There’s a concept in quantum mechanics, and also in parts of classical mechanics, called the Berry phase. Say you’re walking around a mountain. You start off along a path and follow it all the way until you’re back to the point where you started. You’re at the same point, sure, but you’re probably facing a different direction now. The Berry phase works something like this. Say you’ve got a bunch of electrons that you’re manipulating using a magnetic field. As you vary the field in continuous increments, the electrons will respond continuously in some way. But as you vary the field through a cycle of changes and bring it back to the original setting, the electrons won’t exactly be at their original configuration as well. Or they will be in addition to some change. This ‘additional change’ is called the Berry phase.
Reading about the Kancha Gachibowli forest brought the Berry phase to mind. Yesterday, India’s new Chief Justice, B.R. Gavai, faced Telangana state with a choice: “between restoring the forest or having the Chief Secretary and [half a dozen] officials in prison,” per The Hindu. The latter people are being held responsible for attempting to divert mostly moderately and densely forested land to a planned campus for information technology companies. The court had no sympathy for Telangana counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi’s argument that the state’s efforts had been good-intentioned. The principle reason: the state hasn’t been able to explain the fact that it organised a phalanx of bulldozers to bring down 104 acres of old trees during an extended weekend, when the courts were closed, leaving the felling’s opponents without access to legal recourse. A few telling passages from The Hindu:
The State had previously denied the land was a forest. The claim, it said, that the area was forest land had sprung up only after developmental activities commenced following the allotment of the land to the Telangana Industrial Infrastructure Corporation. Mr. Singhvi submitted that the processes regarding the allotment had been on since March 2024. He said the intention of the State was bona fide.
…
Mr. Singhvi maintained that “thousands” of trees were not cut. “We have seen the photographs,” Chief Justice Gavai responded.
Mr. Singhvi submitted that not a leaf has been moved on the site after the apex court ordered everything to be stopped on April 16. The State was complying with the court’s direction in letter and spirit. A huge afforestation programme was underway in the area.
Amicus curiae, senior advocate K. Parameshwar, drew the attention of the court to a finding in a Forest Survey of India report, which was forwarded to the Central Empowered Committee, that out of the 104 acres cut in two nights, over 60% had been moderately and heavily dense forest.
It’s worthwhile these days to treat the concept of afforestation as a yellow flag at best and a despicable idea at worst. In the last decade it has evolved regressively into a sort of olive branch offered up alongside casual excuses to divert forested land for non-forest uses, often in open defiance of India’s existing forest protection laws — which sadly have been increasingly enfeebled by the environment ministry. That the state is now afforesting the area is little consolation because the trees that have already been cut represent a greater ecological loss than that can be recouped by young plants anytime in the near future. We may have come full circle since the state first felled the trees but we bear the burden of an additional change as well.
In fact, this could be more like magnetic hysteresis than the Berry phase depending on the mode of afforestation. Quantum systems are said to have acquired a Berry phase when they undergo a reversible process in which entropy doesn’t increase*. But entropy, the amount of disorder, has indeed increased. We’ve lost energy. We’ve lost old trees and their ecosystem services. We’ve lost a sustainable carbon store. We’ve learnt that the Telangana government is willing to act in bad faith. We’ve learnt that our forest protection laws continue to not work. Why, we’ve been reminded that the Supreme Court remains the country’s last democratic institution, perhaps short of Parliamentary majority, prepared to measure the loss of green cover by the precepts of sustainable development. Every Supreme Court decision to stall a project that entails deforestation has been met with cheers in the conservation and environmental justice communities but each such verdict also serves a reminder that we remain at the mercy of the last line of defence. If someday the Supreme Court also yields, or is let down by Parliament passing a law that makes a mockery of protecting trees, we are only left with protest — like the brave students of the University of Hyderabad mounted to bring the Kancha Gachibowli issue to the whole country’s attention.
When you apply a magnetic field over a ferromagnet, like a block of iron, it becomes magnetised. If you remove the magnetic field, the block stays magnetised to some degree. This phenomenon is called remanence. Future attempts to magnetise and demagnetise the block will have to work against the remanence, causing the block to lose energy over time as heat. This macroscopic feature is called magnetic hysteresis**: it’s irreversible, dissipative, disorderly, and vexatious. Much like the state of Telangana, it claims to find value in the context of computers (disk drives in particular), and much like the trees of Kancha Gachibowli, there’s nothing a ferromagnet can do about it.
* I’ve used entropy here with reference to a quantum adiabatic process. In a thermodynamic adiabatic process, entropy isn’t produced only if the process is also reversible.
