Category: Culture

Lord of the Rings Day

Today is Lord of the Rings Day (previous editions: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.). Every year, I spend a part of March 25 thinking about the continued relevance of this book; even though this may have diminished significantly, it remains for better or for worse the work that founded modern fantasy literature (in the English language) and which subsequent works sidestepped, superseded or transcended. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, thinking about Lord of the Rings has largely been, to me at least, thinking about fantasy as escape, but this year, it may represent something else – and in doing so also become a little bit more relevant in my own imagination.

This year, on this day, war is on all our minds. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic Middle-Earth saga, of which Lord of the Rings is one important part, there are many, many wars. The fundamental themes of Lord of the Rings, the greatness of friendship and the triumph of good over evil, are themselves consummated by victories in battles, a motif that Tolkien establishes in the (fictitious) history of Middle-Earth from the very beginning itself. Some of them come immediately to mind, for being more poignant than the others: the Battle of Sudden Flame, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the War of Wrath and the Defence of Osgiliath. Three of these four conflicts are tragedies.

In the Battle of Sudden Flame (‘Dagor Bragollach’ in Sindarin), Morgoth, the primordial antagonist in Tolkien’s works, breaks the siege around his fortress by the high-elven Noldor and marches forth with a great army, including the first dragon, to reassert his power in the region of Beleriand. Shortly before this battle, some of the Noldor had contemplated an assault of their own to quell Morgoth once and for all, but didn’t proceed for want of consensus. Most of the Noldor believed the siege alone, which by then had lasted over four centuries, would suffice and that Morgoth would fade away. But after the Battle of Sudden Flame, Morgoth rose and rose in power.

Two decades after the siege was broken, many of the high-elves, dwarves and Earthlings – led by Maedhros – united once more under his banner, inspired by the heroics of Beren and Luthien against the kingdom of Morgoth, and intended to take the fight to him instead of, as with the siege, letting him muster his forces. But through a network of spies and turncoats, Morgoth got early wind of the Union of Maedhros. This led to the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (‘Nirnaeth Arnoediad’), in which the Noldor were decimated, by the end of which Morgoth had an iron grip on the continent’s north, and had only three kingdoms left to challenge him: Gondolin (which had secluded itself anyway), Doriath and Nargothrond.

Some six centuries, and many interim epics, later, Eärendil pleads with the Valar – the angelic peoples called the “Powers of the World” in the Middle-Earth mythos – to help the elves and the humans defeat Morgoth. They agree, thus the Host of Valinor is assembled, and thus begins the War of Wrath, which by one account lasted fully 40 years. The exchange of power is so great in this time that Beleriand itself is reshaped and many of its mountains and plains are drowned by newly recast rivers and seas. Morgoth himself is defeated and cast into the “Timeless Void” (that favourite place of fantasy authors in which to consign villains who have become too mighty for anyone’s good).

His lieutenant, the necromancer Thû, however escapes and hides in east Middle-Earth, eventually creating the dreaded kingdom of Mordor and himself becoming known as Sauron. The Defence of Osgiliath transpires when Sauron is preparing to assault Gondor, a great kingdom of humans on Middle-Earth. Osgiliath, by this time, is an outpost with a military garrison. A small scratch force from Gondor sets out to prevent Sauron’s forces from occupying Osgiliath, and fails miserably. One of the casualties is Faramir, younger son of Denethor, the steward of Gondor. Faramir, as captain of the party, sets out to defend Osgiliath though he knows he can’t, that he may even die, simply because Denethor had wished Faramir had died in battle instead of his older, and favoured, son, Boromir.

I was hoping in the course of this recollection to find parallels to Russia’s war in Ukraine. I don’t know what they might be. However, the battles of Beleriand – especially the ones the ‘good guys’ lost – in Tolkien’s telling are not about underestimating Morgoth’s might or miscalculating one’s own, even when they are. They are ultimately animated by the spirit of resisting a mindless tyrant irrespective of the outcome. It’s certainly folly to found one’s attacks on flawed strategies, but in the face of an enemy who can’t be reasoned with and who just won’t back down, there are times when waiting for the numbers to add up, for the skies to clear, for the stars to align can be more indefensible. Ukraine may not have wanted this war but it must fight anyway to resist Russia, and Vladimir Putin.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration.

John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy: And Chapters on Socialism, 1848

Happy Lord of the Rings Day!

Featured image: ‘Maps of Tolkien world‘, tamburix, CC-BY-SA 2.0.

A Brahmin wedding

I was at a wedding this weekend. It had a distinct Omelas-like quality throughout. For most of the elders present, it was an oru naal koothu — a single-day celebration that has been many weeks in the making. But the bride, whom I knew, didn’t want to get married, especially to the groom her parents had picked out without her consent. I was told they had gone ahead anyway because the bride’s parents had liked the groom’s parents, and the two families had liked each other and wished to be related.

When the bride insisted, as best she could, that the wedding be postponed (or the groom be replaced — not a bad idea considering this was a man who believed sincerely that the women who spoke out in #MeToo were doing so only for attention), she was first met with a barrage of emotional blackmail: “think of what will happen to your mother”, “your grandmother will have a heart attack”, etc. — followed later by her father insisting that she provide a good enough reason, only to dismiss each one (‘don’t like the groom’, ‘don’t want to get married now’) promptly as not being “good enough”.

