Category: Culture

A masculine build-up to the Ind-Pak cricket match

This post benefited from feedback from Thomas Manuel.

Every time I watch an ad about the upcoming India-Pakistan men’s cricket match, as part of the ongoing T20 World Cup in Australia, I’m reminded of Cutler Beckett’s line in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series: “It’s just good business.”

Beyond the field, there has been new animosity between the Indian and the Pakistani cricket boards, with the former having said that the Indian men’s cricket team won’t travel to Pakistan for the 2023 Asia Cup. But even beyond the administrators of cricket and their realpolitik machinations, there are Star Sports and Pepsi.

Star Sports has been running an ad depicting life in a fictitious town called “Dardnapur” (Hindi for ‘no-pain town’) peopled with many men of considerable strength, capable of lifting motorcycles, having their fingers slammed by a closing door with nary a wince, and so forth. But when India lost to Pakistan at the Asia Cup, as a young boy narrates in the video, these men were sent to tears. So, the boy says in an address to the Indian men’s team, “Right this wrong, win the match and end the wait.”

(The ad benefits from an ambiguity: India’s loss to Pakistan contributed to the end of its last Asia Cup campaign, so “ending the wait” could apply equally to beating Pakistan and winning a major tournament. On the flip side, at the ad’s end, the screen shows illustrated faces of the two team captains, Rohit Sharma and Babar Azam, gesturing to each other in an aggressive way.)

In the Pepsi ad, India’s frontline pacer Jasprit Bumrah askes if viewers have the guts to watch the upcoming match against Pakistan from the PoV of a camera fit into the batter’s stumps (a.k.a. the ‘stumpcam’), followed by the ad spelling out something about a QR code to be found in Pepsi bottles.

Obviously women and people of other genders are welcome to share in these sentiments but neither ad features any women and there has been no indication that either of these brands – Star Sports or Pepsi – is interested in advertising to women in this matter. Instead, both brands are investing in associating the match with shows of strength and guts, an inescapable parallel to the violence in Kashmir as well as to the fact that India-Pakistan face-offs in the cricketing sphere represent one of the few remaining ways in which the two countries directly compete for victory.

There have been a few articles in ESPN and similar outlets about the Indian and the Pakistani men’s cricket teams trying to relax, stay away from the hype and focus on playing the game (see here, e.g.). But everyone else – from the administrators to the people at large, mediated by advertisements of the sort described above – are either pushing or are being pushed the triumphalist narrative that the match is a proxy for India being “better” than Pakistan, to project India as a highly competitive and – assuming India will win the match – tough country. Even the ICC is partly to blame as it starts major tournaments by having India and Pakistan face each other.

All this brings to mind the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’, coined by various sociologists in the 1980s and which has come to encompass the following features, among others: shows of achievement, use of physical force and heterosexuality – all of which have been put on display in the two ads and in the actions of the Indian cricket board.

Even “frontiersmanship” has raised its head: according to Wiktionary, it stands for “the craft or skill of being a frontiersman, of succeeding in settling a frontier” – which in this case is relevant to the regions of ‘Pakistan-administered Kashmir’ in western Kashmir and Aksai Chin in the eastern portion, over which India has disputes with Pakistan and China, respectively.

The person who announced India wouldn’t go to Pakistan for next year’s Asia Cup was Jay Shah, who has three identities here that matter: he is BCCI secretary, president of the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) and son of Union home minister Amit Shah. Shah junior said he was making the announcement as the president of the ACC, yet it’s laughable that the decision was motivated by anything other than the Indian government’s grouses with Pakistan in Kashmir.

The Frida Kahlo NFT

Like a Phoenix rising from its ashes, Art is reborn into Eternity.

fridanft.org

In July this year, a Mexican businessman named Martin Mobarak allegedly destroyed a painting by Frida Kahlo in order to liberate it from its physical shackles and unto its “eternal” existence henceforth as an NFT that he is selling for $4,000 apiece. He has said the money will go to charity, but it’s hard to understand how that is relevant considering what has (allegedly) been lost. Art these days is not entirely art: at least a part of its purpose has been subverted by cryptocurrencies into an object for proponents of this technology to con. Also, a fundamental tenet of the NFTs market is that scarcity is always better. Put these things together and you realise Mobarak’s actions were a matter of when, not if. However, the intersection of NFT-centric thinking with the art world has been and continues to be complicated.

In 2021, an artist named Beeple sold a collage of images he’d crafted and pieced together to a cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Metakovan for tokens worth $69 million. Metakovan, and his partner Twobadour, had said at the time that they were democratising art by enabling the cryptocurrency-based public ownership of works of art and by taking advantage of cryptocurrencies’ opportunities to allow non-white, non-western people to acquire high-valued art. It was a poorly conceived proposition in many ways – starting from the fact that the acquisition was a façade for Metakovan to inflate the value of the tokens he owned and going up to the fact that the $69-million moment did everything to uphold the links between art and modern capitalism instead of critiquing them (forget tearing them down).

Fast-forward to Martin Mobarak’s (alleged) destruction of ‘Fantasmones Siniestros’ and the contradictions abound. Contrary to Metakovan’s aspiration to democratise anything, even in principle, Mobarak’s (alleged) action epitomises the private ownership of art – outside history itself, isolated in one’s personal collection and thus – by the premium American logic of private ownership – at the unquestionable mercy of its proprietor, who may even choose to burn it without regard for its thingness as a historical-cultural-political object. In both cases, and the thousands of other instances in which NFT-makers have either championed the cause of paying artists or conceived art of their own, this human endeavour has been far removed from its telos of critiquing capitalist society and has become a commodity per se.

But while this is the long- and well-known effect of capitalism on art, the (alleged) destruction of ‘Fantasmones Siniestros’ also confronts us with a tense three-way contest. On vertex 1: The painting is Kahlo’s and is as such an important part of Mexico’s past, heritage and the aspirations of its people through the ages. On vertex 2: The headlines of most news reports, if not all, make sure to mention that the painting was worth $10 million, in a reminder of its monetary value de facto and the place of art by influential artists as an important bourgeois value-store de jure. And on vertex 3: No matter the legerdemain of businesspeople, NFTs will always and eventually ensure the complete commodification of art, thanks to their foundational premise.

