Travels With Herodotus

Title: Travels With Herodotus

Author: Ryszard Kapuscinski

Publisher: Penguin, 2008 (First published 2004)

ISBN: 978-0-141-02114-0

Pages: 275

This is a delightful little book by Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist who died in 2007, yet impresses us a lot with his lucid prose which has no pretensions to pedantry. It was originally published in Polish and was translated into English by Klara Glowczewska, but retains the charm the original had had. Usually, when we approach a translated work, we perceive the lack of spirit which animated the original, but this book is clearly an exception. Kapuscinski’s wit, clarity of thought and economy of words has been faithfully rendered through the perfect transparency of the translator’s work. The author came to know of Herodotus while in Poland after Stalin’s death when state censoring of publications became relaxed for the first time. He was immediately captivated by the book which became his constant companion in his own travels. Like the ancient Greek man who is considered the father of history, Kapuscinski had in him a mind which yearned to cross borders, both geographic and temporal and travel around the world and back into time. Journalism turned out to be his key to unlock the iron curtain which screened Poland off from the rest of the world. He traveled widely, but recollects fondly his travels to India, which was his first foreign trip, to China and to various states in Africa. Herodotus always accompanied him in book form which devoured the author’s attention quite overwhelmingly.

Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus, called Bodrum in modern-day Turkey on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean in 485 BCE. He often got tired of the vain pride Greeks maintained about their homeland and started to collect tales and narratives of historic events from around the known world. His book, Histories, is the first one ever to come out of the genre which described in colourful detail the story of mighty, ancient Persian empire under imposing monarchs like Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes and its war against Greece which ended in an ignominious defeat for the mighty empire. Historians assert this victory as the first in a series of encounters the West had with the East. Indeed, this moment is sometimes regarded as the defining moment which oversaw the birth of modern West, a precinct where democracy and freedom was practiced, pitted against monarchy and despotism of Asia. Herodotus, himself a Greek, however doesn’t fall prey to unduly singing the glories of his compatriots. In a tone which will be wholeheartedly approved even by modern standards of literary judgment, he checked each fact on the balance of critical examination and accepted it as fact only when he was thoroughly convinced of the truth of the matter. However, this does not absolve him of all fabrications. We know that there are lots of fantasies and imagination presented as fact. Herodotus claims that there was a tribe in India which was so black in skin colour that even their semen was black! On such points, we should forgive the story teller in him who had the onerous task of keeping the attention of his listeners unflagged through the better part of an evening.

What Kapuscinski does best is to read human emotions through the intricate web of fact and fiction. While telling us about the deeds, most of them wicked, brutal or amorous, he commands us to think about the emotions which might have fleeted past the minds of the victims or spectators. Standing on the edge of a chasm of time separating us from the characters in the story, we appreciate the similitude which is an inalienable trait of human nature. This thinking from the people’s side is an attractive feature of the author’s style which might have been moulded into shape by an education system overseen by the Communist party, who always respected the equality of men in principle.

Reading about the author’s first trip to India in the middle of 1950s, his remarks go deep into the psyche of our country. Commenting on the widespread poverty which marked urban life, he describes an incident in Calcutta where he saw an old woman preparing a bowl of rice for cooking in Sealdah railway station. She was surrounded by hungry and emaciated children eagerly watching her prepare food which would not be available to them. He says, “The children stayed there, staring – motionless, wordless. This lasts a moment, and the moment drags on. The children do not throw themselves on the rice; the rice is the property of the old woman, and these children have been inculcated with something more powerful than hunger” (p.29). Also, he finds India is all about infinity – an infinity of gods and myths, beliefs and languages, races and cultures; in everything and everywhere one looks, there is this dizzying endlessness (p.30). Such numerousness has attracted the attentions of foreign writers about India. Mark Tully’s ‘No Full Stops in India’, which was reviewed earlier in this blog is an example. Kapuscinski’s comparison of Chinese and Indian societies is also noteworthy. “The behaviour of people in the two countries could not have been more different. The Hindu is a relaxed being, while the Chinese is a tense and vigilant one. A crowd of Hindus is formless, fluid, slow; a crowd of Chinese is formed before you know it into disciplined marching lines. One senses that above a gathering of Chinese stands a commander, a higher authority, while above the multitude of Hindus hovers an Areopagus of innumerable and undemanding deities. If a throng of Hindus encounters something interesting, it stops, looks and begins discussing. In a similar situation, the Chinese will walk on, in close formation, obedient, their eyes fixed on a designated goal” (p.64-65).

