This blog has been missing out on a lot of action in the recent past. The reasons are plenty and not necessary to get into. One noteworthy fact is that Twitter has managed to steal a greater percentage of my digital communication.

I also understand that I had cited a similar reason many months ago to explain the paucity of posts here. Things seldom change. While I re-resolve to blog regularly, here are some interesting links which you might find interesting (some have already been shared in my tweet stream):

• Tour de France 2010: Circle of Death marks century of suffering http://bit.ly/dx4ogO – Fantastic writeup on the history of the Tour de France and how arduous it really is! Must read to give you an idea of man’s endurance limits (or rather the lack of limits)
• Penguin’s next march http://bit.ly/atGj9i – This is about the publishing house named after the black and white forever freezing bird. Penguin’s 75th anniversary (yes, it is that old) is coming up and as it approaches this milestone, how does it deal with the rising challenges of the industry
• The urban housing conundrum http://bit.ly/9ZNlLS – Rahul Chandran writes at The Mint on the problem of “inclusive” accommodation. How India’s cities need to plan to accommodate the ever-growing population of the urban poor. Very insightful and well written.

And oh yes, in the meanwhile The Better India celebrated its 2nd anniversary.

Enjoy, ladies and gentlemen.

This is perhaps one of the biggest and most important milestones in the history of mankind. Craig Venter has created the world’s first synthetic life form. The new organism was created in a lab entirely out of four bottles of chemicals.

Excerpt from the article in Guardian:

The new organism is based on an existing bacterium that causes mastitis in goats, but at its core is an entirely synthetic genome that was constructed from chemicals in the laboratory.

The single-celled organism has four “watermarks” written into its DNA to identify it as synthetic and help trace its descendants back to their creator, should they go astray.

“We were ecstatic when the cells booted up with all the watermarks in place,” Dr Venter told the Guardian. “It’s a living species now, part of our planet’s inventory of life.”

Details of this process in some other articles indicates that the creation of this new synthetic “life-form” did involve yeast as an intermediary. Does that still count as synthetic then? Keeping that minor fib aside, I believe this is an incredibly big achievement for mankind. Creating life was the prerogative of God and by imitating Him, man has reduced Him to a much lesser stature. That is of course based on the assumption that He existed in the first place. This particular experiment and all subsequent ones might well question that assumption a lot more strongly.

Andrew Brown raises interesting questions in his article titled “Has Venter made us gods?” Some points made by him:

The man who can make life can also give humans apparently godlike powers. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it” said the Californian visionary Stewart Brand 40 years ago; and Venter’s techniques should make it possible to engineer bacteria to do almost anything we can imagine, from cleaning up the oceans to supplying us with energy. The bacteria found in nature can work like the philosophers” stone, transforming almost any substance into anything. If we can design them to turn pollution into energy, that would be wonderful; but the same techniques could produce weapons of unparalleled cruelty and efficiency.

This is exciting stuff! God knows what the future will hold for all of us. Oh wait, change that sentence…

Quick update: My book “Neumonia and Other Sketch Stories” is now available on Rediff.

The book is shipped in 3 days and you also get Rs. 25 off the original price!

Click here to order now!

Some details about the book here: www.sketchstories.com

Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a book that neatly conforms to the phrase ‘poetry in motion’. Set in the times of the Chinese cultural revolution, when every educated youth was sent to the villages to get “re-educated” by the peasants, this book unfolds magically and just as youthfully as its protagonists.

Luo and Ma are two lads from the city whose parents have been classified as “enemies of the people” solely because they were educated doctors. Banished from the city, Luo and Ma find themselves in a village in the mountainous district of Yongjing. The book opens with a beautiful frame of the two kids being inspected by a crowd of peasants led by the village headman. I use the word frame because this book paints pictures very well in your mind. After all that is the quality of literary excellence – to tear away from the boundaries of prose and instead sketch moments in the reader’s mind.

One such moment is during the inspection when the peasants discover that these two kids possess a violin – clearly a Western instrument and hence blasphemous. Luo decides that Ma should play the violin and this act might make the peasants happy. He announces that Ma will play a Mozart sonata. To this, the village headman warily asks what is a sonata. Ma replies that it is a Western song. This raises the vigilante mode of the headman and he insists on knowing the name of the song. “Mozart….,” Ma manages to mutter and the headman snaps at him in anger asking him to name the song. At this crucial juncture, Luo calmly slips in and says that the song’s name is “Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao”. Relief sets in all around, the headman smiles, nods to himself and replies, “Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao all the time.” With that sweeping sentence he has just answered all questions about Mozart’s loyalty.

As Luo and Ma settle down to work in the fields, they discover and befriend another young boy from the city who has been sent to be “re-educated” to one of their neighbouring villages. This young boy, nicknamed Four-Eyes, has a secret – he is carrying with him a suitcase full of Western books. Through him, Luo and Ma are exposed to the French writer Balzac’s Ursule Mirouet. Luo and Ma read this book through the night and are fascinated about how it exposes them to worlds far away, to thoughts and emotions completely alien to them. Luo and Ma are now addicted – they want all the books from Four-Eyes. At around the same time, they meet the village tailor’s daughter – the beautiful little Chinese seamstress. A country girl, Luo and Ma both fall in love and take it upon themselves to “educate” her via the works of Balzac. Luo’s natural flair for story-telling is put to good use and she takes to Balzac like the proverbial fish does to water. Then one day, when Four-Eyes earned the permission to return to the city, Luo, Ma and the seamstress decide to steal the suitcase of books. After all, they couldn’t think of a life without Balzac!