The only thing worth prizing here is that on vertex 1: Kahlo’s work, inasmuch as it captures her spirit and anima and is a reminder of what she did, when and amidst whom. But vertices 2 and 3 seem to hold the means by which this preservation has been achieved before and will be achieved in future, and together prompt us to pay more attention to the delicate strands by which the memories of our pasts dangle. We still await the public ownership of the work of important artists, and many others, but anyone who says cryptocurrencies or blockchains are the way to get there is lying.

A similar problem has assailed the world of scientific knowledge and publishing for many years now, with more scientists becoming more aware today of their actual role in society: not to create new knowledge and improve lives as much as to widen the margins of scientific journals, overlook their glaring flaws and the incentives they have set up to the detriment of good science, and comply unquestioningly with their inexplicable price hikes. And even as many scientists have invented notions like “prestige” and “status” to make their allegiance to journals make sense, Mobarak et al. tell us, and themselves, that they’re doing everyone a favour.

In search of sandastros

About a week ago, I wrote to ICANN asking for a list of all the .com domains that were still available. After I received the file a few days later, I used two pieces of code to extract all the single-word entries on the list and subsequently all the words that were listed in a dictionary. The idea and the instructions came from Derek Sivers. Finally, I randomly picked a letter – ‘s’, it turned out – and began googling all those words whose meanings I didn’t know. I like doing this because sometimes new words can tell you what to think or to write, instead of the convention of what you write determining what words you wield. That’s how I discovered ‘sandastros’.

When I googled it, I found that the word comes from chapter 28, book 37 of Natural History, an ancient encyclopaedia put together in the first century AD by the Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder. Its contents (as translated by John Bostock) are available to read, book- and chapter-wise, here; the text is also available on a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. It’s a fascinating text throughout, including book 37, which is dedicated to what was known about precious stones in Pliny’s time. To quote at length from chapter 28:

Of a kindred nature, too, is sandastros,1 known as “garamantites” by some: it is found in India, at a place of that name, and is a product also of the southern parts of Arabia. The great recommendation of it is, that it has all the appearance of fire placed behind a transparent substance, it burning with star-like scintillations within, that resemble drops of gold, and 2 are always to be seen in the body of the stone, and never upon the surface. There are certain religious associations, too, connected with this stone, in consequence of the affinity which it is supposed to bear with the stars; these scintillations being mostly, in number and arrangement, like the constellations of the Pleiades and Hyades; a circumstance which had led to the use of it by the Chaldæi in the ceremonials which they practise.

Here, too, the male stones are distinguished from the female, by their comparative depth of colour and the vigorousness of the tints which they impart to objects near them: indeed the stones of India, it is said, quite dim the sight by their brilliancy. The flame of the female sandastros is of a more softened nature, and may be pronounced to be lustrous rather than brilliant. Some prefer the stone of Arabia to that of India, and say that this last bears a considerable resemblance to a smoke-coloured chrysolithos. Ismenias asserts that sandastros, in consequence of its extreme softness, will not admit of being polished, a circumstance which makes it sell all3 the dearer: other writers, again, call these stones “sandrisitæ.” One point upon which all the authorities are agreed is, that the greater the number of stars upon the stone, the more costly it is in price.

The similarity of the name has sometimes caused this stone to be confounded with that known as “sandaresos,” and which Nicander calls “sandaserion,” and others “sandaseron.” Some, again, call this last-mentioned stone “sandastros,” and the former one “sandaresos.” The stone4 that is thus mentioned by Nicander, is a native of India as well as the other, and likewise takes its name from the locality where it is found. The colour of it is that of an apple, or of green oil, and no one sets any value on it.

1 “Sandaresus” and “Sandasiros” are other readings. This stone has not been identified, but Ajasson is inclined to think that it may have been Aventurine quartz, and is the more inclined to this opinion, as that mineral is found in Persia, and sandastra or tchandastra is purely a Sanscrit word. The description, however, would hardly seem to apply to Aventurine.

2 Dalechamps thinks that this is the same as the “anthracites” mentioned in B. xxxvi. c. 38, and identifies it either with our Anthracite, or else with pit-coal or bituminous coal. It is much more likely, however, that a precious stone is meant; and, in conformity with this opinion, Brotero and Ajasson have identified it with the Spinelle or scarlet Ruby, and the Balas or rose-red ruby, magnesiates of alumina.

3 Littré suggests that the reading here probably might be “ob id non magno”—” sell not so dear.”

4 It has not been identified.

Such a fascinating stone. The “garamantites” is a reference to the Garamante people of the second century AD in the Sahara, according to another source, Nicholas Lemery’s Complete Materials Lexicon from 1721. Further searching for ‘sandastros’ led me to an essay published in June 1953 by a D.J. Greene, entitled ‘Smart, Berkeley, the Scientists and the Poets: A Note on Eighteenth-Century Anti- Newtonianism’. It doesn’t explain what sandastros is or where it originated, but it’s worth reading in full for its distinct premise:

In spite of all that has been written in recent years about the effect on poets and poetry of the modern development of natural science, the conscientious student may be forgiven for wondering whether the historical evidence adduced in these discussions is yet adequate and unambiguous, and for feeling that much more research needs to be done into the history of the relations between science and poetry before any valid generalizations can be made. This article is intended to be a small contribution to that history.

One line from the essay that I liked in particular: “John Livingston Lowes proved long ago, in his study of The Ancient Mariner, that poetry, however romantic, is not spun solely out of the bowels of poets.”

