Has Darwin Failed?

This year is a year for a double celebration - in science.

• 150 years since Charles Darwin published his "The Origin of Species"

• 400 years since Galileo turned his telescope towards the skies and changed man's concept of the world and himself.

Both brought man down from the pedestal he had placed himself on. There are debates about who did more in that direction. Galileo showed that we are not the centre of the Universe and Darwin showed that god did not create man after his own image.

In honour of these two events, there are many interesting articles in the press. I came across one of them and decided to translate it for myself. I did and here it is for your reading pleasure - hopefully.

The Original German Article from Spiegel Online: Ist Darwin Gescheitert?

My liberal translation of it: Has Darwin Failed?

Zamana Badal Gaya

This has been bothering me a long time.

Indra Nooyi is awarded the Padma Bhushan. Pullella Gopichand, the Padmashri.

Wondering what the connection is?

Nooyi is the CEO of a company that is actively contributing to the ticking time bomb of diabetes in India. The products of her company symbolises imprudent consumption. It uses water that is scarce and converts into a drink that has no benefits, except to the people who make it and sell it.

Pullela Gopichand, a fine human being and a great achiever, refused to endorse some Cola, perhaps even Pepsi. The offer must have been lucrative and hard to resist, to anyone, except Pullela.

Our omniscient government deems it fit to honour her and not him.

This has been boiling inside me from the day Nooyi's award was announced. The anger or frustration was so much that I did not blog it. Today the nudge from a friend finally made me write this. Thanks friend!

Pragmatism

I was reminded of
Cromwell's admonition
To his troops,
"Put your trust in god,
But, keep the powder dry",
When I saw
The three spikes
Of a lightning arrestor
Atop the tall tower
Of a house worship

Mera Bharat Mahan

I was watching some “nature” channel on TV and the programme was on snakes, cobras in particular. It took us to various lands and showed us the different species of cobras in those lands.

The location shifted and there were huge boulders and the presenter was walking on them towards a snake. I could see that there were inscriptions on the rock. No, not the type that would interest an epigraphist. More recent graffiti and quite large. I tried to read what was written and at the back of my mind derived some satisfaction that it was not only in our country that people leave their (ugly) mark on otherwise beautiful rocks.

My satisfaction was short lived.

That new country turned out to be, you guessed it, India.

Dedication

I am living in the present house for more than a year. I had not seen the design of the gate of my next door neighbour at all. Rather, I had not observed it at all.

Here is the picture of that gate.

“What is special?”, you might say. Look closely. What does the white line represent? If you have had any brush with statistics, you will recognise it as the Normal Distribution curve or in the more general parlance the Bell Curve.

The owner’s profession? An expert on Statistical Quality Control. This is the gate of the house of (now late) Mr. Srinivasan. He had a Master's degree in Statistics. He once told me that he had trained some top people in the company I worked for – for nearly 20 years – Kirloskar Electric. When I left that company, I was the head of Quality Assurance for one of its units, Unit IV, Mysore, hence my interest in Statistics.

When I told Mr. Srinivasan about myself, he presented me some books written by him, one of them on Quality Control. You could take a look at his book here: Managing Quality: Concepts and Tasks By N S Sreenivasan, V Narayana. After retirement, he wrote some more books - on self development and he gave me copies of those too. One of them is "vyaktitva sudhaaraNe" published by saahitya sindhu prakashana.

Alas, he is no more.

Happy New Year

I had taken a hiatus to study for an examination. Now I am back but, without even attending the examination. For various reasons, I decided not to take the examination at all this time. Now I am back with blogging, among other things.

Now I have to prepare for the exams again, either during March/April 2009 or November/December 2009. Inshallah!

Many of my friends will ask me where that last word came from. (This is almost like the time when E M S Namboodiripad said “God only knows” in the Kerala assembly. Some people took him to task. How could he say that, after calling himself an atheist? EMS replied, “When I say god only knows, I mean no one knows”.) It is only an expression of uncertainty and nothing more. As someone said, "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future" – variously attributed to Churchill and Mark Twain among others.

Let me end with some forwarded e-mail humour.

God had enough and decided to end the world. He decided to announce this to the world through some really powerful people. He chose George W Bush, Hu Jintao and Bill Gates and told them. They in turn told the others.

Bush: I have good news and bad. Good news is that there is a God, as I always said. The bad news is that he is going to end the world.

Hu: I have bad news and worse. We were wrong. There is a God and he is going to end the world.

Gates: I have good news and better news. Good news is that there is a God. But then, we don’t have to release updates of Windows Vista.