Category Archives: Science & Technology

Put your feet up and let ‘Dr Sil’ take charge

Inspiration / Positive News and Features, Science & Technology

Many doctors recommend a visit to Sil over surgery

Subhendu Sil attends to a client. / Picture by Subhendu Chaki

As I settle into the client’s chair in Subhendu Sil’s little chamber, I feel a bit like a distraught visitor entering 221B Baker Street. A sudden revelation about a part of me that I had not even noticed throws me off my guard.

“Do you wear hawai chappals with plastic straps that pinch you near your toes?” is the first thing Sil asks, with the sharp precision of a detective. Yes, I do. The hard plastic, which does not stretch, has bitten into the flesh and has calloused my feet, at a spot near the heels. I need to give up on the chappals immediately, says Sil briskly, his alert eyes scrutinising my feet, but his face, unlike Holmes’s, betrays a gentleness and a serenity that are striking.

Sil, 48, has been looking at people’s feet in this room for 20 years. A Bata employee, he is a chiropodist. He treats various foot problems, some of them extremely serious. His healing touch is so well-known that people queue up to meet him; sometimes they have to wait for a month for an appointment.

His chamber is located at the Hindustan Park branch of Bata on Rashbehari Avenue. It is a small, slightly cramped square room, measuring 49 sqft, and is tucked away behind stacks of shoes at the back of the store. It has a wall-to-wall mirror on one side to make him examine his clients’ feet better, two unassuming chairs, a generous porcelain basin with taps for soaking the feet in, a shelf for the toolkit and a wooden stool covered in red for Sil to sit on.

Two slender shelves with shoes border the mirror on the two sides. The only decoration in the room — some plastic flowers.

In this room Sil is to be found almost always, bent over his clients’ feet, almost as if over a musical instrument, but working with his toolbox, patiently removing layer after layer of dead skin to relieve his clients of deep-rooted corns or calloused feet. A resident of Sonarpur, he starts his work at 10.30am every day, and works till late evening, with a small lunch break in between.

Corns, particularly, can cause immense pain and immobility. A visit to Sil can take time, but the intervention is minimal. When he is done, his client’s relief is enormous. Many of them leave the room blessing him. And keep recommending him to everyone.

Corns are the most common problem. People also come to him for treatment of in-growing toenails, calloused skin removal and hard skin removal.

Diabetic feet need special care. Any procedure becomes more complicated with the possibility of bleeding. Many diabetes patients come to him for foot care. “Warts are also an increasing problem,” he says. Though most of his clients are over 50, many children visit him too.

Sil is reluctant to talk about the effects of his work, but he does mention two or three instances when he felt particularly rewarded. “One client, who had 12 to 14 corns in her two feet, told me that after coming here, she could visit her mother’s house after 15 years.”

Many doctors recommend a visit to Sil over surgery.

After joining Bata in 1990 as a salesman, Sil was chosen to work as a chiropodist in 1999. Bata was reputed for this specialised work. Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi would be attended by Bata chiropodists.

“It is really a service that the organisation offers,” says Sil. It is a paid service, but it does not burn holes into pockets.

To those without a specific problem, Sil offers a pedicure. It is quite unlike a beauty parlour treatment; again, layers of dead skin are peeled off, and a great peace seems to descend on earth. “You will sleep well tonight,” says Sil, after my pedicure is done.

How many people has he seen in this room since he started?

Sil smiles. “Let me see. I see about seven to eight persons a day. In a month about 200 people.” He calculates quickly. “That would make about 48,000 people in 20 years.”

That is a substantial population.

Currently he is the only Bata chiropodist working in Calcutta, but others are being trained.

He joined Bata in 1990 when he was still in college and was chosen to be a chiropodist nine years later from five candidates, he was told later, because of his patience. He was trained by the organisation.

But patience is only one of his virtues.

The foot presents many challenges. Touching it can be an act of intimacy. At the same time, given our social and historical contexts, touching the feet also means an act of obeisance, or worship, or even abjection, as attested by so much of Hindu iconography, or Indian literatures, art or cinema. Tagore’s works are full of feet being touched.

Padasheba (foot care — pedicure) is a great tradition, and an intensely personal one.

Sil negotiates this complexity well. He is completely engaged when he looks at a pair of feet, but is discreet, and distant, in a most friendly way.

He says his greatest reward is the relief he brings to his clients. Since he sits for so long every day — he has one full day and one half day off every week — he has to exercise regularly, twice every day.

After seeing thousands of feet, has he gained any special insight into human nature? If the face is the mirror of the mind, does the foot say anything?

“No, the feet are just feet,” he says emphatically. Then adds, as an afterthought: “Even the face may not say anything about a person. How can you know anything from a pair of feet?”

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> West Bengal / by Chandrima S. Bhatacharya in Calcutta / August 19th, 2019

Larger features of total solar eclipse match IISER Kolkata’s prediction

Science & Technology, World Opinion
Spot on: The team’s prediction (right panel) of two bright petal like structures in the Sun’s corona were confirmed by the observations of the eclipsed Sun (left panel). Photo courtesy: Durgesh Tripathi and CESSI  

The team predicted the shape of the Sun’s atmosphere at the time of the eclipse using a two-step model

Scientists from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata were in for a pleasant surprise as the total solar eclipse on July 2 proved their prediction correct in its major features. They joined solar physicsts from India and several international researchers who had gathered in Argentina to view the eclipse.

While their aim was to check whether their prediction of the shape of the corona had been realised, imaging the solar corona, or the Sun’s atmosphere was the motivation for many others. The corona can only be viewed during a total solar eclipse. This total solar eclipse was visible only within a narrow strip of land stretching over Chile and Argentina.

Dibyendu Nandi’s group, from IISER Kolkata, had used a two-step model to predict first the shape of the solar magnetic field on the day of the eclipse and then extrapolate it to describe what the corona would look like. “Our predictions of two cross-equatorial streamers, or bright petal like structures the Sun’s Corona were confirmed by the observations,” said Prof. Nandi in an email to The Hindu.

