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.

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?”

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

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.

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.

This is one book I’ll cherish with the best of them. It was the direction vector for the design thinking I had evolved a few years ago, when doing general design calculations, sizing and performance calculations for general aviation concepts.

A very personal dream I have had is to make an airplane of my own, designed from scratch and built to seat only me. It was the sort of dream any self-righteous 11 year old would encourage, and I was more than happy to carry on this dream several years into my adult life. The surfeit of involvements and life events in general get one sidetracked about one’s projects and old ideas, and sometimes, it pays to revive them, just to experience what it should be to examine lofty dreams again. And many times, such examination leads to veritable gains, sometimes with a new direction that arises from a critical self-examination. As a journalist friend of mine put it wittily (on the occasion of my college gang and I sharing pictures of sundry quizzes we took part in and conducted then), “…as if we aren’t embarrassed enough about our pasts!”

When I think of what kind of project this would be, in terms of the scale, complexity or the cost of it, I can comfortably say that I have neither the time, nor the money to execute it, regardless of whether I have the will or the talent. However, that doesn’t mean that the problem is not worth examining, especially if I have a beloved text book right by me, to help me out.

It is instructive to think of human society these days to be evolving to a period of greater collusion, with tendencies towards violence distributed evenly in societies, rather than grouped into certain conflit zones. This defies the data we have available presently on areas like the West Bank, The Gaza Strip, Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, but we have to remember that many conflicts that brew in other parts of the world are not documented or given enough attention. My qualms chiefly center around Tibet and the state-sponsored violence there, the Naxal problem in eastern and Central India, the much-discussed conflict in Northern Srilanka, the unrest in Somalia, the genocides in Darfur and other conflicts that we probably don’t know about in detail, in different parts of the world.

I saw a very interesting perspective in Steven Pinker’s talk on TED here. The talk is embedded below for ease, but there is also a discussion on TED that’s worth following on this page. 

The talk is instructive because it defies a widely held perception that we are living in a society of increasing violence and unrest. In Indian myth, there is reference to a mythical golden age, the Satya Yuga or the Krta Yuga. This age, as fictitious as it may be, probably points to certain social trends that can help one examine one view of how people can live in harmony. In a stroke of romantic imaginativeness, the Satya Yuga is purported by the ancients to be the longest, lasting 1,700,000 years. The time scales in Indian mythology are staggering, with Brahma the creator having a lifespan of 77 trillion years. Such time scales are probably what prompted Carl Sagan to view them as an exalted and perhaps wondrous, somewhat realistic view of the cosmos (compared to the widely held Western view of a 5000 year old universe). The subsequent ages – Treta, Dwapara and Kali represent periods of increasing moral decay, leading to greater materialism, and perhaps greater violence. Modern science and an examination of human evolution tells us a different story – that human evolution hit a sort of tipping point 2 million years ago, when Homo erectus started transforming into Homo sapiens. It is scientifically plausible that the development of civilization, education and the slow erasure of instinctive tendencies have permitted greater cooperation between tribes and groups that previously would be at odds or would have violent conflicts, but have education and technology taught us anything new? Has technology made killing easier or has it, on the contrary, ended up protecting us from the violence within us better?

What is plausible, given evidence that the Puranic texts with vivid characterizations of the four different Yugas originated around the Christian Era, is that historians and scholars of Ancient India, given their hopeful view of their cultural lineage, ascribed a certain perfection to their ancestors’ existence, in order that this may serve as a paragon of human society. What helped were some of the morals attributed to classical Indian religions – the Shaiva and Vaishnava sects both stressed on a set of human values that could have been developed in classical Indian society, possibly also with influences from kingdoms outside of the boundaries of what is now India. How does such a situation influence the development of non-violent thought in religion and how does this elevate the non-violent to a place of eminence in society? Does such social transformation hold the key to understanding how violent trends may have reduced in society today? I have to ask the bleaker question here also – whether human society has really progressed to a period of less violence or whether violence is reported less often or felt on a less personal level in the past, over the past few decades? Could a portion of this be because of the spread of technology that makes killing easy?

