Shunya's Notes

INDIANS: A Book Trailer

My sales pitch for Indians, or as they euphemistically say in the industry, a ‘book trailer’. :) 

A shorter book trailer with just music (and on-screen text) is here. To learn more about the book, click here.

On the Indian Knowledge Systems Calendar from IIT Kharagpur

(This article also appeared in Raiot.)

My alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kharagpur, has created a condensed history of Indian knowledge systems in calendar form. Lavishly produced, it is being widely shared and praised on social media. Sadly, it brims with lies, misleading ideas, and fanciful fictions. Rather than educating to inform and delight, it seeks to inflate cultural pride by taking liberties with the truth. Let me explain.

Early India had many solid achievements in advancing knowledge but this calendar’s authors miss loads of them while twisting the rest into convoluted descriptions laced with Sanskrit jargon. For instance, they ignore the Harappans entirely—their fine urban planning, precision weights, hydraulic engineering, the first indoor toilets, and a relatively egalitarian society with no standing armies or temples. Instead, they begin with legendary Vedic sages. It’s as though they can’t acknowledge that the roots of any knowledge system could possibly lie earlier and outside of the holy Vedas. They also repeat the absurd claim that Sanskrit is ‘the root of the entire Indo-Aryan branch in Asia and systems of European languages.’ No, it’s not. Sanskrit is just another branch of the family, like Persian and Greek.

This false claim also reveals their foundational belief that Aryans did not migrate into the Subcontinent, that Vedic people were indigenous to this land and carried Sanskrit westward. There never was any scholarly justification for this belief, which was driven by ignoble motives: the creators of the Vedas have to be ‘made’ primordially indigenous to promote Hindu pride and ‘faith and fatherland’ nationalism—and to render Islam and Christianity ‘invader’ religions. But the fact is that, to the extent that the Rig Veda, Sanskrit, and priestly fire rituals are seen as foundational to Hinduism, Hinduism too is an ‘invader’ religion that arrived with the Aryans from Central Asia.

Our Moment on Earth

[The seventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

“Our plan B has always been grounded in our beliefs around the continued evolution of technology and engineered solutions to address and react to whatever the climate system and its outcomes present to us, whether that be in the form of rises in sea level, which we think you can address through different engineering accommodations along coastal areas, to changing agricultural production due to changes in weather patterns that may or may not be induced by climate change.” —Rex Tillerson, as CEO of ExxonMobile, to shareholders in 2015

***
For the past few years, I’ve been taking a fairly deep dive into attempting to understand the physical and ecological changes occurring on our planet and how these will affect human lives and civilization. As I’ve immersed myself in the science and the massive societal hurdles that stand in the way of an adequate response, I’m becoming aware that this exercise is changing me, too. I feel it inside my body, like a grey mass coalescing in my chest, sticking to everything, tugging against my heart and occluding my lungs. A couple of months ago, I decided to stop writing on this subject, to step away from these thoughts and concerns, because of their discomfiting darkness.

But I’ve discovered that walking away from this matter is no longer something I can just choose to do. For I now experience the world in a different way than I once did, as this grey mass clouds my vision and leaves its residue on everything I touch. I’ve come to see the changing Earth as the greatest single force shaping human affairs into the future, the backdrop against which the human story will play out and respond. 

Just as the temperate stability of the Holocene once enabled the shift from nomadism to settled farming and all of civilization, so the ongoing mass extinction of species and the rapidly warming climate will erode our present modes of life and maps of political order to make way for something new. Not just new, but very likely burdened by unprecedented collective hardship that stresses and tests our political systems, economies, infrastructures, and provisioning networks as never before. Some of these systems will fail. Without knowing how extremely or how quickly the planetary changes will occur, but knowing with some predictive capacity—unlike our Paleolithic ancestors—that an essential and irreversible change is underway, makes it difficult not to feel frightened and aggrieved for our future, even if I may not live to see the most startling changes. But then, what I’ve already witnessed has been startling enough.

Lost and Found in Eden

[The fifth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

High in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of northern Colombia, the Kogi people peaceably live and farm. Having isolated themselves in nearly inaccessible mountain hamlets for five hundred years, the Kogi retain the dubious distinction of being the only intact, pre-Columbian civilization in South America. As such, they are also rare representatives of a sustainable farming way of life that persists until the modern era. Yet, more than four decades ago, even they noticed that their highland climate was changing. The trees and grasses that grew around their mountain redoubt, the numbers and kinds of animals they saw, the sizes of lakes and glaciers, the flows of rivers—everything was changing. The Kogi, who refer to themselves as Elder Brother and understand themselves to be custodians of our planet, felt they must warn the world. So in the late 1980s, they sent an emissary to contact the documentary filmmaker, Alan Ereira of the BBC—one of the few people they’d previously met from the outside world. In the resulting film, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1991), the Kogi Mamos (shamans) issue to us, their Younger Brother, a warning akin to that which the Union of Concerned Scientists would also later issue in their World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1997, with a second notice in 2017): that we must take heed of our damage to the planet; that if we don’t stop what we’re doing to it, we will destroy the world we know.

