Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Calcutta’s Scottish cemetery a scene of desolation

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Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent, in the Independent:

As the British Empire expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of its most prominent pioneers were Scots, whether as traders, soldiers, missionaries or administrators. They left their mark in multifarious ways, among them the monuments to their dead.

Although many imperial cemeteries were unified, with Britons of all countries and religious persuasions buried side by side, in some of the larger cities there were separate burial grounds. One such place was Calcutta, where hundreds of gravestones in the Scottish cemetery decay gently amid the tropical vegetation.

“It is an extraordinary record of the lives of generations of Scots, a part of Scotland’s heritage overseas and surely a site for which present-day Scotland should feel some responsibility”, said Thomas Addyman, an Edinburgh-based archaeological consultant who has initiated a survey of the Calcutta cemetery, “but it is a scene of desolation. Monuments are in every stage of decay and collapse, burst apart by roots or swamped by strangling undergrowth.”

Mr Addyman’s survey, under the auspices of the Calcutta Scottish Heritage Trust, has begun to assess the potential and the problems of the six-acre site, which lies in a densely-packed mixed Muslim and Christian neighbourhood. More:

The great Indian darkness

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Grace Boyle at the Independent:

lampI visited some villages in rural Karnataka this week where people are living without electricity. After nightfall we drove to Mahime Village in Uttara Kannada, a coastal district of Karnataka State and left the car at the side of the road. On foot we picked our way along a dirt path through the forest, splashed through a creek and uphill until we reached a house. The muted blue of the mud walls glimmered in the yellow light of the small kerosene lamps as we picked leeches off our feet and Sarojini Rama Naik, the wife of the house, burnt them with embers from the fire.

Sarojini and her husband, Rama Timma Naik, have lived here for nearly 40 years, fitting their daily schedule into the daylight hours and eating their evening meal by kerosene lamplight before going to sleep at around 8pm. The government provides everyone in the area with three litres of kerosene per month, subsidised to a rate of ten rupees per litre, but as this isn’t enough for their needs Rama travels to Gerusoppa Town, 10km away, once a month to pick up an extra six litres on the black market, at a higher rate. As the express buses don’t stop at their hamlet – Vatehalla – the journey takes him a whole day, on which he must set other business aside. The people in the village who do have electricity don’t always need their government-issued kerosene, so he asks the ration-shopkeeper to deal him the extra.

Mahime village consists of scattered hamlets, like most of the villages in this rural area, and of the 300 families the village is home to about 65 are living without access to electricity. It’s not an uncommon living arrangement, easily overlooked with the district website’s claim that “all towns and villages have electricity facilities in the District.” More:

Network of militants is robust after Mumbai siege

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Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba has persisted, even flourished, since 10 recruits killed 163 people in a rampage through India’s financial capital. Lydia Polgreen and Souad Mekhennet in the New York Times:

Hafiz Saeed

Hafiz Saeed

Indian and Pakistani dossiers on the Mumbai investigations, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times, offer a detailed picture of the operations of a Lashkar network that spans Pakistan. It included four houses and two training camps here in this sprawling southern port city that were used to prepare the attacks.

Among the organizers, the Pakistani document says, was Hammad Amin Sadiq, a homeopathic pharmacist, who arranged bank accounts and secured supplies. He and six others begin their formal trial on Saturday in Pakistan, though Indian authorities say the prosecution stops well short of top Lashkar leaders.

Indeed, Lashkar’s broader network endures, and can be mobilized quickly for elaborate attacks with relatively few resources, according to a dozen current and former Lashkar militants and intelligence officials from the United States, Europe, India and Pakistan.

In interviews with The Times, they presented a troubling portrait of Lashkar’s capabilities, its popularity in Pakistan and the support it has received from former officials of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment.

Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, helped create Lashkar two decades ago to challenge Indian control in Kashmir, the disputed territory that lies at the heart of the conflict between the nuclear-armed neighbors. More:

Amartya Sen shakes up justice theory

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From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Suppose three children-Anne, Bob, and Carla-quarrel over a flute. Anne says it’s hers because she’s the only one who knows how to play it. Bob counters that he’s the poorest and has no toys, so the flute would at least give him something to play with. Carla reminds Anne and Bob that she built the darn thing, and no sooner did she finish it than the other two started trying to take it away.

