Mythologies engage with science fiction to inform real science

In commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, NASA has named 21 constellations after present day mythical heroes and objects. From The Hulk to Doctor Who’s TARDIS, Godzilla to Thor’s hammer Mjolnir, and Albert Einstein to the Starship Enterprise, all of those things have now been memorialised in the stars.

Those constellations that the very first astronomically curious humans were able to spot with their naked eyes were named after mythological heroes and objects that those early astronomers could identify with — depending on which civilisation they lived in. There’s no reason why that trend should not be followed in the present day as well. NASA appears to agree. In commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, NASA has named 21 constellations after present day mythical heroes and objects. From The Hulk to Doctor Who’s TARDIS, Godzilla to Thor’s hammer Mjolnir to the Starship Enterprise, all of those things have now been memorialised in the stars.

These constellations are not regular stars, but are groups of gamma-ray sources that scientists have discovered using the Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope, the most sensitive gamma-ray telescope in orbit around the earth. The Fermi has been in orbit for a decade now and has helped scientists understand the mysteries of objects that emit gamma-rays such as supermassive black holes, merging neutron stars, and streams of hot gas moving almost at the speed of light. The Fermi maps the entire sky every three hours, and studies some of the universe’s most extreme phenomena such as pulsars, supernova remnants, and gamma-ray bursts. Gamma-ray radiation is a high energy radiation billions of times more energetic than visible light. Studying these phenomena using the Fermi can give us more insight into the birth and the early evolution of the universe. Bringing together cosmologists and particle physicists, the Fermi has helped scientists test the very fundamentals of science, such as the speed of light, what sort of particles dark matter is made of, and to study younger, and more high-energy pulsars in the Milky Way.

Since all good science fiction is rooted in actual science, it is hardly surprising that most of the fictional heroes and objects that these gamma-ray constellations have been named for are linked in some way to gamma-ray radiations too. Godzilla’s trademark “heat ray” weapon “bears at least a passing resemblance to gamma-ray jets associated with black holes and neutron stars” according to NASA ; while the Hulk is famously a result of Dr Bruce Banner’s experiments with gamma-rays going horribly wrong. The Starship Enterprise’s engines were powered by the annihilation of matter and antimatter, a process that produces energy in the form of gamma rays. Immortalising such symbols in scientific endeavour is as much an acknowledgement of modern day mythologies as it is of the power of science fiction to inform real science.

Source: Hindustan Times, 26/10/2018

Look Beyond Compulsions

When we are physically born, it is the birth of a possibility. Only you can make yourself from a human being to a divine possibility. A possibility that does not become possible is a tragedy, like a seed that does not sprout and a flower that does not bloom. Brahmacharya means to walk the divine path. They are people who are striving to go beyond their compulsive nature and move into a conscious process of life. The very effort is sacred. Will they rise beyond their limitations today or tomorrow, in 10 years? That’s not the point. The fact that someone is striving to go beyond his compulsive nature, to become a conscious being, is what is significant. It is said that Gautama had over 40,000 monks around him. Among these monks, there were kings and emperors, and today, the world is enjoying the fruits of his effort. Brahmacharya does not mean just change of clothes and names, it’s a much deeper process. The fruit of that seed, the fruit of that effort, one may not be able to see immediately, because a simple weed outside will flower in three days; but if you want the coconut tree to flower, it takes six years. If you want to produce something worthwhile, it takes time. But if the seed is right, and the way we nurture it is good, the fruit is bound to happen, there is no doubt about it. If we can function consciously, take away all compulsiveness within us and make every aspect of our life into a conscious process, then we don’t have to worry about ultimate liberation. Brahmacharya is about becoming an instrument of the Divine.

Source: Economic Times, 29/10/2018

Board Remuneration: Miles to go for Women Directors

 Pay gap reflects poor representation of women at the top, but situation changing with younger women aiming for high-paying roles