The Kogi warning, however, is couched in the language and metaphor of their own knowledge system. They speak of The Great Mother, who taught them “right from wrong,” and whose teachings still guide their lives. “The Great Mother talked and talked. The Great Mother gave us what we needed to live, and her teaching has not been forgotten right up to this day,” they tell us. It’s Younger Brother who is causing problems. “They are taking out the Mother’s heart. They are digging up the ground and cutting out her liver and her guts. The Mother is being cut to pieces and stripped of everything,” the Mamos scold. “So from today, stop digging in the Earth and stealing the gold. If you go on, the world will end. You are bringing the world to an end.” You can hear in their tone that it doesn’t occur to them that Younger Brother might not listen.

For the Kogi, gold is the blood of the Great Mother; it holds for them a value entirely apart from the way we value gold. For them, the wellbeing of the Great Mother is paramount, and they live now—as they always have—in service to her, our world. During the millennium before Columbus bumped into the Caribbean islands, the ancestors of the Kogi had created the complex, non-literate Tairona civilization, stretching from the Caribbean Sea up into the Sierras. They farmed and fished, their subsistence practices enmeshed within a sophisticated knowledge system that described the complex local ecology. They built cities of stone connected by roadways, marvels of engineering, working in league with what nature provided, rather than against it. Their several settlements were located within the different ecological zones of the diverse landscape, and each played its part in providing for their larger civilization. For example, the coastal Tairona fished and collected salt, which they shared with their sister settlements, from whom they received maize and other goods, each of which was produced within its own optimal ecozone, sustainably supporting a population of three hundred thousand people.

Tales From a Changing World

[The fourth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

Tabea Bakeua lives in Kiribati, a North Pacific atoll nation. Her country is likely to be the first to disappear completely under the rising seas within a few decades. Asked by foreign documentary filmmakers if she “believes” in climate change, Bakeua considers and tells them, “I have seen climate change, the consequences of climate change. But I don’t believe it as a religious person. There’s a thing in the Bible, where they say that god sends this person to tell all the people that there will be no more floods. So I am still believing in that.” She smiles, self-consciously, as she continues. “And the reason why I am still believing in that is because I’m afraid. And I don’t know how to get all my fifty or sixty family members away from here.” She’s still smiling as tears fill her eyes. “That’s why I’m afraid. But I’m putting it behind me because I just don’t know what to do.” She turns, apologetically, to wipe away her tears. [from “The Tropical Paradise Being Swallowed By The Pacific” by Journeyman Pictures]

***

Bakeua’s response is one of many that people now have about anthropogenic climate change. Grasping for magic or miracles in the face of destruction and helplessness, her narrative is common among her hundred thousand fellow citizens. Having remained self-sufficient and sustainably prosperous in their way of life for thousands of years—while contributing effectively zero carbon emissions—they will abruptly be left with nothing as the encroaching tides sweep their lands out from under them, sacrificing their islands for the greater prosperity of other countries. The people of Kiribati played no part in triggering this annihilation and have no way of withstanding it. Nor is the international community throwing them a life raft—through compensatory rights to lands, housing, livelihoods, and autonomy, elsewhere, as would be just—nor even expressing any meaningful concern for their plight.

How did we get to this tragic moment? Whose responsibility is it to help save the people and culture of Kiribati? And what of other, similar cases now arising around the globe? Our politics seem wholly unequipped to deal with our ongoing and anticipated climate-forced migrations; our worldviews and political formulations evolved on a planet different from the one presently emerging. And a planet now reeling with nearly eight billion souls and a collapse of biodiversity also offers less resource flexibility to respond to the looming global challenges. Knowing these limitations, however, doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to do everything we can to address the crises; rather, we must figure out how to change ourselves to meet the moment.

We know that human beings have always had to contend with changing climates since our species first emerged in Africa, during the Pleistocene ice age. In earlier eras, having more wilderness and fewer people on Earth afforded a great deal of climate resiliency—inhabitants of drowning islands could readily enough find somewhere else to go, for instance. But as so many of us have been feeling distress or denial about the effects of the changing climate, I’ve wondered how our distant ancestors experienced the changes they lived through. Did they change themselves to meet their moment? What stories did they tell?

Of Wanderers and Nomads

(The third in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.)

