville aspires to be such a place, "a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and harmony, above all creeds, all politics, and nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity." Today it is home to 1800 people (700 Indians) from 35 countries in over 100 settlements.

 

At the city's heart is a place for silent meditation, the Matrimandir ("Temple of the Mother"), which the Mother deemed the "soul" of Auroville. The plan calls for setting up four zones—Cultural, International, Industrial, Residential—radiating out from the Matrimandir, with a wide "Green Belt" around the city. For various reasons (including shortage of funds to acquire the requisite land, despite help from private donors, NGOs, and GOs), the realization of these goals has been slower than expected.

 

For members, Auroville is not a retreat but their primary home, where they and their families live, work, and play. Visitors are restricted to the visitor center and a walkway to the Matrimandir. Prospective members can stay for a week and sample the life of the community. Membership is by invitation from the Auroville Entry Group. New regulation requires that members pay for themselves for the first two years, effectively shutting out those with limited means (the Indian membership has reportedly stagnated since this regulation).

 

The task of running Auroville is overseen by various working groups. Major community decisions are taken collectively by the Residents Assembly, rarely without animated debate. Authority and bureaucracy are hated words. Assets are held by The Auroville Foundation—no one owns real-estate or earns an income; food, education, healthcare, entertainment, sports, etc. are free. A long-term goal (bucking a salient historical trend many associate with human progress) is to completely eliminate the use of money within its borders.

 

Many ideals at Auroville derive from Sri Aurobindo's vision, whose ashram (religious retreat) at Pondicherry is now an international study centre. The purpose of man, he claimed, is to transcend his lowly form of consciousness. Yoga is a technique not for personal liberation but for cooperating with the cosmic evolutionary urge destined to take mankind ahead to a higher, supramental stage of consciousness. Though generally progressive, his vision also betrays a muddled view of natural evolution. He brandishes the word "divine" all too often. Even the Auroville charter requires members to be "willing servitors of the divine consciousness." Too bad if you not only fail to see a "divine consciousness" around you, but see no need for it to live a moral life. Despite its many dubious foundational ideals, however, only the most cynical would dismiss the age-old quest for self-knowledge, meaning, and growth that must inspire many individuals who join Auroville.

 

Aurovillians research and practice environmental regeneration, organic farming, renewable energy, building technology, handicrafts, and various small scale industries (offset printing, graphic design, food processing, electronics, garment manufacture, etc.), all with an overarching desire to live lightly on earth. Though their research is rarely at the cutting edge in any given field, Auroville is perhaps unique in running so many projects in parallel and exploring their synergies. Strong emphasis is placed on artistic pursuits. Aurovillians also assist neighboring Tamil villages with infrastructure development, healthcare, and education; their emergency relief work after the Dec 2004 tsunami was exemplary. To an outsider, the idea of Auroville may evoke the Jewish Kibbutz, the American Peace Corps, and an Indian ashram, all rolled into one.

On Photography: Truth, Lies, and Photos

(This is a follow-on to part one of my notes on photography)

 

Many urban middleclass Indians I know are peeved by what they see as a staple of photography on India: squalor, poverty, lepers, fakirs, the deformed. Their India is not like that, and they harbor a knee-jerk hostility to such images. There are so many more suitable subjects of photography, they say, this isn’t the full story (what is?). One cousin was more articulate: the West, he said, has employed such a lens for decades to perpetuate negative stereotypes of India. It is an act of power. The white man came, and still comes, with little love in his heart. His jaundiced eye only sees the exotic and the grimy, making India seem primitive and medieval.

 

This may well be true but my cousin's stance also reveals his inferiority complex. It is conditioned by what he imagines as the colonizer’s gaze, scarcely a better tribute to it. His insecure pride is tinged with nationalism. He despises a whole class of portrayals of his country, including scenes so ubiquitous that they can perhaps be ignored only as a survival tactic. Because he turns defensive and shuts off upfront, he doesn't find in such images a universal human drama beyond nations and states. He neither sees in them our common humanity, nor its astonishing diversity.

 

I present this example to suggest that the motivations we ascribe to a photographer usually have more to do with us than with the photographer. To be sure, fresh new pictures can challenge stereotypes, forcing us to examine our received ideas. They can be a mirror to our inner selves; they can reflect the very depth of our being and experience, individual and collective. They can certainly evoke in us joy and sorrow, wonder and delight, but can a picture by itself increase self-knowledge? One answer is that it helps only those who are ready to be helped by it. It may well confound others, or reinforce their stereotypes. Like all works of art, a picture's contribution to self-knowledge is therefore indeterminate.

