A journey called India

A journey called India

VIBHUTI PATEL

British historian and broadcaster Michael Wood’s “The Story of India” made its debut on American TV recently. India’s long pluralistic history has relevance today in a world coming to terms with a host of human and cultural issues, says Wood. Excerpts from a conversation…

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Global culture is taking root everywhere now, I came away feeling that India’s the only place that has incorporated the modern without rejecting the old.

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Heady blend: For Michael Wood, India is an intoxicating mix of the old and the new.

Michael Wood’s six-part TV series “The Story of India” shows the 10,000-year history of the Indian subcontinent in six episodes. First aired by the BBC in August 2007, it was part of a BBC series marking 60 years of Indian independence. The series was broadcast in the United States by PBS early this year. An ambitious project like this, a life-changing experience, needs at least 100 hours of air time, says Michael Wood.

What attracted you to India?

On British and American TV, you see ancient Rome, Greece, even Egypt, but never India — even though India has a fifth of the world’s population and plays a great part in world history. We thought PBS might do this but they said, “India does not figure on the radar here.” Then, five years ago, they simply emailed, “India?” The moment had come; our first Indian shoot coincided with President Bush’s visit. The response to the series in the States — a million and a half hits on the website in the first two weeks — confirms that interest.

So PBS funded the series?

PBS commissioned it and put in the initial money, then BBC paid a portion of the costs and got a long-lasting programme for a big audience without a huge outlay. The impetus came from America, PBS were great supporters of this project.

How long did it take you to make the series?

Originally, it took 20 months filming and editing, a short time for a series like this — we were pressured by BBC’s deadlines. It aired in England in 2007. Then, in 2008, we reedited it for America, adding satellite maps, changing some passages, cutting others. Ayodhya, for instance, had been so rushed, I recut it to layer its past and present.

What was the reaction in Britain?

Fantastic! Very good ratings, big audiences and great critical reaction: they liked the sweep of the series, loved the camera work and the combination of big ideas with intimate down-to-earth events like having fun at Holi. The response of British-Indians — important to me because I was making a film about someone else’s culture — was reassuringly positive.

Was it hard to select six hours from 10,000 years of material?

It was a nightmare. To do justice to Indian history, you need 100 hours — 10 would’ve been the minimum required. I wanted to film Baluchistan’s pre-Harappan settlements, I’d planned to do Shivaji and more on the Partition. The freedom movement is an electrifying story, Nehru and Gandhi among the greatest figures in modern history. The last 100 years of Indian history helps us understand today’s clashes with Islam. The BBC did not want the modern story which they have covered but Americans would have benefited from it.

How did you research India’s vast history?

I’ve been interested in India for many years. I have a library of books collected over a lifetime, I read the Rig Veda controversies for pleasure, I’d been a dozen times to Benares. All that goes into the research which exists on many levels. You can get expertise from scholars but I wanted real voices of ordinary Indians. I’d phone people and ask for help. Everyone helped because they take pride in their culture. In Mathura, the Krishna Leela play was rained off when we were to shoot, so we returned later. It was 47 degrees — so ferociously hot that our bare feet burned on the temple floor — but they did the play again for us.

Britain’s colonial perspective long dominated Indian history books; now, the BJP is rewriting history. How did you steer clear of such false extremes?

It was difficult for a white middle-class Brit of my generation who comes with baggage. The pressure of filmmaking is intense, so when you stand back, you think, I should have done this or that…but history does not always go in a straight line. I wish I’d covered the Marathas and Shivaji to balance the emphasis on the Mughals which came out of colonial writing. But the cultural battles of Akbar and Dara Shikoh have relevance today. What Barack Obama says about relations between Islam and the West will be interesting, but what Akbar said about Islam could only have come out of India’s pluralism. The Mughals’ heroic attempts to reconcile great human issues has a lesson for today.

How is reporting history on TV different from writing a book?

