Two Reetigowla Numbers

I played a bit of Reetigowla and recorded two numbers, two of my favourites in Tamil film music. They’re in the sidebar. Check them out and comment!

If you want to access them outside of the sidebar, here are the links:

Rama Kadhai Kelungal (from an old Tamil movie starring Kamal Haasan)

Chinna Kannan Azhaikkiran (from another 1980s Tamil movie)

I haven’t been very active on the blog as I use websites like Twitter and Facebook a little bit more these days and use more social media than generate. However, once I am freed up on a few fronts, I’ll probably get back to blogging more often.

Strife: A Dialogue

What makes great friends and sworn enemies? How useful is an island of peace in which we can while away our sometimes senseless and pointless existences because we have a place called home, for love and friendship? Very useful, you think. In fact, you probably think it is the only thing every person in a God-less world needs.

“You are reminded of how human everyone else is despite the plethora of things in their control – their jobs, their personal lives, their freedoms – all of which they seem to control at some level. And yet, it hurts when that person who became a sworn enemy you wished to outwit has now gone far ahead of you in ways, and is yet at odds with what you represent. You’re not a loser – you just haven’t been fortunate enough or won the same things. You’ve won different things. You’re working things out, hoping things will work and hoping to either never confront this person again, or to never have to compete with him again. But today’s realities may change, and you may get back in touch inadvertently, you may make that big mistake, in a weak moment, of having to speak to that person again. And I say to myself – don’t. Don’t give that person a chance, if such a conundrum manifests. Don’t let the thought that you’re inadequate face you, and defend yourself, and believe that you can kill this beast. It merely takes more perseverance on your path. It takes discipline – this enemy you want to kill is within – and it is not the hate for disgusting existences such as this person, because you know that the principles can never be reconciled – yours and his, and that therefore, you will forever remain enemies. This is how things are and will be. Your principles cannot coexist in the same space. Goliaths are seldom only in one’s head – they have real and tangible manifestations. Be a Minotaur while you can, build your defences, work with the chicanery that you can muster with all the goodwill you have.

You resume association with a friend, who in conceit you considered to be lesser than you or one of your deeds, who in your foolishness you considered trite, who in your wisdom you considered indispensable. Your fallible character has led you back to him, who welcomes you with open arms and who considers you no less a friend than you seemed, despite your past malice.

Do you deserve what you got for your past behaviour? You know that thinking such things can become a folly, a mere blandishment of one’s own belief in a form of ill-defined causation – a causation that few understand and even fewer practice. It is when such self-effacing thoughts cross one’s mind that one is confronted with the task of rising above them – because even then, one’s mind is considering the possibilities that you’re dying, that you’re losing, that your moral fibre is being drained from you and that your principles and promises to yourself are being washed away, because the animus you based so much of your life on is weakened by the alacrity with which your friends find him good.”

“Where will my solace come from? Does a God not exist? Will I forever remain defeated by this man, who unfairly took what was mine? Do these objects of worship and these words of philosophy bring nothing more than momentary hope? Will my struggles disappear, will I not be redeemed my fair share of success? Or is fate merely a game that my adversary understood better than me? Friends, do you welcome me and be steadfast? I wish to not see my enemy again, I wish to be only with friends. I wish to fight the battles insde myself – is there no respite for me?”

Thoughts on India’s Nuclear Deterrent

Cartoon courtesy The Hindu

Of course, the cartoon above is somewhat fallacious in a scientific context, but has significance in the political context and exposes how organizations like the DRDO, scientific leaders and erstwhile governments have been in cahoots over India’s nuclear capability and how we project ourselves as a nuclear state. I have been following the recent controversy on India’s 1998 nuclear tests and the question of our nuclear deterrence with great interest. Not only does nuclear “game theory” – and this probably shouldn’t be in quotes – make for interesting coffee table discussions (assuming, of course, that we are at peace with our neighbours and not at war), but it also makes for questions of degree of destruction rather than the type of destruction to come up. When nuclear weapons are discussed, they are generally considered weapons of mass destruction. The reasoning applied here is that since nuclear weapons are capable of wiping our entire cities, they can win a possible war quite decisively. Until recently, I was of the opinion that the deterrent which we use to justify diplomacy and strategy with neighbours like Pakistan is based on a viable nuclear deterrent which can cause annihilation of entire cities if need be. Of course, I intend to discuss this from the perspectives of the governments using such nuclear weapons, because common people on both sides of a potential nuclear conflict don’t want to face the consequences of decisions taken by their nuclear-armed leaders or rival leaders.