Intuitions clashing yet? Need something more complex to tingle your justice antennae-perhaps a puzzler from game theory? The example is Amartya Sen’s, from the Nobel-Prize-winning economist’s just-published The Idea of Justice (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press), his magnum opus on a line of work he’s long addressed and now thoroughly re-examines: justice theory. And what a growth industry it’s been since John Rawls revived the subject with his classic, A Theory of Justice (1971), and colleague Robert Nozick made its core principles into an Emerson Hall battle with his libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Since Rawls, one hardly ranks as a political theorist without a whack at the J-word. Sen’s stepping into the fray should keep things hopping, but justice theory is one subsidiary of philosophy that never really suffers a bad century. More:

Kitsch in everyday life

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on September 29, 2009
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Githa Hariharan in the Telegraph:

If I were to draw a picture of a typical middle-class Indian home around the time I was growing up, I would leave out some things we now take for granted. The TV set, for example, or the cordless phone and the computer. Instead, I would sketch in some curiosities, especially in the living room. These curiosities, called ‘showpieces’, sat stolidly in cabinets called ‘showcases’, as if they were there by birthright. Any books that had sneaked into these cabinets ended up looking apologetic, like second-class citizens. The most popular showpiece was the miniature Taj, with the best of its kind lit up with tiny light bulbs.

As time went by and technology grew up even in our part of the world, the showpiece began to move – with the assistance of what seemed like magic, but was, invariably, well-charged batteries. The hot favourite of the period was a pair of pink storks on either side of a water tank, taking turns to dip a long slim beak into the water. It went on forever – or at least as long the switch was on.

It took some years, but I was lucky enough to see the scaled-up version of the stork showpiece. This was a grand “religious showpiece” on display in Delhi’s Panchkuian Road. Devi had been animated by human ingenuity to bend from the waist so that her sword could decapitate Mahishasura. Then she straightened up while the demon’s head reconnected itself to his body, ready to be cut off again. Devi bent once more to her task. It could be argued that the showpiece illustrates Good continuously overcoming Evil – but only by ignoring the suggestion of Good caught in a hellish situation where a job never gets done. More:

The significance of Kaminey: Social dystopia or entrepreneurial fantasy

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kaminey

M K Raghavendra, a film scholar and critic, argues that “celebration of social decay started with the film Satya, and Kaminey takes this to a new high.” From the Economic and Political Weekly:

Urban criminals, until the mid-1990s, were not glamorous figures in Hindi popular cinema, and only people led astray (as in Deewar 1975) became criminals. The film that changed this was perhaps Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1999). Satya appeared “realistic” but had a discourse interpretable in the context of the economic liberalisation initiated by P V Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh in 1991-92, which also marked the end of Nehruvian socialism. Law enforcement has been treated in different ways by Hindi cinema but Satya was the first film to treat the police as though they were no different from a private agency, made stronger by their indifference to the law. The protagonist of the film casually proposes the killing of the police commissioner as though he were a gangland rival and the police responds as another gang might have – by liquidating his group without attention to legality. More:

Arundhati Roy on Democracy Now!

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Author Arundhati Roy on the Human Costs of India’s Economic Growth, the View of Obama from New Delhi, and Escalating US Attacks in Af-Pak. Click here for transcript.

Aliens in Karachi

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What if extra-terrestrials with superior intellectual faculties stumbled across Pakistan’s seaside metropolis? Would they get mugged, hugged or asked to tea? Fauzia Husain at Chowk:

If aliens were to arrive in Karachi on an anthropological fact finding mission of the kind described so often by Ursula Leguin- their initial report to base might look something like this:

At first glance Karachi looks like a complicated network of palaces surrounded by the settlements of the palace menials. In each neighborhood one finds a large and materially superior settlement of houses and established in convenient proximity to these residences of the Lords are the corrugated roof, or D-class semi permanent constructions that house the plumber/electrician/mechanic and cook/driver/cleaning woman that supports and maintains the home of the leader/strongman/village head.

The fancies and the fantasies of these privileged superior abode dwellers cannot be contained within the walls of their A/B class construction, concrete homes and are therefore liberally sprinkled along the streets and byways where the royals dart up and down in superior vehicles. Men, women and children smile down vacantly from large, at times lighted and at other times video signs where the characters are depicted as enjoying mattresses/ magic money cards/ large amounts of food/and cleansing agents, amongst other materials. It is supposed that the privileged are so fond of these items that they like to be reminded of their existence even upon leaving the homes where these items surround their waking hours.