** The term ‘hysteresis’ comes from the Greek ‘hústeros’, meaning ‘later’. This is a reference to the shape of the curve on a graph with the strength of the magnetic field H on one axis and the magnetisation M on the other. As the H curve rises and falls, the M curve starts to fall behind. The seemingly closely related ‘hysteria’ comes from the Greek ‘hustéra’, for ‘womb’, and is thus unrelated. However, the well-known Cornell University physicist James P. Sethna wrote sometime before 1995:
There seems to be no etymological link between hysteresis and either hysterical (fr. L hystericus of the womb) or history (fr. Gk, inquiry, history, fr. histor, istor knowing, learned). This is too bad, as there are scientific connections to both words. (There is no link, scientific or etymological, to histolysis, the breakdown of bodily tissues, or to blood.) … Many hysteretic systems make screeching noises as they respond to their external load (hence, the natural connection with hysteria).
‘Hysteria’ has of course rightly fallen out of favour both within and without clinical contexts.
An odd little detail in a Physics World piece on Microsoft’s claim to have made a working topological qubit:
Regardless of the debate about the results and how they have been announced, researchers are supportive of the efforts at Microsoft to produce a topological quantum computer. “As a scientist who likes to see things tried, I’m grateful that at least one player stuck with the topological approach even when it ended up being a long, painful slog,” says [Scott] Aaronson.
“Most governments won’t fund such work, because it’s way too risky and expensive,” adds [Winfried] Hensinger. “So it’s very nice to see that Microsoft is stepping in there.”
In drug development, defence technologies, and life sciences research, to name a few, we’ve seen the opposite: governments fund the risky, expensive part for many years, often decades, until something viable emerges. Then the IP moves to public and private sector enterprises for commercialisation, sometimes together with government subsidies to increase public access. With pharmaceuticals in particular, the government often doesn’t recoup investments it has made in the discovery phase, which includes medical education and research. An illustrative recent example is the development of mRNA vaccines; from my piece in The Hinducriticising the medicine Nobel Prize for this work:
Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman began working together on the mRNA platform at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1990s. The University licensed its patents to mRNA RiboTherapeutics, which sublicensed them to CellScript, which sublicensed them to Moderna and BioNTech for $75 million each. Dr. Karikó joined BioNTech as senior vice-president in 2013, and the company enlisted Pfizer to develop its mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 in 2020.
Much of the knowledge that underpins most new drugs and vaccines is unearthed at the expense of governments and public funds. This part of drug development is more risky and protracted, when scientists identify potential biomolecular targets within the body on which a drug could act in order to manage a particular disease, followed by identifying suitable chemical candidates. The cost and time estimates of this phase are $1billion-$2.5 billion and several decades, respectively.
Companies subsequently commoditise and commercialise these entities, raking in millions in profits, typically at the expense of the same people whose taxes funded the fundamental research. There is something to be said for this model of drug and vaccine development, particularly for the innovation it fosters and the eventual competition that lowers prices, but we cannot deny the ‘double-spend’ it imposes on consumers — including governments — and the profit-seeking attitude it engenders among the companies developing and manufacturing the product.
Quantum computing may well define the next technological revolution together with more mature AI models. Topological quantum computing in particular — if realised well enough to compete with alternative architectures based on superconducting wires and/or trapped ions — could prove especially valuable for its ability to be more powerful with fewer resources. Governments justify their continuing sizeable expense on drug development by the benefits that eventually accrue to the country’s people. By all means, quantum technologies will have similar consequences, following from a comparable trajectory of development where certain lines of inquiry are not precluded because they could be loss-making or amount to false starts. And they will impinge on everything from one’s fundamental rights to national security.
But Hensinger’s opinion indicates the responsibility of developing this technology has been left to the private sector. I wonder if there are confounding factors here. For example, is Microsoft’s pursuit of a topological qubit the exception to the rule — i.e. one of a few enterprises that are funded by a private organisation in a sea of publicly funded research? Another possibility is that we’re hearing about Microsoft’s success because it has a loud voice, with the added possibility that its announcement was premature (context here). It’s also possible Microsoft’s effort included grants from NSF, DARPA or the like.
All this said, let’s assume for a moment that what Hensinger said was true of quantum computing research in general: the lack of state-led development in such potentially transformative technologies raises two (closely related) concerns. The first is scientific progress, especially that it will happen behind closed doors. In a June 2023 note, senior editors of the Physical Review B journal acknowledged the contest between the importance of researchers sharing their data for scrutiny, replication, and for others to build on their work — all crucial for science — and private sector enterprises’ need to protect IP and thus withhold data. “This will not be the last time the American Physical Society confronts a tension between transparency and the transmission of new results,” they added. Unlike in drug development, life sciences, etc., even the moral argument that publicly funded research must be in the public domain is rendered impotent, although it can still be recast as the weaker “research that affects the public sphere…”.
The second is democracy. In a March 2024 commentary, digital governance experts Nathan Sanders, Bruce Schneier, and Norman Eisen wrote that the state could develop a “public AI” to counter the already apparent effects of “private AI” on democratic institutions. According to them, a “public AI” model could “provide a mechanism for public input and oversight on the critical ethical questions facing AI development,” including “how to incorporate copyrighted works in model training” and “how to license access for sensitive applications ranging from policing to medical use”. They added: “Federally funded foundation AI models would be provided as a public service, similar to a health care private option. They would not eliminate opportunities for private foundation models, but they would offer a baseline of price, quality, and ethical development practices that corporate players would have to match or exceed to compete.”