It’s a different process, television simplifies, it’s a medium for showing, not for argument. The difficulty is to tell stories in a simplified way, to select stories that have resonance for the whole historical process. In a book, you can qualify your remarks, spend pages talking about the Aryans, discuss the pros and cons. Television audiences want to be taken on a journey, not down academic pathways. The challenge is to balance credibility and accuracy with entertainment. That’s why I film contemporary culture and try to relate it to the past. The audience’s imagination connects today’s people to their past. The people of Kerala or Tamil Nadu, for example, are too educated to wallow in the past, their past coexists with daily life. Tamil Nadu is the world’s last surviving classical civilisation.

What do you mean by “classical civilisation”?

One that’s 2,000 years old like ancient Greece or Rome. Tamil is the last living classical Indian language. The first surviving work in Tamil, a 300 B.C book on linguistics, refers to an already existing culture. Tamil is older than any modern European language. I wanted to remind Western-centric audiences, who implicitly assume the superiority of Western modes of thought, that Tamil is one of 23 official Indian languages, with a literature comparable to any in the West. It makes viewers sit up and question their assumptions.

What was your most amazing or memorable Indian discovery?

I had many incredible experiences over the years…in 1987, we took our kids to the Kumbh Mela and stayed with Tamil friends in a tent with 24 million people around. Then, Ram Leela at Ramnagar, Holi in Mathura, sailing on the Arabian Sea... I was knocked out by Patna, a fascinating imperial capital for centuries, I love Benares, I adore Peshawar…such an old city. The biggest surprise was Ayodhya, a historical place with its old, mixed Hindu-Muslim culture which still survives despite what happened there, it was haunting.

What did you come away with finally?

This wasn’t just a job, it was a great life experience. The best was the people of India — helping wherever we went. Obviously, there are drawbacks to traditional culture — injustices of the caste system, untouchability, what happens to women so often. But I felt things changing. It’s been only 60 years since the British left India — in a terrible state.

It’s not for us to criticise India for being unable to modify its age-old legacy. The beauty, complexity, richness and pluralism of traditional India in all its myriad forms are unique. Global culture is taking root everywhere now, I came away feeling that India’s the only place that has incorporated the modern without rejecting the old. That makes it a rich experience to be there. Change is coming fast, and inevitably. There’s poignancy in that. But I have no doubt that India will continue to incorporate its past into the present

What is the cost of US invasion of Iraq?

What is the cost of U.S. invasion of Iraq? George Mathew

A war fought in the name of democracy has weakened accountability and transparency and degraded governance within the U.S.

Six years ago on 20 March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. President Bush went to town saying this military invasion of oil rich Iraq was to bring that country, suffering from brutal dictatorship, to democratic governance. Moreover, the United States took upon itself the task to wipe out weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had allegedly kept in his possession.

It did not take long for the people of the United States and the whole world to realise that the pretext of the war was patently false and the Iraq war was bound to be a big failure. President Bush stuck to his gun and pushed Iraq into the Dark Age and the entire world into an unprecedented economic doom. Mercifully, President Barack Obama has reversed the suicidal course by pledging to end the U.S. Combat Mission by August 31, 2010. Today, the U.S. force in Iraq numbers 142,000. Out of this, 92, 000 will be brought home in the next 18 months. The remaining 50,000 will continue till 31 December 2011. Thus the doomed mission will end after eight long years, but the conflict will rage on.

Naturally, one question comes to everyone’s mind: What is the cost of this war? While launching the war, there were various estimates. The official figure was hovering around $57 to $69 billion (adjusting the inflation in 2007). When Larry Lindsey, President’s economic adviser, stated that the cost could touch $200 billion, the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed it saying it was a “balcony” estimate. The Bush Administration believed that part of the war expenses would be borne by other countries and that oil revenues would meet the post-war reconstruction costs.

After six years what is the real cost of the Iraq war? Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Joseph Stiglitz along with Linda J. Bilmes of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government had estimated last year (2008) that the cost of the Iraq war would be more than $ 3 trillion (in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2008). Incidentally, the U.S. budget for 2010 is $3.55 trillion.