Space weather

The model built up by the IISER Kolkata team can be used to predict space weather. It will also be useful in analysing data from the proposed Indian space mission – Aditya-L1 – which is meant to study the Sun’s corona. “We now know the basic theoretical premise of our computational modelling is correct. This work has given us confidence to utilise similar theoretical models for supporting the interpretation of data from India’s Aditya-L1 solar space mission which is currently under development,” says Prof. Nandi.

The path of the eclipse was known well in advance and hence a professional meeting was planned for solar physicists about a year earlier.

“The local organisers looked at possible locations near San Juan (which is situated at the edge of the path). One needs to go to the central line for maximum duration of totality,” said Dipankar Banerjee, solar physicist from Indian Institute of Astrophysics who helped organise the meeting.

“Special permission was needed to reach this place; apparently tourists are not allowed to these locations,” he added in his email to The Hindu.

This eclipse offered an excellent opportunity to view and image the corona. Despite being hotter than the layers of the Sun that lie within, the corona has lower density of photons. For this reason, the inner layers of the Sun such as the photosphere outshine the corona, rendering it practically invisible. Except, that is, when the Moon totally occults the Sun. During a total solar eclipse, the Moon’s disc completely covers the region of the photosphere. This lends a moment of total darkness. But just before totality, light from the Sun reaches viewers, first as a brilliant spot of light known as the “diamond ring.” At this stage, you can see the chromosphere and solar prominences. The next instant, when the Moon’s disc covers the Sun, we see an uneven ring of light – the corona. This is seen only during the totality.

Details to be analysed

The broad features of the corona are as predicted by the IISER Kolkata team. “We have to perform a detailed analysis to ascertain which fine scale features of the corona we got right and what aspects we did not. For this we have to wait for technically processed images and other scientific observations acquired during the eclipse by teams from the US National Science Foundation, regional observatories in Chile and Argentina and space-based satellites,” explains Prof. Nandi.

Based on constraints set by these observations, the group plans to refine their models before translating these into operational space weather forecasting tools.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Sci-Tech> Science / by Shubashree Desikan / July 06th, 2019

The invisible women in science

Amazing Feats, Inspiration / Positive News and Features, Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion

Bibha Chowdhuri and Jocelyn Bell Burnell were denied the Nobel, and Donna Strickland was denied a Wikipedia page


Bibha Chowdhuri developed the basic principles of identifying new particles by studying their tracks in cloud chambers and on photographic emulsion plates. Illustration by Suman Choudhury

One evening during my MSc nuclear physics practicals, a frail, slightly stooped lady with round gold-rimmed glasses and dressed in a spotlessly white attire enquired of me as to what I was doing. She was Bibha Chowdhuri, the lady who had been denied the Nobel Prize even though she had been the first to discover the pi-meson (pion).

Chowdhuri developed the basic principles of identifying new particles by studying their tracks in cloud chambers and on photographic emulsion plates. Accelerators were unknown in those days. The only source of high energy particles were the cosmic rays. As a student of D.M. Bose, she studied cosmic ray showers during 1938-1942 in Darjeeling. After meticulously exposing and observing half-tone photographic plates, she found new tracks created by a new subatomic particle with 200 times the electronic mass. This was the pion!

The results were published in Nature. Chowdhuri and Bose could not access full-tone photographic plates because World War II was raging at the time. Using the same technique, but with high quality full-tone photographic plates, the British physicist, Cecil Frank Powell, identified the pion at least four years later and won the Nobel in 1950. Powell, however, acknowledged the work of Chowdhuri and Bose.

Subsequently, Chowdhuri went to Manchester and obtained her doctorate degree in 1952. She was a researcher right till her death in 1991. She was never made a member of any national academy of sciences; she was not mentioned in a compendium of 98 women scientists edited by a Padma Shri winner. A handful of people have come to know about her only recently — thanks to Bose Institute authorities and a recent biography by R. Singh and S.C. Roy. But Chowdhuri never complained about anything.

In November 1988, I met Antony Hewish while visiting Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad. Hewish’s winning of the Nobel in 1974 (along with Martin Ryle) was mired in controversy because his Irish student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, had not been a co-recipient. Her discovery of the first pulsar changed the picture of the universe and served as a pointer to later discoveries of black holes and gravitational radiation. Pulsars are born when a massive star exhausts its fuel, its outer layers explode in a supernova and the core collapses. For core masses greater than three solar masses we get a black hole. For lesser masses, the huge pressure and density fuse electrons and protons into neutrons. Some neutron stars, spinning at huge speed and with powerful magnetic fields, accelerate local electrons and produce radiation, which is observed as periodic flashes (‘pulses’) by distant observers. There are millions of these exotic objects in our galaxy alone. Bell Burnell discovered the signals in 1967 by analysing voluminous data from the Cambridge dipole array telescope. Strangely, Hewish always maintained that Bell Burnell discovered the pulsar first. Her cryptic reaction was that the Nobel Committee does not consider graduate students for the prize. Last year, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. To counter the existing ‘unconscious bias’, she donated the prize money of three million dollars to the Institute of Physics in Britain to fund scholarships for women and marginalized groups.

Donna Strickland developed a major portion of the physics associated with laser surgery. She was awarded the 2018 Physics Nobel Prize along with two others. She is the third woman to win the Physics Nobel in 118 years. The medical and industrial applications of her technique are infinite and will influence future technology. Yet, she was denied a Wikipedia page before she won her Nobel although she has been an authority on lasers since the mid-1990s. Strickland sees herself as a scientist — not as a woman in science. Dignity of an unusual kind is at work here again.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> Opinion / by Debashis Gangopadhyay / April 01st, 2019

When the love of nation and the love of science thrived together

Amazing Feats, Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion

The scientific genius of Bengal just before Independence deserves better storytelling


Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray Laboratory, University College of Science and Technology, Calcutta / Telegraph file picture

One of the problems with history is not how it is written but how it is perceived. Time adds a certain sense of melodrama and stereotype to events. History then acquires a grandeur, a stark monumentality, but somehow the narrative lacks nuance, the sensitivity and vulnerability of genius. As a sociologist who has worked in Bengal for a decade, I always felt Bengal, nationalist Bengal, was more creative and nuanced than it is presented to be. One sees this particularly in the relation between science and nationalism. The debates that Bengal fought embodied a plurality of visions which the nation desperately needs today.