Those who are desirous to have a deeper understanding of Herodotus and his style may look forward to Justin Marozzi’s The Man Who Invented History, which was reviewed earlier.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Ancestor’s Tale

Title: The Ancestor’s Tale – A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life

Author: Richard Dawkins

Publisher: Phoenix, 2005 (First published 2004)

ISBN: 978-0-7538-1996-8

Pages: 629

A huge, but thoroughly informative work from Richard Dawkins, with additional research by Yan Wong. It is a kaleidoscope of the events on earth right from life’s beginnings billions of years ago to today’s sapient individuals in the form of modern humans. Modeled on Geoffrey Chauser’s Canterbury Tales, the narrative is portrayed as a pilgrimage to the past where the representatives of modern species go backward in time, meeting representatives of more basic ancestors of themselves. The journey goes down across millions of years until the nucleated cell emerged. It depicts in pictorial detail the similarities which underscore the common origin of all lifeforms and shows how small changes in individual genomes accumulated over many generations resulted in the emergence of a new species, which is the essence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Dawkins is sometimes referred to as an ultra-Darwinist, an accusation not denied by the author himself. He is the most prominent figure in the fight against regressive forces propounding creationism or intelligent design, wasting no chance to lampoon the fallacy of these arguments.

When we look at lifeforms which inhabited the earth prior to man’s appearance, it is conceivable that we tend to look upon them (or rather, look down upon them) as creatures which are intermediate between the origin of life and the appearance of man, which many of us take to be the crowning glory of nature. Before proceeding on his pilgrimage to the dawn of life, Dawkins warns us not to don such ‘hindsight’. Every organism which occupied the earth for a considerable time were perfectly adapted to its environment just like man is to his. In contrast to other tales of evolution, this book takes a backward-going journey from the present to the origins. Representative of each living group goes back and meets other cousin groups at several points on the way, when the lineage split into two at a previous age. Dawkins uses the term, concestor, to denote a common ancestor of more than one species of animals. Forty such concestors are identified on the entire journey.

Naturally, we’ll be interested more in the evolutionary pathways of our own species. There is irrefutable fossil evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals, a related human subspecies lived alongside each other in Europe as late as 30,000 years ago. The lot of modern humans had somewhat flourished suddenly at around 40,000 years ago which many anthropologists refer to as the ‘great leap forward’ (not to be confused with Mao’s program). This is evidently the development of speech or the use of complex conditional statements in language which opened up whole new vistas for human imagination and progress. Going back a little further, we see humans emigrating out of Africa at 100,000 years ago. This has caused a controversy among scholars. There is a large proportion of them who believe that the present day’s population of the world are the descendants of these emigrants from Africa and is called Young African Origin. There are others who maintain that there were several migrations tuned to the waxing and waning of previous ice ages who might have cross-bred with already existing humans in other parts of Asia. It is called ‘Old African Origin’ and cite it to be the reason behind racial differences across populations. One thing is sure, that all humans originated in Africa and only the date of migration is in question. When we reach around one million years ago, we come across Homo erectus which are hominids. At six million years ago, we meet our common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, which are man’s closes cousins. At 7 million years ago, gorillas join the team.

Going further back, monkeys join the bandwagon. There is a marked difference between apes and monkeys that the former don’t sport a tail and are mainly bipedal. Arguments vary about the origin of bipedalis, ranging from increased height to sexual advantage. Also, full colour vision developed in apes as compared to most of Old World monkeys. Similar faculty occurs in the howler monkeys of the New World which probably evolved genes for colour vision in the same way as apes did. The concestors of all apes and primates probably pre-date the Great Cretaceous extinction which ensured the demise of large reptiles like dinosaurs. Ancestors of all mammals might have been nocturnal until then, but when the competition was suddenly removed, they gradually filled every niche vacanted by dinosaurs. Development of colour vision ensued the conversion to diurnal animals.

Opponents of evolution often argue that if the modern lifeforms evolved from ancient forms, the intermediate forms should have been present all the way to modern times. When evolution spans geological time periods, intermediaries are not easily discernable since most of them must have died out. Dawkins presents a parallel idea to show that speciation (the process of a species metamorphosing into another) is a continuous process. He suggests the case of salamanders of California valley as the test species. The valley is longer than it is wide, with mountains on both east and west which is joined at the north and south. The salamanders cannot cross the vally east to west or west to east, but they could propagate north-south or south-north through the mountains. We now see that there are two subspecies at the southern end, the eschscholtzii and klamberi which don’t interbreed on the west and east respectively. However, both the species can breed with their neighbours immediately on the north. When we go north on both sides, we see changes in the characteristics of salamanders when compared to those at the extreme south. All of the subspecies can interbreed with their neighbours in an uninterrupted sequence along the ring of mountains, but when the starting point is reached again, the changes accumulated over the journey has resulted in two species which don’t interbreed. In other words, all the salamanders on the north are intermediates between the two species at the extreme south. Evolution proceeded likewise and the example is a powerful one.

