How Richard Dawkins might explain a tennis coincidence

[Did this for my Sunday Guardian books column]

“Look into a mirror for a lifetime,” said the poet-filmmaker Jean Cocteau, “and you see Death doing its work.” Having watched nearly half of the eleven-hour match that John Isner and Nicolas Mahut contrived to play at Wimbledon last year, I’d say no mirror is necessary.

If you follow tennis, even casually, you may have heard about the gasps of astonishment at the Wimbledon draw ceremony last week when Isner and Mahut were again drawn to play each other in the first round. This has opened the conspiracy-theory floodgates. Their 2010 match, soul-annihilating though it was, probably got more media coverage and public attention (especially outside sporting circles) than any Slam final. “Arranging” a sequel could be good for ticket sales – so was the draw rigged?

Personally I doubt it: the draw process is a transparent one and the ceremony very public. But the rhetorical question “What are the chances of such a thing happening just randomly?” continues to be asked by tennis fans everywhere – the implication being that this couldn’t have been a coincidence; that organisational (or occult) forces had to be at work.

Actually, the odds aren’t close to astronomical. I won’t bore you with the calculations, but keeping in mind that Isner and Mahut were both among 96 unseeded players, the chance that they would play each other works out to something like 1 in 140, or 0.7 percent. Improbable, yes, but hardly mind-boggling as these things go. Even if you calculate the chance of their meeting in the first round in successive years, you don’t get wildly unlikely numbers. (In fact, the coincidence of the same two players meeting in the 1st round in consecutive Wimbledons has occurred eight times since 1970.)

My favourite writings on the phenomenon of coincidences and how the human mind can get excessively excited about them are in Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, specifically in the chapters "Hoodwink'd with Faery Fancy" and "Unweaving the Uncanny". Dawkins begins with a simple enough incident: a four-digit personal code number issued to him by his college was exactly the same as the safety code he had just chosen for his bicycle lock. The probability of this happening is 1 in 10,000 – seemingly very large odds – but as he points out, “the number of people in the world is so large compared with 10,000 that somebody, at this very moment, is bound to be experiencing a coincidence at least as startling as mine. It just happens that today was my day to notice such a coincidence.”

Each ordinary day that you or I live through is an unbroken sequence or events, or incidents, any of which is potentially a coincidence. I am now looking at a picture on my wall of a deep-sea fish with a fascinatingly alien face. It is possible that at this very moment, the telephone will ring and the caller will identify himself as a Mr Fish. I'm waiting...

On another occasion his wife bought an antique watch as a gift for her mother, then discovered that the watch had her mother’s initials – “M.A.B.” – engraved on the back. Many people I know, if faced with this situation, would hasten to invoke supernatural causes (presumably because the invisible pink unicorn in the sky has nothing better to do with Her time than spring pleasant little surprises on randomly selected homosapiens), but Dawkins takes out the phone book, checks the frequency of names beginning with M, A and B and then sets about his calculations. It turns out that if each of the 55 million people in Britain bought an engraved watch, we could expect nearly 20,000 of them to experience a coincidence of this magnitude.

Much heft is added to Dawkins' argument by the concept of the PETWHAC (Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental), a term he coins to show how the pattern-seeking mind can make coincidences appear even more remarkable than they are. (If his wife had discovered the initials of her mother’s maiden name on the watch, or her own initials for that matter, it would have seemed just as impressive – but it would also mean a broadening of the PETWHAC, which would further increase the probability of a coincidence.) Public “mystics” and “psychics” dine out on this sort of gullibility and pattern-seeking all the time.

(More about the PETWHAC here)

Incidentally the title Unweaving the Rainbow comes from John Keats’ observation that science had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by “explaining” its colours. Dawkins’ response is that the natural world as revealed by scientific understanding can be beautiful and awe-inspiring. “Disarming apparently uncanny coincidences is more interesting than gasping over them,” he says. Whether or not you agree with him, I’d say analysing mathematical probabilities is much more interesting than watching another Isner-Mahut match. Even if you hate maths.

[Here's an old post on Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable. And a little more about Unweaving the Rainbow in the postscript of this post.]

Update: Just realised that the Serious Men post I linked to above was written on this day exactly a year ago - now there's another good coincidence for you! (And I swear it wasn't planned.)