Our nationalism had a confidence, with powerful insights into oppression and liberation. I remember the first great nationalist institution in science, the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science established by Mahendra Lal Sircar. Few remember its great goal, which was to rescue science from Western civilization. Our nationalism, thus, was not merely an attempt to liberate ourselves from the West but to evaluate it, to reinvent the defeated West. One sees it again and again as we look at science. We wanted to inject into science our own genius. J.C. Bose, for instance, borrowed from Shakta traditions to challenge the dualism of the mechanical and the living. Bose had an acute sense of being an Indian scientist. He realized that one had to take on the mainstream paradigms. He realized the danger was of the West reading you through orientalist eyes and reducing you to an occult or mystical figure. Bose realized that one had to make English science say things it had not said without being marginalized. Bose had that genius which people valued.

I remember a cousin of mine, a physicist, listening to a lecture at Princeton by William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor and a Nobel laureate. Shockley began his lecture by invoking Bose and claiming, “[T]here was Bose and the rest is toilet paper.” I wish some local publisher would republish Patrick Geddes’s biography of Bose to recapture his genius.

In fact, history has little to say about the relation between Bose, the poet, Tagore, and the biologist, Patrick Geddes. They shared a mutual reverence and a curiosity about nature which needs more discussion. The narratives of science and nationalism often become a failure of storytelling. Few know that Tagore wrote a textbook on science and even fewer know that Tagore, Bose and Geddes taught a summer school in science at Darjeeling.

The conversation between Geddes and Tagore also led to a vision of Santiniketan few talk about. The current Santiniketan embodies the aesthetic genius of Tagore. But the original Santiniketan embodied a vision of science that Tagore and Geddes discussed. One gets a whiff of this plan as one reads the Geddes-Tagore letters edited by Bashabi Fraser or Philip Boardman’s biography of Geddes. Geddes and Tagore dreamt not only of rural reconstruction but also of a return to an agricultural view of science. Tagore felt that the dialogue of civilizations would be a dialogue of universities. He argued that this exchange would be between the city science of the West, which sought to dominate nature, and the forest universities, which lived in harmony with nature. It is a pity we have not explored these dialogues or even captured the romance or the romanticism of science that this trio evoked. One forgets that Bose was an inventor par excellence also and one of the scientists who refused to patent his work, genuinely believing that ethically and creatively, science belonged to a commons of knowledge. I cannot resist but relate a story about Tagore’s first visit to Bose’s laboratory. The scientist was not there but Tagore left as his signature a bunch of oleander flowers. This relationship between the three makes C.P. Snow’s idea behind The Two Cultures an illiteracy. Nationalist science was interdisciplinary and cross-cultural in a way we cannot imagine today.

Tagore helped create an aesthetic of technology. His debates with Gandhi on khadi are critical. Gandhi saw khadi as transforming the village but Tagore warned that a mechanical use of khadi would create a uniform dullness. Tagore’s sense of the aesthetic went beyond function because he wanted to inject an aesthetic and an erotic into technology.

The debates between Prafulla Chandra Ray and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the geologist and the art critic, are also relevant. Ray warned about the impact of synthetic chemistry, claiming its power stemmed from the tapas of German scientists. Coomaraswamy warned that chemistry had no balancing ethic, that it would create an industrialization of colour: a standardized red for madder, replacing the infinite variety of red that was available in the villages.

Ray himself was a folklore figure. One can invoke a pantheon of stories about the chemist who was a great swadeshi scientist. In fact, Ray’s Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist is a literal embodiment of a life in science. The two volumes have nothing private or personal in them. The book is an attempt to show how science creates public knowledge. The whole narrative is written as a scientific experiment with Ray’s life as a test tube, creating a scientific method. Ray realized the importance of a swadeshi science and was among those most committed to a Gandhian way of life. His was an ascetic life and an ascetic style of science. I remember a leading scientist who had gone to visit the University College of Science and Technology. He landed up one evening, found it deserted except for an old man in a corner. Thinking he was the chowkidar, he asked about Ray, to discover that the old man was Ray himself. Ray brought to life and science a simplicity that was stunning.

A perfect contrast to the vision of Ray was Meghnad Saha. An astrophysicist, a brilliant scientist, Saha was tired of politicians who had no sense of the possibilities of science. It was Saha who was the greatest advocate of a Leninist style of planning and it was Saha who persuaded Subhas Bose to set up national planning committees. He also edited Science and Culture, one of the great science policy journals. Science and Culture comprised a wonderful network of intellectuals which included P.C. Mahalanobis, N.K. Bose and D.M. Bose, all of whom combined in their individualistic ways to create a society based on the scientific method. The prolific Saha worked on everything from dams to calendrical reform. He was quick to express his disappointment with Nehru and got elected to Parliament to challenge him. One can hardly dream of that kind of vision and commitment today.

One can retail story after story about this period, celebrating Satyendra Nath Bose or P.C. Mahalanobis, but what one wants to emphasize is the different styles of science and the varied dreams of it that the Bengal of that time possessed. There was a playfulness, a plurality, a sense of dream and ideals, an availability of eccentricity and creativity one misses today. The stories once popular are quietly fading. One wishes Bengal was better served by its historians of science. At least one would like to propose a museum of photography, stories, technologies as a tribute to this generation. We sadly have a regime that talks of ancient science idiotically but ignores the neighbourhoods of genius just before Independence. Surely this generation deserves the storyteller and his tales of a great and creative science.

The author is an academic associated with Compost Heap, a network pursuing alternative imaginations

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> Opinion / by Shiv Visvanathan / November 28th, 2018

Metro rake on way to Calcutta from China

Business & Economy, Records, All, Science & Technology, Travel, World Opinion

The train manufactured by CNR Dalian Locomotive & Rolling Stock Co. is the first of 14 rakes to be shipped to Calcutta


The China-made coaches being loaded on a vessel at the Dalian port / Sourced by the Correspondent

Consignment: Calcutta Metro’s first foreign-made rake

Origin: Dalian, China

Status: In transit

Calcutta Metro’s first foreign-made rake is sailing towards Chittagong on its way to the city from China.

