The Fall of a Sparrow

Title: The Fall of a Sparrow

Author: Salim Ali

Publisher: Oxford University Press 2006 (First published: 1985)

ISBN: 978-0-19-562127-3

Pages: 252

A definitive autobiography of the greatest ornithologist India had ever produced. Salim Ali rose to great renown by sheer dint of hard work and perseverance against great odds. The book begins from his childhood, how his interest in birds germinated and how he kept the spirit going for many decades to become one of the world’s leading men of his chosen field. The book, written in simple and elegant prose is designed to arouse the interest in young readers to dedicate themselves to an ideal which they deem fit as their life’s ambition. Salim Ali’s career is a great exemplar of how determined men can make a trail where no path existed before. Those who wonder at the relevance of the title find their curiosity satisfied on the front page itself in a quote from Hamlet, which runs ‘there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’. Salim Ali is the author of many world-renowned books on ornithology. The author also tells the story of how the books came into being.

Salim Ali was born in a well to do family with lots of family members as company. An inclination to birds was apparent in the early stages, though as the author himself confesses, it was in the form of the menu on many occasions. Hunting was his pastime in the early periods and a lot of birds and wild game fell before his guns. However, we must take into proper account the era in which hunting was a socially acceptable hobby and a man’s coming of age was often reckoned on the number of beasts he’d felled. Ali’s intention to pursue a bachelor’s degree in zoology was foiled by his strong aversion to mathematics, which also formed a part of the curriculum. He had to skip the course and move to Burma in a bid to work as partner to his brother in his tin and tungsten mining business there. Burma provided ample grounds for developing his ornithological skills. He communicated frequently with experts of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and other leading luminaries. We know that technologies for instant communication and the World Wide Web were not extant in those times, but the moral we must assimilate from Ali’s example is that nothing would hinder the efforts of a determined person. Technology has only the role of a facilitator.

The book contains excellent descriptions of field trips the author performed as part of bird surveys in the state of Hyderabad. These journeys were most often made with the basic minimum infrastructure available whether in the form of transportation or boarding facilities. He also made a survey in Travancore-Cochin as the central and southern parts of Kerala were known at that time. Even though he reminisces about Kerala as a wonderful abode for many species of birds and plants, no noteworthy incident is recounted.  The author puts forward a remarkable observation however, that the birds and fish fauna in Kerala are striking in similarity to that of Eastern Himalayas and Malaya. He argues about an extension of Satpura mountain range which provided contiguity by land and water as the cause of this phenomenon. However, this assertion seems a bit farfetched and requires the attention of geologists and expert zoologists to crack the secret of their coincidence.

                                                  

Salim Ali gives a detailed description of his field trip to Tibet to survey the birds there. The journey took place around Kailas Mountain and Manasarovar Lake, which assumed huge popularity later as a pilgrim route. Ali half-humouredly calls the trip an ornithological pilgrimage. He gives verbatim reproductions of his field diary and the readers get to know that the author greatly enjoyed the trip even in spite of the physical hardships endured on the way. We also discern the gradual, but subtle shift of attitudes of the people in the region at the outset of large scale pilgrimage, which lets loose a torment of commercial interests to wipe off the isolated manifestations of charity and compassion. Being a man of science, Ali finds many of the religious practices of the Tibetans disgraceful, but we may find many of his remarks uncharitable. Also the verbatim accounts of his diary lack any substance of interest, as the author himself confesses later that his writing style is ‘as dry as dust’.

The book is graced with a profound sense of humor displayed by the great ornithologist. This thread of subtle humor runs through the entire narrative and livens up the reading experience. One such incident is so hilarious that I am prompted to repeat it here. The author’s wife Tehmina though related to him by birth, was in a higher social and financial level than him. Many of her relatives expressed reservations about the match due to these differences. So, Ali was ecstatic when a situation presented itself to impress the relations favorably. This fiancée’s elder brother and his entire family were down with influenza. Salim Ali sent a telegraph which left him as “SHALL I COME AND HELP?”, but which was received as “SMALL INCOME, SEND HELP”. Imagine the consternation that would have caused due to this error in telegraphy.

Ali confesses that he was not a non-violent bird lover as so many people have made him out to be, and admits that exclaiming the truth sometimes embraced him. In the true spirit of scientific enquiry, he had to kill many birds to collect details of their diet, behaviour and nesting habits. With compunction in his heart he pulled the gun’s trigger thousands of times, but asserts that each dead bird had not died in vain and it enhanced scientific knowledge in some way. The author narrates one incident in which he came up with a nest full of unhatched eggs. He was cool enough to scramble one egg to make a delightful snack. So, if anyone harbours any idea of the ornithologist warmly caressing an unknown bird in order to study it, nothing is further from the truth.

