Category: World event

My God! What have we done?


Atomic Dome today

The bomb exploded 600 meters above the city. A blinding flash of light, a thumping boom and more than 50,000 people were dead. Those who survived were destined to suffer from the horrendous effects of radiation linked diseases and mental trauma over months and years.

I was at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, watching the recreation of 6th August 1945, that fateful day when ‘fat boy’, the first Atomic Bomb, was dropped and detonated over the city of Hiroshima.

A detailed cinematic view of how Hiroshima would have looked on that day was being projected from the ceiling on a large circular surface. It was akin to looking at the city from above. I could see the city scape with cars, vehicles and streetcars moving on the roads, boats sailing on the river channels and the concentration of buildings in the city Centre. A city like any other, with people going about their daily chores. Doing what they should, thinking of tomorrow, aspiring for a better future.

Hiroshima on 6th August 1945 morning
Street cars on Hiroshima streets on 6th Aug. 1945 morning

Then the bomb comes into view. Pirouetting and gyrating as it falls in slow motion.  If I had not known what it was, it did not look menacing at all. And then it explodes. A writhing, swirling engulfment by crimson flames, smoke and a mushrooming cloud blocks out everything. When visibility returns, I can see nothing on the ground except a few building structures standing; everything else had been obliterated.

Hiroshima on 6th August 1945 after the Bomb

As I meandered through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, looking at the exhibits, the graphic visuals and reading the quotes of unknown people of eighty years back, little did I realise the mind-altering experience it was having for me. 

A visit to Japan and Hiroshima had been on my bucket list for a long time. My dad used to frequently tell me stories about his trip to Japan in the nineteen fifties. Japan was barely a few years beyond the great war when all its cities had been devastated by American bombing. But as per my dad, it’s veritable phoenix like ‘rise from the ashes’ was a testimony to the Japanese indomitable spirit.

Moving out of the Museum, I strolled through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial gardens. I could see the skeletal remains of the Atom Bomb dome, now a UNESCO heritage site. Interestingly, it was the only building close to the nuclear blast which remained standing. Today, it remains a mute reminder to an event which should never have happened.

The Atomic Dome buiding after the bombing

In between the Museum and the Atomic Dome is the memorial cenotaph, a saddle shaped monument in remembrance of all those whose life got so suddenly snuffed out by the atomic bomb.

A view of the memorial cenotaph

The park, nestled as it is between the gently flowing waters of two river canals, has a tear shaped outline. Does it signify the tear drops of the holocaust survivors as they went about looking for their near and dear ones all those years ago? I wondered………

Peace memorial garden- the river canal
Hiroshima Peace Memorial garden

As I walked under the afternoon sun, the images and the writings in the museum danced and coalesced in my mind.  The perceptions of the victor and the vanquished. How those perceptions led to differing narratives and actions. Those contrasting threads of recorded history about what led to what happened and how what happened showed up for the unaware Hiroshima dwellers on that fateful day. Yes, there was a victor and a vanquished. But no winners, only losers all round ……….

@ Hiroshima Castle which was completely destroyed by the bomb, reconstructed a few years later

**

  • With the surrender of Germany, the Allies focus had shifted to Japan which continued to fight. The Potsdam declaration of end July 1945 threatened ‘utter destruction’ and sought an unconditional surrender of Japan, a demand that got rejected by the Japanese armed forces.

US War publicity poster

“My mother and I, aged 6, went grocery shopping. Every- one was out on their verandas, enjoying the absence of piercing warning signals. Suddenly, an old man yelled ‘Plane!’ Everyone scurried into their homemade bomb shelters. My mother and I escaped into a nearby shop. As the ground began to rumble, she quickly tore off the tatami flooring, tucked me under it and hovered over me on all fours.

Everything turned white. We were too stunned to move, for about 10 minutes. When we finally crawled out from under the tatami mat, there was glass everywhere, and tiny bits of dust and debris floating in the air. The once clear blue sky had turned into an inky shade of purple and grey…….”

-Takato Michishita, Atomic Bomb survivor

  • Despite brutal firebombing of more than a hundred Japanese cities and towns which led to near destruction of infrastructure and large civilian casualties, the American high command remained unconvinced about its efficacy to end the war. The firebombing of Tokyo, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, killed an estimated hundred thousand and destroyed forty square kilometers and more than two hundred and fifty thousand buildings in a single night.

“I was three years old at the time of the bombing. I don’t remember much, but I do recall that my surroundings turned blindingly white, like a million camera flashes going off at once. Then, pitch darkness. I was buried alive under the house, I’ve been told. When my uncle finally found me and pulled my tiny three-year-old body out from under the debris, I was unconscious. My face was misshapen. He was certain that I was dead.

Thankfully, I survived. But since that day, mysterious scabs began to form all over my body. I lost hearing in my left ear, probably due to the air blast. My younger sister suffers from chronic muscle cramps to this day, on top of kidney issues that has her on dialysis three times a week. ‘What did I do to the Americans?’ she would often say, ‘Why did they do this to me?”

-Yasujiro Tanaka, Atomic bomb survivor

  • As a full-fledged Allied invasion and ground offensive into Japan was being planned, U.S. President Truman and his war cabinet were getting increasingly alarmed by the estimates of American casualty that would occur from such an invasion. The estimates ranged between two to four million casualties and more than half a million dead. A nation and its citizens were increasingly war fatigued. The President and his cabinet came round to the view that it would be better to use Atomic Bombs to end the war quickly and save American lives. But can such an arithmetic tradeoff justify taking the lives of innocent citizens? I wondered……

“I was eight when the bomb dropped. My older sister was 12. She left early that morning to work on a tatemono sokai (building demolition) site and never came home. My parents searched for her for months and months. They never found her remains. My parents refused to send an obituary notice until the day that they died, in hopes that she was healthy and alive somewhere, somehow.

