An Immense World by Ed Yong

An Immense World by Ed Yong is a captivating exploration into the intricate and diverse ways by which animals perceive the world around them. It takes a deep dive into the rich tapestry of the animal kingdom and sheds light on how their senses reveal a vastly different reality from what we, as humans, perceive as the "Real World."

Indeed we should refrain from imposing our limited perception of reality onto animals. As humans, we perceive the world through our own subjective lens, influenced by our senses and cognitive skills. The World, as humans experience it, is simply just one of the many different ways of perceiving the world.

Ed Yong's vivid descriptions of animals and their various sense organs are so enchanting that I simply had to google and search for the images and videos to fully comprehend what was being described.

The book covers a wide range of captivating topics, and I will just try to highlight a few of the fascinating images and visuals that have been imprinted on my mind. Have also posted links to videos wherever I could find it.

Ants- Pheromones 

The book begins by delving into the fascinating world of Pheromones. Compared to humans, Ants are nearly blind and deaf. An Ant's main mode of communication is through smelling chemical agents called pheromones.

Pheromones are Lightweight chemicals that easily rise into the air and are used to summon mobs of workers that can rapidly overwhelm prey. Crush the head of an ant, and within seconds, nearby colony-mates will sense the aerosolized pheromones and charge into battle.

Pheromones are also used to mark trails. The Ant Workers lay these down when they find food, leading other colony-mates to foraging hotspots. Other Pheromones are also found on the surface of the ants' bodies, and act as identity badges.

Pheromones hold such sway over ants that they can force the insects to behave in bizarre and detrimental ways, in disregard of other pertinent sensory cues. Red ants will look after the caterpillars of blue butterflies, which look nothing like ant grubs but smell exactly like them. The YouTube link shared below captures what the author so vividly describes in the book:-

 Army ants are so committed to following their pheromone trails that if those paths should accidentally loop back onto themselves, hundreds of workers will walk in an endless "death spiral" until they die from exhaustion.

Many ants use pheromones to discern dead individuals: In an experiment, when oleic acid was daubed onto the bodies of living ants, their sisters treated them as corpses and carried them to the colony's garbage piles. It didn't matter that the ant was alive and visibly kicking. What mattered was that it smelled dead.

Colors

One of the most intriguing chapters is the one which discusses color perception, highlighting the variations among different species. Human beings are trichromats, and most people can match any given reference color by combining the three primary colors. However a small proportion of people, and entire species of animals,  see only in shades of gray, not because of brain damage but because their retinas aren't set up for color vision. They are called monochromats.

Whales have just one cone. So for a Blue Whale, the ocean is not blue. Octopuses are also monochromats. So they can rapidly change the colors of their skin , yet are unable to see their own shifting hues.

Dogs have two cones and are dichromats. They see mostly in shades of blue, yellow, and gray.  Below is a photo reproduced from the book on how dogs view the world:

This YouTube video covers how most animals perceive the world around them:-

 

Birds can perceive colors humans can't. Most birds have four types of cone cells, and are hence tetrachromats. So they are able to distinguish a multitude of colors that are imperceptible to us.

Dichromats can make out roughly One percent of the colors that trichromats see i.e. tens of thousands, compared to millions. If the same gulf exists between trichromats and tetrachromats, then we might be able to see just I percent of the hundreds of millions of colors that a bird can discriminate. 

Birds  don't just have human vision plus ultraviolet, or bee vision plus red. Tetrachromacy doesn't just widen the visible spectrum at its margins. It unlocks an entirely new dimension of colors.

Frustrating though it might be, most of us simply cannot imagine what many animals actually look like to each other, or how varied their sense of color can be.

All of us- monochromat, dichromat, trichromat, or tetrachromat- -take the colors that we see for granted. Each of us remain convinced that this is what the world is really like.

 Heat sensing Beetles

Fire-sensing beetles have an outer skin tough enough to let them sense the infrared radiation from a blaze up to 10 kilometers away. Arriving at a fire, the beetles have perhaps the most dramatic sex in the animal kingdom, mating as a forest burns around them. Later, the females lay their eggs on charred, cooled bark. When the wood-eating grubs hatch, they find an Eden. The trees they devour are too injured to defend against insect larvae feeding within them. The predators that might eat them are put off by the smoke and heat emitted from the embers and ashes. In peace, they thrive, mature, and eventually fly off in search of their own blazes

Parasite Animals

The emerald jewel wasp is a parasite that raises its young on cockroaches. When a female finds a roach, she stings it twice once in its midsection to temporarily paralyze its legs, and a second time in its brain. The second sting delivers venom that nullifies the roach's desire to move, turning it into a submissive zombie. In this state, the wasp can lead the roach to her lair by its antennae, like a human walking a dog. Once there, she lays an egg on it, providing her future larva with a docile source of fresh meat.

