Leave our gas alone!

Imagine you have a water well in your backyard. It's a modest sized well and provides enough to meet your basic needs. The trouble is - your needs continue to grow, and your own well cannot satisfy your demand. So you reach out to neighbors, many of whom have far bigger wells, or at least have a lower demand for the same sized well. You convince them (and yourself) that those wells are best utilized to serve you, and talk about all the water from those wells being part of a single "pool".

Now imagine one day when you discover that your well suddenly has a lot more water than you had originally - and you are actually supplied beyond your needs! Once you are over the initial surprise, and excitement, you contact your neighbors to tell them the good news - and promptly inform them that you intend to keep this water for yourself, because it is too precious to put into the pool or give to others who might now need more of it.

Such is the irony that the shale gas boom has created in the US - and if it does end up with restrictions on the ability to export the surplus to level out the price in the marketplace, will severely dent the US' ability to dictate terms to energy and resource suppliers in the future. Of course, one could argue that such hypocrisy is perhaps well known, and in any case, the matter is far from resolved.

But the fact that such a restriction was even considered highlights the deep fear in the US of the dependence on "foreign oil", a phrase that has become as common as "monday morning quarterbacking" in the American lexicon. Energy security is desirable, but it does not come from closing down the borders - the same way that political security cannot be achieved (in the long run) by restricting free speech or emigration. 

Reverse engineering

For some years now, the US and other western countries have been marching down the path of encouraging the development of technical resources (the "STEM" - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - curriculum) as a way to retain the dominance of their societies in the face of increasing numbers of trained people from China and India entering the global marketplace. With the loss of manufacturing jobs, and influence of Wall Street in the American psyche, many youngsters today prefer to take up careers in business or law, rather than hardcore technical sectors. As a result, Silicon Valley, Detroit and the energy companies tend to do a lot of recruiting from international arenas - either from the pool of immigrants studying at US universities, or directly from colleges and schools abroad. The prospect of a six figure starting salary, in dollars, is now very realistic for a youngster in Shanghai or Chennai.

The rigorous curriculum in these countries is also something that the US is trying hard to emulate. Studies point to the long hours spent by students in the Asian tiger economies, and their eventual success, as an indicator of what an American kid should be aiming for. The documentary "2 million minutes" tracks the lives of 4 students in different countries, showing how different (and perhaps easy) the US high school life is compared to someone who is slogging 8 hrs a day for two years to compete with a hundred other candidates for a seat at a good university.

So it might come as a bit of a surprise to read that Chinese parents are paying upwards of $ 50,000 a year to get their children into elite preparatory schools in the US as a stepping stone to a US university education! Some of the students commented that they wanted to experience the US education over the rote learning and hardship of the classrooms back home. As their societies develop and more service sectors open up, young Indians and Chinese are likely to realize that one can have a good life without being restricted to the few career choices. After all, there are enough and more engineers to go around even if half the students opt for another choice! Perhaps the US needs to do this in reverse - send its technically inclined students to go through the meat grinder of an Indian education and have them come out committed to being an engineer for life.

London 150

In today's rapidly changing world, where a product is rendered obsolete five minutes after it's bought, the relative permanence of some things is worth appreciating. This past week, the world famous London underground, the world's first subway/metro system, an institution that has grown with the city and made it one of the top destinations in the world for tourists and its residents, celebrated 150 years of existence. From its humble beginnings as a single line running a few miles, with steam locomotives belching smoke and perhaps causing several premature deaths for its original set of passengers, the network has literally created the greater London metropolitan area by providing people an option to live beyond the city center but still have access to it. It is also, by default, the mother of all other transit systems, the benchmark not just for design but also style (the iconic tube map is perhaps one of the most recognized images in the world, quite remarkable given that it does not feature a face or logo for a company).

The longevity of the tube has not come for free, of course - millions of pounds are invested every year to keep it running smoothly, and fares continue to rise, much to the anger of commuters. But it would be a brave person who advocated doing away with the system, or at least questioning whether it met a benefit to cost hurdle, which every public (and private) investment needs to do in today's cash strapped world, where there is money to throw away on nonsensical products, but not on projects for social good.  What is even more remarkable is the foresight of the individuals, who saw a future where the city degenerated without a properly designed transport system, and drove through the implementation in the face of what was likely widespread criticism.