I too was affected by the radiation and vomited profusely after the bomb attack. My hair fell out, my gums bled, and I was too ill to attend school………”

-Emiko Okada, Atomic Bomb survivor

  • A month before that fateful day when the Atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the highly secretive Manhattan project in the US had produced two distinctive types of atomic weapons. The first was code named ‘Little Boy,’ a Uranium based fission chain reaction type bomb. The other was called the ‘Fat Man,’ a more sophisticated and powerful plutonium-based implosion type weapon. Nuclear Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, now made famous by the Oscar winning movie of the same name, oversaw the research into the calculation of the fissile material critical mass and detonation.

“Then the sky turned bright white. My siblings and I were knocked off our feet and violently slammed back into the bomb shelter. We had no idea what had happened.

As we sat there shell-shocked and confused, heavily injured burn victims came stumbling into the bomb shelter en masse. Their skin had peeled off their bodies and faces and hung limply down on the ground, in ribbons. Their hair was burnt down to a few measly centimeters from the scalp. Many of the victims collapsed as soon as they reached the bomb shelter entrance, forming a massive pile of contorted bodies. The stench and heat were unbearable.” 

-Shigeko Matsumoto, Atomic Bomb survivor

In the aftermath of the bomb
  • As the Atomic Bombs were being assembled for eventual use, simultaneously, pilots of the U.S. Air Force were getting trained on the long-distance B-29 Super fortress aircrafts which would be used to deliver the bombs.

“As my mother and I were eating breakfast, I heard the deep rumble of engines overhead. Our ears were trained back then; I knew it was a B-29 immediately. I stepped out into the field out front but saw no planes. Bewildered, I glanced to the northeast. I saw a black dot in the sky. Suddenly, it ‘burst’ into a ball of blinding light that filled my surroundings. A gust of hot wind hit my face; I instantly closed my eyes and knelt to the ground. As I tried to gain footing, another gust of wind lifted me up and I hit something hard. I do not remember what happened after that.

When I finally came to, I was passed out in front of a bouka suisou (stone water container used to extinguish fires back then). Suddenly, I felt an intense burning sensation on my face and arms, and tried to dunk my body into the bouka suisou. The water made it worse. I heard my mother’s voice in the distance. ‘Fujio! Fujio!’ I clung to her desperately as she scooped me up in her arms. ‘It burns, mama! It burns!’

I drifted in and out of consciousness for the next few days. My face swelled up so badly that I could not open my eyes. I was treated briefly at an air raid shelter and later at a hospital in Hatsukaichi, and was eventually brought home wrapped in bandages all over my body.” 

-Fujio Torikoshi, Atomic Bomb survivor

In the adtermath of the bomb
  • Just after 2 am on 6th August 1945, three B-29s took off from the island of Tinian and proceeded on their six-hour flight to Japan. One of them, the Enola Gay, carried the Little Boy atomic bomb. The bomb was released and detonated over Hiroshima just after eight in the morning. The radius of destruction was two kilometers with fires raging over eleven square kilometers.

“One incident I will never forget is cremating my father. My brothers and I gently laid his blackened, swollen body atop a burnt beam in front of the factory where we found him dead and set him alight. His ankles jutted out awkwardly as the rest of his body was engulfed in flames. My oldest brother suggested that we take a piece of his skull – based on a common practice in Japanese funerals in which family members pass around a tiny piece of the skull with chopsticks after cremation – and leave him be.

As soon as our chopsticks touched the surface, however, the skull cracked open like plaster and his half-cremated brain spilled out. My brothers and I screamed and ran away, leaving our father behind. We abandoned him, in the worst state possible.”

-Yoshiro Yamawaki, Atomic Bomb survivor.

Melted statue of Buddha
  • From the Enola Gay, the crew saw “a giant purple mushroom” that was boiling upward and had reached much above the aircraft altitude.  At the base of the cloud, fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar. The city that had been clearly visible in the sunlight a few minutes ago, had completely disappeared under smoke and fire. Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of Enola Gay, wrote in his log, “My God! What have we done?”

“The injured were sprawled out over the railroad tracks, scorched and black. When I walked by, they moaned in agony. ‘Water… water…’. I heard a man in passing announce that giving water to the burn victims would kill them. I was torn. I knew that these people had hours, if not minutes, to live. These burn victims – they were no longer of this world.

‘Water… water…’

I decided to look for a water source. Luckily, I found a futon nearby engulfed in flames. I tore a piece of it off, dipped it in the rice paddy nearby, and wrang it over the burn victims’ mouths. There were about 40 of them. I went back and forth, from the rice paddy to the railroad tracks. They drank the muddy water eagerly. Among them was my dear friend Yamada. ‘Yama- da! Yamada!’ I exclaimed, giddy to see a familiar face. I placed my hand on his chest. His skin slid right off, exposing his flesh. I was mortified. ‘Water…’ he murmured. I wrang the water over his mouth. Five minutes later, he was dead.

In fact, most of the people I tended to were dead…….”

-Inosuke Hayasaki, Atomic Bomb survivor

**

Epilogue: The final death toll in Hiroshima from the bomb was close to 150,000 people, mostly civilians. An event which led to Japan surrendering nine days later, effectively ending the great war.