A vindication of the rights of "brutes"

[Did this for my Sunday Guardian column. An earlier post about Lennox the dog here]

Imagine a group of people coming uninvited to your home, measuring the length of your nose or assessing the exact shade of your hair, and then using these attributes to decide that you must be taken away and locked up alone in a tiny cell – without any visiting rights for the people you love. Imagine that after nearly a year of this torture, a judge decrees that you be put to death. Now imagine (and since you’re a human reader, this will place stronger demands on your powers of empathy) that you have no language or means of communication with your captors, no idea why your world has become a living hell, and no sense of the possibility that things might ever get better.

For 11 months now, a docile dog named Lennox – a Bulldog-Labrador cross – has suffered exactly this fate in Northern Ireland. When the Belfast City Council decided that Lennox was a possible “Pit Bull type”, they took him away from his family, including a disabled 12-year-old girl for whom he was a companion, and locked him up – all because of an archaic, breed-specific legislation (BSL) that says Pit Bulls must be destroyed. BSL is based on the notion that certain dog breeds are insuppressibly dangerous, regardless of the environment they were raised in (in this case, a loving family and completely domesticated conditions). Speaking in human terms, this is dangerously close to the generalisations that have been offered as justifications for racism at various points in our history.

What does all this have to do with a books column? Well, the more I read about the Lennox case, with its mix of incompetence, prejudice and inhumanity, the more I think about the writings of Peter Singer, Jeremy Bentham and other ethical philosophers. Their work touches on subjects that are of vital importance to human morality, including our responsibilities – as the planet’s biggest-brained species – to those who are weaker than us. Singer, whose landmark book Animal Liberation was published in 1975, has made compelling arguments against “speciesism”, which he believes will one day be just as unacceptable as racism and sexism are today. “Despite obvious differences between humans and nonhuman animals,” he writes, “we share with them a capacity to suffer – and this means that they, like us, have interests.” This is an expansion of ideas expressed by Bentham as long ago as the early 1800s. One of the first proponents of animal rights, Bentham had argued that the benchmark (or “insuperable line”) for determining a creature’s welfare is not “Can it reason?” but “Can it suffer?”

That was a radical argument for an age when most humans didn’t have freedoms in the sense that we understand them today. During Bentham’s lifetime, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was satirised in a tract titled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, which mockingly wondered if Wollstonecraft’s arguments might not be applied to dogs, cats and horses too! Needless to say, in the centuries since, the sphere of acceptance has widened to include women as well as humans of all races and colours. But it can widen further: as Singer points out, one should always be wary of talking about “the last remaining form of discrimination”.

The dilution of religious certitudes and the publication of On the Origin of Species has helped us reassess our relationship with other life forms. In the post-Darwin world, no thinking person can crouch behind the idea that humans are “special” beings made in the image of God, and with complete dominion over “inferior” species. As Richard Dawkins points out in his essay “Gaps in the Mind”, any comforting assumptions about human superiority (and the consequent prioritising of our rights) would be blown out of the water if we had a chance to see all the countless intermediate creatures that link us with other species.

What we do have, to a greater degree than other animals, is the ability to reason and to take responsibility for our actions, and the senseless handling of the Lennox case should give any right-minded homo sapien pause for thought. I hope he’s freed soon.

(Details of the Save Lennox campaign here. Also see Peter Singer's "All Animals are Equal") 

Of upwardly mobile men and descending microbes

Manu Joseph’s debut novel Serious Men contains so many dryly funny moments that it’s difficult to hold up a single one as representative of the book’s tone. But take the scene where the veteran cosmologist Arvind Acharya is walking down a corridor in the Institute of Theory and Research with a young astrobiologist, Oparna. She’s in awe of the famous scientist and tries to make small talk with him.

“This corridor is endless,” she says – a safe enough ice-breaker, you’d think.

“That’s not true,” Acharya says tersely, and they continue walking in silence.

The joke isn’t underlined, it’s quietly slipped in, and it’s typical of the book’s matter-of-fact contemplation of people (in this case, a man of science who is too literal-minded to engage in casual chatter). Elsewhere we are told that once, when Acharya’s little daughter brought him a poem she had written titled “Infinite Stars in the Sky”, he ruined the moment for her by patiently explaining why the number of stars is not immeasurable, and introducing her to the much less poetic word “finite”.

