Rahul Basu (04/03/1956-05/03/2011)

Because he lived, next door a child
To see him coming often smiled,
And thought him her devoted friend
Who gladly gave her coins to spend.

Because he lived, a neighbor knew
A clump of tall delphiniums blue
And oriental poppies red
He'd given for a flower bed.

 Because he lived, a man in need
Was grateful for a kindly deed
And ever after tried to be
As thoughtful and as fine as he.

       Because he lived, ne'er great or proud
       Or known to all the motley crowd,
       A few there were whose tents were pitched
       Near his, who found their lives enriched.


 `Because he lived',  Edgar A. Guest.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Kumbh Mela 2013 - A view from Jhusi

The Kumbh Mela, India's largest religious festival, is on right now. This year is supposed to be the Purnakumbh, which occurs only every 12 years. The festival is held at the Sangam (the confluence of the rivers Ganga and Jamuna) at Allahabad, as it happens, right next to the Harishchandra Research Institute, Jhusi, Allahabad where I  work. So here is a ringside view.

This is the time when the world converges on the moderately sized city of Allahabad, to have its dip in the Ganga on the designated snanam (bathing)  days (of which yesterday was one). A complete tented city comes up on the banks of the river, all ready to accommodate pilgrims, sadhus, halwais, tourists, hawkers, gawkers and what have you-s (that's us!). The pre-Kumbh preparations of the city had started over a year ago with the construction of new over-bridges, laying of new sewer lines, repairing of roads, etc. Given the  pace of work, it was hard to believe in October, that things would  actually get completed by the time the Kumbh began. However,  the great Indian `jugaad'  worked out finally and by January, everything was in place.  We, Jhusi residents,  saw the new Kumbh city develop in just a matter of weeks, in  an amazing and efficient fashion, complete with  lights,  water, the sewage, public toilets, sectors and roads, and a large number of pontoon bridges  (around twenty) across the Ganga, over areas which had been submerged just a few months ago.  We had seen this happen in 2001, however it was still awe-inspiring, especially given the functioning of the city  in  the remaining eleven years!

The tent city has tents  of all kinds, from  simple staying arrangements for the ordinary folk, to quite comfortable accommodation for the well off, with attached bathrooms, hot water, western style toilets, and  plants growing all around, transplanted from elsewhere! Besides these residential tents, there are the `pravachan' or discourse tents, which compete with one another in having fancy `architecture', lighting arrangements, like pooja pandals, elsewhere.

The first of the shahi snans was on Makar Sankaranti, January 14.  This year's bitter winter  kept many people away from the icy dip in January, but February saw an increase in numbers. Until then, the crowds were moving towards the sangam area and taking their dips in an orderly and well-behaved fashion. There were big tour groups from different Indian states, and a sprinkling of foreigners. Some of the groups  had designated gurus and would go to listen to their particular gurus, others would try out different tents. There were `superstar'  gurus with a huge number of followers whose tents were overflowing. There were those who were preaching to just a few faithful followers. There were young gurus out to make their names. Academic types thought  it was like a  `March meeting' on the subject of religion, with many parallel sessions!

The big day was  February 10th or Mauni Amavasya day, the most auspicious day, of the Kumbh, when more than 30 million people were expected in a small area of a   city which has  a normal population of less than 10 lakhs!  The day did not disappoint us. In the earlier days of the Kumbh, the `HRI akhada' as we called ourselves often went for walks in the mela as a group, to see the sights,  and eat hot jalebis!

This became impossible after February 9th.  The actual sangam area was closed to the general public from about midnight to about ten or eleven in the morning, because Mauni Amavasya is also the day of the second shahi snan of the ascetics, and the main bathing area was reserved for them. This did not deter the continuous procession of people going towards and away from the sangam with the one-point agenda of having a dip in the sangam and cleansing their sins!