Despite heightened awareness of the ‘end of Humanity’ risk posed by nuclear weapons, the cold war between the U.S. and the erstwhile U.S.S.R. ensured continued stockpiling of these very weapons.

In Remembrance……                                                                      Shakti Ghosal

Acknowledgements:

  1. Time Magazine ‘After the Bomb’, 1985.
  2. Wikipedia: ‘Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’
  3. Several of the photos used are from the exhibits in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Palestine


As the current Israel Hamas war spirals up into the stratosphere, amidst the 24X7 clash of words and images on social media and TV channels, I turn to that iconic graphic novel ‘Palestine’ by Joe Sacco to re-read some parts. The American Book Award winner of 1996, the nine series compilation was based on the author spending months in the Gaza strip in 1991-92. For no amount of ‘from the stands’ perspective of a situation as articulated by news readers sitting in London, New York or even Tel Aviv can match a ‘on the court’ as lived feelings and impressions.

In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, which in English translates to “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Three decades on after Joe Sacco’s as-lived experiences, perceptions and writings, these words seem so prophetically apt when it comes to Palestine.

I remember the six-day Arab Israel war in 1967 in which the latter came out on top, annexing the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan heights, even though it fought the war on three fronts with Egypt, Jordan and Syria. As a school kid in Delhi at that time, I recall being influenced by how the conflict was being projected in the newspapers, majorly a stance of the Indian Government being an Arab supporter. To my mind it was the Arabs who were fighting a just war! My childlike awareness failed to realize that here was a tiny country fighting for its very existence.

The 6 Day Arab Israel war 1967

And a consequence which would hold huge implications for the future (and what we are evidencing today as Israel asks Palestinians to vacate North Gaza before the tanks roll in) was the displacement of three hundred thousand Palestinians and an additional hundred thousand Arabs. With victory came arrogance and this was aptly on display when the Israeli Premier Golda Meir remarked, ‘Palestinians did not exist!’

Palestenian Movement of 1967

Much water has flowed down the Suez since then. And with the water has flowed a succession of images (were they reflections of something deeper?), geo-political initiatives and newsbytes.  The shifting of the Palestinian militancy into Lebanon and the Lebanese Civil war of the Nineteen Seventies. The Oslo Peace accord of the Nineties which led to the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority on the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Parliamentary elections in Gaza in 2006, which Hamas won and took over control.

What is ironical is that in its early years, Hamas and its founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin received patronage of Israel who saw the organisation as a counterweight to the other Palestinian movements. A déjà vu’ situation akin to the US support to the Afghan Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation years, leading to the rise of Osama Bin Laden who then became the former’s nemesis. In the nineteen seventies, Indian PM Indira Gandhi of the Congress party allowed, nay supported, Bhindranwale and his cult to become a Frankenstein’s monster, in a bid to weaken the Akali Party’s hold in Punjab. A horrible decision which spun out of control and sowed the seeds of the Khalistan movement. History is replete with such situations, spawned by political expediency, gone horribly wrong.

As I sit re-reading parts of Sacco’s Palestine, the graphics and the words seem to detach and swirl around, before coalescing with the world news’s images I have been seeing on the screen over the last week.

The more things change, the more they stay the same…….

A Narrative which seemed to be both connected and disconnected from the societal prejudices of race, class and religion. Be it the image of the Palestinians as rock and missile throwing fundamentalists. Or that of the Israelis as a harsh and superior force with an apartheid mindset.

The perception of the Gaza strip of being an intolerable world of quasi freedom, military occupation, demolished houses, torture and brute force to ensure compliance of arbitrary Do’s and Don’ts by the Palestinians. What do you say to the people when this happens to them at the place which they consider their home?

To be a Palestinian in Palestine…..

The Palestinians’ scanty existence, anxious with uncertainty and deprivation. A life without a seeming purpose within Gaza’s inhospitable confines, waiting for a better tomorrow which never comes.

In the book’s preface, Edward Said writes tellingly about the existential lived reality of the average Palestinian in Gaza:

“ ….The vacancy of time , the drabness not to say sordidness of everyday life in the refugee camps, the network of relief workers, bereaved mothers, unemployed young men. Teachers, police, hangers- on, the sense of confinement, permanent muddiness and ugliness conveyed by the refugee camps which is so iconic to the whole Palestinian experience….

….. the scrupulous rendering of the generations, how children and adults make their choices and live their meager lives, how some speak and some remain silent, how they are dressed in drab sweaters, miscellaneous jackets, and warm hattas of an impoverished life, on the fringes of their own homeland, in which they have become the saddest and most powerless and contradictory of creatures….”

The imagery created by the words in my mind are at once frenzied and halting.

“….. how some speak and some remain silent….”  The telling graphic of the ubiquitous Israeli soldier refusing to let Palestinians through a roadblock at his whims and fancy because of a set of enormous, threatening teeth and a M-16 gun that he brandishes, flashes in my mind.

How some speak and some remain silent……

Images swirl on that daily screen in my bedroom. A detached view, I realize, is a blessed state. A state far beyond the reach of the Palestinians and the Israelis.  A young Israeli girl being abducted from a Rave festival and taken away on a motor cycle by masked Hamas gunmen. The naked body of a female tourist being displayed on the back of a truck. The swerving billowy streaks of rockets and missiles. Neighbourhood after neighbourhood in Gaza being bombed out of existence by Israeli firepower. The danger of the entire Middle East region getting engulfed in the conflagration.

The abductions and the terror …….

Rockets & Missiles….

The bombings…….

What is it that has led to the situation spiraling out of control like this, I wonder.

