Intercalation and leaps of faith

Every now and then some Muslim scholar will pop up claiming Islam accords with modern science (or at least modern astronomy, Darwin remains beyond the pale). Zakir Naik, a popular preacher, when asked why the Quran refers to Earth as being like a carpet, responds that carpets can be wrapped around a globe. Sure they can, but somehow I doubt Allah would say 'carpet' when He meant 'globe'. There's one verse in the Quran that says, 'He spread out the Earth', which some creative interpreters, Naik included, have suggested can also be translated as 'He made the earth egg-shaped'. I'm reminded of the old saw that every word in Arabic means itself, its opposite, and a camel.
But I'm not hugely concerned about the Earth of the Quran, whether carpet or egg shaped. One thing that does bother me, though, is the Islamic calendar. It's the most useless thing ever invented: no rational being, whether human or superhuman, setting out to create a logical register of days and months, would display as a finished product this calendar.
The background to the monstrous folly goes something like this: the Arabian calendar, which the early Muslims inherited, was strictly lunar, unlike the many Chinese / Indian / Hindu calendars, which are lunisolar. A year in a lunar calendar like the Arabian one is between 11 and 12 days short of a solar year. This means that, every so often, an entire month has to be added to keep the calendar honest. So that's what the Arabs would do, circa 600 AD. When Muhammad began receiving messages from Allah, he denoted four months as holy months, months during which no wars were supposed to be fought. Ramadan was one of them. Occasionally, though, the Arabian calendar would repeat the month of Ramadan to keep in step with the sun, leading to all sorts of problems from a ritual point of view. Imagine 60 days of fasting.
So the revelation came through that intercalation was forbidden. Allah had decreed twelve months, and humans had no business duplicating any of them. With intercalation out of bounds, the new Islamic calendar drifted entirely free of the sun, which was a problem because, in human affairs unconnected to religion, the sun is of crucial importance, while the moon means jack. The Arabian calendar as modified by Islam provided no indication whether it was a good time to plant crops, whether a given day could be expected to be hot or balmy or snowy, and whether the sun would set early or late. The calendar would only tell you whether it was a day of fasting or not; whether it was OK to march to battle or not; and other stuff related explicitly to the faith itself.
It's no wonder that few Muslim nations run their civic and financial affairs on the basis of the Islamic calendar. Saudi Arabia claims to work entirely by the lunar year, but I'm sure Saudi officials peek at a proper calendar before undertaking any journeys. After all, the fact that it's the middle of Shawwal or the beginning of Rajab tells them nothing about whether they should pack an overcoat for London.

The Universe is Expanding

The Nobel Prize for Physics this year has been awarded to three researchers who showed that the universe is expanding at an increasing pace. Physicists don't yet know how this could be happening; they've had to dream up a massive amount of hypothetical invisible matter to get their equations right.
As a boy, I was pretty interested in astronomy. I remember reading about quasars that were 10 billion light years away and thinking, "Well, why should quasars only be found at the fringes of the universe? What's so special about the edge, except that the light reaching us from there is coming from the farthest back in time? If a chap stood on one of those quasars and looked toward us right this second, maybe he'd see a quasar too. Maybe, the universe was full of quasars ten billion years ago."
Well, apparently it was, more or less.
Before I got to the quasars bit, I learned the universe was expanding. I wasn't a morose type as a kid. The knowledge that the universe was expanding, and the stars and planets would probably keep drifting farther apart and grow ever colder till all communication and all life ceased, was about the only thing that depressed me around the age of ten. When I saw Annie Hall years later, I realised Alvy Singer had felt the same way back during World War II.



Unlike Alvy, though, I stopped doing homework a while before I read about the Big Bang theory.

Salman and Chingis Khan and John (not Khan)

Salman Khan is apparently preparing to play the Mongol chief Chingis Khan (or Genghis Khan, or Changaiz Khan, spell it which way you will). This is what Salman looks like:

At least, this is what he looks like after a hair transplant, hair extensions and some Photoshop work.
We don't know what Chingis-Genghis-Changaiz looked like, there are no contemporary images of him. But from portraits painted a few years after his death, we can accept he looked something like this:


Now you might think Salman doesn't look much like the guy to whom he owes his surname. But then, how much does this actor resemble Chingis-Genghis-Changaiz, who did not even share a surname with the emperor?