Of course, quantum computing isn’t beset by the same black-box problem that surrounds AI models, yet what it implies for our ability to secure digital data means it could still benefit from state-led development. Specifically: (i) a government-funded technology standard could specify the baseline for the private sector to “match or exceed to compete” so that computers deployed to secure public data maintain a minimum level of security; (ii) private innovation can build on the standard, with the advantage of not having to lay new foundations of their own; and (iii) the data and the schematics pertaining to the standard should be in the public domain, thus restricting private-sector IP to specific innovations.[1]
[1] Contrary to a lamentable public perception, just knowing how a digital technology works doesn’t mean it can be hacked.
CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat said the recent remarks on freebies by Supreme Court Judge Justice B.R. Gavai fails to recognise the struggle of India’s labouring class for survival in the face of “rampant unemployment, precarious nature of work and low wages”.
In an open letter to Justice Gavai on Friday (February 14, 2025), Ms. Karat urged him to reconsider his comments as they could prejudice social opinion against those receiving social benefits from the government.
Justice Gavai made the remarks on Wednesday while hearing petitions on the shortage of night shelters for the urban homeless in the national capital. During the hearing, he had asked whether untrammelled freebies lull the poor into a parasitic existence, depriving them of any initiative to find work, join the mainstream, and contribute to national development.
Kudos to Brinda Karat for raising this counterargument and for asking Justice Gavai to reconsider his views. Aside from “prejudicing social opinion”, Justice Gavai’s observation also goes against a fact that social scientists and behavioural economists alike have repeatedly established: the poor don’t want to stay poor, they don’t like to stay poor. This extends to the degree to which they are comfortable about leading a “parasitic existence” as well as vexes the allegation that they are devoid of initiative.
This is why, Justice Gavai may be interested in being reminded, researchers and policymakers have found the most effective welfare scheme in various countries worldwide to be simply giving poorer people money to spend as they see fit. Studies of social welfare schemes in low- and middle-income countries have even found that giving households money to spend doesn’t affect whether their working-age members want to work.
If Justice Gavai’s concern is that the poor stay poor and don’t seem to be able to exit poverty, he should redirect the force of his words at how easy it has become to slip into destitution in contemporary India and at initiatives that render direct benefit transfer schemes — including handing out money — more frictionless.
I have access to the premium version of ChatGPT, and every day I ask it a few questions about concepts in physics that I’d like to know more about. Yesterday, for example, I learnt the difference between quenching and annealing…
Is there an opposite phenomenon for quenching?
Yes! The opposite of quenching would be processes that allow gradual relaxation, equilibration, or annealing rather than rapid freezing. Some terms that describe this include:
Annealing (Thermal and Simulated) — In metallurgy and physics, annealing is the process of slow cooling a material so it can reach a more ordered, lower-energy state.
In simulated annealing (used in optimization and machine learning), a system is gradually "cooled" to allow it to find a global minimum rather than getting trapped in local minima (which can happen in quenching).
Slow Equilibration / Adiabatic Processes — Unlike quenching, which often leads to metastable states, slow thermalization allows the system to reach true equilibrium.
Adiabatic processes in quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics allow the system to evolve slowly so that it remains in a well-defined state.
Supercooling vs. Slow Nucleation — When liquids are rapidly cooled (quenched), they might bypass crystallization and form a glass. In contrast, if cooling is slow, proper nucleation occurs, leading to a well-ordered crystal.
Self-Organization & Aging in Complex Systems — Some complex systems exhibit aging (e.g., glasses, biological systems) where they slowly evolve toward an ordered or more stable configuration over time, in contrast to being frozen in a quenched state.
… and later about the Weierstrass function.
Please explain the Weierstrass function to me.
The Weierstrass function is a famous example of a continuous but nowhere differentiable function. It is defined as:
[ W(x) = \sum_{n=0}{\infty} an \cos(bn \pi x) ]
where:
( 0 < a < 1 ) (controls decay)
( b ) is an odd integer ( > 1 ) (controls frequency)
The product ( ab > 1 + \frac{3\pi}{2} ) ensures nowhere differentiability.
Key Properties
Continuous Everywhere — Despite its wild oscillations, ( W(x) ) is continuous for all ( x ).
Nowhere Differentiable — No well-defined slope exists at any point, making it an early example of a function that is continuous yet "rough" at all scales.
Self-Similarity (Fractal-like Behavior) — Since it is constructed as an infinite sum of cosine waves with exponentially increasing frequencies, it exhibits self-similarity: small-scale structures resemble larger-scale patterns.
Role in Mathematics — This function was introduced by Karl Weierstrass in the 19th century as a counterexample to the assumption that "continuous functions are differentiable almost everywhere."