With the new nuclear powers – the ones that don’t have hundreds of nuclear weapons – like India, China, France, Britain, Germany and Pakistan (and possibly Israel, South Africa, North Korea and Iran), it is reasonable to consider that the nuclear equations are written in terms of the delivery mechanism of the weapons as well as in terms of the systems that control launch schedules. In recent years, the development of a missile defence shield has become a primary focus. Only four countries are known to have the technology currently, the USA, Russia, Israel and India.  In the seconds or minutes leading to a cataclysmic attack on large populations, it is these delivery mechanisms (missles) and response systems that determine how good one’s deterrent is. This isn’t India’s problem at the moment, despite the fact that the Agni-III missile isn’t quite ready for deployment. India’s problem seems to be the lack of confidence we have in the yield of the weapons themselves. And naturally, this can be a source of grave concern. Not only will a damp squib nuclear device turn things in our enemies’ favour when it comes to actual exchange of bombs and missiles across the border, but the very idea that we have a deterrent becomes a false hope that we rest our strategy upon, and when it comes time to take the difficult decisions and defend our country (by attacking our enemy, if that is the only option left), becomes a contentious issue. Leaders cannot make decisions about everyday things that need their attention – be they border incursions, weapons buildup, political rhetoric or regime change. If India’s nuclear deterrent isn’t as good as it is touted, we are in deep trouble already – because much of our strategy and some of our diplomacy is dependent on the existence of this deterrent.

India’s nuclear deterrent is good enough for 200 kilotons (200 kt, equivalent to a few thousand tons of TNT). The effect of a 200 kiloton device is about 10 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. A sizeably large crater will exist after the explosion, a mushroom cloud that would blank out the sun for days, with the damage to life and property being a statistic, rather than something that can be clearly fathomed or something that can be imagined. To give you an idea of how complete the destruction from a Hiroshima-style nuclear device is, here are two images of Hiroshima itself, before and after the nuclear attack by the US in 1945:

Hiroshima Before the Blast

Hiroshima after the blast

Given that only the most basic features of the landscape are visible, albeit bathed in deadly radiation, a 20 kt like the sort used in Hiroshima is not exactly a lightweight. It is justifiable to expect much more from a 200 kt device, and even more from a multi-megaton class device such as the Tsar Bomba.

And yet, given the extent of destruction that 200kt nuclear weapons can cause, they can only cause so much damage. Given that decision making in a nuclear war scenario is often left to the commander in chief of the armed forces, or the President, it is crucial that the destruction a device is capable of is not half-hearted or feeble, because the price to pay for a feeble nuclear weapon is probably one’s entire country, all its people and all its infrastructure, given the nature of some Doomsday devices like the Soviet Era Perimeter. We don’t yet know if China has a similar doomsday device, capable of acting by itself once it has registered from seismic readings that a nuclear bomb has exploded on its soil. Chances are that if they do have one, we don’t know its inner workings or the location of their missile silos, which makes our nuclear game theory tilt quite lopsidedly in favour of China. This is probably quite true since Indian commanders are considering re-examining the no-first-use option that India has long favoured. Perhaps this is necessary because India’s belligerent neighbours are not likely to launch merely one attack – there will probably a concerted slew of several attacks if at all diplomacy fails and our nations have to go to war.