It is somewhat fortuitous that the system, and those of most European cities thereafter, arose at a time when the modern auto industry did not exist, or was in its infancy. The outcome might well have been different if you considered 1963 instead of 1863 - the solution might have been to build wide highways with thousands of cars instead of narrow tunnels with hundreds of people jammed into a long metal tube. Most US cities that did have trains or trams found those quickly ripped up and replaced by roads - a conspiracy of the auto companies that does little to support the assertion of providing a level playing field to competition.

The developing world, unfortunately, will not enjoy the benefits of this foresight - systems being installed in India are coming at a time when population has crossed the 10 million mark in cities like Delhi and Mumbai, and well over 5 million in some others. Using (or avoiding) mass transit is as much a statement of class as it is of cost and convenience - the dream of car ownership trumps the desire to stand alongside fellow travellers, no matter that the choked roads are no match for the empty tracks. In London, in contrast, the tube is used by all classes of society, from the football hooligan to the banker, the NHS nurse to the thousands of immigrants who flood the city every year in search of a better life. Perhaps the fact that the tubes, in addition to providing a path for trains, also gave safe haven to Londoners from falling Nazi bombs, where both rich and poor alike perished, has resulted in it being regarded as an essential service. And with that comes the will to support it in the coming 150 years.

The effluent society

On a recent visit to India, I ended up on a 7 hr train journey from Chennai to Mysore. The minute the train left the platform, I was at my customary spot by the doorway, gazing out on the passing landscape, with the warm breeze of the early morning blowing through my hair. The tightly packed houses and traffic of the city gave way to the somewhat quieter suburbs and then open fields with palm trees lined up as far as the eye could see. People going about their business, the farmer getting his bullocks or tractor ready for some ploughing, cyclists meandering down dirt roads and children at play, turning towards the tracks as the train passed by, yelling and waving with a big smile on each face.

The one thing that didn't change during the entire journey, however, was the vast amount of detritus along the tracks. Paper cups, newspapers, food waste, little supari packets - everything that could be found in a shopping mall was strewn across the ballast, the whites and colors contrasting starkly with the dull grey. I might be accused of misguided nostalgia if I were to say that back when I was growing up, things were not so bad - but to some extent, we must recognize that with India becoming a more affluent society, the corresponding waste generation that goes hand in hand with development simply cannot be ignored. I recall an article some years ago in a magazine that compared the trash from a city dwelling family, which was tends of kilograms a week, to one that lived in a village, which was an order of magnitude lower. I would bet that since then, both numbers have gone up, perhaps disproportionately in favor of the village dweller, who now has access to more "stuff".

Even the often cited Indian tendency to reuse materials because of a scarcity of resources is coming under attack - the ease with which things can be thrown away makes it that much more difficult to make a case to recycle or conserve. The same problem hit the west after the second world war, a time when most families were being encouraged to be thrifty and not squander any precious raw materials. Old tin cans were being recycled by the millions so that the military could have enough to win the war. In a time of peace, the threat of environmental pollution and general wastage is clearly not a strong driving force.

The problem in India is made worse by the fact that proper waste disposal rarely exists, but even so when it does, people are somehow unwilling to use it. The millennia old taboo against waste handling is yet to disappear, and people would much rather not have to deal with the problem than confront it head on. Unlike the US, we don't have the benefit of vast tracts of empty land that can be used to landfill these materials - even if we did, that should not be an excuse to fill them up!

So back to the challenge of the trash along the railway line - I'm sure the people who live in the towns and villages are less than pleased with the donations made by passengers who are passing by. If you're willing to take in the view, then spoiling it should be the last thing in your mind.

Science vs Supersitition

The movie "Tenchi - The Samurai Astronomer" is a wonderful story of Japan's equivalent to Galileo and Copernicus - a young man whose fascination with mathematics, and eventually astronomy, leads him to a decades long struggle to reform the Japanese calendar. Along the way, he faces rejection at every step by the Imperial court, who view any interference with the calendar as a challenge to their divine right, as ordinary men are not expected to be able to understand the complex workings of the heavens. He also wins the heart of a woman who ends up working alongside him on his experiments, standing in heat and rain and snow to make observations of the stars and help him predict, amongst other things, when the next solar eclipse is likely to take place. In the end, he is able to convince the deepest of skeptics and the Japanese calendar is finally modified.