John Wayne was cast as Chingis (sick of name extensions, I'm dropping Genghis-Changaiz) in a film titled The Conqueror, produced by Howard Hughes, who saw it as an 'Eastern Western'. The Conqueror, released in 1956, has gone down in history for two reasons. First, it is considered one of the worst cases of miscasting in the history of Hollywood.


Second, the exteriors were shot in Utah, downwind from a US nuclear test site in Nevada. Of the 220 crew members, 91 developed cancer over the next two decades, about three times the proportion of the average American population.

Weirdly enough, Chingis Khan has been, at one point or another, considered Indian as well as Caucasian. The Indian bit came early on. Europeans didn't know much about this country back in the 13th century, but they had a vague understanding that St.Thomas had converted a few heathens here. When Chingis first came to their notice, it was as a warrior kicking the butts of Muslim kings. Roman Catholics, who'd waged long wars for control of the Holy Land, took this as a sign that a Christian priest-king they called Prester John was riding out from the east to retake Jerusalem. They applauded as the Mongols overran West Asian kingdoms, grew a little apprehensive when Russia and East Europe were attacked, and finally concluded: "These guys aren't Christians, they aren't Indians, they're coming to get us, and we're screwed." Luckily for them, the Mongol invasion of Europe was aborted at the gates of Vienna.

As for Chingis's European connections, that's a modern tale, but one no less peculiar. Hitler, you may have heard, was a fan of Chingis Khan. Genocidal rulers being a relatively small and select group, this is not surprising. But fitting Chingis into the Aryan pantheon was tricky. The problem was solved by Heinrich Himmler, who decided that Chingis was in fact descended from people who had fled the island of Atlantis before it sank, and was, therefore, as blue eyed as John Wayne.

As a sidelight, the Mongol invasion of Europe explains why children with Down syndrome used to be called Mongoloid. You may think it was only because of the epicanthic fold of the eyelid, but there was more to it than that. Scientists believed that Down Syndrome sufferers represented genetic atavism (from the Latin at-avus, or like-grandfather); they expressed traits suppressed for centuries. Mongols had raped or otherwise slept with European women during the 13th century invasion, and those traits within Europe's genetic pool occasionally burst to the surface. Children with Down Syndrome were like normal Mongol children, and the impairment of cognitive ability associated with the condition was explained by the fact that Mongols were not as bright as whites. A British doctor, F G Crookshank, published a book in 1924 titled The Mongol in our Midst, which explained that since most Mongols were imbeciles, it was to be expected that Mongols who atavistically appeared in Europe should share that imbecility. The book was generally well reviewed.

As it happens, the nations of North and East Asia, Mongolia included, score exceptionally well in IQ tests. From the information available today, it appears that average IQs in these nations (China, Mongolia, Korea and Japan) are 2 to 5 points higher than those measured in white-majority countries.

Climate of Opinion

A piece that was to appear in a newspaper this morning, but was spiked.