Although most people managed to walk for miles, have a successful dip and find their way back, there were inevitable replays of the `lost in the Kumbh Mela' scenarios, beloved of Hindi movies.  Compounding the problem was the fact that many people spoke no language, other than their native tongue, and not a word of the local Hindi.  A young man from Andhra who spoke only  Telugu had lost his wife and child. One of our Telugu speaking friends helped him and took him to the `lost and found' centre (which has been functioning for decades with the help of volunteers)  in the Mela where they were allowing people to speak over the loudspeaker themselves in their own language. His story fortunately had a happy ending when he got re-united with his wife and child after two frantic days, in Varanasi, where his wife had also managed to independently reach the Andhra Samaj.

It was really nice to see that  the police were trying to be helpful, under quite difficult circumstances. I especially remember the commando lady, who after putting in an uncountable  number of hours on duty, went up to the pujaris to give her offering, before wending her weary way home.

The stampede at the railway station on the Mauni Amawasya day was a real tragedy and an unforgivable lapse on the part of the administration, as was the fire on the Basant Panchami day. Despite these serious problems,  before criticizing anyone, I would like to say that the mela administration, the police and the security people, the safai karmacharis who have kept the area clean and the local Allahabad administration have done an extra-ordinary job, extra-ordinarily well. The scale of the operation which has been carried out has to be kept in mind, before indulging in blame games, and what has gone wrong cannot take away all that has gone right.  Here's wishing for a perfect Kumbh, the next time round (in 2025)!

This blog post is by Sumathi Rao.

Another hanging

This Saturday saw another hanging, again in a terrorist related case. Afzal Guru, who was convicted as a conspirator in the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, was hanged this Saturday in Tihar jail, again under the utmost security and secrecy. While this case looks superficially similar to Ajmal Kasab's, there are important and crucial differences. Guru was not one of the perpetrators of the actual attack. His crime was to provide shelter for the actual attackers, and to be involved in their financial transactions. Locking him away for his natural life could well have been been adequate punishment under the circumstances. Some of the evidence against Guru was circumstantial, and some under his own confession. Conspirators whose contribution to the assasination of Mahatma Gandhi was similar, were not awarded the death penalty. Senior jurists and human rights activists have been perturbed by this execution.  Rather than discourage terrorism, this hanging may provide support to the agenda of hate that fuels terrorism. Yes, the state should be strong, but some times strength lies in mercy. We hope the strength of mercy will be allowed to prevail in future cases.

This blog post  is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao

The IPA Rahul Basu Memorial Award

It gives us great pleasure to announce the names of the winners of the first IPA Rahul Basu Memorial award for the best thesis in High Energy Physics. The winners of the award are Dr. Lokesh Kumar (Ph.D. from Punjab University, presently at Brookhaven National Lab) for his thesis entitled "Identified particle production, fluctuations and correlations studies in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC energies" and Dr. Diptimoy Ghosh (Ph.D. from TIFR, presently at the University of Rome "La Sapienza") for his thesis entitled “Looking for physics beyond the Standard Model through flavour transitions.”

The quality of the nominated theses was very high, and the final choice was very difficult. Therefore it was decided to award two honourable mentions as well. These are Dr. Debasish Banerjee (Ph.D. from TIFR, presently at the University of Bern), for the thesis "Nonperturbative studies of strongly interacting matter at finite temperature and density", and Dr. Ketan Patel (Ph.D. from PRL/Mohanlal Sukhadia University, presently at TIFR) for the thesis, "Beyond the Standard Model Physics: Grand Unification and otherwise". The prizes will be presented on 17th January at the XX DAE-BRNS High Energy Physics Symposium which is being held at the Department of Physics, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. We hope to share further details of the award ceremony with you next week.


Update:

The award ceremony took place in the Physics department at Santiniketan on 17th January. The ceremony started with two short talks by Sunil Mukhi and Rohini Godbole on Rahul Basu, his personality and work. This was followed by a short interaction with the award winners Lokesh Kumar in the U.S. and Diptimoy Ghosh in Italy on Skype. The award winners had described their work in two excellent recorded talks.