In other words, Arvind Acharya is a serious man. He’s preoccupied with his work, with his firm ideas about the direction that scientific research should take, and impatient with colleagues who in his view are trying to make science glamorous for the lay-person – by sending out radio signals to contact anthropomorphic aliens, for instance. But Acharya has a magnificent obsession of his own: convinced that the real extraterrestrials are microbes that enter the Earth’s atmosphere on meteorites, he wants to send sterilised containers to a height of 41 km to catch them. (“If we find, say, a bacterium at that height, it will mean that he was coming down, not going up.”)

However, the science in this book is a pretext for other explorations. We see Acharya and the other scientists mostly through the eyes of Ayyan Mani, a lower-class, low-caste man, and as Ayyan himself puts it, “If you stare long enough at serious people they will begin to appear comical”. Ayyan works as Acharya’s personal assistant at the prestigious institute, but he lives in a single room in a giant chawl with his wife Oja and their 10-year-old son Aditya, and he has high ambitions. Sensing that the differences between the scientists will soon lead to a power struggle (he thinks of it as the “war of the Brahmins”) and that he might use this to his advantage, he spins an elaborate story about Aditya being a child prodigy. Further complications develop when the besotted Oparna starts making advances on Acharya.

What I liked about Serious Men is that though it has some obvious talking points – the class and caste struggle, social aspiration, the role of science in today’s world, the many ways in which human beings go about keeping themselves busy and rationalising their lives and ambitions – I never felt pressured to classify the book or to define what it’s “about”. It’s enough to enjoy Joseph’s sharp prose, to follow the characters around and to let themes and ideas gently float around your mind, like the descending microbes of Acharya’s fantasies.

Humour and perceptiveness are the twin strengths of this novel. Its knack for detached observation is visible right from the first page where Ayyan, strolling near the Worli seaface, contemplates a sea of humanity, and it never loses its drollness – though it comes close at times, when we are made privy to Ayyan’s bitterness about the peculiar injustices of the world: when he watches a shampoo commercial and sneers about privileged people who think hairfall is a big problem, or sees elite scientists deferring to foreigners (“the whites are the Brahmins of the Brahmins”), or wonders about the lives of rich men “who were nothing without their inheritances, yet dedicated to themselves a song called ‘My Way’ ”.

There is plenty of darkness in these passages when one steps back to consider it, but it doesn’t become too polemical because Joseph repeatedly finds a way to lighten the tone, and to do it in such a way that the original thought isn’t drowned out. A description of Ayyan’s black thoughts about the “moronic pride” of Indians who boast about the country’s glorious past is immediately leavened by a surreal speech where a scientist explains that the cries of slaughtered cows “go down to the core of the Earth through Einsteinian pain waves and cause seismic activity, especially after Muslim festivals”. Unexpected deadpan sentences (we are told of Oja that “the fear of raising a strange genius was eating her for some time”) are interspersed with moving passages such as the one where Ayyan and Oja, attending a quiz at their son’s school, stand on the periphery of a group of upper-class parents, knowing that they don’t quite fit in but reticently participating in the conversation, and acquiring validation when one of the other men recognises Ayyan as “the father of the genius”.

Much of the frisson derives from the gaping contrasts between the lives led by its protagonists. At one point Ayyan gets a call from the weeping Oja telling him that her cousin was burnt alive by her husband (and we are given a sense of how commonplace this sort of thing is in their immediate circle: she did not want to know how a woman looked after she was burnt. It was something every girl she knew had nightmares about when they were growing up), but Ayyan is simultaneously listening to two scientists discussing “correction terms” and “space-time geometry” as if it were the only thing that mattered in the world.

He wondered if there was a way he could tell Oja Mani how absurd were the occupations of these men and women who so easily frightened her. An old man wanted to search the atmosphere for microbes that were coming down from space. A young woman would soon study two bottles of air. This was what people did. This was their job. In the real world that lay outside the institute, it was even more weird. Majestic men went in cars, in the isolation of the back seat, studying laptops on their way to work where they would think of ways to fool people into buying cola, or a type of insurance, or a condom that had dots on it...

I thought the juggling of the stories of the three central characters was skilfully done. The Acharya-Oparna liaison could have been nothing more than a convenient plot-mover, but it gives us insights into their personal histories, notably when Acharya, in the newfound, liberating intimacy of this relationship, recalls a childhood incident – a brush with the idea of predestination – that forever changed his life. On one grand, absurdist level, all the people in this book (including Ayyan, the puppet-master) can be seen as comic figures, as all of us ultimately are – self-importantly serious about the things that personally matter to them, willing to scoff at the things that don’t. But they are also believable people, it’s possible to care about them, and that eventually is what makes Serious Men such a winning novel.