Is it that slow but relentless turning of the screw by Israel on the hapless Palestinians by inflicting insults and hardships on an already miserable existence? Is it the Palestinian mindset that perceives only a hopeless and ‘no light at the end of the tunnel’ existence because of a world order which has turned its back on their right to a respectable and decent life? Has the Palestinian society being pushed to a point when life or death no longer matter, as long as they can hit back at their tormentors?

Or is it a surge of anger in Israel of having been outmaneuvered and upstaged by someone who has been perceives as weak and unequal all these decades? Is it frustration of being ‘caught with one’s pants down’ with one’s vulnerabilities on display?

Be as it may, methinks a way forward can never be achieved through horrendous acts of terror as a last-ditch attempt to gain the world’s attention. Nor through a revenge war to carpet bomb, smoke out and eliminate embedded ‘terrorists’. Both ways unfortunately lead to innocent citizens suffering collateral damage with unimaginable hardships and sorrow all around.

A way forward would require both Israel and Palestinians to eschew Amygdala hijacks, accept the ground reality of each other’s existence through negotiated give and takes. A complex and politically difficult task but not impossible if there is a will and vision. But will the world display such a will and Leadership at this juncture?

God of Comfort
Send your Spirit to encompass all those whose lives
are torn apart by violence and death in Israel and Palestine.
You are the Advocate of the oppressed
and the One whose eye is on the sparrow.
Let arms reach out in healing, rather than aggression.
Let hearts mourn rather than militarize.

Rose Marie Berger, Oct 9th 2023

In musing….. Shakti Ghosal

Acknowledgement : Palestine by Joe Sacco. Random House, London

Extinction


The long orange strip unfurled from the small roll at the end and then snaked across the entire wall. It changed colour from deep to light orange before morphing into a green strip and finally ending with a tiny four-inch blue coloured block at the end.

I was looking at a timeline representation of the start of life on earth, about three and a half billion years ago, culminating with the appearance of us humans two hundred thousand years back. That blue-coloured block highlighted the minuscule period ( around 0.006% of total )  that we humans have existed on mother earth as compared to all life.

Each loop represents approx. 0.5 billion years; the final 0.5 billion years is expanded to show more detail.

I was at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History on a recent visit to Washington DC. Though the museum carries the same name as the more well-known American Museum of Natural History in New York, I was finding the format and the presentation refreshingly different.

As I looked at the representation, I was intrigued to see the periods of mass extinction that have taken place in the planet’s living history. There seem to have occurred around five major extinction events since earth cradled life. These were when between fifty to ninety-five percent of all living species died out. I got particularly interested in two such events.

The first was the one that led to the demise of the dinosaurs. I sat watching a video of what might have happened sixty-six million years back when the age of the dinosaurs ended. A large meteor comes hurtling from outer space and hits earth in the Mexican coastal region. The impact kills all life on land and sea for thousands of kilometers all around, its explosive power equivalent to billions of atomic bombs going off at the same time. And as if that is not enough, giant tsunamis and billions of tons of vaporized asteroid and terrestrial debris spew up into the atmosphere, envelop the earth and block out sunlight for years. Photosynthesis all over the world gets seriously impeded and the global climate alters leading to large-scale death of flora and subsequently the herbivores and carnivores going up the food chain.

It is estimated that three-quarters of all life on earth perished during what is today known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. But the event also led to an interesting development. The age of the mammals commenced. Being smaller in size and with less need for sustenance, the surviving mammals who had existed on the peripheries during the dinosaur age got the planet to themselves and started flourishing. The evolutionary path over several subsequent million years took the necessary steps toward modern humans with the ability to walk on two legs.

Writes Rick Potts, the Director of Smithsonian Institute’s Human Origins Program, “East Africa was a setting in foment—one conducive to migrations across Africa during the period when Homo sapiens arose. It seems to have been an ideal setting for the mixing of genes from migrating populations widely spread across the continent. The implication is that the human genome arose in Africa. Everyone is African, and yet not from any one part of Africa.”

The second extinction event that intrigued me was the one in which the human species more or less vanished around seventy thousand years ago. Estimates range from a few hundred to a thousand humans who remained to fend for themselves in a dangerous world. The event is generally linked to a super volcanic eruption named Toba which went off in Indonesia and spewed a colossal amount of ash, debris and vapour into the atmosphere. The Sun got dimmed for years disrupting seasons, choking rivers and killing all vegetation in large parts of the planet.

Says Science writer Sam Kean, “There’s in fact evidence that the average temperature dropped 20-plus degrees in some spots,” after which the great grassy plains of Africa may have shrunk way back, keeping the small bands of humans small and hungry for hundreds, if not thousands of more years.So we almost vanished.”

As I continued to look at that unfurling orange strip and read about the extinction events, I found it indeed amazing how the present world stands dwarfed by close to eight billion of us humans. Even though our footprint remains that tiny blue coloured four-inch block on the timeline representation of life. The probability numbers about a meteor hitting or a super volcano erupting remain minuscule and clearly in our favour because of our small timeline footprint. But within that insignificant (fleeting?) footprint, we have managed to subjugate every other species, harnessing both flora and fauna to our needs. We have mastered science and technology in wondrous ways, improving our lot in every way conceivable. Be it food, be it energy, be it resources, be it our understanding of the Universe.  

But could it be that we are willy nilly walking on the extinction pathway of our own making? Stemming from our sheer numbers and our continued actions to reorder and realign nature to our own needs. Vulnerability to increased incidences of diseases and viruses. Vulnerability to our own selves as we fight for scarce resources. Vulnerability from the very technology which we believe we have harnessed.