I have found using ChatGPT in this way to be a valuable learning tool, and I imagine there are already people out there who are repackaging instances of ChatGPT to be autonomous ‘teachers’ for students looking to learn something.
One of my jobs at The Hindu is to get explanatory articles for concepts in (pure) science. I recently attempted one on amplifiers, which required me to explain the working of a NPN bipolar junction transistor, a device I’d until then been happy to leave behind in my high school classroom. I turned to ChatGPT, asking for a visualisation of the transistor, and it obliged. I’m a visual learner and having access to the tool made a big difference.
How does an NPN bipolar junction transistor work? Please explain with a visualisation.
An NPN bipolar junction transistor (BJT) is a type of transistor that consists of three layers of semiconductor material: two n-type layers (emitter and collector) separated by a p-type layer (base). It is commonly used for switching and amplification.
How an NPN Transistor Works
Structure & Terminals:
Emitter (E): Heavily doped n-type region that emits electrons.
Base (B): Thin, lightly doped p-type region.
Collector (C): Moderately doped n-type region that collects electrons.
Operation Principles:
When a small current is applied to the base-emitter junction (forward-biased), it allows a larger current to flow from the emitter to the collector.
The base-emitter junction acts as a diode, allowing electrons to flow into the base.
Most electrons injected from the emitter into the base are swept into the collector due to the voltage difference.
Visualization
Collector (C)
|
|
|----|----|
| N | <-- Collector (N-type)
|----|----|
|
|----|----|
| P | <-- Base (P-type, thin and lightly doped)
|----|----|
|
|----|----|
| N | <-- Emitter (N-type, heavily doped)
|----|----|
|
|
Emitter (E)
Current Flow:
Electrons flow from Emitter (E) to Collector (C).
A small Base (B) current controls a much larger Collector (C) current.
I_B (Base Current) is small but controls I_C (Collector Current), which is large.
( +V_C ) | | [C] ← Electrons | | | [B] → Small Base Current (I_B) | | | [E] → Large Electron Flow (I_E) | ( GND )
Working Mechanism:
The Base-Emitter junction is forward-biased, allowing electrons to move from Emitter to Base.
Most electrons are swept into the Collector due to the reverse-biased Collector-Base junction.
A small Base current (I_B) controls a large Collector current (I_C), amplifying the input signal.
I have a background in engineering plus more than a decade’s experience in spotting yellow/red flags in scientific papers, and I imagine anyone with these skills will have an easier time navigating ChatGPT’s answers. For anyone else that lacks these skills, all we need is a guarantee from OpenAI that the tool doesn’t hallucinate or that it hallucinates in specific contexts, and definitely not above a certain rate.
In case you haven't watched the film and don't plan to, you can check out the plot description on Wikipedia.
Maharaja was bad for two reasons.
First, good films don’t lie to their viewers. Maharaja did in two instances. It lied when it led viewers to believe the Selvam/Sabari storyline was contemporaneous to the Maharaja/Lakshmi storyline. Towards the film’s middle it slowly dawns on us that something’s off, followed by the epiphany that the Selvam/Sabari storyline concluded before the Maharaja/Lakshmi storyline began. What was the purpose of this switch? I can’t think of any beyond the film introducing a twist for a twist’s sake, which is disingenuous because it had no other point to it. It's a sign of the film taking its viewership for granted.
It lied the second time it becomes clear Nallasivam was the fourth person in Maharaja's house that day and we realise an ostensibly comical passage of the film has become doubly redundant — until we stop and think: what was the purpose of the film depicting Inspector Varadharajan’s phone calls at night to the various crooks asking them to take the responsibility for pilfering the dustbin?
Varadharajan would have known by then that Nallasivam was the culprit. Even if one of the crooks he phoned had agreed to own up to the crime, Varadharajan’s plan (previously hidden from the audience) to deliver Nallasivam to Maharaja’s house would have imploded. Alternatively, if Varadharajan was only fake-calling the crooks, why did we have to spend time watching their reactions? Maharaja offers this passage as comic relief, yet such relief wasn’t necessary. In fact the film could have done itself a favour by presaging Varadharajan’s plot against Nallasivam instead of blindsiding viewers at the climax.
This review benefited from inputs from and feedback by Srividya Tadepalli.
Second, the sexual violence in the film is gratuitous. It was reminiscent of Visaranai (2015) and parts of Paatal Lok (2020). It was trauma porn. We realise Selvam, Dhana, and Nallasivam grievously injured Jothi before Nallasivam raped her multiple times. Rather than simply and directly establish that the three men perpetrated sexual violence, Maharaja split up each instance of Nallasivam raping the girl into a separate scene. We sit there and watch Nallasivam perform the act of seeking Selvam’s ‘permission’, followed by Selvam’s drawling response, and Nallasivam making excuses for what he’s about to do.
