Light in dark days

You can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (in Encyclopedie, volume 4, 1754)

Many people see the current situation of the world as disastrous. Multiple wars play out as out a clear threat of the climate crisis caused by the industrial revolution looms over us all. Dark days indeed. Is there any light to be seen? Perhaps none, some believe. Perhaps the world is doomed to a 4 Celsius rise in temperature, a catastrophic displacement of several billion people as they move away from seas and the tropics, and a collapse of the current civilization. But perhaps there will only be a 3 Celsius rise in temperature, and there will only be massive wars and genocide with a remnant of today’s capacity hoarded by a few. Or maybe, we can halt the rise in temperature at 2 Celsius. Maybe we can green our cities to give a milder microclimate, fill them with basin sponges to soak up floodwaters, and survive without our politics becoming ever more warlike and xenophobic.

I kept noticing the open society of Kazakhstan as we travelled through the country. Like many Asian countries which had to rebuild themselves after a period under foreign control, Kazakhstan has turned into an inclusive society. There is no state religion, and 137 different ethnicities following 46 different religious doctrines live together. People on the streets were extremely welcoming, and sometimes stopped to chat even though their command of English only mildly exceeded our knowledge of Kazakh or Russian. It is often hard for Indians to grasp how effective a cultural ambassador Bollywood movies have been. The movies had taken the message of our open polity across a vast spread of cultures.

I found a second reason for hope when I realized that low-tech and shared resources remain popular even in a petrostate like Kazakhstan. There are certainly BMWs and Mercs on the streets, but you can also find buses and bicycles. There are metros in the cities and also free kick-scooters which you can pick up at one place on the road and leave elsewhere when you are done with it. The world is already hotter than we wanted, but it is still possible to prevent 4 Celsius of heating. All it requires is cooperation and sharing.

Perpetual motion machine

A city is always in motion. Old buildings are torn down, new ones are put up. Or the interiors are torn apart and rebuilt. We see cities growing, but they can also contract. Old capital cities like Nara and Bagan have clearly contracted, others have been lost and some like Hampi and Siem Riep were rediscovered. But no one really knows a city in its entirety: our lives are too short for it. I took the featured photo of Mumbai from a plane and thought it looked beautiful like the expanding remnants of a supernova, or a cancerous growth picked out in false colour.

On the ground I have seen this growth and change in the form of parts of the city hidden away behind metal sheets. The photos you see in the gallery above were taken in 2006, 2009, 2014, and 2015. When I walk out on the streets today, there are still these metal barriers behind which the city changes. There is no before and after, only here or there.

But if you fix your attention to one place, then you could see a before and after. I took the first photo one night in 2019 when the Metro line 3 tunnel was being dug. The other photo was taken three years later, after the tunnel was done and workers were putting together the superstructure of a metro station. Three years from then perhaps I can complete the set with photos of the station and tunnel from inside.

In 2013, in another part of the town, I saw these massive machines being used to dig deep trenches so that new towers can be built on firm foundations. People were paying for flats before the ground was broken. Six years later I took the other photo of a nearly century old building being torn down before it becomes old enough to get protection. The French have a phrase for this: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change the more they remain the same.

First Snow in Zuluk

Nathang valley was the target for the day. The idea was to drive past Zuluk, climb to Thambi point, and then walk a little beyond that to look for birds. People pass this way to get to Gangtok from Zuluk via Nathu La, near the border post. I had the best of luck on the way: a view of a Himalayan monal (Lophophorus impejanus) on the road. Birder friends used to be incredulous when they found I hadn’t seen a monal. It is supposed to be easy to find if you go birding at heights. Now I can claim to have seen it, although I missed a wonderful photo op because of a passing car.

Everywhere in this region roads are being widened. Old hands talk about stopping on the road at any point to watch birds. No longer. An army of earth movers can be seen digging away at cliffs next to the road, doubling its width, and putting in extra shoulders. The forest has been pushed back. When the road is completed the traffic is bound to increase, so the easy sighting of birds is perhaps gone.