Scientists and environmentalists are raising the alarm that we may be already at the extinction tipping point arising from global warming and climate change. A tipping point that might lead to the mass extinction of more than half of humanity with the collapse of social, political and economic structures. Once the tipping point is breached, the world could witness accelerating global warming and climate change with no way to control. Simulation studies point to an overall ecological disaster and collapse leading to the mass extinction of a large number of flora and fauna species; more than a million species are on track to go extinct in the coming decades. Would this be Judgment Day for Humanity and its cradle planet?

It seems to me that we have been plain lucky. There really is no certainty of our continuing the domination of the world beyond the so very tiny and fleeting ‘blue block four-inch’ period that we have done so. If our luck was to change, we might just have an epitaph written about us by someone in the distant future. Like the way we have written one about the dinosaurs.

Standing there I was left wondering whether we are creating the right luck for us.

Man who gave you life, man who gave you home
Man who gave you all you desire?
All you do is blight, all you do is waste
Don’t you see the ash of your fire?
Our mother’s crying, our mother’s dying
Our mother’s cancer is true
Mother we belied, mother we defiled
May your human child’s end be good for you

  by Oversense

In Musing………….                   Shakti Ghosal

Absence made Visible


The water cascaded down the black granite sides, flowing as rivulets before disappearing into the small squarish void in the center. As I looked at the flowing water, juxtaposed feelings pulled in different directions. A feeling of melancholy and sadness about the flow of our lives which was perhaps never to return. But also a feeling of peace and acceptance, an emotional cleansing about all that was not right, maybe would never be right.

From the corner of my eyes, I could see the Oculus, that majestic steel ribbed white wings about to soar up into the skies. The reflections on the nearby glass towers seemed to be heralding a brighter, more vibrant tomorrow. A tomorrow in which peace and acceptance might run the winning lap.

I was at the site of the two World Trade Center towers in Manhattan which had gone down in the September eleventh attack more than two decades back. The black granite square pools with flowing, falling water had been built as memorials to that event. The Oculus served as the integrated transportation hub built for the Path and Subway trains.

Oculus Transportation hub at the World Trade Center complex

As I stood there in contemplation, the place was a tranquil and serene island in the midst of high energy Manhattan life. Did the flowing water suggest a life force embryo just below the surface? That somehow brought into our thoughts those who had perished in the attack, their names etched on the sides serving as the only reminder? Or was it that the simplicity of the slow cascades into the void which could never be filled (as per the memorial architect Michael Arad) allowed their ‘absence (from our living world) to be made visible’?

**

My memory went back to that day decades ago.

 It was evening. I was in the office and had called a colleague to discuss an operational issue when he excitedly mentioned about a disaster in which an aircraft had crashed into one of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers in New York. We spoke about the incident for a couple of minutes and wondered about the low probability of an aircraft crashing into a building.

Returning home after office, I switched on the TV only to see the news headlines flashing all over, ‘AMERICA UNDER ATTACK!’ In the interim, a second aircraft also carrying passengers had slammed into a second WTC tower. Burning from the aviation fuel of the colliding aircrafts, both the towers collapsed. A third aircraft had crashed into Pentagon, the US Defence headquarters in Washington DC. Due to the time zone difference, what was evening for me was really morning hours on the US Eastern seaboard where the attacks were taking place. Close to three thousand people died in the attacks.

What seemed at that point in time a senseless act of violence led to a fundamental shift in the way US saw the world and how its foreign policy would come to be defined. Over the next two decades, US would engage in conflicts aimed at crushing terrorism in various parts of the globe. From demolishing Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan to the Iraq invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein to confronting the self-styled Islamic State in Syria.

I think of our world today. The actors have changed, the issues have shifted but the conflicts remain.

**

A couple of days back, I heard the tragic news of the Texas shooting in which a teenager Salvador Ramos armed with a gun entered an elementary school and senselessly shot and killed nineteen children and two adults. The carnage was a deadly reminder that even the world’s most powerful nation is unable to protect its children in their innocence.

My granddaughter has been going to a play school. She loves going there. For us, the school is a safe haven that nurtures. I agonise when I think of what might be passing through the minds of the parents and grandparents of those children whose lives were so brutally snuffed out even before they got the chance to blossom. Like me they too would have had complete faith in the safety and security of their child in school.

I muse. What is that which leads to some folks inflicting injury and death on others? I sense that this arises from an extreme psychologically aberrant mindset. A mindset which shifts into viciousness from its inability to accept ‘we versus they’ differences. So it was with Osama Bin Laden, so it is with Salvador Ramos.

An all-powerful state like the US does possess the weapons and technology to wage war against the enemy without.

But does it possess the conviction and resolve to change the mindset of the enemy within?

In learning………                                                    Shakti Ghosal

The Children of Zeus


Apollo, son of Zeus and one of the major Olympian deities, is the God of voyages.

The Apollo space program got its name from the image of Apollo riding his chariot across the sun.

It was the sheer audacity of President Kennedy’s speech in September 1962 which launched the Apollo program. A speech in which he declared, “We choose to go to the moon, 240,000 miles away using  a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.” 

A speech that was made based on US’s first manned space flight a year earlier (Alan Shephard, May 1961). A speech that shifted the goal post from near-earth space fights to a manned flight to the moon within the decade.