At the beginning of our story—paraphrased from an origin story remembered by a Cree elder—two figures are walking along the clouds. They’ve been walking long and far. Looking down through the spaces between the clouds, they spy a beautiful, green landscape, rich and inviting. They long to go down to this land, but they don’t know how to get down from the clouds. So the two keep walking. When at last they see a speck on the horizon, in the far distance, they walk toward it. The speck grows, looming larger than they are as they get nearer. When the two look up at it, it looks back down at them—it’s Great Spider.

The people tell Great Spider how much they wish to climb down from the clouds and inhabit the land below, and they ask him for his help. So Great Spider begins to weave a web. He weaves and weaves and weaves, until he’s woven a boat. The two climb into the boat with Great Spider’s web still attached, and Great Spider lowers it down from the clouds. Despite his care, the boat rocks and sways precariously. After a long and harrowing downward journey, the boat ends up stuck in the top of a huge tree.

Now the Earth is almost within reach, but the people don’t know how to get down from the top of the tree. Below them they can see Caribou and other animals walking around. They call out for help, but none of the animals is able to help them. Finally, they ask Fisher-weasel, who scampers up the tree and carries each of them safely to the ground. Once they’re on the ground, Brother Bear befriends the people and teaches them everything they need to know as they make their way in this world.

I’m neither a member nor a student of the Cree people and I don’t know what this story means to a Cree person, nor what was left out or changed in this telling. But I’m struck by the tale as both alien and familiar and brimming with humility and kindness in a way that’s unlike many other ancient myths I’ve heard. Before Europeans invaded the Americas, the Cree people were nomadic foragers living in what today is Canada. They traveled in family bands of around ten people, give or take a few, related by blood or marriage; each of these family bands associated with other bands to form larger, more loosely related sociopolitical groupings. These larger groupings facilitated working and socializing together, while each family band maintained its independence. When larger group decisions were called for, every band had a vote; unresolvable disagreements could also be handled by fissioning the larger group associations, with dissenting bands going their own way—voting with their feet, as anthropologists are fond of saying.

A Story of Fire and Ice

(The second in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The first part is here.)

When I was a kid, I used to wonder about the possibility that the planet could slip back into an ice age. I grew up in the Rocky Mountain region of the northwestern USA, where winters lasted half the year and summers were brief and blustery. I hated being cold all the time. Aware that ice ages result from some sort of natural cycles, I worried what might happen if the planet should head that way again. I tried to imagine how we would construct cities and farms, how we would travel between countries or even build roads, if huge glaciers grew down from the Arctic Circle and smothered our little mountain town.

So I was surprised to learn, much later, that we actually do live in an ice age. In historical memory, we’ve been enjoying a warmish, rather pleasant phase of this ice age, to be sure—an interglacial phase, called the Holocene, that’s persisted for about ten thousand years. But interglacial phases, like our present one, have only been brief respites, as the ice age has cycled between glacial and interglacial phases over the past two million years. Past interglacials never lasted very long and, left to its own geological devices, all signs suggested that this one would end too, to be followed by a much longer glacial phase—the stuff of my nightmares.

In fact, a 2016 study indicates that the Holocene interglacial should already be ending. As it was, the weather of the fourteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries was already given to frequent fits and bouts of cold weather extremes. The precise causes for the drop in temperatures are complex, and though it didn’t get cold enough to become a real glacial age, the period is now playfully referred to as the Little Ice Age. During that time, centuries of sporadic, crop-crippling cold led to erratic harvests, reducing grain yields and causing periodic famine, helping to topple Chinese dynasties and destabilize the feudal order of the European Middle Ages. Persistent hunger and poor nutrition amplified the depredations of plague and other diseases across Europe. In England, the Thames regularly froze over. In North America, even the Rio Grande froze up more than once. Peoples across southern North America suffered frequent droughts and malnutrition, especially in the southwest, which remained persistently dry for a span of decades. Some agricultural peoples were forced to return to lives of nomadism. Across the northern latitudes, glaciers extended themselves. The Norse Greenland colony, which had been thriving for centuries, collapsed and was abandoned by around 1500 CE. Early European colonists in North America struggled to survive frequent winters of bitter cold and failed harvests.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather

(The first in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily.)

In 1997, I was living on Ambae, a tiny, tropical island in the western South Pacific. Rugged, jungle-draped, steamy, volcanic Ambae belongs to Vanuatu, an archipelago nation stretching some 540 miles roughly between Fiji and Papua New Guinea. There, under corrugated tin roofs, in the cinderblock classrooms of a small, residential school, I taught science to middle- and high-schoolers as a Peace Corps volunteer.

That December, the rainy season was in full force, with heavy downpours most afternoons, lasting sometimes long into the night. Never before had I, and never again would I, witness rains like those, where the water poured straight down, not in drops, but in globs and sheets. Standing in it felt like standing under a waterfall; I’d catch myself stepping forward or back, left or right, in an attempt to get out from under the flow, but it was everywhere. It seemed impossible that the sky could hold so much water, constricting summer’s broad daylight to a sodden gloaming.