In Bombay in the 1970s, the rains would fade at the end of September and return only in June, at least that’s how I remember it. The pattern’s been disturbed in recent years. Heavy showers surprise the city in odd months, as they did a few weeks ago. That downpour barely inconvenienced office-workers, but had serious consequences in rural Maharashtra, where tomato farmers saw their year’s profit washed away in hours. Across the globe, people in traditional occupations, from watermelon growers in the Mekong delta to reindeer herders in Finland, their livelihoods threatened by unseasonal rains, are finding the old certainties no longer apply. Anecdotal evidence is insufficient ground for concluding a significant change is upon us, but in this case it is aligned with data which most experts consider unequivocal, and which suggests that higher temperatures recorded in recent decades cannot be ascribed to normal climatic fluctuations.
We know for certain that atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat. Considering that human activity has led to an almost 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 within a short span of time, it stands to reason that this has played a role in warming the globe. Yet, even as the science of climate change has gained an ever firmer footing, public belief in the hypothesis has slipped significantly. Only 36% of Americans now agree carbon emissions are making the earth warmer, down from 47% a decade ago. A similar downtrend is visible in Europe and Australia. In India, only one in three adults has even heard of climate change.
The figures are bad news for leaders who've gathered in Copenhagen to settle on a plan to spew less CO2. They have to sell a prescription of higher taxation and stricter regulation to increasingly skeptical electorates. Their cause has not been helped by the release of hacked emails from a few climate scientists that imply data was being fudged to fit a preconceived conclusion.
I’m not surprised that wariness about the climate change hypothesis has grown as nations move to implement potential solutions. The shift to political action brings science into an arena where it is judged primarily on ideological grounds rather than on its own terms. Right-wingers in the United States, who dislike big government and multilateral agencies, find it easy to say, “The science is shoddy, misleading, incomplete”, rather than, “Our actions are altering the climate and will hurt hundreds of millions of vulnerable people, but that’s no reason to pay more for emitting CO2”. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News, both right-wing media outlets controlled by Rupert Murdoch, have led the attack on the science of climate change.


In 1859, John Tyndall demonstrated that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation and thus helps keep the earth warm and habitable. That same year, Charles Darwin published his monumental On The Origin of Species. In the hundred and fifty years since, the ideas of Darwin and his followers have become the basis of all biological science. We now possess mountains of evidence that humans descended from other animals. Despite this, acceptance of the theory has dropped in the US in the past two decades. A recent survey concluded that a mere 14% of American adults agree evolution is ‘definitely true’, while a third say it is certainly false. The number who are unsure has jumped three times since 1985, to 21%, thanks to attacks on evolution by conservative Christians.
Like any scientific advance, evolution has attracted its share of hoaxes, from Piltdown Man to Archaeoraptor. These are seized upon by ‘creation scientists’ to discredit the entire discipline, just as the hacked emails have been gleefully publicised by climate change deniers as proof that the whole notion of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is fake.
Those questioning the broad consensus on AGW see themselves as underdogs, champions of free thinking battling an entrenched establishment. They remind me of people who, in the 1990s, rejected the relationship of HIV to AIDS. The HIV virus was isolated in 1983 and understanding of AIDS progressed rapidly enough for the first antiretroviral drug to be produced by 1987. In 1988 the Institute of Medicine of the US Academy of Sciences stated, “The evidence that HIV causes AIDS is scientifically conclusive”. Even as the disease was brought under control in the developed world, it exploded in poorer countries, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.


One of the most prominent leaders of the region, South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, was drawn into the orbit of AIDS deniers. He grew convinced that the disease afflicting Africa was not the same as the one the West was battling. Antiretroviral treatment, he claimed, was toxic, and the whole notion of an African AIDS epidemic a conspiracy hatched by racist whites and multinational pharmaceutical companies. He obstructed the sale of drugs that could counter HIV and prevent its spread from mothers to infants. The result, according to a Harvard School of Public Health report, which compared South African infection rates with those of neighbouring countries that put in place antiretroviral treatment programmes, was that at least 330,000 more deaths occurred thanks to Mbeki’s embrace of unconventional ideas.
Climate change deniers are entitled to express their views freely, but South Africa's AIDS tragedy demonstrates there can be a dreadful cost attached to rejecting the scientific consensus. If misrepresentations by the Wall Street Journal and Fox News impact public opinion enough to wreck attempts at reversing global warming, Rupert Murdoch will have blood on his hands as surely as does Thabo Mbeki.

We are the champions

A multinational study has been seeking the answer to a question related to early human migration: what route did the first inhabitants of China and Japan take to reach those places? The general belief was that the tribe of Homo Sapiens that came out of Africa split into two in West Asia (into four if you count those that went west, as seen in the map above). One branch followed the coast into India, traced the peninsula and then spread east to what is now Thailand and Indonesia before crossing a land bridge to Australia. The second branch struck out due north-east, and worked its way to China, before a tiny faction made the incredible move up to Siberia, across the frozen Bering Strait and into north America, proceeding to populate that entire continent while hunting a variety of giant mammals (megafauna) to extinction.
The Human Genome Project's Pan-Asian SNP Consortium has concluded that this standard view is false, and that China was populated not from the west, but from the south, with humans who moved up from South-East Asia.
Here's how Indian papers have responded to the news:
Times of India: Ancestors of Chinese came from India
Daily News & Analysis: The Chinese evolved from Indians
Indian Express: India: Mother of all Asians
Press Trust of India: Study traces genetic origins of Asians to India

This is rubbish. The study restricts itself to lands east of India. Since India was populated from the west, you might as well claim that we 'evolved' from Iranians. It's fair, by this logic, to claim that Persia is the mother of all Asians. Except those who came from further west, of course...

