Tag: nationalism

Review: ‘Mission Mangal’ (2019)

This review assumes Tanul Thakur’s review as a preamble.

There’s the argument that ISRO isn’t doing much by way of public outreach and trust in the media is at a low, and for many people – more than the most reliable sections of the media can possibly cover – Bollywood’s Mission Mangal could be the gateway to the Indian space programme. That we shouldn’t dump on the makers of Mission Mangal for setting up an ISRO-based script and Bollywoodifying it because the prerogative is theirs and it is not a mistake to have fictionalised bits of a story that was inspirational in less sensationalist ways.

And then there is the argument that Bollywood doesn’t function in a vacuum – indeed, anything but – and that it should respond responsibly to society’s problems by ensuring its biographical fare, at least, maintains a safe distance from problematic sociopolitical attitudes. That while creative freedom absolves artists of the responsibility to be historians, there’s such a thing as not making things worse, especially through an exercise of the poetic license that is less art and more commerce.

The question is: which position does Mission Mangal justify over the other?

I went into the cinema hall fully expecting the movie to be shite, but truth be told, Mission Mangal hangs in a trishanku swarga between the worlds of ‘not bad’ and ‘good’. The good parts don’t excuse the bad parts and the bad parts don’t drag the good parts down with them. To understand how, let’s start with the line between fact and fiction.

Mission Mangal‘s science communication is pretty good. As a result of the movie’s existence, thousands more people know about the gravitational slingshot (although the puri analogy did get a bit strained), line-of-sight signal transmission, solar-sailing and orbital capture now. Thousands more kind-of know the sort of questions scientists and engineers have to grapple with when designing and executing missions, although it would pay to remain wary of oversimplification. Indeed, thousands more also know – hopefully, at least – why some journalists’ rush to find and pin blame at the first hint of failure seems more rabid than stringent. This much is good.

However, almost everyone I managed to eavesdrop on believed the whole movie to be true whereas the movie’s own disclaimer at the start clarified that the movie was a fictionalised account for entertainment only. This is a problem because Mission Mangal also gets its science wrong in many places, almost always for dramatic effect. For just four examples: the PSLV is shown as a two-stage rocket instead of as a four-stage rocket; the Van Allen belt is depicted as a debris field instead of as a radiation belt; solar radiation pressure didn’t propel the Mars Orbiter Mission probe on its interplanetary journey; and its high-gain antenna isn’t made of a self-healing material.

More importantly, Mission Mangal gets the arguably more important circumstances surrounding the science all wrong. This is potentially more damaging.

There’s a lot of popular interest in space stuff in India these days. One big reason is that ISRO has undertaken a clump of high-profile missions that have made for easy mass communication. For example, it’s easier to sell why Chandrayaan 2 is awesome than to sell the AstroSat or the PSLV’s fourth-stage orbital platform. However, Mission Mangal sells the Mars Orbiter Mission by fictionalising different things about it to the point of being comically nationalistic.

The NASA hangover is unmistakable and unmistakably terrible. Mission Mangal‘s villain, so to speak, is a senior scientist of Indian origin from NASA who doesn’t want the Mars Orbiter Mission to succeed – so much so that the narrative often comes dangerously close to justifying the mission in terms of showing this man up. In fact, there are two instances when the movie brazenly crosses the line: to show up NASA Man, and once where the mission is rejustified in terms of beating China to be the first Asian country to have a probe in orbit around Mars. This takes away from the mission’s actual purpose: to be a technology-demonstrator, period.

This brings us to the next issue. Mission Mangal swings like a pendulum between characterising the mission as one of science and as one of technology. The film’s scriptwriters possibly conflated the satellite design and rocket launch teams for simplicity’s sake, but that has also meant Mission Mangal often pays an inordinate amount of attention towards the mission’s science goals, which weren’t very serious to begin with.