Lokesh Kumar's work was related to constructing the phase diagram for QCD. For the construction of this phase diagram  a beam energy scan (BES) program was proposed at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider Facility, BNL, USA in 2008. The experiment and Collider was asked to demonstrate the feasibility of RHIC carrying out this program below the injection energies. A test run was provided at center of mass energies of 9.2 GeV per nucleon for Au+Au collisions. A major part of Dr. Lokesh Kumar's thesis work was related to demonstrating that STAR experiment could  successfully carry out the BES program. With only 4000 events available in the short test run, he was able to provide convincing physics results which played a major role having approving the program approved at RHIC from the year 2010. The success of the analysis of the 9.2 GeV Au+Au collision data establishes the foundation for the subsequent beam energy program, one of whose primary objective is to locate the possible critical point in the QCD phase diagram. This was the importance of Lokesh Kumar's thesis.

The other awardee, Diptimoy Ghosh worked on flavour physics for his Ph.D.  An interesting aspect of his thesis is that it looks for signatures of processes beyond the standard model.  He played a major role in  identifying the new physics required for explaining the  large enhancement seen  in the [Bs to tau tau] decay rate. He had also worked on constraining specific new physics models using low-energy flavour-physics data in addition to the high-energy collider data from ATLAS and CMS, pointing out implications of a variety of interesting signals involving the anomalous decay rates, the top quark forward-backward asymmetry, searches  for Higgs and supersymmetric particles  in various channels, etc.

The talks were received very well. The awardees came back at the end of talks for a very lively question answer session.  We hope this award will inspire work of equally high quality in the coming years, and wish the awardees every success in their future careers.


This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The Masters of Music

The Jazz Master, Dave Brubeck, passed away last week at the age of 92 (well, one day before his 92nd birthday). Brubeck, the son of a rancher father and a mother with a strong background in classical piano, brought his unusual background to everything that he did.His mother did not allow him to listen to the radio, because she thought the best way to enjoy music was to play it. His father sent him to veterinary college, but his teachers threw him out and sent him to their school of music, where his heart clearly lay. The music school appreciated his prodigious talent, and gave him a degree, after making him swear that he would never teach music, as being cross-eyed, he couldn't read music. College was followed by a stint in the army, where he ended up accompanying Red Cross travelling shows, and admiring commanding officers made sure he was kept away from the front. After the war Brubeck went back to college to complete his education in music, and then went out to form a series of highly successful jazz octets, trios and quartets. Despite a near fatal swimming accident, which left him with a minor nerve disorder for many years, Brubeck attained great popularity and critical acclaim, although there were  carpers who called him `bombastic' and plain 'stolid'.

Brubeck's uniqueness lay in  his fascination and experimentation with time signatures, which is said to have been picked from his exposure to different kinds of music during his trip to the Middle East, and India, in 1958. One of the most famous of his pieces, Take 5, is featured in this video.This piece became very well known all over the world, and inspired versions of the original everywhere. The most recent version, and the one he thought the most innovative, was played using instruments like the sitar and the tabla, by Pakistani musicians who had lost their livelihood thanks to General Zia Ul Haq's suppression of  the Pakistani film and music industries, and is featured here.

Brubeck's wife Iola collaborated with him as a lyricist and librettist in a number of his musical ventures, and four of his sons grew up to become musicians. He was an unwavering proponent of racial integration and was a little embarassed that he was the second Jazz musician to be featured on the cover of Time magazine, (Louis Armstrong was the first), and felt that Duke Ellington had been more deserving of the honour, and had lost it due to racial considerations. Brubeck remained an active musician till the end of his life. His most recent concert was in November 2010, soon after his heart surgery. A major bash had been planned for his 92nd birthday, and got converted to a memorial event on his death.

Barely had this post been up for a few hours, when the terrible news came that another master of music had left us. The sitar maestro Ravi Shankar passed away today, also at the age of 92. The facts of his life are sufficiently well known to Indians to not need any reminders from bloggers, so we will just remember him the way we saw him last, at the Music Academy in Chennai with his eldest son Shubho Shankar. It was one of the rare occasions when the two played together.  They played their first raga, then a short piece, and then Ravi Shankar took the mike, and said, with his mischievous smile, `I know you Chennaiites like to go home early, so I will play just one more raga'. And they played just one more raga, for the next four hours, and was it beautiful! The crackers were bursting for the New Year when they finished, and we went out in the early morning.  It was an occasion to remember.

