RESEARCH

T he Indian Railways’ act of using signal detonators (crackers) about a quarter kilometre away from outermost signal points to warn train drivers of approaching stations and yard’s staff of incoming trains under foggy conditions is a ludicrous anachronism in this high-tech era. The news comes in the wake of a recent Press release by the Railways that talked of a laser technology to be developed jointly by IIT, Kanpur, the Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) and other industry partners on a “fog vision instrumentation” project, which will allow trains to run unhindered in foggy conditions. This is nothing impressive. The largest public sector employer has never suffered from a dearth of ideas. But converting science into practicable technology has always been a problem with it. Browsing the documents of the Commission of Railway Safety, one comes across a plethora of ideas for safety that were either not implemented at all, or were meant only for privileged trains like Raj...

{ Excerpted from my autobiography } An immense hunger for knowledge that about a dozen of us had ensured that we kept ourselves abreast with the latest that was happening around the world not in the fields that comprise matters of general knowledge interest, but ones that the students learn reluctantly. We found mistakes in the suggested academic curricula. We suggested improvement in teaching techniques. In the third quarterly issue of the school magazine, Panorama HCS , for which I was entrusted the task of editing, I brought in features – like interviews and debates – that were hitherto inconceivable for school-goers. As teachers from Kerala were slowly replacing the European ones, we feared our perfect Surrey accent would go for a toss. When the brown mem-sahib s came to know of our consulting the ex-English teachers at their homes, a sense of inferiority got the better of them. The school library was a favourite spot for unwinding. Curiously, our relaxation too was fuelled by expl...

“Dream Girl” of yesteryears Hema Malini was, in January-February, in the eye of a storm for reportedly asking the migrant labour class from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — it’s funny, they are referred to pejoratively with the respectable address bhaiya — to leave Mumbai for ‘home’. It must be her personal opinion as none from her party, the BJP, seconded her ‘motion’, though some said she was misquoted. Her concern, if it may be termed so, is however not uncommon among Maharashtrians and people from other parts of the country eking out a living in Mumbai. This is a bogey often raised by the Shiv Sena too. It would do Maharashtrians a world of good if they stopped looking at Gujaratis with envy and Biharis with disgust. Why not compete with them with entrepreneurial skills and hard labour respectively? Those averse to the bhaiya s forward a specious logic of economics to make their grievance sound authentic. They say these people mostly do not have identity proofs. Obviously, they also don’...

From the issue of cloning to publication of research in journals to intelligence tests carried out on various peoples to reproductive health, a brigade of 'conscience keepers' springs up to protest something it does not understand fully Cloning is now a hot topic of discussion in the fora of medical ethics. Prof Ian Wilmut of Edinburgh University, who gained celebrity status and attracted criticism equally for cloning the first mammal from an adult cell in 1996, has decided not to pursue a licence to clone human embryoes which he was awarded two years ago in favour of a method pioneered by Prof Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, Japan, who has managed to create stem cells from fragments of skin in mice without using embryos. A UN report called last week for efforts to ban reproductive cloning worldwide after a US research team reported the first-ever cloning of a rhesus monkey whose embryo was cloned from adult cells and then grown to generate stem cells. 'Moralists' ...

[ Caution: The use of Bengali expletives could not be avoided in some parts of this article for the sake of an authentic feel of Bangla, in which street language, I observed in course of my life in Kolkata and visits to some suburbs, is indispensable. Readers are advised discretion. ] Relevant portions of my e-mails to friends will be added towards the end of the blog (after Anjan Dutta's lyrics) from time to time naqsh faryAdI hai kiskI shokhi-E-tahrIr kA? kAghazI hai pairahan har paikar-E-taswIr kA. [naqsh = a drawn impression faryAdi = appealing shOkhI = style, coyness tahrIr = writing kAgh'azI = made of paper, fake, useless pairahan/pairAhan = outfit, clothing {kAgh'azI pairahan/pairAhan = plaintiff's dress pairahan/pairAhan kAgh'azI hOnA = be a plaintiff (in an old Iranian tradition, one who came to the Shah to appeal against some injustice done to him would hang from his neck a sheet of paper, sometimes containing the written complaint, before presenting hims...

The train was moving as if inebriated. After hundreds of jigsaw-puzzle shaped irrigated fields, thousands of trees and lampposts, millions of rhythmic taps of the train-wheels' on the conjoint tracks and a billion stars in a moonless night, it stopped at a semblance of a station. A ramshackle structure was there, in which an excuse of a government servant, whose designation is a euphemism: "Station Master", was seen serving in odd hours, lest one should say the administration of the country does not work. In Baba's rectangular arms' lock, about five feet above ground level, I descended on what was supposed to be the railway stoppage of a paean-like name of a town—Bokaro Steel City. It seemed Baba knew the Bada Babu. A child all of three, I used to wonder those days how almost every person the elders came across appeared an acquaintance. After the mandatory niceties, we left along a serpentine way that looked like the parting of hair of an old lady with thinning ha...

Google's new platform, Android, takes on the might of Nokia's Symbian, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry, promising to turn handsets into fully functional PCs. Google must now take the quantum leap It has been reported that Google, through a collaboration with 33 other companies, is going to launch in two years a Rs 4,000 mobile phone that will replace personal computers completely. Google's spokespersons say that the alliance is targeting Internet-enabled smart phones where the asking price worldwide is closer to $ 200 rather than $ 20. The Open Handset Alliance will include handset makers, technology developers and carriers, the prominent among them being Qualcomm, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica, LG, and Samsung. Google will offer up something called the "Android Mobile Software Stack", an integrated family of software including an operating system and new mobile applications. If you access the World Wide Web on a machine of Dell, H...

The James Bond film, Die Another Day, had a fictitious North Korean terrorist scheming to set the Earth ablaze with harnessed solar energy. Now, some scientists want to use the idea to burn out asteroids rushing headlong towards us. Surajit Dasgupta differentiates science from fiction Last week, a large section of the popular Indian media was abuzz with the possibility of an asteroid, Apophis, hitting the Earth after William Ailor, director of the Centre for Orbital and Re-entry Studies, Aerospace Corporation, predicted that the collision could occur in 2036 if not in 2029. Elsewhere, Boris Shustov, director of the Institute of Astronomy, Russia, said on October 1 that the impact of the asteroid, of size equal to three football fields, would cause far more devastation than what the asteroid that hit Siberia in 1908 did. The Tunguska astral event affected 2150 sq km and blasted eight crore odd trees. The force of the impact was about 1,000 times more powerful than that by the atomic bo...