Say bye to Nukes?

Rhetoric should not obfuscate the energy security debate.
When parts of Japan were devastated recently by an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, news of the human toll was quickly overshadowed by global fears of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant. The concern was understandable: radiation is very frightening. I grew up in Denmark at a time when fear of nuclear power was pervasive.

But our latest nuclear fears have broader implications, especially for energy supply and our desire to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels. It is difficult to step back at the time of a natural disaster to gain a broader perspective;even attempting to do so can feel crass. But there are some facts that we should not overlook.

During the round-the-clock coverage of the nuclear drama, the spectre of Chernobyl has been raised repeatedly. It is worth noting that the worst nuclear disaster in history directly caused only 31 fatalities. The World Health Organization estimates that 4, 000 deaths could be linked to the disaster over 70 years, whereas the OECD projects a range of 9, 000-33, 000 deaths during this period.

That is substantial. But consider that, according to the OECD, every year nearly one million people die from fineparticle outdoor air pollution. Yet this massive death toll provokes no discernible fear in the developed world, and receives virtually no news coverage.

Of course, every country with nuclear power facilities should revise its safety measures in light of the Japanese disaster, which raised obvious questions about the sites chosen for such facilities. But while America's commitment to nuclear power was quickly reaffirmed by President Barack Obama, some European governments took the knee-jerk decision to freeze all new nuclear-energy projects immediately, and, in the case of Germany, not to extend the life of existing reactors. For Germany, this will leave a gap that it cannot fill with alternative energy sources, leaving it little choice but to rely more heavily on coal power.

We see coal as a polluting but reasonably "safe" energy source compared to nuclear energy. Yet, in China alone, coalmining accidents kill more than 2, 000 people each year - and coal is a leading cause of smog, acid rain, global warming, and air toxicity. Alternative energy sources are too expensive and nowhere near reliable enough to replace fossil fuels.

Although safety concerns are paramount right now, the construction of new nuclear plants faces another hurdle: they are very expensive. New nuclear power plants have high up-front costs (which can be politically challenging), including a very complicated, slow, and fraught planning process. When completed, the total cost of nuclear power is significantly higher than the cheapest fossil-fuel source. And society must bear significant additional costs in terms of the risks of spent-fuel storage and large-scale accidents. Moreover, in most parts of the world where energy consumption is expanding, nuclear proliferation is an issue.
Then there is the question of maintaining existing plants. Decommissioning nuclear reactors may make us feel safer, but we should acknowledge that this will often mean compensating for the lost output with more reliance on coal.

Moreover, given that the plants are already paid for, waste facilities are already in place, and the high decommissioning cost will have to be paid regardless of timing, the actual operating costs are very low - half or lower per kilowatthour than the cost of the cheapest fossil fuels.

The long-term answer is more research and development - not only into next-generation, safer nuclear energy, but also into energy sources like solar and wind, which currently provide well below 1 per cent of the planet's energy. Alarmingly, this research has decreased over the last three decades.

At protests calling on politicians to respond to climate change, a cry has rung out: "No coal, no gas, no nukes, no kidding!" The harsh reality - thrown into stark relief by the Japanese disaster - is that we do not yet have the luxury of dumping coal, gas, and nuclear power. Until we can find a feasible alternative, reducing reliance on one of them means that another must take its place.


The writer is head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center at the Copenhagen Business School Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.

Rain meets rashi

Much before meteorology developed into a science and satellites were sent up into outer space to keep a tab on cloud formations, farmers in India relied on the wisdom of folklore and the movement of planets and stars to predict weather conditions, often with an impressive degree of accuracy.

Taking a cue from the past, Anand Agriculture University (AAU), in Gujarat, in a unique project, has combined meteorology with astrology to understand the moods of the rain gods. Since 2005, AAU has been publishing a 'monsoon panchang', or calendar, which forecasts rains on a particular day.

The predictions are arrived at after taking into account the rainfall records of the past 100 years and the planetary arrangements of 27 nakshatras (constellations) and the nine grahas (planets).

Skeptics, of course, cast doubts over the accuracy of the figures and the methodology, but farmers from far-flung areas in Gujarat have given a warm response to the panchang.

Last year, Dinesh Patel from Navli, near Ahmedabad, was set to sow paddy in his farms, but changed his mind when the panchang showed him that there would be deficit rainfall in 2009. "I went ahead with tobacco instead and it turned out to be a wise decision," he says. Reports suggesting that the monsoon will be delayed this year made Parshottam Patel from Gothda village in Mehsana write to AAU, asking for a copy of the calendar.