(Did a version of this review for Business Standard Weekend)

P.S. Here's an old post about a book that Serious Men reminded me of in a couple of small ways - Paul Torday's Salmon in the Yemen.

P. P.S. The story about Acharya, his little daughter and the “infiniteness” of stars made me think of this anecdote related by Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow:

I remember once trying gently to amuse a six-year-old child at Christmas time by reckoning with her how long it would take Father Christmas to go down all the chimneys in the world. If the average chimney is 20 feet long and there are, say, 100 million houses with children, how fast, I wondered aloud, would he have to whiz down each chimney in order to finish the job by dawn on Christmas Day? He’d hardly have time to tiptoe noiselessly into each child’s bedroom, would he, since he’d necessarily be breaking the sound barrier? She saw the point and realized there was a problem, but it didn’t worry her in the least. The obvious possibility that her parents had been telling falsehoods never seemed to cross her mind. She wouldn’t have put it in these words, but the implication was that if the laws of physics rendered Father Christmas’s feat impossible, so much the worse for the laws of physics.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression: it would be a mistake to read this story as Dawkins the cold-blooded rationalist bullying a little child into submission. In the chapter from which this anecdote is taken, he readily concedes that trusting credulity (including the belief in Santa Claus) is normal, healthy and desirable in a child; what he’s concerned about are the effects when the non-questioning spirit carries over into adulthood (as it does with an alarming majority of people). Unweaving the Rainbow, like most of Dawkins’ other popular-science books, is a wonderful exposition of the wonders of the natural world, and it makes science stimulating and fascinating.

But even so, I amuse myself by imagining the expression on the face of that little girl as Uncle Richard shares his calculations with her. What fun.

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?]

"Down with atheist values"

Predictably, religious leaders in Kerala have got their knickers in a knot over the contents of a school textbook that apparently “tries to inject atheist values into young minds”. And why? Well, because the textbook 1) encourages children not to flaunt their religion anywhere, 2) asks rhetorical questions such as “which religion would be worst hit in the event of a drinking water crisis, epidemic or earthquake?”, and 3) includes a story about parents telling a school headmaster that their child will be allowed to choose his own religion when he grows up.

Personally I’m impressed by this textbook – it makes a heck of a lot more sense than most of the ones I grew up with (which admittedly isn’t saying much; I did Commerce and Accounts in 10+2). But I can’t understand what the protesters are so vigorously objecting to. Let’s momentarily forget the whole hyper-sensitive religious-irreligious divide and simply examine each point on its own merits.

Point one. I propose that it makes perfect sense to ask children not to go about flaunting their religion. Unless you’re a closet child-hater who wants to see younglings killing each other in riots (since we all know what the eventual consequences of flaunting can be). I say let the poor dears grow up, suffer through at least 12 years of formal education and then kill each other in riots. It should be an informed adult choice.

Point two. The implicit answer to the question asked in the textbook is that all religions would be equally badly hit in most such cases: natural calamities don’t make the distinctions that human beings do. In my view, the question is a sensitive and genuinely secular one that has the good sense to place basic humanity over religion. It’s also a fine counterpoint to the vile suggestions often made by people looking to promote their own agendas – that such-and-such disaster was “God’s way of punishing the wicked” (for more on that, see this post by Amit).

But point three is the one I’m most interested in. In The God Delusion, a book that is much more temperate and restrained in tone than its reputation suggests, the one time Richard Dawkins gets really angry is when he discusses the near-universal practice of labeling children with the religion of their parents; he points out that in an ideal world there would be no such thing as “a Christian child” or “a Hindu child”, just as there is no such thing as a Marxist or Libertarian child. The idea might instinctively make many people uncomfortable, but think about this: though most of us associate the term “child abuse” with sexual abuse or violence, it basically applies to any situation where children are attributed motivations or emotions (or expected to display behaviour) that they are too young to understand the implications of. Why should religion be given a green chit in this context?

(It’s important to note that in the story provided in the textbook, we are not told the child’s birth-religion. If it had been specified that he was from a Muslim or Hindu or Christian family, it would be possible to see the story as having a hidden, proselytizing agenda or displaying prejudice against a particular faith. But that isn’t the case here.)