Linda Bilmes is an expert in government finance. Stiglitz and Bilmes have used rigorous, scientific, economic methodology to come to this mind-boggling figure. The formidable data collected from all available as well as rare documents to quantify the cost have been detailed in separate notes from page 273 to 341. The book is an eye opener as to who suffers and to what extent, when rich and powerful nation(s) decide to go to war. Also, it gives an insight into who reaps the riches from the wars.

Two critical issues inter alia dealt with in this book by Stiglitz and Bilmes attract our attention because they speak volumes about deepening crises behind the façade of war.

First is the human cost and its implications for society, economy and nation. The cost of war is not merely expenditure on machine, fuel and personnel but also includes compensating for death and disability and the economic cost of loss of productivity due to loss of lives and disability. Such quantification is not easy. What this publication has done is admirable.

The coalition has incurred 4,576 deaths — 4,259 Americans, in addition to 179 Britons, 33 Italians, 22 Poles, 18 Ukrainians, 11 Spaniards, 13 Bulgarians, and the rest from Australia, Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Denmark, Netherlands, Estonia, Fiji, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Latvia, Romania, El Salvador, Slovakia and Thailand as of March 13, 2009, says the CNN. At least 31,102 U.S. troops have been wounded in action (Pentagon). The number of violent civilian deaths in Iraq is touching a lakh (from March 2003 till February this year the civilian death is 91,059 -99,431 according to Iraq Body Count website).

According to a survey by the American Psychiatric Association, 32 per cent of those who were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from mental health complaints. Another shocking trend is rising suicide rate. In 2007, at least 115 soldiers killed themselves, in 2006 it was 102, and 87 and 67 in 2005 and 2004 respectively. “There were also 166 attempted suicides among troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 935 attempts in the army as a whole, with young, white, unmarried junior enlisted troops the most likely to try. The trend worsened in 2008” (p.213). How does one quantify the loss of life and its impact on society and economy? Take the case of 24 year-old Staff Sergeant Ryan D. Maseth, a Green Beret, who was electrocuted in his living quarters in Baghdad because of faulty wiring by a U.S. contractor. His family will receive $100,000 “as death gratuity” and the Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance has to pay $ 400,000. If he were alive, he would have reached higher professional levels. Maseth’s death has caused much higher economic loss than just $500,000. If we multiply the lives lost, wounded, mentally ill and their impact on economy and society, the three trillion dollar cost is a gross underestimate.

The huge monetary cost of war has had significant implications for the social security and welfare measures within the U.S. The National Priorities Project website estimates that the budgetary amount spent on the war could have provided for nearly 5,103,740 Affordable Housing Units or 193,370,980 people with health care for one year. Stiglitz and Blimes have argued that the diversion of resources to Iraq was one of the main factors due to which the National Guards could not effectively respond to national crises like Hurricane Katrina.

The second frightening issue is the weakened structure of accountability and the increasing corruption. It poses a vital question: whose interests did the Iraq invasion serve? The answer probably lies in the warning President Eisenhower gave as early as 1961 in his farewell speech wherein he warned against the military-industrial complex. The military industrial complex, simply understood, is an informal alliance of the military and related government departments with defence industries that is held to influence government policy.

Stiglitz and Blimes have highlighted this in the case of Iraq by pointing out that the defence contractors have been the most notable beneficiaries of the Iraq conflict as reflected in the rise in share prices of Halliburton, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and others. The linkages of the Bush administration with some of these firms are all too well known. For instance, Dick Cheney formerly headed Halliburton and the Republican Party received $1,146,248 as campaign contribution from it. Throughout the six years of the war it has been funded by emergency funds marked by reduced transparency and lack of detailed analysis. The result has been rampant waste and corruption. “Shoddy accounting practices at the Pentagon and lax oversight of contractors make it difficult to know how much of the money flowing towards private industry is being squandered on abuse, fraud and war profiteering,” write Stiglitz and Blimes. The Defence Department employs 196,000 private contractors. Interestingly, between 1998 and 2004 the Department of Defence’s total spending on contracting increased by 105 per cent while the number of people it employed to award and supervise the contracts declined by 25 per cent. In Iraq the money spent by the U.S. for reconstruction was through American contractors. Henry Waxman, the Congressman from California had revealed that non-Iraqi contractors charged $25 million to repaint twenty police stations – a job the local firms could have done with $5 million.