 

Tadpoles- Surface Vibrations

When a cat-eyed snake lunges at a tree frog and clutch and grabs several eggs in its jaws, the surrounding embryos wriggle furiously, releasing an enzyme from their faces that quickly disintegrates their eggs. One of them plops into the water. A second later, another joins it. Soon, tadpoles are tumbling down too quickly to count, and the snake, still chewing its first mouthful, is left with a smear of empty jelly.

 

Thus frog embryos sensory bubble extends beyond the actual bubble in which they're trapped. Light can pass through the translucent eggs, and chemicals can diffuse into them. But vibrations are what really matter. They pass into the eggs and into the embryos, which can distinguish between bad vibes and benign ones without any previous experience of either. A bite from a snake will trigger hatching. Rain, wind, and footsteps will not. 

Treehoppers, which are pea-sized insects communicate with each other using jiggles. By rapidly bouncing their abdomens, they send vibrations down through their legs and into the plant they are standing on. Nearby treehoppers pick up and interpret the vibrations, which vary in frequency and pattern depending on the message being conveyed.

The songs that Treehoppers make are haunting, mesmerizing, and surprising. None of them sound remotely like the familiar, high pitched chirping of crickets or cicadas, but instead sound more like birds, apes, or even machinery and musical instruments.

 

Owls

As Owls are generally active at night, they have a highly developed auditory system. The ears are located at the sides of the head, behind the eyes, and are covered by the feathers of the facial disc. But while a humans outer ears are a pair of fleshy flaps, the owl's are effectively its entire face.

They act like a radar dish that collects incoming sound waves and funnels them toward the ear holes. These enormous openings are found behind the owl's eyes, hidden among its feathers. In some species, they're so wide that if you part the overlying feathers and look into the ears, you can see the back of the owl's eyeball.

 

Bats

Bats produce echolocation by emitting high frequency sound pulses through their mouth or nose and listening to the echo. With this echo, the bat can determine the size, shape and texture of objects in its environment. Bats have developed the most specialized form of sonar in the world.

Many night-flying insects hear the sonar sounds of attacking bats and take evasive action. Among moths, evasive flight is often accompanied by the production of ultrasonic sounds. The Ultrasonic counter clicks either startle the bat, to warn of distastefulness, or “jam” the bat's sonar system.

Tiger moths click to tell bats that they aren't worth eating and that they are full of foul-tasting chemicals.

American tiger moths frequently flub attacks by 'jamming' the Bats' Sonar System. The clicks by the Moths overlapped with the bats' echoes and messed with their ability to gauge distance.

Electric eels.

The Eels electric organs take up most of their 7-foot-long bodies, and contain around 100 stacks of between 5,000 and 10,000 electrocytes. The most powerful of the electric eel species can discharge 860 volts enough to incapacitate a horse. When hunting small fish and invertebrates, it delivers pulses that force the muscles of its prey to twitch, giving away its position. Stronger pulses then cause those same muscles to lock, paralyzing the victim. The electric organ is both remote control and Taser, allowing the eel to commandeer the bodies of other animals from afar.

Magnetic Fields

 The geomagnetic field of the Earth is a boon for travelers, who have always used it to establish their bearings. Humans have done so for more than a thousand years, using compasses. Other animals sea turtles, lobsters, birds – have done so for millions of years without help.

Whales have some of the most insane migrations of any animals on the planet. Some of them almost go from the equator to the poles, and with astounding precision, traveling to the exact same area year after year. And it is suggested that they have inbuilt gyro compasses.

"An Immense World" is a truly exceptional read. The book is indeed a riveting journey into the awe-inspiring world of animals and their extraordinary senses. 

From Eternity to here- Sean Carroll

 

An extremely educative and entertaining read. This book by Sean Carroll touches upon all those big impressive questions that has wracked mankind, or possibly any sentient being, anywhere in the Universe. What is Time? What is Space? Why do we remember only our past and not the future? Can we travel through Time? What is going to happen to the Universe? Will it go on forever? Or is it all going to end up in one Big Crunch someday?

The author makes it clear that of course , he doesn’t have the answers. No one does probably. But that doesn’t stop Carroll from taking us on an entertaining ride, and in a fairly easy to understand manner attempts to answer these tough questions based on the scientific knowledge and evidence available as on date.

Time seems to be special. There appears to be a beginning of Time wrought upon us supposedly by the Big Bang, some 13.8 Billion years ago. Space? Well, Space is all the same for the Universe. Up, down, left, right… there is no difference. And no, the Big Bang did not occur at any particular point in Space, but yeah, it did occur at a particular point in Time, apparently.