This is a problem because it’s important to remember that the Mars Orbiter Mission wasn’t a scientific mission. This also shows itself when the narrative quietly, and successfully, glosses over the fact that the mission probe was designed to fit a smaller rocket, and whose launch was undertaken at the behest of political as much as technological interests, instead of engineers building the rocket around the payload, as might have been the case if this had been a scientific mission.

Future scientific missions need to set a higher bar about what they’re prepared to accomplish – something many of us easily forget in the urge to thump our chests over the low cost. Indeed, Mission Mangal celebrates this as well without once mentioning the idea of frugal engineering, and all this accomplishes is to cast us as a people who make do, and our space programme as not hungering for big budgets.

This, in turn, brings us to the third issue. What kind of people are we? What is this compulsion to go it alone, and what is this specious sense of shame about borrowing technologies and mission designs from other countries that have undertaken these missions before us? ‘Make in India’ may make sense with sectors like manufacturing or fabrication but whence the need to vilify asking for a bit of help? Mission Mangal takes this a step further when the idea to use a plastic-aluminium composite for the satellite bus is traced to a moment of inspiration: that ISRO could help save the planet by using up its plastic. It shouldn’t have to be so hard to be a taker, considering ISRO did have NASA’s help in real-life, but the movie precludes such opportunities by erecting NASA as ISRO’s enemy.

But here’s the thing: When the Mars Orbiter Mission probe achieved orbital capture at Mars at the film’s climax, it felt great and not in a jingoistic way, at least not obviously so. I wasn’t following the lyrics of the background track and I have been feeling this way about missions long before the film came along, but it wouldn’t be amiss to say the film succeeded on this count.

It’s hard to judge Mission Mangal by adding points for the things it got right and subtracting points for the things it didn’t because, holistically, I am unable to shake off the feeling that I am glad this movie got made, at least from the PoV of a mediaperson that frequently reports on the Indian space progragge. Mission Mangal is a good romp, thanks in no small part to Vidya Balan (and as Pradeep Mohandas pointed out in his review, no thanks to the scriptwriters’ as well as Akshay Kumar’s mangled portrayal of how a scientist at ISRO behaves.)

I’m sure there’s lots to be said for the depiction of its crew of female scientists as well but I will defer to the judgment of smarter people on this one. For example, Rajvi Desai’s review in The Swaddle notes that the women scientists in the film, with the exception of Balan, are only shown doing superfluous things while Kumar gets to have all the smart ideas. Tanisha Bagchi writes in The Quint that the film has its women fighting ludicrous battles in an effort to portray them as being strong.

Ultimately, Mission Mangal 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. It is a mess but – without playing down its problematic portrayal of women and scientists – the film is hardly the worst thing to come of it.

In fact, if you are yet to watch the film but are going to, try imagining you are in the late 1990s and that Mission Mangal is a half-gritty, endearing-in-parts sci-fi flick about a bunch of Hindi-speaking people in Bangalore trying to launch a probe to Mars. However, if you – like me – are unable to leave reality behind, watch it, enjoy it, and then fact-check it.

Miscellaneous remarks

  1. Mission Mangal frequently attempts to assuage the audience that it doesn’t glorify Hinduism but these overtures are feeble compared to the presence of a pundit performing religious rituals within the Mission Control Centre itself. Make no mistake, this is a Hindu film.
  2. Akshay Kumar makes a not-so-eccentric entrance but there is a noticeable quirk about him that draws the following remark from a colleague: “These genius scientists are always a little crazy.” It made me sit up because these exact words have been used to exonerate the actions of scientists who sexually harassed women – all the way from Richard Feynman (by no means the first) to Lawrence Krauss (by no means the last).

Would you take Epstein’s money to fund your research?

Note: Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on August 10, 2019. The following post was written before news of his death emerged.

In 2016, I attended a talk by a not-unknown environmental activist in Chennai (not Nityanand Jayaraman, before you ask) who had spent many years stitching together community efforts to restore water bodies around Tamil Nadu. His talk covered the various challenges of his work as well as the different ways in which he overcame them. The one that stood out was his being absolutely okay with receiving donations to support his work from any and all sources, irrespective of their rectitude. He encouraged others to not shirk from any opportunity to accrue wealth because, to rephrase him, you never know why you are going to need it or when it is going to dry up.