The book describes the direct and indirect ways of contractors evading tax and never completing work (pp 218-225). While the executives of the big contracting companies make enormous gains, the workers doing “cooking, driving, cleaning, and laundry, are poorly paid nationals from India, Pakistan and other Asian and African countries. Indian cooks are reported to earn $3-$5 per day. At the same time, KBR bills the American taxpayer $100 per load of laundry.” Of course the Indian workers are there against the wishes of the Indian government.

This large scale reliance on private contractors coupled with reduced accountability has led to large scale profiteering and corruption. According to the authors, in America “corruption takes on a more nuanced form than it does elsewhere. Payoffs typically do not take the form of direct bribes, but of campaign contributions to both parties.” Ironically a war fought in the name of democracy has weakened accountability and transparency and degraded governance within the U.S.

All said, President Obama’s decision to end the Messianic war in Iraq is welcome. Whether the new administration will support and encourage conflict resolution and anti-war movements remains to be seen.

(The writer is Director, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi.)

Award for Sivathanu Pillai

I met this person at IIT-M, after his talk on "Brahmos - The making & India in defence". Very down to earth person and a good sense of humour, Dr.Pillai is a genius. His talk was mind-blowing and inspiring. His worry and sadness about bright students leaving for the US and leaving behind India could clearly be seen in his speech. A true patriot ended his speech with a beautiful story, which I will never forget.
"Money", "Fame and "Love" visited a couples home to stay overnight and have some dinner. But the condition was they could invite only one person. After much contemplation, the couple decided to invite "Love". When they entered with "Love", both "Money" and "Fame" also came. The couple were surprised and asked what the issue was. All three of them said in unison, "Where there is love, there is also money and fame".
So, "Love your country, and fame and money will come automatically".
Dr.Pillai, another genius among the 100s of others who have made this country proud.


Award for Sivathanu Pillai Special Correspondent

CHENNAI: The International Project Management Association (IPMA), Switzerland, has awarded its highest level (Level A) certification of Project Directorship to A. Sivathanu Pillai for his contribution in the field.

Dr. Pillai is the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of BrahMos Aerospace Private Limited, New Delhi.

He is the first Indian to receive this certificate.

The IPMA is an organisation comprising 44 national project management associations from all over the world. The certificate was awarded to him on Tuesday in New Delhi by Adesh Jain, deputy chairman of the IPMA.

A press release says Dr. Pillai has 40 years of experience in project/programme management in the Indian Space Research Organisation, and the Defence Research and Development Organisation. It adds that under his leadership, the scientific communities of India and Russia designed and developed the BrahMos missile in a short span of time and made it a world leader in the cruise missile family.

Daughters of India: Art and Identity

A tribute to women

Author-photographer Stephen P. Huyler talks about the journey of “Daughters of India: Art and Identity”

Capturing the pulse A still from the book

Author-photographer Stephen P. Huyler says he never clicks a picture without permission. Yet his “Daughters of India: Art and Identity” published by Mapin narrows into hidden rural crevices and urban scenes to capture women, known and unk nown, at their candid best. The book, a journey through 262 colour photographs, travels through villages and cities, and narrates the stories of 20 women from different backgrounds. Indra peeps out of her veil for a few seconds, while Achamma overcomes her reticence and joins the others to be the chief players in the book.

While Huyler knits together disparate tales and battles, he allows creative expression to be the thread that binds the women. So the tales of Savitri from Dhunlo, Orissa, Padma from Madurai in Tamil Nadu and Sonabai of Puhputra in Chhatisgrah come alive along with vibrant pictures.

Huyler’s intention was to let the world know “the pulse of the Indian woman” and quell misconceptions. He writes in his introduction: “Much of Western reportage about Indian women is misinformed and misguided, depicting all or most of them as victims.”