Farmers are not only inquiring about the panchang. Some like Parakramsinh Vaghela from Khakharda village in Jamnagar want to know about crop selection and the use of pesticides. His letter to the university read: "Please give me feedback on my choice of crop and also send me the monsoon calendar soon."

Buoyed by such responses, scientists at Anand are mooting a computer model that can synchronise all software and data. An English edition of this panchang is also on the cards.

The rain gods, however, don't always humour these scientists - their self-proclaimed accuracy rate is 85 per cent. The 2010 panchang, which has been generously distributed amongst the farmers in Gujarat, expects 31 per cent more rainfall than is the state average.

"For decades, monsoon forecast was based on statistical models," says AAU vice-chancellor MC Varshneya. "The Indian Meteorological Department adopted a more advanced 16-parameter model in 1988 to track the progress of the season across the country. The model held good till 2002. But in that year, though the model predicted that the month of July would see normal rainfall, many parts of the country witnessed drought-like conditions and agricultural production saw a sharp decline."

Every year AAU scientists and weathermen begin work on the panchang from January. They first sit down with a group of astrologers to prepare kundlis, or horoscopes, of planetary conjunctions. Then, these are interpreted to get an idea of whether a region will get low, medium or high rainfall. For instance, a couple of kundlis indicate that this year Gujarat should receive ample rainfall. Another suggests that the onset of rains maybe delayed, though.

The second step is to marry stargazing with empirical evidence. "Once we are ready with qualitative figures that we prepare through kundlis, we superimpose them with statistical data to make quantitative prediction of rainfall," says Dr HR Patel, a faculty member at the university. "For the past five years, our forecasts have come true, though, with some variations," says Varshneya. 

Relationship management

Well, that's one mystery solved. It's now clear that 123 does not equal 126. For all those who believed that India had shackled itself to the US aerospace industry after the nuclear deal, this week's decision to dump the US fighters in favour of European ones should be a relief.

India is spreading the love around. Russians used to be king in the Indian defence market, until they succumbed to the lure of the Chinese and their technology was becoming dated. After it became clear the Chinese were knocking off MiGs and Sukhois for Pakistan and Russia could do absolutely nothing about it, India backed away from Moscow's vulnerabilities. Israel, the US, France all have a big presence on the Indian horizon now.

The Americans, according to most technical assessments, pitched two not-so-new aircraft for India. At a rarefied level, the differences between the world's top-line aircraft is minimal, so what tilts the balance are extraneous factors. For instance, there was never any hope that Indians would buy the same fighters that Pakistan has, even if India had got a more evolved version. India would have wanted access to the US' enviable avionics, radar systems, beyond visual range capabilities etc.

But little of the top-line stuff would be available to India and almost all of it would come with far too much intrusive baggage, including end-user verification, restrictive export control laws etc, which would make things very difficult. The US still hasn't quite got its head around the fact that on many things India likes to play solo. Actually, if the US had offered a role in the joint strike fighter, then it could have been a sweet deal.

Left to himself, PM Manmohan Singh would have probably found a way to get the US in, because he believes it's important to get the US invested in India's defence sector in the longer term. But in the poisonous political environment in the upper echelons of the government, defence minister Antony won the day making technical grounds supreme.

The Eurofighter (if that's the one India ultimately chooses ) apparently comes with a more attractive technology transfer and offsets policy. India needs to develop manufacturing capability and fast. Since it cannot match China in mass manufacturing, India needs to get on top of the highend manufacturing sector for its economic growth to be a strategic tool going forward.

That, India has decided, is best done with the Germans and Italians. Bernhard Gerwert, head of EADS (which makes Eurofighter) said in an interview, "Look at the strategic partnership which we offer to the Indian customer and the Indian industry. EADS Defence & Security just launched a joint venture with Larsen & Toubro. What are we planning to do? We will transfer technology from Germany to India. We will transfer workload from Germany to India. The products which will be produced in the first step of this joint venture are not related to the Eurofighter. However, we can use this technology later for the Eurofighter. " This could happen in the field of avionics too. This is also one reason why India and Israel are such a natural fit. However, the Eurofighter, while possibly a great product, is not a tested one. Its first combat experience is ironically, in Libya. Reports from there are mixed. And we will all have to pay a heck of a lot more for the aircraft.

The MMRCA deal was always going to be a strategic one. The question is what strategy has India decided to invest in. The aircraft or the relationship? I believe India has the aircraft in its sights. On the relationship, it is to be hoped that India will manage the US better. It's doubtful, because the system finds it so hard to acknowledge the importance of the US in India's strategic matrix. Certainly, we should have informed them of the decision in advance out of courtesy if nothing else.