One evening, during such a downpour, I left a teachers’ year-end potluck to return to my room—one in a row of tiny, concrete flats for the school’s single female staff. Mine was not much more than 100 yards away across an open lawn, which was now filled with ankle-deep water flowing gently down the long campus green toward the sea. As this was not my first deluge, I wasn’t concerned by the prospect of a routine water-logging; it was only water, after all, and not at all cold. The only problem was that the rains had washed away all light into a blind, enveloping darkness. I knew that once I stepped into it I would become disembodied, aware of my limbs only through my untrained sense of proprioception. How dependent we are upon the faculty of sight, even to know where we end and the external world begins.

Standing in front of the large, glaring light, which the principle had set up outside the classroom doorway, I pointed myself in the direction of my house. I held out my arms and stepped forward. Walking in perfect darkness feels like stepping in place, going nowhere. There’s only the light sensation of your feet tapping over a surface—or in this case, shuffling through a pool of water nearly indistinguishable from the cascade of water also flowing over my body. And at the time, I didn’t know that a person who tries to walk a straight line with no bearings will end up traversing an arc. But I continued moving, certain that after about a minute I would run into one of the papaya plants in front of my house. This did not happen.

The Climate Crisis and India

(A version of this article first appeared as the cover story in The Caravan, The End of Nature: Ecological myths and warming climates.)

FIVE YEARS AGO, there was some speculation as to whether Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, was a climate-change sceptic, after he made a remark that indicated he was unconvinced about the phenomenon. “Climate has not changed,” he said, in September 2014, during a televised address to a group of schoolchildren. “We have changed. Our habits have changed. Our habits have got spoiled. Due to that, we have destroyed our entire environment.” In a remark made to a group of students at Sacred Heart University around the same time, he displayed total incomprehension of the matter: “The reality is this that in our family, some people are old ... They say this time the weather is colder. And, people’s ability to bear cold becomes less.”

These statements contradict Modi’s imperative to readers of his 2011 book, Convenient Action: Gujarat’s Response to Challenges of Climate Change, in which he references Al Gore, the environmentalist and former vice-president of the United States, who has been vocal about the need for urgent action to save the planet in his 2007 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It is also entirely at odds with some of his other public statements, such as his declaration at the World Economic Forum, last year in Davos, that climate change constitutes the “greatest threat to the survival and human civilization as we know it.” This apparent contradiction is reflected in the disparity between statement and action when it comes to his government’s measures to protect the environment. For example, his acknowledgement that climate change is our greatest existential threat does not align with the present government’s lack of urgency around decarbonising India’s transportation sector or its energy grid. It has created no institutional structures designed to specifically tackle such a grave existential threat. His government has even failed to properly allocate earmarked funds toward environmental initiatives.

Previous governments were resistant to setting targets for limiting emissions, citing development priorities. The Modi administration at least signed on to the much lauded Paris Agreement in 2015, which aimed to get countries to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of limiting the rise in global average temperature to 1.5º Celsius above what we call the pre-industrial baseline, or the average global temperature in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, when the mass burning of fossil fuels began to change the atmosphere. In addition, under Modi, India ratified the International Solar Alliance, an agreement intended to nurture cooperation among “solar rich” tropical countries in developing and deploying solar power infrastructure. Such measures that the Modi government intends to undertake are helpful but not substantial. While India’s carbon emissions are expected to rise for some years, far more aggressive steps need to be taken to alter the emissions trajectory that India is currently on.

Stories About the End of the World

(This essay first appeared in Pangyrus literary magazine, June 2019.)

My first visit to a science museum, when I was kid, had a remarkable impact on me. I might have been eleven or twelve; it might have been in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle. In one hall of the delightful exhibits, an electronic signboard hung mutely overhead. It displayed only a number—a very large number, of a magnitude difficult to grasp, though I don’t recall how many digits—that represented the estimated number of species currently living on our planet. This number was silently ticking down, like a clock running backwards. I watched the display for a while, as the last digit dropped. And dropped again. Five species lost. Then ten. Right before my eyes! Unsettled by this, unable to accept the implications, I wandered off to find a fun distraction in the museum. When later I returned to check, I saw that dozens of species had already gone extinct that very afternoon. Nobody else in the museum seemed alarmed. I told myself this must be because it’s a bigger number than I can comprehend, and I’m childish to be concerned; everyone else understands it’s not such a big deal. But there was no denying that it was dropping very fast, and it’s haunted me ever since.