Egon Schiele and the Flu

Vienna is the Aishwarya Rai of cities, extraordinarily beautiful but cold and rather boring. It is redeemed somewhat by the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. The latter's been on my mind because my friend Chetna, who visited Vienna last week, came away a fan of the man; and Sotheby's recently organised a lecture about the nude in modern art in which the Austrian artist's drawings and paintings featured prominently.
Jabeen and I had expected to be impressed by Klimt on our Vienna visit, but Schiele came as a surprise. That's because Klimt is among artists whose works communicate well through photographs. Schiele's paintings do not, which is why I had not been overly impressed by them before walking through the Leopold and Belvedere museums. You might look at the image above and like it, but will get little sense of how moving the original is.
Part of the reason it touches us is biographical. The infant in the frame replaced a bunch of flowers in the original composition after Schiele learned that his wife Edith was expecting. She died in her sixth month of pregnancy, and he three days later, aged 28. Both succumbed to the influenza pandemic of 1918.
The outbreak of the so-called Spanish flu at the end of the first world war claimed more lives than the war itself had done: fifty million in all. About a third of the world's population is thought to have caught the infection. The country which lost more people than any other was India (then undivided). Between 15 and 17 million Indians died of the flu in those months, from a citizenry of 300 million. The equivalent in today's terms would be 50 million deaths, the entire population of all our major metropolises put together.
Despite the collosal damage it caused, the flu of 1918 and 1919 hardly figures in the nation's imagination. We hear about the plagues of the late 19th and early 20th century that, well, plagued Bombay and Poona, but influenza finds no place in our history books or folk tales. We read stories about cholera, small pox, leprosy and dozens of other ailments, but never ever about the worst wave of death ever to wash over the sub-continent.
I thought of these things as I travelled back from town this evening, passing people wearing masks, handkerchiefs, scarves, anything to keep out the H1N1 germ. The Spanish flu, too, was an H1N1 strain, but far more lethal. What if something that infectious and dangerous were to return? Our response to swine flu has proved that our defenses are too paltry to withstand an assault like that. We would be able to keep the death count down below 20 million, but considering the kind of panic a dozen deaths have caused, it is clear the entire nation would go berserk with fear. Something that doesn't appear to have happened eighty years ago.