For every 100 that a male non-independent director earned on the board of a large Indian company in FY18, his female counterpart earned 74. The gap in average remuneration earned by men and women directors stood at 1.2 crore, according to data sourced from Prime Database for BSE100 companies. On average, 412 male directors earned 4.5 crore in comparison with 52 women directors who earned 3.3 crore in the last fiscal. Does this reflect deep-seated discrimination or are there other forces at play? “Pay gap is a function of labour market participation, degree of executive discretion, compliance with labour laws, selection bias or pure serendipity,” said Bino Paul, dean of School of Management and Labour Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). “There are regression analysis methods like Oaxaca Decomposition to find the proportion of discrimination due to gender.” The pay gap is 5 lakh in the case of independent directors, although this has been shrinking over the past three years. While male independent directors have drawn 36 lakh remuneration on average in each of the last three fiscal years, the average pay of their female peers has steadily increased from 27 lakh in FY16 to 29 lakh in FY17 to 31 lakh in FY18. The gender gap has been narrowing in recent times, said Falguni Nayar, founder and CEO of Nykaa, a cosmetics and wellness retailer, and an independent director on several boards. Women need to drive a harder bargain, she said. “As far as the role of non-independent directors is concerned, it will take coming generations to negotiate harder. I don’t think women negotiate hard enough,” she said. In the case of independent directors, she doesn't think companies differentiate based on gender “as it depends on the responsibilities taken, the committees they are in charge of, etc.” The pay gap reflects the poor representation of women at the top.
‘A Supply-Demand Issue’
 At 24%, India is among the lowest among peer countries in women’s participation in the overall workforce. This is starker at board level where there are about eight times more men than women. “It becomes a typical supply-demand issue in the labour market, where money chases the talent that is more readily available,” Paul said. In the five years since it became mandatory to have a woman on the board, representation has been growing but the pay gap hasn’t narrowed. That’s also down to the relevant function, said Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. “I serve on several boards and disparity in board remuneration certainly is not the case—it’s about the role you play,” she said. For instance, committee chairs get paid more than committee members and those on audit committees get paid higher than others. “If it is about the fact that most of the roles are attributable to male board members, then there is likely to be a perceptible difference in board remuneration but it should be put into the right context and not just a generalised computation,” she said.
GLOBAL SCENERIO
Global studies have shown that the gender gap widens and diversity drops as one goes higher up the corporate ladder. The pay gap is most in the private sector, according to these. In the UK, legislation made it compulsory for all companies with 250 employees or more to report gender pay gaps by March. The results showed eight out of 10 UK companies paid men more with the national median pay gap at 18%. “Males are at high-paying positions because there are less females to take up those jobs,” said Ronesh Puri, managing director of Executive Access, a search firm. “With information on remuneration being available in the public domain, it is not possible to discriminate on this count as no female senior executive would agree to work at a lower pay package than drawn by the earlier incumbent.” Some companies incentivise search firms to get female hires for top management roles to improve diversity, “It is most likely a function issue rather than a gender one,” said Sunit Mehra of Hunt Partners. “Males are generally seen heading higher-paying functions like finance or operations compared to functions like HR or marketing.” The pay gap arises not because men and women are paid differently for the same work but because the labour market incentivises them to work differently, according to Claudia Goldin, Lee professor of economics at Harvard. One of the reasons women receive less pay than men is that they're not working the same amount of time and in many occupations, working more hours or being there when the firm wants you to be there earns you a lot more, she has said. Nayar said younger women are increasingly making stronger professional commitments. “Women, in general, need to commit to a serious career, be where an organisation needs them to be,” Nayar said. “I see those kinds of commitments in women of the younger generation giving to their careers, taking transfers to different countries as and when a requirement comes up.”

Source: Economic Times, 27/10/2018

Think small: on Ganga rejuvenation

Decentralised sludge management systems are vital to achieve clean water goals

Bad sanitation is India’s worst-kept secret, but recent data from Uttar Pradesh show that in spite of working in mission mode to expand sanitation, 87% of faecal sludge expelled from toilets in urban areas is untreated. Viewed against the 2030 goal to achieve clean water and sanitation for all under the UN Sustainable Development Agenda, this depressing statistic shows how much work remains to be done. State support for improved housing and planned development has never been strong, and the National Urban Sanitation Policy of 2008 has not changed that significantly. At the national scale, a United Nations report of 2015 estimates that 65,000 tonnes of untreated faeces is introduced into the environment in India annually. The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan promised a major shift, but it has focussed more on the basic requirement of household and community toilets in rural and urban areas. The study in U.P. conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment has now exposed broken links, of faecal sludge and septage being collected from household tanks and simply discharged into drains, open land and wetlands. The problem of the waste not being contained, collected without manual labour, transported and treated safely is becoming graver. It is now time for a new approach. This has to be decentralised and different from the strategy being used to clean the Ganga, for which the NDA government announced an outlay of ₹20,000 crore in 2015. That strategy relies on large sewage treatment plants for riverside cities and towns.

Immediate investments in decentralised sludge management systems would bring twin benefits: of improving the environment and reducing the disease burden imposed by insanitary conditions. It is welcome that the CSE study is being followed up with a mapping exercise on the flow of faecal waste streams in individual cities. The results for Varanasi, Allahabad and Aligarh in particular should be revealing, since the collection efficiency for sludge in these cities ranges from just 10% to 30%. One immediate intervention needed is the creation of an inter-departmental task force to identify land to build small treatment systems for sludge, and to provide easily accessible solutions to houses that are currently discharging waste into open drains. The business of emptying faecal material using tanker trucks needs to be professionalised and de-stigmatised. It is untenable that manual scavengers continue to be employed in violation of the law to clean septic tanks in some places, and caste factors play out in the recruitment of workers even in the mechanised operations. All aspects of the business of sanitation need reform if India is to meet Goal Number 6 of the Sustainable Development Goals with egalitarian policies. A large State such as Uttar Pradesh provides the opportunity to demonstrate commitment to policy. Success here can transform lives.