Speaking pragmatically, I know that in the real world it’s futile to expect most parents to be so liberal – too many people want their children to be miniature versions of themselves, complete with all their beliefs and sacred cows neatly preserved and passed down till Kingdom (or Oblivion) Come. But I wish more parents – even the ones who shudder at the dirty word “atheist” – could see that there is merit in at least some atheist values.

The God Delusion - review

Almost inevitably, Professor Richard Dawkins' bestselling The God Delusion has caused a large measure of discomfort since it was published late last year. But what's interesting is that much of this discomfort has been felt by people who consider themselves atheists - or at least non-believers, for many people think of "atheist" as a daunting word, suggestive of someone who wears his denial like a badge and saunters about beating others over the head with it (at any rate, does one really need a specific word to denote a lack of belief in something?). Their argument is that Dawkins, so insistent on ranting against religion, is in danger of developing into an "atheist fundamentalist", just as shrill, intolerant and closed to other people's perspectives and needs as his religious counterparts are.

To many genuine liberals, the Dawkins approach is a problematic one. Why not leave believers – the harmless, moderate ones – alone, even if they are deluded? After all, faith in a higher power, with its attendant sense that our lives have a definite purpose and should therefore follow certain moral codes, has provided an important crutch for human beings over several centuries. Besides, isn't nihilism the logical alternative to belief?

As Dawkins persuasively argues here, no, it isn't. Delving into evolution and the genetic codes that define our behaviour, he points out that our moral sense has little to do with religiosity. We don't need the spectre of a supernatural creator in order to be good, or to lead fulfilling lives. In a throwaway but moving passage, he quotes Human Genome Project founder James Watson: "I don't think we're here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, 'Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose.' But I'm anticipating having a good lunch and conversation."

Much of the criticism of The God Delusion owes to the demands of political correctness in today's world, the kowtowing to an unsaid rule that religious sentiments automatically demand respect over most other things. This idea is one of the first things Dawkins tackles in his book. "I am not in favour of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it," he writes, "but I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of religion, even when it directly conflicts with basic human rights, in our otherwise secular societies."

Making it obvious that he won't pull punches, he goes on: "I am attacking all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented." This is calculated to discomfit readers, but Dawkins spells out the reasons for his vehemence. He is alarmed by the widespread lack of knowledge, even the insidious suppression of information (about Darwinism and the concept of natural selection, for instance) that allows a vast chunk of the world's population to believe in the literal truth of the Bible or the Koran (the Old Testament and its fire-and-brimstone supporters come in for especially severe but well-deserved mockery). It's farcical, he points out, that a majority of the world's population still lead their lives by tenets set down in ancient literature that was written (and repeatedly modified over the centuries) to fill gaps in people's lives that could not at the time be filled by science. Most of all, he deplores the way religion is used to manipulate young minds ("I want everyone to flinch when they hear a phrase like 'Catholic child' or 'Muslim child'," he writes).

Dawkins also makes the point that when beliefs are founded on something that has no scientific basis in the first place, it makes little sense to complain that an extremist's interpretation of a holy book is a "corruption" of the real thing. "How can there be a perversion of faith if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn't have any demonstrable standard to pervert?" His view is that for all our attempts to distinguish moderate belief from fanaticism, the line separating the two is much thinner than we realise. "For good people to do evil, it takes religion."

Anyone who's seen how ordinary people can behave during riots, or even heard a sweet old grandmother rallying furiously against members of another faith while watching the news on TV, will find it hard to disagree with this observation. Whether or not you agree with Dawkins' approach or his stridency, The God Delusion is more than a one-dimensional polemic. It's a passionately argued, fiercely rational work built on genuine concern for a world bent on erecting narrow walls for itself.

[Did this for the Sunday Business Standard]

A crisis of faith in My Father My Lord

A small boy watches as an old woman’s body is wheeled into an ambulance. An Alsatian runs out of the apartment where the woman used to live, jumps into the vehicle and sits, whimpering, next to the stretcher; it has to be dragged away by a neighbour. Later that night, the boy asks his father if dogs have souls.

“No,” replies the father, an orthodox Rabbi of the Haredic community. He says this as a simple statement of fact: the “rules” are different for animals, to whom such concepts as “soul” or “heaven” do not apply in the way they do to humans – or, more precisely, the way they do to Jews who follow the word of the Torah: they are the only ones God looks out for.