The wedding itself was a deeply patriarchal affair — an upper-caste conclave in which its members asserted their caste and “culture”, made a display of observing and preserving ancient traditions, brought two families together by unanimously waylaying the life of one woman. Like the story of the Mahabharata seems so different from that pieced together in Yuganta, viewing a Brahmin wedding through the eyes of an unwilling bride can reveal a very different picture from the wedding that everyone else experiences. It is no different from a tradition that her parents, the groom and his parents, and the extended family on both sides — enabled by a swarm of priests — further using the body and soul of one woman, with or without her willing participation. Good wedding ceremonies with willing participants exist, but only the bad ones truly demonstrate their totalitarian character.

For example, furthering the agony are the rituals immediately preceding the knot-tying, in which the bride and the groom are led through a series of joint activities by the priests and the extended family. They are apparently modelled on the rituals of two gods who got married: sitting on a swing together, exchanging garlands while perched on the shoulders of their fathers and brothers, and so forth. Surely these sound like the activities of a pair of people excited about getting married; to force them on a bride who has been brought there by (emotional and social) force has really no meaning, other than to reinforce the importance for all these rituals of a pliant woman, the ultimate vessel of Brahmin assertion.

The instrumentalisation of the bride and her functions begins in fact from the make-up — slathered on the bride, who also has to don silk sarees and other ornaments with no regard for the Chennai weather, while the groom stands next to her in a cotton shirt, a cotton veshti and the customary streak of vermillion on his forehead. She also has to sit through more rituals than him, some of which happen late at night or early in the day (she was woken up at 2 am for the make-up); cannot know when or what she can eat, or if she can visit the canteen or must have food brought to her; and, of course, she is expected to smile at all times for the cameras. While the matrimonial traditions of the families of the bride and the groom overlap for the most part, there are a few differences – yet all of them impose an equally unforgiving information asymmetry on the bride.

Meanwhile, the priests are chanting something in Sanskrit, a language no one in the room understands. It is hard to know what they are saying and why, but even as they are, there is another man with a bag full of cash standing just behind them, possibly belonging to the bride’s side, handing bills to them as part of rituals that require people to exchange wealth or give it away to others — i.e. to more relatives or to the priests themselves. There are some new observances as well, and while everyone is keen to observe them, no one asks the priests of their provenance or meaning. If they’ve been invented, it seems they will be observed — like the bride’s father having to carry a plateful of cash (intended to be donated to a temple) out of the room. They’re clearly nothing other than more lines drawn to distinguish between those whom the priests claim are “real Brahmins” and those who aren’t, and charging a fee to do so.

As the groom tied the three knots and everyone in the hall blessed them, and came away smiling, the wedding ended. Everyone was happy, nodding at each other in an implicit acknowledgment of having brought another conclave to a successful finish. The bride and groom were still onstage, next to a “holy fire”, spelling out the remainder of their prayers. The camera crew was taking a break, the relatives were heading in droves to the canteen, and the bride had to take a quick break in between as her new mother-in-law approached her with a make-up kit.

Featured image credit: Viktor Talashuk/Unsplash.

Climate change, like quantum physics, will strain language

One of the defining features of quantum mechanics is that it shows up human language, and thought supported by that language, to be insufficient and limited. Many of the most popular languages of the world, including Tamil, Hindi and English, are linear. Their script reads in a line from one end of the page to the other, and their spoken words compile meaning based on a linear sequence and order of words. It is possible to construe these meanings in turn only after word after another, through the passage of time. If time stops, so does language.

Such linearity is incompatible with the possibilities in quantum mechanics for simultaneity, in both space and time. Quantum superposition is not exactly a system in two states at once but in a linear combination of states, but without the specialised knowledge, language can only offer a slew of metaphors, each of which hews asymptotically closer to the actual thing but never captures it in its entirety. Quantum entanglement, similarly, causes one particle to affect another instantaneously, over hundreds of kilometres, defying both the universal information speed limit and the ability of human minds that remain constrained by that limit, as well as a human language that has no place for, and therefore can’t identify, simultaneity. All we have something after another, effect after cause, the first step and then the second, and never both at once.

Indeed, the notion of causality – that cause will always precede effect – is one of the load-bearing pillars of reality as we strive to understand it.

But while quantum mechanics is so kooky, it is also excusably so, considering it represents a paradigm shift of sorts from the truths of classical physics (it plays by different rules, that is). It is almost simply natural that our languages do not encompass the possibilities afforded by a phenomenon we didn’t encounter until the 20th century, and still don’t except through specialised apparatuses and controlled experimental conditions.

However, there is another system of things that plays largely by the rules of classical physics – our interactions with and formalisation of which paralleled the evolution of our languages – and yet increasingly defies the ability of our languages to describe it faithfully: climate change.

True, weather and climate patterns include aspects of chaos theory, which explains how minute differences in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes. But chaos theory still only takes recourse to non-linear effects, which, while harder to conceive of than their linear counterparts, are easier than to grapple with non-locality and non-causality. Of course, climate change doesn’t violate any of these or other similarly foundational principles, yet it complicates interactions in the global weather system and intensifies the interactions between the elements and human culture, technology and biology – both to such a degree that they have consequences both different and new.