There are a few key learnings from the movie that are worth discussing. The first is the realization of how difficult the scientific method really is. All that we take for granted today is the result of the hard work, and occasional genius, of people who had a gift for observation and rational analysis, and used it to improve our understanding of the world around us. Take Archimedes, who first observed the relationship between weight and volume displacement - every school kid knows the famous story of how he jumped out of his bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse when he realized the enormity of what he had discovered. The contribution from other ancient Greeks like Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristarchus and Democritus cannot be valued (the fact that Greece today is in such dire straits is truly heartbreaking when you look at the contribution from their civilization to all of mankind). And let's not leave out other civilizations like the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, all of whom have in some small way built up the disciplines of mathematics, natural sciences and astronomy. In all cases, the methods have been painstaking - tools have had to be developed from scratch where none existed previously, theories have been invented to explain the unexplainable - and there have been constant challenges to frustrate even the most dedicated scholar.

The second learning is that the establishment (in most cases, monarchs with absolute, or divine, power, and their associated lackeys) have typically been reluctant to accept the findings from scientists when it clashes with their "view" of the world. The persecution of Copernicus and later Galileo by the Catholic Church is known to everyone - in fact, the Church did not officially accept that the earth moved around the sun till sometime in the 20th century! Evolution is still up for debate - perhaps it will be a few more centuries before they finally come around.

Of all the fields of learning, astronomy has typically being the most contentious, because it deals with objects and concepts that are "not of this world" - but of the heavens. The movement of the sun and moon, phenomena such as eclipses and shooting stars and supernova, were all used by organized religion and the ruling class as a way to demonstrate their superiority over the masses, who were told that these were omens and signs from God or some supreme being. No religion has been immune from this blindness - an entirely priestly class evolved to be able to interpret these "signs", and elaborate rituals were constructed to propagate various myths. Which is why the thought that the occurence of an eclipse is simply the result of a few simple laws of motion and the alignment of the sun and moon, which can be understood by everyone, was so dangerous an idea.

I mentioned earlier that Tenchi had a passion for mathematics and then got involved in astronomy - in fact, most of the scientists from antiquity were skilled in a diversity of areas including philosophy, poetry, mathematics, medicine and so on. It is only in recent times that the concept of specialization in one single field has become the norm, this would be quite alien to the likes of Newton, Descartes or Faraday, let alone their predecessors from two millennia ago. This cross-discipline knowledge is, however, critical for dealing with problems, as at the base level, all the sciences are fundamentally linked.

Moving forward to the 21st century, the debate over climate change is the modern equivalent of the challenge that Tenchi and others have faced in the past. On the one hand is the established order that posits there is nothing to worry about, while another group has continuously raised the alarm about the potential havoc that might be wreaked on the planet if fossil fuel use is allowed to continue unchecked. The "climategate" emails from a few years ago is balanced by the near total loss of ice cover in the Arctic. And while the methods available to us are infinitely more sophisticated than those that Tenchi used, the deep entrenchment of the establishment is that much more formidable.

The tongue that unites - and divides

I recently watched Sridevi's comeback movie "English Vinglish", which has received a number of favorable reviews. My initial reaction (as usual) was negative, as I was more focused on her nose job and botox that made me feel she was impersonating the actress who was THE box office attraction in the mid 1980s - but once I got past that, the movie itself was quite well done. The story was quite unconventional, focusing on the female lead who is a mother, rather than the usual boy-girl-love formula. Central to the theme is the fact that the mother is not comfortable speaking English as compared with her husband and children, who are somewhat cruel in their mockey of her pronunciation - the children particularly seem embarrassed by their mother's linguistic limitations and want to avoid any interaction between her and the (more sophisticated i.e English speaking) parents of their friends. The one time that she does accompany the daughter for a PTA meeting ends up with the teacher speaking in broken Hindi to be understood by Sridevi, and the daughter wanting to just melt into the floor. Sridevi herself seems to resign herself to her fate, even though it is quite obvious that she is hurt by all the comments from her family. The fact that she is running a fairly successful home catering business, supplying sweets to weddings and other functions, earns her no credit - in fact, her husband (a fairly typical Indian male) uses that fact to typecast her as "being born to make laddoos" and not a whole lot more!