It’s possible that seeing the extinction clock struck me with such force because I’d already noticed living things disappearing around me at home. As a child growing up in the arid hills of southern Idaho, I’d once discovered a colony of tiny creatures living on the side of our home. Each one was about the size of a thumbnail on my six-year-old hands, bearing a curled shell, like a snail. But these shells were soft, and the animals within seemed dry and sticky, rather than slimy. Their rate of movement was imperceptible to me, but every summer a great throng of them clung to the sunbaked red bricks of our southwestern exposure. A couple of summers after I’d first noticed them, I realized that there were fewer of them. Their numbers shrank every year, until, by the time I was eleven, they were simply gone. I never found out what kind of animal they were, and I’ve never seen or heard reference to animals like them anywhere again.

I’d already noticed, too, that the shimmering explosion of grasshoppers, which once erupted from our every footfall as we walked through the weedy grasses, where our lawn gave way to tumbleweed, sagebrush, and juniper, had gone still. The long, fat earthworms that exhumed themselves during every rainstorm, to twist awhile and then dry up on the pavements, no longer left their brown stains along the sidewalks. Stinkbug beetles and roly-poly potato bugs, once our playthings on idle summer afternoons, had become harder to find. The little scorpions that occasionally took shelter in our house, hiding in our shoes, stopped coming inside (though I habitually tamped out my shoes before wearing them for years after). No longer did we have to scrub our car’s windshield and grille clean of the bugsplats that coated them after every night drive along the highway, for the swarms of flying insects that once hovered ubiquitously over the sundowned desertscapes had thinned and finally vanished.

It seemed to me as though all the bugs, everywhere (except the pesky mosquitoes!), were disappearing. As in the museum, no one around me seemed concerned about this. My peers and elders carried on as though the world remained limitless and unchanging. In the fifth grade, I didn’t know much about bugs and I had no one to ask. I wasn’t aware at the time how much of the living world depends upon their daily toil, their unremarked—and still largely mysterious—interactions that link the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. Yet somehow I intuited that their demise was a dire warning, like canaries in a coalmine.

But it was worse than that: it was not a warning but a collapse already underway. Today we know that perhaps eighty percent of the world’s insect biomass has vanished in just the past three decades. The ticking signboard I saw at the museum, and the research results of scientists I’d learn about decades later, confirmed to me that the silent decline of the natural world was not merely my imagination.

What Are We Made Of?

A brilliant, accessible talk on Quantum Fields by David Tong. It reminds us how bizarre, mysterious, and awe-inspiring our universe really is! 

In the same lecture series are Philip Ball on Quantum Mechanics, Andrew Pontzen on Dark Matter (Q&A), and Harry Cliff on the Higgs Boson.

Happy New Year!

Forest Man of the Northeast

Forest Man, an inspirational short documentary film (19 mins): "Since 1979, Jadav Payeng has been planting hundreds of trees on an Indian island threatened by erosion. In this film, photographer Jitu Kalita traverses Payeng’s home—the largest river island in the world [on the Brahmaputra river]—and reveals the touching story of how this modern-day Johnny Appleseed turned an eroding desert into a wondrous oasis. Funded in part by Kickstarter, "Forest Man" was directed by William Douglas McMaster and won Best Documentary for the American Pavilion Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014."

Also consider watching this insightful video on how to grow a forest in your urban backyard—a TED Talk by Shubhendu Sharma.

Genetics and the Aryan Migration Debate

“The thorniest, most fought-over question in Indian history is slowly but surely getting answered: did Indo-European language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, stream into India sometime around 2,000 BC - 1,500 BC when the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end, bringing with them Sanskrit and a distinctive set of cultural practices? Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA evidence is making scientists around the world converge on an unambiguous answer: yes, they did.” (—Tony Joseph in The Hindu; more here.)

Even before these genetic studies of recent years, it has long been clear which way the scholarly evidence has overwhelmingly leaned, though the evidence had gaps that the “out-of-India” folks exploited to advance their rival theory. These new findings from genetics, if correct, imply that Vedic Sanskrit, the Holy Vedas and various cultural practices of these migrants (especially the varna system) are not Subcontinental in origin (at least their precursors are not). They came via migration, as did Islam, the Qur’an, and the Persian language. In other words, the religious beliefs of all contemporary Indians—Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and others—have descended from what migrants brought in (and subsequent accretions, fusions, innovations, conversions, appropriations); nor is India the mother of all Indo-European languages.

This ain’t going to make the “out-of-India” theorists too happy. They’re largely a brigade of proud Hindu “scholars” obsessed with the idea that there was no Aryan migration into South Asia, allowing them to claim South Asia as the indigenous homeland / birthplace of Hinduism’s earliest scriptures and their language (Sanskrit, but also its earliest ancestor, proto-Indo European)—and so also of Hinduism (of Brahminism, more accurately, but that’s a separate discussion), which evolved out of them. They also claimed that the language of the Indus Valley Civilization was a proto-Sanskrit, though its “linguistic script” remains undeciphered (it’s not even clear that the inscriptions represent a linguistic script)! Trolls have plastered such claims on countless Internet forums, but they’ve been mostly led by nationalistic windbaggery (aka Hindutva), wishful thinking, and gaps in rival theories—not on solid evidence from linguistics, philology, archaeology or anything else.