It’s possible Maharaja’s writers presumed they had to lay the groundwork to justify Varadharajan’s and Maharaja’s actions later. And yet they fail when they refuse to admit a rape once is heinous enough and then fail again when they conclude people who commit heinous crimes deserve vigilante justice.
Such justice is an expression of anger, an attempt to deter future crimes with violence. But we should know by now it fails utterly when directed against sexual violence, which erupts most often in intimate settings: when the perpetrator and the survivor are familiar with each other, more broadly when the men think they can get away with it. And most of all vigilante justice fails because it punishes once the (or a rumoured) perpetrator is caught, yet most perpetrators aren’t, which led to the dismal upwelling of voices during #MeToo. The sexual crimes we hear about constitute a small minority of all such crimes out there, which is why the best way to mitigate them has been to improve social justice.
Yet films like Maharaja persist with a vengeful narrative that concludes once the violence is delivered. I fear the only outcome might be more faith in “encounter” killings. Visaranai claimed to be fact-based but the brutality in the film served no greater purpose than to illustrate such things happen. If the film was responding to a fourth estate that had failed to highlight the underlying police impunity and the powerlessness of those at society’s margins to defend themselves, it succeeded — yet it also failed when it didn’t bother to attempt any sort of triumph, of spirit if not of will. That’s why Paatal Lok and in fact Jai Bhim (2021) were better. But Maharaja is cut from Visaranai’s cloth, and worse for being a work of imagination.
In fact, Maharaja has a ‘second’ climax during which we discover Jothi is really Ammu, Selvam’s biological daughter, and whom Maharaja has been raising since his daughter, his wife, and Selvam’s wife were killed in the same accident. There are some clues at the film’s beginning as to these (intra-narrative) facts but they're ambiguous at best and in fact just disingenuous — another lie like the other plot twist.
But further yet: why? So we can watch Selvam have his lightbulb moment when he realises Jothi was Ammu and feel bad about what he did? (This was also the climax of 2023's Iratta.) Or that men should desist from such crimes because they could be harming their own daughters? Or that viewers might be duped into thinking any kind of justice has been done when Jothi shames Selvam with boilerplate lines? Consider it a third failure.
It was a Sunday. Around 7 am, I was woken by the sound of an auto idling outside my house. It had one of those loud put-putting engines, and the driver had parked the vehicle there waiting for one of my neighbours to step out. The noise echoed sharply around my block and was audible from everywhere within my house three floors above. Just as I prepared to step out and have a word with the driver, the idling stopped.
Just across the road from my house is a vendor of construction materials. Its proprietor runs a loud business. His resupply trucks arrive in the dead of night to offload sand and bricks. During the day, his employees are often heard shouting at each other as they work. During the weekends, they bring out a wood-cutting machine that shrieks loudly as they use it for several hours in the afternoon.
As the day wears on, the occasional canine screaming match breaks out nearby. At just around 10 am, another neighbour up the street revs his silencer-less motorcycle up before leaving for wherever he does at 10 am every day. The hawkers turn up one by one, blaring their wares and services — tender coconut water, fresh vegetables, “sofa repair”, spices, flowers, iron-whetting, and of course the kabadiwalas — in recorded voices blaring through small yet boisterous loudspeakers. These sounds are all crisscrossed by horn and engine noises from other vehicles passing by.
Often the only way to find silence here is for the Sun to beat down hard. That way no one steps out in the afternoon. I don’t even find birds on the pea tree outside. That’s also a cruel thing to wish for, but even if it’s just a little cloudy, the hawkers keep coming and going. The pea tree is a popular local source of shade: come 4 pm and a bunch of Swiggy delivery guys gather underneath for a chat, maybe a glass of tea. Their voices can be comforting, a reminder that you’re around other people. When you’re looking for just a minute of silence, however, it's yet another irritant.
The day is a continuous drizzle of sounds but you’re probably thinking it’s an essential, even desirable part of city life — especially life in Chennai, with its oft-village-like vibes. But listening to them in isolation, as the government often seems to do, misses the point. There are of course the sounds we need, even desire: birds chirping at dawn, a fan creaking on a hot summer day, laughter from the neighbours' houses, children making their way to school (and the sounds of band practice in the distance), voice lifting into the wind from the tea stall nearby… One of my neighbours practices playing the flute at night and he's already very good at it. Another goes to bed listening to old Tamil film songs. I love them all.
These are sounds. Then there's noise. Imagine it is raining constantly, relentlessly where you are and then one day there’s a storm. You haven’t worn dry clothes in a long time. The storm subsides soon after yet the pitter-patter rain continues. I expect you’d be quite irritable and just wishing the Sun breaks out soon. Noise, constant noise is like this — sounds born of a social order that has long forgotten their intrusive nature. You don’t have a moment’s peace. Your ears, and heart and mind, are constantly responding to something. Unless you’re really, really good at spacing out or can afford noise-cancelling earphones, there is no escape.