There are other cultures whose studies are instructive when discussion trends of violence. The Norse and the Egyptians seem to be polar opposites – with the Norsemen known for their stereotypic brashness, revelry and bacchanalian behaviour, and the Egyptians known to be analytical, worker ants whose architectural splendour far outlasted the civilization itself. However, closer studies of the Egyptians reveal the ruthlessness with which the Pharaoh and his Viziers exercised their power, and the plight of common people in Ancient Egypt, especially the slaves. Indeed, several Biblical tales are irrevocably tied to this hegemony. A study of the Ancient Norsemen reveals a culture of sophistication and is quite instructive about their less violent side – where metallurgy and filigree art flourished, explorers were welcomed and honoured and pioneers ruled the roost. There is probably an intellectual dynamism to Norse culture that is not well documented enough in the stereotypes.

It is now a well known thing that the Ancient Mayans, a culture of mathematicians, builders and conquerors were also a culture dictated by sacrifice, notably human sacrifice. It is also being uncovered that the Dark ages, known for the widespread plague outbreaks, cruelty, the fall of civilization in Europe, political and social unrest, etc., was a period of social, political and economic development in the Islamic Caliphate, a period where civil society developed in the Middle East from the fruits of the Islamic conquest of parts of India and Europe. Europe’s Dark ages have for many decades mystified historians, but recent studies have also revealed the development of creative thought alongside witch hunts and burnings at the stake. The glory of the Islamic Caliphate probably came at the expense of 80 million Indians who were taken prisoner, massacred or systematically killed off by various emperors as part of their Islamic duties. This could arguably be one of the least discussed, least well known genocides in human history. Would this genocide have been possible without technological advancement that made better weapons possible in the middle east? Are ideas in the end stronger technological tools than implements of destruction?

It can be held that the Renaissance perhaps harboured the beginning of rational thought, but ironically (given the violence in India these days from terrorists and Naxals alike), one has to look back to Ancient India to understand the roots of Ahimsa. The Jain religion and its Thirthankaras pioneered non-violent thought in a religion and aspects of the Buddhist faith helped alleviate social violence and violence with social sanction. These ideas were eventually distilled into interpretations of the Hindu faiths, especially Srivaishnavism. The dawn of the Victorian Era and the conquest of India by Britain probably helped revive these ideas amongst groups such as the Theosophists (as evidenced from Helena Blavatsky and her obsession with Zen/Dhyan Buddhism). Gandhi probably gave a credible face to non-violence as a method of social uprising and protest against colonialism, racism and injustice.  If Steven Pinker is indeed right, that we are going through periods of reducing violence in society, would Gandhi figure as one of the key catalysts for non-violent behaviour? Contrarily, are we merely deluding ourselves by thinking that atrocities such as the ones committed in the World Wars and in the decades after are blips on an otherwise peaceful social landscape of modern society? Or is it the case that the non-violent protests by Gandhi were just a much talked about phenomenon – while events such as the genocides of the partition are ignored?

Tests of faith usually are tests of faith in oneself. Sometimes, though, tests of faith can become tests of the truth. How strongly are we willing to stand by the truth in trying times? Does standing by the truth include a constant examination of aspects of the self, so as to absolve oneself of all malcontent and wrong doing? Does it also include a constant questioning the other aspects of oneself so as to admit one’s foibles?

Where do the two intersect? Is there a grey area? There perhaps is.

