The Horseshoe Table

Title: The Horseshoe Table – An Inside View of the UN Security Council
Author: Chinmaya R Gharekhan
Publisher: Pearson Longman 2006 (First)
ISBN: 81-7758-453-7
Pages: 322

The Horseshoe Table is the table around which discussions are being made in the UN security council. It is a privileged reserve of the five permanent members (P5) who wield veto power. The tolerance and accommodation displayed by the haughty P5 is limited and many a times the ordinary members with a term of only 2 years are forced to toe the line of one of the big powers. Chinmaya Gharekhan, the author was a member of the Indian Foreign Service, who had served in Egypt, Congo, Laos, Vietnam and former Yugoslavia. He spent nearly a quarter-century in the UN in varying capacities from first secretary of Indian mission, Permanent Representative to the UN, and as India’s Ambassador to the UN for over six years. He was appointed Under-Secretary-General in 1993 and he was the personal representative of the Secretary-General to the Security Council which afforded him to get a first-class eye witness account of the wheelings and dealings of the world’s most popular diplomatic body. The book is adorned with a foreword written by Dr. Boutros Boutros Ghali, the former UN Secretary General, the only one who didn’t obtain a second term so far.

The author was a confidante of Ghali and when he stopped the practice of attending the discussions at Security Council citing excessive work load, he appointed Gharekhan as his personal representative in the Council, which was an unheard-of practice in the UN. Ghali became more and more unpopular with the USA as time went by and was vetoed by them when he tried and failed for a second term. The book also shows the arrogance and condescension displayed by some of the US diplomats, the most noted being Madeleine Albright who later went on to become the US Secretary of State in the second Clinton administration. The book describes several events which the world body discussed and acted upon when the author served in the Council. These issues include the Gulf War of 1991 and consequent sanctions on Iraq, the civil war and disintegration of former Yugoslavia, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Libya after Lockerbie disaster, Haiti and the Rwanda genocide. The tussles and lobbying attendant to the election of the Secretary-General in 1991 and 1996 are given. The book ends with a very relevant chapter on the reform of the Security Council which is noted for the prescience writ upon it in every sentence.

The essential point one discerns from the book is that the UN is not so elegant or effective as it is often made out to be. People of developing countries look to the UN to rectify some of the injustices occurring in several parts of the world, but it is a prisoner of the might of the permanent members of the Security Council, which is the most powerful body of the world organisation. Gharekhan doesn’t mince words when he says that the UN as well as the Secretary General are often force to go along the line USA adopts. Since they are the largest contributor to UN’s coffers and the principle of ‘who pays the piper calls the tune’ is made out clearly by subsequent actions.

The passages are witty in some chapters, but the momentum is not generally kept up. Regarding the role of the Secretary of UNSC to assist its President in matters of rules and regulations are impressively narrated. “It is the Secretary of the Council who is the more useful to the President since he is the one who must instantly advise the President in case he is confronted with a difficult issue related to a point of order from a member quoting some rule of procedure of which the President almost certainly has never heard. Mercifully, members of the Council themselves hardly have a nodding acquaintance with the rules of procedure and are understandably reluctant to expose their ignorance. As a result, the Secretary is seldom put to test about his knowledge of the rules” (p.17). UN’s obsession with its official languages are brought out in another passage. “It is the practice in the Council for each speech to be translated consecutively in all the working languages. When a statement was made in Russian or Chinese, it was interpreted in other languages one by one! This was in addition to the simultaneous interpretation, which was available to the members as the statements are delivered. The real reason for this absurd, time-consuming and highly expensive practice was that it gave time to diplomats to seek instructions from their governments, since consecutive interpretation could at times take several hours. Very often, the delegates left their seats and either went home for meals with their families or, more likely, patronised the bar and ‘held consultations’ with fellow delegates” (p.16). The resolutions are often colour-coded to reflect their status. Drafts are circulated in blue and once they are adopted, the text is distributed in black.

US ambassadors often treat the UN as one of their departments and an incident is described regarding the UN mission in Yugoslavia represented by Akashi. Madelline Albright’s tirade against him is put down as “In the Security Council consultations on the 26^th, Mrs. Albright lashed out at Akashi for the remarks attributed to him in the New York Times. She said it was ‘totally unacceptable for an international civil servant, whose salary for the most part we pay’ publicly criticise President Clinton or any other government leader. When I told Akashi about all this, he was quite cool. ‘I thought she was my friend. Do the Americans pay?’ This was a reference to the fact that the US at the time was heavily in arrears in the payment of its dues to the UN budget” (p.141). The critical difference between ceasefire and cessation of hostilities is given. Ceasefire stopped fighting but left the opposing forces where they stood. Cessation of hostilities called for the withdrawal of forces to an agreed distance from the ceasefire line and the interposition of neutral or UN forces.

One would naturally expect to find some references in this book about UN to have some references to Shashi Tharoor, the present Minister of State for External Affairs of India who was also an Under-Secretary-General and tried unsuccessfully to contest to the post of Secretary General when Kofi Annan’s term ended. In fact, there is only one reference regarding the naming of the UN forces to the various states in disintegrating Yugoslavia. “The operation in Croatia would be called UN Confidence Restoration Operation (UNCRO). The Croats were happy since ‘CRO’ sounded very much an abbreviation of Croatia. The mission in Bosnia would continue to be called UNPROFOR. The mission in Macedonia would be called UN Preventive Deployment Force (UNPREDEP). All these names were suggested by Shashi Tharoor, the great Indian novelist, and the most able deputy of Kofi Annan” (p.166).