This particular activist was a man of simple means but one thing he did have, and arguably needed to have, was the conviction that his work was useful and necessary. Notwithstanding his personal character (only because I didn’t know him that way), most people in the audience that day judged his work — or what they had been told of it — to be important and, of course, good. Most of us are not so lucky. We often have to be very careful about the way we view our work — as a public good or, more precariously, the ‘greater good’, for example — and the things we are prepared to do to justify working on.

Recently, scientists have been in the news in connection to this question thanks to an unlikely cause: Jeffrey Epstein. On August 5, STAT News published an interview of George Church, the noted American geneticist, biologist and teacher, where he apologised for having “contacts” with Epstein “even after the financier pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution”. The interview has so many parts about the behaviour of scientists around billionaires worth chewing on; consider the following example:

Universities are supposed to vet potential donors who ask to meet with a faculty member, especially if they want to fund research. Epstein made a donation to Church’s lab for “cutting edge science and education” from 2005 to 2007. “My understanding is this [vetting] is the responsibility of the development office, which is yet another reason why scientists are a little bit more relaxed,” Church said. “They feel they have administrators, who in theory do the difficult job of figuring out who’s legit.” Epstein’s donation went into what Church called “a general account used to get new projects going before we have enough preliminary data to warrant a formal grant application.”

Later, the article continued:

As for whether Epstein’s 2008 conviction gave Church (a father and grandfather) pause, he said, “I did read a couple of news articles” a decade ago, he said, “but they weren’t clear enough for me to know there was a serious problem.” (The full extent of Epstein’s crimes came out in an investigation by the Miami Herald in 2018; in the New York Times, a 2006 story [described] Epstein’s not-guilty plea … and one in 2008 characterized the allegations as “involving massages with teenage girls”). “But that is still no excuse for me not being abreast of the news.”

How much can you blame scientists for receiving money from tainted sources? I am not sure of the answer. Receiving and using money from corrupt individuals, and certainly those as morally and ethically corrupt as Epstein, is a problem because doing so:

a) Allows the corrupted to claim a form of redemption, especially when they can exploit a shortage of funds required for risky projects

b) Encourages the scientist to harbour an exceptionalism: that she gets to define what ‘good’ is through her work, and

c) Creates the demand, so to speak, that sustains the problematic supply, but this is an admittedly weak contention in this particular case.

At the same time, funding for research has been hard to come by. How often would a scientist stop to check if money sourced through a different department in her university came from a convicted sex offender – money that would ensure she and her students would get paid for the next few months, and possibly provide a way for her to produce research to further ingratiate herself with the university? Not very, possibly because she hasn’t been habituated to check.

This said, the scientist doesn’t get off the hook because the larger argument to be made, or problem to be solved, here is that scientists shouldn’t assume their responsibilities are restricted to their labs. They ought to be as aware of whoever is funding them as, say, journalists are expected to be if only because the same standards should apply to everyone, or at least to every community that prizes independence and self-regulation. This is necessary beyond considerations of one’s relationship with the rest of society, and towards eliminating the imbalance of power that is sure to erupt between a donor who knows how consequential their wealth can be and the researcher who stands to be manipulated by it. For example, she could be tempted to design future projects in ways that are likelier to attract funding and, of course, ruffle fewer feathers.

(I am aware of the difficulties of working scientists, so I don’t say that the solution – such as it is – is to berate them until they make better choices as much as large-scale reform over many years.)

Notwithstanding (important) questions of financial independence, the use of tainted money for a self-proclaimed ‘good’ would at the least form a moral shield for the corrupt funder to hide behind. However, the extent to which this should concern the scientist is doubtful, especially if she is able to insulate herself and the products of her intellect from the influence a sizeable donation is likely to carry. Another argument could be that we should frame these narratives around those who do ‘good’ instead of obsessing over how they render those who do ‘bad’.