Despite the problems Indian women face, Huyler says: “They display phenomenal inner strength and resilience. My respect for them has grown as the deeper levels I see of their difficulties.” In the West, Indian women are identified with the injustices they face, says the author-photographer who was in New Delhi recently for the book launch. His introduction touches upon dowry harassment, female infanticide and treatment of widows.

Strength of women

Quiz him on the battles women have to wage despite geographical locations, and Huyler responds: “The cultural characteristic of India is kind of unique. In the Western cultures, women are subjugated in the belief that they are weaker. In India, it is the fear in men, of the strength of women. Yet women make these little cracks on the pavement to let the flower bloom.” Huyler, also the author of “Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion,” draws on the references to Shakti in Indian mythology.

Huyler took about eight years to ready the book. However, his link with India goes back 37 years. “Initially, it was just wanderlust and my deep fascination with people and art,” Huyler recalls. “My mentor, Beatrice Wood, told me that in India I might find a group of cultures in a relatively small land mass that would feed my interest and would be worthwhile to document,” says Huyler. A Bachelor of Arts in Indian Studies from the University of Denver followed, and he plunged headlong to India, where Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and Rukmini Devi Arundale nurtured him.

“Strong Indian women have guided me,” he says. Though he admits it is impossible to be objective and forget the cultural baggage he carries, Huyler says: “For 37 years, I have worked and travelled in India possibly more than any American or Westerner has.” When he steps into the homes of rural communities, he brings with him the “rare ability to just be”. “It doesn’t make me less American, but gives me a breath of experience from where I can draw,” says Huyler.

According to him, it is his ability to “absorb” and be a mere “witness” that helps his subjects shed inhibitions even when he is interviewing and clicking pictures in the remotest corners of India. “I let them emerge,” he says. “I only go where doors are open,” he adds.

The challenges

“Daughters of India” threw challenges to Huyler, but he never compromised on his principles. “It was difficult to reach to Achamma Joseph in Kochi who is heralded as the poster girl of IT. She was very cautious and afraid of industrial espionage. But once she was assured of my trustworthiness, that door opened.”

The book also gave Huyler many poignant moments. “Pushpa from the slums of Mumbai, Larku the child bride, Kusima who deals with abject prejudice, Bimla, the Dalit woman from Varanasi…,” Huyler reels off.

P. ANIMA

150th Anniversary of J C Bose

Celebrating an Indian’s breakthrough science Ashok Parthasarathi

Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose finally gets his due around his 150th birth anniversary.

Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose made seminal scientific discoveries and technological inventions in electromagnetism and plant physiology.

Despite being free people for more than 60 years now, Indians are yet to develop the tradition of remembering and honouring their great savants of pre-Independence times. One example of such neglect relates to Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858-1937), arguably the first ‘modern’ scientist to have emerged from India. This year marks the 150th birth anniversary of J.C. Bose, who made seminal scientific discoveries and technological inventions at the world level, in two s eemingly unconnected areas of science and technology — electromagnetism and plant physiology. This was unique for a modern scientist.

In 1895, Bose successfully demonstrated in public in colonial Calcutta the wireless transmission of electromagnetic waves. Generating waves using a self-designed and built transmitter at one end of a link and sending them to a similarly built detector located 75 feet away, through intervening obstacles such as the body of Lieutenant General Mackenzie who commanded the British troops in the Calcutta garrison, he set off an explosion in a cache of gunpowder at the other end.

That Bose built all the equipment in the abysmal conditions that existed at the University of Calcutta then, and the country as a whole, in the 1890s makes the achievement even more mind-boggling and creditworthy. Over the next decade, Bose obtained four U.S. and U.K. patents for his invention with the aid of friends.

It took some five years more for a technician of mixed Italian-Irish parentage, Guglielmo Marconi, to make a similar public demonstration. In the heyday of imperialism, the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to 35-year-old Marconi and a 59-year old German physicist from Strasbourg, Karl Ferdinand Braun, “in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.”