The musicians are  gone, the music plays on. R.I.P.

Tailpiece:
Dave  Brubeck once explained  what jazz meant to him. “One of the reasons I believe in jazz,” he said, “is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It’s the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It’s the first thing you hear when you’re born — or before you’re born — and it’s the last thing you hear.” (Source: N.Y. Times, 5/12/2012).

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

We thank Gautam Menon for sending us the link of the Sachal studios version of Take 5.

A hanging

A notable hanging took place last week. Ajmal Kasab, the butcher of Bombay, the only survivor of the group of ten attackers of 26/11, was hanged in Yerawada jail, with tight security and the utmost secrecy, after the due process of law had run its course. The nation woke on the morning of 21 st November to find the news of the hanging running across the ticker tape of the morning's news, just as they had seen the news of the attacks, and the never to be forgotten image of Kasab, swaggering with an automatic gun, dealing out death in all directions at Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus, in 2008. Both the Home Minister of Maharashtra, R.R. Patil and the Home Minister of India, Sushil Kumar Shinde, soon came on TV to confirm the news, each emphasising that the judicial process had been carried out to its last step.

The execution provoked mixed reactions, from the public, as well as the near and dear ones of the victims. There were those who experienced closure, and those, notably the father of the NSG commando Sandeep Unnikrishnan, who died in action in countering this operation, who said no one's death can be rejoiced over even if it was a legal necessity. It was universally agreed that Kasab, agent of death as  he was, was only a puppet, and his deadly puppet masters, the real perpetrators of terror, remained  at large, and outside the reach of justice. However, it could be said that justice had been done, even if in small and partial measure. It is interesting to remember, that George Orwell, the writer of the original As I Please, had written a piece with an identical title, a hanging. We wonder what his take would have been, on the case at hand. His customary clarity of thought might have yielded useful insight on the moral morass of the efficacy of capital punishment, even for a case like this. Meanwhile the debate goes on from the newspapers to the tea stalls.

This Monday, it will be four years from those three days of horror, that left 164 people dead, and a city shattered, but proud of the quiet heroism of its ordinary citizens. In their memory,

 "And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been".

We won't forget.
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

For an earlier post  by Rahul Basu on the Mumbai attacks see this link.

Cyclone Nilam

Here is a highly local one. Cyclone Nilam is approaching Chennai rapidly. It's been raining since morning. The streets are full of water, although our local drainage has held up so far, no waterlogging, merely the usual potholes full of water. However, the eye of the storm passes us only tomorrow evening, so who knows what the situation will be tomorrow.  If past experience is any guide, there was the year we were marooned on an island, viz. our fourth floor flat, and all the neighbourhood kids had a wonderful time with a boat. There was also the year when two evacuations were necessary thanks to cyclone Nisha (see here). There was another year when the municipal authorities released water from the lake and it overflowed in the streets, so that the main roads became waterways. That was the same year that my first year class phoned to report that they were marooned in their hostel, and could class be cancelled? (They had boats, but paper ones! Judging by the background noise, a great time was being had by all.  They were only nineteen, after all!)        

Here's Nilam. She looks pretty fierce and is approaching pretty fast, 100 kmph,  and will hit us sometime tomorrow evening, as per the met office.  Hopefully, Nilam will wander off into the Bay of Bengal, as other cyclones  have, in the past, and leave us in peace! Watch this space for further updates. Meanwhile, bring out the candles.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte.

Update: Nilam came and went. It saw landfall at about 5.30 p.m on Wednesday evening. There were very strong winds from 4.00 p.m to 9.30 p.m, when, as it happens, all of us were trying to get home with varying degrees of adventure. TNEB tripped the power supply till morning, at least in our parts. This was inconvenient,  but no one got electrocuted at least. Many idiot thrill seekers stood on the beach, watching an oil tanker run aground, and its life boat, which had 22 people in it, capsize. The fishermen, valiant guardian angels of Chennai's treacherous shores,  managed to rescue quite a few, but six are still missing. The threatened rains did not arrive. Life was normal from this morning. In short, cyclone Nilam was a phuska bar (failed firework). We are truly thankful for this failure!