Time, of course, is special. There is a Past Time and there will be a Future Time. And how does the Universe distinguish the Past Time from Future Time? Entropy is the answer. The distinguishing feature of Time is that at any point in the past, the Universe was in a state of lower Entropy and in the future it will be in a state of higher Entropy. Entropy, is loosely defined as the state of disorder in a system.  And the Universe is ultimately headed there- to a state of increasing disorder and chaos. All these very orderly Planets, Stars, Galaxies, even Black Holes…(and yeah, life itself), all will dissipate into  a very disorderly, fundamental particle state, billions of years into the future. Yes, even Black holes too, thanks to the dissipation caused by the Hawkings radiation. So the final pretty picture of the Universe is of isolation and desolation essentially.

So the question arises- if the natural order of the Universe is to be in a high Entropy state, how come we are in this seemingly low Entropy environment? And able to bask in the sunset, admire the birds and the flowers, marvel at the Swirling Milky Way? That is the question that no one is able to give a clear answer to. Why was the Early Universe in such a Low Entropy State? Tempting to think in Anthropic Terms, of course. The Universe exists for us, Creationism etc. But, of course, who has time for such fairy tales?

An interesting theory cited in the book is a Boltzmann hypothesis of the observable Universe being a fluctuation on the entropy equilibrium scale. A box containing gas molecules reaches an equilibrium state of high Entropy, with all the gas molecules dissipated randomly all around the box. But Boltzmann says that the high Entropy state of these Gas molecules are not always constant. There will be  minor fluctuations all the time, wherein there would be a temporary dip into a lower entropy state, before the Law asserts itself and the gas molecules re-aligns themselves into its default high equilibrium state- The state of max entropy. What if, asks Boltzmann, if this observable Universe that we are in, is in a state of one of those random fluctuations, with the dip in entropy now being in the process of being corrected, with the Universe moving to its goal of maximum entropy state?

To quote from the book:

“Ah, says Boltzmann, you have to take a wider view. What we've shown …. are tiny fluctuations in Entropy over a relatively short period of time. When we're talking about the universe, we are obviously imagining a huge fluctuation in entropy that is very rare and takes an extremely long time to play itself out. …. the entropy of our local, observe part of Universe …. where a fluctuation has occurred and is in the process of bouncing back to equilibrium. If the entire history of the known universe were to fit there, we would indeed see the Second Law at work over our lifetimes, while over ultra-long times the entropy is simply fluctuating near its maximum value.”

 

Its just a theory, of course. Just idle drinking session chatter. No one knows really.

 There are so many great passages in the book. I will just quote a couple that has stayed with me. One is by Schrodinger on what life is:

 What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to keep going' under similar circumstances.

Schrodinger is making the point that nonliving physical objects tend to wind down and come to rest. A rock may roll down a hill during an avalanche.  But before too long it will reach the bottom, dissipate energy through the creation of noise and heat, and come to a complete halt. For living organisms, this process of coming to rest can take much longer.  And that, suggests Schrödinger, is the essence of life- staving off the natural tendency toward equilibrium with one's surroundings- why the goldfish is still swimming long after the ice cube would have melted.

So life is, as one always suspected, a struggle against the natural order of the Universe.

And of course, this one by Carroll  is quite swanky and can easily be in those quotable quotes area:

“That's okay. We find ourselves, not as a central player in the life of the cosmos. But as a tiny epiphenomenon, flourishing for a brief moment as we ride a wave of increasing entropy from the Big Bang to the quiet emptiness of the future universe. Purpose and meaning are not to be found in the laws of nature, or in the plans of any external agent who made things that way; it is our job to create them. One of those purposes-among many-stems from our urge to explain the world around us the best we can. If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.”

 But of course, as Carroll himself would agree, Purpose and pride etc are all Anthropic principles. The Universe simply does not care one way or the other. Period.

 

Machinehood by S.B. Divya(2021)

A science fiction novel set out in the near future, about 75 odd years ahead- 2095 to be precise. Machinehood is a thoroughly enthralling and an intelligently crafted book, and the future fictional world  created by the author, SB Divya is most fascinating.  The good part of the book is that the author has not really attempted to dazzle us with jaw-dropping technological innovations of the future, but kept the future progress made  pretty simple and straightforward. Most of the tech mentioned in the book is simply a kind of extrapolation of what one sees around the world today, and she alludes in the book to certain historical progressions  made in the field of technology, the ethical issues, the resistance and the protests, and how the World finally got to be what it is in 2095.

AI Robots and Androids have advanced so much in the future that humans are literally left with no work and have to compete with machines to survive. And humans can only survive and maintain their competitive edge if they take these pills – Nanobots that go to work inside the body. The pills are either ‘flow’ pills to help function with efficiency in a given job, ‘Zip’ pills to enhance our strength and fitness or something called ‘Juvers’ for healing and reducing pain. The very interesting aspect of these pills is that you need to constantly keep taking them to upgrade yourself, much like the need to upgrade or buy a new Smartphone every few months these days. However in this future world, one can download the design and follow the instructions for making the pills and even create them using 3D printers at home.