Even so, it might have been easier to deal with if the drizzle was all there was, but no. The evenings are the worst. There are two temples nearby. On any auspicious day — and there are about a dozen in a single month — devotional songs blare on loudspeakers. If the day is particularly auspicious, there are motorised floats bearing large idols lit by hundreds of LED lamps that, for some reason, face straight ahead. On Vinayak Chathurthi, a few such lamps lit up every front-facing apartment in our building through thick curtains at 4 am. Almost every Sunday evening there’s devotional karaoke on loudspeakers. Their only grace is to wind up at 10.30 pm, except of course if the occasion is, again, particularly auspicious.
My house is near those of two well-known Kollywood actors and about 200 metres away from a Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam bigwig. There’s almost always a police car patrolling the neighbourhood, yet the cops never question the noise or when it begins or ends. Even on Vinayak Chathurthi, these weren’t the folks to respond when a loud drum-beating procession set off from the temple at 12.40 am. The devotees piped down only after two policemen paid them a visit after I'd given them a ring on phone numbers the Greater Chennai Police had tweeted.
Even on less auspicious days, the ordeal isn’t done yet. The users of our local public dustbin don’t segregate waste. When the trash-collection vehicle rolls around at 11.30 pm, the workers attach each bin to its handles, and the driver then has the mechanism smash the bin against the rim of the container to ensure the bin yields its jumble of contents no matter how mucilaginous they’ve become. That slow-mo bang-bang-bang is in fact how the whole neighbourhood knows it’s nearly midnight.
Then finally there’s quiet, unless of course another barking match hasn’t already broken out.
Deepavali is coming up, and since the first week of September I’ve been enveloped with dread. The noise from firecrackers in the city — whichever city — has graduated from being part fun, part nuisance to just harmful. The Supreme Court’s mandate to firecracker manufacturers and consumers to switch to ‘green’ crackers did nothing to mitigate the demand itself, which is to say the kind of pollutants entering the air has changed — from more to less toxic — but the quantities may not have.
The court required these green firecrackers to be less noisy as well, but the new noise range is ironically no less harmful. They emit an estimated 100-130 dB, whereas research has registered harmful effects due to noise from 50 dB onwards and often considers 120 dB to be the threshold of human hearing — the point from which more sound pressure on the ears leads to pain more than perception.
A meta-analysis of studies with people from Canada, Europe, Japan, and the UK reported in 2014 that every 10 dB increase in traffic noise hiked the risk of developing heart disease by 8%. In a statement published in 2016, the American Academy of Nursing called noise “a public health hazard”. Other studies have linked extended noise exposure to stress, anxiety, cognitive difficulties, and depression. Some small studies in Indian cities, including Chennai, Jammu, and Vadodara, have reported an elevated prevalence of hearing loss among traffic police and auto-drivers.
All these effects, but stress in particular, is compounded when people are exposed to loud sounds when they least expect it — such as in the middle of the day, near a place of worship or a school, or at any time after 10 pm. Likewise, a very loud noise that lasts only for a brief moment may not be reason enough for a complaint, but it could still damage humans’ auditory apparatus and send stress levels soaring, yet there are no noise-based sanctions when such events occur.
On September 4, the Government of Tamil Nadu sanctioned funds for a project to produce a “noise map” of four cities in the State with more than a million inhabitants: Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore, and Tiruchi. The project will install noise monitors near airports, railway stations, high-traffic roadways and intersections, and areas with industrial and construction activity, as well as in spots that require quiet, like near schools, places of worship, and hospitals.
Following the announcement, the Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) for Chennai, R. Sudhakar, told The Hindu that based on the project’s findings the city may adopt a system in which “decibel meters are installed at traffic signals. If noise levels exceed a certain threshold due to honking when the signal is red, the signal will reset and remain red for longer.”
I have every confidence in my compatriots to find ways to render such social engineering meaningless, if not counterproductive. What if there is a lone miscreant among the drivers waiting for a signal to change who wastes others’ time by blaring his horns at the last second? What if there is an ambulance or cop car that really needs to make its way to the front? The noise monitor may just falter in Chennai’s incessant heat and humidity. Or an informal market may erupt in each city for horns emitting sounds at frequencies that evade the monitor yet are still audible to vehicles nearby.
The State’s new noise-mapping exercise is (currently) restricted to permanent or semi-permanent sources of noise and doesn’t address the more common transient ones. Such sources include all those that haunt my neighbourhood and presumably most neighbourhoods in large cities. Their principal threat isn’t their isolated loudness per se — although that’s bad enough — but their interminability. By populating every moment with sound, they exacerbate the absence of quiet and heighten the consequences that other particularly loud sounds provoke.
Noise pollution in India is no joke but given the wildly varying realities with which the country often confronts its own laws, the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 are amusing. The Rules demarcate the hours of daytime (6 am to 10 pm) and nighttime (10 pm to 6 am) and four kinds of spatial areas. In daytime, the noise limit in industrial areas is 75, in commercial areas 65, in residential areas 45, and in “silence zones” 50.
