How the Modern School man evolved to its present form

Press releases are usually dull, unreadable, Inbox-cluttering things, but every now and again I get one that is so magnificent in its terribleness that it makes me want to pirouette around the room, clutching a cushion to my chest, singing "Quando Quando Quando". Consider merely the following mail subject:

"Book Launch: By Rohan Shroff, 17 Old Boy, Modern School: The Origin of Species"
 

The interest is piqued immediately. Is "17 Old Boy, Modern School" an address ("Old Boy" being the name of the building where the embalmed bodies of this school's alumni are stored) or were they perhaps trying to say "17-year-old boy"? Also, the title of that book - surely he isn't passing off a 150-year-old classic as his own?

These doubts are cleared when one reaches the main body of the release and learns that the book's title isn't actually "The Origin of Species" (the PR guys got confused, and would you blame them?) - it's the much more elegant "The Species of Origin?". That's right, with a question mark at the end.
 

Now I quote:

A YOUNG MIND TRIES TO GRASP THE WORKINGS OF THE UNIVERSE

Challenging few of the aspects of Darwin’s theory, a book named “The Species of Origin?” is written in a very simple language by Rohan Shroff.Rohan Shroff, a student of Modern School, Barakhambha Road, has just given his +2 exams.

The focus of the book is on the creation of the universe and how the modern man evolved to its present form. The author accepts some of the views of the Darwin’s theory called the “The origin of species”, however, refutes some other views and hence has named his own book as “The species of origin” stating that some extraterrestrial species is responsible for the origin of species on the earth. Hence, the readers are requested to not hesitate from questioning the current beliefs or accepting the newly proposed one.

This book was inspired by the movie and book by Brandon Levon named ‘Old World Secrets the Omega Project Codes’.

This will be followed by the launch of Book by Dr.Geeta Shroff titled as "Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy Chronic Spinal Cord Injury Cases Descriptive Statistics”.

I have no intention of reading young Rohan's book (or the embryonic stem cell one, scintillating though that title is) but based on the synopsis I suspect what he's trying to tell us is that Charles Darwin was planted here by extraterrestrials. No doubt his book is full of excellent evidence for this thesis, carefully accumulated over 12 years of tiffin breaks and profound thought.

Archdeacons and earthworms: Charles Darwin, the good novelist

Enchantment, Utopia, epiphany, sublime insight – the grand words of Romanticism are not Darwinian words. (In fact, they never occur anywhere in his writing.) Slight, small, varied, struggle, helpful, hopeful, natural, selection, modification (not revolutionary change) – these are the words of Darwinism, and they have become the words of liberalism. By giving us a new set of words, Darwin changed our minds.

Extended essays don’t usually make compelling books, but Adam Gopnik’s Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life is an exception. It began life as two long pieces Gopnik wrote for the New Yorker last year, and some critics might say the very premise of those essays was a little dubious: they were based on the coincidence that two great men – Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, whose collective achievements altered the way human beings think about their relationship with other species as well as with other races of people – were born on the same day in 1809.

But Gopnik, to his credit, doesn't over-romanticise this coincidence of birth. “Coincidence is the vernacular of history, the slang of memory,” he writes, “the first strong pattern where we begin to search for subtler ones.” Angels and Ages examines many aspects of the life and work of Darwin and Lincoln, but the one I found most interesting was the observation that both men had a lucid, direct writing style that was the perfect conduit for the (radical for their times) ideas they needed to express. Alone among major scientists of his time, Darwin wrote books that an amateur reader in the 21st century can understand and enjoy (I’m currently halfway through The Voyage of the Beagle), while Lincoln's writing was marked by what Gopnik calls a “liberal eloquence” even though his profession required him to deal in rhetoric. Their styles can be seen as natural offshoots of their personal qualities, including clarity of thought and the questioning spirit.

I’ve been very interested in Darwin’s life and work for some time, and I thought the outstanding passages in Angels and Ages were the ones where Gopnik analyses him as a writer – even comparing his work to some of the great novelists of his time.