A massive change in her life comes about when she has to fly to the US to help with the wedding of her niece (sister's daughter) - rather than the entire family travelling together, she is sent about 5 weeks ahead of time to help with the advance preparations. While initially hesitant about travelling alone, she finally agrees and lands in New York after a long flight where a suave Amitabh Bachchan (in a guest role) recognizes her plight and gives her some reassurance and advice about enjoying herself. The conversation with the immigration officer is a bit of a disaster despite all her preparation on how to answer the standard questions - what is the purpose of your visit? where will you be staying? for how long?

The first few days in the US are spent at home catching up with her sister and getting over jetlag - then she's prepared to hit Manhattan along with her niece. The youngster tells her wait for her in a coffee shop - and that's where it all falls apart. She is completely clueless in the line, makes a mess of the order, the cashier gets increasingly aggravated and she runs out of the place without her order, dropping someone else's fries in the process. Just at that point, she sees an advertisement for English language classes that changes the direction of the movie - she signs up for lessons, and for the next four weeks painstakingly learns the finer points of the English language to the extent that she is able to give a toast at her niece's wedding, much to the amazement of her family. Along the way, she also rediscovers her Indianness, thanks to a particularly suave Frenchman in her class who woos her without realizing that she is married - she, being the "good Indian wife" resists knowing that she should remain true to her husband, even though he is quite the boor and feels her place is in the kitchen and nowhere else (that's the second theme in this movie, which can occupy an entirely different blog post of its own!)

Whether or not one can actually learn English in 4 weeks is another point altogether - what the movie does highlight is the manner in which English has, for almost two centuries now, been the language that has both united and divided India - and Indians. Much like Europe, where each country has its own language, and English has become the default medium of communication, Indians rejected one of their home grown tongues (Hindi) as a medium of communcation and instead chose to adopt the language of their rulers as their lingua franca. This was not unlike the practice in colonies held by the French and Spanish, with the main difference being that the indigenous languages in most of those countries were totally wiped out in the process (the Native Americans of the US are facing the same problem today, with fewer and fewer speakers of ancient tongues dying out).

With the large population of India, and the diversity of languages already present, English was never going to be adopted en masse, and indeed was never intended to. Lord Macaulay, who (in)famously commented about the penury of Indian literature in comparison to his mother country, specifically wanted to create a class of Indians who were close enough to the British that they could be used as an intermediary to control the vast population. This small group of individuals would, by virtue of speaking the same language as the Brits, be more likely to see themselves as a class apart from their fellow Indians. And succeed that plan did - to this day, speakers of English will always have an advantage in terms of job prospects and career advancements, which explains why even the poorest of poor people will stress that they want their children or grandchildren to get an English education. In the process, the native tongues are somehow accorded second class status, to be kept behind closed doors. Nowhere is this observed more than when two Indians meet abroad - even though they might speak the same Indian language, they will tend to defer to English, as though speaking in the mother tongue demonstrates some kind of backwardness with which they don't want to be associated.

This is quite different from European countries, where two Frenchmen or Germans or Italians would never dream of conversing in English - even if they are in mixed company! In fact, they make it a point of speaking in their native language, as though they regard English as a necessary evil (this is certainly true for the French, who would point out that their language is dominant in over 60 countries, whereas, strictly speaking, English is #1 in only about 5 countries - the UK, US, Australia, NZ and Canada - everyone else is part of the vast "ESL" community!) And it's not as though they are any less competitive in the global marketplace - which is one of the main reasons why Indians clamour so much for English - getting BPO jobs is the stepping stone to a world of plenty.

In the process, though, we lose a small bit of our culture and history. A poem by Wordsworth might be beautiful, but no less beautiful is a sher by Ghalib or doha by Kabir. The Japanese poetry haiku in fact is so popular that there are English haiku competitions - a wonderful case of vernacular form making it across the language divide. If the Sridevi's of the world are to keep their head high and be proud of speaking in their native language, we first need to appreciate and respect it and not send it to the back of the class.