Social Media is taken to the next level, wherein each and every action of yours is captured in the Cyber world.  Eating, sleeping, intimate moments with your lover… everything is captured live by these swarm of nanodrones that are ubiquitous.  Privacy has become an alien concept.  And there are these ‘Tip Jars’ by which people vote for how you have fared in your day or rate how your last love making session was.  Your entire life is literally live streamed. 

The theme of the book revolves around a rebellion by an extremist group who believe that the rights of machines have been trampled over with and advocate all Intelligence, be it artificial or biological, should be treated at par.

One flaw in this book however, would be in the character portrayal may be.  The main heroes are monochromatic  and everyone seems to be out to save the world- no hint of grey in them. Even the Extremist group turn out not to be such bad guys, as they also have an altruistic motive for all the violence unleashed onto the world.  And of course, a dash of humor in the conversations and narration etc would have made the book more entertaining.

Nevertheless a thoroughly great read for sure.

 

Early Indians- Tony Joseph

An extremely interesting read.

Tony Joseph in his book somewhat clears the air on who we Indians are and where we came from.

The first Out of Africa migrants reached the subcontinent around 65000 years ago.

These were the first Indians. Every Indian has  upto 40-50 % of the First Indians genetic makeup in him.

The Harappans- the people who were part of the earliest known civilisation in India, sometime between 7000- 2000 BC, were a part mixture of First Indians and Iranian agriculturists, from the Zargos region of Iran.

The Aryans- from the Steppe- Caucasian region- came to India sometime beginning 2000 BC.

There was a lot of intermingling that happened between 2000 to 500 BC which sort of set the base for us Indians.

As per the author, two different Indians with different genetic composition came into existence during this period, dubbed as Ancestral North Indians(ANI) and Ancestral South Indians(ASI).

The ASI are essentially the result of intermingling of Harappans who went down South beginning 2000, with the Early Indians. 

The ANI are the people who are the result of intermingling of Steppe people with the Harappans.

And that is essentially who the Indians are.

This should somewhat clear the air on the Aryan migration/invasion theory. 

One strong reason why the theory finds credence is that there are no First Indians genetic components in present day European genes.

However the ANI has a European/Steppe gene component.

Of course this is in addition to other archaeological and linguistic evidences that the author cites in the book for the Aryan invasion/migration theory.

Other interesting postulate in the book is that the caste system became stratified only around 100 BCE.

So even though the Aryans came to India around 2000 BCE and brought with them the Vedic/Hindu religion with allusions to Varna system beginning 1800 BCE, the intermingling of Aryans with the locals continued till about 100 BCE.

It is only around this period that the caste system sort of drew lines between communities and prevented further intermingling.

Really mystifying. 

 How does a race allow intermingling for more than a 1000 years and then suddenly decide that enough is enough and no more? 

And this is evident in that the genetic make up of a Brahmin or a Shudra or a Vaishya or a Dalit is different.

In contrast the genetic composition of Han Chinese who constitutes 90% of China are similar. India  on the other hand have various groups of populations with different genetic make up primarily on account of the caste system which prevented intermingling.

A must read.

The Gated Republic by Shankkar Aiyar

The latest book by Shankar Aiyyar is a searing indictment on the failures of the Indian state in providing the following essential services to its citizens:-

•         Piped drinking water
•         Power supply
•         Health care
•         Education
•         Internal Security

Heavy on data , Aiyyar paints a stark picture on the failures by the Central governments in succession. He dwells on the repeated tall and grand promises made, terming it 'announcement approach', the failures in implementation, and the States dismal record in ensuring last mile connectivity.

Aiyyar does not touch upon the even more appalling failures of the government in eradicating grinding poverty from the nation, with 250 million of its citizenry still mired in abject poverty, or providing meaningful employment opportunities to its teeming unemployed  millions, crumbling infrastructure state of cities etc. That is another depressing story.

The book is a statement of facts and at times brings about comparisons with other countries to underline how innovative solutions have been found in places where the baseline was similar to India a few years/decades ago.

The dream for piped water

Nehru at least had the priorities right it would appear. The  Bhakra-Nangal Canal project began in 1954 and was completed in 1963. It helped to irrigate large portions of Punjab and Rajasthan and Nehru called the project something ‘tremendous, something stupendous, and something which shakes you up when you see it. Bhakra, the new temple of resurgent India, is the symbol of India's progress’.

It enabled the generation of electricity and ramped up irrigation - gross irrigated area increased from 22 million hectares to 36 million hectares between 1950 and 1970. But all the dams and reservoirs put together were not enough for populous and far-flung India. It wasn't just enough to create storage but also to make water available to people, particularly those in the rural areas.

Inspite of all his good intentions, towards the fag end of Nehru’s rule in 1961, of the 5,67,000 villages in India, only 1.9 per cent or 11,000 villages had piped water.