The US can, in its pique, make it a lot more difficult for us to get into the global non-proliferation regimes as retaliation for the MMRCA decision. Barack Obama too is a transactional leader and he could conclude that India is no longer a good bargain. That will be a setback. But the sense seems to be, there's life beyond a fighter aircraft. It's possible that the extraneous problems accompanying an American aircraft could consume the relationship.

A buzzed generation

This time, the summer in Delhi has been especially cruel. Temperatures have steadily been hitting over 42 degrees by mid-May itself. But that hasn't stopped Anand from hitting the field. 

A die-hard soccer fan, Anand - who studies in Class IX in a private Delhi school - plays soccer for at least two hours everyday after school. Ask him what keeps him going and Anand - drained from the heat - promptly answers back, "My energy drink. " In his hand is a fancy bottle with a purple syrupy drink. "Its delicious and peps me up, " says Anand.

Energy drinks can actually pep you up. But for the average child engaged in routine physical activity, the use of energy drinks in place of water on the sports field or in the school lunchroom is unnecessary and alarming.

In fact, according to a new clinical report, energy drinks pose potential health risks for children and adolescents primarily because of the stimulant content in the drinks.

To be fair, many soft drinks also contain caffeine. But many parents mistakenly assume that 'energy drinks' are somewhat healthier than soft drinks when in reality there is very little difference.

Scientists reviewed energy drinks like Red Bull and Monster and sports drinks like Powerade and Gatorade, that contain electrolytes and, according to them, although the term "energy" is perceived to imply calories, energy drinks typically contain stimulants, such as caffeine and guarana, with varying amounts of carbohydrate, protein, amino acids, vitamins, sodium and other minerals.

Sports drinks, on the other hand, are flavoured beverages that often contain carbohydrates, minerals, electrolytes (eg, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium), and sometimes vitamins or other nutrients.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has for the first time come out with extensive guidelines against the use of energy drinks by youngsters, parents need to keep a watch while children select a beverage to hydrate before, during or after exercise to prevent excessive sugar and caloric intake that may encourage dental erosion and weight gain.

"Sports drinks contain carbohydrates, minerals, electrolytes and flavouring, and are intended to replace water and electrolytes lost through sweating during exercise. Although they may be useful for young athletes participating in prolonged, vigorous physical exercise, they tend to be overused and are usually unnecessary, " the Academy says.

Experts say that excessive regular consumption of carbohydrate-containing beverages increases overall daily caloric intake without significant additional nutritional value.

The report, "Sports Drinks and Energy Drinks for Children and Adolescents: Are They Appropriate?", was published in the June 2011 issue of the medical journal "Pediatrics. "

Marcie Beth Schneider, a member of the AAP committee on nutrition and co-author of the report, said, "There is a lot of confusion about sports drinks and energy drinks, and adolescents are often unaware of the differences in these products. "

"Some kids are drinking energy drinks - containing large amounts of caffeine - when their goal is simply to rehydrate after exercise, " she added. The mantra therefore is still what your grandmother told you - drink large amounts of water. Doctors say that adequate hydration is necessary for maintaining normal cardiovascular, thermoregulatory and many other physiological functions during exercise. Experts suggest that children should be taught to drink water routinely as the beverage of choice. Many children, however, perceive the need to increase or boost energy levels while playing a sport in this heat. Energy drinks often provide carbohydrates, but the primary source of energy in these drinks is caffeine - one of the most popular stimulants taken today. "It is unfortunate that many young people knowingly ingest large amounts of caffeine despite its known negative health effects, " the report said. Caffeine has been shown to enhance physical performance in adults by increasing strength, improving reaction time and delaying fatigue. However, these effects are extremely variable, dose-dependent and, most importantly, have not been studied in children and adolescents.

The effects of caffeine on various organ systems include increases in heart rate, blood pressure, speech rate, motor activity, attentiveness, gastric secretion, diuresis and temperature. Sleep disturbances or improved moods are considered individualised effects. Caffeine can also increase anxiety in those with anxiety disorders, and it is known also to play a role in triggering arrhythmias.

What's worse, the actual caffeine content for many energy drinks is not easily identified on product packaging in India. The total amount of caffeine contained in some cans or bottles of energy drinks can exceed 500 mg (equivalent to 14 cans of common caffeinated soft drinks) and is clearly high enough to result in caffeine toxicity.

So what are the problems children can face with sports and energy drinks? Dental erosion is one concern. Citric acid is frequently included in such drinks and has been found to be highly erosive.