One of the best and most widely respected books on this topic is Edwin Bryant’s The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (2004). As I wrote on 3QD years ago, Bryant not only has a sophisticated sense of history, his synthesis and exposition of a vast range of topics—such as 19th-century historiography in Europe and India, Vedic philology, Avestan studies, historical Indo-European linguistics, South Asian and Central Asian linguistics and archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, postcolonial studies, Hindu nationalism, etc.—is a real achievement. He even evaluates the central claim of Hindu chauvinists—that India is the homeland of Indo-European languages—without condescension and based on evidence. And one of his key conclusions is that though gaps exist in the current migration theories, “there has been almost no convincing evidence brought forward in support of a homeland this far east”.

What inspires these Hindutva “scholars”? This excellent article explains what’s at stake in this debate. Or as Meghnad Desai wrote, “To say that the Aryans are foreigners would make Hinduism a foreign religion [just like Islam]. The aborigines – tribals – would then be the only true natives, as some Dalit scholars have argued. That is why Hindu nationalists deny foreign origin of the Aryans. The Aryans [and Sanskrit] have to be primordially native to suit the Hindu nationalist narrative.” But if the Vedas, product of a nomadic-pastoralist world, and its language turn out to be of “foreign” origin (if not Vedic Sanskrit then certainly its predecessor), that deals a body blow to the Hindutva intellectual project, since their indigenous origins are central to the Hindutvadis’ claim of a Hindu nation. In their view, Hinduism is native, Islam is foreign. But if the foundation of Hinduism too turns out to be of foreign origin … man, oh man!! It’s going to be fun to watch Hindutva “scholars” react to these new studies. I’m gonna get me some popcorn!

The Reality of Artificial Intelligence

A great deal of fear, excitement, and hype has lately grown around Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is partly because advances in machine learning keep surprising—and even overtaking—us in a growing number of domains, such as disease diagnosis, driving, language translation, and complex forecasting. To add fuel to fire, AI enthusiasts keep making dramatic claims about the imminence of Singularity, human-level AI, super intelligence, and the threat of machines taking over the world and even enslaving us! How warranted are these claims? We owe it to ourselves to better understand both the current state, the potential, and the limitations of AI, to separate hype from reality, and to reflect on the problem of AI philosophically—so we can focus on the actual challenges we’re likely to face as AI becomes more common.

AI can certainly improve human lives on many fronts, but this promise coexists with the fear that AI will cause havoc in labor markets by not just appropriating more blue collar work, as industrial automation has been doing for decades, but even a lot of skilled white collar work. This disruption—which will further concentrate wealth and create jobless hordes and cause new social upheavals in nation-states—will likely occur and needs to be taken seriously. What makes AI-led disruption different than earlier waves of technological disruption is that earlier the loss of manufacturing jobs was met by the rise of services sector jobs, but this time the latter too are at risk, with no evident replacement in sight. This is a recipe for jobless growth, with GDP and unemployment rising together—a grave problem that may well require disruptive solutions. 

As for the more dramatic claims about AI, my view, which I articulated in The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence (2009), remains that even if we develop ‘intelligent’ machines (much depends here on what we deem ‘intelligent’), odds are near-zero that machines will come to rival human-level general intelligence if their creation bypasses the particular embodied experience of humans forged by eons of evolution. By human-level intelligence (or strong AI, versus weak or domain-specific AI), I mean intelligence that’s analogous to ours: rivaling our social and emotional intelligence; mirroring our instincts, intuitions, insights, tastes, aversions, adaptability; similar to how we make sense of brand new contexts and use our creativity, imagination, and judgment to breathe meaning and significance into novel ideas and concepts; to approach being and time like we do, informed by our fear, desire, delight, sense of aging and death; and so on. Incorporating all of this in a machine will not happen by combining computing power with algorithmic wizardry. Unless machines can experience and relate to the world like we do—which no one has a clue how—machines can’t make decisions like we do. Unless machines can suffer like us, they will not think like us. (Another way to say this is that reductionism has limits, esp. for highly complex systems like the biosphere and human mind/culture, when the laws of nature run out of descriptive and predictive steam—not because our science is inadequate but due to irreducible and unpredictable emergent properties inherent in complex systems.)

Harari on Nationalism vs. Globalism

Here is a breezy conversation that abounds with big picture thinking. If you enjoy this, listen to a talk by Harari, The Future of Humanity, and read this interview where he describes what he gets out of Vipassana meditation, this article on the rise of Donald Trump, and this Q&A.