It was July 20th 1969 and humanity had come together as one. The Apollo Space program had succeeded in placing Man on the moon. Humanity had finally left its cradle. As a school kid, I accompanied my father to the US Information Services (USIS) center near Mandi House in Delhi. A crowd that milled around was gaping at a full size model of the Lunar Module which had successfully landed on the moon, allowing astronaut Neil Armstrong to step onto the lunar surface and utter those famous words, “ That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for Mankind”. These words, successfully relayed over radio stations all around the world, were uniting Mankind like never before. As a child, I could sense that from the manner strangers were excitedly speaking to each other as they pointed to features of the lunar craft named Eagle. Going to school over the next few days, I recall the exhilarating discussions of my classmates vying with each other about how many newspaper cuttings of the momentous event and the grainy photos they had managed to cut out and paste into their scrapbooks.

**

The other day, I did a day excursion to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. For me the trip was a pilgrimage, growing up as I had in the sixties and seventies. When Space travel and Moon landings were what our dreams were made of. When our imaginations were fuelled by the stories of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein.

As I stood looking at the full-scale exhibit of the Saturn V Rocket that had powered the Apollo missions as well as the replica of the spacecraft that had successfully carried astronauts to the moon and back more than half a century ago, deep emotions stirred within me.

In the sixties when computing, communication and control systems were so rudimentary, I realised the awesomeness of the belief and effort that not only used brute rocket force to hurtle a spacecraft with astronauts beyond earth’s gravity, it could also deploy fine navigational controls to land the lunar module onto the moon surface and then lift off with the astronauts to dock with the orbiting command module before bringing them back to earth. It was the sheer cowboy-like bravado and risk of a journey into the unknown that had brought up the emotions.

NASA Command & Control center for the Apollo missions

” The Eagle has landed!”

Which brings me to the story of Artemis. In mythology, Artemis, the Goddess of the Moon and daughter of Zeus, is the twin sister of Apollo.

An apt name for Humanity’s next phase of exploring the unknown depths of space. Artemis is all about NASA’s vision to return to the moon after half a century. Artemis would deploy the cutting-edge technological advancements in computing, communications, robotics and materials of this century to not only put men and women on the moon but take them on manned flights to Mars and beyond. The Artemis vision incorporates sustainability, international cooperation and involvement of a plethora of private sub-contractors for developing innovative mission equipment and processes.

The following is an extract from the US Presidential Memorandum on reinvigorating America’s Human Space Exploration program:

“Lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities. Beginning with missions beyond low-Earth orbit, the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.”

The Artemis initiative envisages the use of a powerful Space Launch System, the Orion spacecraft, a lunar space station similar to the International Space Station called the Gateway circling the moon, reusable human landing systems onto the lunar surface as well as a lunar basecamp. An initiative designed to leverage experience, technologies and mindset from Man’s return to the moon in 2024, to eventually make the quantum leap to Mars and beyond.

In the words of NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, “Pushing the boundaries of space exploration, science, and technology once again, America is on the verge of exploring more of the Moon than ever before. This new era of lunar exploration is called Artemis. Named after the twin sister of Apollo, she is the Goddess of the Moon, and we are the Artemis Generation.”

Could it be that Man’s destiny to the stars remains inexorably linked to the son and daughter of Zeus?

In Learning……..                                   Shakti Ghosal

Acknowledgment: ‘The ARTEMIS Plan – NASA’s lunar exploration program overview’, Sept. 2020

The Peacock Throne and today’s date….


Did you know that close to four centuries ago, on 22nd March 1635 AD, the Peacock Throne was inaugurated by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and unveiled to the world?

Did you know that the Peacock Throne took seven years to build and cost twice as much as the world-famous Taj Mahal, made as it was of solid gold, diamonds and pearls? Kohinoor, one of the largest cut diamonds in the world weighing more than one hundred and five carats, today takes pride of place in the British crown jewels but was originally part of the Peacock Throne. In some ways, the inauguration of the Peacock Throne represented the zenith of the Mughal empire.

The Peacock Throne remains a masterpiece of Moghul creation, unsurpassed in opulence and extravagance before or after. The throne creator and master goldsmith Said Gilani wrote this couplet on the occasion of the throne’s inauguration.

“Towards India he turned his reins quickly and went in all glory,

Driving like the blowing wind, dapple-grey steed swift as lightning.
With bounty and liberality, he returned to the capital;
Round his stirrups were the heavens and angels round his reins.
A thousand thanks! The beauty of the world has revived

With the early glory of the throne of multi-coloured gems“

A century later in 1739, the Mughal Empire’s decline was precipitated by its defeat at the hands of the Iranian ruler Nader Shah. What had attracted Nader Shah were stories of the Peacock Throne and the wealth of the Mughal empire. Interestingly, it was again on 22nd March 1739 AD that the Mughal capital of Delhi witnessed one of its worst mass killings and slaughter. As the invader Nader Shah ordered Qatl-e-Aam, an estimated twenty thousand men, women and children were butchered in a spell of six hours- the single bloodiest massacre in the shortest time in recorded history. In many ways this sacking of the much-venerated capital city represented the demise of the Mughal empire.

And what happened to the magnificent Peacock Throne? Well, it along with other treasures was taken away by Nader Shah and his army as they went back to Iran. The total wealth carried in today’s value terms was a stupendous eleven billion dollars.

The throne then disappeared! It is rumoured of being dismantled and literally destroyed after Nader Shah’s assassination in 1747, most of the gold and precious stones looted. It is also said that parts of the Peacock throne were used in the construction of the Persian emperor’s Sun throne.

Fascinating is it not that the zenith and the demise of the Mughal Empire in India are linked to the Peacock Throne and the date 22nd March.