The winter has been unusually warm here, and rhododendrons flowers were in full bloom near 3000 m already before holi. This is unthinkable in most years. But the warmer year had also enabled an early upslope return of winter migrants. We stopped near this rhodo bush to watch a mixed hunting party of birds: rufous sibia (Heterophasia capistrata), short-billed minivet (Pericrocotus brevirostris), green-backed tit (Parus monticolus), chestnut-crowned warbler (Phylloscopus castaniceps), black-throated tit (Aegithalos concinnus), and stripe-throated yuhina (Yuhina gularis). After this I was confidently dreaming of the shots of blood pheasants that I would take higher up when the weather changed.

Before we could reach Thambi point a flurry of snow made our drivers pull up at a bunch of roadside shacks. We were at 3220 m, about 30 meters below the lookout and there was already snow collecting on the ground. There was a stream of cars returning from higher up, a layer of fresh snow almost two centimeters deep on their roofs. The news was bad; the road ahead was closed.

Newton’s coins

Coins are the earliest attempts at mass production. The featured photo shows a gold coin from the reign of Chandragupta II, late in the 4th century CE. The first thing that strikes you when you see such a coin in a museum is how misshapen it looks. Perhaps the first thought that pops into your mind is that the technology of that time was unable to hammer out a better circle. But if you see other technology from that time you’ll realize that this can’t be true. Actually the shape of the coins is due to a problem that persisted until the early modern times. It is due to people shaving bits off the edges of coins before recirculating them. This problem was solved when the process of mechanical milling was invented. By the middle of the 16th century France had adopted this mechanized process, and other European powers followed soon.

But today, on Isaac Newton’s 380th birthday, this is not the story that I want to tell, since Newton’s contributions to coinage began after this ancient problem was solved. He has many achievements in coinage. One of lasting value was the study of copper for the use of making coins. But this was only part of a larger problem that Newton concerned himself with. As master of the mint, Newton tackled the problem of standardizing the purity and weight of the metal which was struck into coins.

Queen Anne guinea, struck from bullion captured from Spain in the Battle of Vigo (Image may be copyright Royal Mint of UK)

Two of his contributions to the problem of industrial standardization were amazingly prescient. One is seldom remarked about. It is well known that he had a dispute with an independent body which tracked the standardization of coins through a process called the Trial of the Pyx. He resolved this by showing that the trial used a standard of gold which was purer than the one required by law for the making of coins. This has been written about many times. What seems to have attracted less attention is that following this dispute Newton tracked the weight of coins by taking small samples instead of the large sample used by the Trial. This anticipates modern statistical methods which take the variation in a measurement as itself being measurable through a refinement of the process Newton started.

The other contribution was an interesting piece of physics applied to metallurgy. It was remarked by many, including Samuel Pepys, that the first step in striking coins was drawing a gold ingot through a press. The hot metal cooled and became harder as it was drawn. This was a significant source of the variation in weight of coins. Newton studied the process of cooling (the speed of cooling is codified into a law named after him) and experimented with alloys which slowed the rate at which the metal cooled. His discovery that this could be achieved by alloying gold, of the requisite purity, with a small quantity of copper led eventually to a law that allowed this alloy to be used. This is an early example of industry-supported research in pure science, a process that reached its apogee in the late 20th century.

Portrait of Isaac Newton by John Croker struck in a copper medallion (Image may be copyright by the Royal Mint UK)

In his youth Newton was taken out of school since he was deemed to be easily distracted, and put to managing his father’s business. He turned out to be bad at this. That such a boy grew to being a master of the mint, with lasting managerial and technical achievements to his credit, warns us against making snap judgements about people’s abilities. That surely is a lesson to take to heart on Newtonmas.

Over Wari La

Leh was just a stop on our road journey. We had our coffees and apples, chocolates and apricot pies, a big Ladakhi lunch, and after the next breakfast we were ready to hit the road again. The Ladakh marathon was scheduled to cross Khardung La on precisely the day we wanted to cross over to Nubra. The pass was closed. But that was a blessing in disguise. We could take a route we hadn’t tried before, over the 5312 meters high Wari La. Normally people cross this when going to Pangong Tso, but we could branch off to Nubra first and then go to Pangong Tso without having to cross a high pass.