It is common knowledge that there are aspects of intense events that are traumatizing, that are not well known to the person who is the victim of that incident. When the victim has to face a personal tragedy or an attack on his life, do these lost memories become fabricated memories? How much can we trust our own version of the events at, for example, a crime scene? How do people explain complex sequences of events to themselves? Do they consider the other party, that potentially brought them harm, as a reasonable actor? Does attributing such character to those that harm you bring you a level of comfort in their humanity, while making their actions seem trivial in comparison to the ways in which they could have acted? Is this transactional analysis the basis of Ahimsa and non-violent thought? When Mohandas Gandhi was struck down by an officer in South Africa even as he protested inequality in marriage rights for non-whites, was he comforted by this thought, that his non-violence rendered him superior, in some way? What was the basis of this thinking? Was it religious? Was it something less irrational? Were it religious, it could probably be considered as a case of irrational thinking being used to bolster one’s state of mental soundness. This state of mental fortitude is accomplished not by a basic physical security and strengthened by repeated exposure to pleasure,  but by an affirmation inside one’s mind, that an idea can be responsible for one’s well being. Effectively, one’s hierarchy of needs stands reversed in this situation, with personal safety and security becoming less important than the affirmation inside oneself that one is at par with, or holds a higher ground morally than, the other party.

It is probably very interesting to examine how people can move from a traumatizing experience to relative calm. There are probably multiple phases in this – starting with the shock of the trauma, acting reflexively to the situation as it demands of him/her, building a sequence of events, building paths of reasoning from these event sequences, rationalizing one’s misdeeds/mishandling of the situation, and then determining a version of the truth. Subsequent to this comes the inordinate worry, perhaps of any fall out from the event. The human animal has to, in the course of the first three of these activities, have a sense of belief in itself that caters to its survival. This reason can be born of religion, science, deduction, strategy or any tool it has at its behest.

How does one reconcile uncertainties arising from the confusion that a grey area creates in one’s mind? Is irrationality a solution? Does faith in a higher power, a judge superior to the human judges, have its roots in the social infrastructure that inures in individuals a sense of right and wrong, or is faith born of a deeper, more philosophical view of an all-controlling force? Does the former merge into the latter after manifesting in our minds as multiple other ideas? Whatever the method, it seems apparent that traumatizing situations surely test the notions we have developed about religion and reason. Habits developed in the individual, sometimes by practicing a religion or a system of belief come to the fore, and reasoning that leads from one activity to another sometimes also follows the irrational route. Strange as it may seem, irrational thinking may actually help retain certain information that is specific and factual about a situation that caused trauma to the victim.

It is possible that the human brain has to depend on some form of self-centred survival strategy when in times of trouble, and that this could defy all rational thinking, because it is the result of a neural net which is self-aware.

If one’s behaviour in an emergency defies logic at times, it is possible also, that one’s worries fall far short of the possibilities one may see when using reason and probability, while also being biased towards a few types of worry. The incident that leads to the trauma tends to condition the mind so that certain possibilities seem more possible to the mind than certain others, and these distinct possibilities become a source of worry.

What is the solution to worry after a trauma? Reliving the event may be sufficient for events that have brought fear but not harm to the individual. However, in cases where the victim has acutely suffered, there are probably multiple ways to get them to reconcile the damage and come away with a positive frame of mind. It helps to think that justice will be done, or that a solution will be provided, but for many situations in life, there seem to be no way out for victims of trauma, unless they reason out the event and develop the fortitude to divert their minds to something positive in their immediate future. This may be the antidote to bring their confidence to a level where they can fend for themselves again.

Having lived in the United States, the world’s second largest democracy and only superpower, and having seen through an election season here, I am certain that nothing in this democracy matches the scale of the campaigning and the colour and energy of an Indian election. It is strange that India, a country so divided and diverse can be so regionally, socially and politically fragmented and can still have an elected government. I am not about to brush aside the success India has had in its electoral system because of the many faults associated with its politics, such as criminalization, caste politics and corruption. I am more optimistic than, say, Arundhati Roy is, in that it is possible for the Indian democratic system to become more refined as Indians, especially young Indians, realize the importance of their democratic heritage of sixty years. However, with all the mixed signals being sent out in this election ahead of it, the multitude of crises that haunt the public memory, I think it would be safe to say that the very system of our democracy is under attack from many sides, especially from a homebred cynicism amongst the youth that is threatening the fundamental premise that our country can be a democratic republic.