Anyway, according to the fifth chapter of a compilation by a George Rapp of the University of Minnesota, entitled ‘Gemstones, Seal Stones, and Ceremonial Stones’ and published in 2009, sandastros is aventurine, a green-hued form of quartz (and matching the “green oil” colour of sandastros). Rapp doesn’t mention this but aventurine lends its name to aventurescence, a phenomenon referring to a peculiar reflection of light, resembling “metallic glitter”, within the material owing to some mineral structures. (Another mineral that exhibits aventurescence is sunstone, a form of plagioclase feldspar found in small parts of Europe, Australia and the US.)

A piece of polished aventurine.
A piece of polished aventurine. Credit: Simon Eugster/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

However, recall that ref. 1 to the text by Pliny the Elder clarifies that his description doesn’t match that of aventurine, presumably referring to the “appearance of fire placed behind a transparent substance” and the “drops of gold” that are “always to be seen in the body of the stone, and never upon the surface”. There appears to be some dispute here and which I plan to follow through later – but it remains that sandastros is, as I said, an utterly fascinating thing.

Featured image credit: Holly Chisholm/Unsplash.

UAE: Straws in the wind

At the Ajman Museum (in the UAE), there is on display a traditional architectural design called barjeel, to cool homes and other small places of human occupation. It is essentially a cooling tower, also called a windcatcher, with the room to be cooled at the bottom. At the top, which is open, there is a sail-like suspension of wet cloth that cools and imparts moisture to the descending air. The barjeel at the museum had no wet cloth on top, but even so, the opportunity for air to cool by moving through the column kept the room a few degrees below the ambient temperature, a blistering 39º C.

I was to visit the much more popular Frame in Dubai – a large rectangular structure in which visitors could walk its topmost portion, with views of old and new Dubai on either side. It’s a superficial premise, that the Frame frames the city in two ways, yet it is oblivious of the fact that it frames itself poorly in the process. Among the achievements of the city of Dubai – which have become emblematic of the aspirations of the country’s other emirates – structures like the Frame, the Burj Al Arab or the Palm Islands are tacked on like ornaments to a landscape replete with historical and natural beauty, but which the local government has done little to popularise or celebrate and much to replace with concrete, metal and glass. Even the surrounding desert faces a constant, latent threat of being changed into an artificial forest or receive rain that it doesn’t need.

So it made more sense to visit a place I couldn’t read about online and certainly something that could teach me new things about this strange country. After a protracted argument with my local hosts (who struggled to believe why I wouldn’t want to check out the Frame), someone mentioned the Ajman Museum being not 20 minutes away, and that’s how we got there. And even there, half of the objects and stories on display sang paeans to the country’s modern rulers, delving into their magnanimity with as much detail as was missing from older events in the region’s history.

But the other half was utterly fascinating. Here are just four things I very much liked to know about:

  1. The Umm Al Nar Bronze Age culture in 2600-2000 BC – Wikipedia: “The Umm Al Nar people were important regional trading intermediaries between the ancient civilisations of Sumeria in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Harappan culture. Known to the Sumerians as ‘Magan’, the area was the source of their copper and diorite as well as a trading entrepôt for other goods from the Indus Valley, including carnelian jewellery.” (There is also an important tomb at Umm Al Nar.)
  2. The Umayyad Caliphate – the second caliphate established after the death of Muhammad ibn Abdullah (a.k.a. Prophet Muhammad), lasted from 661 AD to 750 AD and, remarkably, its territory spanned from Toledo in modern-day Spain to Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan. In this time, Christians formed the largest denomination in the empire but had to pay a tax for not being Muslims (the Muslims also had to pay a tax but which was used for their welfare). Islam had become the most common religion in the UAE region a little earlier, around 622 AD.
  3. The region in which the UAE lies was settled in recorded history by tribes migrating from Oman in search of freshwater. This was available in the UAE area through groundwater, extracted through tunnels dug into the soil. The Aflaj irrigation system in Oman is a UNESCO World Heritage site and was used to extract and transport groundwater using sloped channels in Oman and the UAE.
  4. The UAE’s emirs had a history of struggling with the British for the authority to rule their people, notably including the General Maritime Treaty of 1820. The region was at various times controlled, or had battles for control, by the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British, with the British coming out on top in the late 18th century. The Strait of Hormuz in particular was important to the UK because it was part of trade routes originating from or destined for major Indian ports.

All this from a visit to a single museum in a not-so-wealthy emirate! It’s a sad joke that modernising exercises far outpace those to preserve what the country already has. There are no advertisements or outreach programmes dedicated to archaeological and palaeontological sites in the country, no tours or ‘travel packages’ to popularise the country’s history among tourists. Visitors should ideally receive a booklet of what they could do in the UAE at the airports’ immigration counters, highlighting what they can do in each of the seven emirates.

Indeed, it’s strange that the national government isn’t exactly cohesive, consisting of a ‘supreme council’ composed of the rulers of each emirate, but with emirate being left to its designs. The council elects a president and a vice-president from among its members but historically they have been the rulers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, respectively. These two emirates are also at odds over the former’s proximity to the Saudi Arabian government and the latter’s relatively liberal attitude towards social and religious mores. Sharjah also has conservative tendencies and has, according to some anecdotes, been holding back from flying off the developmental handle like Dubai. Ras Al Khaimah is ‘up and coming’ now, spending money that its ruler (as opposed to its people) has been saving up. Umm Al Quwain still depends not inconsiderably on fishing. ¯(ツ)/¯

The UAE may not have had ‘great civilisations’ like India or China did, yet there is a lot to return to, and I think the country’s insular focus on technological development and utilisation, together with its fractured yet autocratic administration, is gradually erasing this source of identity and pride.

My photos of the barjeel at Ajman Museum: the column (left) has a cloth wall where the concrete wall is currently, upon which the shadows are being cast; the room to be cooled is at the bottom of the column (centre). The panel on the right shows the relative arrangement of the room’s components.
A schematic diagram of a windcatcher at work. Credit: Fred the Oyster/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Every other room in the Ajman Museum, apart from the one housing the barjeel, was fit with an air-conditioner and most of the rooms lacked a motion sensor, keeping the devices running constantly and the chambers frigid. This is quite akin to the UAE’s pervasive technologism: from a sophisticated transport surveillance system to help enforce traffic laws to breathtaking feats of engineering that transcend the country’s natural limitations, it is everywhere in the UAE, and often imposes itself to the point where the country seems eager to exist solely in the future – in the realm of things to come. The entry fee to the Ajman Museum was AED 5 (Rs 108) and the fee at the Dubai Museum was until recently AED 3 (Rs 65); compare this to the Museum of the Future in Dubai, which charges AED 145 (Rs Rs 3,145) for entry, limits the duration of each visit to 30 minutes and showcases scientific and technological advancements that the emirate country expects in future.