As we go back to the misty dawn of life, we lose track of time. Before 500 million years, the methods of time reckoning diverge to senseless numbers. Continuing the pilgrimage back, we reach a point which Dawkins calls the Great Historic Rendezvous, the time at which the first eukaryote (nucleated cell) emerged. The cell then gradually grew by itself and in symbiotic relationships with other cells. Cyanobacteria were able to convert sunlight to useful energy by photosynthesis. Oxygen, which was the byproduct of this reaction was a toxic gas, but mitochondria adapted to convert it to useful energy. Chloroplasts ended up in plant cells while mitochondria migrated to animals, including us, which are still the powerhouse of the cell. Dawkins also addresses the issue of how life itself emerged. Preservation of heredity was the key event which was realized by self-replicating chemicals out of which DNA emerged. Life is hypothesized to have begun in deep underground rocks which have a very high temperature in the form of thermophile bacteria. If life replayed its growth again from the beginnings, there is no assurance that the same path will be followed. However, some aspects of evolution, like eyes, is sure to appear again as some form of vision has independently evolved not less than 40 times in the animal domain.

The book is arranged in a structured way, with lots of colour plates. One must wonder at is the comprehensive coverage of life depicted in the various chapters. It spans all classes, habitats and time periods. The author’s great knowledge of biological systems is effectively demonstrated in substantiating his arguments. Spanning 629 pages, this book is really worth to possess.

Too many footnotes play the spoilsport in many pages. To clarify some other related point, the author has not hesitated to include as much footnotes as he thought fit. This may be useful, or in fact essential, in an academic publication, but definitely not in a book aimed at the general public. Paradoxical it may seem, but the book is an out and out biological one, while readers with backgrounds in other disciplines may find it difficult to digest the concepts and even to fully develop a working familiarity with the taxonomical finer points. Also, lay readers may get a feeling that after the human concestors are passed in the tale, the journey becomes a bit tedious and fails to rivet their attentions consistently.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The World According to Monsanto

Title: The World According to Monsanto – Pollution, Politics and Power

Author: Marie-Monique Robin

Publisher: Tulika Books, 2010 (First published 2008)

ISBN: 978-81-89487-68-3

Pages: 329

A very peculiar book, to say the least. At the end of the day, when it was completely read I doubt whether it indeed can be called a book. Trust me, this is nothing but propaganda – a haphazard collection of unconvincing arguments bordering on ridiculousness and inconsistent facts ranging on attempts to misinformation. The author’s frothing vehemence to Monsanto is queer, as she takes other companies which also operate in genetically modified products with a gentle sweep. Robin calmly passes over European companies like Novartis or Syngenta, but when it comes to Monsanto, which also deal with the same type of products, the author bares the canine teeth. In a seething criticism which pervades the whole of the book, there is no tactic she has missed. The book is a translation from the French.

Monsanto was founded in 1901 for the manufacture of chemicals. It started operations by producing saccharine for Coca-Cola. Later, it diversified into electrical insulating liquids and engine lubricants, which contained PCB (poly-chlorinated biphenyls) like any other company which produced these. PCBs may cause cancer, but its adverse effects became apparent at a later stage and the company ended its production. The author however lists internal documents of the era which highlight that Monsanto was aware of the health risks involved in its handling and usage. Monsanto also produced weed-killing chemicals and herbicides for the Vietnam war. When U.S. troops were falling easy prey to communist Viet Cong guerillas operating under the cover of thick tropical forests, America resorted to aerial spraying of defoliants, specifically Agent Orange on a massive scale for ease of military operations. This caused serious health problems among the local population and also American soldiers stationed there. Associations of Vietnam war veterans later sued their government to claim damages. What is strange is the author’s accusing Monsanto of causing environmental harm. Any herbicide is designed to kill plants and if it is sprayed over forests, that too will wither. But who is guilty? The party which deliberately sprayed the chemical or the manufacturer of it? If the author’s absurd argument is accepted in a court of law, soon we may find suits against Ford or Honda for car accidents in our neighbourhoods.

The book is written in a partisan spirit, with the author not letting go any trick that could be effectively used against Monsanto. It lists out a long series of enquiries and fact-finding missions in which various authorities probed into the adverse health effects of chemicals manufactured by the company. She then accuses that “those who did not rule out the possibility of the chemicals having harmful effects had their scientific contributions denigrated and their reputations belittled” (p.62), but it was she who is actually doing it when she accuses Richard Doll in the very next paragraph. Doll, who was one of the greatest cancer specialists in the world had demonstrated the association between smoking and lung cancer and had proved himself to be an incorruptible person. The author then alleges that he was working for Monsanto 20 years previously and that had caused his submitting a report that some of the chemicals manufactured by the company was found to be only weakly carcinogenic in animal experiments (p.63).