Turning the pages, we realise that Darwin, the greatest Victorian sage, does not write like a Victorian sage. He writes like a Victorian novelist ... [his] prose is calm and exact and, in its way, witty – not aphoristic, but ready to seize on a small point to make a large one, closer to George Eliot and Anthony Trollope than to his contemporary defenders ...

Gopnik shows how Darwin moved almost imperceptibly from studying small, seemingly insignificant things to raising large and difficult questions about the workings of the natural world, and how – importantly – he did this in an almost diffident way, without ever beating the reader over the head with his knowledge; how he anticipated many of the objections that could be made to his theories and pre-empted his critics by raising those points himself (and occasionally expressing self-doubt).

Little wonder that Gopnik says if he had to pick a single book “to sum up what was great and rich in Charles Darwin – a book to place alongside Middlemarch and Phineas Finn and Through the Looking Glass and Great Expectations”, it would be not his obviously important works but the almost oddball On the Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, which Darwin published near the end of his life. Here was a book with an apparently narrow subject (the title tells the story), which ends up demonstrating that even a “lowly” creature like an earthworm can play a very important part in the history of the world, given enough time.

I love this passage, which likens Darwin’s methods in On the Origin of Species to the Barchester novels of Anthony Trollope:

... Both Trollope and Darwin work in the mock-epic mode: the acts of very small and humble and comic creatures, archdeacons and earthworms, are shown to be not just illustrative of heroic and cosmic workings but an aspect of them. Trollope’s Barchester is a smallish place, but its acts are not diminutive; every kind of passion and betrayal and tragedy can be found within those narrow, provincial precincts. Archdeacon Grantly is a Greek hero and Mrs Proudie as big as Clytemnestra if we pay them the right kind of attention. England’s pastures are small, and its kennels cosy, but for Darwin they contain the keys to all creation ...

... Darwin had the gift – the gift of any good novelist – of making the story sound as if it just got pushed out by the descriptions. The plot seems to grow out of his observations rather than being imposed by his will; in reality, the plot came first, as it usually does.

In the reviewer's parlance, it might be said that Darwin, like the best novelists, was adept at "showing rather than telling".

P.S. While on great thinkers who expressed themselves lucidly, consider this quote from Mahatma Gandhi’s editor K Swaminathan:

Gandhi’s literary style is a natural expression of his democratic temper. There is no conscious ornamentation, no obtrusive trick of style calling attention to itself. The style is a blend of the modern manner of an individual sharing his ideas and experiences with his readers, and the impersonal manner of the Indian tradition in which the thought is more important than the person expounding it. The sense of equality with the common man is the mark of Gandhi’s style and the burden of his teaching.

Scattered thoughts on Inherit the Wind

Even when you’re aware of the extent of Christian fundamentalism in America, it’s surprising to read this news item about the British film Creation not finding distributors in the US because Charles Darwin and evolution are still considered loaded subjects. I was talking recently with a friend about religious intolerance/sensitivity in India probably being greater today than it was 50 years ago, when a revered prime minister was known to be agnostic; today, it’s highly doubtful that an Indian PM or a state chief minister (in north or central India at least) would be able to criticize organised religion or the idea of a personal God as sharply as Nehru did in Discovery of India (a book that was recommended reading for the country’s youngsters). Perhaps this is true of the US too.

A few days ago I re-watched a favourite old film, Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind, about the trial of a schoolteacher arrested for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The movie is based on the real-life Scopes Trial of 1925 and it stars one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors, the 60-year-old Spencer Tracy, as a rationalist lawyer who defends the schoolteacher, fiercely challenges literalist interpretations of the Bible and refers to the Book in a decidedly offhand manner. In light of recent developments, this film seems more topical and bolder than ever.

Stanley Kramer (whose work I wrote about in this post) wasn’t renowned for cinematic inventiveness – his films were mainly issue-based, with lots of dialogue – but Inherit the Wind opens with a sinister, visually striking scene, as the camera draws back from the Hillsboro Courthouse. A group of men silently walk across deserted streets, the opening credits appear and the soundtrack plays the gospel song “Give Me That Old-Time Religion”, its lyrics a paean to unquestioning belief:

That old-time religion...
If it’s good enough for Joshua,
It’s good enough for me
If it’s good enough for dad and mother,
It’s good enough for me...