Parsis, vultures, cows and dogs

Sooni Taraporevala's Little Zizou is a charming tale of two intricately connected Parsi families, the Khodaijis and the Pressvalas. The youngest Khodaiji, Xerxes, sees in Roxanne Pressvala a substitute for his own dead mother, to the annoyance of Liana, the Pressvalas' younger daughter. Liana's older sister Zenobia, meanwhile, is an unreachable object of desire for Xerxes's brother, Artaxerxes. Boman Presswala, father of Zenobia and Liana, is the liberal editor of a tabloid caught up in a battle against the born-again orthodoxy of Cyrus Khodaiji, faith healer, charlatan, and father to Xerxes and Atraxerxes.
The ideological dispute between the two fathers primarily revolves around giving mudbloods and half-bloods the same status as purebloods. Unfortunately, Khodaiji is a caricature who, as played by Sohrab Ardeshir, lacks the charisma required to be a convincing congregational head. Pressvala, on the other hand, is a nuanced character essayed with relish by the excellent Boman Irani. The imbalance between the two seriously weakens the central premise of the film.
Taraporevala obviously wanted to avoid steering too close to a figure like Khojeste Mistree, leader of the revivalist faction in the battle being played out in the community today. Among the many disputes between conservatives and liberals is the manner of disposing the dead. For centuries now, Parsis have built dakhmas or towers of silence, where corpses are placed to be consumed by vultures. Unfortunately, there aren't enough vultures left to do the eating, and corpses lie rotting for days on end, a prospect that horrifies many Parsis when they think of their own end or that of their kin. Solutions such as special mirrors to focus the sun's rays have been suggested, but conservatives resist the idea, proposing instead a breeding programme to augment the vulture population.
As a child, I liked spending holiday afternoons up on the terrace of my building gazing at vultures soaring in the sky. The woman who stayed on the top floor and kept the key to the terrace thought the habit weird, and looking back I sort of agree with her. Even after my vulture fascination dissipated, I was interested enough to look for the familiar circling flock of birds as I walked around the park or to the bus-stop . So I was probably one of the first to notice that the vulture population of Bombay was diminishing. Since other species, sparrows for example, were also disappearing from the metropolis in those years, I did not take the drop in vulture numbers to be a sign of a general decline, but that is precisely what it was.
In the late 1990s, I heard about massive falls in south Asian vulture numbers, and could see why it was so puzzling for experts seeking its cause. Vultures, after all, are hardy carrion eaters. They consume flesh that's been lying in the sun for hours. To digest that stuff, they need the strongest immune systems in the animal kingdom. Since there was no shortage of food in the subcontinent, and little likelihood of a deadly infection, why were they dying out?
By the time American and Pakistani scientists found the answer, south Asia's vulture population had fallen 95%. India contributed to the process of investigation only negatively. Not only did our scientists fail to come up with anything close to an answer, our government blocked foreign researchers from taking tissue samples back to their labs citing a law banning export of genetic material.
I was gobsmacked to hear the cause of the vulture decline. The culprit was diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug I, like millions of people across the world, took regularly to treat muscle pain. In the 1990s, diclofenac, known to damage kidneys, was introduced on a mass scale in south Asia as a cheap veterinary treatment. Farmers across the subcontinent jabbed their lame cattle with the drug to get a little more work on the land out of them. Milch cows, their knees affected by standing in one place for long periods of time, were similarly treated. When these bovines died, the diclofenac in their bodies was ingested by vultures whose kidneys were specially sensitive to the drug. Researchers estimated that only one dead cow or buffalo in 250 needed to have been treated with diclofenac in the week before its death to cause the observed 30% annual decline in vulture numbers.
Diclofenac is now prohibited for veterinary use and vulture numbers will hopefully pick up. The primary beneficiaries of the vulture decline, meanwhile, have been stray dogs. They are the main competition for the raptors in tearing out bits of dead cattle flesh. Parsis, incidentally, prize dogs as much as they do vultures. Before the practise of dakhmas was instituted, Zoroastrian corpses would be exposed to the elements on specially designated plots of land. Dogs and vultures would share in the feast. Even now (correct me if I'm wrong), a dog is brought to look at a corpse as part of Parsi funeral rituals.
Parsis can get very upset when the issue of dogs comes up, as the Brits in Bombay found out back in 1832. The administrators organised a cull of stray canines, only to have a riot on their hands. Of course, Britons, Europeans and Americans have their own peculiarities in this respect. Used to owning the animals as pets, they are repelled by the East and south-east Asian practice of putting dogs on menus. Aside from questions about the conditions in which the animals are reared, which apply to all species, there is no objective reason for considering the eating of cows and pigs civilised, but condemning as barbaric the consumption of dog flesh. But westerners have a habit of advancing their cultural prejudices as universal moral concerns.
Sorry if I digress, but this entire post is a series of digressions.
The data bear out the fact that stray dog numbers in India have risen as the vulture population declined. How much of the increase is a result of less competition for food is impossible to quantify. Unlike vultures, though, dogs frequently bite living human beings, and are the main carriers of an incurable disease with a mortality rate greater than that of any other affliction known to humankind. Over 80% of the world's rabies cases occur in the Indian subcontinent. About 40,000 cases per year, and therefore about 40,000 deaths. That, you will agree, is an astonishing figure.
When I was a child, alongside my fascination with vultures, I liked dogs very much. The closest I came to having one as a pet was to adopt an abandoned puppy along with galli friends. One day, the puppy-turned-dog went crazy and bit three of us. The injections were not pleasant. I'd have to stand in a long line at KEM hospital each day for a dose of the vaccine. That more or less killed my enthusiasm for dogs.
In Little Zizou, the young Liana Pressvala is a dog lover. Near the end of the movie, she is promised a pet puppy. There is no mention of vultures in the film.