In the meanwhile the workers weave in and out of driving lanes offering their rich rulers the opportunity to pick up whatever necessary items the car owners might need upon their journey, flowers, balloons, combs and coconut slices. More:

British Asians ‘outsourcing murder’

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on September 29, 2009
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Poonam Taneja at BBC:

A BBC investigation has uncovered the deadly practice of British Asians travelling to India to hire contract killers.
Family and business associates, who are lured to the sub-continent, are often the targets.

In a country where murder is cheaper and less fraught with risk, the perpetrators of these crimes are rarely brought to justice.

Campaigners in both India and the UK believe this to have claimed the lives of hundreds of victims over several years.
These armchair murder plots are hatched in the living rooms of Britain and executed mainly in the rural Indian state of Punjab.

I made the journey to India to investigate these sinister crimes. More:

Click here to listen: BBC: Passport to Murder

Design Diary

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on September 28, 2009
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Aditya Dev Sood at 3quarksdaily:

I later talked with Ravi Naidoo, South African design curator of the Design Indaba Festival in Cape Town, about the state of design in his country. While it was clear that design was changing how people around the world perceived South Africa, was design doing anything to change how people actually lived in Africa? What stories could he share with me of designers showing people a better way of living? Naidoo tells me that design is about enthusiasm, and that that is the reigning zeitgeist of South Africa today. From that enthusiasm will come change. Abreu’s pan-African imagery, Nkosi’s contemporary African chic, these had never been possible before, and together with Nathan Reddy’s on-going rebranding of the country design was going to transform the country as an inclusive, multicultural creative society. Images and surfaces are important, because they can transform perceptions and lead to a better way of living.

Naidoo described how the South African economy had grown once the political poison of apartheid was removed in the mid-nineties. He compared that with India’s own growth since liberalization in 1991, and suggested that growth in the design industries was directly linked with the growth in the market as a whole. I found his theory pretty sound, and offered him one better: South Africa and India both represented countries experiencing informationalization under conditions of limited or partial industrialization. And for that reason, the disciplines of design that have flourished in both countries up until now have had more to do with the shaping of images, ideas and perhaps retail experiences than with the design and manufacture of things, they way they might do in places like Italy and China. More:

On a Scottish island bought as a birthday gift, Baba Ramdev sets up base

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yoga_island

Amit Roy in The Telegraph:

Little Cumbrae (Scotland): The Scottish island of Little Cumbrae, whose long and chequered history takes in the Vikings, Robert The Bruce of “try, try again” fame and Oliver Cromwell, is witnessing the arrival of three wise men from the East.

From their retreats in Haridwar and Rishikesh high up in the Himalayas, the trinity – Baba Ramdev, Swami Chidanand and Acharya Balkrishna – have come bearing blessings for the Hawan ceremony and bhoomi puja.

This is because Little Cumbrae is being transformed into “a place of pilgrimage” for followers of Patanjali yoga by the island’s new owners, Sarwan and Sunita Poddar, who bought the island for £2 million (Rs 15.2 crore) last month.

As a fast “rib boat” sped across the Firth of Clyde from the marina at Largs on the Ayrshire coast, Ramdev was dressed the part from his saffron shawl and dhoti down to his fashionable saffron trainers. Only the life jacket he and all the others were required to wear was more a shade of red.

The breeze ruffled Swami Chidanand’s long hair, while it emerged that Acharya Balkrishna, who preaches Ayurveda, had visited the island on a previous occasion to advise the Poddars on their purchase. More:

[Image: www.s1millport.com]

For more on the island, visit Private Islands Onine website.

‘Designer’ butter chicken: Serves 2; Rs 6,000 (or USD120)

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From Mint:

butter_chickenMumbai: A cup of Evian natural spring water, a tablespoon of Filippo Berio olive oil and a pack of Lurpak unsalted butter are just some of the gourmet ingredients that go into making the “classiest butter chicken” currently available. Software professionals Iran Bharat Saxena and Padma Prasad are the chefs and people behind this home delivery venture, Anaarkali butter chicken, which costs Rs6,000 for a portion for two.

The designer dish is packed in a Borosil container, with a pyramid-shaped lid and a firm paper base, which is finally placed in a cardboard box and delivered to your doorstep fresh and warm. It comes with a garnish of black olives and coriander with specks of edible gold and silver. The orders for the dish have to be placed online, at www.anaarkali.in.