Things did not improve a decade later either. In 1971, barely 17,000 or 3 per cent of India's villages were getting drinking water.

Aiyyar terms the path adopted by politicians, whenever  public pressure mounted to provide water to households, the ‘Announcement approach’. A national programme called the ‘Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme’ was kicked off in 1973. Nothing much happened and in 1986, Rajiv Gandhi declared the programme would be on 'mission mode’ and launched the Technology Mission on Drinking Water. The Narasimha Rao regime further renamed it as the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission.

The glacial progress continued. In 1981, barely 38 per cent of the population and only 26.5 percent of rural Indians, had access to safe drinking water. 

In 1989, barely 16 per cent of rural Indians had access to tap water.

To compound the dismal state of affairs, studies showed contamination across a wide distribution of areas throughout India with groundwater containing levels of uranium exceeding 30 ug/L, far above the WHO provisional standard.

In addition about two-thirds of sewage all across India is flowing untreated into the ground, lakes and rivers. In February 2019, the CPCB (Central Pollution control board) reported that there are  351 polluted river stretches on 323 rivers spread over twenty-nine states and two union territories.

In spite of Modi making it an electoral pitch to clean up the Ganga, not much change is visible in the ground. Three years after its launch, in December 2017, the CAG found Namami Gange wracked by administrative delays, poor contract management and lack of monitoring with the audit revealing staggering sloth.

 No major Indian city has a 24-hour supply of water, with four to five hours of supply per day being the norm, as against the nineteen hours per day supply across the Asian-Pacific region.

Piped water status as in 2019

As of 2019, only one in five Indian households have piped water in their homes. Over 78.6 per cent do not have access to piped water in their homes. Every second home depends on water from wells, tube wells, unprotected water bodies, hand pumps or tanker water. Over 42 per cent must trek between 0.5 and 1.5 km to fetch water.

Contrast the state of affairs with Israel. In 2000, The Sea of Galilee was rapidly depleting and its bed risked being severely damaged. The government imposed restrictions on water usage and inducted a comprehensive strategy. In 2015, one of the driest years in its history, Israel had surplus water. Thanks to the policy push, it now 'manufactures' 62 per cent of its water requirement through recycling and desalination and natural water accounts for just 38 per cent of its consumption. Indeed, the country produces 660 billion litres each year from desalination and 290 billion litres through recycling of water. What's more, Israel now exports 150 billion litres of water every year.

India is ranked a dismal 120 among 122 countries in the water quality index.

Healthcare

In 2018, the Global Burden of Disease and Healthcare Access Quality Index report published by Lancet ranked India 145th out of 195 countries, trailing Countries with large populations, such as China, and countries with smaller economies and per capita incomes, like Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Bangladesh.

A few instances cited by the author, captures the malaise that afflicts the Indian Health care system. In August 2017, in just twenty-four hours, twenty-three infants died in Gorakhpur's Baba Raghav Das Medical College Hospital. In a five-day period, over seventy infants admitted to the hospital's neo-natal ward for treatment of Japanese encephalitis died due to lack of oxygen supply. The hospital did not have the required number of oxygen cylinders because the oxygen supplier had not been paid his dues.

The national average however camouflages regional disparities. The NITI Aayog in its study rated  Kerala, as the topper in healthcare provision, with 76.55 points  , while Uttar Pradesh scores 33.69; Bihar with 38.46 is at the bottom of the pile. While under-five mortality rates in Kerala are at thirteen per 1,000 births, they are at sixty-one in Assam and at fifty-one in Uttar Pradesh. Similarly, maternal mortality is six per 1,000 births in Kerala while it's thirty-five in Odisha. Every second baby's birth in Uttar Pradesh and four of ten births in Bihar are not under medical care, whereas 92 per cent of the births in Kerala and 85 percent in Maharashtra are at a health care centre.

As per the National Health Profile 2019, India has a ratio of 1 doctor  per 1456 personnel as against the WHO norms of 1 doctor per 1000 persons.

India's rural healthcare system is a three tiered pyramid- the sub centres cater to habitations of 3000 to 5000, primary health centres to between 20,000 and 30,000 people and community centres are for populations up to one lakh.

Of the 1,58,417 sub-centres, 26,360 are without a water connection, 39,122 are without electricity and 15,623 lack approach roads.

The next tier, the primary health centres  should be open round the clock. Only 9,492 of the 25,743 primary health centres function 24x7. 55 per cent function with just one doctor - that's one doctor per 30,000 persons. An unbelievable 1,494 primary health centres, meant to cumulatively cater to nearly 45 million persons, don't have doctors on the premises. 

The community health centres require  22,496 specialists but only 4,074 are present. Effectively, the community health centres only have one-fifth of what they need.