For this and other reasons, the test yield targeted by most modern nuclear bombs is of the order of a few megatons (equivalent to a few thousand tons of TNT). In addition to the explosive force of such a blast (of a few megatons, a few thousand times more powerful than India’s current nuclear deterrent) the radiation levels are significantly higher in case of larger explosions, as is the radius of the blast, which will effectively put paid to a few hundred square miles of terrain for several years and possibly decades. The key question that the users of the deterrent (the strategists) will ask, however, is whether the deterrent is good enough to take care of multiple targets whose destruction is crucial to the survival of India if and when a nuclear fusillade begins.

Let’s look at the nuclear capabilities from our two immediate (hostile/semihostile) neighbours. China has 3-5 megaton yield devices, which are capable of being delivered by their DF-5 Dong Feng missile which has a range of around 12,000 miles and is therefore a viable deterrent against all of Europe and the east coast of the USA. Pakistan has the Ghauri and the M-11 missiles for medium/long range strikes, which can reach Delhi and Mumbai from Pakistan with ease as per theoretical range calculations. In reality, although China has full nuclear capability over all sovereign Indian land, Pakistan doesn’t have nuclear delivery capability over most of our territory in addition to the fact that they have lower yield nuclear weapons (although more nuclear weapons than India). That said, the present controversy puts us at par with only Pakistan in terms of nuclear bomb yield, which is disappointing news for India as we should have the capability to approach China in terms of our yield. Our launch vehicle technology and of its hitherto largely successful operation, however, is something ISRO and the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre have to be lauded for, apart from their efforts in the Chandrayaan – I moon mission.

The present controversy also has a unique political flavour. K Santhanam and PK Iyengar, the scientists who consider the tests a failure and call for more nuclear tests are figures in the scientific community, presumably, and don’t have any apparent connections with the Congress party or the Left. Even the Congress and the Left have gone out of their way to make it clear that they believe the tests were successful. The BJP of course will have to claim it was successful because they were the ruling party at the time. While Abdul Kalam, Rajagopala Chidhambaram and other prominent scientific and political figures contest Santhanam’s claims,  other scientists support his claim – probably also the ones at Lawerence Livermore National laboratories who measured seismic data from the May 1998 nuclear tests in both India and Pakistan. I find it difficult to believe that Santhanam’s claims are a sort of opportunism, but it cannot be ruled out. Neither can it be ruled out that the Congress could be allowing Santhanam to rake up the issue because they would like to see a dead BJP rather than a beleagured one. The BJP’s other controversies notwithstanding, they were seen by the nationalist party’s supporters as a party which wouldn’t compromise the military strength of the Indian nation, and an exposé in this regard will be a blow for the BJP.

Without actually having the deterrent that we say we have in our journals and in our press conferences, we could strategically adopt the dark horse strategy of possessing greater capability that we are seen to have, which is almost always an advantage, rather than bragging about our capabilities. We could also end up destroying confidence in a government whose stability is essential for a stance on issues such as Kashmir, terrorism, border incursions and other issues that determine our policy towards our neighbours. I believe that being the dark horse is a great idea in the context of nuclear conflict (look at Israel), but that we have neither the capability nor the integrity to accomplish something like this if we don’ t stand with our scientists on the state of nuclear technology and instead only seek to manipulate their accomplishments to benefit from our respective vote banks.

What does all this mean? I guess I, like all citizens expect the scientists’ peer reviewed word to prevail and not  be hijacked by propaganda. If propaganda says that India has 200kt devices and a viable nuclear deterrent, they should be backed by strong agreement in terms of scientific evidence for this claim. Pushing the idea of a deterrent at the citizens to make them feel secure in the face of a confused, beleaguered, Islamic fundamentalist uprising in one of our neighbours and a zealously expansionist communist, aggressive, oppressive regime in our other neighbour makes for bad strategy, especially when we don’t have the quality of the deterrent we talk about. When the Congress government has to make a decision now on whether to conduct another nuclear test to make the technology reliable, the nuclear opportunism that the BJP exhibited when they were in power will haunt the present government. Were they to make the mistake of not carrying our another set of nuclear tests to ensure our country’s deterrent against potential nuclear assault from Pakistan or China, we would be lying to ourselves and compromising the well being of our entire nation in the event of a conflict.