More:

Empty churches, full mosques

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on September 27, 2009
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Several redundant churches in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland are slowly being converted into mosques as Christian congregations dwindle while a growing Muslim population demands more places to worship. Colin Randall in the National:

Glasgow: When the Glasgow Central Mosque, then rivalling the biggest in Europe, opened a quarter of a century ago, it seemed all the needs of Muslim worshippers in Scotland’s largest city would be met at its imposing site on the banks of the Clyde.

But as the city’s Muslim population has swelled to 33,000, with the Pakistanis who have always formed its main component joined by refugees from conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan, demand has continued to grow for space. More than 70 years after organised worship first began, in the homes of Pakistani immigrants, Glasgow has 14 mosques, and some feel it could do with more.

It is not difficult to find examples of growth. Across the city, extensive work is under way to expand al Furqan mosque; elsewhere, two other mosques are being modernised. And 80 km to the east, a mosque that opened in January with the express aim of serving English-speaking Muslims in the capital, Edinburgh, chose Ramadan as the occasion to extend worship to Friday prayers. More

Rhythm of soul

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on September 27, 2009
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Some days back we posted a rendition of Husn-i-Haqiqi by Arieb Azhar, a superb and vibrant piece of music. Here’s another chosen by All Things Pakistan: Sufi singers Saeen Zahoor and Noori.

And read Sain Zahoor Ahmed on Sufi music and his mission at The Nation (via Pak Tea House).

20 fabulous boutique hotels in India

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on September 27, 2009
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The publisher of the Special Places to Stay guidebooks selects 20 extraordinary hideaways in India. From the Observor:

The Manor, New Delhi

The Manor, New Delhi

Casa Susegad, Goa

Casa Susegad, Goa

The Manor, Friends Colony West, Delhi
Shanti Home, Janakpuri, Delhi
Tikli Bottom, Gairatpur Bas, Haryana
Panchavatti, Corjuem Island, Goa
Casa Susegad, Loutolim, Goa

Click here for the full list:

Hope Diamond goes naked

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The Hope Diamond was mined in Golconda, India. It was sold to King Louis XIV of France in 1668. For the first time in its 50-year residence at the Smithsonian Institution, the diamond has been taken out of its setting, giving the public a rare look at its bare beauty. From the Washington Post:

hope-diamondAt a morning press conference, with the doors locked and security personnel glaring, a jeweler wheeled a trolley out from a workroom. Atop it was the Hope Diamond covered with a white cloth; the cloth was taken off with a flourish by museum director Cristián Samper. “This is a new chapter in the history of the Hope Diamond,” said Samper, facing a lineup of camera crews. “We wanted to celebrate this legacy by giving people a look at the Hope Diamond in a new way.”

The 45.52-carat gem, which was donated to the Smithsonian on Nov. 10, 1958, by the firm of Harry Winston Inc., has been one of the most visited objects at the Smithsonian. More than 5 million people a year peer into its enclosure. More:

[Read more at the Smithsonian]

My mother’s imposed fast: I feel her hunger

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A daughter studies the void in her parents’ relationship. Natasha Singh in the New York Times:

That day I had no papers to grade or classes to prepare for, so I busied myself with cleaning our apartment, mailing bills and exercising. It wasn’t until evening that I remembered my stomach, that I had not fed it. Just then the phone rang – my mother calling to remind me that it was Karwa Chauth, the day Hindu women all over the world honor their husbands by fasting.

My parents’ fates were tied together 40 years ago in an arranged marriage in India. On each Karwa Chauth since then, my mother has dressed in her red wedding sari and lost herself in the world of preparations. Usually she makes my father’s favorite dishes along with poori, samosas, chhole and sweets. Her entire day is spent over the stove in front of her shrine of gods and goddesses, the secrets of her wishes for my father’s health and happiness hidden in the upward spirals of her prayers. More:

Inside India’s sacred heart

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An excerpt from William Dalrymple’s forthcoming book, Nine Lives (Bloomsbury/Penguin), on a modern nation’s ancient beliefs. In the Times of India:

nine_livesTwo hills of blackly gleaming granite, smooth as glass, rise from a thickly wooded landscape of banana plantations and jagged palmyra palms. It is dawn. Below lies the ancient pilgrimage town of Sravanabelagola, where the crumbling walls of monasteries, temples and dharamsalas cluster around a grid of dusty, red earth roads. The roads converge on a great rectangular tank. The tank is dotted with the spreading leaves and still-closed buds of floating lotus flowers. Already, despite the early hour, the first pilgrims are gathering.