(By virtue of keeping the cost of entry so low, the museums are more accessible and whose contents ought to be more popular. Yet the ridiculous logics of privatisation and capitalism – both of which the UAE embraces – prevail: that more expensive things are deemed more desirable.)

It is safe to say that if you take away your awe of engineering accomplishments and of the cumulus of wealth at these places, Dubai in particular and the UAE in general have little variety to offer. And the barjeel is an apt symbol of this state of affairs (with which India must also be familiar): an important piece of the people’s history forgotten and superceded by inefficient, foreign counterparts associated with arbitrary definitions of ‘development’, ultimately reintroduced in highly gentrified fashion – in the ramparts of the bungalows of the rich and in parts of the city inaccessible to those who can already barely afford air-conditioners.

On referring to female officers as ‘madam sir’

ET Lifestyle published a Twitter thread this morning about police officers referring to female superior officers as “sir” or as “madam sir”.

I do find the practice offensive, because it signals an inability to imagine anyone but a (cis)man in the position currently occupied by a woman. That calcification – of the masculine identity of occupants of certain roles – is often the root of sexism. It being inadvertent, as some have said, is to my mind all the more reason to get rid of it, because that means we are passively allowing sexisms to cement themselves in our collective psyche.

All this said, some of the officers’ comments highlighted on Twitter also refer to an aspect of the English language that I find endlessly fascinating: a combination of Whorfianism and Indians’ modification of the language according to their more immediate needs. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the way people think is shaped by elements of their spoken language. This idea is also known as linguistic relativity and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Indians’ modification refers to the way people in India use and relate to English. This is obviously a highly heterogenous group, divided along caste, wealth, religion and geographic lines. A simple and familliar (to me) example is one I described in a 2020 interview:

… in India, English is – among other things – the language you learn to be employable, especially with MNCs or such. And because of its historical relationships, English is taught only in certain schools, schools that typically have mostly students from upper-caste/upper-class families. English is also spoken only by certain groups of people who may wish to secret it as a class symbol, etc. I’m speaking very broadly here. My point is that English is reserved typically for people who can afford it, both financially and socio-culturally. Not everyone speaks ‘good’ English (as defined by one particular lexicon or whatever) nor can they be expected to. So what you may see as mistakes in [an article] may just be a product of people not being fluent in English, and composing sentences in ways other than you might as a result.

If a poorly edited article is impossible to read or uses words and ideas carelessly, or twists facts, that is just bad. But if a poorly composed article is able to get its points across without misrepresenting anyone, whom does that affect? No one, in my opinion, so that is okay. (It could also be the case that the person whose work you’re editing sees the way they write as a political act of sorts, and if you think such an issue might be in play, it becomes important to discuss it with them.) … My job as the editor is to ensure that people are understood, but in order to help them be understood better and better, I must be aware of my own privileges and keep subtracting them from the editorial equation (in my personal case: my proficiency with the English language, which includes many Americanisms and Britishisms). I can’t impose my voice on my writers in the name of helping them.

The use of English in India is implicitly political. Its appearance on government forms, such as to avail compensation for the death of a loved one due to COVID-19 or to provide informed consent for the forest department to cut down a forest, has often served to exclude people from the rights to which they are entitled. At the same time English is very necessary and important to secure good jobs and to effectively navigate the bureaucracy. In this tension, my role as an editor requires me to strike a fine balance – between letting people express themselves the way they will, ensuring what they’re thinking matches perfectly with what they’re saying, and not – in the process of making clarifying edits – making their text sound like me instead. The second point here, of words matching one’s thoughts, is particularly important in the context of junior male officers referring to their female superiors as “sir” or “madam sir”. As she is quoted as saying in the following tweet…

Durga Shakti Nagpal, and presumably others as well, countenance “madam sir” or “sir” as another manifestation of a gender-neutral term along the likes of ‘janab‘ in Punjab, ‘hukum‘ in Rajasthan, etc. Here, “madam sir” is taken to be another gender-neutral term, and this to my mind is an Indian modification of an originally English term that is decidedly masculine. This is the sort of issue I was referring to in the context of the ways in which we – the people of a post-colonial state – have adapted our former hegemon’s language. It is quite possible, as it already seems to Durga Shakti Nagpal, that “madam sir” means something else in India, especially in one, some or all of the demographic groups that regularly use this term, than it might in the UK or elsewhere. Here, it may be possible that its users employ it as an extension of more gender-neutral terms that already exist in Punjabi, Rajasthani, etc.

To be clear, this is not an attempted justification but an exploration of possibilities, albeit an admittedly superficial one.

At the same time, “madam sir” is not gender-neutral, as Durga Shakti Nagpal vaguely suggests it might be, because officers don’t use the same term to address their male superiors. With the latter, it is but “sir”. In India, and to someone fluent in English (like me), it may often seem like other, non-fluent speakers translate into the language in careless fashion. I encountered many examples of this when covering clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines in India, where trial investigators were obviously more fluent in Hindi, were forced in some contexts to use English (such in official reports and in interviews to the press), and subsequently turned technical terms into vagueries, respectful terms into casual ones and appeared to admit inaccuracies where things were much more accurate. In such situations, there isn’t only a potential mismatch between thoughts and words but also actions and words. So it is possible in theory that when people for whom English isn’t the first language translate into the language, something is being lost in translation – and which could include a non-sexist sentiment. In theory.