Where this cynicism comes from is a question any self-respecting Indian should ponder about. The changing tides of power and the cultural changes, globalization and economic influences have led to a multitude of changes in the average voter’s mindset. The truism that exists in Indian society today is that as a society with an increasingly wealthy upper class and a burgeoning middle class and an increasing number of poor people, the country as a whole is producing leaders who are more and more opportunistic, rather than more enlightened. Gone are the days when a Nehru or a Sardar Patel could inspire millions with his vision for the future. That world has merged with this one through the predictable route of authoritarian dynaties stemming from Nehru, the subsequent threats to the very idea of the Indian nation, communal clashes, the rise of the alternative to the Congress and even the rise of a third alternative to the Congress and the BJP. The phenomenon of coaliation politics is here to stay as well. These days, well meaning leaders are cast into the same fray as bullies, cowards and opportunists, making political survival a dirty game. There are no movements to capitalize on, no flags to fly except the flags that divide and conquer, and no stones are left unturned in gaining political advantage. Predictably, the way forward is forgotten in the mess of the present. And part of the mess of the present is the very nature of India – the pluralistic, dissonant country that has many faces, voices but seemingly, a single ethos.

Where does the common man fit into this picture? Only on the very fringes. The majority of India’s political class have effectively isolated the power of the common man from the equation, by practicing caste-based and communal politics. Even the so-called secular fronts indulge in this, perhaps more ignominously than the parties known to be oriented towards the Hindu majority in our country. The buck doesn’t stop there. Polarization on many fronts has been a feature of most recent Indian societies, especially during and after the 1980s. It is common knowledge that when a people are oppressed for centuries, and are then provided the freedom to practice their culture, they find an expression that is somewhat militaristic in its fervour, as if to affirm that their culture is a source of power. Leaders around the world have probably exploited this sentiment effectively, to lead their people in the face of odds large and small. The common man in today’s India is on the fringes, influencing these divisive forces, or else blissfully disconnected from the Gordian knot that is Indian politics. We need no Alexander in sight to break the knot with his sword, as that may damage the rope that makes the knot. This has been the case with our neighbour, Pakistan. We need a force that is intelletual and sweeping, awakening the masses to act in the face of corruption, greed and power hungry opportunism, and not a dictator who will crush the fabric of our society. Most well meaning fellow Indians accept this, but also admit that India’s system needs watershed change. This watershed change will probably not be a revolution, because, as poetic and irrational as it may sound, people are now too pragmatic for revolutions. It may be war that could change political equations in India, or better still, completely rewrite them, but war is a phenomenon that is becoming an outdated way of settling issues. That is, until we have our own version of D H Lawerence, who’d package the oldest trick in the book as the very latest thing and pass it off as the best thing to do. As enticing as this may be for those of us who think with our hearts rather than our heads, it is common knowledge that most effective outcomes to a problem lie in the middle, somewhere in between the very old and the very new. Although Bertrand Russell’s essay on Genius may have been relevant in 1932, it is most certainly not relevant in modern India, where things are more complex and anything pontifical and self-righteous is either frowned upon or dismissed as froth, as if the intentions behind these bouts of self-righteousness are malefic. It is not possible for India to attain a leader of magnanimous stature any more. We will have to make do with many hundreds of emasculated ones. This may not be a bad thing, and in fact, may become a very good thing, as long as we the people keep ourselves in check. If we were to cross the limits that we don’t know well enough yet, we may be in for trouble, and then, no one can come to our help in the midst of our distrust and cynicism.

There are probably two ways out of this. On the one hand, we could develop a cadre of leaders by a form of social engineering – but as we know crowds are generally less intelligent than the average person, and the greater the crowd, the more so. India is the second largest crowd in a single nation on the planet, and I don’t see a single leader emerging soon. The second way, is to do a lot more work away from the top, bring a silent revolution to the people that sees many more empowered, enlightened and cooperative individuals in our society. The second way is more sustainable, and that is probably the way forward.