Skepticism as an Equal Opportunity Sport

Knowledge never progresses unencumbered by ordinary human politics. Clubbiness, careerism, prejudice, personality clashes, bigotry, corruption, charm, and other human factors affect the advancement and dissemination of all knowledge, even in the hallowed academies of the West. While the scientific disciplines may have the best inbuilt methodologies for self-correction, still their practice isn’t immune to these impairments of judgment and objectivity.

In his recent Guardian article, The Sugar Conspiracy, Ian Leslie reminds us of how important individual personalities or even the fashionability of ideas can dominate, pervert, or slow the progress of entire fields of science. He writes,

In a 2015 paper titled Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?, a team of scholars at the National Bureau of Economic Research sought an empirical basis for a remark made by the physicist Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

The researchers identified more than 12,000 “elite” scientists from different fields. The criteria for elite status included funding, number of publications, and whether they were members of the National Academies of Science or the Institute of Medicine. Searching obituaries, the team found 452 who had died before retirement. They then looked to see what happened to the fields from which these celebrated scientists had unexpectedly departed, by analysing publishing patterns.

What they found confirmed the truth of Planck’s maxim. Junior researchers who had worked closely with the elite scientists, authoring papers with them, published less. At the same time, there was a marked increase in papers by newcomers to the field, who were less likely to cite the work of the deceased eminence. The articles by these newcomers were substantive and influential, attracting a high number of citations. They moved the whole field along.

In this context, Leslie goes on to narrate the story of how, for decades, American nutritional science chased doggedly down a rabbit hole of false conclusions about the probable causes of heart disease, under the influence of decidedly non-scientific factors. A prevailing theory became fashionable, and contradictory data was shouted down; those presenting it were professionally attacked. The shaming and silencing alternative lines of questioning surely contributed to the ongoing public health crisis we now face, in which at least two generations of people are suffering epidemic frequencies of obesity and diabetes. Leslie lays it out,

The Genomic Ancient DNA Revolution

Population genetics is an emerging field that’s shedding new light on ancient human migrations. It complements linguistics and archaeology, which have until now been the primary avenues for understanding prehistory. David Reich, a leading geneticist and a Harvard professor, has taken special interest in the much contested issue of the original homeland of Indo-European (IE) languages and the mixing of populations in India. Watch a video conversation with him on the edge.org page below (also transcribed).

Nothing Reich says will comfort the “out-of-India” theorists, largely a Hindutva brigade of “scholars” who claim that there was no Aryan migration into India; that instead a migration happened from India to Europe; that IE languages originated in the Indian Subcontinent from a proto-Sanskrit; that the people of the Indus Valley Civilization spoke this proto-Sanskrit (never mind that their script remains undeciphered; there’s no consensus on whether it is even a linguistic script); that the Vedas are wholly indigenous in inspiration, etc. It’s amazing how many people on the Internet confidently assert that the Aryan migration theory has been “discredited”.

Of course much of this was/is nationalistic windbaggery, based on wishful thinking and gaps in rival theories, not on any solid evidence from linguistics or archaeology. Population genetics is now producing a clearer picture once and for all. But we’re not there yet, even though Reich’s work has bolstered the Kurgan hypothesis, which puts the IE homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Watch this field for more definitive revelations in the years ahead.

The Road to Fixing Air Pollution in Delhi

I have a piece in The Wire today: The Road to Fixing Air Pollution in Delhi, Beyond Odd-even. Among other things, this attempts to distill the research and learning from my recent months at the Delhi Dialogue Commission, an advisory body to the Government of NCT of Delhi. Also an announcement on the right for my talk this weekend that's open to all.

An unprecedented public health crisis has been unfolding in Delhi: 40% of our kids now fail lung capacity tests. Respiratory emergencies have tripled in the last seven years, with no relief in sight. Just breathing our air, full of toxic gases and particulates, has raised the incidence of strokes, heart disease, cancers, birth defects, pneumonia, and more. In Delhi alone, an estimated 80 people are dying daily from conditions provoked by air pollution. Much like smoking cigarettes, it’s shaving years off our lives.

Though some fare worse than others, none are immune: rich or poor, young or old. A high burden of disease erodes quality of life, family finances, and the economy. What will be the cost of this health crisis, in human lives, in healthcare, in lost productivity?

It’s a good thing the AAP government plans to build a thousand Mohalla clinics, because what’s unfolding is far bigger than last year’s dengue scare in Delhi. Though experts have long known these health effects of air pollution, years of apathy, ignorance, and denial—among both citizens and politicians—have led us here. So how serious are the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments about fixing this menace? How well do they understand the gravity of the situation?

More here.