For example, to quote from an article The Wire Science published this morning:

Climate change will further exacerbate marine heatwave risks in the [Indian subcontinent] region, according to [Ming] Feng. This could suppress coastal upwelling – the process by which strong winds move surface water in the ocean, permitting water from below to surface – and reduce the amount of oxygen in the water. This in turn could have a “great impact” on fisheries.

A big part of climate change’s (extant as well as impending) devastation is in the form of surprise – that is, of the emergent phenomena that it makes possible. Expounded most famously by the brilliant physicist Philip W. Anderson, especially in his 1972 essay ‘More Is Different’, emergence is the idea that we cannot fully describe a large system only by studying its smallest components. Put another way, larger systems have emergent properties and behaviour that are more than the sum of the ways in which systems’ most fundamental parts interact. Studying climate change is important because the additional complexity it imbues to existing weather systems are ripe with emergent effects, each with new consequences and perhaps more effects of their own.

At the same time, the bulk of these effects, taken together, anticipate such a large volume of possibilities that even though they certainly won’t defy reality’s, and human languages’, assumption that causality is true, they will push it to extreme limits. Two events are still at liberty to happen at the same time, each with a distinct and preceding cause, but even as the ways we communicate wait for cause before composing effect, climate change will confront us with a tsunami of changes – each one reinforcing, screening or ignoring the other, rapidly branching out into a larger, denser forest of changes, until the cause is only relevant as an historical artefact in our grammar of the natural universe.

Art is something for cryptocurrencies to con

Joe Dunthorne penned an amusing article in London Review earlier this month about encountering a fake account of him on Instagram, whose user promoted the real Dunthorne’s poems and book. Dunthorne begins by citing Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, in which a doppelgänger usurps the life of a nondescript young man named Yakov Golyadkin by taking over his life and social circles. The original is eventually confined to an asylum because everyone in his life, such as it was, prefers the new fellow.

Dunthorne himself quests for the identity of the person impersonating him, only to find, through many twists and turns, that it is a guy who constantly changes his identity as he goes about scamming people to invest in cryptocurrencies by posing as someone whose work doesn’t directly involve these digital entities in the first place.

It’s a fascinating con – although not the one Dunthorne may believe it is, as he writes: “Then there was the one where scammers tricked people into investing $2.7 million in cartoons of apes. In fact, this was a double scam, convincing buyers first that the images were timeless works of digital art and then that they should pay huge amounts of money to an organisation that didn’t exist.” Dismissing these investments because they’re directed at companies that “don’t exist” in the physical realm is naïve. Nonetheless, while Dunthorne ponders if a random stranger has done a Yakov Golyadkin on him, there is a con here – one that brings to mind a post by a user named kevbrinx on Tumblr:

Tumblr is known for being a place where creativity happens because it’s cool, it’s fun, it’s different and difficult! “I will make it because I can”.

The majority of NFT artists I’ve seen don’t share the same mentality. And that is worrying.

I’m sure out there are many works of art that aren’t made by a computer and have been created with the intention to inspire. However, just like it has been demonstrated on Twitter, who buys wouldn’t do it just to showcase their precious possessions?

Where is the value in that?

It might be not what NFTs have been created for originally, but right now they represent vanity and greed to many. Expecially when there are other safer ways to support artists economically.

…

“The focus of NFTs is not actually the art”.

The post is addressed to Matt Mullenweg, the cofounder of WordPress. Mullenweg’s response is ambiguous, noncomittal:

The list of things to do before we got to anything NFT-related is super-duper long. I don’t share all your worries about NFTs, but I am not fanboying them. The only NFTs I hold myself right now are Wapuu related: https://web3wp.com/

If Mullenweg doesn’t see the problem that already exists, he’s not going to solve it.

Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a (disagreeable) way to fund art, and therefore supposedly support artists, using the Trojan horse of NFTs. (For a detailed yet accessible detailed explanation of this concept, see here.) Dunthorne’s story illustrates that cryptocurrency evangelists – including scammers – are looking for ways to promote it without letting their prospects be tainted by the conflict of interest of how much they have to gain: lots of money, and the advantage of being invisible to law enforcement – in exchange for allowing struggling artists to enter the cool cryptocurrencies circuit.

But what Dunthorne leaves unsaid is that the modus operandus of his scammer is indistinguishable from those who claim they’re legitimately supporting artists by trading their work using cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Separating the item in question from the value of it that’s being traded may seem virtuous, but it’s really the essence of the scam: art becomes another financial asset, one that the rich and the powerful are already familiar with. Art here is being used to give cryptocurrencies something to do, and to look any bit respectable while doing it. But breaking into this art-trading system only legitimises the rituals of the moneyed and renders art, and its makers, inseparable from their limited representation in the plutosphere.

The purpose is money, and profiteering, not the art itself or the issues embedded therein. The antics of the cryptocurrency-proponent Metakovan last year, buying an NFT of a collage of pictures for $69 million, popularised the concept and set this ship sailing, but in his case itself, as I wrote:

Metakovan’s move was ostensibly about getting the world’s attention and making it think about racism in, for some reason, art patronage. And it seems opportunistic more than anything else, a “shot fired” to be able to improve one’s own opportunities for profit in the crypto space instead of undermining the structural racism and bigotry embedded in the whole enterprise. This is a system which owes part of its current success to the existence of social and economic inequalities, which has laboured over the last few decades to exploit cheap labour and poor governance in other, historically beleaguered parts of the world to entrench technocracy and scientism over democracy and public accountability.