The men are joined by a reverend and there’s something menacing about the group – they’re like a sheriff's posse in a Western, heading in single formation for a shootout, or to haul in a notorious criminal. It turns out that this isn’t far from the truth, except that the “criminal” in question is the mild-mannered teacher Bertram Cates, and his crime is explaining Darwin’s theory to his students and encouraging them to think for themselves.

For townsfolk living in America’s “Bible Belt”, such an act is intolerable. It’s also against the law that states that nothing that contradicts the Bible’s version of Creation can be taught in a school. The incident draws countrywide attention and gets politicized; the veteran conservative politician Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) is called in to prosecute Cates, while the liberal-rights champion Henry Drummond (Tracy) leads the defence. For the duration of the trial, the town turns into a carnival, with barkers sitting about displaying chained monkeys to people and handing out placards that say “I’m not descended from no ape!” and “Don’t monkey with us”. Meanwhile, inside the courthouse, the two men go hammer and tongs at each other. “Is nothing holy to you?” asks the exasperated Brady at one point. “Yes. The individual human mind,” replies Drummond. “In a child's power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘amens’ and ‘holy holies’ and ‘hosannas’.”

“An idea,” he continues, “is a greater monument than a cathedral.” This is the nub of the film – Drummond’s impassioned defence of the schoolteacher’s right to think and question, and to encourage others to do the same. "The Bible is a good book," he says, "but it is not the only book."

More than one critic has said that Inherit the Wind scores an easy victory against Creationists by turning Brady – the exemplar of the religious fundamentalist – into a soft target, a caricature. My two responses to this: 1) Anyone who sincerely believes that the earth was created at 9 AM on October 23rd, 4004 BC, and who tries to throw someone else into jail for teaching an alternate theory, is already a "caricature" beyond anything that the drunkest scriptwriter can create (also see Poe’s Law, which states that a parody of a religious fundamentalist can be indistinguishable from the real thing), and 2) Though Brady is deservedly portrayed as a pompous, closed-minded old fool in the courtroom scenes where he gives speeches and stirs up the general public sentiment, the film spares time to show shades to his character. One of the most moving scenes in the film is the one where he quietly admonishes a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher for being too harsh on his daughter (though again, his objection is voiced in Biblical terms): "I know you speak from the great zeal of your faith,” he says, “but it is possible to be over-zealous, to destroy that which you ought to save, so that nothing is left but emptiness...He that troubleth his own house will inherit the wind.”

The other great sequence in this vein – and I insist that it's great, even though it plays like a scene that was carefully designed to give two giants of American acting a non-antagonistic moment together – is the one where Drummond and Brady sit together on two rocking chairs late one evening, more old friends reliving the past than courtroom adversaries. "Why is it that you’ve moved so far away from me?" asks Brady. "Maybe it’s you who moved away by standing still," Drummond says laconically. Understanding the implication of this remark, Brady replies that he has no time for “progress” if it means abandoning God. Then he gets reflective, and you see a shadow moving beneath the surface of the Bible-thumper. "These are simple people," he says, “they are poor, they work hard and they need to believe in something ...something beautiful...something more perfect than what they have, like a golden chalice of hope.” (It's an argument often employed by those who believe that religion is essential for the world; even if you don’t agree with the argument, you believe that Brady does.)

“In other words, they’re window-shopping,” snaps Drummond, and he gets the final word with a story about a beautiful rocking horse he had coveted as a child, which turned out to be made of rotting wood. “All shine and no substance, and that’s how I feel about your religion. As long as a prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it.”

March and Tracy are both superb in this scene (arguably even better than in their more flamboyant courtroom confrontations), which is all about two actors listening carefully to each other and reacting, with smiles, grimaces and nods of the head, rather than thinking about their own lines.

In praise of Fredric March

When two different acting styles – one subdued, the other loud – occupy the same frame, there's a kneejerk tendency in some circles to rate the former more highly, even when both performances are completely true to the characters being portrayed. Note: I'm not talking here about personal preference or sympathy for a character. It's one thing to prefer Amitabh's Jai over Dharmendra's Veeru because the former is quiet, intense and ultimately tragic while the latter is boisterous and gets his girl. But it's quite another thing to devalue Dharmendra's superb performance because you're confusing the unsubtlety of the character with that of the actor, or because Veeru's cartoonish romantic exploits don't pull at your heartstrings the way Jai's wooing of the widow does. (Longer post about Dharmendra in Sholay here.)