A Plea for Culinary Modernism

A Plea for Culinary Modernism is a though-provoking essay on modern food and our attitudes towards it by Rachael Laudan, food historian and philosopher of science and technology. "The obsession with eating natural and artisanal," she argues, "is ahistorical. We should demand more high-quality industrial food." She is also the author of "Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History", now on my reading list.

As an historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by Culinary Luddism, a past sharply divided between good and bad, between the sunny rural days of yore and the gray industrial present. My enthusiasm for Luddite kitchen wisdom does not carry over to their history, any more than my response to a stirring political speech inclines me to accept the orator as scholar.

The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front. That food should be fresh and natural has become an article of faith. It comes as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad.

More here.

Under the Dome

"Under the Dome" is a brilliant documentary on air pollution in China that has been seen by millions. Scary as hell. India is catching up fast and would do well to avoid some of China's mistakes. Not likely though. Things are going to get much worse in India before people wake up.

The Quantum Indians

A film on the life and work of three Indian scientists: Satyendra Nath Bose, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, and Meghnad Saha, "the significance of whose contributions are of vital importance even today in quantum physics, fibre optics, nuclear science or astrophysics." The film's biographical sketches are celebratory and tinged with patriotic pride, but it still furnishes an engaging overview of their life and work.

Mysteries of the Unseen World

"We live in a world of unseeable beauty, so subtle and delicate that it is imperceptible to the human eye. To bring this invisible world to light, filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg bends the boundaries of time and space with high-speed cameras, time lapses and microscopes. At TED2014, he shares highlights from his latest project, a 3D film titled Mysteries of the Unseen World, which slows down, speeds up, and magnifies the astonishing wonders of nature." Must see.

Sugar: The Intimate Enemy

This brilliant talk by Dr. Robert Lustig persuasively argues that sugar, based on how our bodies metabolize it in the liver, is no less a poison than alcohol. He explains how our bodies process different carbohydrates like glucose, sucrose (table sugar), and fructose, and why sugar in the latter two forms is the primary cause of obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and more. He also debunks many common myths of health and nutrition by showing that a calorie is not a calorie (its source is important), why exercising is not about burning calories but improving metabolism, why fat is nowhere near as bad as sugar, etc. Also read this review of the related new documentary, Fed Up.

More From the Annals of Animal Intelligence

.... [Head keeper Jerry] Stones finally managed to catch Fu Manchu in the act. First, the young ape climbed down some air-vent louvers into a dry moat. Then, taking hold of the bottom of the furnace door, he used brute force to pull it back just far enough to slide a wire into the gap, slip a latch and pop the door open. The next day, Stones noticed something shiny sticking out of Fu's mouth. It was the wire lock pick, bent to fit between his lip and gum and stowed there between escapes.

Apparently, Orangutans are the escape artists of the animal world. This particular incident happened back in 1968, but scientists at the time weren't paying attention, as they were busy with their apes struggling with language and performing tasks in their labs.

However, Eugene Lynden, author of several books on animal intelligence, found it more than interesting. Lynden's 1999 article on animal intelligence is remarkable for the way that it's astutely anecdotal. Lynden had realized what "now seems obvious: if animals can think, they will probably do their best thinking when it serves their purposes, not when some scientist asks them to", and he then began to speak to a broad range of people who work intimately with animals: zookeepers, veterinarians, trainers, and yes, researchers. He says,

Get a bunch of keepers together and they will start telling stories about how their charges try to outsmart, beguile or otherwise astonish humans. They tell stories about animals that hoodwink or manipulate their keepers, stories about wheeling and dealing, stories of understanding and trust across the vast gulf that separates different species. And, if the keepers have had a few drinks, they will tell stories about escape.

Each of these narratives reveals another facet of what I have become convinced is a new window on animal intelligence: the kind of mental feats they perform when dealing with captivity and the dominant species on the planet--humanity.

Though it's an old article, it's only recently available online. It remains worth reading for the astonishing and amusing stories of animal wit—and lack, thereof. Among other things, what becomes clear is how complex, non-linear, and multifaced is anything we might call intelligence. Certainly animals have it, but with lacunae in areas one might not expect.

A New Green Revolution?

The Green Revolution of the 60s and 70s is best associated with higher yields through new innovations in agricultural science and technology. To attain its impressive results however, the new farming practices used synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides which ravaged the soil, damaged ecosystems, polluted groundwater, encouraged crop monocultures, and raised the incidence of certain diseases. The resulting land degradation fueled the search for new land and deforestation. In other words, modern intensive farming practices are not sustainable, and various experiments worldwide have tried to make them sustainable while increasing yields at lower cost — the agricultural holy grail.

Here is a promising Al-Jazeera story about "two million farmers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh [who] have ditched chemical pesticides in favour of natural repellants and fertilisers, as part of a growing eco-agriculture movement [that] has improved soil health and biodiversity, reduced costs and upped yields." Could this catch on more widely?