The book is really worthy at getting a feel of matters going on in the world body of ‘united nations’. After reading the book, we would get a feel that the member states should behave more properly in dealing high international policies and to try to transcend the barriers of petty nationalism and regionalism. Ever since the cold war ended, the practice of putting religion in international affairs is also seen to be going strong in the UN, particularly Islamic countries. The problem in Bosnia was a case in point.

However, there are obvious drawbacks to the narration as well. At several places, it degenerates to copying from a diary kept by the author. Also, the various problems discussed are not followed till the natural conclusion. The issues are narrated only for the period the author was in the UN! Some issues like Palestine have neither the beginning nor the end. Some other issues like Iraq have the beginning because Gharekhan was in the UN when it occurred, but don’t have the end properly explained. The reader is thus kept in a state of limbo after reading the book. Also, since the issues were international and involving neighbours, some maps would have been valuable. There is not even a single map in the book. Use of terms not explained was particularly troublesome when the Yugoslave crisis was considered. The word ‘Pale’ was used intermittently and it was not clear whether the author meant a person or place. I had to search Google to find out that “Pale is a town and a municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina, located southeast of Bosnia's capital Sarajevo. The municipality of Pale is one of the six municipalities of the City of Istočno Sarajevo in is located in the Republika Srpska entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina”. The author could have saved me the trouble! Any way, this is a good work and recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Greatest Show on Earth

Title: The Greatest Show on Earth – The Evidence for Evolution
Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Bantam Press 2009 (First)
ISBN: 978-0-593-06174-9
Pages: 437

Undoubtedly one of Dawkins’ master pieces of scientific books! A confirmed atheist and popularizer of science, Dawkins shines supreme among the authors. In addition to the several works he has produced on evolution and the mechanisms by which it works its magic, the present volume is the capstone of them all. As he commented, he was motivated to write a clinching piece of book on the bicentennial year of Darwin’s birth. Evolution is a fact, but surprisingly, there are quite a lot of people with strange ideas like creationism, intelligent design, etc. As the author lists out the results of a survey, 40% of Americans believe in the literal truth of the Bible and that the world was created about 6000 years ago. This book lists so many examples and convincing arguments to establish the truth behind evolution beyond any reasonable doubt. It’d truly astounding if any one continue to vouch for creationism after reading the chapters on skeletal and genetic uniformity among various species.

Change continually happens to animals. This can be artificial, like domestication or spontaneous, like natural selection. The genetic differences imparted on dogs in a very short span of time is immense and the fact that they are genetically evolved from the wolves is difficult to digest now, by just looking at two members of the respective families. If so much change can occur in so short a time, imagine what’d happen if the time available for evolution is large, in fact so huge as to involve billions of years. We have evidence of the elapse of the enormous amount of time from radioactive dating. In addition to such long time scales, evolution can also fact as in the case of the tusk weight of elephants in Africa and in a controlled experiment on frogs on two Adriatic islands done in a span of 37 years. The evidence of evolution is also displayed by fossils and one of the pet arguments of creationists-designers are that there are some missing links. The author strongly refutes such allegations and explains with examples that there are no missing links and every thing is accounted for. We have obtained fossils of intermediate hominids like australopithecus and several home-species to show the intermediate steps when humans evolved from the common ancestor from whom us and chimpanzees diverged. It is not difficult to understand why species diverge, how the so called speciation takes place. When two life forms are separated by islands, not just land surrounded by water, but desert oases, Alpine mountain peaks etc, gradual changes begin to take place such as those seen in Galapagos and Madagascar islands. When these new species encounters the parent species after a sufficiently long span of time, no interbreeding can take place and a new species is established. The process of forming islands is natural in geologic time scales as predicted by plate tectonics. Hence, the mechanism of speciation is clearly proved. The similarities in the bone structure of all vertebrates is striking as exemplified by a comparison between the skulls of a human and a horse. There are 28 bones in the human skull and the structure and number is the same for a horse too, with the difference only in size. The similarities abound in molecular structure of the genes too, as several genes performing the same functions in various animals are in fact similar. The final chapter on ‘intelligent design’ renders an apt and accurate summing up of this old wine in a new bottle, or in other words, creationism in a new garb! Design of animals, if it ever was, is not so intelligent as evidenced in the laryngeal nerve in mammals, the pipe called ‘vas deferens’ which connects testis to the penis. With masterful illustrations, it is made clear that the ‘design’ of these organs are in no way intelligent and if at all they had a designer, he is seriously wanting in intelligence. The animals are cute and elegant only from the outside, and the innards of them are such a mess. This sums up the chain of arguments in the book.