In all cases the unit is dB(A) Leq, which has an important physical meaning. ‘dB’ stands for decibel, a unit that expresses not an absolute value but the ratio between two values. When used to measure the loudness of sound, a dB denotes how many times more a given sound is louder than the threshold at which human hearing begins (a sound pressure of 20 micropascal). The ‘A’ in brackets refers to the use of a weight scale that combines a given amount of loudness with a constant that represents the perception of the human ear. Leq means the decibel value is a time-average — but this isn’t equal to adding up all the dB(A) values and dividing by the number of values. Because the decibel is a logarithmic measure, computing the Leq requires us to convert the dB(A) figures to sound-pressure levels first, calculate their average, and finally convert back to dB(A).
This mathematical exercise throws up a crucial perspective. The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 allow people to register a complaint if some activity breaches the specific threshold by more than 10 dB(A) Leq. If, say, there is a loud sound of 80 dB(A) Leq for 20 seconds every minute, and this plays out for an hour, the average noise level comes to 75.22 dB(A) Leq in this period — which is just enough to lodge a complaint in a “silence zone”, a residential area or a commercial area, and not in an industrial area. But it will not be enough if the average is calculated throughout daytime. In any case, the police is unlikely to admit a complaint against the simple hawker responsible for that 20-second blip.
To make matters worse, Chennai and most other cities are haphazardly planned. Residential and commercial areas often spill into each other — assuming there has been a noise-wise zonation exercise. Even if they are chockablock, sounds carry over. It is thus a Kafkaesque challenge to register a complaint for violating the Rules unless the violation is altogether egregious. Even then, however, the damage to human (and animal) health is already done.
(The US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health recommends its Sound Level Meter app — simply called NIOSH SLM — for smartphones. It “ measures workplace noise to determine if workers are exposed to hazardous noise. The free app combines the best features of professional sound levels meters and noise dosimeters into one simple tool.”)
I spent many of my childhood years in my grandparents' house in T Nagar, opposite Ranganathan Street — a very crowded and noisy part of Chennai. There was always some sound around us. If it lapsed we'd know something was very wrong. It never did, of course. When I first travelled to Dubai, Sweden, and New York, I found the lack of ambient sounds unsettling, but over time I also got used to it, especially once I moved to Bengaluru in 2018, where my house was relatively secluded. Since then noises have frightened me, especially sudden ones, but I don't feel badly about it. In fact I'm happy I lost the ability to be okay with it, an ability repeatedly souped up by less-than-ideal living conditions normalised by others around me.
If there is noise everywhere in space and time, the question of who can afford quiet becomes important. When I lived in Delhi, it was readily apparent that only a certain class of people could access clean air and the benefits for well-being such access conferred. The air is on paper a part of the commons but in the national capital, especially during winter, there were only three ways to find clean air: live in the upper parts of a high-rise building, live near or in places with access to large green parks, or get an air-purifier or two. All of these things are expensive, so the poorer and the more marginalised had less access to clean air.
In much the same way, quiet is becoming synonymous in Chennai with the upper-class, upper-caste experience of life given that it requires homes located far from thoroughfares, sound-proofing material, and expensive consumer electronics. Even on the road, quiet exists inside cars but is lost to every other mode of transport. Many of us are familiar with parents allowing their children to throw loud and protracted tantrums on public transport, but if shushing them is taboo, what of those with the deafening cellphone ringtones, those who speak loudly no matter where they are, and those who see fit to watch videos on full volume while you’re trying to sleep on the next seat?
In a country in which pollution of some form is almost everywhere, noise pollution appears to be the most acceptable and tolerated. Deepavali is now less than a month away, but then it is also the storm amid the drizzle that just won’t abate.
Heidi Ledford had a tragic and powerful story published yesterday in Nature, about a team of scientists at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology racing to develop a CRISPR treatment for Uditi Saraf, a young girl whose brain was losing neurons due to a very rare, very aggressive genetic condition called FENIB. The story’s power comes from what it reveals about several facets of developing new treatments, looking for a cure for a rare disease, the importance of state support as well as control, the fact of the existence of neglected diseases, the demands made of clinical researchers, self-sufficiency in laboratory research infrastructure, and of course the cost of treatment. But most of all, it is a critical study of time. Uditi passed away four months after one of the researchers working on a CRISPR-based treatment for her told her parents they’d be ready with a solution in six. But even before her passing, there was time, there was no time, there was hurry, and there were risks.
Uditi’s disease was caused by a mutation that converts a single DNA base from a ‘G’ to an ‘A’. A variation on CRISPR genome editing, called base editing, could theoretically correct exactly this kind of mutation (see ‘Precision gene repair’). … But Rajeev and Sonam saw an opportunity for hope: perhaps such a therapy could slow down the progression of Uditi’s disease, buying time for scientists to develop another treatment that could repair the damage that had been done. The Sarafs were on board.