Weight watching

The infant, brought out screaming, is placed on weighing scales. The reading is 5.5 pounds. Birth weight has not gone metric in India. Calls are made to relatives and friends across the city, the country, the world. The message goes out: she's healthy, 6.5 pounds, almost 7. Back in the delivery room, the new mother is told nothing till she recovers from the strain of giving birth. Eventually, the sex of her new born is revealed. If the woman is lucky, it is her first child, and she has a few more attempts left at a male heir.
That's the way thousands of lives begin each day in India. With silence about gender and lies about birth weight. The two are more intimately connected than one might suppose. Today's Times of India carries a large feature about malnutrition in India. The writer, Kounteya Sinha, has published similar articles more than once in the past. The news remains the same. Despite concentrated efforts by this government, and by all the administrations that preceded it, levels of malnourishment in Indian children exceed those in sub-Saharan Africa. How can this be, one wonders. Sure, the bureaucracy is corrupt, sure most of the rations meant for the poor never reach the people targetted, but even so, how can all that outlay, all that effort undertaken by a nation experiencing unprecendented economic growth fail to raise nutrition levels above those of states bereft of even rudimentary governmental oversight, states whose economies are sustained largely by foreign aid. India's population has a higher per capita income, better access to sanitation and substantially better literacy rates than that of sub-saharan Africa, yet one in every three Indian children is born underweight compared with only one in every six in that part of Africa.
It's a huge puzzle, and the Times article provides no answers, just more gruesome figures. Half the child deaths in India are caused by malnutrition; 27% of the world's undernourished children live in India; 43% of children under 5 are underweight, and more than 70% are anaemic. High food prices are making the problem worse.
A few years ago, researchers isolated the cause of India's failure to improve nutrition levels among children. It lies in the extremely low position of Indian women in society. Their status is so low that the nation has an abysmal female to male ratio; so low that a girl's birth is greeted with sombre silence as often as joyous celebration. Women cook for their husbands, but eat after their men are done. They consume whatever little is left, and it is often very little indeed because the husbands have been brought up to consider only their own stomachs, and women trained to think of other people before themselves. The ideal Indian woman is defined by her self-sacrifice. All this is well-known, so it should be no surprise that over 80% of India's women are anaemic.
In Africa, they say, the social mores are different. It is shameful for men not to ensure their wives are well fed. Whatever little there is to eat is shared more equitably between the sexes.
As it happens, the nutrition levels of women are crucial to the birth weight of their babies. An undernourished female will, likelier than not, produce underweight babies, and birth weight is, in turn, a crucial determinant of future health.
The point, then, is not just to provide more food to the poor, but to ensure it is distributed more equally within households. But prejudice is bound to be a massive stumbling block in any educational campaign. The solution, in my opinion, is to fight prejudice by pandering to it. Men ought to be taught that, should they want healthy male children, they need to keep their wives well fed, and not just once a pregnancy is discovered. Women, similarly, must learn that their sacrifices are often counterproductive. By denying themselves, they are denying their children.
We may not be able to break through the disappointed silence that greets the birth of girls, but we might do better when it comes to the weighing scales.

Narco-analysis, Brain Mapping and other frauds

News has just come in that S Malini, the Assistant Director of Bangalore's Forensic Science Laboratory, has been sacked after it was found that her credentials were forged. I'm not surprised at all. I've written more than once about how the narco analysis and 'brain mapping' pioneered by that facility were voodoo techniques. What's shocking is how long the media swallowed the idea that these tests were scientific, and how much credibility they were given by the judicial community. This, despite a study by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences showing that 'brain mapping' is untrustworthy; and a recent paper published by Nawaz Irani, a researcher at the forensic lab at Kalina in Bombay, which demonstrated that narco analysis is equally useless.
Some day journalists will write about how thousands of suspects were injected with drugs that caused debilitating side effects, and failed to produce any credible information for investigators. Perhaps there will even be demands for compensation filed. For the moment, I hope judges across the nation agree to an immediate moratorium on narco analysis and brain mapping till forensic scientists of proven credentials attest to their efficacy.
Here are the two columns I wrote in Time Out about the issue. The first was published in 2006, the second in 2008. Some irrelevant text has been cut out and replaced by ellipses.