Links:

FAS article on India’s nuclear arsenal

Indian Express article on India’s current nuclear deterrent controversy

Lawerence Livermore National Labs report (PDF) on yield of nuclear tests conducted in 1998

FAS’ nuclear forces guide

Recent Reads and More

It has been a while since I blogged here primarily because I have been doing more reading and gaming than writing of late. In addition, projects at work have kept me pretty busy as well. I have read a few interesting books since my return to India:

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: A book so packed with information, anecdotes, facts of science and innovative ideas from centuries before that I am left wondering and penitent on my not having done anything significant so far in my lifetime. The sheer magnitude of some of the accomplishments delineated in this book make for a book that’s difficult to put down, if you have the time for it. I think I will finally be able to go back to Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, whose first 8 chapters I managed to finish about three years ago. Subsequent chapters in that book were dense enough to scare even a technophile like me – and I scarcely believe that barring professional physicists, anyone finds the book readable. More on this later.
2. Ancient India by R C Majumdar: This is a must-read for anyone who is passionate about India and her history. From the Pre-Vedic and Vedic ages to modern day, this book covers large swathes of time in punctilious detail, often outlining the sagas of individual kings and dynasties lost in the mists of time to most of us. The book was a real eye opener in the sense that the real virility of the dynasties we now seem to accept faced defeat at the hands of the Persians and Mughals were in fact formidable dynasties for millenia before circumstances drove them to become militarily enervated. Kings of the late first millenium CE, such as Shashanka of Gauda, who consolidated north India after the fall of the Gupta empire. In addition to Yashodharman and Yashovarman, Shashanka and Harshavardhana represented some of the greatest military might before the arrival of the Islamic kings in India and were comparable to the formidable armies of Europe in what are known as the Dark Ages before Saladin entered Europe through Spain.  I now do not favour the undue importance given to emperors like Ashoka, Chandragupta Vikramaditya and subsequently, Akbar, when all they did was inherit and to an extent expand upon an empire whose practiced collusion was in large part due to circumstance and not because of some superhuman will and power that these emperors possessed.  More on this later, as I probably will write more on this.
3. Several hundreds of articles on my Google Reader, out of which I have shared interesting or relevant ones. You may find some of these shared in the column on the right. Also reading Myth = Mithya by Devadatta Pattanaik (an interesting take on Indian Gods and Goddesses), Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (an analysis of how people are successful) and a couple of reference books on aircraft.

As a long time gamer, I have caught up with some of the games I hadn’t played in the last couple of years – notably Bioshock. I am an incessant and unrepentant Half Life 2 fan, so I have been replaying Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Half Life 2 in their entirety. Guitar has understandably taken a backseat for the moment, but I still do play and record stuff, like the Thodi and Mohanam that you see in the widget on the right. A primary reason I am not recording as often as before is because of the background noise that is higher in India, the lack of a good quality microphone (I left mine in Bangalore and hope to get it back soon) and of course, the amplifier I have these days which is decidedly inferior (albeit cheaper) than the one I used to have in the US. I gifted that to a fellow guitarist and good friend when I left and he was quite happy to get a 20W Fender amp with delay and reverb built in. Given funds, I may buy a nice line in recording device in order to avoid the background noise.

Four Great Performances

I have been dormant as far as playing music goes, for the last three months, owing to my busy schedule and the fact that I haven’t had a chance to play guitar for  the whole time. I hope this will change because I am heading to Bangalore in late July and will be reunited with my guitar then. Although dormant on the blog for the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to get a lot of reading done as well as listen to a ton of music. Carnatic and otherwise.