To quote Rosanna McLaughlin of The White Review:

The most shocking aspect of the NFT to the art intelligentsia is its brazen entanglement with finance. Trading art has always been a pastime of the wealthy. Much of what counts for art history consists of flattering portrayals of the rich and powerful, and artists have long been expected to perform what Tom Wolfe called the Art Mating Ritual – attracting the interest of wealthy patrons and conservative institutions, while simultaneously presenting as Bohemians and renegades. Yet with the NFT, the distinction between art and asset seems to have disappeared. In place of the curated exhibition is the auction website; symbols of the market have seeped into the aesthetic language of the art itself. Prices, not ideas, dominate.

Despite the promise of “art for everyone”, the final destination of the NFT might not actually be art. Art may simply be a useful way to advertise the possibilities of a new technology. “I’ve done everything from fashion, fragrances to endorsements,” Paris Hilton says, adding that NFTs are another way for “fans to have a piece of me”. As well as working with the rapper Ice Cube, Jones recently made an NFT for the whisky company Macallan, to be auctioned alongside a very expensive cask of scotch. This, it seems, is a taste of where NFTs may be heading: not a radical new model for trading art, but a digital marketing bauble.

Anil Dash, the CEO of Glitch:

Meanwhile, most of the start-ups and platforms used to sell NFTs today are no more innovative than any random website selling posters. Many of the works being sold as NFTs aren’t digital artworks at all; they’re just digital pictures of works created in conventional media.

…

There’s only one exception to the lack of interest in blockchain apps today: apps for trading cryptocurrencies themselves. What results is an almost hermetically sealed economy, whose currencies exist only to be traded and become derivatives of themselves. If you squint, it looks like an absurd art project.

After a decade of whiplash-inducing changes in valuation, billions of dollars are now invested in cryptocurrencies, and the people who have made those bets can’t cash in their chips anywhere. They can’t buy real estate with cryptocurrency. They can’t buy yachts with it. So the only rich-person hobby they can partake in with their cryptowealth is buying art. And in this art market, no one is obligated to have any taste or judgment about art itself. If NFT prices suddenly plunge, these investors will try buying polo horses or Davos tickets with cryptocurrencies instead. Think of a kid who’s spent the day playing Skee-Ball and now has a whole lot of tickets to spend. Every toy looks enticing. NFTs have become just such a plaything.

Finally, Laurie Rojas, cofounding editor of Caesura, on the inevitability of NFTs because of art’s foregone relationship with capitalism:

Commentators, however, actively neglect the lesson learned since the late ’60s that trying to escape art’s commodification is futile, or merely a pretense, and rarely reflect on the artwork’s connection to capitalist social relations. The connection between these two tendencies — that art’s value is determined/critiqued by commodity “fetishism” or that art’s value is determined/critiqued by socio-political position-taking — is deeper than it appears at first glance. These “critical” tendencies express how much Art has become caught between being an end in itself and a means to an end. NFTs are the latest phenomenon to express this.

Even with all the financial speculation around NFTs, the point that Art’s value is determined within the parameters of a society in which commodification is the dominant form of social relations (i.e., capitalism) has too easily been abandoned for poorly defined neologisms. Rarely is there a reflection on the relation of the artwork — its form, technique, beauty, contemplativeness, incomprehensibility, and what have you — to the increasingly barbaric commodity form.

Has the art world gone mad? No. This is business as usual.

Featured image credit: Karolina Grabowska/Pexels.

Streaming now: the 24/7 human centipede

You could be easily forgiven for not having watched, or even knowing about, the 2009 film The Human Centipede. If you hadn’t heard about this film earlier, its title can be a reverse-spoiler: you probably think a ‘human centipede’ is a twisted metaphor for some detestable aspect of the human condition, only to discover that it is in fact grossly literal. In the film, a surgeon kidnaps three people and stitches them together, anus to mouth, to form a centipede, each segment of which is an adult human. The film’s writer and director Tom Six released two more films with the same premise in 2011 and 2015, each more deranged than the last. A friend who managed to watch the third film, simply called The Human Centipede: Final Sequence, said the centipede itself might have been the least objectionable thing about it.

I had occasion to recall these films when, late last month, the Bigg Boss franchise launched Bigg Boss Ultimate (in Tamil), a reality TV show that follows the usual template of a bunch of celebrities being confined in a purpose-built house fit with cameras, supplied with all amenities, and directed by the unseen ‘Bigg Boss’ to perform various tasks together as viewers watch and vote to evict celebrities they dislike from the house. The last person still in the house wins a lot of money. But Bigg Boss Ultimate has an additional ‘feature’: instead of being edited into 60-minute episodes that are released in one or two installments every week, it is live-streamed 24/7 (with a day’s deference) on the OTT platform Disney+ Hotstar. It’s an offset but continuous relay of the participants’ lives, with everything from them lazing around chit-chatting to having loud arguments being watched by lakhs of viewers in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere. The mind boggles at what so many people consider to be entertainment, but it boggles more at one factoid that I learnt many years ago and its odd, unsettling resonance the premise of Bigg Boss Ultimate.