Bheja Fry

It now seems standard Bombay police practice to fly the accused in high profile cases down to the Karnataka State Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Bangalore... The Bangalore lab’s USP is what the police call ‘brain mapping’...

A little digging told me that ‘brain mapping’ is a misnomer for tests conducted in Bangalore, which are more akin to ‘brain fingerprinting’. Neurologists have known for decades that seeing a familiar image triggers a characteristic, measurable neural response called a P300. An inventor named Lawrence Farwell has created a memory-detector machine based on this involuntary response. He calls the procedure brain fingerprinting. If, for instance, an accused in a homicide claims he’s never visited the victim’s house, his brain could trip him up by sending out P300 waves when shown photographs of the home’s interior. However, finding material to which only a guilty brain will respond is exceptionally difficult and has restricted the use of brain fingerprinting. In the above instance, policemen might have shown the suspect pictures of the home during questioning, or images may have appeared in the media.

To make matters murkier, it turns out that the Bangalore forensic lab doesn’t use Farwell’s patented method but a variant called Brain Electrical Activation Fingerprinting developed by Dr. C R Mukundan, formerly of NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neural Sciences). Three years ago, Mukundan received a grant of Rs.70 lakhs (bizarrely, from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting) to evolve an indigenous brain fingerprinting technique. BEAF involves recreating the crime through auditory stimuli, an extremely imprecise process which could never hope to provide unambiguous results. Unlike Farwell, who has been writing research papers for twenty years, Mukundan appears to have published nothing about BEAF’s efficacy in respected peer-reviewed journals. What he has done is to start a company called Brainex to market his unproven machine. This sounds to me like voodoo science, somewhere between herbal fuel and cold fusion.

The BEAF route is significantly more expensive than the default technique used by police, which, of course, is to beat up suspects till they say whatever cops want them to say. But I suspect it will fare as pathetically in court as forced confessions have done for years.

Forensic technology can help get many criminals convicted, but its judicious use requires well-trained, honest, professionals, which the police utterly lack. Case in point: the Marine Drive rape where, despite all circumstances being favourable, no clinching DNA evidence has been found tying constable Sunil More to the crime.

Bheja Fry Redux

In a column published two years ago, I criticised the police for their increasing reliance on ‘narco-analysis’ and brain scans in criminal investigations. Since then, two additional labs have been set up for Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature (BEOS) testing, including one in Bombay. This year, a judge in the Sewri sessions court and another in Pune accepted BEOS evidence while handing out life sentences in murder cases.

Meanwhile, the inventor of BEOS, C. R. Mukundan, has yet to publish a single paper about the technique in a peer-reviewed journal. Last year, the central government appointed a committee of six experts to probe Mukundan’s system. The committee, led by the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, D. Nagaraja, concluded that BEOS was unreliable as an investigative tool and should not be used as evidence in court. The Directorate of Forensic Sciences immediately rejected the experts’ conclusion and reaffirmed its commitment to quack technology.

When BEOS or narco-analysis are mentioned in the media, they are invariably referred to as “scientific tests’. I’d like to know what exactly is scientific about drugging people and prompting them to babble by asking leading questions. From the incoherent ramblings thus produced, officers pick and choose what they please. Arun Ferreira, accused of links with radical left wing groups, stated Naxalism in Maharashtra was being funded by Bal Thackeray. Naturally, this revelation was ignored. The police wouldn’t touch Bal Thackeray if he invited top Naxals for dinner and wrote them a cheque before a dozen cameras. In the Aarushi Talwar murder investigation, on the other hand, the dope-induced confession of Dr. Talwar’s compounder Krishna led to the arrest of two other underlings, Rajkumar and Vijay Mandal. Both revealed their guilt while under the influence of Sodium Pentothal and in a lab with electrodes attached to their skulls. Unfortunately, the police ended up with no hard evidence of any kind and couldn’t even file a chargesheet in the stipulated period.