In her all-out effort to give Monsanto nothing but the choicest abuses, the author fails to grasp the inconsistency and contrary approaches of the arguments themselves. In the chapter on rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone, which when injected on cows enhanced milk production significantly), the book concedes that 30% of cows in the U.S. has been administered the drug Posilac which imparts the hormone. No regulatory organisation has found any unhealthy ingredient in milk produced by these cows. Robin still accuses the drug of very harmful side effects like mastitis, which is an inflammation of udders. Readers who have not donned mental blinders ask the obvious question, “then why do a very large portion of the clientele use the drug, if it is so hazardous?”. Also, the author develops misinformation into an art in the chapter, “Monsanto weaves its web”, by citing scientific studies which ‘proved‘ genetically modified food can cause serious health issues in rats. Arpad Pusztai, a well known researcher did the experiment with transgenic potatoes and came up with results reporting harmful effects. Naturally, we expect the potatoes to have been produced by Monsanto. But no, they were produced by the researchers themselves which cleverly remained unemphasized. Robin then uses this result to claim that all GM food is hazardous.

The whining tone continues throughout the length of the book. Whether it is Roundup-ready Soybeans in Latin America or Bt Cotton in India, Monsanto is accused of rapid rise of Soybean cultivation, resultant drop in prices, low yield of Bt cotton, high price of seeds and contamination with organic varieties. Bt cotton is said to be four-times costlier than normal ones, but the yield is claimed to be up to 30% less. Anyone with common sense wont go for such a crop in the next season. But when we see that they do go for it, we can be sure of either of the two – that they are imbeciles who can’t decide for themselves or that the argument was a lie, pure and simple!

The work is not backed by serious research. Searching Google is not an alternative to research work, which the author has freely employed. The arguments she arrays against the company is her hit results in Google (see p.2 and p.6). The author alleges that Monsanto produced transformer oil which contained PCB, other harmful substances like 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D (dioxins), DDT and aspartame but conveniently forgets to mention that these were not banned chemicals at that time and their hazardous nature was established only later. On many occasions, the text assumes the parlance of a legal document extensively quoting irrelevant dates (what use is there for the reader to know the date on which the author interviewed her clients?) and the style is distinctly propaganda-like. To give credence to her unsubstantiated allegations, she even attacks well known protocols like peer review for articles submitted for publication in reputed science journals. She calls it the “damaged system” (p.56) only because a study conducted by Monsanto was published by the journal of American Medical Association refuting the author’s arguments.

Whether intentional or not, Robin falls into the trap of wrong interpretations of statistical data leading to false alarms. When talking about adverse effects of weedicide ‘Roundup’, she says “A Canadian study published in 2001 showed that men exposed to glyphosate more than 2 days a year had twice the risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma than men never exposed”. This statistics may be literally true, but won’t prove anything until the base is also revealed. If only 1 person in a sample size of 1000 is afflicted, while it is 2 in the other group, the risk rate is twice that of the former, but not statistically significant. For details of such pitfalls awaiting authors see the very enlightening The Tiger That Isn't, reviewed earlier in the blog. Robin even opposes free speech at some points. Anyone opining favourably to GM food is alleged to be either in Monsanto’s pay or under their influence. Interviews with such persons are disproportionately harsh with the author uncharitably commenting on their nervous blinking, fidgeting in chair and such mannerisms as if they were being interrogated for a malicious crime. These interviews are never intended to be the author’s quest for reaching the truth. They are solely packed there for underlining the same malicious argument against all biotechnology. Even Green Revolution, which wiped away hunger of most of the third-world is safe against the barbs of Robin.

The political leaning of the author is evident from the following quotes. “Ethics and morality are abstract concepts foreign to the logic of capitalism” (p.16). “At a time when globalization is impoverishing the rural North and South…” (p.5). “Combined with the rising power of the anti-globalization movement that denounced the control of multinationals….” (p.229). The saddest fact is that she could hitch some unsuspecting scholars from the third-world to her bandwagon. The case in point is that of Vandana Shiva from India. The country is a very poor one, with most of the population below the poverty line when it became independent in 1947. Luckily, the country soon adopted Green Revolution with an uncharacteristic rigor and became the second largest producer of wheat in a span of 15 years. This miracle fed the poor, but Vandana Shiva is furious that it wiped away low-yielding varieties, under the guise of biodiversity. Perhaps in the ivory towers of these arm-chair scholars, the call of hunger is not heard.

The book is a waste of time and not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star