The section on radioactive dating is very illuminating as the detailed mechanism is not described in many books of this genre. Carbon-14 which has a half-life of 5730 years is used for dating fossils of life forms, but for longer duration dating like that of rocks, Potassium-40, which has a half-life of 1.26 billion years is used. In this decay, Potassium-40 is morphed to Argon-40. This section also discusses the controversy surrounding the ‘Shroud of Turin’ which was discovered in the 13^th century claiming to contain a blood stained image of the Christ, but was proved to be a hoax. In 1983, Vatican decided to test the integrity of the piece of cloth in a rare show of scientific temper and allowed three labs in Europe and USA to test the relic with carbon dating. The labs in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich came up with convincing results, 1304 C.E, 1200 C.E and 1274 C.E.

A parody of the song ‘All things bright and beautiful’ praising God for creating all things is given in page 212 and offers excellent humour.

All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons
Each little wasp that stings
He made their brutish venom
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous
All evil great and small
All things foul and dangerous
The Lord God made them all

Each nasty little hornet
Each beastly little squid
Who made the spiky urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous
All pox both great and small
Putrid, foul and gangrenous
The Lord God made them all.

The scientists have come up with a unit for evolution, in a bid to make it quantitative and to bring it in line with the exact sciences. The name of the unit, as expected, is darwin. It is the natural logarithm of a measured characteristic of an animal such as the mean leg length over evolutionary time. It is assessed that the rate of evolution of the horse is approximately 40 millidarwin, where as for some domestic animals including dogs, it is measured in kilodarwin.

The five fastest runners among mammal species are the cheetah, the pronghorn (a kind of antelope), the gnu (another kind of antelope), the lion and the Thomson’s gazelle. It is a mix of the predator and the prey. One thing about such arms races that might worry enthusiasts for intelligent design is the heavy dose of futility that loads them down. If we are going to postulate a designer of the cheetah, he has evidently put every ounce of his designing expertise into the task of perfecting a superlative killer. One look at that magnificent running machine leaves us in no doubt. The cheetah, if we are going to talk design at all, is superbly designed to kill gazelles. But the very same designer has equally evidently strained every nerve to design a gazelle that is superbly equipped to escape from those very same cheetahs. For heaven’s sake, whose side is the designer on? When you look at the cheetah’s taut muscles and flexing backbone, you must conclude that the designer wants the cheetah to win the race. But when you look at the sprinting, jinking, dodging gazelle, you reach exactly the opposite conclusion. Does the designer’s left hand not know what his right hand is doing? Is he a sadist, who enjoys spectator sport and is forever upping the ante on both sides to increase the thrill of the chase? Did he who made the lamb make thee? (p. 384). Powerful argument indeed!

As another illustration of the ‘unintelligence’ of design, animal eye is described. Our retinas consist of photosensitive cells with nerves attached to them. But strangely, the sensors are placed back-to-front and the nerve connections are blocking light from reaching the sensors. It is our brain which filters out poor clarity and presents a good picture. Hermann von Helmholtz, the great nineteenth-century German scientist opined about the deficiencies of the eye thus, “If an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which had all these defects, I should think myself quite justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest terms, and giving him back the instrument”. The sole motive of creationists is the desire to uphold the origin myth of a particular set of Bronze age desert tribesmen!

A superb book, fully endorsed and recommended. Three profound discoveries, that of DNA as carriers of heredity, plate tectonics which changed the continents of the world and carbon dating of fossils came very much after Darwin published his ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859, but each discovery only corroborated his theory rather than presenting even one instance of deviance! This book explains several of them in detail this is a must-have for every man of self-respect.

Rating: 5 Star

The Universe - A Biography

Title: The Universe – A Biography
Author: John Gribbin
Publisher: Allen Lane (Penguin) 2007 (First published 2006)
ISBN: 978-0-713-99857-3
Pages: 226

A biography of the Universe from one of the world famous popularizers of science is a natural best seller. His other books of which ‘In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat’, ‘Stardust’, ‘Science: A History’ and ‘Deep Simplicity’ are some, are icons of crowd pullers among the publishing industry. The author was trained as an astrophysicist, who soon turned to popular science and now works with his wife, Mary Gribbin, who has co-authored some of the works.

The Universe – A Biography, as the name indicates, is a biography of the universe from the start to finish. Unfortunately, or rather, naturally, the beginning and end are clouded in a lot of uncertaintly which the author has tried to blow away with some clever bits of intelligent speculation. The book starts with a refresher on sub-atomic particles and the status of research on the subject. Perching on this solid base, Gribbin then plunges head on into the question of how the Universe began in the Big Bang and its early development. The story of the origin of galaxies and stars comes next. The Big Bang theory itself can’t explain the development of stars as such. I had always felt that the reasoning of many scientists that the non-uniformity of the space-time caused local hotspots of gravity which caused the material to fall back and accumulate to form clusters is a little bit stretched. To prove their stand, they quote the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) result, which found that the radio hiss of the Big-Bang which is also known as Cosmic Microwave Background is not uniform in all respects. But, the radiation is so weak and near uniform that we’d be tempted to regard the COBE data as nothing more than white noise! This is only my personal opinion which hinges on the conviction that the scientists should come up with more convincing proof!