If they’d stuck to established forensic tools like fingerprinting and DNA matching, they could have charged or absolved the trio with authority. DNA profiling is not something outlandish from episodes of CSI, it’s incredibly easy and inexpensive. A town near Tel Aviv uses it to fine dog owners who fail to clean up behind their pets. All pooches are brought in for mouth swabs, creating a database against which unscooped poop is compared.

Perhaps the most novel defence of narco-analysis has come from IPS officer turned civil rights activist Y. P. Singh. He argues it reduces the chance of detainees being tortured for information. Isn’t that a great option to give arrested suspects in a liberal democracy: do you want your body bashed or your brain addled? I believe the investigating officer usually fills in the answer: both of the above.

Darwin: A Bicentennial Tribute

Charles Darwin was among my first heroes. As a primary schooler, I read a Ladybird account of his life, and was deeply fascinated. Beagle, Galapagos, iguana: the words felt wonderful on the tongue. I dreamed of discovering unknown creatures in malarial swamps far from civilisation. As I grew older and realised I had capacity neither for the self-sacrifice nor for the meticulous persistence required for explorations of that kind, my admiration for Darwin and those who followed in his path was reinforced considerably.
Darwin's central thesis of natural selection acting on random variations is very different from, say, the Theory of Relativity. Anybody of sound mind can understand it. It is so simple, in fact, that that any intelligent person living in the early Victorian era might have hit upon it independently, given the right circumstances. The reason nobody did is that, while the mechanism Darwin proposed was elegantly simple, its consequences were so far-reaching as to overturn all traditional notions about how trees, reptiles, insects and humans came to occupy Planet Earth. The idea was so radical that even today, exactly 200 years after Darwin was born, in the 150th year of the publication of his celebrated book On the Origin of Species, and after a century and a half of discoveries that have proved his idea true beyond all reasonable doubt, a majority of people across the globe reject its validity.
I never had a mental block against the idea of natural selection because I didn't believe any of the explanations religions provided for the origin of life on earth. My immediate family members were not religiously inclined. The only time I attended prayers was when an uncle or neighbour installed a Ganapati during the annual festival. I gorged on the modaks made in that period, but the fervent chanting always struck me as faintly ridiculous. I found it mind-boggling that intelligent, well-educated adults could actually believe their prayers would be answered by a deity with a human body and elephant's head.
It was evident that the world was very unfair to some individuals and extraordinarily kind to others; and that the unfairness and kindness did not correlate with any discernible external factor like religious faith, goodness or intelligence. Those who worshipped Ganapati were no better off than devotees of other gods. Why, then, believe in the dogmas of one faith over another?
Once I understood Darwin, life made sense. The facts as I saw them, and as they were observed by people everywhere, could be explained in ways that did not create an infinite regression of questions ("If everything must have a creator, who created the Creator? And who created that Creator?"), or unsolvable contradictions ("If Allah is omnipotent, it follows that he made me a disbeliever. Why, then, will he condemn me to hell and an eternity of torment for my disbelief?"). By the time I turned thirteen or fourteen or fifteen (past years coalesce in memory as one gets older), I was convinced that natural selection was the driving force behind the creation of the varied forms of life visible on earth, and nothing I have read or experienced since has shaken that conviction in the slightest.
I have written this post without using the word most associated with Darwin: evolution. It is, in many ways, a misnomer, implying as it does that some states of being are inherently better than others. It places Darwin in a category that includes a number of misguided thinkers who came before him, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and leaves the door open to criticism that he was not the 'father of evolution'. He wasn't, just as Gandhi was not the 'father of non-violence'. Gandhi's originality lay in demonstrating how non-violent protest could be the basis of political struggle. Darwin's resided in his explanation, backed by hundreds of practical examples, of how life began with extremely simple forms and changed over hundreds of millions of years, without any external impetus, to the mix of simple and complex living things we observe today.