Category Archives: Science and Technology

The Markhor stands proud

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There is at least one group (above all others) that values the comparative “calm” that has recently settled over the LOC in Kashmir, as India/Pakistan relations have thawed.  The mighty Markhor.  The Independent reports:

The ceasefire between India and Pakistan in Kashmir has produced an unexpected beneficiary – the world’s largest goat.

The markhor, a mountain goat that stands almost 6ft tall at the shoulder and can weigh 17 stone, was thought to be extinct in Indian-held Kashmir. But a recent joint survey by Indian wildlife organisations and the Indian army found 35 small herds – 155 goats – thriving near the Line of Control.

As recently as 1970 there were 25,000 on the Indian side, but by 1997 they had been driven to near extinction. The main cause was the conflict.

The Indian Express goes into more detail:

”It is really encouraging that we still have a sizeable Markhor population here. The present peace situation is conducive for wildlife. Regular cross-border firing and shelling was a serious threat. But the habitation was improving even before the ceasefire was announced in late 2003. We declared protected areas and were hopeful that the Markhor population would improve,” J&K Chief Wildlife Warden CM Seth told The Indian Express.

J&K Principal Chief Conservator of Forests SD Swatantra also lauded the Army for its role.

”Army personnel have been sensitive to the environmental concerns. Border thaw during the last two years has helped the animals a lot. Earlier, constant presence of the troops minimised poaching and human interference. Now in the absence of conflict, the habitat is improving fast,” he said.

What a noble animal.  A part of me has always wished that humans too had horns.  A lot of petty arguments could be settled by simply locking horns for a few moments…or impalement.  Plus girls would immediately know that you were packing.

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No Plastic for You!

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flood.jpg When asked, “Paper or Plastic?” how do YOU answer?

Are you blissfully indifferent to the ramifications of your choice? Angst-ridden because neither option is perfect? Filled with guilt because you are an Alum from the University of California at Santa Cruz or Davis, and thus, you should know better?

While you’re sorting all that out, I’m filling my much-adored Boat and Tote, sans guilt, confusion or consternation. It turns out that if I ever visit Mumbai, I might have to schlep it THERE, too.

The government in the western Indian state of Maharashtra has banned the sale and use of plastic bags.
“Mumbai and various other areas have suffered from the misuse of plastic bags,” state chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said in Mumbai. [BBC]

Perhaps you are asking yourself, “What misuse?” No, you pervs. Not that kind.

“These tend to choke the drainage and sewage systems.” [BBC]

Who’s brilliant enough to guess where I’m going with this?

Mr Deshmukh said plastic bags had added to the problems of the recent floods across the state, which claimed more than 1,000 lives. [BBC]

Exactly. w00t smart environmental choices! 😀 Continue reading →

Radio killed the video star

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A de Menezes update: police and military radios both were on different frequencies and apparently didn’t work underground. It’s shades of 9/11.

Police marksmen and army surveillance teams following Jean Charles de Menezes onto a Tube train could not receive orders in the vital moments before he was shot dead because their radios did not work underground… The undercover officers sitting alongside Mr de Menezes are understood to have decided he was not a threat, but they could not get this message back to Gold Command at the Yard nor relay it to the marksmen.

As the firearms officers ran into the station they are believed to have been out of touch with everyone else involved in the operation. It has been disclosed that the two groups involved — one from Scotland Yard and the other from the Army — were using different radio networks as they trailed the innocent electrician from his home on July 22. Officers on the train are understood to have decided that from the way Mr de Menezes was dressed, and that he was not carrying a bag, he was not about to blow himself up. [Link]

Active suspects should never have been let onto the tube in the first place:

One of the troops who accompanied the Yard marksmen on to the tube also reportedly told military chiefs that the armed police arrived far too late and should have intercepted their target outside Stockwell Underground station, in South London. [Link]

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An heir for Rakesh Sharma

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Conflicting reports suggest that NASA may offer an astronaut slot to an Indian citizen in one of the next selection cycles.  The Telegraph reports that an offer is imminent:

After Indian-American astronaut Kalpana Chawla, an Indian national could soon hitch a ride aboard a US space shuttle. An announcement could be made after the Joint Working Group on Civil Space Co-operation meets in Washington next month.