What one would notice most from the narrative is the candour and lucidity with which he had told the story. Ali’s inimitable sense of humor, often applied to himself, enables him to make a clean breast of even embarrassing situations in order that the readers get a true picture of the incident being described. Even when he sets aside a full chapter to enlist the recognitions and awards won by him, we do not suspect even a trace of pomposity and accept the author’s argument that this list was put there as a tribute, or rather a fitting reminder to those people who mocked him on his choice of career at a time when such unconventional fields attracted rebuke from one’s own friends and well wishers. This was particularly so for Salim Ali in the 1920s when his partnership mining business in Burma had floundered and he had to spend a little time in Bombay as a married jobless guy. The candidness makes the book such a delight to read.

The author’s comparison of rates of transportation, wages and provisions appear naive and the readers are forced to observe that the old ‘bird watcher’ is utterly ignorant of the concepts of monetary inflation and the changes in the value of the currency over a period of time. We must suppress our smile when Salim Ali declares that so many products and services could be purchased at such a minuscule amount of money, typically five or six decades before.   

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Engaging India

Title: Engaging India – Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb

Author: Strobe Talbott

Publisher: Penguin, 2007 (First published 2004)

ISBN: 978-0-14310-214-4

Pages: 234

Strobe Talbott, the gentle US Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001 chronicles the events which led to and resulted from India and Pakistan’s tit-for-tat nuclear tests in May 1998. The book ingenuously narrates the diplomatic fallout of the explosions and how India withstood the onslaught from the US singlehandedly and with esteem. As we know, India tested first and Pakistan was virtually forced to follow suit. Though the explosion was beneath the ground in Pokhran in Western India, its impact was felt half a world away in the White House. We read about how helpless the Clinton administration felt when the news was broken to them by CNN. The author then tells the long but lucidly described story of the ups and downs in the complex dialogue America maintained with India. The author represented the Americans and Jaswant Singh, India’s foreign minister, acted as his counterpart. Readers get a clearly articulated picture of what bothered the administration, their plan to get India sign along the dotted line and India bided their time well enough to beat Clinton on his homeground, when he lost face after the Republican majority senate threw out his test ban treaty summarily. When Clinton and the Democratic Party lose the presidency, CTBT was also buried quietly. The book is well structured, with a limpid account of the history which led to the bomb and the after-events that finally led to lifting of post-test sanctions and integrating India back into the world stage.

Talbott begins the book with a neat and precise introduction to the events which led to India’s nuclear tests in May 1998. Even though democracies in the modern sense, both India and the US had more to disagree about than to agree with, in the past. Talbott describes how India sided with the USSR in the political game, assisted in no small measure by Nehru’s socialist agenda, which was continued by Indira Gandhi, his daughter and prime minister, who was disdainful of capitalism in general. After China tested the atom bomb in 1964, a test ban treaty came into being, and a non-proliferation treaty (NPT) sought to bring in a regime in which the five nations already possessing nuclear weapons were allowed to continue holding them while non-nuclear states were forced to forego the weapons option. India objected to this discriminatory treaty and wanted itself to be given the honoured place due to it on account of being the world’s largest democracy. The ‘peaceful’ nuclear tests conducted in May 1974 was a milestone in India’s path to become a nuclear weapon state. Things moved with a feverish pitch during the administration of Bill Clinton, beginning in 1993. We get a ringside view of the activities through the candid prose of the author who was a prominent official in the American government. Clinton was proposing a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and forcing India to sign and ratify the NPT, which would have sealed the country’s hopes of becoming a nuclear power forever. Indians acted fast, but the effort was open and the political establishment weak-kneed. In December 1995, American spy satellites detected extensive movements in Pokhran and Clinton warned Narasimha Rao, then prime minister, against any misadventure. Rao promptly buckled and called off the tests. But politics in India was fast moving towards a transformation. The Hindu nationalist party – BJP – came to power in March 1998, with Vajpayee at its helm. Inducting nuclear weapons in the country’s arsenal was an electoral manifesto of the party, which it did on May 11, 1998 – less than 60 days after it assumed office – exploding five weapons in a span of three days. The US administration was taken completely off-guard and even the State department and the CIA learned the news through CNN – a greater shame they couldn’t even imagine.