The author then systematically inspects the forces which bind the universe together, how the chemical elements were formed, how the solar system was formed, how life originated, and by the greatest stretch of speculation, how it will all come to an end. The organisation and presentation is superbly done and attest to the multifaceted experience of the author, he is quite a master of letters. However, as can be expected from an author who had produced several titles, he refers to many of his other books in foot notes. The avoidance of life sketches seemed to be a welcome change, as all popular science titles use these and historical anecdotes to streamline the flow. As I have read how Penzias and Wilson (who discovered the microwave background radiation) cleaned their antenna of bird droppings many times in the past, I found this book’s approach more to the point. Gribbin stood his ground firm, even when he ventured a bit into the territory of biology regarding the origins of life.

The book begins with an apt quote from Russell, “It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition”. The description of the Higgs field becomes essential when experiments at CERN are trying hard to verify or annul this important hypothesis. As he says, “The idea that Higgs came up with is that all particles are intrinsically massless, but that there is a previously unsuspected new field filling all of the universe, which interacts with particles to give them mass. This field is now known as the Higgs field. An easy way to get a picture of what is going on is to imagine the way the behaviour of a spacecraft would be altered if space was actually filled with an invisible gas, like air. In empty space, if the rocket motors of a space probe are used to provide a steady push of the probe, it will accelerate at a steady rate as long as the motor keeps firing. But if the probe were moving through a completely uniform sea of gas, when the motors were fired at the same steady rate, it would not accelerate so quickly, because of the drag caused by the gas. The effect would be the same as if the probe were heavier (more massive) that it really was. In an analogous way, massless particles moving through the Higgs field encounter a ‘drag’ which seems to given them mass, with the exact mass depending on the nature of the individual particle and the strength of the influence it feels from the Higgs field” (p.21). The descriptions of the gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO, TAMA, VIRGO and GEO600 are enlightening and the extent upto which scientists would go to ensure accuracy and sensitivity of their measuring instruments.

The travel of photons from the inner core of the sun presents a curious aspect of its journey. As the book states, “Below the surface of the Sun, where the temperatures exceed 6000 K, electrons are stripped from neutral atoms by energetic impacts and the matter is in the form of a plasma like the last stages of the fireball in which the Universe was born. A photon starting out from the heart of the Sun travels, on average, just one centimetre before it collides with a charged particle and bounces off in a random direction. So it moves in zig-zag steps each about a centimetre long, and typically takes 10 million years to get to the surface, even though it is travelling at the speed of light. If it could go in a straight line from the centre of the Sun to the surface, its journey would take just 2.5 seconds” (p.75).

The author also gives the five basic tenets of the ‘New Standard Cosmology’. They are,

1. The Universe we live in emerged from an early epoch of rapid expansion (inflation), then slowed its expansion rate.
   

2. The Universe today is flat and its acceleration is expanding.
   

3. The irregularities in the Universe today (galaxies, stars and all the rest, including ourselves) result from quantum fluctuations during inflation.
   

4. The Universe is made up of roughly 70% of dark energy, 30% matter.
   

5. The matter in the Universe is made up of roughly seven times more non-baryonic dark matter than baryonic matter, with only 10% of the baryonic matter (0.4% of the total mass-energy of the Universe) in the form of bright stars. Neutrinos contribute as much mass, overall, as bright stars.

Overall, the book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Mughal Empire

Title: The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India)Author: John F Richards Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1994 (First published 1993) ISBN: 81-85618-14-3

The world famous Cambridge history series are renowned for their accuracy, impartiality, authority and comprehensiveness. Numerous such series exists for histories of many parts of the world. This volume deals with the Mughal empire during the period 1526-1720, from the conquest of Babur to the ascent of Muhammad Shah in 1720 which symbolized the crumbling up of the empire. The author is a professor of history at the Duke University who has presented the subject in a capable and interesting way. Several maps given at appropriate places accentuate the assimilation by the reader. The greatest problem with studies of the medieval Islamic states in India are the biases exhibited by the scholars depending upon their religious or political affiliations. Historians like P N Oak tend to favour the Hindu nationalist style, while Irfan Habib approaches issues with a Muslim mindset and historians like Romila Thapar and K N Panikker follows the marxist way of pseudo-secularism. John F Richards presents a refreshingly impartial method.

The mughal state was a theocratic one. “Indo-Muslim rulers appealed regularly to Muslim militancy in the jihad against the idolatrous Hindus of the subcontinent. They relied heavily upon the support of the Islamic religious establishment for legitimacy and political backing. In return, the state supplied money and administrative support for the essential institutions of organized Islam” (p.2). The rise and effective administration was helped in no small measure by the wide adoption of paper and gunpowder. Paper made its appearance in the eleventh century while gunpowder became available by the mid-sixteenth century. Even the emperor Akbar used the weapon of jihad against the Rajput princes. He was troubled by the authority of Udai Singh, Rana of Mewar. “Akbar, at this early period, was still enthusiastically devoted to the cause of Islam and sought to impress the superiority of his faith over the most prestigious warriors in Brahminical Hinduism” (p.25). After a long siege of Mewar, the royal forces conquered the fort and slaughtered about 25,000 ordinary persons, inhabitants of the town and peasants from the surrounding areas on the grounds that they have actively helped in the resistance. After this brutal massacre, Akbar made a thanks-giving visit to the shrine of Khwaja Muin-ud-din Chishti at Ajmer. Akbar was thought to possess mild epilepsy, chronic depression (p.34) and dyslexia which made him physically unable to read.