For a tangential example, India’s National Green Tribunal recently slapped Volkswagen with a hefty fine of Rs 500 crore ($71 million) for cheating on emission tests, up from the Rs 171 crore recommended by a special panel. This was because, to quote the tribunal’s principal bench:

… the measure of damages has to be fixed taking into account not only the actual damage but also the magnitude and the capacity of the enterprise so that compensation has deterrent effect. … [The] worth of the company is stated to be $75 billion. Thus, apart from actual damage by a conservative estimate, deterrent element has to be considered, specially in view of international unethical practice.

Let us ignore for a moment that the Supreme Court has stayed this order and assume that Volkswagen deposited Rs 500 crore with the Central Pollution Control Board. We would have considered this a great victory, since Rs 500 crore would have increased India’s environment budget for 2019 by 15%, and expected the board to put the money to good use. Similarly, if rich people commit crimes and are convicted, their punishment could carry a big fine in addition to a prison sentence and commensurate to their personal wealth, to be deposited with an independent body staffed by experts from different fields who decide how that money is spent.

This said, it might also be worth asking if the research project is so important or so urgent that its stewards can’t look beyond the first available source of funds, towards less controversial options. Think of it as a contest between the kind of example we want to set as a society about the foundations of our knowledge systems and if it matters that the funds are directed towards studies that are unlikely to be undertaken through other means. For example, on July 11, Peter Aldhous reported for BuzzFeed that between 2012 and 2014, Epstein donated to projects on melanoma, Crohn’s disease, consciousness research and one to develop open source software for AI. Is it possible to appreciate these contributions while condemning the enormity of Epstein’s crimes at the same time?

It might be useful to draw a line here between the likes of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the one hand and, say, community colleges on the other. The former already boast of multiple donors and don’t stand to lose much by forgoing $250,000. However, the latter don’t have nearly enough and even $50,000 to a single institution could make a big difference. It would be a tragedy if there are no alternatives to Epstein’s money, but when there are, it becomes harder to justify the need for it. It is also not lost on any of us that ties between professors at these privileged universities and Epstein run even deeper, to the extent that they fly on his private jet to attend TED talks and then defend him in public using “empirical evidence” shorn of all social context.

All of these questions disappear if government sources pay more for R&D; put another way, such are the questions that raise their heads when private sources of funding overshadow public ones. However, the early 21st century has been characterised by, among other things, an increasingly pervasive mistrust of experts, if not expertise. Leaders of large nations like India, Brazil, the US, the UK, the Philippines and Australia have consistently placed business interests above safeguarding their natural resources, flying in the face of scientific consensus and protest. Public investment in higher education, healthcare and R&D has stagnated or has fallen in the last few years, increasing researchers’ reliance on the private sector. (In India, the government has on occasion expressed interest to the point of dictating which questions researchers should and shouldn’t pursue.) At this time, what is the right thing for a scientist to do?

The answer isn’t necessarily a blanket policy that says ‘accept the money’ or ‘don’t accept the money’. Instead, what is okay and what is not has to be negotiated by those who receive it, with knowledge of their specific circumstances, the relative importance of their work, what they think the consequences could be, and inevitably informed by their personal moral compasses. So the first thing scientists ought to do is step out of the neatly organised lab and into the messy real world, and not leave their public image to be mediated by a university press office with potentially divergent priorities. To paraphrase Church, there is no excuse for not being abreast of the news.

Cognitive flexibility and nationalism 2.0

Remember that paper about cognitive flexibility and nationalism? The one that said people who are more nationalistic in their politics tend to have lower cognitive flexibility? I’d blogged about it here. I hadn’t read the study’s paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, because I didn’t think I had to to be able to call the study’s conclusions into question. An excerpt from my previous post:

… ideological divisions, imagined in the form of political polarisation, are bad enough as it is without people on one side of the aisle being able to accuse those on the other side of having “low cognitive flexibility”. The nuance can be worded as prosaically as the neuroscientists would prefer but this won’t – can’t – stop the less-nationalistic from accusing the more-nationalistic of simply being stupid, now with a purported scientific basis.