In practice, of course, this is tremendously unlikely to be manifesting in the context of the male members of a male-dominated workforce in which women’s enrollment is perceived to be an exception, rather than as a herald of change, and in which the identity of the chair – no matter its occupant – is vouchsafed to cis-het men. As director-general of police Renuka Mishra said, police training should reflect the fact that words matter very much and – taking a cue from Whorfianism – force trainees to think closely about how their perceptions of certain roles in the police force are coloured by their perceptions of gender.

Unless the West copies us, we’re irrelevant

We have become quite good at dismissing the more asinine utterances of our ministers and other learned people in terms of either a susceptibility to pseudoscience or, less commonly, a wilful deference to what we might call pseudoscientific ideas in order to undermine “Western science” and its influence. But when a matter of this sort hits the national headlines, our response seems for the large part to be limited to explaining the incident: once some utterance has been diagnosed, it apparently stops being of interest.

While this is understandable, an immediate diagnosis can only offer so much insight. An important example is the Vedas. Every time someone claims that the Vedas anticipated, say, the Higgs boson or interplanetary spaceflight, the national news machine – in which reporters, editors, experts, commentators, activists and consumers all participate – publishes the following types of articles, from what I have read: news reports that quote the individual’s statement as is, follow-ups with the individual asking them to explain themselves, opinion articles defending or trashing the individual, an editorial if the statement is particularly pernicious, opinion articles dissecting the statement, and perhaps an interview long after to ask the individual what they were really thinking. (I don’t follow TV news but I assume it is either not very different in its content.)

All of these articles employ a diagnostic attitude towards the news item: they seek to uncover the purpose of the statement because they begin with the (reasonable) premise that the individual was not a fool to issue it and that the statement had a purpose, irrespective of whether it was fulfilled. Only few among them – if any – stop consider the double-edged nature of the diagnosis itself. For example, when a researcher in Antarctica got infected by the novel coronavirus, their diagnosis would have said a lot about humankind – in their ability to be infected even when one individual is highly isolated for long periods of time – as well as about the virus itself.

Similarly, when a Bharatiya Janata Party bhakt claims that the Vedas anticipated the discovery of the Higgs boson, it says as much about the individual as it does about the individual’s knowledge of the Vedas. Specifically, the biggest loser here, so to speak, are the Vedas, which have been misrepresented to the world’s scientists to sound like an unfalsifiable joke-book. Extrapolate this to all of the idiotic things that our most zealous compatriots have said about airplanes, urban planning, the internet, plastic surgery, nutrition and diets, cows, and mathematics.

This is misrepresentation en masse of India’s cultural heritage (the cows aren’t complaining but I will never be certain until they can talk), and it is also a window into what these individuals believe to be true about the country itself.

For example, consider mathematics. One position paper drafted by the Karnataka task force on the National Education Policy, entitled “Knowledge in India”, called the Pythagorean theorem “fake news” simply because the Indian scholar Baudhayana had propounded very similar rules and observations. In an interview to Hindustan Times interview yesterday, the head of this task force, Madan Gopal, said the position paper doesn’t recommend that the theorem be removed from the syllabus but that an addition be made: Baudhayana was the originator of the theorem. Baudhayana was not the originator, but equally importantly, Gopal said he had concluded that Baudhayana was being cheated out of credit based on what Gopal had read… on Quora.

As a result, Gopal has overlooked and rendered invisible the Baudhayana Sulbasutra as well as has admitted his indifference towards the programme of its study and preservation.

Consider another example involving the same fellow: Gopal also told Hindustan Times, “Manchester University published a paper saying that the theory of Newton is copied from ancient texts from Kerala.” He is in all likelihood referring to the work of G.G. Joseph, who asserted in 2007 that scholars of the Kerala school of mathematics had discovered some of the constitutive elements of calculus in c. 1350 – a few centuries before Isaac Newton or Gottfried Leibniz. However, Gopal is wrong to claim that Newton “copied” from the work from “ancient texts from Kerala”: in continuation of his work, Joseph discovered that while the work of Madhava and Nilakantha at the Kerala school pre-dated that of Newton and Leibniz, there had been no transfer of knowledge from the Kerala school to Europe in the medieval era. That is, Newton and Leibniz had discovered calculus independently.

Gopal would have been right to state that Madhava and Nilakantha were ahead of the Europeans of the time, but it’s not clear whether Gopal was even aware of these names or the kind of work in which the members of the Kerala school were engaged. He has as a result betrayed his ignorance as well as squandered an important opportunity to address the role of colonialism and imperialism in the history of mathematics. In fact, Gopal seems to say that unless Newton copied from the “ancient texts,” what the texts themselves record is irrelevant. (Also read: ‘We don’t have a problem with the West, we’re just obsessed with it’.)

Now, Madan Gopal’s ignorance may not amount to much – although the Union education ministry will be using the position papers as guidance to draft the next generation of school curricula. So let us consider, in the same spirit and vein, Narendra Modi’s claim shortly after he became India’s prime minister for the first time that ancient Indians had been capable of performing an impossible level of plastic surgery. In that moment, he lied – and he also admitted that he had no idea what the contents of the Sushruta Samhita or the Charaka Samhita were and that he didn’t care. He admitted that he wouldn’t be investing in the study, preservation and transmission of these texts because that would be tantamount to admitting that only a vanishing minority is aware of their contents. Also, why do these things and risk finding out that the texts say something else entirely?

Take all of the party supporters’ pseudoscientific statements together – originating from the Madan Gopals and culminating with Modi – and it becomes quite apparent, beyond the momentary diagnoses of each of these statements, that while we already knew that they have no idea what they are talking about, we must admit that they have no care for what the purported sources of their claims actually say. That is, they don’t give a damn about the actual Vedas, the actual Samhitas or the various actual sutras, and they are unlikely to preserve or study these objects of our heritage in their original forms.

Just as every new Patanjali formulation forgets Ayurveda for the sake of Ayurveda®, every new utterance about Ancient Indian Knowledge forgets the Vedas for the sake of the Vedas®.