Modi announced the National Health Protection Scheme in 2018. Popularized as Ayushman Bharat and tagged as the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY), it promises 100 million families- roughly 500 million persons a coverage of Rs 5 lakh per family. The government proposed to pay around     Rs 1,100 per family as premium.

The design of Ayushman Bharat on who is eligible raises problematic questions of who is poor and therefore who can be left out. Ayushman Bharat  suffers from poor capacity and dependence on private hospitals. For instance, a scheme that must cover 500 million persons had, in February 2019, only 16,000 hospitals empanelled to deliver services.

Unsurprisingly, across India, in rural and urban areas, over 42 per cent of Indians are opting for private doctors for outpatient treatment and 55 per cent are going to private hospitals for hospitalization even though the costs are as much of a killer as the disease for both poor and middle-class people.

Meanwhile, government expenditure on health is barely 1.8 per cent of GDP, which is worse even in comparison to India's neighbours and even low-income countries.

Education

Copying is an endemic problem in states like UP and Bihar even today. The reasons are not hard to find. A quarter of a century earlier, UP government led by Kalyan Singh had tried to crack down on mass copying. Rajnath Singh, then education minister in UP, had promulgated via an ordinance the Anti-Copying Act, 1992. That year, the passing percentage dipped to 14 per cent; barely one of seven students who appeared for the Class X exam passed. The opposition of that time Samajwadi Party led by Mulayam Singh Yadav and Bahujan Samaj Party led by Mayawati – deployed it as an election issue, with Mulayam promising to abolish the anti- copying law. In December 1993, the BJP lost the polls and the SP-BSP alliance came to power. When Mulayam was sworn in as chief minister, one of his first acts was to scrap the Anti-Copying Act. The pass percentage in the following years went up to over 85 per cent.

Ironically, both Mayawati and Mulayam, before they embarked on their political careers, had been teachers. The BJP made mass copying an election issue in 2017 and upon coming to power in the state, initiated this crackdown on mass copying.

Comparison to countries which started with a similar baseline is telling. India and Indonesia had similar levels of literacy of sub 20 per cent in 1950. By 1990, Indonesia boasted of 81 per cent literacy while India was stuck at 52 per cent. The scale of India's population is cited as a reason for its many failings. China would have faced the issue too, but between 1950 and 2000, China ramped up literacy from around 30 per cent to over 95 per cent. India in 2019, in terms of literacy, is where China was in 1990.

Adult literacy in Indonesia is at 95 per cent while a fourth of India's populace is classified as not literate. In 2018, of the 750 million persons in the world who are not literate, 37 per cent or over 287 million resided in India.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development evaluates global education systems through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. In 2012, over half a million students participated for reading and understanding of science and mathematical abilities. Chinese students from Shanghai topped the tests in reading, science and mathematics. India came second from the bottom, just above Kyrgyzstan. India pulled out of PISA tests the following year.

Electricity 

In  2019, nearly 40 per cent of the schools in the country in India do not have electricity. Similar story for the heath care centres also with one in four sub-centres, functioning without  electricity.

Pace of electrification 

At the end of the first plan in 1957, Only 7,294 of 5.7 lakh villages had electricity. By 1961,  the number of villages electrified rose to 21,754, the pace of electrfication being appallingly slow.. 

In the sixth five year plan, in 1980, it was recorded that over half the 5.7 lakh villages in the country continued to be without electricity and only 14 per cent of all households had electricity.

Of the total 247 million households in India, eighty-two million urban and rural households spent the time after sunset in complete darkness as they did not have access to electricity. This translates to over 400 million people living without any power.

In  2018, all inhabited villages had been electrified. Of 177.3 million rural households, 152.2 million (85.84 per cent) households were electrified. This meant that 25.1 million households in rural India (roughly one in seven households) did not have access to electricity. 

As of 15 September 2018, only 1,425 villages across the country could boast of 100 per cent electrified households. Only six states and one  union territory - Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab, Goa and Puducherry - could claim 100 per cent household electrification.

On 8 January 2019, Power Minister R.K. Singh informed Parliament that SEBS were unable to recover costs on one-fifth of the power supplied. SEBS could not collect any money on 21.42 per cent of the power generated due to transmission and distribution (T&D) loss. Globally, T&D losses average between 2 per cent and 8 per cent. T&D losses are 5.5 per cent in China. At 21.42 per cent, India does worse than Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh .

Security

In early 2019, Delhi Police released some statistics - every day, five women are raped and eight are molested in Delhi. In 2016, nationwide cases of theft, dacoity and burglary recorded were 4.94 lakh. The maximum cases were from Delhi, followed by Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.

On average, around ninety banks are looted every month across the country. Shockingly, rape of foreign women is high enough to be a data classification category for the NCRB. NCRB records show that on average, nearly 100 women are raped every day, with four rapes every hour.