Talbott was a born negotiator and shares his experiences dealing the regimes in India and Pakistan. At the very outset, he was aware of the structural and constitutional differences between the two countries – one an out and out democracy and the other where instability of elected governments was the harm. At the time when negotiations were going forth, Pakistan had a civilian – Nawaz Sharif – as the PM, but General Karamat controlled the administration as usual. The author clearly differentiates the caliber and tone of negotiations. Indians tried to wear the Americans down, and hoping for congressional restraints which was expectable as the Republicans controlled it. Pakistan was ‘bullying on its weaknesses’ and Talbott likens their reaction to that of a person who holds a pistol to his own head, threatening to pull the trigger unless we handed him our wallets. Talbott also identifies that the discussions with Pakistanis were not as intellectually engaging as that with India (p.105) and the rootlessness of Pakistani interlocutors was painfully evident as most of them were worried about who controls what in Pakistan and hence unwilling or unable to deviate much from their brief. In fact, military leaders exhibited a calm and cooler demeanour than the civilian leadership. Pakistani bureaucrats sometimes lost their bearings and assumed intimidating expressions towards their guests. Talbott describes one such incident when a high-ranking official leaned across the table in a moment of rage as if trying to strangle his American counterpart. He had to be physically restrained (p.105). On the other hand, the Indian side displayed a diligent maturity becoming of a responsible democracy. Jaswant Singh and Talbott became close friends during the dialogue process.

                 

Watching from close quarters, Talbott enjoyed a prime spot in bringing out the complex nature of interactions President Clinton had with India before and after its nuclear tests. It is said that Clinton admired India right from his education days at Oxford. He read E.M.Forster’s ‘A passage to India’ more than once in those days. Himself a voracious reader of history, Clinton had as his partner Hillary, who also had a warm regard for India, where she had planned an educational programme in her career. The Democrat-President was eager to visit India during the second term in office, but the nuclear tests upset the apple cart. As the author says, Clinton preferred managing differences with foreign leaders whom he regarded as essentially decent, conscientious, and deserving of a better relationship with the US. Even though he became very furious in the immediate aftermath of the tests, he cooled down considerably and appointed the author as the interlocutor in his engagement with India in a bid to secure the country’s signature on CTBT and to ensure a speedy visit, which had been postponed as part of the sanctions regime. Then he fell into the grips of temptation in the form of an obliging young intern at the White House and lost credibility with the populace, coming close to impeachment. Clinton finally made the India visit in 2000, without obtaining any leverage on his points of contention with the hosts.

                  

The book exemplifies the importance of the personal equation in international relations. The excellent rapport existed between Talbott and Jaswant Singh was instrumental in ironing out many of the stark differences of opinion where they existed and of ignoring the stubborn opposition to some points where no amount of compromise could be effected. We get the impression that a small part of the coldness that suddenly crept up between the US and Pakistan may be accounted for the superior level of mutual communication between the two. The book as a whole is written in an appreciative mood for India and its variegated processes and institutions of democracy, even though those same factors hindered the development of high-level talks in no small measure. It also shows the total change of stress on key issues whenever there is a transfer of power in the White House. Clinton was a staunch non-proliferationist, but as soon as George W Bush took over, he reversed many of his predecessor’s steps. Talbott fumes over Bush’s near-casual acceptance of India as a nuclear power without any of the strings attached.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Signal and the Noise

Title: The Signal and the Noise – The Art and Science of Prediction

Author: Nate Silver

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2012 (First)

ISBN: 978-1-846-14752-4

Pages: 454

Uncertainty is an inseparable feature of natural and social lives of man. We come across unpredictability at every corner, and encounter experts predicting the outcomes of various events based on painstaking research – at least that is what they say. Normally, this incertitude is so much a part of our way of life that we hardly pose to realize that there may be other ways, less uncertain, about them. This book is an excellent beginning to inspect those events in a rational way and to reach impressive conclusions. Even though I have used terms like uncertainty and unpredictability in a synonymous way, there are subtle differences between them which the author is at great pains to explain in the course of the narrative. And Nate Silver is just the right man for doing that, being a statistician and political forecaster at The New York Times. In 2012, he correctly predicted the outcome of all the states in the US presidential election. He has also been named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the world. Being a forecaster himself, he explains the pitfalls many of them fall into, when analyzing complex fields such as electoral outcomes, stock markets, spread of contagious diseases, sports betting, weather, climate change and even some of the nuances in Chess tournaments. Every prediction is wrought with uncertainty, but the quantum of this factor is not always mentioned in some of the startling announcements. When skill is also a factor to account for, experts find it easy to outsmart the novices who are ignorant about the probabilities which determine the outcome to a great extent. Hence the importance of the book – it helps to assess the predictability of an event, the margin of error inherent in a prediction and how best to effectively use such advice in reaching conclusions that have impacts on the financial, political or climate fronts.