For more than 2,000 years, this Karnatakan town has been sacred to the Jains. It was here, in the third century BC, that the first Emperor of India, Chandragupta Maurya, embraced the Jain religion and died through a self-imposed fast to the death, the emperor’s chosen atonement for the killings for which he had been responsible in his life of conquest. Twelve hundred years later, in AD 981, a Jain general commissioned the largest monolithic statue in India, sixty feet high, on the top of the larger of the two hills, Vindhyagiri. This was an image of another royal Jain hero, Prince Bahubali.

It was in a temple just short of the summit that I first laid eyes on Prasannamati Mataji. I had seen the tiny, slender, barefoot figure of the nun in her white sari bounding up the steps above me as I began my ascent. She climbed quickly, with a pot of water made from a coconut shell in one hand, and a peacock fan in the other. As she climbed, she gently wiped each step with the fan in order to make sure she didn’t stand on, hurt or kill a single living creature on her ascent of the hill: one of the set rules of pilgrimage for a Jain muni or ascetic. More:

Does it play in Deoria?

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Humour works in a context. Muff that up-and the joke’s on you. Mani Shankar Aiyar on Shashi Tharoor’s “holy cows” and “cattle class” tweet in Outlook:

Let me share with you another tale when I got myself into a Tharoor-like jam. I had been appointed the conference spokesman at the 7th Nonaligned Summit held in New Delhi in 1983. NAM conferences always get off to a genteel start with everyone politely pretending to listen to the set speeches of the leaders-and then the going gets rough, everyone fighting his corner till the last possible minute. In consequence, the agonised question of Cambodia/Kampuchea got untangled only at three in the morning. I immediately summoned a press conference to brief the media. One correspondent asked why NAM outcomes always emerged at such unearthly hours. Turning to the NAM symbol mounted behind me, I remarked that it was perhaps because the symbol should be changed from the dove to the owl. The Hindi press went berserk the next morning, saying I had described the distinguished leaders gathered-more than 100 of them from across the region-as “ulloos”, while the Western media, notably The New Yorker, sang paeans of praise over my wit and humour. Indira Gandhi, like Queen Victoria, was not amused-and I was promptly suspended, but, happily, a bit like Tharoor, restored to my perch shortly thereafter.

What the Tharoors and the Aiyars have to remember is that all the world is not St Stephen’s College and that what gets by as a PJ (Punjabi Joke) in Allnutt Court can get all of Ludhiana baying for your blood even for calling it a PJ. In a multilingual, multicultural society a joke has to be tailored to the audience. Indeed, even a gesture has to be tailored to the audience, as Tharoor discovered when he foolishly tried to teach a Kerala audience true patriotism by holding their hands across their chests like Americans do when they sing their national anthem. The Malayalis were not amused. Nor was I. Imagine learning patriotism from the Yankees! More:

The bigot in the mirror

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Indians outraged by racism might want to look closer home for ammunition, says Nisha Susan in Tehelka:

This summer two people, one afflicted by the flu, and the other by sympathy, went to a South Delhi clinic. The flu-bitten woman was leaving the clinic when the doctor told her that she had a ‘pigmentation problem’. The patient was startled. Her deep, smooth darkness has been admired most places in the world. As a Bengaluru woman she had not expected to be feted in Delhi, but she had not anticipated a pink Punjabi doctor saying that her skin could be ‘fixed’. The doctor turned to her companion and pronounced, “You have a pigmentation problem too!” As a Malayali who went to school in Delhi, he was prepared. His earliest memories were of the neighbourhood children refusing to play with him or his equally dark sister. He laughed and tried to calm his outraged friend. Defusing the tension is now as much part of him as his skin. More:

Our racist secrets

Navdeep Singh in Tehelka:

There’s a negro outside”; my sister-in-law runs in, a little out of breath. She’s barely arrived a few hours before from Delhi to visit us in an old Southern California suburb. I peek out of the window to see one of my neighbours washing his car in his yard. Yeah, he’s black. He’s also a doctor. Not that that should be important but, you know. “Is he dangerous?”; she asks, still wide eyed. I’m not sure what to answer. On the operating table, maybe.

“That’s not racism, that’s ignorance”; intones a friend whom I’m recounting the incident to, years later, on a Mumbai terrace. But racism is ignorance. More:

A jihadi village of white al-Qaeda fighters

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on September 26, 2009
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Investigators have discovered a village of white German al-Qaeda insurgents, including Muslim converts, in Pakistan’s tribal areas close to the Afghan border. From the Telegraph:

The village, in Taliban-controlled Waziristan, is run by the notorious al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which plots raids on Nato forces in Afghanistan.