 

It is often said that a photo doesn't lie, since it records something real in the world. But what's behind this laboring woman’s smile for the camera? Is it even a smile or is she reacting to the load?  A smile absolves us from further concern or involvement. It lulls us into imagining that all is well in her life, despite her innocence of dentists and sturdier equipment. Our ignorance and our need for solace can even make her charming. Is the deformed man begging for alms, yawning, or singing? There are many other interpretations but they all share one thing: what we make of them has little to do with their self-image or reality, a lot with ours. So photos can lie, and generally because we let them.

Our Moral Compass

The gazillions of regular readers of Shunya’s Notes may find interesting a recent exchange of views between me and Ruchira Paul on Accidental Blogger. It began with my comment to a post by Ruchira on a book called Moral Minds by Marc D. Hauser, and then moved on to somewhat tangential discussions on the roots of morality, and secular and religious ethics.

Amartya Sen on Globalization

Where does "our own" Nobel laureate in economics stand on globalization? Earlier this year, I reviewed The Argumentative Indian by A Sen. A wide ranging book with sixteen essays on Indian culture, history, and identity,  it often brims with that perennially precious thing: commonsense. It also reveals his abiding love of India. Here, too, Sen tackles globalization from his unique vantage point as an economist. Below is an extract from my review that examines his views on the topic.

 

Some fears about globalization, Sen says,

 

make it sound like an animal—analogous to the big shark in Jaws—that gobbles up unsuspecting innocents in a dark and mysterious way ... Globalization is neither new, nor in general a folly. Through persistent movement of goods, people, techniques and ideas, it has shaped the history of the world. India has been an integral part of the world in the most interactive sense. The forces of ideological separatism may be strong in India at present, as they are elsewhere, but they militate not just against the global history of the world, but also against India's own heritage.

 

He warns us against the temptation to see globalization as a "one-sided movement that simply reflects an asymmetry of power which needs to be resisted." Throughout history, "different regions of the world have [benefited] from progress and development occurring in other regions." He points out that a millennium ago this movement occurred in the reverse direction—with "paper and printing, the crossbow and gunpowder, the wheelbarrow and the rotary fan, the clock and the iron chain suspension bridge, the kite and the magnetic compass," zero, the decimal system, and advances in mathematics—but he is conspicuously silent about how the unprecedented scale of today's globalization, with its pace and engine of change, instant flights of capital, rapid demographic shifts, and powerful corporations, might differ from that of an earlier age.

 

Sen acknowledges that economic globalization poses risks to the vulnerable and the disadvantaged and his prescriptions appear close to the neo-liberal line: It's inescapable, so let's try to make it more humane and just. Rather than isolating itself or blaming the "shark" of globalization, India should get behind it and, through smart public policies, tackle specific ills that arise from it, as well as invest in education, health care, micro-credit, land reforms, women's education, and infrastructure (like energy, communication, transportation). He favors safety nets and well conceived social welfare programs that do less harm than good (who can disagree, but here Sen betrays no awareness that this old problem is known to ensnare even the best kind of reasoning). He has used part of his Nobel Prize money to fund development research in India and Bangladesh. He has persuasively argued that development should be measured not by GDP but in terms of "real freedoms people can enjoy."

 

But Sen's analysis is not without its flaws. He writes: "Global economic interactions bring general benefits, but they can also create problems for many, because of inadequacies of global arrangements as well as limitations of appropriate domestic policies." If (a big if) these were addressed—Sen seems to suggest—economic globalization should create few problems. This is simplistic at best. Problems can also come from a culture's unpredictable response to it. What novel set of beliefs will it provoke? Will they be broadly liberal, rational, and conducive to economic success? Can we say how the dust will settle? The patient may get worse, or trade one serious illness for another. This recognition, far from turning us against globalization, makes us more realistic about its effects. Factoring in culture, Amy Chua, in her World on Fire, provides sobering examples that contrast with many of Sen’s sanguine assumptions about "the crooked timber of humanity".

Who's That Pretty Pachyderm?

One of the pleasures of traveling in India is to unexpectedly run into elephants. Almost always decked out by the mahout, they're typically found blessing visitors at temples and festivals, strolling down a street, or giving rides at tourist sites and national parks. I’ve also seen wild herds in the African savanna and tropical forest, and in the grassy woods of Uttaranchal and the hills of Kerala. But elephants never cease to amaze and delight me.