Their lives become intertwined around works of Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, Romain Rolland and Alexander Dumas. The works of these master writers influence the three to such a large extent that their lives get changed forever.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a breezy little book that talks about the importance of dreaming, the futility of oppression and, perhaps directly so, the influence of literature on a society. While Balzac may have influenced many of the greatest writers of world literature (including Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Kerouac among others), Dai Sijie’s book is also a wonderful piece of writing and is perhaps a fitting tribute to Balzac.

A couple of links pertaining to the Naxalism issue, the government’s role in it and the impact being created.

Annie Zaidi, of Known Turf, jots down excerpts in her post “Some questions, some stories”
One of the excerpts:

‘My name is Lingaram, from Sameli, Dantewada. I am a driver and my family has a car, in which I can ferry people. We have some land on which we farm. I am not very literate.I was watching TV at home, around September last year. Five motorcycles came, with 10 people, who were holding AK 47s. They took me to Kokunda. They asked me questions such as “where did you get the bike from? How do you go about in style?” My family is fairly comfortably off, but they accused me of being a Naxalite.

The Open Magazine carries an article by Rahul Pandita, “The War Nobody Can Ever Win“, that details out ground realities in the deep forests of Gadchiroli. Horrifying? Yes.

A popular radio channel hosted a “coffee cup reader” on its morning show yesterday. While listening to the show I managed to figure out that a “coffee cup reader” is some sort of a soothsayer.

Out of the many people who call up to know about what lies ahead in their lives, Karan Singhvi is one. This lad of 18 years loves playing cricket and wanted to know when he would make it to the national team.

Nawal Gani, the lady who reads coffee cups (and she takes about half an hour to do so per cup per person), announces that Karan will be in the team within 4 to 5 years. She also adds the apt disclaimer that in order to make it happen Karan will have to ‘persist with his dream’ and put in the hardwork required.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you manage to see a Karan Singhvi play in the national team within the next 5 years, do let me know. I would like to be the first one to visit Ms. Gani. With my coffee cup in tow.

In other notes, here is one of India’s premier physicists Jayant Narlikar talking about “The Scientific Case against Astrology“

P. Chidambaram has released this official statement in response to yesterday’s Naxalite attack which led to 76 CRPF personnel losing their lives. Couple of paragraphs:

The State has a legitimate right to deploy its security forces to resist, apprehend and, if necessary, neutralise militants who are determined to strike at the very roots of our nation.

It is the Naxalites who have described the State as the ‘enemy’ and the conflict as a ‘war’. If this is a war – and I wish to say that we have never used that word – it is a war that has been thrust upon the State by those who do not have a legitimate right to carry weapons or to kill. The State – the Central Government and the affected State Governments – are discharging their legal and Constitutional duty to protect the people.

What do you think of that?

Steven Strogatz returns with his 8th post of the “math, from basic to baffling” series, this time focusing his articulate discourse on the concept of differential geometry.

It is a must read and will leave you a whole lot clearer on things like geodesics and shortest paths.

Loved the final paragraph, which I present below:

Sometimes when people say the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, they mean it figuratively, as a way of ridiculing nuance and affirming common sense. In other words, keep it simple. But battling obstacles can give rise to great beauty — so much so that in art, and in math, it’s often more fruitful to impose constraints on ourselves. Think of haiku, or sonnets, or telling the story of your life in six words. The same is true of all the math that’s been created to find the shortest way from here to there when you can’t take the easy way out.

Two points. Many paths. Mathematical bliss.

Two young army cadets wanting to break the ranks. One smart, the other a romantic. Two powerful army generals gambolling in power. One is the country’s president, and the other touted as the “second most powerful” person. The country is Pakistan, and in the backdrop is the war between the USSR, Afghanistan and the USA.
The president, General Zia, dies in a plane crash. Pak One smoulders on its final journey into a blast and a whimper. Who killed General Zia? The young army cadets? The second most powerful man? The CIA? The ISI? A crate of mangoes? Did blind Zainab have anything to do with it? Or the crow that flits across India and Pakistan depending on the weather?

Mohammed Hanif’s The Case of Exploding Mangoes is a thrilling page-turner. The protagonist, Ali Shigri, is an army cadet whose outlook towards life has a lot to do with his father, Colonel Shigri’s, alleged suicide. His compatriot, Obaid, is a fragile dreamer and clearly a misfit in the army. General Akhtar is the second most powerful man, heading the ISI and keeping a watch on everything of importance in his country. Then there is the US Ambassador, running his own games to fufill their motives beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan’s borders.

The people who would like Zia dead are quite a few in this fast-paced explosive novel. Who actually does it, and whether you come to know of it is something you need to dive into its pages to find out. Ali Shigri’s ponderings on life’s nuances and its unpleasantries are noteworthy in the context of the proceedings.

The Case of Exploding Mangoes might not be a literary achievement (perhaps because it does not wander its cause on topics like humanities and the war suffering?) but it more than surely is a read that leaves you thrilled on having witnessed (from the inside) one of history’s better kept secrets – the death of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

Steven Strogatz continues his series on “math, from basic to baffling” with his latest article talking about complex numbers. Very interesting, especially the fractal representation of multiple roots of a polynomial. Check out the article here.

Excerpt:

Better yet, a grand statement called The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra says that the roots of any polynomial are always complex numbers.  In that sense they’re the end of the quest, the holy grail.  They are the culmination of the journey that began with 1.