The first part of the drive was smooth. We took the Leh-Manali highway to Karu, stopped for a tea, and began the climb. Our next stop would be the village of Agham north of the pass. It is here that the road forks, one way leading to Nubra valley and the other to Pangong Tso. After some bit of climbing, we stopped to take a photo of the vista south of us. In the distance we could see the peaks of the high Himalayas, covered with snow even so late in summer.

On the climb the roads were good, but not as good as the highways. Pretty soon we were at the windy and cold pass. We wasted some time there taking selfies, and photos of those flowers which were still in bloom (it was a warm September). A hundred meters below, the road was being repaired and we came to a halt for about 20 minutes. Then the workers cleared a way for cars to pass and we moved on.

The northern meadows were no longer in flower. July is too early for flowers, and September is too late. To see flowering in these altitudinal oases in the cold desert of Ladakh, watered by melting glaciers, one must travel in August. These oases are caught on the knife edge between inadequate water and insufficient oxygen, and one wonders that as glaciers eventually melt away what will happen to this precarious ecosystems. We had our first sighting of a Himalayan marmot (Marmota himalayana) a few hundred meters below the pass. It sat quietly, doing nothing. We would see more later. We also had our first sighting in this trip of wild yaks (Bos mutus). Most were usual dark brown coloured animals, but there was a rare one with a white stripe down its back. Even as recently as a hundred and fifty years ago, its tail would have been sold to kings in India or China.

We descended rapidly to Agham because the road was pretty good. An isolated monastery kept watch over the road. Perhaps the village it was attached to was out of view behind a bluff. We saw a villager walking slowly through a meadow above the road. Tsering, our guide and driver, said that she would be collecting yak dung. It is a good source of fertilizer here, and useful also as domestic fuel. She spotted us and waved out. We waved back.

After lunch at Agham as we took the road along the valley of the river Shyok, the road pretty much ceased to exist. This part of the journey was the most taxing. The old road was too narrow and it was in the process of being broadened. We’d noticed the road work beginning the previous summer and work was at its peak this year. We were happy to learn that a two lane road was expected to be operational by next summer. Maybe that is the time to come here, if you haven’t done it already.

Rusting discards

As you drive out of Ooty you pass one slope after another covered with a waist-high monoculture of fresh green tea leaves. Sunith, our driver for the day, told us that his family owned five plots and they pluck leaves from it in rotation. There is constant production, when they finish the last field, they cycle back to the first. Each of the cycles takes a little less than two months. To my amateur ears this sounded like over-production. Perhaps in selecting for volume, the farmers here have selected for the less flavourful tea that is characteristic of these hills. Also, the fact that the holdings are small means that the need of a regular income forces them to overproduce. It is a vicious economic cycle that the local tea growers are caught in. So there is a growing interest in orchards of fruits and spices.

Since the hills are broken into small holdings, there are lots of small tea factories dotted about the area. We came to one and the niece wanted to take a look. She hadn’t seen the industrial process by which less flavourful tea is dried, shredded, and converted into hard pellets of instant pour-through brew, a chain called crush-tear-curl (CTC). As we waited to walk through, I noticed rusting pieces of discarded machinery waiting to be photographed. The overcast sky enhanced the clash of colours between the green leaves of tea, and the reds of dry grass and rusting metal. A perfect stop for my train of thought.

Flying koi at the Tokyo Tower

During dinner The Family said “Let’s go see the Tokyo Tower afterwards.” It was a short ride on the metro and a little uphill walk after that. I hadn’t been there in thirty years, but I remembered that the approach was different. Not that it mattered. It looks like the Eiffel Tower, and is equally impressive. It loomed over us from more than a kilometer away, and we stopped to take photos now and then.

One of the stories that I like most about it is that it was made from scrap iron sourced from tanks destroyed in the Korean war. Of course there are many other interesting stories about it. For example, that it is nine meters taller than the Eiffel Tower, and that its height was determined by the requirement that the antenna at the top should be able to transmit across the Kanto plain. Can both these stories be equally true?