Source: The Hindu, 26/10/2018

What is O-ring theory in Economics?

Also known as the O-ring model of economic development, this refers to the theory that even the smallest components of a complex production process must be performed properly if the end product of the process is to have any useful value. In other words, a mistake that creeps into even the smallest of tasks can cause the final product to possess absolutely no value to users. The O-ring theory derives its name from a 1986 incident in which the Challenger space shuttle was completely destroyed as a result of the failure of a simple gasket, or O-ring, to work properly. It was first proposed by American development economist Michael Kremer in 1993.

Source: The Hindu, 24/10/2018

Metoo: The movement to create equality should begin at home

If we want to create a better world where women feel absolutely safe, men truly and genuinely respect every human irrespective of the gender and there is equality in its truest sense, we need to teach men to respect women

Written by Apoorva Bapna

I have been reading a lot on #MeToo since this became the most trending topic on Twitter. Unfortunately, it caught the attention only when it went to social media, when so many accomplished women brought out sexual harassment stories of their past to the forefront.

Technology has been the single-most contributor to the empowerment of women and more so in the urban areas. In a world, where speaking about many topics is considered a taboo even today, sexual harassment being one of them, technology has almost given them wings to fly — to express opinions blatantly or anonymously.

Harassment has always been rampant and, in fact, starts at home. Nine out of 10 women would have been harassed in their personal lives much before they stepped into the professional world. A decade ago one didn’t even know what harassment meant. If you did, could you muster the courage to speak up? Could you speak to your own family members? Not really.

Even if you did, you were told to ignore and to be “careful” in future. Careful of what? Like, don’t come in front of that sick uncle who saw you as nothing but an object of his lust. Or stop learning music from a teacher who touched you in places which he should not have.

We live in a world where women are and will be subjected to this kind of treatment and such movements will come and go without changing much. Have rapes stopped after the Nirbhaya incident? The civil society made so much noise, the government machinery got into action and stricter laws were passed. But what happened? Every day a girl or a woman is still raped, assaulted or ill-treated. And so many of these incidents take place at home and not outside.

If we want to create a better world where women feel absolutely safe, men truly and genuinely respect every human irrespective of the gender and there is equality in its truest sense, we need to teach men to respect women. And women to respect women. And this can’t be taught when you have grown up, entered the professional world. It needs to start from the day the child is born. The sense of equality needs to be ingrained right from the beginning. It needs to start at home. Girls and boys should be taught everything — a boy should know how to work in a kitchen just as a girl should be interested in sports.

Today gender diversity at the workplace is a boardroom discussion topic and every leader wants to drive this agenda. We know an organisation’s sustained success is a function of how diverse the leadership team is and this has been proven and validated by many reports generated by the McKinseys of the world. But before it becomes a boardroom agenda, it must become every home’s agenda to create an inclusive family where everyone is treated equally, everyone’s point of views are respected equally and children are given equal opportunity to make decisions about the life they want to lead, whether it’s a son or a daughter.

I write this after having gone through a divorce which was my decision. It took me three years to convince my family that I needed to move on for my sanity. It wasn’t easy, but it finally happened. Even today, I am reminded of my decision and that I should have compromised or I was too assertive or I did not look after my husband well enough.

I don’t CARE. For once I chose to be selfish for me and my daughter’s sake. I was clear, I did not want her to grow up in a house where all she would see were two unhappy, distant parents. She would grow up to either hate men or marriage or both.

So while the #MeToo campaign is good if it is genuine and helps shame the men who need to be, but what we really need is a #WeToo campaign to make this world more equal, where there is genuine respect for everyone, laws that truly protect and create a sense of fear and strong set of values which helps in building a strong civil society.

It is easy to always blame “someone else” — like the system/the law/the government, but movement to create equality should begin at home, instil the right values in both the son and daughter and create a sense of respect for humans.

And then the world will surely become a better place to be.

Source: Indian Express, 26/10/2018

My books, my truths

My work reflects the lived realities of marginalised communities. A methodology that depends on secondary data cannot do justice to first-hand knowledge

A member of the Delhi University’s Standing Committee for Academic Affairs, among the teachers who demanded that three of my books be removed from the university’s curricula, argued that “Ilaiah’s understanding of the Hindu faith is wrong and there is no empirical data to establish his understanding”. Let me refer to three of my books: God As Political Philosopher: Buddha’s challenge to Brahminism, Why I am Not a Hindu: A Sudra critique of Hindutva philosophy, culture and political economy and Post-Hindu India: A discourse on Dalit-Bahujan socio-spiritual and scientific revolution.