“The US offered to include an Indian astronaut in its training modules and later on a flight. So, it is their invitation rather than our request,” a source at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said.

“That’s why we cannot say much except that Discovery’s smooth landing means it could happen sooner than expected. We will begin working on the details after the next meeting of the joint working group.“

vs.

To a question on an Indian astronaut being trained by NASA, he [Chairman G Madhavan Nair of ISRO] said ISRO had not received any such proposal. [Link]

The India Daily seems to corroborate though, with an actual attributable source:

In a clear reflection of the newfound bonhomie, Robert Blake, Deputy Chief of US Mission in India, told reporters in Chennai that India’s moon mission would have active participation of the US.

“We wanted to do more in the area of space exploration, space navigation, satellite navigation and launch. We want to launch two US instruments on the “Chandrayan” (moon mission). Finally we agreed to include an India astronaut in the US astronaut programme,” Blake said.

India plans to send an unmanned mission to the moon by 2008, in what is seen as an effort to showcase the country’s scientific capabilities. The mission has been named as ”Chandrayan Pratham” (First Journey to the Moon).”

Now I’m a little skeptical.  Deputy State Department officials don’t usually have sway with NASA.  It’s true that foreign astronauts do fly with NASA (including an Israeli and a Japanese citizen on the last two missions), but in recent years they have almost all been from countries which have a stake in the International Space Station.  India is not one of those countries.  Israel isn’t either though.  Israel is however a strategic partner with whom we share a lot of technology.  Given that Bush is a big supporter of space exploration and a recent supporter of technology transfer with India, maybe it’s not so far-fetched after all.  My personal attitude (obviously for selfish reasons) is that there are plenty of good Indian American candidates already.  Hmmmm, maybe now would be a good time to apply for that dual-citizenship .  On the flip-side the Russians took up Rakesh Sharma over two decades ago.  It may be time for an Indian citizen to make the trip again.

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Stem-cell Research vs. The Mahabharata (and fare thee well)

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[Hi folks, this is my last Sepia Mutiny post. It’s been fun, but it was a one-month guestblogger gig all along (same deal with Turbanhead). I’ve really enjoyed playing in this sandbox, and doing comments gupshup w/people like Bong Breaker, Punjabi Boy, DesiDancer, Razib the Atheist, Al-Mujahid for Debauchery, etc. etc. Feel free to come play in my smaller, geekier box over here. Ciao, and I leave you with a short post on bioethics, just in case “Versions of the Ramayana” wasn’t punk enough for you]

Pankaj Mishra has an intriguing piece in the Times, about India’s budding biotech industry. It receieved a major injection of momentum after George W. Bush severely limited embryonic stem-cell research in the U.S. a few years ago.

Surprisingly, though India is in some ways an even more religiously polarized place than the U.S., the question of the ethics of this kind of biotech (as well as the ethics of genetic cloning) has not become a bone of political contention. This is despite the fact that passages in Hindu scriptures like The Mahabharata clearly suggest that life begins at conception:

Indeed, most evangelical Christians, who believe that the embryo is a person, may find more support in ancient Hindu texts than in the Bible. Many Hindus see the soul — the true Self (or atman) — as the spiritual and imperishable component of human personality. After death destroys the body, the soul soon finds a new temporal home. Thus, for Hindus as much as for Catholics, life begins at conception. The ancient system of Indian medicine known as Ayurveda assumes that fetuses are alive and conscious when it prescribes a particular mental and spiritual regimen to pregnant women. This same assumption is implicit in The Mahabharata, the Hindu epic about a fratricidal war apparently fought in the first millennium B.C. In one of its famous stories, the warrior Arjuna describes to his pregnant wife a seven-stage military strategy. His yet-to-born son Abhimanyu is listening, too. But as Arjuna describes the seventh and last stage, his wife falls asleep, presumably out of boredom. Years later, while fighting his father’s cousins, the hundred Kaurava brothers, Abhimanyu uses well the military training he has learned in his mother’s womb, until the seventh stage, where he falters and is killed. (link)