Akbar was very particular on complete submission by his officers. A curious example is given for a case of unitended disobedience: “the King ordered him to be seized, dragged to the palace which he had told him to go to, bound prostrate on an inflated bag of ox-hide, and launched upon the river. The officer was being carried hither and thither in the middle of the river at the mercy of the current. He was weeping, imploring pardon with miserable cries, and trying to move the King to mercy. As he was carried past the royal pavilion, the King gave orders for him to be rescued from the river, entered in the inventories as royal property, exposed for sale in all the bazars and finally auctioned as a slave” (p.44). The royal budget for the year 1595-96 is reproduced from a reference work. We see that 89.92 million silver rupees out of a total of 99.01 million (91%) was earmarked for military purposes while 4.7% was set apart for the imperial household and the emperor’s pleasures, with the remaining 4.3% for public works. At the time of Jahangir too, the percentages remained more or less the same. A sum of 8.2% of the imperial revenue were allocated for the salaries of the four princes including Khurram (later, Shah Jahan). In fact, 73 members of the inner nobility amassed a staggering 37.6% of the revenue.

War of succession was one of the reasons why the empire floundered in the reign of later monarchs. Fratricide was an accepted practice. Even incestual policies were adopted with the full support of the ulema. “Nur Jahan arranged a marriage between Shahryar, Jahangir’s youngest son, aged sixteen, to her daughter, Ladili Begum” (p.113). Aurangzeb hastened the collapse of the empire with his begoted ways. India has never seen a more fanatical ruler than him. “Auranzeb’s edict of 1669 ordered that all temples recently built or repaired contrary to the Sharia be torn down. Throughout the empire many, although not all, such temples were ruined by official action. The emperor’s special targets were the renowned stone temples in the holy cities of Mathura and Varanasi. The great Kesav Rai temple at Mathura was pulled down. The golden bejewelled idols were taken to Agra and buried under the steps of Jahan Ara’s mosque. A new mosque was erected on the site of the razed temple” (p.175). The people were even denied the opportunity to present their cases to the emperor. When Aurangzeb re-introduced Jiziya in 1679, thousands of Hindus assembled at Delhi to petition the emperor for the repeal of the law. He found it difficult to move to the Jama Masjid for prayers due to the crowd. What happened next is hard to believe. This emperor, who was enjoined by the Sharia to protect the lives of his subjects ordered war elephants to be brought out and trampled upon the hapless people. Several people were killed in the melee (p.177).

Shivaji emerged as the fountainhead of Maratha resistance in the latter half of the 17^th century. Himself not a Kshatriya, Shivaji found it difficult to assume the title of ‘Chhatrapati’ due to the brahminical beliefs immersed in millenia of superstition which won’t accept individual merit unless that person belongs to twice-born castes. Richards describes the process by which Shivaji was made a Kshatriya. “Many months of preparation preceded the ceremony. Shivaji immersed himself in a period of intense prayer and worship at a number of temples and shrines. In the meantime, Brahmin advisers persuaded Gagga Bhatta of Varanasi, the foremost Hindu theologian of his day, to declare that Shivaji was not a mere Shudra of the Maratha caste, but a lapsed Kshatriya, a Rajput, whose ancestors could be traced back to the solar line of the Ranas of Mewar. Gagga Bhatta travelled to the Maratha capital where he first purified Shivaji and then invested him with the sacred thread and Vedic verses of the twice-born castes”. (p.213)

The Maratha empire didn’t witness men of the calibre of Shivaji ascending the throne after his death at the age of 53. His son Shambhaji was a careless, pleasure-seeking fellow. The Mughal empire easily caught up with him and brought him to Aurangzeb. His death was gruesome, as depicted thus, “Shambhaji and his Brahmin chief minister were brought to the imperial encampment beside the Bhima river. Shambhaji, although a monarch, was not treated with the dignity permitted the Bijapur and Golconda rulers. Dressed as buffoons he and his minister were presented to Aurangzeb who knelt in thanksgiving prayer. During interrogation by Mughal officers, Shambhaji sealed his fate by insulting both the emperor and the Prophet. A panel of ulema sentenced him to death for having slain and captured good Muslims. After a fortnight of torture, Shambhaji and his companion were hacked to death and the pieces thrown to the dogs” (p.223)

An impressive book by all standards. Richards has narrated the history of nearly two centuries as if it was a folk tale from ancient India. Even the economic details mentioned, along with tables and statistics are presented without losing the reader’s interest. This book is only a part of the Cambridge history of India series, and we eagerly await the appearance of more volumes in this series. A must-read for all enthusiasts of Indian history.