Now, given the statements of this nature from ministers, other members and unquestioning supporters of the BJP, we have reason to believe that they engage in kettle logic. This in turn implies that these individuals may not really believe what they are saying to be true and/or valid, and that they employ their arguments anyway only to ensure the outcome, on which they are fixated. That is, the foolish statements may not implicitly mean that their authors are foolish; on the contrary, they may be smart enough to recognise kettle logic as well as its ability to keep naïve fact-checkers occupied in a new form of the bullshit job. Even so, they must be aware at least that they are actively forgetting the Vedas, the Samhitas and the sutras.

One way or another, the BJP seems to say, let’s forget.

Review: ‘Love, Death & Robots’ 3 (2022)

Spoilers abound.

Two overarching impressions. 1) The Telegraph wrote that LDR 3 is about the pitfalls of human greed. I came to a different conclusion. Almost all of the episodes in LDR 3 were about humans meeting the ancient, the mysterious or the new and coming away humbled or humiliated, if they came away at all. It’s an important, but not necessarily interesting, choice of theme at this moment: the apparent centrality of exploitation to the human condition. Perhaps more importantly, LDR 3 seems to reflect on the violence that being good demands of us – call it revolution, survival, whatever – in this age of the banality of greed. Be good. It won’t be easy, but be good.

The second impression is at the end.

Episode 1: [Exit Strategies] The very end of the ending delivers a punch that is immediately humorous but out of sorts with the tone and narrative of the rest of the episode. The rest – in the form of a social commentary of humankind’s last days – was informative coming from robots but nothing quite eye-opening or mind-blowing. But it’s short, so it’s easy to enjoy.

Episode 2: [Bad Travelling] “There’s nothing more terrifying than a man prepared to live by his conviction.” This quote appears in the Netflix series Unabomber, about the manhunt for Ted Kaczynski. This line, or a minor variant of it, apparently originated with Kaczynski and it’s easy to see its imprints on his choice of lifestyle and his radical beliefs about the environment, industrialisation and self-governance. This said, the line has remained with me because it reads like one of the few fundamental truths about the human condition – something you can’t drill further down, something that leads to a fount of insights into what it means to be human. The episode brings this truth to powerful light, and demonstrates how the absolute adherence to doing the right thing – while it may lead to morally desirable outcomes – can appear just as devious as the actions of a chaotic-evil character might.

Episode 3: [The Very Pulse of the Machine] One thing this episode gets right within the first two minutes is that it resolves a long-standing what-if that two movies have left us with: Prometheus (2012) and The Martian (2015). At the end of Prometheus, Elizabeth Shaw is stranded on an alien moon with the rest of her crew dead and only one spacecraft left to operate, which she intends to use to get to the home-planet of the Engineers. She is determined and focused. Through most of The Martian, Mark Watney has no self-doubt, no anxiety, no panic attack – even though he’s stuck on Mars and needs to find his way back to Earth, and also figure out how to feed himself and keep himself alive. He is instead simply determined and focused. What would it look like to be stranded on an alien world, with the hope of going or returning somewhere, and to have self-doubt as well? This is how this episode of LDR 3 begins – but the problem is that the character quickly consumes some potent drug that makes her high, and the self-doubt is replaced with visual and auditory hallucinations. Ugh.

Episode 4: [Night of the Mini Dead] This was funny from start to finish, but the laughter didn’t last. It began funny because of the medium – miniatures on a tapletop acting out the deceptively innocuous beginnings of a zombie apocalypse, followed by the apocalypse itself – and stayed funny because the rapid pace of events keep you from thinking too much and because the apocalypse for once seems neither unpredictable nor offers redemptive value. Even the ending, a climax that lasts for all of a second, carries the tone on and leaves you with a chuckle. But give it a few more seconds and you’re probably thinking what the point was. I did. I didn’t get it. Silly little things can set off non-silly non-big things, and when it’s all said and done, none of it matters? Fuck you.

Episode 5: [Kill Team Kill] This one was pointless. Really. I mean, LDR 3 like its two predecessors keeps its bodily obscenities focused on the male form, which makes sense only if you’re going to make a larger point about toxic masculinity and such things. But this one’s just adrenaline from start to finish.

Episode 6: [Swarm] LDR 3 was released earlier this year, unintentionally (maybe) coinciding with a time in which experts and stakeholders around the world were pondering how we should treat genetic information – in line with the biological specimens from which they’re obtained or with a separate policy. The man’s ambitions in this episode encode the hubris that we’ve come to expect from the corporate sector vis-à-vis our biological resources – the conviction that the exploiter will triumph by virtue of the destructive tendencies of exploitation. But as in the episode as in the real world, such conviction obscures the complementary admission that we assume we know everything there is to know. We never do, and exploitation always backfires.

When scientists working for a large company sequence the DNA of a rare plant using a single leaf plucked from a sacred forest, return it to the forest’s stewards once they’re done, and go on to replicate a compound encoded in the genes that provides a beautiful fragrance eventually bottled as an expensive perfume, should the stewards benefit? Should they have asked the stewards first? Should the stewards have much of a say? To my mind the answers to all these questions is ‘yes’, but few of the reasons are rooted in science. The stewards and indeed the complex community of organisms of which they are part often possess an intelligence to which science blinds us. Yet these discussions frequently begin among scientists, involve scientists and repeatedly appeal to scientific principles to claim moral, and eventually political, authority – and it inevitable leads to exploitation. The same thing happens in the episode, which I must say ends on a very gratifying note.

Episode 7: [Mason’s Rats] No particular thoughts beyond the two impressions.

