Back!!

After months which were ostensibly spent in preparation for GATE ’09, thought i’ll get back on track. Exams can be quite a distraction. Good news for lovebirds who are facing opposition from their families, all you need to do is hold hands and walk the streets on Feb 14, and Sri Rama Sene will take care of the rest. This group has been a great source of comic relief in the past month for me, don’t know what I would do if they did not burst onto the scene like they did.

Added a new page which lists those books that I have read recently, with a short note for each. It is called ‘Reading List’, and appears as a tab. Hopefully, it will get updated regularly.

Finally!!

After months of exams, bad health and miscellaneous distractions, was able to steal some time off to continue my rants. Too many things to write about, and fortunately I have forgotten most of them. Was planning to write this post after my next visit to Timbaktu, which is next week, but got carried away anyways.

The last time time I had discussed the concept of harvesting , be it in energy or any other resource. Energy is something that I no longer need to talk about, since the effects are there for all to see. People always find interest in something only when it matters directly (in terms of Rupees/Litre here), but that is a peripheral issue. Mining is another concept that is more directly relevant to urban patterns of resource consumption. Mining is not just something that happens in Orissa and Jharkhand, but something that occurs in each and every household. Remembering the stock, flow, flux terminologies, we regarded as harvesting that usually taps fluxes. It is therefore highly sustainable as well as unreliable. Mining is the exact opposite: tapping stocks and disregarding fluxes. Think of our urban resource bases – LPG, petrol, diesel, water (from dam projects or underground aquifers), food (intensive agriculture), shelter (glass fronted buildings with AC !) – all these directly tap into existing stocks of resources without much regard to their continuing availability. In other words, we mine water, energy and food.

The direct implication of such a tradition is the necessity for large stocks of resources to be available at any given time. If one looks at energy as a sector, one finds research into new battery technologies, ultracapacitors, carbon nanotubes, with ‘high energy density’ being the key word. Agriculture, high-yielding varieties, storage and processing facilities; water, the ubiquitous deep borewells and water tankers which dot Bangalore’s roads, apartment complexes and IT parks and all contemporary agricultural lands. While it is pragmatic to maintain reasonable amounts of resource stocks so that we can stop worrying about tomorrow, the ways in which we treat and maintain them is completely shocking. The measure of affluence has unfortunately become the rate at which we vaporize large amounts of resources (money, bath-tubs, food, cricket floodlights). Optimists have predicted that our civilization will find ways to do more with less, but it seems to me that this is more of a cultural than technological issue. Even if we forget the matter of energy (we have enough coal to burn for a few thousand years), water, land, food are still being replenished by harvesting technologies and exploited by mining technologies. It is only a sign of desperation or craziness, depending on your point of view, that we need to look at solutions like tapping icebergs for water and using satellites to capture solar energy. All these `solutions’ have the same recurring theme : Find large stocks of resources!

If one examines the situation from a saner point of view, it is not that there is insufficient resources. The problem is of equity. MIT students recently ran a study about the `Footprint of The Man‘, which tried to calculate the energy consumption of the least resource consuming American (A Buddhist Monk), and this came upto 120GigaJoules. India would barely scratch 50. This ranking table should give you some indication.  Mining civilizations like Western Europe and USA required large stocks of resources to fuel their rise, leading to colonization. Once ‘primitive’ countries realized that they should be independent and went on to become so, they realized affluence can only comy by exploiting someone else, and so started internal colonization. Orissa and Bihar are good examples, so is Chamarajanagar right in my backyard. Not satisfied, ‘booming economies’ like India started going global with their ambitions and now Indians beat their chest with pride saying we are doing to the West what they did to us, which is the most childish way to react to the situation. India has absolutely no claim to such titles, considering half of the children in India are still undernourished and female mortality rate during childbirth is obscenely high.

Coming to demographics, mining is the reason cities are preferred to villages – A large and expendable stock of labor that is willing to get vaporized in a short time (retire at 45, remember ?). Another buzzword that betrays our obsession with mining is Data Mining. Information Technology is the perfect tool in the hands of the miners; but its very structure makes it equally powerful in the hands of the people, unlike so many other technologies. Which is why you will hear calls for strict regulation, prevention of piracy and all such things.

While I consider this feature of modern society to be irreversible even with a WW 3, one must consider and deploy policies which can counter its effects at the frontiers, social and environmental. All said and done, to me the next few decades will be monumental in history, almost as important as the Enlightenment itself. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

At last!

drowned in miscellaneous work and travel killed any time I might have had to do some writing. Add to that the Internet blackout in our area for almost two days, and we have a seriously bad situation in our hands.

Banal internals in college, a demo of my lighting system here, and two books occupied my time during this hiatus. FTF was tiring, more because of the fact that we had to stand all the time, offset only by the lunch. It was, after all, in a 7 star hotel, and hence you could expect something interesting. This was the only one missing in the repertoire, and now from seedy roadsides to 7 stars, been there, seen that. Quite interesting to meet desperate job-seeking classmates one day, to desperate job-changing techies on the other. Interacting with genuine intellectuals like Ashok Rao on one day and with a “Senior Project Manager” from Wipro on the other can leave a person amused and bewildered. Was fun,

meeting and seeing people of varying stupidities, ranging from the eager IISc post-grad to the slow Wipro managers.

Sociology exams are fun. Minimal preparation, maximum creativity and scant respect for the details will help one well in passing with flying colours. On second thoughts, it works with most exams, including Engineering. After writing the most insane crap – praising things that I seriously think have no validity, but know that they somehow seem to attract good grades – got out.

The books were somewhat of a relief in this madness. One was interestingly called ‘Who owns the sky?‘ , written by Peter Barnes, addresses the question of the present day preoccupation with pollution and consumption of natural resources well. Most rhetoric seems to concentrate on our depleting energy and natural resources, predicting that they will become so scarce that using them will no longer be feasible, and that this will happen very soon. However, another book that I had come across put across arguments to support that we seem to have enough energy (though its conclusions for me were rather perverse and the book on the whole incoherent) and seem destined to find more sources of the same. Then why on earth are we pinching pennies ? Barnes says yes, we have enough coal to last half a millenium (like a person I know put it, we have enough coal to burn until humans evolve into something else) but the question is of sinks. We don’t seem to have any more place to put our waste in our ecosystem, and that is the main cause of concern. True, the US wants to send carbon dioxide to space, but that can hardly be practicable. So, how can we use market principles to counter this is the question the book asks, and comes up with a solution similar to emissions trading, though more equitable, but not without its own problems.

The other book, written by the eminent economist Joseph Stiglitz, is a harsh look at how global institutions like the IMF have played with the lives of billions, ostensibly in the service of New York investment banks. This book is easily available and a highly recommended read. Though it comes with its share of economics jargon, it is well written. It looks at two major examples, of the East Asian crisis of the late 90′s and Russia’s transition from Communism to a market economy and shows how the IMF failed in its mandate and made things worse, though only for the voiceless billions. The ones who made a windfall were usually aligned towards the financial or trading elites.

Both books bring up the same issue, addressing very different problems: how can we grow in prosperity, together. Individual opulence only brings hatred, jealousy and unrest, and growth needs to be equitable to be sustainable in a social framework (forget the environmental, that needs deeper repairs). Our generation seems to be understanding the issues involved. It is to be seen whether we are prescient enough to do the necessary changes.