Rating: 4 Star

A Brief History of Science

Title: A Brief History of Science – As Seen Through The Development of Scientific InstrumentsAuthor: Thomas CrumpPublisher: Universities Press (India) Pvt Ltd, 2004 (First published 2001)ISBN: 978-81-7371-497-9

The origin of science dates back to antiquity and starts with the mastery over fire. The pre-historic man was already familiar with fire in the form of wild-fires and lightnings which couldn’t be controlled. Darwin has noted that “the discovery of fire, possibly the greatest ever made by man, excepting language, dates from before the dawn of history”. The mastery over fire blossomed into rapid strides in pottery and ceramics which paved the way for civilizations to rise. There were only 10 chemical elements known to ancient man were iron, sulphur, carbon, zinc, copper, tin, lead, mercury, silver and gold. Newer kilns provided greater temperatures for smelting and it became possible to work with molten iron, which has a high melting point of 1535 deg C than copper (1083 deg C), zinc (420 deg) or tin (232 deg).

The ancient thought was dominated by the writings of Aristotle which was canonized by Thomas Acquinas in the 13^th century. Even though Aristotle was not a Christian, Acquinas took him from science to theology. In a day when politics was closely tied to the Church, the legacy of Acquinas placed a severe restriction on scientific thought. This was later to cause embarrassment for Galileo who maintained that the earth revolves round the sun. The Catholic church opposed it on the ground that Aristotle has said that the sun goes round the earth! The century after the fall of Constantinople (1453) saw the rise of great astronomers life Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. Tycho coined the word ‘nova’ for exploding stars. In 1572, he observed a brilliant new heavenly body in the constellation Cassiopeia and designated it ‘nova stella’ (new star). Kepler’s observations about the errors in the orbits of Mars helped him formulate the famous Kepler laws and negated Aristotle in the sense that planets don’t move in perfect circles, but in ellipses. Interest in astronomy helped develop telescopes and as a natural corrollary, microscopes. Holland was the place where making of lenses and basic optical phenomena like refraction and its laws were fully understood. Van Leeuwenhoek performed observations on plant and animal physiology. Isaac Newton entered the stage by the latter half of 17^th century. He contributed to mathematics, optics, gravity and several other fields. He used a prism to separate light into its component colours and proposed a theory for interference. He also a built a telescope with a resolution of 40X which was great in those times.

Time keeping was an essential aspect of maritime travel, as the sighting of heavenly bodies was not practical in a cloudy night. John Harrison developed a chronometer H4 which was precise to a second in a course of one month. The development of the measure for length, steam locomotion, electric telegraphy and the postage stamp occurred in the 50-year period from 1790-1840. In 1842, an Austrian physicist, Christian Doppler stated the principle of changes in the pitch of sound from approaching or receding vehicles. This was tested in 1845 by having a locomotive draw an open carriage with several trumpeters through a station on the Dutch railway. The pitch of the trumpets, as heard by observers on the platform, lowered immediately as the train passed by. The drop in frequency, related to the speed of the train, accorded precisely with Doppler’s principle which was to prove a fundamental rule in the case of electromagnetic waves too. We measure the distance to stars using the red-shift in their spectra due to this effect.

Along with the developments in other areas, measurement also found prominence in the renaissance era. But the unit of pound dates back to Roman times. As the Roman empire came to its end, a unit of measurement called pound (libra) developed to denote the standard both of money and weight. The relationship was defined by equating a pound of silver to the same amount in money. France took the lead in developing a standard measure of length and weight by the end of 18^th century. In 1788, a commission of six scientists including Coulomb, Laplace and Lavoisier was founded in Paris. For developing the units, the commission decided to base it on some constant of physics. For metre, there were two possibilities. One was to make use to Huygens’ discovery that the period of oscillation of a pendulum depended only on its length and the other was to base it on the length of a meridian. It opted for the latter, a long straight meridian was chosen from Dunkirk in France to Barcelona in Spain passing through Paris. This was precisely measured by scientists using the triangulation method even during the turbulent times of the French revolution and the metre was standardised. To use the terms for international purposes, latin and greek words were used. For smaller measures, Latin suffixes milli-, centi-, and deci- were proposed and for larger measures, Greek suffixes like the deca, hecto and kilo were proposed. At the same time, the liquid measure, litre, was defined as 1 cubic decimetre of water. During this time the English were battling the French and they didn’t attend the convention to formulate new units. The English-speaking world, particularly the U.S with its archaic system of weights and measures, is still paying the price. (p.82-85). The quest for knowledge permeated all the spheres of lives of these scientists at that era. The Marquis of Laplace (1749-1827) published his magnum opus, ‘Celestial Mechanics’ of his theories on planetary origins. Napoleon, always interested in astronomy, was particularly impressed by Laplace’s achievements, and asked him what part God had played. Laplace is still remembered for his classic answer: “I have no need of that hypothesis” (p.297-98)

There have been recent speculations in India and elsewhere regarding the origin of the use of powered rockets as a means of warfare. Some people claim that it was used by Tipu Sultan during the siege of Srirangapatnam against the British. In fact, no less a person than Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam, renowned rocket scientist and former President of India has claimed likewise. But, the author presents a different picture in this book. “In China, projectiles powered by rockets were used in the Sung-Chin wars, almost a thousand years ago. The basic science consisted of finding a fuel (gun powder in Sung China) that would burn at an optimal rate” (p.94-95). We should ascertain the true facts before honouring Tipu Sultan on this count!