Episode 8: [In Vaulted Halls Entombed] One thing that many (but not all) horror productions fail to get is that it’s not the grotesque that really frightens us but that momentary but singularly immense shock of being faced with something that we never expected to face – to have our minds confront something that they can’t possibly conceive. Even more fundamentally, terror erupts when we need to fill in a blank in reality (or in a movie if we’ve suspended disbelief). The brain is a prediction engine, so when it has no reasonable options to choose from, it seems to go haywire, populating the blank with monsters lurking in the dark of our conscience. A production succeeds the moment it creates a suitable blank and forces us to admit that we can’t ignore it. But I’d say there’s one fear that’s even deeper, even more unsettling: the incomprehensible. It’s the blank that’s clearly been filed yet which evades complete comprehension. Hans Giger’s art captured this sensation wonderfully well as did H.P. Lovecraft’s lore of the Old Ones – but I experienced it most profoundly in the latter’s The Outsider. It’s the thing that you know and that you struggle to know, both at once – and it’s the sensation to which this episode builds up. Excellent stuff. Also: “Embrace the suck” – a line worth remembering.

Episode 9: [Jibaro] The internet suggests this was the most popular episode. I’m going to stick with In Vaulted Halls Entombed but only because of my fascination with the unknown. Without that, the fever-dream that is Jibaro would easily cut ahead. It brings together a “baroque” combination of “film and animation” and “dance and mythology” (source), a melancholy soundtrack and a story so replete with metaphors that it’s hard to come to one conclusion about it – and that apparently was also its maker’s intention. It’s shot through with greed but it doesn’t seem reasonable to stop there, with that conclusion, that Jibaro is a parable about one of the seven deadly sins. Instead, the tale seems to me to be about what how perfectly acceptable being our worst selves looks like (as its maker told Awn), how familiar the Knight and the Siren seem to us. We’ve seen them before, at least parts of them, in the people around us, in the people we read about.

Recommended reading: Alberto Mielgo’s Sci-Fi Short ‘Jibaro’ Is Not a Critique of Colonialism. Excerpt:

I don’t want to fall into the same trap as the readings I am criticizing and try and ‘pin down’ Jibaro into a single parable or message. Mielgo is not deliberately making a comment on Cervantes here. Rather, his short film, like his characters, is meant to ‘dance’. It spins on and through and around a variety of tropes, the central one being that of toxic relationships and the way these are both frightening and alluring. But the textual bed in which the deaf knight and the siren sleep together is less that of Spanish colonialism than that of Spanish mythology. The correspondences to the latter are much more precise.

The second impression: Many of the episodes seem to bear the echoes of episodes in LDR’s still-the-best season 1. Exit Strategies is obviously related to Three Robots, but the other episodes are connected more subtly. Night of the Mini Dead brings to mind Ice Age. Mason’s Rats brings to mind The Dump. In the Vaulted Halls Entombed brings to mind both Shape-Shifters and The Secret War. The Very Pulse of the Machine brings to mind Fish Night. Jibaro brings to mind Good Hunting (and The Witness in style of animation). Bad Travelling brings to mind Sonnie’s Edge. It’s hard to say if this was intentional (I’m being lazy and not googling), but it’s also hard to explain the raft of similarities. This said, the ultimate effect of LDR 1 was mind-expanding (Beyond the Aquila Rift and Zima Blue remain unmatched); LDR 2 was to remind us that LDR can also be bad; and LDR 3 is a contemplation of the costs of being good.

Featured image: A scene from Jibaro. Source: Netflix.

Hail the Royal Society

It’s an underappreciated form of our colonial hangover when a body like the Royal Society appoints its first Brazilian member since 1871 (on May 13) and almost everyone including the appointee talks about why the Society continues to be great instead of facing it with hard questions over why it didn’t elect Brazilian scientists into its ranks for 151 years and rejecting the deceptive honour of its admission. It’s a similar story with the Nobel Prizes: no women or no non-white persons win one for decades on end, so when the first exception appears on the scene, it’s because the prizes are great – not because the scientists were perfectly able to labour without the incentives presented by the prizes and certainly not because the prizes are an assertion of colonial power.

Why don’t the Royal Society or the Nobel Prizes – and for that matter any award-giving entity in India that coasts for decades without acknowledging the work of scientists of non-Brahmin caste denominations – suffer a reputational crisis when their prejudice is spotlighted by their own feeble and frequently meagre attempts to rectify it instead of enjoying a rhetoric suffused with praise for “doing the right thing”?

Prestige-awarding institutions like the Royal Society must be torn down as a rule of thumb – and we must simultaneously also strive to move past the idea that such institutions are necessary to move the needle in a world that will ultimately only perceive another reminder that prestige is relevant and valuable. This particular brand of iconoclasm is not easier to say and significantly more not-easier to do in our era of crises, when outspoken scientific consensus is a triply valuable thing and bodies like the Royal Society are seen as being necessary to birth, hold and present that consensus to the elite cadres of both science and society – the movers and shakers, as it were. “Hail the Nobel Prizes,” we say – “Raman has won a Nobel Prize” – “the state listens to Raman” – “let’s let Raman run a science institute” – “the institute is producing good work!” – “hail the Nobel Prizes,” we repeat. For example, the new Brazilian appointee to the Royal Society, climate scientist Carlos Nobre, told Reuters: “The Royal Society is giving international recognition to the risks that the Amazon faces. It’s an enormous risk that we could lose the greatest biodiversity and the biggest tropical forest on the planet.”

But from where I’m sitting, it’s easier to feel the weight of a history that precipitated the need for a Royal Society to return to the climate scientists of Brazil the self-evident relevance of their voices – as well as an elite institution piggybacking on the urgency of the defining crisis of the Anthropocene epoch to right a wrong that should, in fairness, have destroyed it long ago. Then again, I can’t fault Nobre himself because from his point of view he has acquired access to one more pedestal – one to which no other compatriot of his has access – from which to bring the world’s attention to the ruin of the Amazon. Or maybe I do, but not Nobre himself as much as the community of all scientists for not unionising (whether or not in the traditional sense) against the arbitrary selectivism of the Royal Society, et al.[1] and their campaigns of piecemeal restitution.

[1] It inherits the problems of everything from admission to well-funded science institutes to one’s ability to publish in ‘top’ journals to appointment in senior positions at research centres.