Fredric March's Brady in Inherit the Wind is a classic example of the sort of performance I'm talking about. It's unsubtle, it plays to the gallery, it's marked by very visible and repetitive character tics ... and it's utterly authentic. Brady is, above all, a showman: as a rabble-rousing politician who has run thrice for president and made numerous self-aggrandizing speeches over the decades, certain traits have become intrinsic to his personality, and March displays this masterfully. One of Brady’s defining mannerisms is when he thinks up a "witticism" (usually something quite banal) in response to something that has been addressed to him, and March's performance allows us to see the whole process: the light-bulb appearing over the man’s head, his “Aha!” moment, and how he ostentatiously says the words for maximum effect.

In his first scene, where he is addressing the adoring masses after arriving in Hillsboro, a man shouts out "We all voted for you, three times!" Brady initially just smiles and looks set to continue his speech, but then he does a sudden double-take, wags a finger at the man and says "I trust it was in three separate elections!" This is followed by a short laugh; it's hard to say whether this is because he's genuinely impressed by his own wit or because he's giving the audience their cue to laugh with him. You see the same thing on a number of other occasions, including when he tosses off the line “I am more interested in the Rock of Ages than in the age of rocks!”, in response to Drummond holding up a fossilized rock and asking him how old he thinks it is.

P.S. March is one of my favourite actors. He was hugely respected by critics and by his peers for his stage and screen work, but he never became part of the star system to the same extent as his contemporaries such as Tracy, Bogart and others did. For anyone interested in seeking out his work, these are some of my recommendations: Nothing Sacred (one of the best screwball comedies I’ve seen, co-starring the great Carole Lombard), A Star is Born (the first of many film versions of the story about an acting couple whose careers follow different trajectories), Death Takes a Holiday, The Best Years of Our Lives, An Act of Murder, The Iceman Cometh.

Climbing Mount Improbable with Richard Dawkins

I’ve been trying to fill a big gap in my reading – literature on popular science – and have been greatly enjoying some of Richard Dawkins’ earlier books, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow and The Blind Watchmaker among them. My introduction to Dawkins was through The God Delusion (old post here), which, unlike his popular-science writing, is a strong polemic about a very sensitive topic, and calculated to evoke extreme reactions. But the roots of many of its ideas can be found in his earlier work, which falls more properly into his field of specialisation (evolutionary biology).

Much of Dawkins’ writing is geared towards opening the reader’s eyes to the wonders of the natural world and the laws that made it what it is – and, by association, showing that you don’t need to believe in a higher power in order to be overwhelmed by the beauty of creation. In fact, The God Delusion gets its epigraph from a line plucked out of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, from a passage where Ford Prefect is bemused by the myths that have grown around a planet named Magrathea. “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” he asks himself. Variations on this theme runs through all of Dawkins’ writing – in Unweaving the Rainbow, for instance, he argues against the idea that explaining how things work (“unweaving the rainbow”, as the poet Keats put it) means taking the mystery and the poetry out of them.

My favourite among his books so far is Climbing Mount Improbable, a collection of essays that have been expanded from various lectures Dawkins has given about natural selection. “Mount Improbable” itself is the metaphor Dawkins uses to show that the illusion of design in living things is just that – an illusion – and that the incredible complexity we see in the natural world (however improbable it appears when we take it in all at once) can be explained with great economy by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Here, and in his other books, Dawkins has to repeatedly clarify that natural selection is not a matter of “chance” (a belief propagated by Creationists and advocates of intelligent design) but the end result of an unimaginably long accumulative process. In Climbing Mount Improbable, he uses the following analogy to explain this:

Mount Improbable rears up from the plain, lofting its peaks dizzily to the rarefied sky. The towering, vertical cliffs of Mount Improbable can never, it seems, be climbed. Dwarfed like insects, thwarted mountaineers crawl and scrabble along the foot, gazing hopelessly at the sheer, unattainable heights. They shake their tiny, baffled heads and declare the brooding summit forever unscalable.