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Really Stuck on Shiva

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Over in the tech world, a debate rages over the naming of Really Simple Syndication, a format which lets you subscribe to multiple blogs and receive regular updates. Some say its orange button is ugly, its acronym too geeky for your grandma to grok. They suggest the simpler word ‘subscribe’ or, perchance, ‘feed.’ Others say that people learn acronyms all the time: XP, BMW, CYA. (Disclaimer: I’ve written a blog editor and prefer non-technical terms.)

What few are saying is that the little saffron RSS button really freaks out millions of desis all over the Net. It’s the flip side of the cultural hijacking of the swastika, and the acronym makes it looks like a donation button for right-wing Hindus. Godse would be proud.

The Internet standards groups are getting ready to roll out their next proposal, Very High Performance. In retaliation, India has released its version, Konsistently Krunk Kaching 

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The Savannahs of America

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A couple of days ago the New York Times had an interview with Dr. Ullas Karanth, a wildlife biologist/conservationist from India who is desperately trying to save the tiger from extinction (thanks for the tip Yamini):

Dr. Karanth, 57, was in New York on a recent summer afternoon to attend a conference at the Bronx Zoo, a subsidiary of the conservation society, on the future of tigers in the wild. In a break in the proceedings, he spoke of his favorite feline.

Q. Do we know how many wild tigers still exist in India?

A. We don’t. The government claims that there are over 3,000. But that figure is based on a flawed counting method that officials developed for themselves. There are preservation groups who claim the number is more like 1,000. It’s probably not that low.

We believe that if India is to have tigers, these wildlife reserves must be rigorously protected.

Josh Dolan of Cornell University publishes a paper in this week’s Nature (paid subscription required) that proposes a solution for animals faced with the same prospects as the tigers in India:

North America lost most of its large vertebrate species — its megafauna — some 13,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene. And now Africa’s large mammals are dying, stranded on a continent where wars are waging over scarce resources. However much we would wish otherwise, humans will continue to cause extinctions, change ecosystems and alter the course of evolution. Here, we outline a bold plan for preserving some of our global megafaunal heritage…

Our vision begins immediately, spans the coming century, and is justified on ecological, evolutionary, economic, aesthetic and ethical grounds. The idea is to actively promote the restoration of large wild vertebrates into North America in preference to the ‘pests and weeds’ (rats and dandelions) that will otherwise come to dominate the landscape. This ‘Pleistocene re-wilding’ would be achieved through a series of carefully managed ecosystem manipulations using closely related species as proxies for extinct large vertebrates…

Bold plan?  Are you kidding me! You guys get what he is saying?  They want to reintroduce lions and tigers and…elephants from Africa into North America so that they have a chance to survive the seemingly inevitable extinction they face in Africa (and most likely India).  This is just ballsy.  There are a dozen reasons why this is a very very bad idea but I like big thinkers.

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Having clout is cool

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Apul informs me that Fortune Magazine has released a list of what it considers the 50 most influential people of color.  The real name of the list is, Diversity 2005: People with the most clout.  Why such a wishy-washy title?  Anyways there are three Indians that made the cut:

Sonny Mehta, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Alfred A. Knopf Publishers

Mehta is arguably the most admired editor in book publishing. In his stable: Michael Crichton and Toni Morrison. Also helped President Clinton’s My Life break nonfiction sales records. [Link]

Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of the Imaging and Printing Group at Hewlett-Packard

Restructuring aside, Joshi is still the straw that stirs the drink. Despite rival Dell’s push into printers, his unit alone would rank No. 79 on the Fortune 500. [Link]

and Indra Nooyi, President and CFO of PepsiCo

The executive is known as a skilled strategist. She has engineered tens of billions of dollars in acquisition deals. [Link]

Who do I have to sleep with to make this list next year?