The rake is scheduled to arrive at the Calcutta port on March 1. From there, it will be taken to Metro Railway’s Noapara maintenance base for trial runs, Metro officials said on Thursday.

The train manufactured by CNR Dalian Locomotive & Rolling Stock Co. of China is the first of 14 rakes to be shipped to Calcutta.

The prototype rake was loaded onto cargo vessel Han Zhang at Dalian port.

The vessel, which had set sail from Dalian on February 1, is now sailing towards Chittagong in Bangladesh after touching Singapore. It is scheduled to reach the Sandheads on February 28 and wait for the high tides.

At noon on March 1, when the high tide sets in and the water level rises, the vessel will enter Netaji Subhas Dock at Garden Reach.

The rake, like the existing Metro rail fleet, will have eight coaches.

“The train is being carried in two tiers of the vessel’s deck. Each tier has four coaches,” Metro spokesperson Indrani Banerjee said.

Once the cargo ship anchors at Calcutta port, special cranes will be used to lift the coaches and load them on to a container. “The coaches will be assembled in the port area to form the rake before a diesel engine pulls it to Noapara,” Banerjee said.

Metro will use Eastern Railway’s tracks to roll the new rake into its Noapara facility. The rake will be taken to Majerhat and from there to Chitpore, Belghoria and Dum Dum, before entering Noapara.

Calcutta Metro’s rakes, unlike other Metro trains, run on broad gauge tracks used by passenger and long-distance trains. “So, it’s easier to bring the rake into Noapara from the port using Eastern Railway’s tracks,” a Metro official said.

Engineers from China and Japan would be present when the coaches are unpacked and assembled into a train. Although CNS Dalian has manufactured the train, the components have been made by Toshiba of Japan.

“Once inside the maintenance base, the trials will begin,” Banerjee said.

Metro officials could not say when the first train would start commercial runs.

The 14 Chinese rakes will replace the snag-prone old non-AC Metro rakes and reduce the burden on the existing AC rakes.

The new rakes will also be used in the expanded network of Metro. The Noapara-Airport and Noapara-Baranagar-Dakshineswar lines are scheduled to be commissioned by next year.

The Chinese company is manufacturing 14 low-maintenance rakes for Calcutta Metro, breaking the monopoly of the Integral Coach Factory in Perambur, near Chennai, where the current snag-prone AC trains were built.

The trains will run at an average speed of 65kmph, 10kmph faster than the rakes in use. The aerodynamic design of the rakes will help them hit peak speed faster than the existing ones and reduce energy consumption too, the Metro spokesperson said. The doors will be 20cm wider than that of the existing AC rakes.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online edition / Home> West Bengal / by Sanjay Mandal in Calcutta / February 22nd, 2019

The woman who could have won a Nobel

Science & Technology, World Opinion

Despite being a pioneer in the study of cosmic rays in India, Bibha Chowdhuri remains practically unknown.

Gifted physicist Bibha Chowdhuri /
Illustration by Suman Choudhury

Judging by her publications in journals such as Nature and Proceedings of the Physical Society of London, and her doctoral research work at the laboratory of renowned physicist P.M.S. Blackett in the UK, Bibha Chowdhuri was a gifted physicist. No wonder she was one of the young scientists — the first woman researcher — selected by Homi J. Bhabha to join the newly established Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bombay, in 1949. Chowdhuri (1913-1991) served in renowned institutions of the country and was a tireless researcher till she died, unsung and unheralded, in Calcutta. No national award or fellowship of any major scientific society came her way. She does not figure among the 98 scientists of uneven quality in the 2008 book Lilavati’s Daughters: The Women Scientists of India, edited by Rohini Godbole and Ram Ramaswamy and published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.

Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of two physicists, a book has been published from Germany that throws light on the life and work of this remarkable scientist who happened to be a woman. Rajinder Singh, a noted science historian at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and Suprakash C. Roy, former professor of Physics at the Bose Institute in Calcutta seek to unravel the “story of courage and determination of a lady born more than a hundred years ago …for our younger generations to emulate.”

While her research contributions are well recorded and have been critically examined by the authors, not much material could be unearthed on her life. Chowdhuri was wedded to physics and led a quiet, modest and dignified life largely within the confines of her laboratory. A quintessential researcher who never aspired for high office, she hailed from an educated zamindar family in the Hooghly district of undivided Bengal and her mother was related through marriage to the family of Sir J.C. Bose. Chowdhuri was one of six siblings — five sisters and a brother. All of them were well-educated, thanks to their Brahmo lineage, and none of them married.

Chowdhuri obtained her MSc in Physics from Calcutta University in 1936 — the only woman in that batch — and plunged headlong into research, mostly at the Bose Institute. Debendra Mohan (DM) Bose [nephew of Sir J.C. Bose] and Chowdhuri published three consecutive papers in Nature, but could not continue further investigation on account of “non-availability of more sensitive emulsion plates during the war years. Seven years after this discovery of mesons by DM Bose and Bibha Chowdhuri, C.F. Powell made the same discovery of pions and muons and further decay of muons to electrons… using the same technique” and won the Nobel Prize in 1950. Powell acknowledged Bose and Chowdhuri’s pioneering contribution in his work.

In 1945, Chowdhuri joined “the cosmic ray laboratory of would-be Nobel Laureate P.M.S. Blackett (he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948) at a time when studies on extensive air showers in cosmic rays were one of the most important investigations in particle physics” for her PhD.

On her return, she joined TIFR. After eight years, she joined the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) at Ahmedabad. She was involved deeply with the Kolar Gold Mine experiment and discussed with Vikram Sarabhai, then director of PRL, about her future research plans. Unfortunately, after Sarabhai’s untimely death, she was not permitted to take up the planned work. It is unfortunate that at two critical junctures, once at the Bose Institute and later in PRL, she had to abandon the work she intended to pursue. She finally opted for voluntary retirement, moved to Calcutta to pursue her work on high energy Physics, continued as an active researcher with the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science and kept publishing her findings till almost the time of her death.