The parent concept for the ‘Bigg Boss’ franchise is the Dutch TV franchise ‘Big Brother’, conceived in 1997 by Dutch media tycoon Johannes de Mol, Jr. and produced and aired as a TV show from 1999. And one of the very first directors of this show, which ran for six seasons, was Tom Six. Six has called his three centipede films First Sequence, Full Sequence and Final Sequence. In 2016, he stitched the three films together together and released what he called Complete Sequence – a “movie centipede” in which each film followed the next while being able to stand alone in its own right. Paralleling his efforts, the ‘Bigg Boss’ franchise has now evolved (or devolved?) into an unending broadcast from the house of celebrities. What might have been a single weekly episode earlier now blends seamlessly into the next one, stretching into a 1,700-hour centipede of celebrity culture and voyeurism.

Make no mistake: as vapid as the show is, it’s also a pinnacle of consumerism. It’s hard to watch any segment of Complete Sequence without at least retching, a reaction honed by evolution to keep our bodies away from things that might make us sick or kill us. But Bigg Boss Ultimate has created an analogous centipede for the human psyche, and has convinced people that it’s’ a harmless, even desirable, way to bide their time.

Featured image: Tom Six in June 2013. Credit: Nigeldehond/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Marie Curie: An icon or ‘in the way’?

Who would have been the most iconic woman physicist of all time if the Nobel Prizes didn’t exist? In 2017, Science published an article by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Marie Curie. I got to it today because of this tweet:

One of the most well-known woman physicists and scientists – if not the most well-known – of the post-industrial era is Marie Curie. This is due in large part to the fact that she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (physics, 1903), the first woman to win any Nobel Prize, the first person as well as the first woman to win the Nobel Prize twice (chemistry, 1911) and in two different fields.

As awesome as this roster of accomplishments sounds, they were all manufactured. The Nobel Prizes create prestige by being selective: they pick awardees for a prize after rejecting hundreds of equally eligible candidates for arbitrary reasons. One important reason is that potential laureates have to be nominated and are then considered by a committee of ‘luminaries’ behind closed doors. Both the nomination and the deliberation have historically been dominated by men, so as such few women were nominated in the first place and even fewer made it to the shortlist, if at all.

Ultimately, using the Nobel Prizes to describe “iconic” scientists forces us to inherit the Nobel Prizes’ prejudices. As a people, do we want to assemble a list of iconic scientists – members of society that were shaped by our collective morals and aspirations, and worked among us, often struggling through shared problems – that is assailed by the flaws that beset the Nobel Prizes? I assume the answer is ‘no’.

While Marie Curie may deserve her laurels for all the notable work that she did, we must remember that notability is like a fraction: the numerator is that individual’s contribution and the denominator is the background of achievements against which we examine it. The Nobel Prizes have horribly skewed the denominator in favour of men and of pseudo-signifiers of notability, like publishing in certain journals at certain times from certain countries.

Marie was the first woman to record a clutch of achievements vis-à-vis the Nobel Prizes, and all of them were the prize-giving committee’s failures – not Marie’s success. We don’t know how many other women everyone from the first nominators to the final committee overlooked. More importantly, we don’t know how many more women, and scientists of other genders, we the people ourselves overlooked, because we were too busy paying attention to the Nobel Prizes.

I can’t claim to speak for Marie Curie but I know it’s not fair to call her the “most iconic” on the back of a false distinction. As Hemmungs Wirtén wrote in her article:

Curie’s track record is well known. So far, the only woman twice awarded the Nobel Prize – her 1903 and 1911 distinctions in physics and chemistry, respectively – ensure her a permanent seat on the Mount Olympus of science. … The material that transformed Curie from person to persona comes to us largely via Eve Curie’s famous hagiography of her mother, Madame Curie. …

Recent years have seen this idealized version of Curie challenged by less-celebratory interpretations. In Julie Des Jardin’s The Madame Curie Complex, Curie is described as “a superhuman anomaly,” one who causes female scientists frustration by establishing unrealistic expectations of scientific accomplishment, rather than inspiring them to excel. … For some, Curie is simply in the way. “Stop talking about Marie Curie,” suggested Rachel Swaby in a piece in Wired in 2015. She casts too big a shadow, is too well known, and has become the one and only female scientist in the public imagination, Swaby argues. There is some merit to this argument.

Featured image: An edited photo of Marie Curie, c. 1920. Credit: Public domain.

‘Steps in the right direction’ are not enough

This is a step in the right direction, and the government needs to do more.

You often read articles that have this sentence, typically authored by experts who are writing about some new initiative of the Indian government. These articles are very easy to find after the government has made a slew of announcements – such as during the Union budget presentation.

These articles have the following structure, on average: introducing the announcement, a brief description of what the announcement is about, comments about its desirability, and finally what the government should do to improve (often the bottom 50% of the article).

There was a time when such articles could have been understood to be suggestions to the government. Some news publications like The Hindu and Indian Express have traditionally prided themselves on counting influential lawmakers among the readers of their op-ed pages and editorials. But almost no one could think this is still the case, at least vis-à-vis the national government.

The one in power since 2014, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has always done only what it wants, frequently (and perhaps deliberately, if its actions during the COVID-19 pandemic are anything to go by) to the exclusion of expert advice. And this government has launched many schemes, programmes, missions, etc. that are steps in the right direction, and that’s it. They have almost never become better with time, and certainly not because bona fide experts demanded it.