Our mountaineers are too ambitious. So intent are they on the perpendicular drama of the cliffs, they do not think to look round the other side of the mountain. There they would find not vertical cliffs and echoing canyons but gently inclined grassy meadows, graded steadily and easily towards the distant uplands. Occasionally the gradual ascent is punctuated by a small, rocky crag, but you can usually find a detour that is not too steep for a fit hill-walker in stout shoes and with time to spare. The sheer height of the peak doesn't matter, so long as you don't try to scale it in a single bound. Locate the mildly sloping path and, if you have unlimited time, the ascent is only as formidable as the next step.

My initial acquaintance with this book was by way of the Pocket Penguin The View From Mount Improbable, which carries an excerpt about the evolution of that most intricate of organs, the human eye (an organ that apparently produced a “cold shudder” in Charles Darwin because he had doubts about whether its complexity could be fully explained by his theory). With the help of a marvelous series of diagrams done by his wife, the actress-illustrator Lalla Ward, Dawkins explains how eyes have evolved at least 40 times independently in various parts of the animal kingdom – from their most primitive forms in single-celled organisms billions of years ago (“...eyes so simple that they scarcely deserve to be recognized as eyes at all. It is better to say that the general body surface is slightly sensitive to light”) to the critical step that was the evolution of the lens.

The eye chapter (cheekily titled “The Forty-Fold Path to Enlightenment”) occupies a central position in Climbing Mount Improbable, but there are many other treasures in this book: among them, absorbing and detailed analyses of how wings and spider webs came into existence, and the spine-tingling final chapter ‘A Garden Inclosed’, about the astonishingly complex co-dependent relationship between a fig tree and the tiny wasps that live and die within the confines of the fruit (which Dawkins describes as “a flower garden turned inside out...and one of the wonders of the world”). In between all this, he also explains his use of computer biomorphs to artificially simulate the process of evolution. Other bits I enjoyed included the descriptions of the termite mounds – “insect skyscrapers” – that can be found in parts of Australia, and the feats of mimickry in the insect world, especially the startling achievement of the beetle that arches its abdomen backwards in order to superficially resemble a termite (Ward’s drawings are a big help here as well).

Dawkins’ great achievement is to make evolution and natural selection easy to understand, and even stimulating, for the layperson. His passion is truly contagious and his writing is free of distancing or hard-to-understand jargon, making it accessible to a layperson like myself. I think someone observed once that his writing has the effect of making readers feel smarter than they are. This is something I’ve experienced firsthand: if you were intimidated by the sciences when you studied them in school (as I was, at least from class 9 onwards), prepare to feel rejuvenated by the clarity with which R.D. explains things.

[The first chapter of Climbing Mount Improbable can be read here, though unfortunately it doesn’t include the diagrams. Suggestions welcome for more reading on these and related topics. I’ve read a few essays by Stephen Jay Gould – who disagrees with Dawkins over some of the finer points of evolutionary theory – as well as some Steven Pinker, Richard Feynman and Jared Diamond. Anything else that’s as accessible as the books mentioned in this post?]

Tigers in Red Weather

(Excerpts from an interview I did with author Ruth Padel, and a part-review of her new book; in this week’s Business Standard Weekend)

Journeys, literary and otherwise, must necessarily begin with a single step as the cliche goes. For scholar and poet Ruth Padel, that step was the painful end of a long relationship a few years ago. Suddenly adrift and desolate, she turned to a dormant interest in wildlife to help keep her mind occupied. The result: a two-year journey through the tiger reserves and jungles of India, China, Russia, Bhutan and many other countries.

One of the many remarkable things about the book, Tigers in Red Weather, that emerged from these travels is how it moves from being an intimate, very personal story into a magnificent study of an animal whose fate is more relevant than the world realises. Padel's journey may have begun as therapy for a broken heart - "I was being pulled towards the great animal solitary…Tigers are about surviving, alone" - but it soon turned into an obsession in its own right. Writing the book as part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-wildlife primer was a literary risk - it could easily have opened her to accusations of using an important topic to exorcise her own demons - but Padel pulls it off beautifully. "Mine was a journey of learning," she says, "and I wanted to root the reader in my own life to help provide a personal perspective."