While Chowdhuri’s research in the fields of high energy and cosmic ray physics has been extensively reviewed and rated as “superb” by the authors, her life, devoid of any major recognition, raises many important questions, especially in the context of barriers women face even today, while pursuing science.

Just like C.V. Raman was reluctant to admit the first woman researcher to the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, DM Bose too was initially not enthusiastic but eventually accepted Chowdhuri as a research student. The situation was not much different in the West.

In her introduction to the book Women and Science in India: A Reader,a collection of interesting essays, Neelam Kumar states that “science continues to be characterised by low number of females, clustered in disciplines considered feminine and confined to the ranks of invisible, poorly paid assistants, and other lower positions.” In the same volume, Namrata Gupta and A.K. Sharma write about the “triple burden” —- In addition to the double burden of career and home, the long hours in the laboratory demanded by scientific study and research constitutes the third burden — faced by women in science. The issue of “passive discrimination” and of invisible barriers are also no less important.

The authors of the book on Chowdhuri cite Godbole and Ramaswamy that till a few years back only five per cent of the fellows of the Indian National Science Academy were women. Eileen Pollack, author of The Only Women in the Room: Why Science is still a Boys’ Club, argues that society encourages men to take up science and discourages women. In an interview to The Manchester Herald during her research days, Chowdhuri had said, “Women are terrified of Physics — that is the trouble. It is a tragedy that we have so few women physicists today… I can count the women physicists I know, both in India and England, on the fingers of one hand. At school, scientifically-inclined girls choose Chemistry; perhaps because a really sound grasp of Higher Mathematics is one essential of any physicist’s equipment.”

Singh and Roy deserve praise for having written a scholarly and dispassionate analysis of what Chowdhuri achieved. One hopes that the book would lead to more material on Chowdhuri emerging from her students who may still be alive. It may also prompt the government to take due cognisance of Chowdhuri’s life and honour her memory as a way of expiating our collective apathy towards her.

A Jewel Unearthed: Bibha Chowdhuri by Rajinder Singh and Suprakash C. Roy was released by German publishing house Shaker Verlag recently

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Online edition / Home> Science / by Amitabha Bhattacharya / November 25th, 2018

A tribute to Jagadish Bose, who proved plants have life

Amazing Feats, Green Initiatives / Environment, Leaders, Nature, Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion

Group of scientists recreates Bose’s experiment, which was not received well 100 years ago

Bose’s peers in the West may not have got the same results as him because of the water used /
Image: The Telegraph

More than 100 years after Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted the experiment that established plants have life, a group of scientists in Calcutta came together this year to repeat it.

Supriyo Kumar Das, an assistant professor of Geology at Presidency University, led the initiative. The others on the team were also from Presidency — Debashis Datta and Rabindranath Gayen, both assistant professors of Physics, Snigddha Pal Chowdhury, a research associate in the Geology department, Abhijit Dey, an assistant professor of Botany, and Saranya Naskar, an MSc student of Physics.

Bose, who had joined Presidency College in 1885 as a professor in the Physics department, had conducted the experiment in a laboratory on these very precincts. No matter how much he is hailed today for his scientific genius, in his time Bose’s experiment had not been received well.

It all began when Peter V. Minorsky, a botanist and professor at Mercy College in the US, got in touch with Das earlier this year. Minorsky wanted to know about the groundwater composition in the College Street area, where Presidency University stands.

Says Das, “It is from him that I heard about the prejudices against Bose. In the course of our exchanges, I got interested and emotionally involved with Bose’s work.”

He had been savagely criticised by George James Peirce, professor of Plant Physiology at Stanford University. Peirce wrote in the journal, Science, in 1927: “The trouble with Bose… is that while his curiosity is directed to biological phenomena, his mind is inadequately equipped with the information and habits necessary for accurate study, and his reflections are addressed to philosophical problems.”

In 1929, the Indian Review reported that G.A. Perrson, who was from the US, was unable to find pulse in plants. And years later, in the mid-1960s, in the Handbuch der Pflanzenphysiologie (Encyclopaedia of Plant Physiology), it was said, “Unfortunately Bose’s theoretical views and his emotional style of reporting have generated what may be an excessive skepticism concerning the validity of his observations.”

This is what Bose had observed. By devising a wire electrode — an invention three decades ahead of its time — he identified a pulsating layer of cells abutting the vascular tissue in plants. In an email to The Telegraph, Minorsky says, “In the last few years, plant biologists have come to recognise this layer is the site of propagating waves of calcium release that are involved in communicating stress from local points of occurrence to the rest of the plant. The discovery of this calcium wave is one of the more exciting discoveries of the 21st century, and Bose’s ‘plant heart’ predates this discovery by a century.”

Bose has left notes aplenty about every aspect of his historic experiment. One of the lone omissions is the kind of water used. Says Das, “Being a geochemist and scientist, I understand the composition of groundwater and the effect of chemical stress of sodium on plants. I also know that the composition of water varies from place to place.” He adds, “It occurred to us that Bose’s peers in the West might not have got the same results as him because of the water used.”

PULSE TEST: A repeat of the experiment at Presidency University that Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted in the 1900s /
Image: The Telegraph

In Bose’s time, water was supplied to the Presidency campus from Palta in the Barrackpore area. Das points to a spot occupied by an elevator on the ground floor of Baker Building that houses the Physics department and says, “This is where the old pipeline ran.” Currently, the municipality takes care of the water supply. It comes from the Tala tank in north Calcutta.

When Das and and others repeated the experiment, they decided to use water from every possible source Bose might have accessed. “He could have also used water from the Ganges or from the pond in College Square,” says Das.

Datta explains, “We wanted to check the potassium and sodium concentration. Electricity flows through water only when there are some ions present in it. Possibly, the scientists from the West had not used ionised water.”

The “repeaters” used for the experiment the plant Bose had used — the Desmodium motorium, locally known as bon charal. Minorsky explains, “The lateral leaflets of Desmodium are unique in the plant kingdom for their pronounced and unprovoked oscillatory movements. If conditions are optimal, one can watch these lateral leaflets move at a pace slightly slower than the second hand of a watch.”