Some examples: Ayushman Bharat, KISAN, Swachh Bharat, Mudra Yojana and ‘Smart Cities’ (too many instances to cite). Most of these initiatives have been defined by lofty, even utopian, goals but lack the rigorous, accountable and integral implementation that these goals warrant. As such, the government’s PR and troll machineries simply spin the ministers’ announcements at the time they are made for media fodder, and move on.

To be sure, the government has some other initiatives it has worked hard to implement properly, such as ‘Make in India’ and the GST – a courtesy it has reserved for activities that contribute directly to industrialisation and economic growth, reflected in the fact that such growth has come in fits and starts, and has been limited to the richer.

So at this time, to laud “steps in the right direction” followed by suggestions to improve such initiatives is worse than a mistake: it is to flout an intentional ignorance of the government’s track record.

Instead, an article would be better if it didn’t give the government the benefit of the doubt, and criticised it for starting off on a weak note or for celebrating too soon.

Apart from making suggestions to the government, such articles have served another purpose: to alert their readers, the people, to what needs to happen for the initiatives in question to be deemed successful. So the experts writing them could also consider pegging their statements on this purpose – that is, communicating to their readers as to what components an initiative lacks and why, therefore, it would be premature to hope it will do good.

The persistence of NFTs

NFTs freak me out. One of the ways in which my grandmother lost touch with her daughter – my mother – was my mother’s generation’s access to and use of computers, smartphones and the internet. And one of the ways in which my mother and father are out of touch with my generation is digitisation: the amount of information, and ways to manipulate it and extract wealth from it, that has become virtual. And I’m becoming surer that NFTs will be one of the big ways in which I’ll lose touch with the generation following mine.

From my point of view, NFTs have two facets, one each for the physical and the digital worlds they span. NFTs are essentially digital, but their name itself – non-fungible tokens – indicates that they are the product of a time in which the physical, typified by the fungible, and the digital coexist but in which the fungibles are still more important, even as the non-fungible is starting to evolve its first ‘offline communities’. Such communities are perhaps the best indications there could be that something is worth noticing, even if it’s misguided or just culturally hollow.

The film (and the book, which I haven’t read) Ready Player One should quickly clarify how powerful and how liberating the non-fungible universe, the metaverse, can be, even though it’s very much an outcome fantasy, and NFTs are allowing people to crenellate around such possibilities. Yet I remain deeply sceptical of NFTs because they exist in a superposition of high energy-consumption, the socio-economic privileges of their proponents, the absence of socialist values in their development trajectories and, immutably, a soup of jargon that constantly keeps their principles out of reach of those who would like to debate them. (The last point is non-trivial: intended inexplicability is a common symptom of scams).

I’m aware that, with these vectors of scepticism, I’m also part of a global community that’s pushing back against the nebulous rhetoric that has enveloped NFT culture – a community animated by the obvious and considerable distance between the present as lived by countless people in the “Global South” and the future as those in New York and California are imagining it.

At the same time, I’ve also been sort of wary of what the essential motivation for the NFT culture and the metaversal tendencies more broadly might be. This picture isn’t immediately clear because both cryptocurrencies and the metaverse are the brainchildren of that white + libertarian + Silicon Valley + tech-bro space that has prided itself on its profiteering, technocratism, cynicism of politics and a unique brand of super-rationalism. So it’s hard to conclude that anything this group thinks is a good idea is more than a good idea to make more money.

On the flip side, the existence of communities around an asset as baffling as NFTs at least indicates the presence of a deeper angst, particularly among people of certain ages. What might this be?

I recently read an article by Ginevra Davis, published on January 21, that attempted a diagnosis:

Our generation is notable for our lack of a youth-led counterculture, or any coherent rebellion, at least not on the scale of the late 1960s. But this lack of open rebellion does not mean that we are more satisfied than previous generations, or that we have nothing to rebel against. We are by many measures poorer, sicker (mentally and physically), and have fewer close relationships than our parents or grandparents. But instead of running away to some proverbial California, we have mostly chosen to express our frustration in private, on the internet, where you can laugh at memes about major depression or wanting to kermit sewer slide from the safety of your bedroom.

In the NFT community, we are witnessing the logical conclusion of a generation that is so alienated, so profoundly unfulfilled, that they are considering abandoning the physical world altogether. At least the metaverse is something new—maybe somewhere they can be rich, or important.

Either this is really true or it’s what the NFT-evangelists are telling themselves. Either way, it’s led to the creation of a parallel dimension that apparently promises to quell the tension that inhabiting the physical world in the 21st century entails. But it’s probably what the evangelists are telling themselves because, for an observer at infinity, it’s very difficult to distinguish the mores of the wider cryptocurrency + metaverse community, especially the self-indulgence and consumerism, from those of the tech scene that this community is apparently tiring of (Metakovan’s eyebrow-raising purchase of that piece of art for $69 million comes to mind). In fact, it’s tempting to consider whether NFTs are the result of a people doubling down on a culture and worldview in search of a purpose that this culture and worldview have thus far failed to produce, that their angst is less the desperation to break out and more the desperation per se. Davis herself is more charitable in her conclusion:

In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” [Joan] Didion captured a moment in time; a small group of teenagers who tried to find meaning in psychedelics. But it was also one of the first major literary works documenting the broader phenomenon of American decadence, or cultural malaise in the face of unprecedented economic prosperity. In the fifty-odd years since “Slouching” was published, a diagnosis of “decadence” has become shorthand for a constellation of cultural neuroses plaguing Western countries, including technological stagnation, cultural repetition, sterility, and nihilism. Unlike in the 1960s, it no longer includes coping with unprecedented prosperity.