It was two days before Japan’s Children’s Day, and in celebration of the festival, these koinobori, windsocks in the form of carp, were strung across the base. It seems that the black carp celebrate the father, the red the mother, the blue the eldest child, and the rest all the other children. I’d been buying the special oak leaf wrapped kashiwa mochi every day for breakfast. I was a little embarrassed to discover why the sales staff had been so concerned about telling me how long they would last each time they sold it to me. They’d expected me to take it back for the children in my family. I guess I won’t tell my nieces what I didn’t get them for children’s day.

Tokyo Scrambles

Scramble crossings are crossroads where traffic comes to a halt on all roads simultaneously to allow pedestrians to cross in any direction whatever, including diagonally. It’s not a thing I see in India, although they are as efficient for traffic and pedestrian flow as our alternative. So I was very happy to see one in Tokyo’s Ginza as we crossed to the Tokyu Plaza to grab a quick bite at midday. Later I went up to the terrace on top to take a video of the crossing. You can see that here.

One of the things I liked about Japan was the attempt to make pedestrian crossings as accessible as possible. There is, of course, a light that turns green. But there is also a rhythmic sound that plays during the time that a crossing is allowed, with a special note which indicates that the crossing will end soon. At a scramble, there are different tones playing at different zebras. Very convenient if you are a little confused about which way to go.

But the most well-known scramble crossing in Tokyo must be the Shibuya scramble. Things become famous for the flimsiest of all reasons, and then people try to second guess why. I read all kinds of things about why this is famous. Is it really true that 3000 people cross it at each go? Is it because of the many Hollywood movies which featured it? (Or is it that the movies featured it because it has become a recognizable symbol of Tokyo?) Is it the best place for people watching in Tokyo? I thought that a lot of the people who crossed it did not look Japanese. If you listen to the sounds in my video, you might notice many snatches of Mandarin.

In any case, we had aimed for a lunch at the Shibuya Hikarie after our walk down Omotesando, so we came up here to watch the fun and cross a few times randomly before going up to the observation deck at Magnet. This hadn’t been built in the last time I was in Shibuya. If you are interested in what most foreign tourists have a go at in Tokyo, you could do worse than go up here and watch the crowds below for the price of one drink.

At the Shibuya crossing I didn’t want to pass up the memorial to the dog Hachiko. The story is an oft-told one of man’s greatest friend. Hachiko would come to the station (Shibuya station opened in 1885) to greet his master when he came back from work, and continued to come every day even after his master’s death. But what is Tokyo without its kawaii? The Family took a few photos of the famous Hachiko statue. This being 100 years of the statue, the surroundings were very Hachiko themed, and I took a few photos of that.

Trudging from door to door in rain

One of the longest walks I’d had in mind for Kyoto would have started at the Higashiyama Jisho-ji, better known as the Silver Pavilion or Ginkakuji, and would have ended at the Gion, by way of the Philosopher’s path, several temples and eateries, and a bit of the recent Meiji and Showa era history of the city. I’d forgotten to factor in the weather that dogs my steps in Kyoto so often, namely unrelenting rain. The morning’s drizzle had turned to rain as we left Ginkakuji and turned towards Tetsugaku no michi, the Philosopher’s Path.

Our first stop was a small Buddhist temple called Honen-in. It’s not one of the major tourist stops in Kyoto. This was exactly why I wanted to see the temple. Even in the rain, perhaps specially in the rain, it was a place of calm. The featured photo shows the thatched main gate of the temple; the moss on the thatch is a feature, not a bug. Do and mon, way and gate, are two important philosophical constructs in Japanese culture. A gate connects two realms, and the way is your journey. Past the gate, the road leads between two raised mounds of pebbles, an unusual dry garden. The patterns worked on to the flat space on top change with the seasons. Today’s was ripples in a pond.

Beyond it we stopped at a pond and watched ducks. Turning away from the buildings, we walked under trees where the rain collected into large drops and fell down my neck because the umbrella slipped from my hand when I took a photo. In the building people were gathering for a funeral. We left because we did not want to intrude.