According to Minorsky, Bose enjoyed certain enormous advantages over his Western peers. First, Desmodium motorium is a native of Bengal, so he had access to an ample supply of healthy, thriving specimens. In contrast, in the West its cultivation was restricted to glasshouses. Those days, glasshouses were often heated by wheelbarrows of burning coal. These released a gas called ethylene, which in turn affected many plant processes, including a decrease in overall excitability. Second, he points out Calcutta’s temperatures and how they lend themselves to plant study. “Temperatures of 30-35° Celsius, which occur commonly, are optimal for studying plant movements and excitability. The temperatures at which scientists in the West studied plants would have been much lower,” he says. Finally, there was the salty water advantage.

Dey arranged for 21 Desmodium plants. Each was kept in a beaker full of a distinct water sample. Thereafter, they were all kept in a controlled atmosphere. Says Gayen, “We placed them in glass beakers and left them in the laboratory, where all the lights would be kept on so that all of them were exposed to the same amount of light. The air conditioner would be set at a particular temperature to control the humidity. We would connect the probes to two different parts of the stem. The source meter was used to read the fluctuating signals.”

The brainstorming went on for months and the experiment lasted a fortnight. Das says, “The apprehension of failure was there. But the moment when we got the first response was exquisite. The horizontal line that appeared on the screen formed a peak and then fell only to rise again. Though our graph did not have peaks and troughs as tall as Bose’s, we definitely had got a graph that roughly replicated the ECG graph of humans.”

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Online edition / Home> Culture / by Moumita Chaudhuri / November 25th, 2018

An unrecognised explorer

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It’s time we do justice to Radhanath Sikdar, the man who first measured Mount Everest

All of us are aware from the days of our childhood that the highest mountain peak in the world is Mount Everest and it was discovered by George Everest. It was only much later that one came to know that Sir George Everest was the Surveyor General of India and the peak was so named as he had discovered it to be the highest in the world. As the Surveyor General, he had his offices in Dehradun and used to stay in Mussoorie. He left India in 1843, almost 200 years ago, but his house in Mussoorie is still being preserved and is now a place of tourist interest.

The truth, however, is somewhat different. It is a fact that Sir George Everest was the Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843, but it is also a fact that during his tenure of office, Mount Everest, that we know of today, was only known as ‘Peak XV’. Everest had neither initiated the process of measuring the height of this peak, nor was he instrumental in its naming, which was done much later, long after he had proceeded to England to enjoy his retirement after 1843. Located on the border of Nepal and Tibet, this ‘Peak XV’ has been worshipped as a holy place by the Tibetans, who called it Chomolungma, the Mother Goddess of the World. In Nepal, this peak is known as Sagarmatha, meaning the peak of heavens. Even these days, this peak is addressed by its traditional names, both in Tibet and Nepal, while we have followed what was given to us by the British ie Mount Everest.

In fact, the name Everest was given by Col Sir Andrew Waugh of Bengal Engineers, who succeeded Everest as the Surveyor General of India from 1844 to 1861. Circumstances under which ‘Peak XV’ was named as Mount Everest are rather peculiar and reveal a very biased handling of the matter so that the entire credit goes to the British officers of the East India Company. Going through the historical records of the Survey of India Volume IV: 1830 to 1843, pertaining to the tenure of Sir George Everest, one can observe at a glance that he had shown no interest in ‘Peak XV’ during this period. It was his successor, Andrew Waugh, who made the official announcement of ‘Peak XV’ being the highest known peak of the world in 1856, the measurements had, of course, been initiated much earlier and finalised by our own Radha Nath Sikdar in 1849.

Recognising the work of Sikdar, the Government of India had issued a postage stamp in his honour in 2004. But his work is of such a great importance that issuing a postage stamp and then forgetting about him does not do full justice to his unique and great contribution. It was Sir George Everest who had recruited Sikdar in the great trigonometrical survey and became extremely fond of him. Volume IV of the Historical records of Survey of India, pertaining to his tenure, have the following mention about Sikdar: “Radanauth is high in favour with everybody, and universally beloved in the GT Survey. You will not know him for the same person when you see him again, for he is no longer a puny stripling, but a hardy energetic young man, ready to undergo any fatigue, and acquire a practical knowledge of all parts of his profession. …There are few of my instruments which he cannot manage; and none of my computations of which he is not thoroughly master. …Eventually he will furnish a convincing proof that the aptitude of your countrymen for the practical, as well as the theoretical, parts of mathematics is in no wise inferior to that of Europeans.”

“Of the qualifications of the young man himself I cannot speak too highly. In his mathematical attainments there are few in India, whether European or Native, who can at all compete with him, and…even in Europe those attainments would rank very high.”

Later, on account of a special technique developed by Sikdar for accurate computation of heights and distances through Spherical Trigonometry, he virtually became indispensable to the organisation and rose to become the Chief Computer in the office of SGI. In that position, he moved from Dehradun to Kolkata in 1849. As to why Andrew Waugh gave the name Everest, even though he had left the scene long ago, is an interesting piece of history.

Had SG Burrard, a later Surveyor General of India, not acknowledged the good work of Radhanath Sikdar through a research paper published in 1904 in the scientific journal Nature, these facts would not have come to light. He published in detail various steps taken for the measurement of ‘Peak XV’. This in a way also exposed the machinations of Andrew Waugh who had tried his level best to take credit away from, to where it truly belonged, that is Radhanath Sikdar.

It is human nature that in case something important is achieved, one tries to take credit or gives credit to someone, but in this case, Waugh specifically mentioned that Sikdar had nothing to do with this work, indicating his bias. Later, he could be seen placating him by asking him that he should be happy that the peak had been named after his mentor. Andrew Waugh also gave the additional charge of the Indian Metrological Department to Sikdar, raising his salary to Rs 600 per month. This was unheard for an Indian in those days. Clearly, all these efforts were to keep him happy but away from the core of the survey work.

