Reflections

                                    The lion in winter: Grothendieck in old age  Mathematicians and theoretical physicists fascinate me. This is because, I can imagine myself, if I work hard enough, sometime solving a biological conundrum, or evaluating a chemical compound. But the idea of sitting with a piece of paper and pencil and calculating away for days or months or years and then coming up with a proof of an esoteric mathematical problem, or a theory to explain an observation made in deep space seems to me to be more like magic. Anybody who can do this, in my opinion is made of stuff that I cannot even imagine, let alone ever to hope to emulate. There are several such mathematicians. One of them passed away last November. I refer to Alexander Grothendieck who passed away on the 13 th of last month. Grothendieck was the mathematician par excellence. He embodied all that i...

Artist's impression of Susrutha doing an operation Stones in the urinary tract have been a part of life for humans for all of recorded history. The earliest treatments for the condition originated in India when Susrutha, the undisputed father of Plastic Surgery described a method of lithotomy of cutting for stone. There is some dispute about when exactly Susrutha lived. There are some over patriotic Indian authors who believe that he lived around 3000 B C. Colonial historians who were reluctant to believe that everything did not originate in the West or near about placed him at the end of the first millennium in the Common Era. However most sober scholars place him at about 600 BC which makes him roughly contemporaneous (give or take a century of two), with the Buddha and Mahavira. Susrutha described perineal lithotomy. This method was described in Ashmari Chikitsa (roughly translated as Management of vesical stones). The method has been described as follows: “First, the ...

Gurdip Singh Flora ( his facebook profile picture appears below))  was my classmate at the Medical College,Calcutta. Soon after we graduated, he migrated to the USA.However his roots were in North Bengal. Little did I know that more than 25 years after that I would end up in North Bengal  and make it my home. I caught up with him after all of 35 years thanks to Facebook.  We have occasionally talked about North Bengal and I had asked him to write a guest post in my blog. However it has been a long time coming and I am posting this piece from his pen ( or computer) which has however seen the light of day elsewhere. I hope that I will be able to publish many more in the future. During the later days of British rule in India, it was felt that the people of the northeastern region were facing a shortage of qualified medical practitioners to tend to the sick in that part of the world. The physicians graduating from the Campbell Medical School of Calcutta and the Mitfor...

Communalism has been part of our existence for thousands of years. For those who associate communalism with the advent of Muslims in India (and forget that they came to India by sea to Kerala in the 8 th century, not with the Ghazni invaders), should remember that we had violent communal clashes in the seventh century when Brahmanism took over ground from the Buddhists and when the Saivites in Tamil Nadu fought the followers of Vishnu. However when we talk communalism, we mean what we used to earlier say in hushed terms, and now in louder voices, the “ Muslim question”. We are we, and they are Muslims and occasionally Christians and, not to forget, in the 1980s, the Sikhs. But let us take the Muslim question which, of course, is what seems to drive the discourse among the Bengali Middle class today. When we were young, our parents had seen the communal riots during independence, but mainly as children.  The Partition and its aftermath had coloured the visions of their parent...

The conventional history of Indian cinema states that the first Indian feature was made by Dadasaheb Phalke who in 1913 made the film Raja Harishchandra thereby inaugurating the Indian film industry . However there are reasons to doubt this narrative. It is well established that long before this, Mahadeo Gopal Patwardhan had filmed a Marathi feature “Shambharik Karolike” and exhibited it with the help of a magic lantern in 1885. This may not have used the standard moving picture technology, but even so, another filmmaker, Hiralal Sen has legitimate claims to be considered the first Indian film maker. In the Calcutta of the fading years of the nineteenth century an English entrepreneur named Stephens ran a flourishing business exhibiting short films entitled among others “A running train,” “Man washing streets by water pipe “and so on. Most of his exhibitions were at the Star theatre in Calcutta, but he also ran shows in the suburbs and rural areas of Bengal. At this time, Father ...

Reblogged from GRRL Scientist: hosted by the Guardian website.The was originally posted in Maniraptora . Once the most abundant bird in the world with a population size estimated to be somewhere between 3 and 5 billion in the early and mid-1800s; the sudden extinction of the passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, in 1914, raises the question of how such an abundant bird could have become extinct in less than 50 years. A newly published study combines high throughput DNA technologies, ecological niche modeling and reconstructions of annual production of acorns upon which the birds fed to show that the passenger pigeon was not always super-abundant. Instead, it was an "outbreak" species that experienced dramatic population fluctuations in response to variations in annual acorn production. Thus, the extinction of the passenger pigeon likely was due to the combined effects of natural population fluctuations and human over-exploitation. It was one of those career-alter...