This is why I believe something has to be off about the study. The people on the right, as it were on the political spectrum, are not stupid. They’re smart just the way those of us on the left imagine ourselves to be. Now, one defence of the study may be that it attempts to map a hallmark feature of the global political right, sort of a rampant anti-intellectualism and irrationality, to its neurological underpinnings – but nationalism is more than its endorsement of traditions or traditional values.

As it turned out: if I had, the paper would have revealed more problems with the study and made a stronger case than I was able that it is quite likely a product of the “publish or perish” kind of thinking. The reason I revisit this study now is an interesting conversation I had with Shruti Muralidhar, a cortical and hippocampal neuroscientist, currently a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before I’d written my post, I’d asked Shruti if she could read the paper and possibly critique it.

My primary concern was basically about assigning a kind of “hierarchy of cognitive abilities” to the political spectrum – that sounds dangerous. By saying the political right has less cognitive flexibility, I’d felt like the study was reaching the conclusion that there might be a purely biological explanation for why people behave the way they do. This kind of reductionism is eminently dangerous.

According to Shruti, “This understanding of the paper is not far from what they want the reader to take away – but sadly, they have little or no backing to actually prove or disprove this claim.” She summed her observation up in a few points (quoted verbatim):

  1. Cognitive flexibility is simply just that. It doesn’t mean more or less intelligence, smarts or anything like that. In fact, it might not even be a “positive” trait depending on the situation at hand.
  2. The study’s authors have administered only two cognitive tests, and one of them clearly gives counterintuitive, unexpected or, one might even say, “wrong” results, as in goes against the study’s primary hypothesis.
  3. These are correlation studies, which usually are to be taken with a bagful of salt.

The first question that arises then is why the authors – or PNAS – decided to publish their study when 50% of their tests turned in results that opposed their hypothesis: that the more nationalistic are less flexible, cognitively speaking.

She also pointed out many issues with the language in the paper, especially lines that could be misinterpreted easily. Some in particular stuck out because they revealed a deeper epistemological issue with the study.

Shruti said, “The authors clearly admit that cognitive flexibility is a multi-dimensional beast and that it is difficult to understand it completely,” and often suggest that they don’t understand it completely themselves. One giveaway is that they keep saying variations of “We need more and better tests”.

A bigger giveaway is a line on page 6: “However, it is also conceivable that immersing oneself in strongly ideological environments may encourage psychological inflexibility and promote a preference for routines and traditions.” In other words, if A stood for “more nationalistic” and B for “less cognitive flexibility”, then the authors were saying that A therefore B while also admitting that B therefore A. In other other words, their correlation was in doubt, leave alone causation. This portion concludes thus:

Nevertheless, more research is necessary to understand the nature of cognitive flexibility and the various ways in which it manifests in relation to ideological thinking.

The authors haven’t defined cognitive flexibility explicitly in their paper, instead referencing older studies on the subject. Even so, Shruti said that those papers might not be able to provide the final word either because, as one of her peers had pointed out, “Since this study is EU/Britain-specific, their idea of what ideological inflexibility is might also be different from, say, India’s or the rest of the world’s. Europe thrived on systems and thinking-within-the-box for centuries.”

All together, the paper appears to describe a study of the “low-hanging fruit” variety. Its central hypothesis has been neither proved nor disproved, the reader is left in doubt about whether the tests were properly chosen (and why more tests weren’t performed), and the paper is strewn with admissions that the authors don’t claim to understand what one of the more important keywords in the study really means.