In Learning………Shakti Ghosal

The economic inequality fallout of the pandemic


While doing a course on, ‘Welcome to our post-pandemic future’, the aspect of economic inequality trend jumped out at me. A trend that seems to have accelerated since the onset of the pandemic.

Statistics show that the eight wealthiest people in the world now have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people combined! Incredible as it seems, that is correct. The combined wealth of this league of extraordinary gentlemen out weighs that of three and a half billion people! It set me thinking. What is that differentiating proposition that creates such a disparity? Is it the intelligence quotient, is it the emotional quotient, a combination of the two or something else?

As I reviewed the behaviour patterns and articulations of these extraordinarily wealthy gentlemen. I could discern a pattern. A common underlying theme behind such incredible wealth creation seemed to be a knack of envisaging a future that seemed impossible, in fact laughable to most folks around. However, these individuals held the belief to hunker down and live into that future, having the doggedness to hang on till they could make it true.

 I discovered something else. As the world shifted in terms of technology and mindset, there came a moment when the window of opportunity aligned with the envisaged future and competence set of the individual. Because of the ability to hunker down and hang on, the individual could recognize that ‘clunk’ of the future as it arrived and take appropriate action. This seemed to be true for Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg as well as the others on the list.

In the next three to five years, how could we expect to see the growing economic inequality pan out and its impact on the world? One might envisage depressed ‘across the board’ consumer demand and a drag on the global economy. Most of us can recognize the negative potential of a severe long-term drag.

In one of my earlier posts some years back (https://esgeemusings.com/2017/01/22/a-brave-new-world/), I had mused:

“…….Our Brave New World too seems to be a story of the blue and red pills allowing us a choice of the path we could take.

One road leads us to a virtual utopia. Inhabited by people fully able to realise their creative and innovative potentials. A world where people are uniquely free to follow their passions and creative urges. Where innovations are exploding every other day and unimaginable wealth is getting created. Where products and services are plentiful and available to all. Where being wealthy or not no longer matters. A world that has finally come to realise the socialistic dreams of Karl Marx and Lenin, but in a warped way.

The other way is to the land of dystopia. Of people lacking meaningful work and condemned to exist on the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy. With not a hope in hell of achieving the higher rungs of potential. Of folks condemned to live on a Universal basic income provided by the Governments of the day. Of large sections of society feeling increasingly dispossessed and spiralling down into drugs, gambling, terrorism and similar madness……….”

 As I think of the growing inequality of today, I do spot some of the above-mentioned patterns of change. But I remain unsure of a pre-determined outcome. Would the economic disparity continue to grow? If so, what could each one of us do to support folks to more effectively handle the situation?

I sense that over the next few years, the world would need to go through a period of healing, not only emotional healing from the damage and trauma of the pandemic but a movement to restore overall consensus and a more equitable share for all towards livelihood. All of us would need to get involved and ensure that groups who have been disproportionately affected are at the table for coming up with plans and solutions, including young people, and that they have a chance to really have a say in what happens next to ensure a better and safer future in the coming years.

In Learning…………..                                                                                                      Shakti Ghosal

Does the Omicron variant herald the beginning of the end of the Pandemic?


The newly discovered Omicron variant of the original COVID 19 virus strain is under the microscope of genetic investigation. Initial studies indicate that the variant has a surprisingly high number of mutations ( about thirty) in the spike protein of the virus, allowing it to spread much more easily compared to the other variants. Field reports seem to substantiate this. 

The world is on the threshold of the third year of the pandemic. To try and understand what might happen going forward, we could draw some lessons from the past.

The last major pandemic of the Spanish flu of a century back waned in its third year. We might wonder as to how that happened.  There had been no vaccine then and consequently, the impact of the pandemic had been far more deadly in the initial years. Broad estimates indicate that 500 million people, which was a quarter of the world population at that time, had gotten infected as the virus spread around the globe through ships. Around one-tenth of those infected died which would work out to fifty million deaths! But by the third year of the pandemic, two shifts had taken place.  Mankind had naturally developed antibodies and had to cope with a milder infection with the virus mutating to a much less dangerous variant which has remained with us since.

Now let’s jump a hundred years into the future to the present. The virus keeps on mutating as is its wont. We have been witness to the Alpha, Beta, Delta and now the Omicron variants. To date, the Delta variant, which has been the most aggressively predominant form, accounts for 99% of recorded infections.

But now comes the Omicron. Barely a week has passed since researchers in Botswana and South Africa alerted the world about this new strain. But the variant is already seen in more than twenty countries around the globe. Omicron is seen to have an infection spreading capability of more than three to five times that of the Delta variant. There would be no place to hide from the Omicron.

Today I read in the papers of a doctor in Bangalore, one of the two known infected individuals in that city, saying that ‘apart from body ache and low fever, he felt absolutely fine’. South African doctors too have reported that though the Omicron variant has the capability to evade vaccine induced immunity and reinfect an individual, it creates mild illness symptoms with almost nil requirement of hospitalization.  Clearly, the Omicron is well on its way to displacing the Delta as the predominant COVID 19 spreader. And as it spreads and reinfects more and more of the world population, it also shows us the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.

Why do I say that?

More than one and a half centuries back, Charles Darwin expounded his theory of evolution by natural selection. In it, he said that organisms best adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and flourish. As organisms continue to mutate and have variations, there would be the inevitable selection of those which possess advantageous variations allowing them to multiply and survive.