Silver starts his masterly discourse with a brief but inimitable introduction into the necessity of separating the information in the signal from the background noise. If only all authors used such lucid analysis to explain their concepts! The author asserts that mankind began facing the challenge of richness of data that originated with the invention of printing press, at which time the information revolution really began. The number of books skyrocketed in the years succeeding that momentous event and cost of books and printed information plummeted, making them affordable to a large class of common people. Along with this surge of information came noise, the signal which doesn’t carry any information at all. Man is evolutionarily well equipped to discern patterns in a forest of random shapes and the problem reared its ugly head when this supersensitive faculty was turned against the flood of data that suddenly became available. This ended up in a large number of predictions not matching up with the outcome. Silver describes about the art and science of prediction, the tools with which people go about predicting the results and the pitfalls that await them on the road

Predictions that mainly come our way in our normal course of life are about political events like the result of an election. The author submits the flurry of TV predictions to an exhaustive analysis to come out with the stunning observation that all of them don’t stand a chance better than flicking a coin. But the efforts to predict the future career of baseball players are not that random. Here, software as well inquisitive researchers have made proven track record in identifying talent from early stages. The author himself is immensely attracted to this field, who has made software for predicting this, and the readers gets the impression that Silver is not totally unbiased when he argues that the computer’s efforts in baseball is entirely worthwhile. Another common task is predicting the weather. Here, the meteorologist is solidly assisted with two things – persistence, which maintains that the weather tomorrow would be very similar to what it is today and climatology, which states the statistical probability of a day’s weather collected from data collated over many previous years. In order to classify a weather prediction as accurate, the person must exceed the utility provided by the two. However, the commercial analysis of weather is not unbiased. A wet bias is argued to exist, in which the predictor assigns a chance to rain when in fact the data claims the chance to be very small. This is because people tend to ignore non-occurrence of rain when it was predicted than the other case of rain occurring when it was predicted not to, which may ruin their picnic.

Climate change in the form of man-made global warming as the result of increased carbon dioxide emissions from industrial processes is a phenomenon seems to be occurring on a planetary scale. The UN-spawned IPCC (Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change) monitors the temperatures regularly and comes down with predictions about long-term averages. The predictions of IPCC do not take into account the full measures of the complexity of the situation, as the author asserts. There is a full chapter on global warming in the book but uncharacteristically it does not delve deep into the details and don’t say conclusively whether the UN-body’s prediction would be right or wrong. Silver is contented with presenting a balanced picture, the arguments for and against the theory. There was indeed a rising trend from 1970 to 2000, but the first decade of the present century was relatively cool. But the author quickly picks up his Bayesian calculator and claims that the probability of the theory to be still true is a solid 85% even after accounting for the cool decade. A new argument is also presented to be behind the decline. This has to do with sulphur dioxide. The molecules of this gas spreads as aerosol in the upper layers of the atmosphere and reflect sunlight back to the space, thereby lessening the greenhouse effect. But the substance is highly polluting, being the source of acid rain. Sulphur emissions were cut down drastically as a sequel to the enactment of Clean Air Act in the mid-70s. The reduction might have contributed to the disappearance of the cooling effect of sulphur dioxide in the period leading up to 2000. Then how did the mercury go down in the next 10 years? According to Silver the impetus to industrial production in China, which doesn’t enforce any environmental regulations would have pumped more Sulphur into the atmosphere, ensuring a cooler decade. He ends with a premise that IPCC’s predictions of temperatures, revised in 1995, may well be true.