A UN study suggests that the median is 303.3 police officers per 100,000 population.On paper, the national average of police per lakh population is 193. In reality, it is barely 151 per lakh population. Fourteen of the most populous states are below the UN-stipulated ratio.  Bihar, one of the most backward, has seventy-four police personnel per lakh population. Uttar Pradesh, with a population of over 230 million, has ninety police persons per lakh people. West Bengal, which is the hotbed of political violence, has 102 police persons per lakh population.

The title chosen by the author ‘The Gated Republic’, reflects the  phenomenon of mass exit, of millions of Indians disinvesting from faith in government delivery of services. There is a mass exit towards and into gated solutions, each a republic of its own. Millions of Indians are disinvesting from hope in the government's promises and adopting alternatives in the wake of such glaring public policy failures.

The world over, the migration to private paid-for services is driven by rising income levels. In India, the migration of taxpaying citizens entitled to public services is driven by falling levels of service. The dilution and decimation in accountability propels the exit of even those who cannot afford to do so.  Over six of ten students in the poor and populous state of Uttar Pradesh attend private schools. Indians meet as much as 64 per cent of healthcare costs out of their own pockets. Nearly 730 million people – more than twice  the population of the US – are living without access to piped water.

The earlier book by Aiyyar, Accidental India, had somewhat stuck an optimistic and upbeat note about India. For all its sluggishness and policy ambiguities, the Indian state seemed to find a way to stumble onto the correct path somehow, and the road to prosperity and progress seemed to be a  possibility in the not too far future.

Not this book however. The book presents a bleak and dark outlook. There seems to be no solutions to the mess India seems to be in for the foreseeable future.

She has her mother's laugh - Carl Zimmer

A great read on the history of our understanding of Genes and factors affecting heredity.

Carl Zimmer packs the book with numerous anecdotes to keep you hooked.

Even for me, who quit on biology in school, the first 300 odd pages were a breeze. The next 300 was slightly more difficult, as the terms used were not familiar to me. 

But a delightful read throughout anyway

Do human races differ much genetically? Is there much in common, genetically speaking between an Asian, African and a European?

The author makes it very clear that though physical differences may appear amongst races on a superficial level to be very dramatic, they are determined by only a minute portion of the genome: we as a species have been estimated to share 99.9% of our DNA with each other. The few differences that do exist reflect differences in environments and external factors, not core biology.

And for that hotly debated issue- Is intelligence all genes? Well- partly says the author. It's genes and the environment that shape who we are.

And even though height is even more easily measurable than intelligence, scientists have still not been able to identify the genes that is responsible for it.

But height has also much to do with better food and health care systems. For instance South Koreans are more than an inch taller in comparison to North Koreans, which is a clear demonstration of how environment factors matter.  

Heredity is not just genes by the way. We inherit culture too! And most of us have traces of  Neanderthal genes in us.

One of the more heart warming stories in the book is on the treatment of  PKU or Phenylketonuria, a genetically determined metabolic disorder. Babies with PKU, if left untreated will have devastating brain damage.  

PKU is an inherited disease in which the body cannot metabolize an amino acid called phenylalanine. Normally phenylalanine is metabolized and converted into tyrosine, another amino acid, but if it stays as phenylalanine, there will be too much of it, and high levels of phenylalanine are harmful to the brain.

PKU was diagnosed as early as 1934. But scientists/doctors could not find a cure for it.

It all changed on account of one persistent mother, Mary Jones.

The journey to a treatment started in 1949, when a British woman named Mary Jones brought her seventeen-month-old daughter, Sheila, to a Birmingham hospital. Sheila couldn't stand or even sit up. Nor did she take an interest in her surroundings.

A doctor at the hospital named Horst Bickel examined Sheila and informed Jones that she had PKU. "Her mother was not at all impressed when I showed her proudly my beautiful раper chromatogram with the very strong phenylalanine (Phe) spot in the urine of her daughter proving the diagnosis," Bickel later recalled.

Jones wanted to know what Bickel was going to do now that he had discovered Sheila's disease. There was nothing to do,Bickel explained.

Jones rejected his answer. She came back the next morning to demand help. When he turned her down,she came back every morning.

She was very upset and did not accept the fact that at the time no treatment was known for PKU," Bickel said. "Couldn't I find one?".........

Jones was so insistent, though, that Bickel decided to talk to some of his colleagues about a diet for PKU. He learned that a biochemist in London named Louis Wolff had tried concocting a broth that could provide protein to people with PKU without poisoning them with phenylalanine. When he proposed feeding his broth to patients, his superiors at Great Ormond Street Hospital told him his job did not involve crazy treatments for the incurable.

Wolff gave his recipe to Bickel, who followed the directions, working in a frigid lab kept cold to prevent the concoction from spoiling.