A recruitment video presents life in the village as a desirable lifestyle choice with schools, hospitals, pharmacies and day care centres, all at a safe distance from the front.

In the video, the presenter, “Abu Adam”, the public face of the group in Germany, points his finger and asks: “Doesn’t it appeal to you? We warmly invite you to join us!”
According to German foreign ministry officials a growing number of German families, many of North African descent, have taken up the offer and travelled to Waziristan where supporters say converts make up some of the insurgents’ most dedicated fighters. More:

Maldives’ dilemma

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on September 26, 2009
in Climate change, The Maldives and environment
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It cannot be carbon neutral without killing tourism. From the Times:

In the 1960s a United Nations report warned the Maldives that, sadly, it was unlikely to attract tourists.

Not much grows on lumps of coral in the Indian Ocean apart from coconuts and fish, the report pointed out: the Maldives is largely dependent on imports and the nearest ports are hundreds of miles away. Few of its 1,000-odd scattered islands even had electricity. Yet within ten years, the Maldives had established the reputation it has now, as a holiday paradise for honeymooners, scuba divers and the super-rich.

On Tuesday, the tiny country of 350,000 people once again showed it can punch above its weight. The Maldivian President, Mohamed Nasheed, shared a billing with Barack Obama and Hu Jintao at the United Nations General Assembly, where he pleaded the cause of small island states at risk from climate change. In many news outlets, it was Nasheed who made the headlines.

In many respects the Maldives has always been the little nation that could. Despite its minuscule population and strategic location, it has never been colonised (it peacefully dismissed the British, who had made it a protectorate, in 1965). It has retained its unique language and script, and hung on to its cultural identity while incorporating Islam, elements from African religions, black magic, Indian cooking and the occasional British naval tradition. In 2008 it made a peaceful transition to democracy and was hailed as an example to other, more troubled Muslim nations. More:

From Bhutan to Bronx

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on September 26, 2009
in Bhutan and Nepal
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From the New York Times:

Nearly every immigrant group in New York City has a neighborhood, or at least a street, to call its own. But for refugees from the tiny South Asian nation of Bhutan, the closest thing to a home base is a single building in the Bronx – a red-brick five-story walk-up, with a weed-choked front courtyard and grimy staircases.

Eight families – more than 40 people – have taken up residence here in the past several months, part of a stream of thousands of Bhutanese refugees who have flowed into the United States in the past year and a half. With the help of resettlement agencies, many have found apartments in the Bronx, and the largest concentration has ended up here in the building on University Avenue.

This is their small toehold in a strange new world. The only life most have known was in the rural plains and Himalayan foothills of Bhutan and the dusty refugee camps of Nepal. Few have ever lived in homes with electricity or indoor plumbing, or between walls made of anything but bamboo. More:

India ‘over the moon’

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on September 25, 2009
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chandrayaan_1A NASA probe aboard India’s Chandrayaan-I spacecraft has detected water on the Moon’s surface. Two other Nasa spacecraft – Cassini and Deep Impact – have corroborated the findings.

The U.S. space agency NASA said its Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, found water molecules all over the moon’s surface. The M3 instrument was carried there on Oct. 22, 2008, by the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft — India’s first space mission.

The findings were published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.

Data from instruments on NASA’s spacecraft contributed to confirmation of the finding. The spacecraft imaging spectrometers made it possible to map lunar water more effectively than ever before.

India’s unmanned Chandrayaan-I was supposed to last for two years but fell out of orbit around the moon in late August, ten months after its launch.

From The Telegraph, Calcutta

From The Telegraph, Calcutta

From the Telegraph, Calcutta:

The studies indicate that the water molecules are present in tiny quantities in the top few millimetres of soil and rocks on the lunar surface. “We haven’t found water either in its liquid or ice form. We have detected only water molecules in extremely minute quantities in surface soil,” an Isro scientist said.

The mission scientists estimate that about 1,000kg of soil will yield about a litre of water. “This is fantastic. We’ve found something we never thought we would see,” said Lawrence Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee and member of the M3 team, who has studied hundreds of moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972.