We had a Buddhist lunch in a restaurant across the road. When we came back out, the rain was pelting down harder than before. Our walk would be a little more difficult than I’d anticipated. We passed a little roadside shrine with its Jizo statues all dressed up. Next to us a canal appeared. I hadn’t noticed where it came from. Across the narrow canal I noticed a terribly modern house. Such change was perhaps to be expected in this neighbourhood where the philosophy of wabi sabi was first developed.

There are many little temples here, each with its own history. Beyond them I could see the ridge of the eastern mountains, the Higashiyama. The dressed stone of the banks of the canal and the iron bridges across it made me wonder whether it was one of the waterways dug here during the first wave of modernization in Japan after the Meiji restoration. If the weather had been better we would have ended our walk along the Keage incline where the Meiji era pumping station can be seen. Perhaps we were seeing the same Meiji era industrial architecture here. There were many shops open to the road; no life, no bustle because of the rain. Our progress was slow, and we decided not to look into the shops. We did stop briefly at the Otoya-jinja, the shrine with guardian mice, but only to peer at the statues of the guardians.

We passed the Eikan-do temple, famous for two things. One is the Kamakura era statue of Amida Buddha looking over his shoulder, and the other is the suikinkutu. This buried pot makes musical sound when water is poured into it. The Family said “It will be full and silent today.” The rain had found its way down my clothes now. I was happy that I’d decided not to bring my camera with me. The phone was monsoon-safe and would not suffer in this rain. We decided to give the temple a miss, and turned to walk through a Showa era row of houses towards the Nanzen-ji temple.

I was thoroughly soaked, and not in a mood for further exploration. The Family walked on to take a quick look at the temple as I decided to use the historic San-mon, a rather ornate gate, as a windbreaker. I was too cold and tired to even step back and take a photo of the gate. In the 16th century the outlaw Ishikawa Goemon was boiled to death here. I wouldn’t have minded a quick dip in the Goemonburo myself. My walk had come to an end. It only remained for me to meet up with The Family and take a taxi back to the hotel and soak in a warm bath. Even though it rained so much, when I look back on it, this was a nice walk. Each one’s walk is different, and the rain has become my way of seeing Kyoto, my Kyotodo, 京都道 .

Eating on Bullet Trains

Japan’s Shinkansen, the Bullet Trains, remain iconic although there are many different superfast trains around the world now. The first Shinkansen ran two weeks before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Since then, running times have been shortened substantially by changing the shape of the nose of the locomotive from a bullet cone to the duckbill that you see above. I enjoy train rides in Japan, and prefer them to flights. Getting from Hiroshima to Tokyo by the Nozomi super-express that you see above took us 4 hours. A flight would have taken an hour and a half; not enough of an improvement to really matter.

That wasn’t our first bullet train ride on this trip. We decided to go from Kansai airport to Hiroshima by taking a Shinkansen from Shin-Osaka. That came with the completely superfluous opportunity to buy a little box of Ekiben, a lunch box to take with you on the train. We did not need this, but who can pass up an opportunity to eat a few pieces of Sushi at tea time? The box we chose had two pieces of each kind of Sushi, making it easy to share.

Travelling from Hiroshima to Tokyo we had a much wider choice of ekiben. We took our time choosing. The Family got the mixed spread in the upper panel: pickled ume (plum) and veggies, lotus stem and some mushrooms, a little pork patty, half a boiled egg, seaweed over rice. I looked around and took a more meaty selection. We took out our lunch boxes at about the same time as a family across the aisle, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that they had a much more elaborate meal. Perhaps we should have looked harder, but I was happy enough with this meal.

We have a sweet tooth. So after an hour or so of happiness I reached into my backpack and extracted an omiyage that I’d picked up at the station. Omiyage are gifts that you bring back from travels, so I must have stretched the definition a bit by presenting this packet to The Family and me: freeze dried strawberries infused with white chocolate. Like many Japanese sweets it was more tart than sweet. I don’t know what to call this specialty from Nagano prefecture, so in keeping with the daruma doll motif from the package, let me just call it daruma ichigo.