 

That elephants are smart is common knowledge, but a new study has moved them into a super-elite club of smart animals: the great apes and humans

   

Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror and use their reflections to explore hidden parts of themselves, a measure of subjective self-awareness that until now has been shown definitively only in humans and apes, researchers reported … The findings confirm a long-standing suspicion among scientists that elephants, with their big brains, complex societies and reputation for helping ill herdmates, have a sufficiently developed sense of identity to pass the challenging "mirror self-recognition test."

 

... The new study involved three female Asian elephants at the zoo, in New York City…In a series of experiments, the elephants first explored the mirror -- reaching behind it with their trunks, kneeling before it and even trying to climb it -- gathering clues that the mirror image was just that, an image.

 

That was followed by an eerie sequence in which the animals made slow, rhythmic movements while tracking their reflections. Then, like teenagers, they got hooked … All three conducted oral self-exams. Maxine, a 35-year-old female, even used the tip of her trunk to get a better look inside her mouth. She also used her trunk to slowly pull her ear in front of the mirror so she could examine it -- "self-directed" behaviors the zookeepers had never seen before.

 

Moreover, one elephant, Happy, 34, passed the most difficult measure of self-recognition: the mark test. The researchers painted a white X on her left cheek, visible only in the mirror. Later, after moving in and out of view of the mirror, Happy stood directly before the reflective surface and touched the tip of her trunk to the mark repeatedly -- an act that, among other insights, requires an understanding that the mark is not on the mirror but on her body.

 

The rest of the article is here and includes video footage of the above mirror test. My partner who loves elephants called it “impossibly cute” and I agree. For lots of still photos of elephants from India and Africa, click here.

Melting Girls and Serpent Women

Two days ago I went on a day trip to Pushkar, a Hindu pilgrimage site, from Jaipur. It has what is said to be the only temple to Lord Brahma in the world. Bathing ghats encircle Pushkar Lake, which, like the umpteen other polluted lakes and rivers in India, is believed to have miraculous healing and purifying power. Though alcohol and meat are banned in this holy town, soft drugs are tolerated (Lord Shiva partakes of it himself!) and are a major draw for Westerners. Pushkar’s history goes back a long way but all its temples date from modern times; the earlier buildings were summarily razed by the bad guy Aurangzeb.

 

This was my second visit, occasioned by the annual, weeklong Pushkar camel fair that attracts over 250,000 visitors from India and abroad. Villagers turn up for both business and pleasure. In the animal market, amid women gathering camel dung for fire and children frolicking in tanks that hold drinking water for the camels, I felt transported back by decades, save for the large telecom company ads and the camcorder-toting tourists.

 

Besides the trade in camels, horses, livestock, and farm items, the fair—held on the outskirts of town at the edge of the desert—also offers lots of entertainment and a street market. The former includes tightrope walkers, performing monkeys, snake charmers, acrobats, dare-devil bikers, spherical mirror illusions, circus acts, and shows promising ‘melting girls’ and ‘women who turn into serpents as they wish’. Competitions focus on moustaches and bridal wear, as well as events like camel and horse races, matka phod, and a cattle beauty contest. Brightly dressed women shop for fashion jewelry, pots and pans, and clothes. Food stalls abound, as do merry-go-rounds and similar rides. All in all, it seems like the biggest fun event of the season for the hinterland population.

 

It struck me afresh that these Rajasthani villagers are a proud and handsome lot, weathered by the sun and the desert, though they don't exactly shine on the UN Human Development Index. They have high rates of illiteracy, underage marriages, and selective abortions. Westerners visit aplenty; perhaps Rajasthan, old world and loudly demonstrative, represents a fairly safe and exotic foil to their own modernity. And since a picture says a thousand words, check out some I took that afternoon.

A Day Trip to My Alma Mater

I got a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT, KGP). Sixteen years after graduation, I visited it again from Kolkata during Puja 05.

Most students had gone home but the institute, though fairly deserted, still evoked a flood of memories. But it was different from nostalgia (it's been a while since I felt any nostalgia for the IIT), which I find plentiful in most IITians I meet ("best four years of my life"). This gap may be because I have long viewed my IIT stint as, at best, passage to a richer life in more ways than one (for which I feel fortunate but not nostalgic; for me every four year period since has been better), and, at worst, a relative waste of time that played only a trifling role in my intellectual and moral development. I went again partly because places from our past teach us something about our present.