Eventually, Bickel prepared enough of the stuff for Sheila. He instructed Jones that the girl was to eat nothing else. To his delight, the phenylalanine in Sheila's bloodstream dropped......

The diet even showed signs of improving her brain. Within a few months she began to sit up, then to stand, then to walk with assistance. Her musty odor even disappeared.

But when Bickel told his colleagues at the hospital, they scoffed. They were sure Sheila had improved merely thanks to the extra attention she was getting.

Bickel decided there was only one way to persuade them: take Sheila off of the diet.

Without telling Jones, Bickel secretly added phenylalanine to the formula. Within a day on the altered diet, Sheila started deteriorating. Soon she stopped smiling, making eye contact, or even walking. Bickel and his coworkers told  Jones of their secret maneuver, and put her back on the low-phenylalanine formula. While the transformation was enough proof for Bickel, he didn't think it would be enough to persuade skeptical colleagues. He got Jones's permission to bring Sheila into the hospital and feed her Phenylalanine again.

This time, Bickel .... captured his diet treatment to Sheila Jones in a movie. The movie is available on YouTube and a great watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqZ7QHO5_hs

Bickel's movie was impressive enough to change the minds of doctors at Great Ormond Street.

The treatment for PKU started. By the 1970s, the first generation of people treated for PKU since birth reached adulthood. They could finish school, hold jobs, have ordinary lives.

 In 2001,a graduate student named Tracy Beck became the first person with PKU to gain a PhD. She became an astronomer, helping to build the James Webb Space Telescope. For thousands of years, people who inherited the mutations in Beck's PAH genes would have looked to the sky and not known the word for the lights they saw. Now Beck was helping to extend humanity's gaze to the farthest edges of the universe.

 Sadly for Mary Jones, life wasn't fair on her. Suffering from mental illness herself, Mary Jones, a single mother, ended up in an institution. Sheila Jones learned to feed and dress herself, but could never learn to speak.

Sheila Jones has however been immortalised by the institution of an award in her name- The Sheila Jones Award in 2017. It is an award for patient advocates. This can be awarded to individuals, groups or organizations.

Epigenetics

A current fascinating field of study is epigenetics.   Epigenetics suggests that it possible for your experience to produce changes in your genes that could then be inherited by your children.  It opens up the possibility of a heredity of experience. 

It is being suggested that certain experiences — child neglect, drug abuse or other severe stresses — could set off epigenetic changes to the DNA inside the neurons of a person’s brain.

Jews, whose great-grandparents were chased from their Russian shtetls; Chinese whose grandparents lived through the ravages of the Cultural Revolution; adults of every ethnicity who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents — all carry with them more than just memories. 

Our experiences, and those of our forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. The DNA remains the same, but psychological and behavioral tendencies are inherited. You might have inherited not just your grandmother’s knobby knees, but also her predisposition toward depression caused by the neglect she suffered as a newborn. Or for that matter if your grandmother was adopted by nurturing parents, you might be enjoying the boost she received thanks to their love and support.

Epigenetics, can be seen in plants: where what they experience affects future generations, many generations down. There's pretty good evidence in some animals like worms. But when we get closer to ourselves in mammals like rats, it gets more debatable. When we get to humans, a lot of researchers argue that they're isn’t really compelling data yet for it. 

Still a topic of debate and who know what the future holds?

CRISPR

However one of the biggest science stories of recent times is CRISPR (stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)

CRISPR is basically a group of molecules that can edit DNA. You can fine tune the CRISPR molecules to go after any piece of DNA you want. They can cut that DNA and then you can actually insert a different piece of DNA in its place. 

So this could allow you for example to fix a defective gene. If somebody has cystic fibrosis for example, in theory you could use CRISPR to repair the gene that's faulty in them and then they would not suffer from cystic fibrosis any longer. And also against things like cancer because you can actually take people's own immune cells and edit their genes so that they can recognize and attack cancer cells.

Some scientists have repaired defective DNA in mice, for example, curing them of genetic disorders. Plant scientists have used CRISPR to edit genes in crops, raising hopes that they can engineer a better food supply. Some researchers are trying to rewrite the genomes of elephants, with the ultimate goal of re-creating a woolly mammoth. 

The days when CRISPR technology will be used to alter the genes of human embryos does not seem far off.

 There is at present a  self-imposed moratorium in the United States and Europe to work on human embryos. Not  in China though.  Reports suggest that researchers in China have actually proceeded to human clinical trials using CRISPR.

With CRISPR, it is easy to imagine a world where the haves and have-nots diverge even further in health outcomes than they already do — at the genetic level, because rich people can afford to enhance their genes and their yet-unborn kids’ genes for intelligence, musical ability, height etc.

So assuming we can figure out how to genetically engineer smarter, stronger sons and daughters, who is going to stop us?

 The book covers much more fascinating aspects on genes and heredity, and is definitely a recommended read.