Electric Ganesha Land by Prasanna

Electric Ganesha Land by Prasanna was one of the albums I listened to in depth for a couple of weeks and was hooked on to some of the music in it. My personal favourite in the album is “Dark Sundae in Triplicane” and perhaps a close second is “Sri Jimi”. “Bowling for Peace” is a sweet little number, like “Indra’s Necklace”. “Dark Sundae… ” progresses from a kanjira-bass combination to a lead guitar that seems to be close to the Abheri ragam. The multiple layers of guitar, the use of konakkol chanting and the jazz-influenced styles used in the song are sort of cerebral and appealed to me a great deal. “Sri Jimi” is another superb piece of work. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it is based on the Sri ragam, because it probably only takes a main riff from the scale of the Sri ragam. The piece sounds like like something out of a Jimi Hendrix album, which was indeed Prasanna’s intention, and he seems to have pulled it off quite well. Although I loved this track, I get hooked on to “Dark Sundae in Triplicane” and “Indra’s Necklace” each time I pick up the album. Indra’s Necklace uses three ragas (Nalinakanthi, Bilahari and Kadanakutoohalam) and no percussion, and I wonder if it alludes in any way to Indra’s pearls (a concept in the mathematics of repetitive shapes, such as fractals). Here is the man himself in a WNYC radio podcast.

I’ve had the good fortune of finding some great Carnatic music over the past few weeks. More important, perhaps, is the amount of time I’ve spent listening and playing air guitar to this and Electric Ganesha Land (hopefully my days of playing merely air guitar are  numbered!).

First and foremost, a superb Ragam-Tanam-Pallavi in the ragam Revathi by M Balamuralikrishna (link):

Revathi was one of those ragas that captured my imagination from the get go. There’s something about the sound of it that seems to induce profundity, sacredness and some form of austerity. I could never get enough of Revathi over the past few days – woke up to Nanati Baduku Natakamu by M S Subbulakshmi and listened to Santhanam’s Aparadhi Naanalla in the evenings. However, this particular RTP is where I found the right balance between vocal brilliance, modulation, a technical exploration of the raga at various rates of tala, in different pitches and with different textures, and pure virtuosity came together. I read somewhere that Revathi is one of the ragas used for chanting verses from the Vedas and indeed, some parts of the RTP reminded me of stray incidents (especially temples, which I rarely visit) when I have heard such. Towards the

The second great performance I heard is an RTP in Kaanada by the Ganesh-Kumaresh violin duo (link). Without further ado:

There’s something I have always liked about the Carnatic violin, which is reason enough to like the Ganesh-Kumaresh duo. I have always liked their Ragapravahams (especially the ones in Dharmavati and Sarasangi) . In this RTP, I love the way they transition to Ranjani and a bunch of other ragas and come right back into Kanada, singing “Sukham tarum Kaanada”. Kaanada was always a beautiful ragam to me, and although my introduction to it was through Poo Malai Vaangi Vandhan and Alaipayuthey, I have ended up listening to other compositions in the ragam and found it always likeable, like Sama or Kharaharapriya. Which brings me to the next great performance. The third great performance I have heard of late is a brilliant Kharaharapriya by the late, great, Chitti Babu (link):

Despite the unflattering motor vehicle sounds towards important parts of the concert, Chitti Babu’s mellifluous and dulcet musings in Veena make this eminently downloadable as well we worth mulling over – because suddenly, there are so many more ways in which Kharaharapriya is beautiful, all over again.

The fourth great performance I have heard is by a “young” (well, older than me at any rate) stalwart, the redoubtable TM Krishna – one of his renditions that aired over TV last year was on Youtube – a brief explanation of the raga Naari Reetigowla (the same scale as Natabhairavi, but with some similarities to Reetigowla in terms of prayoga) was followed by one of Dikshitar’s well known compositions in the raga – Shri Neelotpala Nayike. I found his rendition spell binding, with his attention to detail and the drawn out phrases which made for absorbing listening. The minimal use of percussion was strange at first, but I grew to like it (link). Here we go:

Curiously, I found TM Krishna’s rendition of this song more mellifluous and pleasing than M Balamuralikrishna’s (BMK rendered the song in Reetigowla and not in Naari Reetigowla). And this is probably a huge compliment, because I rate M Balamuralikrishna pretty highly amongst all Carnatic vocalists, up there with the very best.

Looking forward to actually catching up with playing guitar after a while  – it will a memorable reunion, I hope.