Traces of water found in one set of the Apollo boxes were, Taylor said, attributed to contamination from Earth because the seals on the boxes had been broken. The alleged absence of water on the moon had remained an enduring mystery. “This is like finding a renewable resource on the moon,” Taylor told The Telegraph. More:

The NASA website has more.

These images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as viewed by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Credits: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ.

These images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as viewed by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Credits: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ.

AFP reports from Bangaore:

India on Friday hailed the discovery of water on the moon as a triumph for a lunar programme that is aiming to cement its reputation as a serious player in the space industry.

The mood in India’s space community has gone from glum disappointment last month when its Chandrayaan-1 satellite mission was prematurely aborted to jubilation with news of a major discovery.

“India should be proud that Chandrayaan discovered water on the moon,” said a smiling G. Madhavan Nair, chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), at a press conference to discuss the findings. “It has done a wonderful mission, it has not failed. It is 110-percent successful.”

In one of the three papers published in the latest edition of the journal Science on Thursday, researchers said they had analysed light waves detected by NASA-made instruments on board the Indian satellite and two other probes. More

The Big Question: What might the existence of water on the Moon mean for space travel? read in the Independent

The Golden Langur — an endangered species

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on September 24, 2009
in Bhutan, India and Wildlife
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From the Telegraph, Calcutta:

golden-langurThe Golden Langur (Trachypithecus geei), found only in Northeast India and Bhutan, is threatened by hunting and the destruction of its forested habitat. It is on the list of endangered species of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and on Schedule 1 (completely protected species) of the Wildlife (Protection) Act of India. Which is why any method of protection of the species is well worth looking into.

As the sound of the langurs moving through the vegetation died down, Kartik appeared. He had been tracking the troop since early morning, partly to help us locate it, and partly to continue his observations of langur feeding behaviour as part of a scientific study that Nature’s Foster is conducting. He is one of the 12 local youths trained in such research, which they combine with their own considerable local knowledge to good effect.

Kartik is one of several villagers passionately involved in protecting the langurs and their habitat. Theirs is a story that is familiar to anyone working on community-based conservation in India. The forests of the Kakoijana hill range, once thick and diverse, had been decimated by a combination of factors. More:

[Image: Tourism Council of Bhutan]

Three-minute fiction: Amitava Kumar’s “Postmortem”

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on September 24, 2009
in Books
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Via 3quarksdaily:

The NPR Contest has a simple premise: Listeners send in original short stories that can be read in three minutes or less. Here’s one by Amitava Kumar:

amitava_kumarThe nurse left work at five o’clock.

She had seen the dead woman’s husband sitting, near the entrance, under the yellow sign that Doctor Ahmed had hung some months ago. “While You Wait, Meditate.” He was sitting with his arms crossed, elbows cupped in the palms of his hands and hadn’t looked up when she passed him on her way out.

Just before lunch, a convoy had come from the Army camp. A dark-skinned soldier, holding a small rifle in his left hand, threw open the office door and announced the Colonel. Doctor Ahmed had automatically stood up.

The Colonel was plump. He looked calm and extremely clean, the way bullfrogs do, gleaming green and gold in the mud. He put his baton on the table and asked the nurse to leave the office.

Click here to read the full story.

Indian ancestry revealed

Published
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on September 24, 2009
in India and Science
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From Nature:

Now, a team led by David Reich of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lalji Singh of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, has probed more than 560,000 SNPs across the genomes of 132 Indian individuals from 25 diverse ethnic and tribal groups dotted all over India.

The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage – which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations – was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. More:

caste_chart

Reconstructing Indian population history

The abstract in Nature:

India has been underrepresented in genome-wide surveys of human variation. We analyse 25 diverse groups in India to provide strong evidence for two ancient populations, genetically divergent, that are ancestral to most Indians today. One, the ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI), is genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans, whereas the other, the ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI), is as distinct from ANI and East Asians as they are from each other. By introducing methods that can estimate ancestry without accurate ancestral populations, we show that ANI ancestry ranges from 39-71% in most Indian groups, and is higher in traditionally upper caste and Indo-European speakers. Groups with only ASI ancestry may no longer exist in mainland India. However, the indigenous Andaman Islanders are unique in being ASI-related groups without ANI ancestry.

And read Indians as hybrids: Razib Khan at ScienceBlogs:

study

Read Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth in the Times of India.

Bollywood bound

Published
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on September 23, 2009
in Education, Entertainment and Movies
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A new acting school in Canada teaches the art of lip-syncing, fake fighting and gyrating. S. Mitra Kalita in the Wall Street Journal:

That millions of people have Bollywood dreams in India comes as little surprise. But Canada?