As I wandered through New York, I wondered what Didion would think of the festivities at NFT.NYC. Are the desires of NFT proponents to rebuild the world online the endgame of a fully stagnant society—a final detour into the absurd before we give up on progress for good? Or is the starry-eyed optimism of digital true believers a last stand against decadence?

…

I came away from NFT.NYC with a certain respect for the NFT community. They are not taking decadence lying down, and have found a way to revel in the absurdity.

I don’t know agree with her, of course. My principal point of disagreement is Davis’s use of the word “we” to refer apparently to all of us as one cohesive mass. But there are many wes here: on the ground, there are super-rich Americans, wannabe-rich Americans, white Americans, non-white Americans, immigrants; off the ground, there are people around the world that technically belong to the same generation but are operating in much less privileged socio-economic contexts, as well as others in the same context who are in turn further disprivileged by class, caste, race, gender, geography, leadership, etc.

On this multi-layered pyramid denoting many strata of a single generation of people, there are many, many things that people on the lower rungs have left to do – from exiting poverty to eliminating caste-based discrimination, from improving income equality to reducing carbon emissions – before the future looks bare enough to populate with NFTs. The only way a unified “we” makes sense is that we will all suffer the vision this vanishingly small group of wealthy and influential people has for a better future.

Review of a review: ‘Rocket Boys’ (2022)

Tanul Thakur has reviewed a series on SonyLIV called Rocket Boys for The Wire. I haven’t watched the show and don’t plan to, for want of time as well as because, reading Thakur’s review, I think I know enough about how the series depicts the work of Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Jehangir Bhabha vis-à-vis transforming India into a “scientific superpower” (Thakur’s words).

This said, I found some of the statements in Thakur’s review worth additional comments in their own right. For example, Thakur, and presumably Rocket Boys itself, says this duo’s goal was “scientific superpower” status, but this is not true. Neither man was interested in science and the goal of their work was never scientific. They pursued the use of technology for India’s betterment, in line with Nehru’s vision, but neither man aspired to technological superpower status per se either; more importantly, conflating their work with scientific work is detrimental to the public perception of science, especially what the people at large believe constitutes progress towards becoming a scientific superpower. Launching rockets and building nuclear reactors will never get us there – only the non-glamorous work of better funding and administering research and not expecting immediate results can. This distinction, rarefied though it may seem, leads to the second part of Thakur’s review that I’d like to address:

Even though the biopic has exploded as a sub-genre in Hindi cinema over the last decade, profiling a vast range of sportsmen, leaders, even gangsters, it has paid scant attention to Indian scientists. Such depictions are so rare that I remember watching something similar almost eight years ago (a National Award-winning documentary, The Quantum Indians, chronicling the lives of Raman, S.N. Bose and Meghnad Saha). So, Rocket Boys, centred on the personal and professional lives of Bhabha and Sarabhai, is a fresh and long-due departure.

The Quantum Indians, made by Raja Choudhury and released in 2013, had the ridiculous blurb that it concerned the work of three “forgotten” Indian scientists – whereas its subjects were the three most well-known Indian physicists: C.V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose and Meghnad Saha. The way we have forgotten these men is often at odds with the way we tend to remember them, which is true with Rocket Boys as well. In 2014, Thakur quoted Choudhury as saying: “In 2012, when the [Higgs] Boson particle was announced, there was no conversation on S.N. Bose in international media at all. That riled me a little.” The reason few invoked Bose in that context was because his work had nothing to do with the Higgs boson!

Now, Thakur’s axis with Rocket Boys is that the biopic genre in India has once again finally visited Indian scientists. But to repeat myself, it hasn’t: Sarabhai’s and Bhabha’s contributions weren’t as scientists but as technologists – but to be more accurate, they are best remembered as fine administrators. Both the Department of Atomic Energy and the institution that became ISRO shortly before Sarabhai’s death were the product of Bhabha’s and Sarabhai’s ability to properly define the problems they needed to solve, build good institutions, staff them with the right people, lead them with integrity and, of course, work with the political establishment to have them funded and supported.

Casting Sarabhai and Bhabha as scientists is to mischaracterise, and ultimately gloss over, the precise nature of their achievements; by extension, to recall them as scientists or their work as scientific at this point of time is to continue to believe technological progress will lead to scientific success. (It’s entirely possible that Rocket Boys paid attention to their work as administrators but, given the givens, I don’t have my hopes up.) And in my view this conflation negates this axis of the review: the Indian biopic genre, at least in Hindi, has yet to concern itself with Indian scientists.

Instead, I’d say (again, without having watched it) that Rocket Boys is of a piece with the heightened valorisation of the Indian spaceflight and nuclear power enterprises since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014. Modi has clearly celebrated India’s prowess on these fronts; he has also frequently sought to appropriate spaceflight achievements in particular to make himself and his party look more powerful, smarter, more decisive. In ISRO’s track record, Modi seems to have unfettered access to a slew of accomplishments that he has sought to attach to his own legacy.

