Science and Superstition

ISRO successfully launched Chandrayan 3's third lunar exploration mission on 14^th July 2023. It is expected to make a soft landing on the southern lunar pole after a month-long journey on 23^rd August. When the GSLV Mark 3 (LVM 3) heavy-lift launch vehicle lifted off successfully from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota as per the scheduled launch time at 2.35 PM, the roar of the engines symbolically matched just not the joy of the people behind it, but the euphoria of the whole nation who celebrated the achievement. India stands to become the 99^th country that has such technological capabilities. The picture of ISRO scientists carrying a rocket on a bicycle to this launch of the 14^th describes the story of India which in just 75 years emerged from its struggle with poverty, malnutrition, disease, and early mortality to assert its position as a global political, economic and knowledge power to reckon with.

Basic knowledge empowers us and can make us arrogant but higher knowledge and wisdom make us aware of the limitation of our knowledge and our powerlessness.

When a neuro or a cardiothoracic surgeon bows before his God, before attempting a complex surgery to save his patient, his act demonstrates that he is nervous and aware of his limitations and the large number of exogenous factors which can affect his best-laid plans and efforts negatively. He is aware of the hopes of the patient and his relatives who think that he only can pull off a miracle after God himself. He is in the same situation as a gladiator who is expected to slay the lion by hundreds of onlookers in the gallery. He just prays for those uncertainties, and unknown and hostile forces not to act here. The doctor and the scientists are not allowed to philosophize about failures.

It's difficult for a rationalist with primary school-level knowledge of science to understand that the doctors and scientists at ISRO are not superstitious - they are humble, sincere, and wise; they want their efforts to succeed.

When Oppenheimer quoted Bhagawat Geeta after the first nuclear test, he didn't speak as a Hindu fanatic but as a wise man who knew how that act stands to destroy and change the world forever.

Time to grow out of the ego state empowered by the mechanistic and reductionist interpretation of the science we know so far and bow before those limitless powers of which we are not even aware. The scientists of the Western world who propounded and popularised those models are realizing their own folly after bringing the world to the throes of destruction in the name of industrialization and economic development.

Many treat those unknown powerful forces as Gods and not everyone who bows before those forces are religious and superstitious.

The Weed and our losing battle with it

Hold your horses. I am not going to discuss the kind of plant whose parts make some people get high and happy. The title is a bit misleading. This piece is about any plant growing where it is not wanted and our losing fight with it. The story of our fight with weeds is just not limited to the state excise department burning them deep inside some forest or apprehending the contraband in baleful during transit. 

It is as old as the fight of humanity with hunger.

Perhaps humans dealt the first dent on nature by altering it, when they identified the plants they need for their food and shelter, and they understood how and where the plants grow the best. And then he chose to be a settled agriculturist from the hunter-gatherer life of his earlier generations.

Human civilization blossomed when humans were assured of their basic requirements of food, clothing, and shelter. His engagement with agriculture provided those basics. He kept on improving that craft and his skill to deal with agriculture. That craft made him alter the contour of the land, change the quality of the soil, and regulate the quantity of water that is required for the plant to yield its best. And obviously, he didn’t want to share these carefully and painfully curated resources with anyone else. He built borders to lay his claim over the land, built fences to prevent wild animals and other humans from eating and destroying his crop, and developed various poisons of a special kind to keep the weeds, microorganisms, and animals trying to live off the same soil by consuming its nutrients.

If June made us rejoice with the arrival of monsoon, by August we are seen suffering its excess. Flood, vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue, and water-borne diseases like typhoid, cholera, and dysentery become commonplace. Not to mention cold and cough which visit every household. The rainy season in our kind of semi-tropical climate is known as the disease season. The abundance of water and sunshine make plants of every kind grow much faster. Man, while struggling with excess water, has also to deal with diseases and overgrown trees, and shrubs everywhere. On the roof, at the shades of windows, driveway, garden, under the trees, and is well-curated lawn. Knowing that any effort to take them out is pointless, he patiently waits for the rains to stop before he does a major de-weeding.

This battle of man to banish the weed and the millions of known and unknown microorganisms which naturally lived on the land he has staked his claim recently is an interesting one.

The size of the academic institutions and research laboratories and the industries which collectively supply him with the knowledge, technology, tools, tackles, equipment, and chemicals are of staggering size. Man’s struggle with the weeds is routine and perpetual. It’s like the fight between Tom and Jerry of the Walt Disney animation series.