Pediatricians, therefore, have been advised to help improve the education of children and adolescents and their parents on the difference between sports drinks and energy drinks and their associated potential health risks.

"Promote water, not sports or energy drinks, as the principal source of hydration for children and adolescents, " says the Academy report.

Who killed poetry?

There is a certain sadness attached to the passing of all things beautiful. When it is something as delicate as poetry, the end seems that much more poignant. But are we in the final throes of an art that gave us Ghalib and Ginsberg, Tagore and Tennyson, Neruda and Nirala? Yes, say publishers across the country, citing the 0. 04 per cent readership for verse. Tamil poets now look to movie lyrics to survive and Marathi poets are taking recourse to technology and multi-media;Urdu poets are a despondent lot and in Bengal there is proliferation without profit. Another problem is the unimaginative teaching of it in our classrooms. But there is hope, and adaptation to a rapidly changing world is the key. Gulzar says he'll still recommend poetry as a profession. Shall we remember Auden then, who wrote, ‘May I, composed like them/Of Eros and of dust/Beleaguered by the same/Negation and despair/Show an affirming flame’ , before we write poetry’s epitaph?

When normal-looking people ask me why poetry is dead, I laugh so much I drop my belly button: poetry is dead because normal-looking people killed it with their shopping. When I look around again, they are missing because the season's sale has just started. In a world full of discount deals, poetry is on the back shelf. Simply because you can't wear it, or eat it. And if you can't wear a thing or eat it, or, at least, sleep with it, what good is it? The bottom line is that poetry doesn't develop your personality. A course in public speaking does. Good words are what you get when you wed the deep violence of thoughts with lyricism of feelings. This doesn't have to be necessarily in terza rima or iambic pentameter. As Auden said, poetry is a way of happening, a mouth. The bitterest life has a beauty to it. There is affirmation to be exacted from the ravages man inflicts on himself. Poetry brings it out. Think of Auden's blinding lines of beauty, of hope and humility, born out of World War II, for instance: May I, composed like them/Of Eros and of dust, /Beleaguered by the same/Negation and despair, /Show an affirming flame.

But we have sidestepped that beauty, found with our compulsive buying sprees and interminable celebrations a way out of what was a civilisational need to reflect on both pleasure and pain. This is especially true of the English Speaking Republic of India which, unlike the regional cultures rooted in literary and cultural traditions, is peopled largely by philistines.

The English Republicans have no real sensibility of their own. Their values and judgements are derivative. Which is why they will wait for foreign endorsements before they accept an author. We are talking about writers, not pulp purveyors, of course. The Republicans don't know. They don't even want to know. The good word is not about cosmetics, it is about surgery. A scalpel for the soul.

The English Republican's soul has been missing for some time now. May be he was born without one. And to think that the freak show has just begun! Which is also why close to 150 million people with purchasing powers comparable to that of the Western middle class do not convert to a critical mass in India's cultural world: the bestselling novel in India does a little over 5, 000 copies.
Poetry the world over is in decline though. But, unlike India, the institutional support for a dying art in, say, the UK or the US is much more forthcoming in terms of fellowships, residencies and other foundational funding. Perhaps more importantly, poets, like good policemen, are seen as doing a service to society. The word is, after all, light, and the world is the brighter for it - if only you take off your Gucci glares.

India, for all its professed religiosity, is a shockingly crass monument to materialism. A bit like Shiv Raj Puri, the brain behind last fortnight's Citibank scam worth Rs 300 crore. Puri, according to reports, is a god-fearing man;but that hasn't stopped him from reaching out for other people's wealth. God is who we pray to, greed is how we live.

In the West, unlike the English speaking India, there is a history of logo-centric culture preceding the neurosis of the credit card - whose logical conclusion must be to transform man to an ATM machine. Who knows, in future all of us will be born with a slot to swipe the card in. Perhaps as a direct consequence of the lack of anything approximating to the Renaissance, the English speaking India will cultivate second rate artists, laugh heartily at third rate stand-up comedians, and worship flop film actors, but they will avoid first rate poets, though they themselves don't mind giving a shot at it. All you need to do is to check the blogs. Just about everybody is a poet. You write two crappy lines and there are four gents giving their thumbs up sign.

It's not just the blogs either. You go for a poetry reading session, and you see with a sinking heart that the audience is mostly made up of aspiring poets, spelling-mistake poets and other assorted unpublished poets who haven't read any real poetry. Not one of them is likely even to know the year, for example, when Dom Moraes gave up his troubled ghost in a small flat in Bandra. Or the name of his last collection.