SG Burrard’s publication in the Nature specifically mentioned that the Chief Computer (who was Radhanath Sikdar) from Calcutta had informed Andrew Waugh in 1852 that the peak designated ‘XV’ had been found to be higher than any other highest measured peak in the world at that time. Raw data from theodolites, taken from seven observation stations at Jirol, Mirzapur, Janjpati, Ladiva, Haripur, Minai and Doom Dongi was collected at the trigonometrical survey at Calcutta. This was then processed by Radhanath Sikdar and conveyed to Andrew Waugh that ‘Peak XV’ had been measured at 29,002 feet, taking the mean value of all observations. Considering that the scientific instrumentation available at that time was only of a rudimentary nature, the level of accuracy reached was almost 100 per cent, and this figure has not undergone any change, despite the current state of technological progress.

Correspondence between Waugh and Sikdar reveals that Waugh did privately acknowledge the achievement of Sikdar but did not recognise his work on record and in public. In his letter dated August 25, 1856, Waugh wrote to Sikdar that he was glad to hear that naming the peak as Everest had given the latter a lot of satisfaction. Thus, it is clear that the name Everest was given to ensure that Sikdar, who could have been the rightful claimant for credit, did not object as he was extremely fond of Everest, who had recruited him in service. The situation would have remained obscure but for the research paper of SG Burrard in 1904. Later, Professor Meghnad Saha acknowledged this feat in 1938 by giving Sikdar full credit. Earlier, Kenneth Mason in 1928, recognised his work as also John Keay in his book, The Great Arc.

In the given situation, changing the name of Mount Everest to Mount Sikdar Everest will perhaps do full justice to Radhanath Sikdar and give him worldwide recognition, which was legitimately his due, long time ago. We do not have to seek anybody’s approval for such a change as the rationale is all well-documented. Even if the world continues to call it Everest, in India, we could still call it Sikdar Everest.

On several earlier occasions, achievements of Indian scientists have not been recognised, as Sir JC Bose could have got the Nobel Prize for Physics or at least shared it with Marconi for his work on wireless and radio; SN Bose could have got the Nobel Prize way back in 1932 for his work with Einstein on Bose Einstein condensate but atleast he was recognised, though belatedly naming the God particle, Higgs-Boson after him. Naming Everest as Sikdar Everest would be a recoginition of a scientist whose work has stood the test of time. Besides it would also justifiably add to our national pride.

(The writer is a retired Delhi Police Commissioner and former Uttarakhand Governor)

source:http://www.thepioneer.com / The Pioneer / Home> Columnists> Opinion / by K K Paul / November 23rd, 2018

Medical care for a low, flat fee of Rs 10

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A Calcutta doctor who spends his Sundays running a clinic in a remote village asks why others don’t do so too.

Manindra Seva Sadan, a health centre in Manihara village /
Samantak Das

On the first Sunday of every month, Dr Santanu Banerjee, MD, gets up at 4:30 in the morning and sets off for a small village some 300 kilometres from Calcutta. I’ve known Santanu for some years now, as a neighbour who is also my physician, and as a keen participant in our para’s various activities, especially during the festive season. A few months ago, after he had completed my check-up, we got to chatting about healthcare issues and he told me how surprised he had been to discover the high prevalence of so-called ‘diseases of affluence’, associated with sedentary urban lifestyles, among the labouring poor in rural Bengal. When I asked, somewhat sceptically, where he got this information from, he invited me to visit the health centre that he runs in his ancestral village and take a look for myself. So, on the first Sunday of this October, I did.

We reached Manihara village, just beyond the Bankura-Purulia border, a little before noon, and went straight to the Manindra Seva Sadan, named after one of Santanu’s ancestors. The spacious three-room centre is located on a largish plot of land, with a beautiful garden and immaculate lawns — Santanu tells me that it belongs jointly to several members of his extended family, but had been lying unused until he decided to set up the centre. He took a loan from his mother, cleared and cleaned the land, and constructed the neat, single-storey structure that stands there now.

Outside the building, under a large permanent awning, villagers wait, patiently, for the daktarbabu to come. On arrival, Santanu’s team swings into smooth, practiced action. Of the three rooms, the first — which runs the length of the building — is where patients have their names, blood pressure and pulse rates noted, and are given a number (depending on their place in the queue) on a slip of paper; as they pass through the long room, they can get a battery of tests done, if needed, on a device that Santanu calls his “lab in a box”. Once all this is completed, they line up to enter the doctor’s chamber in the next room, where one of Santanu’s assistants notes down their details on a laptop. After Santanu examines them and writes out his prescriptions, they move to the adjoining room, where medicines are distributed. On the day of my visit, Santanu’s wife, Kokila, a doctor with an MD in microbiology, was assisting Santanu’s father, a retired engineer, in the medicine room. Patients leave only after collecting a month’s worth of medicines. Some will come back to the centre in a week’s time, and report their condition to Santanu via video-conferencing — he is available online between 9:00 and 11:00 am every Sunday — and some of them will return on the first Sunday of the following month. The cost for all this is the ten rupees patients pay when they register; there are no other charges.

The day I was there, over 200 people had registered to be examined. There was a low buzz around the centre, interspersed with the occasional shout, as a patient’s name was called out, or someone asked someone else not to shove others in the queue. The noise level went up several-fold as patients jostled in line, assistants shouted to patients to register their names, have their pressure noted, and so on and so forth. In the midst of all this, Santanu sat like the calm eye in the centre of a mild storm, radiating cheerful good humour as he spoke to patients in his soft, measured tones and wrote down their prescriptions. Santanu has a mild, friendly manner, and is unfailingly polite even to the most vociferous of his patients. When his assistants raise their voices, mostly in order to ask patients to maintain quiet (“Have you come to a doctor, or to a fish market?”), he remains composed. He also has a sly sense of humour and a ready smile that puts even the most grim-faced individual instantly at ease. He tells a patient, with a broad grin, that he will kill himself if she can prove she actually did take the medicines he’d prescribed last month. After much hemming and hawing, she admits that she “might have missed” a couple of doses.