Bose was not given the prize although he had published his results in leading international journals and lectured at the Royal Institution in London in 1897 at the invitation of his teacher, Lord Rayleigh, one of the most distinguished British scientists of the time. In 1899 Bose read a paper at the Royal Society in London, ‘On a Self-Recovering Coherer and the Study of the Cohering Action of Different Metals,’ on his invention of the coherer which used conductors separated by mercury. In the paper, which was published in April 1899, he wrote: “For very delicate adjustments of pressure, I used in some of the following experiments an U-tube filled with mercury, with a plunger in one of the limbs; various substances were adjusted to touch barely the mercury in the other limb. ... I then interposed a telephone in the circuit; each time a flash of radiation fell on the receiver the telephone sounded.” Performing a series of experiments, Bose concluded that“there can be no doubt that the action was entirely due to electric radiation.”

More than two years later, Marconi transmitted radio waves across the Atlantic, using Bose’s coherer — with nary a mention of Bose. Academic honours such as a D.Sc. by research from London University, a knighthood in 1917 and a membership of the Royal Society of London in 1920 that were conferred on Bose did little to affirm his pioneering status as the father of wireless. Ironically, in a book by Orrin Dunlap, which Marconi personally edited, a page and a half is devoted to Bose, who is acknowledged by Marconi to have provided crucial support at a critical juncture when he needed it most.

Partial amends were made in 1998 when the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), New York, a global professional academy in the field, announced: “Our investigative research into the origin and first major use of solid state diode detector devices led to the discovery that the first transatlantic wireless signal in Marconi’s world-famous experiment was received by Marconi using the iron-mercury-iron-coherer with a telephone detector invented by Sir J.C. Bose in 1898.”

With these revelations, belated though they are, we may safely say that Bose, and not Marconi, was the discoverer and demonstrator of wireless radio propagation through free space and thus the father of radio, television and all other forms of radio communication including the Internet. The IEEE inducted Bose into its Wireless Hall of Fame.

Against this background, the Centre for the Philosophy and Foundations of Science, New Delhi, led by its Director Ranjit Nair, teamed up with Christ’s College Cambridge (of which Dr. Nair is an alumnus) to organise at the college a symposium titled “Beyond Frontiers: From Physics to Plant Sciences,” on December 6, 2008 to mark Bose’s 150th birth anniversary. At the symposium, Cambridge scientists expressed their appreciation of Bose’s pioneering contributions. The physicist E.C.G. Sudarshan spoke on Bose’s work in electromagnetism, while distinguished plant geneticist M.S. Swaminathan (also a Cambridge alumnus), spoke on green genes to combat global warming.

A bust of Bose made by a Kolkata sculptor was unveiled by India’s High Commissioner in London, Shiv Shankar Mukherjee. Two Kolkata physicists, Bikash Sinha and Sibaji Raha, respectively Directors of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Bose Institute (founded by Bose in 1917), spoke.The Master of Christ’s College, Frank Kelly, welcomed the gathering and Dr. Ranjit Nair proposed a vote of thanks. Leading scientists from the U.K. such as David King, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government; Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College Cambridge; and Partha Dasgupta, Professor of Economics at Cambridge, were present. (So was this writer.)

In a curious twist to the tale, Marconi’s grandson, the space physicist Francesco Paresce Marconi, while on a visit to Kolkata in 2006, expressed his astonishment on finding at the Bose Institute the coherer that his grandfather had used to receive the trans-Atlantic wireless signal. “The instrument was critical to radio communication,” he said. On another visit to Kolkata some weeks ago, the grandson is reported to have said that while Bose was a Professor of Physics of international repute, his grandfather was a technician, who nonetheless deserved credit for turning Bose’s discovery and the equipment he invented into an industrial innovation. He admitted it was unfair that Bose was overlooked by the Nobel Committee.

By crossing the boundaries of physics into plant physiology, Bose seemed to some of his dogmatic contemporaries a dangerous heretic. But the more perceptive among them saw him to be a visionary. One must not forget that the distinction between living and lifeless matter was by and large taken for granted among his scientific and lay contemporaries. It required courage and belief in oneself to demonstrate similarities in the electrical responses of living matter and lifeless matter. His theory of the ascent of sap as being due to electromechanical processes involving pumping within living plant cells took six decades to be verified experimentally.