…
There were a lot of unknowns in the base-editing project. And in addition to the work on stem cells in the lab, the team would need to do further experiments to determine which base-editing systems would work best, where and how to deliver its components into the body, and whether the process generated any unwanted changes to the DNA sequence. They would need to do experiments in mice to test the safety and efficacy of the treatment. They also needed to get Ghosh’s facility approved by India’s regulators for producing the base-editing components.
Then there was the pandemic:
In December 2019, the Sarafs moved back to India. … Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and in January 2021, Uditi was hospitalized with severe COVID-19. She spent 20 days in the hospital and her health was never the same, says Sonam. Communication became increasingly difficult for Uditi and she began to pace the house incessantly, rarely even going to sleep. The Sarafs decided to speed up the base-editing project by funding a second team in India.
Developing treatments takes time. Uditi’s story was a one-off, a singular disease that few researchers on the planet were working on, so developing an experimental alternative based on cutting-edge medical technology was a reasonable option. And yet:
Meanwhile, Devinsky had petitioned a US foundation to devise a different experimental treatment called antisense therapy for Uditi. … The treatments didn’t work. And the experience taught Rajeev and Sonam how long it could take to get approval to try an experimental therapy in the United States. They decided Uditi’s base-editing therapy should also be manufactured and administered in India.
Uditi didn’t live long enough to receive treatment that could have slowed FENIB’s progression — hopefully long enough for researchers to come up with a better and more long-lasting solution. Now, after her death, the thinking and effort that motivated the quest to find her a cure has shifted to the future tense.
It will take years to establish the techniques needed to create rapid, on-demand, bespoke CRISPR therapies. Most people with these conditions don’t have that kind of time. … Rajeev has urged Chakraborty to finish the team’s studies in mice, so that the next person with FENIB will not have to wait as long for a potential treatment. … “We are not really trying as aggressively as we did earlier,” he says.
When the health of a loved one is rapidly deteriorating, the clock of life resets — from the familiar 24-hour rhythms of daily life to days that start and end to the beats of more morbid milestones: a doctor’s visit, a diagnostic test result, the effects of a drug kicking in, the chance discovery of a new symptom, an unexpected moment of joy, the unbearable agony of helplessness. The passage of time becomes distorted, sometimes slow, sometimes too fast. People do what they can when they can. They will take all their chances. Which means the chances they encounter on their way matters. Technological literacy and personal wealth expand the menu of options. The Sarafs knew about CRISPR, had a vague idea of how it worked, and could afford it, so they pursued it. They came really close, too; their efforts may even prove decisive in pushing a cure for FENIB past the finish line. For those who don’t know about CRISPR-based therapies and/or don’t have the means to pay for it, the gap between hope and cure is likely to be more vast, and more dispiriting. And one chapter of the Sarafs’ journey briefly threatened to pull them to this path — just as it relentlessly threatens to waylay many families’ laborious pursuits to save the lives of their loved ones:
The Sarafs studied what they could find online and tried the interventions available to them: Indian ayurvedic treatments, a ketogenic diet, special schools, seeing a slew of physicians and trying out various medicines.
Ledford’s narrative doesn’t get into who these physicians were, but let’s set them and the special schools aside. Just this morning, I read a report by Rema Nagarajan in The Times of India that a company called Natelco in Bengaluru has been selling human milk even though its license was cancelled two years ago. Specifically, the FSSAI cancelled Natelco’s license in 2021; a few months later, Natelco obtained a license from the Ministry of AYUSH claiming it was selling “Aryuevdic proprietary medicine”. When the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India complained to the ministry, the ministry cancelled its license in August 2022. Then, a month later, the Karnataka high court granted an interim stay on this cancellation but said the respondents — AYUSH representatives in Karnataka, in the Karnataka licensing authority or from the ministry — could have it vacated. They didn’t bother. In June 2023, the ministry filed objections but nothing more. It finally moved to vacate the stay only in March this year.
Natelco’s case is just one example. There are hundreds of companies whose charade the Ministry of AYUSH facilitates by allowing specious claims ranging from “Ayurvedic toothpaste” to calling human breast milk “Ayurvedic medicine”. This is not Ayurveda: very few of us know what Ayurveda is or looks like; even Ayurveda itself doesn’t belong in modern medicine. But together with the FSSAI, the food regulation body notorious for dragging its feet when the time comes to punish errant manufacturers, and a toothless advertisement monitoring regime, the Indian food and beverages market has provided a hospitable work environment for quacks and their businesses. And inevitably, their quackery spills over into the path of an unsuspecting yet desperate father or mother looking for something, anything, that will help their child. When faced with trenchant criticism, many of these business adopt the line that their products are not unsafe. But they are terribly unsafe: they steal time to do nothing with it, taking it away from a therapy or a drug that could have done a lot. Such cynical alternatives shouldn’t be present anywhere on any family’s path, yet the national government itself gives them a license to be.
Featured image credit: Sangharsh Lohakare/Unsplash
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