This is one of the establishing scenes in David Volach’s superb My Father, My Lord, a film about the conflict between religious faith and humanity, played out on an intimate scale, through the simple story of a small family (there is no larger picture here, no grandstanding about the things that are being done around the world in the name of religion). At 72 minutes, this is one of the most compact movies I’ve seen in recent times, and my favourite among the contemporary features at Cinefan 2007.

The film begins with glimpses of the daily lives of the boy, Menahem, and his parents. The Rabbi is, in his own way, a fond father, but we immediately sense a distance between him and his son – for the Rabbi’s life revolves around his faith, the ritualistic acting out of that faith, and a literalist approach to his holy book, while Menahem is a restless, curious child whose engagement with the world goes beyond the circumscribed limits set by religion (as is the case with most children). The mother, Esther, is not as rigid in her beliefs as her husband is – one senses that for her, the true face of God is in her child – but on the whole the family is happy and content. Despite the Rabbi’s brief show of anger when his son brings home a photo depicting idolatry (“which goes against God’s will”), this isn’t anything like a simplified story about a religious fanatic lording it over his wife and son.

The family makes plans for a pilgrimage trip to the Dead Sea. Before leaving, the Rabbi comes upon a dove’s nest outside one of the synagogue’s windows; he waves the mother bird away, separating her from her children. Back in the van, he explains this action to his wife and son by quoting from a Torah passage that will seem obscure to anyone who isn’t familiar with the book – but part of the point seems to be that the fate of the young ones should be left in God’s hands, to do as He will. (The mother bird might come back, but then again she might not.) As we will soon see, this scene is a foreshadowing: when they reach the sea, the Rabbi asks Menahem to come with him to the men’s beach, leaving Esther with the women. This amounts to another separation of a mother from her child (though we make the connection only in retrospect) and the ground has been laid for tragedy – the Rabbi is preoccupied with his prayers, with “being wrapped in the arms of the Almighty”, as he later tells his wife, and therefore unconcerned with more mundane, worldly things such as the welfare of his son.

The catalogue notes for My Father, My Son mention that it was “conceived as a thematic dialogue with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue 1”. I don’t know if director David Volach ever met the Polish master or discussed matters of faith (or matters of movie-making) with him, but this film has many of the qualities of Kieslowski’s work. It’s quiet and gentle, made with stark simplicity, but hard-hitting in a way that other, more strident films on this subject aren’t. There are a few early sequences where nothing very significant seems to happen plot-wise, but which are invaluable character studies. And many scenes – notably a prolonged aerial shot of men praying on a beach while a little boy tries to get their attention and a storm brews in the distance – are filmed with an intensity that, in my view, approximates the fervour of the religious experience; it’s almost like the director’s camera lens is his God.

It’s admirable how Volach manages to set his tale in a very particular community (one of many sects within Judaism) and still give it universal appeal. On paper, there are many things here that could have a distancing effect on viewers around the world (Indian people sitting in an auditorium in Delhi, for instance). Take something as basic as the Jewish way of praying – the swaying back and forth, which an inexperienced viewer could easily find very funny. But Volach tells his story with such conviction and directness, makes his characters so recognisably human, that we aren’t allowed the comfort of thinking, “Well, this is a story about someone else, it doesn’t apply to us.”

P.S. The scenes where Menahem is made to participate in religious rituals made me think of the most impassioned passages in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins is angry throughout the book, but he gets positively Dirty Harry-ish when discussing the corruption of young minds by religion. “Unquestioned faith can be very dangerous and to deliberately plant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong,” he writes. "I want everyone to flinch when they hear a phrase like 'Catholic child' or 'Muslim child'."

In principle I’m in complete agreement with him, but from any practical viewpoint this is uselessly idealistic. Most parents quite naturally see their children as extensions of themselves (in fact, one of the main reasons to have children at all is to leave something of yourself behind when you’re gone) and there are countless examples everywhere of people being severely disillusioned or angry when their children secede from their views even in relatively minor issues, let alone something as sensitive as religion. It's pointless to expect that parents will stop drumming their own religious views into their younglings’ heads, or encouraging them to do mechanical things like folding their hands each time they see a temple, or to believe without questioning. One of the achievements of My Father, My Lord, a film that evokes complex reactions in a viewer, is that even while we feel disturbed about Menahem being religiously conditioned, the film's pace and matter-of-fact depiction of everyday life allows us to see such conditioning as a natural process within the framework of the family structure. There are no easy answers here.