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Satellite Radio Super-Globality

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A few months ago, my wife started a job that entails a monster commute across the NYC metro area. She spends a lot of time in the car, so as an anniversary present I got her XM radio to make the driving time a little more bearable. She seems to like it.

A few days after installing it, I was bragging about the device a little with my in-laws in Bombay. In the midst of my laborious explanation of how it works, they stopped me and said ‘hey, what’s the big deal? We already have one of those at home.’ Oops. In some spaces, the Indian market for consumer goods is actually a bit ahead of the western one. Satellite radio turns out to be one such space (the other space where that is true is in mobile phones).

asiastar.jpgWorldspace Satellite Radio has been around for seven years, and has had India in its service range for five of them. But it’s only this year that it has made a major push to gain subscribers in the Indian market (coinciding with a stock IPO). According to a recent Rediff report, Worldspace currently has about 40,000 customers in India, and 63,000 worldwide (compare to 4 million XM Radio subscribers and 1.1 million Sirius subscribers in the U.S.). Worldspace in fact predates American satellite radio (they originally owned XM Radio), though it seems they’ve now been eclipsed by it in terms of subscriber base. The big news this summer is that XM Radio has invested $25 million back into its parent company.

Worldspace broadcasts from two geostationary satellites, and covers an area that includes 4 billion people, including the majority of Asia (East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia), the Middle East, Africa, and Southern and Western Europe. (See the full coverage map here)

The questionable business strategy and management of this particular company probably isn’t that important. More interesting is the potential of the medium as a whole: 4 billion people is a lot of potential listeners, especially considering they are being reached with just two satellites. If other companies enter the space, and put up their own satellites, the industry could explode across Asia. Among other things, it could potentially be an impressive engine for globalization: because satellite broadcasts cover huge swaths of earth on limited bandwidth, they can’t be specialized very much by region. Thus, all of South Asia gets the same broadcast. Interesting possibilities… Continue reading →

Finding her match

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Some time ago we posted about a young woman, Pia Awal, who needed a bone marrow donor to fight her leukemia. A 20-year-old Pakistani woman from London matched and saved her life.

Awal and her fiancé, Apratim Dutta, just had their long-delayed wedding. I can’t imagine what they’ve been through in the meantime. The NYT reports:

On June 30, 2002, Mr. Dutta’s 31st birthday, Ms. Awal was feeling feverish and bone tired. They went to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, expecting that she would be given some antibiotics for the flu… she was found to have acute myelogenous leukemia…

… weeks before their July engagement party, Ms. Awal’s doctor said the leukemia had returned… Mr. Dutta began searching for a South Asian donor whose white blood cells were a genetic match for Ms. Awal. He started a Web site, matchpia.org, to find donors. He made a DVD about Ms. Awal’s situation and tried to get television stations to broadcast it. Finally, through an international donor registry, they found a match in a 20-year-old Pakistani woman living in London.

Mr. Dutta, who loves steaks and red wine, began to eat vegetarian meals with Ms. Awal… As part of her recovery this time, she started eating meat, which gave her the sense of being fully fused with Mr. Dutta…

They were finally married on July 30 in Manhattan at the Tribeca Rooftop… Ms. Awal, who cannot have children because she has had so much chemotherapy, is working on a children’s book about cancer.

Congrats to the newlywed couple.

Click here to add yourself to the South Asian bone marrow registry. There are several booths at India Day parades in the next ten days. In NYC, go to 27th & Madison on Sunday, Aug. 21, from 12-6pm for a simple, painless blood test.

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