As I wrote in my review of Mission Mangal (2019), the film “wouldn’t have been made if not for the nationalism surrounding it – the nationalism bestowed of late upon the Indian space programme by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the profitability bestowed upon nationalism by the business-politics nexus” that his government has fostered. Since 2016, I have also noticed (anecdotally) an uptick in the number of books and articles about the ‘golden’ years of the Indian space programme (which could have been a direct fallout of the prime minister’s view, which influences industry and culture). In the same period, and in a more thoroughly documented trend, ISRO has become more opaque, more petty and averse to failure in a way reminiscent of the Modi government itself. In 2019, ISRO also introduced a Vikram Sarabhai Award with a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh for articles that cast ISRO in positive light.

Taken together, it might be more useful to understand Rocket Boys as yet another manifestation of the “hamara ISRO mahaan” sentiment, especially since Thakur also writes that the series ultimately descends into a hagiography of Sarabhai and Bhabha (and Abdul Kalam) – than to consider it as a subject of the more-storied biopic genre.

Featured image: A still from ‘Rocket Boys’ (2022). Source: SonyLIV.

The new JNU VC’s statement has bad grammar. So?

I strongly disagree with some criticism that has emerged on Twitter against the new JNU vice-chancellor Santishree Pandit. The object of criticism is a statement that Pandit has apparently drafted and in which she states, broadly, what she considers to be her mandate. In response, BJP MP Varun Gandhi wrote:

Here are screenshots of tweets by two other people, both with a not-insubstantial number of followers on Twitter:

At the outset, while Pandit deserves the criticism that has come her way for her use of abusive language on Twitter against the country’s students and farmers, using the quality of the English language in the statement to deride her is unfair. I have two reasons.

First, listen to this talk (also embedded below) Pandit delivered in 2015: her diction is much better than her new statement would suggest. It suggests strongly that someone else wrote the statement and that Pandit simply signed off on it, as a formality.

Second, even if we assumed Pandit wrote the statement, or that the criticism of Varun Gandhi and others were really to be directed at the statement’s real author…

English is a difficult language to learn and use. Its grammar often has a mind of its own – typically in the form of what linguist Noam Chomsky has called opaque structures: turns of phrase that allow us to deduce nothing about their origins based on their composition itself (“trip the light fantastic” comes to mind; it means, of all things, to dance in a nimble way.)

There are word and sentence constructions in English into which someone who doesn’t read, write and speak the language regularly is unlikely to ever stumble. As such, the language is part deduction and part memorisation (sort of like biology), and unless someone claims to wish to succeed Mary Norris or Mary Beard, or wishes to draft law, criticising a person’s flawed use of the English language can only amount to a criticism of their lack of access to English-speaking habits, circles, etc., and in turn a criticism of either their inability or their unwillingness to have this access. And this is not a sin. In fact, I suspect that the statement’s author is more fluent in a different language than in English and that if that person had penned their statement in that language, it would have been much less grammatically iffy.

One may contend that the critics expect better from the vice-chancellor of JNU. What is this ‘better’? At the risk of affirming the consequent, let’s flip the argument such that it becomes: “A vice-chancellor of JNU must be able to string two sentences together in a grammatically correct way.” Why must this requirement be met?

There is a presumption here, however slight, that the goodness of Pandit’s knowledge of the English language is an indication of her being unfit for the job, or more generally that it could be a proxy for the many, many things that count towards literacy, not to mention her prowess as a teacher and her familiarity with the subject matter. (Before her appointment, Pandit was a professor of political science at the Savitribhai Phule Pune University.)

If the requirement must be met nonetheless, should we subject all future vice-chancellors to this ‘test’, to have them demonstrate their literacy? Should we also extend these tests to the heads of other important institutions – such as, say, S. Somanath of ISRO or health minister Mansukh Mandaviya? Pandit works at a university where many classes are conducted in English and where English is also an important language of administration – but this is easily true of ISRO and the health ministry as well. Most extant knowledge of space science, engineering studies, medical science and Indian public administration exist in English.

Attacking Pandit’s grammar could in effect set up a requirement for vice-chancellorship that could easily say nothing at all about the appointee’s competency. Pandit’s statement expresses itself without confusion and, given the context, its real author likely didn’t have and/or enlist the assistance of other people who could fix the grammatical mistakes (it’s entirely possible they didn’t check for grammatical mistakes and/or that they believed that they wouldn’t matter to her intended readers).

In fact, I appreciate that the statement dispenses with appearances and seems to come straight from Pandit’s or another author’s desk without having visited a PR unit in between. If such a PR team had helped draft the statement and we all hadn’t discovered today that her English isn’t perfect, we wouldn’t have lost any bit of the information we actually need to scrutinise her Twitter comments and her vice-chancellorship – as much as we haven’t gained anything today by knowing that Pandit is okay with using “would” instead of “will”.

Ultimately, the only criticism that makes sense here, assuming someone else did draft Pandit’s statement, and if that person’s job is to draft statements, then a) they should do better, and b) Pandit should read public statements before signing them. If she doesn’t, that signals another kind of problem.

Featured image: Santishree Pandit delivering her 2015 talk. Source: YouTube.