The symposium, and the unveiling of a bust of Jagadis Chandra Bose in his Cambridge alma mater, mark a milestone in the way Indian scientific capabilities are perceived worldwide. It is perhaps the only case so far when an iconic British institution like Cambridge University saw it fit to commemorate an outstanding Indian scientist of colonial times 150 years after his birth in British India. Can we say that at long last, the prowess and international image of our country are changing among scientific circles? We have every reason for cautious optimism.

(Ashok Parthasarathi is a former scientific adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and was Secretary to various scientific departments of the Government of India. He acknowledges the contribution made to this article by Dr. Ranjit Nair, Director, Centre for the Philosophy and Foundations of Sciences, New Delhi.)

Women Inventors

Forgotten wonders

Move over Women’s Day. With their great inventions, women have for centuries gone beyond symbolic observances, says ZEHRA NAQVI

Inspired Ideas (from left) Marie Curie is the most famous woman inventor, but there are others such as Mary Anderson, Harriet Strong, Patricia Billings and Hedy Lamarr

Have you ever wondered who invented the windshield wiper? Or a medical syringe? What about the car heater?

So many of the little things that make our lives easier are used by us without giving a minute’s thought to the person who first made them. It would be quite an interesting exercise to find out about these unsung heroes. And in this case, unsung heroines — Mary Anderson for the windshield wiper; Letita Geer for the syringe; and Margaret Wilcox for the car heater.

Surprised? Most people would draw a blank when asked to name a woman inventor.

At best, they might come up with Marie Curie (and even she is best known for discovering radium, not for the radium-isolation techniques she designed). Very few people are aware that female minds have been behind some ingenious inventions. Ranging from ordinary but useful creations such as mounted globes, patented by Ellen Fitz in 1875, the cooking stove created by Elizabeth Hawk in 1867, or the electric water heater by Ida Forbes in 1917, to inventions of imposing stature such as dams and reservoir construction by Harriet Strong in 1887, submarine lamps and telescopes by Sara Mather in 1885 or elevated railways by Mary Walton in 1881, women have been hard at work.

Amusing

Run a Google search for inventions by women, and you’ll find umpteen interesting answers. Some can be quite amusing, such as chocolate chip cookies, alphabet blocks or disposable diapers! Others could be complicated, and need careful reading. Sample this: famous Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr was also a pioneer in the field of wireless communications. The “spread spectrum technology” she invented was, simply put, a way to create an unbreakable code that prevented interception of messages by Nazi agents in World War II. This technology formed the technical backbone for cellular technology and other wireless communication.

Another thrilling example of female ingenuity is the ‘Blissymbol Printer’ invented by Rachel Zimmerman of Ontario in the mid 1980s. The printer works through symbols on a touch pad, which are converted into written language and enable communication by non-speaking people, even those with severe disabilities such as cerebral palsy.

Some of these inventions sound like objects from science fiction works. What would you say about construction material that is indestructible, fire-resistant as well as non-toxic? This seemingly magic material was created by Patricia Billings, a sculptor who was trying to create a cement additive to prevent her sculptures from shattering. What she ended up inventing is the world’s first workable replacement for asbestos, patented by her as ‘Geobond’.

The first woman inventor recorded in history is Sybilla Masters, who developed a way to process corn into food and fibres as early as 1715. But that patent was issued in her husband’s name by the British courts. This, in fact, brings us to the chief reason why history has recorded so few inventions by women — the non-existence of legal rights.

Until the late 1800s women could not claim ownership of property, and patents, being a kind of intellectual property, could never be issued to a woman. So most offerings of female minds went in the names of husbands, sons or fathers. Added to this were low women education and socio-cultural beliefs that refused to accept that a woman might be able to innovate and invent.

In the words of Swiss woman author Laurence Deonna: “People complain that society, because of its ruthlessness, kills thousands of little Mozarts every year, but never has a word for all the little Marie Curies drowned in the kitchen sink…” How true!

http://www.hindu.com/mp/2009/03/17/stories/2009031750240500.htm