This month, the Canadian Institute of Management and Technology in Mississauga, outside Toronto, launched the Bollywood Acting Diploma, a four-month course costing $9,000 and targeting students who want to break into the business.

They are people like Dubai-born Maya Noel, 18 years old, who graduated high school in June and was all ready to study drama in college. When she heard about the academy, she reassessed her goals and thought, “I grew up with Bollywood not Hollywood.”

And she signed up.

Her interest is a fitting tribute to the Indian institution that went “global” before that became a buzzword. Indeed, before Benetton and Big Bazaar, there was Bollywood, stealthily offering Indian audiences tastes of the West and nostalgic expatriates glimpses of the homes they left behind. Today, Bollywood has become the ultimate bridge for nonresident Indians, global Indians and everyone in between. While the rest of the world debates protectionism and outsourcing, Bollwood makes room for a new formula: take actors raised and trained in the West and welcome them back home. More:

Maoist who went to India’s best school

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on September 23, 2009
in India
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From the Indian Express:

They had not seen him in years but today, when the frail, white-haired, 60-plus was being led away by police, many recognised Kobad Ghandy instantly. There was no mistaking him despite the white hair – he was the “Doon School boy” from the “huge house at Worli Seaface in Bombay” who went on to chase chartered accountancy in London before quitting it all to return home.

And after all these years, he was suddenly on TV screens, arrested for being a key politburo member of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist). Police said Ghandy was assigned the task of spreading Maoist influence in urban areas, running its publication wing. He was also alleged to have been in touch with global ultra-Left organisations.

The transformation of Ghandy always puzzled friends who recalled his “privileged childhood” from “a well-to-do Parsi family” in Worli Seaface. “His father was a top official in a big pharmaceutical company. They were affluent, had a huge house and quite a lifestyle in Bombay then,” said one of his friends. More:

The Kobad Gandhy I knew

Jyoti Punwani in the Hindustan Times:

Kobad Ghandy was among the three who signed as witnesses at my marriage. His family’s ice cream was served there, much to the distaste of older guests who frowned at the strawberry chunks in a dessert supposed to be smooth and synthetic.

Kentucky’s – a name straight from ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ – was one of the two companies to introduce fresh fruit ice cream in Mumbai; its strawberries were sourced from Mahabaleshwar, where the Ghandys owned a hotel.

Fresh strawberry was the flavour that rewarded us at the end of our study circle afternoons in the vast, empty expanse of Kobad’s sea-facing flat. And scrambled eggs with sausages was the breakfast Kobad served before sitting down to explain Marx’s confounded ‘Wage, Labour, Capital’.

Decades later, whenever Kobad and wife Anuradha met, he made it a point to cook the special chicken she relished. Such meetings were rare, because both were underground Naxalites, working in different areas. And on the extremely rare occasions that Kobad dropped in from nowhere to meet his old friends, he would hover round the kitchen, picking up cooking tips and cooking himself. More:

Previously in AW:

Shekhar Kapur: Act now on global warming

Published
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on September 22, 2009
in Climate change and environment
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From the Hindustan Times:

shekhar-kapurWhen you read this I will have returned to the Himalayas once again to try and highlight the dramatic changes that are taking place in our mountains as a result of climate change. These lungs of the world are clogging with the noxious fumes of our carbon emissions, and the slow crawl of poison must be checked before it is too late. The Himalayas are the largest concentration of glaciers outside of the polar caps, and they are also receding faster than any other in the world because of global warming.

I have always felt a connection with the mountains. I’m not sure where exactly that connection comes from, but I know it is something I have in common with thousands of others who have been as lucky to visit them. I think it’s the sense of humility they impart to you: to stand there and face the immensity of nature and try to be at one with it is a great and humbling experience; the effect it has on you is unique.

Of course, the spirituality the Himalayas provoke isn’t just consigned to the mountain ranges: the Gangotri glacier is the source of the Ganga, the holy mother of India. It is also shrinking at a rate of 34m per year. That means that, by tomorrow morning, as this paper lies outside and a fresh copy is in your hands, another slice of glacier the thickness of your thumb will be gone. My daughter is nine now. If we allow the retreat of these glaciers to continue at the current rate, they’ll be gone by the time she’s in her thirties. There’s a real chance her children will not experience the beauty of the Himalayan ranges and rivers. More: