mvr

By M.V.Ramakrishnan

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Space Net

In the 1970s and '80s I used to write a light-hearted weekly column called Delhiberations in the  Evening News in New Delhi, reinforced by a related cartoon drawn by myself. 

My focus was mainly on the social and artistic scenario in Delhi (Old as well as New);  but quite often my attention used to wander all over India and the  world, as long as the contexts could be somehow related to Delhi.

Once  in a while I even went on an excursion into outer space, featuring a couple of cheerful spacemen called Bill Concorde and Joe Goodfellow. And the last time I drew a cartoon featuring them was around 1985, soon after which I had discontinued the column.

I am glad that today, after a quarter-century, I have an opportunity to bring Bill and Joe back to life --  so here they are, following up my comments  in Tempo Of Transformation yesterday.


Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Tempo Of Transformation

With intense nostalgia I had recalled in this column last week (Sept. 21) that a beautifully illustrated book called Marvels Of The Modern World -- published in London just before the Second World War -- had not only given me a vibrant vision of modern technology when I was a very young student in India in the 1940s, but had equally fascinated and inspired my schoolgoing children some 30 or 40 years later.  And I had observed:

     "..... An important reason for such high durability of the pre-War book, I believe,  is the fact that although the progress of science and technology during the half-century between 1940 and 1990 was no doubt spectacular compared to any earlier period in world history, it was much slower and far less turbulent than during the next 20 years from 1990 to 2010."    
 
     I knew perfectly well that in expressing the above opinion I was running the risk of attracting some  adverse criticism in science circles:  for it could be asserted that the tempo and magnitude of the progress achieved in science and technology for several decades around the middle of the 20th century were no less dynamic and impressive than they've been during the past 20 years around the millennium mark. 
 
     And in specific terms, I knew one might well be tempted to ask indignantly:  were the amazing results achieved in the exploitation of atomic energy and the exploration of outer space during the period in question less formidable and significant than the fabulous progress made in the fields of computers, telecommunications and 'information technology' later on?  

Symbols of change

     Such claims and questions wouldn't be merely hypothetical ones.  and there would certainly be a large grain of truth in them if you considered the issue from a purely scientific point of view.  But my answer would be that I am not a scientist, and I am not looking at the scenario in exclusively scientific terms.  Rather, I am an articulate layman surveying the trends from a social angle also --  or,  to put it more accurately, in a technosocial perspective.      

     I had actually specified 1940 as a significant date in this context only because it indicated the beginning of the decade during which I studied in elementary school and started gaining intelligent impressions about the world at large.  But of course it was a very crucial decade in the history of modern science and technology,  explosively marking the dawn of the atomic age.

     The 20th century, in my opinion,  can be roughly divided into three distinct segments, which we may conveniently call airborne age (1900 to 1940), atomic age (1940 to 1990), and Internet age (1990 to 2000+).  In making such a division, we would only be adopting the advent of the aeroplane, atomic energy and Internet as symbolic landmarks ushering in successive phases of the ever-changing environment, without ignoring other important and parallel phenomena of scientific progress.
 
      And it will need only a little reflection for anyone to realize that during each of the above phases, the quantum and tempo of technosocial transformation has been dramatically greater and faster than in the preceding phase, reaching turbulent levels in the last one. In fact, that's precisely the basis I have adopted for drawing the dividing lines.   
 
     This trend would seem to be all the more intriguing if we conceded that the actual progress of science and technology was no less spectacular around the middle of the 20th century than towards the fin de siecle.  What, then, is the true reason for the frenzied tempo of the past twenty years?  

     That may sound like a very intricte question, but it isn't really difficult to find a convincing answer!  All we have to do is to study the social effects of the marvels of modern science and technology during the successive timespans we have identified above.  
     
     (to be continued)

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Love And Live!

In a Postsript last week (Sept. 17),  I quoted a limerick I had written long ago as a young student in India. That had been an attempt to imitate Edward Lear, of course. 

It reminds me of a short poem I had composed as a college boy (one of about half a dozen).  I had just started learning French with the admirable self-instructor Teach Yourself French by Norman Scarlyn Wilson,  published by the English University Press, London.  I was trying to  get the conjugation of the verb aimer ( to love) by heart,  writing down the whole sequence repeatedly.  The present tense went as follows, of course:

j'aime
tu aimes
il aime
elle aime
nous aimons
vous aimez
ils aiment
   
Reciting and translating this mentally again and again,  I thought it sounded rather nice, so I just wrote it down in English also --  and with a little extension I did have a lovely poem!   I don't  know if Argosy in England would have published it if I had sent it to them, because I never did.  So let me publish it myself  here today, more than 50 years later!

Conjugal conjugation 


I love
You love
He loves
She loves
We love
You love
They love
LET'S LOVE!


I live
You live
He lives
She lives
We live
You live
They live
LET LIVE!

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Marvels Of The Modern World

Overawed by the thought of a potentially massive response to these personal views and visions of mine which I've just started weaving into the invisible and apparently infinite fabric of the World-Wide Web  --  but restrained at the same time by a keen awareness of the fact that such a marvellous dream may not come true at all  --  I had concluded my initial comments in a sober mood as follows (Sept. 15):

     "..... I therefore embark on this trans-Cyberian voyage confidently, expecting that my reflections will pass the test of time and will be floating around the world for a long time to come.  I do earnestly hope that sooner or later they will be retrieved, read and quoted by at least a single scholar doing research in social history, mainly for whose benefit I shall be writing this column.  

     "But who knows, a million other people in a hundred countries may also discover it in due course....  and if that happens, it will be another miracle of the modern world!"    

      Reviewing the last thought I had expressed only a few days ago, and looking back at some of the scientific and environmental scenarios which have survived in my memory for more than half a century, I recall that one of the books which had made the most powerful and lasting impressions on my mind and imagination when I was a young student was a handsome volume called Marvels Of The Modern World.

Tempo of progress

     It belonged to a wonderful set of general-knowledge books published by the Home Library Club in London and imported into India just before the the Second World War.  Beautifully bound in brown or dark-green hard covers and containing hundreds of glorious black-and-white photographs, all those books (bought by my father who was a civil engineer) had given me a global vision of scientific and cultural progress which has governed my whole outlook and attitudes in related contexts to this day.    
 
     This was particularly true of Marvels Of The Modern World, which depicted, in lucid texts and graphic pictures, the evolution of engines and railways,  ships and submarines,  aeroplanes and automobiles.....   the development of telegraph and telephone, radio and gramaphone, radar and rockets.....   the building of roads and tunnels,  dams and bridges, dykes and skyscrapers.....  the exploration of oil fields, polar ice caps, and ocean beds..... the generation, transmission  and distribution of electricity.....    and so on.    

     A remarkable thing about the book was that even 30 or 40 years later it was a source of great fascination and inspiration for my two children who were schoolboys in India in the 1970's.  It is difficult to imagine any book on science and technology published 50 years after the Second World War having such equal and enormous appeal for parents and children alike!

     An important reason for such high durability of the pre-War book, I believe,  is the fact that although
the progress of science and technology during the half-century between 1940 and 1990 was no doubt spectacular compared to any earlier period in world history, it was much slower and far less turbulent than during the next 20 years from 1990 to 2010.  

Beyond the sound barrier
  
     Many specific examples can be lined up for illustrating this significant aspect;   but let me just
mention one of them here -- the sequence of land speed records broken and retained during the 20th century: 

     The first and last world records for maximum land speed rose from 39 miles per hour in 1898 to 763
mph a full century later in 1997.  It had crossed the landmarks of 100/200/300 mph in 1904/1927/1935.  

     My Marvels edition showed George Eyston as the glamorous record-holder, at 357 mph, achieved in 1938 with his famous car Thunderbolt.  That was overtaken by John Cobb in 1939 at  370 mph.

     It took another quarter-century for the 400/500/600-mph landmarks to be crossed (in 1964 and '65,  by Donald Campbell in a wheel-driven turbine car;  Art Arfons and Craig Breedlove in turbojet-propelled cars).  The 700-mph hurdle couldn't be passed during the next three decades;   but suddenly in 1997,  Andy Green shot through the sound barrier in a turbofan car, touching 763 miles per hour (Mach 1.016).

      Perhaps this record or the next one  will be the ultimate level beyond which land speed cannot be attained by any vehicles running on wheels,  even if they're equipped with still more powerful jet engines.  For even the most fabulous marvels of the ultra-modern world would seem to have an absolute limit somewhere  --  except, of course, the never-ending expansion of  the Internet's mysterious memory!   


Friday, September 17, 2010

Postscript

I wrote a couple of days ago: "But the Great Cyberian Ocean doesn't seem to be restrained by any law of limitation.  It just keeps surging and swelling on and on and on somehow...."

Well, that makes me think of a limerick I had written as a schoolboy in Madras more than 60 years ago:

There was an old man of Dover
Who rolled over and over and over
 And over and over
And over and over
And over and over and over....

I am glad to find that my own memory isn't so bad, after all!

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Great Cyberian Ocean

Today, when I start writing my first composition in this independent online column, my mind is naturally full of reflections on the intriguing electronic universe called Internet and the apparently endless manifestation of cyberspace.  Even if I come down from a cosmic level of contemplation and try to view the phenomenon in merely earthbound terms, I can visualize it only as the Great Cyberian Ocean across which I am somehow venturing to sail on this small and insignificant boat of mine.
  
     Mind you, I am not really a stranger to electronic communications, having acquired an e-mail identity and address several years ago in response to my children's forceful demands.  But being a senior citizen born well before the middle of the 20th century, I find it impossible to see through the mind-boggling mystery of the Internet --  although I am not quite unintelligent and had faced no serious difficulty in understanding the basic principles of atomic energy, space travel or genetic engineering when I was much younger.   
    
     And this happens to be so in spite of my own name being instantly recognized by the online search engines as a journalist writing a regular column called Musicscan in The Hindu, one of the most prestigious English-language newspapers in the world!   


Endless memory

     What truly mystifies me in this context is not the instant transmission of extremely massive data across the Internet,  but the amazing fact that there seems to be absolutely no limit to the amount of new information from world-wide sources which can be added to its awesome memory permanently without having to remove any of the voluminous information already stored in its formidable electronic brain.  

     Just imagine a million rivers pouring trillions of gallons of water every minute into the world's oceans, and not a drop of that unlimited liquid mass ever evaporating by natural causes!  How long and how large can the oceans grow without generating huge tidal waves and submerging the entire globe? 

     But the Great Cyberian Ocean doesn't seem to be restrained by any law of limitation.  It just keeps surging and swelling on and on and on somehow;  and yet we are all still undrowned and feel quite safe,  going about our usual business without a care in the world!   

Test of time
    
     The Internet's constantly expanding capacity for absorbing an endless flow of all kinds of useful and useless information is only one side of the profound mystery surrounding the whole new scientific concept of 'information technology'.  Its other side, of course,  is the inverse ratio of the spectacularly growing volume of information preserved and the rapidly shrinking space required for its storage.

      If this trend continues indefinitely and if there's an imbalance in the above ratio, a point of time may be reached when the online memory may well get overloaded and begin to malfunction, and the mystery will be over then.  But if the near future is a reliable reflection of the recent past, we who are alive today -- or at least the seniormost citizens among us, like myself --  may not face such a calamity in our lifetime.

      I therefore embark on this trans-Cyberian voyage confidently, expecting that my reflections will pass the test of time and will be floating around the world for a long time to come.  I do earnestly hope that sooner or later they will be retrieved, read and quoted by at least a single scholar doing research in social history, mainly for whose benefit I shall be writing this column.

     But who knows, a million other people in a hundred countries may also discover it in due course....  and if that happens, it will be another miracle of the modern world!