And both parties are stubborn not to give up.

So sure is the man about his confidence in eliminating anything and everything that he doesn’t want or is of no use to him, that he has forgotten that such pursuits have rendered the air he breaths, the water he drinks, and the soil he grows his food poisonous because of the novel chemicals he is mindlessly pumping to control the living beings which are not to his liking.

A documentary by David Attenborough on such plants comes to mind.

There he throws a different light on these plants. He showed how these resilient species strike their roots in the most inhospitable places like cemented courtyards, stone walls, cobblestone paved sidewalks, and a small hole in the drainpipe system to strike their roots and grow. Not only do they strike their roots for a short period, but they allow similar species to colonize their surrounding areas. It’s said if humans vacate their modern habitations and dwelling structures, nature will reclaim these properties in just a few years and these weeds will be at the forefront of such reclamation. The stone structures will last hundreds of years but steel and glass won’t last more than a few decades. Trees will certainly dominate the landscape within just a few years.

Natural processes continue in and around even occupied cities. One could reasonably argue that once cities are abandoned and human influence is removed, it is immediately reclaimed by nature because all that’s left are wild animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. In the case of Chernobyl, a 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone was abandoned 31 years ago because of a nuclear power plant accident. It has been reclaimed by plants and wildlife that appear to be able to live and reproduce despite the radioactivity.

The hubris of humans to de-weed the world is rightly matched by the nemesis of nature which threaten to recolonize their lost land anytime. These weeds are lurking all around us waiting to find a small crack, a crevice to find a toehold just enough for its seed or spore invisible to us. They need only time and our absence.

We should be happy about just this one thing. 

That if the human species is wiped out from the face of Earth for its follies or due to some dramatic natural calamity caused by any extra-terrestrial events, there is still hope for this blue planet to regenerate to its past glory.

What is friendship to you?

The day before yesterday when I was about to finish a quiet dinner with a friend of mine at a corner table in a not-so-crowded restaurant, a new-age reporter with a camera in one hand and a Rode wireless microphone in another rattled me by asking this question. They were creating content for the hotel which is organising an event for Friendship Day.

I was unprepared.

Not because I didn't know what it was to me, but because I was at a loss how to capture this enormous multi-dimensional variegated feeling that we all have been living with since our adolescent days in a few casual sentences. I chose to dodge.

But it kept haunting me.

There are friends and there are experiences with friends - two different things. My analytical mind dissected the players and the experience which emanates from their interactions.

We all have the experience of having friends.

If there was one best friend during our school days, we would have lost touch with him after we got transferred. Met new people and made new friends. Some of them would have become our best friends with whom we would have liked to spend most of our available time with. Few of them would have chosen to walk away, and a few we would have liked to drop for whatever reason best known to us. We would have let a few down, and a few would have let us down - bored us, frustrated us, betrayed us, hurt us, disappointed us. In our lives, we see dozens of best friends. So, one can quickly identify who is the current best friend but can't describe all the best friends by giving one overarching definition for all of them.

So, friends are just another relationship - strong, fragile, temporary, and temporal.

If it’s challenging to define friends, it's equally difficult to determine the gamut of feelings a deep friendship offers in one umbrella definition.

We border on the danger of using the words which describe our expectations from a friend as the feelings of friendship. Words like, trust, transaction, dependency, joy, and so many are the human expectations of a relationship - not the feelings of friendship.

But then what are the feelings of friendship?

The answer to this can be found by observing the feelings that we experience with the friends we are currently engaged with?

To me, it's some kind of intimacy that attracts us to spend time with each other in either a physical or virtual way. We are attracted to share and interact on issues that are personal, social, intellectual, recreational, spiritual, of shared interest, or which are our common goals. It's gender, age, and status neutral. It can be between two lovers, between a husband and wife, a mother and her daughter, and two different unrelated people who would have met just a few days ago.

It's that state when you connect a dozen times a day, and keep each other informed about the mundane things happening at that moment. You laugh and giggle forgetting the worries around you.

It's about finding a universe of joy in that moment.

How can there be any relationship if two people don't enjoy being with each other? How pleasant was the experience? That's the beginning of every human relationship smaller or bigger.

What is yours?