So, it is in the case of virus strains. That variant which can spread the most and infect the host in a manner that the spread does not get restricted would take over. This is what happened in the Spanish flu pandemic. And my sense is this is what is now happening in the current pandemic with the Omicron taking center stage. Omicron impacts humans mildly allowing it to remain undetected and spread faster and faster. With new cycles of infections and reinfections along with natural as well as vaccine induced antibodies within the human population, the world would eventually reach a sustainable balance between the virus and its host.

If my above surmise is correct, the Omicron variant might just be heralding the beginning of the end of the current pandemic.

In learning…..

Shakti Ghosal

The story of the Blue and Red Pill


The Pandemic has been with us now for more than one and a half years. A virulent new strain, the Delta variant, is the new weapon unleashed by the wily COVID 19 virus to negate all that the vaccines have been doing. Conspiracy theories abound. We look on helplessly through a tunnel with no apparent light visible at the other end yet.

The West and its much vaunted ideal of human freedom is on the backfoot. As US retreats, Afghanistan has once again proved to be the graveyard of Empires- earlier the British, then the USSR and now Pax Americana. The swiftness of the Taliban takeover has been shocking as they begin the task of taking the country back into the medieval ages.

More than 600 people inside a C 17 aircraft fleeing Kabul on the Indian Independence Day 15th Aug. 2021

Almost two decades back, US President Bush had declared, “Engendering democracy across the Middle East ‘must be a focus of American policy’ for decades to come”. Today democracy is sputtering like a flame about to go out, with the failure of the much-vaunted Arab Spring and the Middle East in a far worse situation than previously.

We are into an irreversible global warming era, possibly the most serious climate crisis faced by Mankind. July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded on the planet. An extreme heat wave in Canada at a searing high of 49.6 deg. C. was a one-thousand-year weather event. Floods ripped through geographically distant countries like Germany and China. Drought stalked others. It is now being widely claimed in scientific circles that the Arctic would soon be devoid of ice with the resultant rise of sea water levels and low-lying areas going under.

The above are glimpses of a frightening and dystopian future we are headed into.

Now here is the other story.

In the last month alone, one billion people have been vaccinated against COVID 19. By the end of this year more than half the people on the planet would have received the vaccine. Truly a stupendous achievement in terms of swiftness of response and effectiveness.

The COVID-19 crisis has led to a veritable explosion of scientific progress in the tinkering of genetic information flow and the formulation of proteins, the ultimate nano machines. Trials are currently being done for protein-based vaccines for diseases ranging from Cancer to HIV.

As we speak, electricity generation from the clean sources of solar, wind, hydro and nuclear has outstripped that from ‘dirty’ coal.  Closer home in India, the wind and solar generating capacity has exceeded the milestone of 100GW output. In more and more countries, low carbon economy valuations are rising rapidly. The reason is economic. The average cost of power generation from clean sources is now half that from fossil fuels.

As investors spot a rising opportunity, more money is getting committed to climate investment funds in a day than used to be raised in years a short time back. Three weeks ago, two global asset managers, TPG and Brookfield, closed a combined $12.4 billion in climate investment funds.

Reforestation and conservation funding is taking place in countries as disparate as Indonesia and Bolivia who are supporting equatorial rain forests to United states and Canada who are focusing on wetlands, grasslands and coastal areas and the regeneration of flora and fauna therein.

These are but a few stories of a Utopian future we seem to be headed into.

So which future, whether the Dystopian or the Utopian, would come true?

As Morpheus says to Neo in the Matrix:

 “……This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you…. believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill……. and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more….”

Is our future really like the story of the blue and red pills and the need for us to make a choice of the path?

Or could it be that there is no choice after all? The two futures, dystopian and utopian, would always exist together, like the two sides of a coin. It would all come down to our world view and the context lens we choose to use. If our context was one of dystopia, we would see signals of collapse in every situation we look at. Similarly, if we were to deploy our utopian context, we would notice the signals of renewal and hope all around.

Our story, the shared and evolving narrative that it is, would always contain both dystopia and utopia, both collapse and renewal. It would depend on us which context lens we choose to deploy, which future we would wish to live into.

“What we do makes a difference, and we have to decide what kind of a difference we want to make.” Jane Goodall, English Primatologist & Anthropologist

Acknowledgement: The above piece is inspired by ‘Collapse, Renewal and Rope of History’ written by Angus Hervey, Future Crunch Journal, Aug. 24th 2021

In Learning

Shakti Ghosal

Like a beast awakening…..


Like a beast awakening, the British Howitzers and cannons roared to life. The searing flame moved from right to left as the guns fired in sequence. Ram Prasad saw the charging infantry getting mowed down as he saw the General himself getting hit and toppling from the horse.

“Charge!” Ram Prasad heard his own voice calling. He saw his men as they rose from behind the embankment and moved forward. The unforgiving howl of the British guns erupted again and he saw his brave men falling all around him.

But why was a large part of the Bengal army not moving? He felt a searing pain in the left shoulder and then in the abdomen. Blood erupted from his body, he had been hit. But still, the main flank of the army remained stationary. Indeed, they seemed to be mute spectators of the massacre.

The Battle of Plassey was a decisive victory of the British East India Company over Nawab Siraj Ud Daulah of Bengal on 23 June 1757.The battle took place at Palashi on the banks of the Hooghly River, about 150 kilometres north of Calcutta and south of Murshidabad, then capital of Bengal.The outcome of the battle was to change the history and shape of things to come for ever not only for India, but as some say, for the world, in terms of ascendancy of the British Empire.

The battle of Plassey features in the story ‘The Chronicler of the Hooghly’, part of my forthcoming book of the same name.

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