The first book evolved out of my PhD thesis on ancient Indian political thought; hence it is well referenced and has a lot of citations. The other two books — they have been questioned by Delhi University’s committee — are full of data pertaining to Dalit-Bahujan, upper Shudra, Adivasi and Brahmin-Bania communities, largely from the Telugu-speaking region. They are about lived realities, work, instruments, culture and social relations. They are products of years of field work and are not referenced for sound methodological reasons.

Historically, books are products of two kinds of quests: One, the search for knowledge and two, revisiting already codified knowledge. In ancient times, such quests were of two types. One pertained to spiritual issues. Such texts focussed on god. The Bible, Vedas and Quran are good examples of such literature.

The other kind of literature was produced by people who looked for knowledge in their own milieu and in other environments. First-hand information about peoples’ lives cannot draw from other books for the simple reason that there were none at all. Such knowledge can be verified by revisiting the subjects and sources.

Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics do not have modern-style references from other works. In India, the first ever social science writing of this kind was done by Kautilya. Hence, the Arthashastra does not have a reference list. Even Manu’s Dharmashastra was written in a similar manner. Such a search for knowledge, in my view, leads to the production of foundational texts.

Referencing and quoting other works is a modern practice. It evolved in the post-Renaissance times. The re-search method either borrows ideas from other literature or combines field work — empirical data collection — with an analysis of other texts. Scholars from the West re-searched the knowledge of peoples, classes and races and this endeavour led to the production of referenced literature. But even in the West, post-modernist writing has reverted to the method of not using quotes.

Books that are based on information about people’s lived experiences — habits, social relations, imaginations, food culture, even philosophy — have changed the way knowledge is constructed. Such works do not rely on quotations.

Modernist scholarship — the so-called nationalist and Marxist schools — and Hindu fundamentalist academicians do not accept the post-modernist search method. According to them, to be eligible for a PhD degree, a work should rely on the modernist re-search method. The Hindutva academic school is the most backward of them. This school recognises books that cite the Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Arthashastra, Dharmashastra, V D Savarkar’s Hindutva:Who Is a Hindu, M S Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts and so on. The others, of course, insist on quotations from multiple sources.

I confronted a major methodological problem during the anti-Mandal agitation in the 1990s. How to defend reservations? There was no quotation-based literature to defend reservation. At that time, Indian Marxists quoted from the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. I departed from the citation-based methodology and wrote an article in the Economic and Political Weekly, “Reservations: Experience as a Framework of Debate”. That piece made many anti-reservationists re-think their positions.

I then realised that one cannot draw on written texts to learn about the history, culture and lived experiences of the Shudras, OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis. The Vedas, epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata and the writings of Kautilya and Manu do not reflect the knowledge of these people. Modernist works also did not do justice to such knowledge. My first major attempt to bring such knowledge to light led me to write, Why I am not a Hindu. Shashi Tharoor’s Why I am a Hindu adopts a diametrically-opposite method — it draws from several other books. Hence, there is no original statement in that book.

Post-Hindu India draws on a much more rigorous collection of information from Adivasis, Dalits, OBCs and upper Shudras as well as Banias and Brahmins. It tries to deal with every major community. I could not re-search about their instruments, skills, proverbs and philosophy and past by drawing on secondary data. I had to do first-hand work in villages. For theoretical justification, I did not quote anybody because no one has done work on these people.

I formulated my theoretical positions in much the same way as Plato, Aristotle or Kautilya. Like these savants, I was also not unbiased. What many academicians do not understand is that the caste compartmentalisation of Indian society has not allowed a holistic construction of knowledge about the country. We have not been good at experimenting with newer ways of writing and building knowledge. Universities have to do that.

My training in a regional university allowed me to retain a productive association with several communities. I have been an activist, apart from a being a teacher. This is an area where the nationalist, Marxist and Hindu fundamentalist schools of academicians have, unfortunately, failed us. A scholar conducting such experiments at the PhD level is unlikely to get a degree. That was why I used the traditional method to write my PhD.

The intellectuals from the RSS/BJP do not want the political philosophy of Gautam Buddha to be taught in our universities. There is no codified political philosophy of Sri Ram. There is some philosophy of Sri Krishna in the Bhagvad Gita but that has to be examined from the point of view of the agrarian producers — not the priest and politician.

Universities are meant to be breeding grounds for change. The discovery of new methods of writing should come from them. They should not be fearful of change. All those who oppose my books must read them and tear them apart in their writings. That will help students.

The writer is director, Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy (CSSEIP) at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad

Source: Indian Express, 27/10/2018