If you're a layperson, with little or no knowledge about the issues surrounding tiger conservation today, you'll be drawn into the book for this very reason. More knowledgeable tomes on the animal have been written by men like Valmik Thapar and Ullas Karanth (both of whom feature in Padel's book) but they are so close to the subject, having spent so many years studying tiger conservation, that their work can be daunting for the casual reader. Tigers in Red Weather, on the other hand, is an exploration - from the simplicity of the writing and the careful articulation of things that experts would take for granted to the lovingly detailed index, which took Padel three weeks to put together. Throughout the book, we accompany Padel on her quest, learn with her, feel the wonder and dismay that she does. It’s comforting (even if much of what we learn isn’t).

Every country Padel travelled to has a unique set of problems. In India there is the depressingly familiar issue of corrupt middlemen and collusion between poachers and officials. Beginning her journey in the Panna reserve in Madhya Pradesh, Padel gradually learnt about the inefficiency that cripples the forest service. "There is no centralised body for wildlife," she says, "Some of the best scientific minds in the world are right here in this country but they end up persecuted when they try to make a difference." Like Ullas Karanth, whose move to radio-collar tigers – a reliable, modern method of monitoring wild animals - led to accusations that he was spreading cancer amongst them.

Even so, Karnataka, where Karanth operates, is relatively well off because of the strong network he has built across the state. "Similar networks are badly needed in places like Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh," Padel says. "People need to be trained at the lower levels. If you can have armed police guarding banks...well, forests harbour greater treasures."

In Russia the issue is one of political instability and of an enormous country struggling with too many internal conflicts to count. In China the tiger has traditionally been revered as a symbol of power but has simultaneously been betrayed like nowhere else. ("China is the black hole pulling in all dead tigers," Padel was moved to write.) This is where the greatest demand comes from: for tiger meat, tiger bones for dubious medicinal purposes, tiger skins for the nouveau riche, even tiger-whisker toothpicks! This is where grinning tourists get their adrenaline rushes by sitting atop bound and drugged beasts and posing for photos. This is also where denial has been turned into an art form. "If China is to be the economic model for the world, wilderness is doomed."

And everywhere, around the world but especially in poorer countries, there is the problem of apathy - human beings looking out for their own short-term interests without caring that tiger protection and forest conservation can only benefit them in the long-term. "Forests are protectors of the great rivers," says Padel. "The fall of civilisations through the ages - from Babylon down - can be traced to the destruction of forested land. Saving the tiger means saving everything in the ecosystem - right down to the smallest butterfly."

"But how does one expect a poor villager, who has children and grandchildren he has to feed now, to understand or care about the larger picture? And when the authorities themselves are too myopic and greedy to educate and help people, this becomes a losing battle."

Padel's own ability to see that larger picture can be traced, at least in part, to her genealogy: she is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, whose famous vision was that of balance and harmony in nature, and who helped us understand how the various parts of an ecosystem – humans and tigers included - interlock and sustain each other. But even this vision is easily misinterpreted. Traveling in China, Padel was perplexed by a Shanghai novelist's statement that Darwin represents human progress. "Darwin had made our relation to animals central to our vision of ourselves, made us see ourselves as connected to other animals," she writes, "If you take him to stand for human progress, that connection is lost." Later on the same trip, she was dispirited by a visit to the Jade Garden: "This was nature squeezed and planned, not the natural balance of animal and plant..."

Isn't it idealistic though to see the world today in terms of that grand vision? Hasn't human selfishness already tipped us too far over the edge? "But we have to try and save what there is left," Padel insists. "In India, for instance, less than 4 per cent of land is forested. Surely it isn’t much to ask that in just that territory the interests of the tiger should be allowed to override short-term human benefit?" Even this would be a sad compromise. A century and a half after Darwin dreamt of a vibrant, interdependent ecosystem, Padel herself will continue to see the tiger dreams she describes so vividly in her book, knowing that the wild tiger might soon exist in only those jungles of the imagination.