For an elite college that attracts some of India's "sharpest" kids, its near total lack of liberal education now seems a deprivation to me. That the IITs see no value in leavening technical instruction with the humanities should give us pause about the quality of its graduates. In my former department, only three non-professional courses are on offer today in four years, including English for Communication, which comes with eight other courses in semester one. The incoming freshman must take nine courses in the first semester and eight in the second! And all that while negotiating life away from home. How can he learn anything well? UC Berkeley averages three or four each semester. The IIT KGP curriculum offers nothing even on the history of global science and technology, nor on the unique challenges of technological development in India.

The institute is still run by uninspiring men who cannot intelligently address an alumni gathering to save their lives. I recall it more as a time of stress and confusion than of joy and learning. Faculty teaching skills were abysmal on average; there was no recourse or accountability. The program was rigid: four years, minimal departmental mobility, meager choice of electives. Exam-related anxiety dreams haunted me for years afterwards. For most of us, the main reason to study was the grades, so we could land financial aid from US universities—what better validation was needed for its impoverished idea of education? Barring exceptions, it has fostered a generation of insipid, incurious men who are little more than glorified plumbers of the US economy.

So it is hardly surprising that my fondest memories relate to the wacky, inventive, and taboo things we did—as college boys are wont to—and some of the friendships I made then, the kind that are so hard to acquire later in life. Is it true that the most unaffected bonds between men are the ones formed when they are young and stupid? I also pleasantly recall what was rare in the 80s: a diverse student body from all across India, which helped me shed some of my provincial, small-town ways. Here I honed a more analytical outlook that has helped me in other walks of life. Here I learned to live independently. But I suspect that my own poor self-awareness, perhaps poorer than many of my peers, blocked me from making the best of the extra-curricular opportunities we did have. I regret not picking up more Bengali.

§

Nehru Hall, where I lived for four years, looked fairly unchanged, except the TV room is now a provision store and the canteen on the catwalk has moved below, near the mess. The rooms were exactly the same with their iron cots, open shelves, wobbly door latches, and the green flap doors that have withstood many a sutli bomb and late-night Floyd sessions. Every room now has a desktop PC and 3 Mbps fiber-optic net connection. I wondered what new marvels 19 year old boys—what with the IIT's sorry gender ratio of 20 boys to every girl—find on the Internet today. Trading pondies must be history. Are they still as physically playful with each other as in my time? The water-tanks (aka s---tanks) in the bathroom area remain. I noticed some improvements in the plumbing and tile work by the washbasins, but the toilets are still the squatting kind. A few trees, once far below my second floor wing, C-top West, had grown quite tall. Recent rain had accentuated the withering of the cheap, yellow wall paint. The common room and the mess were closed for Puja. Pradeep, the provision store owner from the old days, is still around but was out that day.

Several new and slick halls of residence have come up (most for freshmen). A new all-AC building in the institute, with rows upon endless rows of desktop PCs on two floors; another architecturally bold building has lots of seminar rooms; both have nice, modern toilets and water coolers with AquaGuard. A new library is searchable online, said to be the largest technical library in Asia. Strangely, there were lots of security guards at the institute entrance but as soon as I said I was an alumnus they waved me in with broad smiles. A few Nescafe kiosks now exist inside with stone benches strewn about. The Tagore Open Air Theater was like before.

The Tatas have built a sports complex in light of which Gyan Ghosh looked positively derelict, its grass overgrown. The only person I recognized was the Surd at Sahara restaurant. Nair's has changed beyond recognition into another restaurant. Waldies was closed that day but its exterior looked the same. Anarks has been turned into a relatively upscale hotel-restaurant by its owner. The Tech Market has grown to at least twice its former size, as has the student body (they admit many more these days; lots more compete for it too). I saw several ATMs and banks. Rollicks ice-cream is still ubiquitous (my travel partner remarked, "gosh, such simple taste you had in ice-creams back then!"). Bimala Sweets lives, as does Thackers Books. The Surd’s joint outside Nehru Hall, where we occasionally splurged on a chikan dish, had morphed into a basic canteen and travel agent plus courier service.