Worst of all (to me) is that the paper has been published with a misleading headline and the university press release, with an incredibly misleading one that should take all the responsibility for fake news born as a result (and strengthening the case that they shouldn’t be trusted). And there’s quite a bit of it:

  • PsychCentral has an article that only quotes Leor Zmigrod, the lead author of the atudy and a psychologist at the University of Cambridge
  • The same is true of an article in The Guardian by Nicola Davis. The headline goes ‘Brexiters tend to dislike uncertainty and love routine, study says’ – more of the reductionism at work.
  • Andrew Brown of The Guardian takes the study’s conclusions at face value, writing in his column:

… some kinds of political argument are going to be literally interminable. Obviously this isn’t true of any particular issue. Even the question of our relations with Europe will be settled some time before the heat death of the universe. But it may be replaced by something else which arouses the same passions and splits the population in the same way, because the cognitive traits [Zmigrod] is analysing are all part of the normal variation of humanity.

In fact, it seems no prominent coverage of the paper has invited an independent researcher to comment on its findings. I concede that I myself didn’t speak to a psychologist – Shruti is a neuroscientist – but all of Shruti’s observations are hard to ignore.

Finally, if I were looking to publish a paper right now, I’d hypothesise that flattering, non-critical coverage of scientific papers – peer-reviewed or otherwise – is more common among news publishers if each paper makes it easier for the publication to maintain its political position.

Featured image credit: mwewering/pixabay.

Big science, bigger nationalism.

Nature India ran a feature on March 21 about three Indian astrophysicists who had contributed to the European Space Agency’s Planck mission that studied the universe’s CMBR, etc. I was wary even before I started to read it. Why? Because of that first farce in July, 2012, that’s why.

That was when many Indians called for the ‘boson’ in the ‘Higgs boson’ to be celebrated with as much jest as was the ‘Higgs’. Oddly, Kolkata sported no cultural drapes that took ownership of the ‘boson’ as opposed to Edinburgh, quick to embrace the ‘Higgs’.

Why? Because a show of Indians celebrating India’s contributions to science through claims of ownership betrays that it’s not a real sense of ownership at all, but just another attempt to hog the limelight. If we wanted to own the ‘boson’ in honor of Satyendra Nath Bose, we’d have ensured he was remembered by the common man even outside the context of the Higgs boson. For his work with Einstein in establishing the Bose-Einstein statistics, for starters.

This is an attitude I find divisive and abhorrent. At the least, that circumstantial shout-out leaves no cause to remember S.N. Bose for the rest of the time. At the most, it paints a false picture of what ownership of scientific knowledge manifests itself as in the 21st century. The Indian contribution, the Chilean contribution, the Russian contribution… these are divisive tendencies in a world constantly aspiring to Big Science that is more seamless and painless.

Ownership of scientific knowledge in the 21st century, I believe, cannot be individuated. It belongs to no one and everyone at the same time. In the past, using science-related decorations to impinge upon our contributions to science may have inspired someone to believe we did good. Today, however, it’s simply taking a stand on a very slippery slope.

I understand how scientific achievement in the last century or so had gained a colonial attitude, and how there are far more Indians who have received the Nobel Prize as Americans than as Indians themselves. However, the scientific method has also gotten more rigorous, more demanding in terms of resources and time. While America may have shot ahead in the last century of scientific achievement, awareness of its possession of numerous individuals on the rosters of academic excellence is coeval tribute to some other country’s money and intellectual property, too.

I understand how news items of a nation’s contributions to an international project could improve the public’s perception of where and how their tax-money is being spent. However, the alleviation of any ills in this area must not arise solely from the notification that a contribution was made. It should arise through a dissemination of the importance of that contribution, too. The latter is conspicuous by its absence… to me, at least.

We put faces to essentially faceless achievements and then forget their features over time.

I wish there had been an entity to point my finger at. It could’ve been just the government, it could’ve been just a billion Indians. It could’ve been just misguided universities. It could’ve been just the Indian media. Unfortunately, it’s a potent mix of all these possibilities, threatening to blow up with nationalistic fervor in a concordant world.

As for that Nature India article, it did display deference to the jingoism. How do I figure? Because its an asymmetric celebration of achievement, especially an achievement not rooted in governmental needs even.

~

This post also appeared in ‘The Copernican’ science blog at The Hindu on March 28, 2013.