The discovery of electricity changed the course of history forever. The first serious study of magnetism and electricity was ‘On the Magnet’ by William Gilbert in 1600 based on experiments with lodestone, a magnet used by experimenters at that time. Images of the versorium, an instrument built by Gilbert was the first known pictorial representation of any electrical instrument. This consisted of a pivoted needle which pointed to the direction of electric charge. In 1660, Otto von Guericke constructed the first electrical machine consisting of a sulphur globe and demonstrating static electricity. Innovations in such instruments led to the development of Leyden jar, in the Dutch city Leyden, for storing electric charge.The discharge of the jar caused mild shock and this so delighted King Louis XV of France, when he had 700 monks hold hands in Paris, with the two at the ends of the chain using their free hands to discharge a Leyden jar. Experiments which followed helped Benjamin Franklin to develop lightning conductors. The power of lightning was demonstrated by Franklin in different ways. He constructed a sentry-box, constructed on an insulating stand to be placed on a high building. A rod, 20-30 feet long, pointed at its far end, would then rise vertically through the roof of the sentry-box. When thunder clouds gathered, the man inside who was well insulated brought a wax candle close to the rod which cause sparks. Franklin always made clear that the wax handle should be earthed with a metal wire to protect the man in the box. In St. Petersburg, a local scientist called Richmann omitted this precaution and was electrocuted. Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) developed the voltaic pile which provided the first continuous source of electric current. He was assisted in these ventures by Luigi Galvani, a physiologist who observed muscle contractions in dead frogs when subjected to electric charge. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was the most successful inventor in the point of lastingness. Electromagnetic induction resulted in the development of electric motors and generators. James Clark Maxwell integrated electricity into magnetism with his theory.

Spectral analysis constituted another area of investigation, particularly in the 19^th century. The element, Helium was first observed using spectrometer on the surface of the sun, before it was discovered on earth. It also reached outside the visible range. J J Thomson’s experiments with specially designed cathode ray tubes led to the discovery of the electron. The integrity of the atom (which meant ‘indivisible’ in Greek) was lost forever. This led to researches in nuclear fission and fusion. After the Manhattan project brought out the devastating power of the atom in painful detail at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists flocked to studies about fusion. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist in charge at Los Alamos, after the testing of the bomb in July 1945 is said to have quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. It is interesting to read the resolution of the dispute between England and Germany regarding the location of their joint project (Joint European Torus – JET). While the arguments were on, a Lufthansa plane was hijacked and forced to land at Mogadishu in Somalia. The German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt was desperate to rescue the passengers, but only the British army had trained commandos to do the job. This team was called in to help the Germans and all passengers were rescued. Schmidt was so grateful that he offered the British prime minister, Jim Callaghan, to name a reward. The response was to ask Schmidt to give up Germany’s claim to the tokamak, and JET opened for business in Oxfordshire in 1978.

Summing up, the book is a must-read for knowing the historical origins of science. A large spectrum of inventions, from the fire to sub-atomic particles are explained and details given. Hundreds of scientists are mentioned by name and in this sense, is a good starting point for further exploration to interested readers. However, there are some points, like crystallography, which is explained in unnecessary and avoidable detail. The barrage of Greek letters in the book may repel at least some of the lay readers who don’t have any formal education in science. The organisation of the theme is also not well done and transgression from the main thread can be seen in several chapters. Besides, some scientists are made conspicuous by absence. Even though theories about stellar origins and ends are described, the name of Chandrasekhar is not mentioned which can only be construed as a slip rather than deliberate omission. The most serious accusation against the book can be that it doesn’t do justice to its title. ‘The development of scientific instruments’ is not developed enough in the main story. Some of the instruments discussed were not appealing to ordinary readers and articulations were not interesting. Even in spite of all these, the book is a superb piece of research and perseverance. The impressive bibliography given at the end may indeed make the work fit for a doctoral thesis. Authors from Gilbert in 1600 to Bertrand Russel are indicated. A very fine work indeed!

Rating: 3 Star

Sikh Martyrs

Title: Sikh Martyrs
Author: Bhagat Lakshman Singh
Publisher: Lahore Book Shop, Ludhiana 2006 (First published 1923)
Pages: 151
ISBN: 81-7647-115-1

Sikhism originated in the 15^th century with the teachings of Guru Nanak. The nascent philosophy crossed ways several times with the bigoted and parochial Mughal emperors, particularly Jehangir, Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb. Two Sikh gurus, Arjan Dev and Tegh Bahadur had to lay down their lives when they refused to convert to Islam as so shamelessly demanded by Jehangir and Aurangzeb respectively. This book by Bhagat Lakshman Singh is a collection of 28 such episodes of heroism and sacrifice by the members of the Khalsa, the organisation created by Guru Govind Singh.

The book is really trash with nothing worthwhile to commend upon. The author himself is a religious fanatic who treats both Hindus and Muslims alike as enemies of Sikhism and presents the examples as a kind of conspiracy on the parts of these religionists to wipe out Sikhism from the world. No words are enough for him to expound the virtues of the Khalsa and this is entirely at the expense of the others. At the same time, he keeps a respectable distance from the British and Christianity. This book was published before Indian independence and the eagerness with which the author tries to please the British authorities is pathetic, to say the least. The book is full of spelling and grammar mistakes that we would wonder how this compendium of errors could possibly get through the hands of a diligent proof reader! The publishers, M/s Lahore Book Shop, Ludhiana finds themselves in the dock in bringing out this practically unreadable and worthless book. Inconsistencies in narration abound at several places. In one episode, he describes how the Khalsa took back some part of Punjab gloriously from the Muslims, and in the next episode, which follows the previous one chronologically, he again comes forward with the story of another hero who lost in battle to defend the place. No historical references are given and some stories are outright false which don’t have any historical background. Legend and folk tales are clothed in the guise of history and are presented before us.