§

It doesn't take a genius to see that the IITs lack a holistic idea of education. To be sure, India needs them and the skills they teach, but the IITs are definitely over-rated as centers of learning. Without roots in a vibrant university, they are more like the best "engineer training" institutes of India. What would Tagore have said? They're the holy grail of the entire urban school system, where too many middleclass Indians (including my own family) equate education with success in competitions and acquiring skills and degrees that promise plush jobs or a life abroad. Their all-too-pragmatic attitudes are understandable of course, if also less than admirable.

Most IITians continue their game after graduation. The great Indian middleclass now cheers their adult achievements: job titles, salaries, stock options, tenures, timely marriages and issues, houses and cars, but above all, money. Nothing is sexier than an IITian who makes his millions in America, or leads a multinational corporation. Achievements on this track leave me cold. I see in them little independence of mind (one can reasonably argue that it's too late to inculcate this at the IIT. It needs to start much earlier in school and at home, for which middleclass ideas of education must evolve). Barring exceptions, I find most IITians to be a thoroughly conventional and self-satisfied bunch. As immigrants in the US, in particular, they seem to embody some of the most unflattering stereotypes of the Marwaris of Calcutta.

It struck me afresh that the campus is so large, green, quiet, and pleasant to wander through. Many roads are wider; the Scholar’s Avenue was shadier than ever; the walk past the gymkhana and the swimming pool brought back memories of inter-hall competitions. Faculty housing still looks straight out of the 80s though: derelict verandas with lush tropical creepers, leaky pipes running down the back, green moss on the walls. But on the whole, IIT KGP, the first Indian Institute of Technology, has become a bigger institute since my time. India Today ranked it the #1 engineering college for three years running (2001-03) and it continues to hover near there. A shiny new management school is named after a philanthropic alumnus. It has more funds and projects, departments, teachers, researchers, labs, new halls, and a devoted alumni network. The cycle-rickshaw ride back to the impressive Kharagpur train station felt pleasant, with the area still sparsely populated and unhurried.

(Click here for pictures.)

Thinkers Anonymous

A friend forwarded me this amusing piece. Not a clue who the author is. Enjoy.

---

    It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then - just to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone - "to relax," I told myself - but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

    That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

    I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't help myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau, Muir, Confucius and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

    One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss.

    "Honey," I said to my wife, "I confess, I've been thinking . . ."

    "I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

    "But Honey, surely it's not that serious."

    "It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"

    "That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently.

    She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.

    "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.  I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors. They didn't open. The library was closed. To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night.

    Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye, "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinkers Anonymous poster.

    This is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.

    I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

    Today I took the final step. I joined the Republican Party.

Our Dignity and Rights

In today’s world, we often take for granted ideas like human dignity and human rights. Many of us hold them to be natural, inalienable, or universal. But we would do well to ask: where do human dignity and human rights come from? JM Coetzee reminds us in his Essays on Censorship that human dignity itself is,

 

         ... a foundational fiction to which we more or less wholeheartedly subscribe, a fiction that may well be indispensable for a just society, namely, that human beings have a dignity that sets them apart from animals and consequently protects them from being treated like animals ... [it] helps to define humanity and the status of humanity helps to define human rights ... an affront to our dignity strikes at our rights. Yet when, outraged at such affront, we stand on our rights and demand redress, we would do well to remember how insubstantial the dignity is on which those rights are based...

 

Human dignity is a human construct; its prehistoric roots perhaps lie in the universal human aversion to pain and humiliation. Animals suffer too, but humans, with their superior consciousness and cognition, could act to reduce it. When they collectively did so, they implicitly adopted a notion of human dignity (the birth of civilization?).

 

The edifice of rights was built upon this foundation of dignity. The right to life is the earliest major human right. Notably, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains extended this right to animals too, unlike the Greco-Romans and the monotheists. The equality of the right to life is a more recent idea and a higher order abstraction still.

 

Human rights today include the equality of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But without a 'higher' or objective truth to derive human rights from, all depends on a peoples' gallant embrace of principles. We also know that rights can be easily undermined by centrifugal traits in human nature (rooted as it is in the animal kingdom and worsened swiftly by sociopolitical turmoil), or by autocrats in the name of culture, order, security, or tradition.

 

‘A secular defense of human rights depends on the idea of moral reciprocity: that we cannot conceive of any circumstances in which we or anyone we know would wish to be abused in mind or body.’*  But there is no consensus on precisely what rights all humans deserve in a world with diverse histories. Then there are practical challenges—how do we match the high-minded language of universal rights with equally high-minded enforcement? What do we make of those who consent to being abused in mind or body, cease to think of it as abuse, and settle for other benefits?