TED has a number of insightful and interesting lectures, one of the most witty, interesting and thought-provoking of which, is this lecture by Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is one of the controversial atheists at the forefront of the atheist-evolutionist nexus that hopes to educate ordinary people about the pitfalls of organized religion and the issues prevalent in all organized religion movements worldwide.

As a Hindu who has a bent of agnosticism within, and as someone who has questioned ritualism and superstition growing up, I have strongly identified in the past with Dawkins’ world view although I do get distracted from this logical bent of mind by the socio-political issues of fundamentalism and militant extremism facing the world today. In other words, the very precepts that we believe provide morality to our way of life as Hindus (or people of other religions) often conflict directly with similar beliefs of other religious systems. This identity conundrum has verily led to the identity crisis that exists today in any citizen of a nation that is multicultural but not necessarily truly secular. I have often believed that it is only an atheist polity that can be secular and accepting of multiple  religious identities.

Dawkins’ world view is rather different, in that the individual should be the agent of reason, rather than the government or society at large. One can, at times refute his arguments on the grounds that religion, philosophy and reason have a morality to account for, and that while the former two have provided a moral bent to the whole question of what is acceptable human social behaviour, it is not concievable to imagine that science or reason as we know it has provided a method of ascribing morality to the human condition in a manner that supposes that a reason derived from first principles, rather than a first cause, is responsible for the development of tendencies of morality in humans. He has often rubbished the causes that religions put forward for the creation of the universe (or rather the world, or a limited portion of it, as most religious texts/thoughts describe the beginning).

It is with the adoption of a number of ideas from the theory of evolution, and not by an original, rationally verifyable account, that Intelligent Design has hijacked the idea that the complexity of the universe around us is due to the presence of a greater intelligence. It is understandable why the Intelligent Design theorists were popular in the US during the time of the Republicans, some of who have a semi-religious bent in their attitude towards politics.

I found the Doha Debates, hosted by Tim Sebastian (noted former host of BBC’s Hard Talk) to be one of the few good programmes that take a good hard look at political Islam in the Middle East, perhaps as well as the US documentaries on radical Christianity have analyzed that phenomenon. The roles adopted by the participants were predictable, while some of the questions that came from the audience were rather elementary, given the seriousness of the problem in the region. The politicization of religion is not a phenomenon unique to the Middle East, where rabid ideologies like Wahhabism and other radical forms of Islam have run amok and made life miserable for millions at the hands of the Mullahs, while the royal families and the promoters of such radical strains of religion themselves live in careless disregard for the very rules they popularize. In a more educated society such as the US, confabulating the discoveries of science to create a theory that appeals to the atavistic tendencies amongst the conservatives, naturally makes for a very useful propaganda tool. If religion by itself can be made more popular by making the concept of a God more appealing to populace largely educated in an atmosphere of free thinking and surrounded by influences of technology and perhaps science, it may become possible to spread rabid ideologies in even the United States,  starting from regions such as the Bible belt, spreading eventually to the other conservative communities, to a point where the abhorrence of minorities, rational thinking and perhaps even free speech, may be made possible. This becomes a poll plank for the TV evangelists, whose endorsement of born-again Christian politicians or power hungry war veteran patriots seems to play an important role in their getting elected.

Even when you consider Dawkins’ allusion to diluted theism, Deism, which advocates a world view filled with wonder at nature, the efforts of most religious and political leaders to defeat the religion-politics nexus prevalent around the world is absent or feeble, and understandably so, because of the power equations therein. Atheism is probably the only movement that has gained acceptance in the United States for the last decade or so. A recent study indicates that more people are irreligious and less people identify themselves as being Christian. And this is despite claims by many right-wing Muslims in demonstrations and on newsgroups that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the West. Perhaps Atheism is popular for a good reason. Perhaps people really are sick and tired of differences of faith and the problems they breed, however, only time will tell whether these problems of today are short lived.