In the entire book, only one paragraph was found to be worth mentioning. This one points at the mindset of the Indian muslims at the time of partition. As he says, “The Indian Mussulmans look up to Turkey and Arabia, more than to India. Their ideal is Pan-Islamism, and until and unless they come to regard religion as a matter of private concern as it indeed it ought to be, the idea of a United Indian nation is merely chimerical. And as long as this is so, the subordination of communal interests to any utopian scheme of liberty, equality and fraternity will be nothing short of national suicide”.

Rating: 0 Star (Unfit for rating)

The Selfish Gene

Title: The Selfish Gene
Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press 2005 (First published 1976)
Pages: 332
ISBN: 978-019-567344-9

Richard Dawkins is a noted biologist and popularizer of science. ‘Selfish Gene’ is one of his best sellers which has made a prominent presence among the literature at that time. The 1970s was the period of resurgence in the knowledge of genetics and popular interest had surged following the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA by Crick and Watson in 1953. Suddenly, the scientific landscape metamorphosed to open up a grand vista to biology. Scientists suddenly realised that they knew very little about genes and the role they play in animal lives. Such realizations had spawned great discoveries in the past and in this case, it was more so. Biology suddenly found itself respectable once again after enduring long centuries of junior role to Physics. Dawkins’ present work describes many of the nitty-gritty of evolution in detail and presents forceful arguments in favour of his selfish gene theory.

Long long ago, before any life-form emerged on earth, a replicator organism was produced due to random chemical reactions in the primordial soup which was energised by incessant lightnings. This was the precursor of the modern genetic material and it started replicating indiscriminately. Soon, the raw material of the soup began drying up and they were forced to evolve into discrete mechanisms to make the reproductive success an assured fact. The replicators created outward appearances of higher life forms which were actually machines created by the genes. Since genes were composed of millions of nucleotides and genes were copied to their offsprings, errors in copying which will inevitably creep up in a process so complex and huge, resulted in natural and random variations among offsprings. Natural selection trained its critical eye on these differences and weeded out unsuccessful variations. Thus evolution began its grinding journey.

The gene is defined as “any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection” (p.28). There are two ways in which copying errors happen. One is called ‘crossing over’ which is caused by the crossing over some of the nucleotides of the parents to their offspring. The other is ‘point mutation’ which is caused by genuine failure of copying. Genes control every aspect of our lives by synthesizing protein molecules which in turn control animal processes directly. Hemoglobin and insulin are two of the well known proteins. Dawkins puts forward a novel theory of aging. He argues that our genome consists of genes which are expressed only in old age which then breaks down the normal metabolism. This is valid evolutionarily, as any other animal which doesn’t have these genes and which died young will not be able to pass over these genes to their offsprings. So, over time, these late acting genes evolved to account for the entirety of animal and plant lives. Every gene is selfish – not in the literary sense – but that they try to replicate as many times as possible, even at the cost of similar and competing genes. Even the altruism exhibited by some organisms are nothing but disguised ways of propagating genes of its own kind.

An index of relatedness between any two individuals in a particular species is defined and according to this principle, the relation between parents and offspring is 0.5 while that between siblings is 0.25. Since there is a greater relation in the first case, the attachment is stronger and genes are more likely to be related in it. Cheating among siblings is to be considered from this point of view. Many of the examples given in the book are directly concerned with several animal and insect species and should not be confused with human applications. Many examples show us the cruel aspect of nature and we can “catch nature, red in tooth and claw”.

In order to account for the human interactions which are tempered by culture and don’t obey the basic laws of nature, Dawkins puts forward the concept of ‘memes’. Meme (rhymed ‘crème’) is a replicating idea which grows and spreads from mind to mind similar to the propagation of genes. Evolutionary concepts applicable to genetics are also relevant in a limited sense to memes. Good memes travel far and wide to ever increasing audience and become embedded in the social psyche.

Even with all these refreshing and new ideas, the book is difficult to read and I couldn’t enjoy it. The introduction and establishment of the main idea of selfish gene is too lengthy, extending to page 50. Such a long argument is tiresome and we lose interest very soon. Since the book was first published in 1976 and several editions have appeared in between, many pieces of info are dated which the author has taken pains to correct in the notes at the end of the book which is quite large to become a nuisance and prevents the reader from following the main thread. Some notes run into several pages with superficial and lateral information. About 20% of the total pages are devoted to notes. Another drawback is that the book is too biological, in the sense that people who are more comfortable with other branches of science find it exceedingly difficult to follow the argument which is expressed in not too easy terms. The biological principles are too vague and hazy which can made to apply to both sides of the argument. Compared to the precise and sharp principles of Physics, these laws and theories make us laugh! The proofs are often computer simulations and rhetoric, to add to the humour!

Overall rating: 2 Star