Personally, I stopped writing poetry in 2006, and switched to prose. The practice of poetry doesn't kill. But in this country, poetry guarantees you death by neglect. Clearly then, poetry is a suicidal wish. Unless, of course, you are a film lyricist, the man who makes you feel mushy with pretty words, and you can say "Wah, Wah" while sipping someone else's wine.

Surely, an art as exacting as poetry must ensure for its practitioner a basic dignity? It must provide him with the means to buy a cake of soap, a shirt, a meal? Poetry here fails to do that, and so I said to hell with it. I haven't written a line since the last four years. No one has skipped a meal. That's because no one gives a damn. Which brings us back to the question: who killed poetry?
Hey, I know who. You.

Sense and sensitivity

Almost everyday, someone's sentiments are hurt - either by a book, a poster, a film and what have you. And the only balm available to soothe the imagined wounds, it seems, is to go on a rampage...

About two decades ago, India earned the dubious distinction of being the first country in the world to ban Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Just how little things have changed since then was evident from the communal violence that broke out in Karnataka two months ago - complete with killings, curfew and police firings - over another publication. The provocation was an article published in a local paper purportedly written by Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen criticising the burqa tradition among Muslims. Sure enough, the police booked blasphemy cases on the basis of that article.

In the prevailing illiberal environment, what has been lost sight of is whether a critique on the burqa can be construed in terms of the blasphemy provision - as an insult to religion committed with "a deliberate and malicious intention". The need to protect free speech from the over-sensitivity of 'believers' is becoming increasingly obvious as the burqa case follows the arrest of three editors last year, two of them again in Karnataka, on equally frivolous blasphemy charges.

Last year, a newspaper office in Kolkata was besieged by a mob of Muslims for over two days for reproducing a rationalist perspective on religion from a British newspaper. The Kolkata mob lost sight of the irony that Muslims in Britain had made no such issue of the article that had been originally published there.

When the provision of blasphemy was introduced in our country in the early years of the twentieth century, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, in his then avatar as a secularist, and as a member of a legislative committee, had the sagacity to oppose it. Since Britain repealed its ageold blasphemy law in 2008, India would do well to follow suit. Blasphemy is just not a reasonable restriction on free speech.

It's Hinglish, yaar

In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie used many Hindi words without italicizing them. He expected his readers - in the subcontinent as well on both sides of the pond - to understand the words, many of which hadn't made it yet to the Oxford English Dictionary. Somebody called it chutney fiction, symbolizing a liberal use of Hindi words in English writing. And since 1981, when the 'Booker of the Bookers' book came out, chutney fiction has gone viral, with many Indian writers trying to do a Rushdie - some with success, others looking like a poor, pale parody of the British writer.

But the tendency to mix English and Hindi is not restricted to the world of Indian English writing. Go to any college canteen or an office or in public transport in any city and you hear sentences like "Aaj weather bahut hot hai". No one is shocked to hear this language as "Hinglish" has become a fact of life. It's the language you hear on TV all day;it's the language of Bollywood;it's the language the young urban India, mostly in the northern part of the country, likes to use in its everyday conversation.

In the foreword of the book, Harish Trivedi raises a pertinent question about Hinglish - is it about using English words in Hindi or vice-versa ? In this brilliant write-up, Trivedi sets the tone for other contributors to this anthology where they discuss how chutnefying English has become a metaphor for a new India which is witnessing the emergence of a new language. In well-written essays by linguists such as Rupert Snell and Rita Kothari, filmmakers Gulzar and Mahesh Bhatt and mediapersons such as Cyrus Broacha, most contributors celebrate the phenomenon, explaining what has happened to the two most widely used languages in India. Hindi and English seem to be in a symbiotic relationship, with both drawing heavily from the other without losing their basic character.

Though most essays in the collection are well-argued, the best one is definitely by British linguist Rupert Snell, who is professor of Hindi at University of Texas, Austin. In Hindi: Its threatened ecology and natural genius, Snell explains the evolution of the modern language we call Hindi and cautions against getting swept by Hinglish. Busting the myth of shuddh Hindi as "it's not a classical language like Sanskrit", Snell takes us through the evolutionary road of the language and its interaction with Farsi, Arabic, Turkish and European languages.

Hindi has become what it has become, says Snell, because of its innate genius to accept influences from other languages. But the overflow of English words into the language has done damage too: it has made Hindi words sound difficult even for native speakers of the language. "As Hindi orientates itself increasingly to the compass of English, it devalues its own genius as a language with innate individuality and articulacy, " writes Snell.

Maybe it's because of its native genius that Hindi is slowly turning into Hinglish as a survival tactic.