Of course, many of his patients have seen him before, and he seems (at least to my untutored self) to recall every detail of their various ailments. Interspersed with talk of symptoms, diagnostic tests, medicines and so on, he exchanges pleasantries with his patients — telling someone she’s fine, reassuring another that he needn’t worry, the usual doctor’s prattle: but, sometimes, he turns to me and says, half in jest and half in despair, “Tell me, how on earth do these people get these diseases, here, of all places?” He seems to be especially puzzled by the high incidence of diabetes among his patients, including in some who are in their early thirties, as well as other diseases of the leisured, particularly hypertension. “Look at her. Not an extra ounce on her and yet she has a blood sugar reading of 210! How do you explain this?” There is speculation in the medical community that undernutrition in infancy could be a likely cause even though official statistics do not seem to bear this out. This is something that needs to be investigated thoroughly because the health of thousands is at stake. Over 33 per cent of his patients have diabetes and 40 per cent suffer from high blood pressure. He has the details of all the patients he has treated since he set up the clinic three years ago but wants to know more about the prevalence of illness in the area. “I would like to make a database of every individual and their ailments in the 30-odd adjoining villages. Once I know this, we can do more to alleviate or, best of all, prevent them.” He would also like to bring every woman, child, and man in the area under a health insurance scheme.

When I leave the centre, it is past 4:00 pm, but Santanu is still inside, talking, smiling, examining, prescribing. He will stay back tonight, along with his wife and two kids, for tomorrow they will distribute saris among the women of Manihara for the festive season. His parents will help him, as will his paternal uncle and aunt, who still live in the village.

As I speed towards the bright lights and loud noise of the city, I glance back at the endless expanse of undulating green, dotted with clumps of kaash flowers, harbingers of the season of festive joy, and I wonder: what makes a man like Santanu Banerjee do this month after month, year after year, almost single-handedly, with scarce resources and at considerable cost to himself in terms of time, effort and energy? By my reckoning, it costs Santanu some thirty to forty thousand rupees every time he visits the health centre, but when I put this to him later he only smiles at me. Does he receive any money from funding agencies? No. Do many other doctors go with him to the centre? Again that smile. Yes, he agrees, he couldn’t have done it without strong family support. But why does he do this, I persist. He looks up, quizzically, “Shouldn’t you be asking me why others don’t do it as well?” I have no answer. Santanu says he can’t really explain why he started doing this work and refuses to accept the usual explanations about giving back to society, extending a helping hand to people, and so on. Instead, he tells me a story. “One night, as I was peeling open sealed boxes of medicines and arranging the strips into smaller bundles, my fingers started to bleed. And instead of feeling upset or angry, I felt this joy radiating through me. That was my epiphany. That’s when I knew this was the right thing to do.”

Samantak Das is professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, and has been working as a volunteer for a rural development NGO for the last 30 years.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta, India / Home> Opinion / by Samantak Das / October 26th, 2018

Country’s first community-based early warning system for landslides deployed in Darjeeling

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200 residents of three villages were trained and mock drills held in the first week of September.

Sagar Rai, a resident of Paglajhora in Darjeeling hills, has a rain-gauge installed in his village. Whenever there is a downpour, he runs to it and watches the level.

He has been trained to watch whether the reading exceeds 123 mm. If it does, he should stand before the gauge, forget everything else, and watch whether it approaches 143 mm.

Read: India using remote-sensing tech developed by NASA to find rare earth elements

The moment it is about to touch 143, he is supposed to send messages to a Whatsapp group that everybody should leave their homes immediately with their valuables and shift to designated safe places in the village.

Rai is not the only one. “On September 7, officials of Geological Survey of India held a mock drill and trained about 200 villagers from the three villages of Paglajhora, Giddapahar and 14 Mile to deploy the country’s first community-based early warning system for landslides,” said Dinesh Gupta, director general, GSI.

Besides sending messages in the Whatsapp group, village guards would blow whistles and ring bells in schools to alert villagers about possible landslides.

At least one member from each of the families in the three villages, and a number of officials from panchayat office bearers to the district magistrate and officials at the state and central level are included in the Whatsapp group so that they, too, are immediately alerted to take any administrative action if necessary.

“From panchayat pradhans to sub divisional officers, district magistrates to state officials, National Disaster Response Force to IMD officials, everybody would be alerted by a single message,” said Ladup Tamang, a resident of Giddhapahar.

Darjeeling, Kalimpong and adjoining Sikkim hills fall in seismic zone IV, and every year numerous landslides take place in these areas. In 2015, as many as 33 people died due to landslides in Darjeeling hills. The next year, the casualties stood at seven. In 2017 one person died and 291 people were affected in Darjeeling. Right now, a large part of North Sikkim is cut off due to landslides.

The Eastern Himalayas consist of young-fold mountains with higher slopes that receive more rains than the western Himalayas.

“In disaster situations, locals first respond and, therefore, GSI decided to put them at the centre of a system where are trained to monitor and interpret the surroundings for timely response,” said a GSI spokesperson.

The idea is to make the system work 24X7. The rain gauges have been placed in areas that are easily accessible. Two billboards detailing the procedure and action points have been put up in the villages.

“Stakeholder participation is a must to make every disaster management plan and action a success. The mountains in Darjeeling are the youngest ones and are always expanding and the area is prone to disaster. The area has the highest density of jhoras (streams) in the world. Local stakeholders should be trained properly,” said Tapas Ghatak, former GSI geo physicist and former UNICEF consultant for disaster management for Darjeeling hills.

Tuhin Ghosh, a faculty of Oceanographic Studies, Jadavpur University said, “People’s participation is of crucial importance in disseminating information, but the system needs continuous monitoring to serve the purpose.”

Since landslides can occur also due to tremors, GSI has also installed InSAR technology by putting five corner reflectors to monitor movement of the rocks and soil.

Satellite reflectors are commonly used to measure the movement of the earth as sensors are installed in the soil and rocks. They can work even in cloudy weather.

“Together the community members and the reflectors are supposed to keep a continuous watch on possible landslides,” said the GSI spokesperson.

“We hope to save life and valuables, if not houses,” remarked Gupta.

source: http://www.hindustantimes.com / Hindustan Times / Home> Kolkata / by HT Correspondents / September 22nd, 2018