Silver’s examples and fields of application for his original thought and insightful ideas are very apt and fitting for the issue at hand. Unfortunately this fine discretion is unfortunately not applied in a few examples on prediction related to sports. The vile contraption going by the name of baseball dominates American thinking, even though nowhere else would you find sensible people pitching for this strange game. The author devotes a full chapter to the nitty-gritty of baseball prediction, which is really a pain-in-the-neck for the non-American readers who are not at all familiar with how the game is played. A similar argument holds for Poker, which is also one of the author’s favourite pastimes that have come to haunt the reader. This must surely be counted as a disadvantage to the book. At the same time, however, the author more than makes up for the shortcoming through several other chapters excellently structured with relevant concepts. We need not look further than the section in which he introduces Bayesian theorem which evaluates the probability of an event occurring due to a phenomenon which has a definite prior probability of occurring. Silver explains the concepts with an extremely hilarious instance of calculating the chances that your partner is cheating on you, if you happen to find a piece of underwear in the wardrobe which does not belong to you. If the prior probability of a cheating partner is 4% (collected from social data), Silver asserts humorously that, even after finding the suspicious object mentioned above, the probability that the person is cheating only rises to 29%. The reasoning is crystal clear, but the probability of a person being consoled by such figures is highly unlikely.

This book is highly recommended and is a must read. I would have given it a 4-star rating, if the author was not so particular about the lengthy chapters on baseball and poker.

Rating: 3 Star

Amazing Sailing Stories

Title: Amazing Sailing Stories – True Adventures from the High Seas

Author: Dick Durham

Publisher: Wiley Nautical, 2011 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-470-97803-0

Pages: 257

The title of this book may appear to be a departure from the policy of this blog to rarely review fiction. It is not that I have any innate dislike to fiction. On the contrary, good fiction is like medicine to the distressed heart and a tranquilizer to the troubled mind. Why I avoid fiction for the purposes of review is that a critical examination of a fictional work presupposes a fine grasp of human emotions which guided the author to bring out a fine volume. As the necessary skills are sorely lacking, I generally stay clear of fiction. I read them often, but not attempt to present them in this blog. And no, even though the word ‘stories’ do appear in the title, this is not a work of fiction. This volume brings out a compendium of sailing stories collected from various sources spanning a time that stretches to two and a half centuries. Dick Durham served on the last working Thames barge before writing for national newspapers and sailing magazines. He is a news editor at Yachting Monthly and has travelled the globe in search of the best sailing stories. The present title is an anthology of sixty stories categorized into eight broad topics like human error, storm, rescue, tragedy, adventure and the like. Each story is claimed to be based on a real life incident and narrates a strange incident encountered by sailors. The stage is the whole world, as the demarkations of land-based principalities are invisible in the ocean and people who manage to save their skins from death in a shipwreck seldom care for the boundaries.

The book’s cover boldly announces that the author’s style is powerful and poetic. But I beg to differ on this count. The person who wrote this line has either not read the book nor read poetry in his life. It takes the deepest ignorance of literary conventions to compare the style of Durham to poetry. If anything, the author’s style resembles that of a police record most of the time. I have a strong suspicion that he has copied some of the stories, or at least parts of it, from a crime record. So unappealing, uninteresting, unimaginative and plain boring is the narrative. The author must not be forgiven for wasting an opportunity to bring good sailing stories to the attention of the world. The seas attract youngsters and old people alike and many opt for the life of a sailor, inspired by books they read about seafaring. Without even a trace of imagination or impressive writing skill, Durham takes a bunch of stories from an impressive biography and throws it towards the reader. It is better to duck the tirade, but those unfortunate enough to have grabbed a copy is sentenced to plough wearily through the muck.

The book is prepared with an experienced reader in mind. You need to possess a more than glancing idea of how a ship works, what are the components of it, how life goes on in the sea, what are the conventions observed by seamen and some of the port regulations too. Else, how can you account for the barrage of sailing terms which appear like Greek of Chinese to most of the readers? Words like gall main sail, stay sail, mizzen rigging, luff slides, hawse pipe, spade rudder, bolt-on keel, fife-rail and jigger rigging don’t light a bulb for any poor reader. The author has not even bothered to compile a glossary of nautical terms for the general reader. The expressions listed above is only a small sample from the litany of such technical terms. The lay man is kept agape as Durham proceeds to list out his story (‘narrate’ would be a much sympathetic term). To borrow a concept from the theme of the book, reading this would be tougher than some of the experiences recounted on its pages! The gods would indeed have mercy on the poor souls who completed it – for the harsh suffering they had had to endure. To be fair, a touch of humour is displayed on one or two stories, but these are few and far between. They may be compared to lighthouses along the course of a sea voyage. I also seem to be allured by the charms of the sea!

The book is to be avoided at any cost. It is not worth reading.

Rating: 1 Star