Why there’s no guarantee that Musk’s Twitter will resemble Dorsey’s

A lot of folks are saying they’re not going to leave Twitter, in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform, because Musk and its once and long-time CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey aren’t very different: both are billionaires, tech-bros, libertarian and pro-cryptocurrencies. And they say that they did okay under Dorsey, so why wouldn’t we under Musk? I find this argument to only be partly acceptable. The other part is really two parts.

First, Twitter under Dorsey is significantly different because he cofounded the platform and nurtured through a few years of relative quiescence, followed by a middle period and finally to the decidedly popular platform that it is today. (I joined Twitter in the middle period, in 2008, when it was hard to say if the next person you were going meet in real-life was be on Twitter. Today the converse is true.)

Musk, however, is inheriting a more matured platform, and one whose potential he believes hasn’t been “fulfilled”. I’m not sure what that means, and the things Musk has said on Twitter itself haven’t inspired confidence. Both men may be evil billionaires but setting aside the sorts of things Dorsey supports for a moment, you’ve got to admit he doesn’t have nearly the persona, the reputation and the cult-following that Musk does. These differences distinguish these men in significant ways vis-à-vis a social media platform – a beast that’s nothing like EVs, spaceflight or renewables.

(In fact, if Musk were to adopt an engineer’s approach to ‘fixing’ whatever he believes he’s wrong with Twitter, there are many examples of the sort of problematic solutions that could emerge here.)

The second part of the “Musk and Dorsey are pretty much the same” misclaim is that a) Musk is taking the company private and b) Musk has called himself a “free-speech absolutist”. I’m not a free-speech absolutist, in fact most of the people who have championed free speech in my circles are not. Free-speech absolutism is the view that Twitter (in this context) should support everyone’s right to free speech without any limitations on what they’re allowed to say. To those like me who reject the left-right polarisation in society today in favour of the more accurate pro-anti democracy polarisation, Twitter adopting Musk’s stance as policy would effectively recast attempts to curtail abuse and harrassment directed at non-conservative voices as “silencing the right”, and potentially allow their acerbic drivel to spread unchecked on the platform.

Running Twitter famously affected Dorsey. Unless we can be sure that the platform and its users will have the same effect on Musk, and temper his characteristic mercuriality, Twitter will remain a place worth leaving.

TV ads are becoming creepy

It began for me with the advertisements for vehicle tires. There was a relatively recent one in which Aamir Khan’s character does ridiculous things on the road, like driving down the wrong side like it was the right side, setting off firecrackers and spilling recklessly into it with a group of dancers at a wedding, in every case forcing people in vehicles to depend entirely on the performance of their tires and brakes to avoid injuring/killing someone.

Ads like this caricatured what we had internalised by then – that traffic discipline in urban India was such a lost cause that we, the people pining for this change, were better off adapting to the shenanigans of these supposedly intractable people instead.

In just the first three months of 2022, however, this cynicism towards change seems to have ballooned past the thin line between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ that the tire manufacturers pretended existed, with the manufacturers claiming to help the ‘us’. Instead, in many ads today, the companies are collectively one party, the ‘us’ from their points of view, and the rest of us the ‘them’.

This perspective seems to encourage consumers to give in to their inner cynics and cowards, as the case may be, and submit to what the companies have to offer. Four examples come swiftly to mind.

There is Magicpin, in which people brawling on the street – and in a subsequent edition a suit-clad man riding in on a battle tank – politely ask a befuddled onlooker to point his camera instead at nearby stores where he can shop at a discount.

The second is Swiggy’s Instamart, a prompt delivery service for grocery-store items, à la Zomato’s promise to deliver some foods in 10 minutes and a similar offering on Dunzo’s part. In the Instamart ad, a fellow watching TV on his couch is startled when his daughter starts to scream because they’re out of chocolate-flavoured cereal. The fellow quickly orders the thing on Instamart and a “delivery executive” shows up a minute later at their doorstep. The daughter promptly stops crying.

Such children are frankly annoying, but not more than their parents, who refuse to discipline their kids in public places and who often seem to believe their kids are entitled to their tantrums, and the irritation of everyone else around. And the fact that Swiggy believes it is healthy and desirable to encourage such behaviour, by catering to such life choices as quickly as possible, is deeply disheartening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmU4U3WR6LI

Then there is Rapido – Uber with motorbikes. Bikes already exist on Indian roads, sure, but they are often driven the way Aamir Khan’s character does in the tire ad above. And Ranveer Singh, Rapido’s brand ambassador in Hindi, makes a show of how bikes can squeeze in the gaps in traffic and reach their destinations faster. This isn’t driving behaviour we need to encourage: it is in fact part of what makes driving on city roads so harrowing and unsafe.

In the Telugu version of Rapido’s ad, Tollywood star Allu Arjun – to quote from The News Minute’s article – says “state buses take too long, and that using a Rapido bike is faster and safer. The actor tells a customer that travelling by a crowded public transport bus would mince a commuter who is like a regular dosa into the stuffings of a masala dosa, suggesting that using Rapido is more convenient”. This outright promotes civic disengagement from the task of improving public transport.

Finally, there is the crowning jewel: the ad for PharmEasy, in which three clones of Aamir Khan turn up one by one at the house of a desperate middle-aged man about to rush out to a pharmacy in pouring rain late at night. But he opens a window, and there’s a clone; he opens a door and there’s a clone; he opens a hatch in the middle of the floor in the living room and there’s a clone. All bear boxes of medicines and ask the man why he feels the need to step out at all.

The poor chap, now trembling, backs down and says he won’t step out again. As the lightning storm continues to rage outside and the man browses the PharmEasy app on his phone, the three box-bearing clones break into an elated dance. If this isn’t a home invasion, what is?

Consider all four ads together and what they seem to imply for what these companies imagine their potential consumers’ lives to be like: don’t step out, get everything on your app, expect deliveries in 10 minutes, throw ear-splitting tantrums if you don’t; if you do need to get out, stick to shopping at all costs – but at discounts – and get to these shops in taxis prepared to make the experience of other commuters miserable. And for your own good, don’t try to do better.