Concluding part of the article by SHREYA DUTTA The next week was extensively involved in wiring and solar panel installation (capacity: 3 KW). By the second day the guys’ and girls’ dorms (classrooms basically) had fans and lights working. There was no teaching but on interaction with the local children it was evident that they have been more exposed to English medium of education since lots of foreign trusts have visited and donated to the school in the past. On the third day, the villagers started preparing for the elaborate farewell ceremony which was to take place at night. Extra lights were connected in the playground, furniture set and the children rehearsed song and dance. The thread tying and blessing ceremony for this village was grander than the previous and this time even the children participated. The villagers performed for us and we performed for them. They thanked the team by offering us body parts of a barbequed pig which they had slaughtered in front of some of us i...

Continuing the account by Shreya Dutta of a Laos trip On 15th June, 2014 we started our journey. Michael, an engineer from Rezeca Renewables, a relatively fresh start-up engineering firm joined us as we boarded our flight at Changi International Airport to Wattay Airport, Vientiane. After a quick immigration, we made our way to Luang Prabang from the domestic terminal. The view during the hour long flight was breathtaking – with the first glimpse of the Mekong River, the valleys and the cloud-covered mountains and multiple rainbows. We were welcomed in Luang Prabang airport by the general manager (GM) of MyLaoHome, essentially a chain of hotels and villas in UNESCO World Heritage Site Luang Prabang. The GM, Mr. Ninthala also happens to be the education minister’s son. We had an authentic Laotian meal and called it a night in the New Daraphet Villa. Next day, some of the team members went along with Michael to purchase items required for electric wiring in the school in the first vi...

My daughter recently visited Laos as a member of a Nanyang Technological University student outreach team. This is her account of the trip. By the Banks of the Mekong By Shreya Dutta Laos People’s Democratic Republic or ‘Lao’ as the French call it is a South-East Asian country and ASEAN member. I start this write-up with this basic information as many, or let me reframe, most people I know didn’t know what or where Laos is until I explained that it’s a country of its own. A friend got it confused with Lagos in Nigeria and congratulated me for having the opportunity to travel to Africa. Some were in the belief that it’s just a part of Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand or Vietnam. Some knew and one fellow pleasantly surprised me by saying, “Oh you’re going to Laos! Its capital is Vientiane, right?” Laos is one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world with about a third of the people being below the poverty line and it being the 25th most hungry nation. It is also the world’s ...

Dunsinane Hill ( picture from www.geograph.org.uk) In our school days, English Literature was taken very seriously, especially for those who appeared for the Senior Cambridge examinations. And inseparable from Eng Lit was, of course, Shakespeare. If I remember right, we studied Julius Caesar in Class VIII, Midsummer Night’s Dream in Class IX and finally Macbeth for the finals. Shakespeare fascinated me. I knew and still know large chunks of some of these plays by heart (as we used to say in those days). I am still liable to spout Macbeth’s speeches (“Is this a Dagger”) or Antony’s speeches at the drop of a hat as my long suffering wife and daughter will vouch. One of my classmates; today he and his wife run West Bengal’s No 1 jewelry chain; was a superb actor and he brought to life the three witches as they plotted in the heath as he did Shylock as he complained “ when you prick us do we not bleed? “ However we hardly ever saw the plays acted professionally. I remember that t...

The Shiv Sena has a bad reputation. Starting as small time bullies who preyed on Udipi shops in Mumbai, they have grown to a major force, more so after the last elections.The recent episode of forcing a Muslim staffer to eat allegedly non edible chapati when he was observing the Ramadan fast made headlines. The story appeared to be the usual bullying of an inoffensive Muslim by the bullies of the saffron brigade. But the Hoot website which, in my opinion is one of the best reporters of media matters in India had a different take. This is well worth reading because it proves that what seems obvious need not always be true. At the least, it is a credible alternate version of the tale that was told by the so called national media whose agenda is always suspect. This appeared originally here This appeared on 25th July 2014, thus the reference to dates and current events must take into account that date. Shiv Sena MPs and the roti fiasco By Nivedita Khandekar The alleged att...

This post reproduces a write up in the Guardian newspaper of the UK. It was written by Adam Marcus who is the managing editor of Gastroenterology and Endoscopy News and Ivan Oransky who is the global editorial director of MedPage Today. They are the co-founders of Retraction Watch News that Peter Chen, an engineering researcher in Taiwan, managed to game the peer review system and sneak into print at least 60 publications in a single journal is certain to raise serious questions about the integrity of the process by which scientific publishers vet papers. Those doubts only get stronger when you consider that this wasn’t the first time a scientist attempted such a scheme. In 2012, a Korean plant chemist was caught cheating the peer review process and was forced to retract 28 articles. (He had already retracted seven others for different reasons, making a total of 35.) The publishing giant Elsevier retracted 11 papers the same year after what it called a “hack” of its editorial pub...