KHOJ Residency, India

When I arrived at TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), a seminar given by a Nobel prize winner was just finishing. It’s that kind of place, a spacious 1950’s building reminiscent of the RFH in London, with gardens running down to the sea and corridors full of crates with tempting labels such as “Danger – Femtolaser”. I was greeted by C.S Unnikrishnan, a large South Indian with the smooth solidity of a rock, and introduced to his chum from college days, Sukant Saran, who now works as the TIFR publications officer. In that capacity, Sukant has produced over the years a very attractive series of posters for conferences on various topics, and recently decided to exhibit the images used in the posters as Scientific Art, a concept he was keen to explain. Whilst I sympathise with, or share, his aim of exploring scientific questions through art, I see no point in a proliferation of categories, since context is basically everything. Either by intent or co-option, art has to be part of contemporary discourse. Perhaps, as Sukant argued, everyone is an artist, but then I think most of them don’t know when. It’s about a capacity for self-criticism, really.

TIFR have quite a fine collection of 20th century Indian art, donated by the founder Homi Bajba, though it doesn’t seem that anything is being added to it. They do, however, have regular concerts in their auditorium, and on Friday I was able to hear the renowned flute player, Shri Rupak Kulkarni. Unnikrishnan (or Unni, as I think I have permission to call him) was at the concert too, and it turned out that he had studied flute with Shri Rupak’s father. Back in his office, he showed me his collection of flutes, which are made from bamboo. He was experimenting with adding an extra hole to allow a smoother bridging between the two octaves that can be played. It was a nice illustration of the mixture of theoretical and practical curiosity that drives his research, a combination that is surprisingly rare in science. Other people that I met at TIFR were either focused on the technology, or pure maths theorists such as Sunil Mukhi, who freely admitted that his interests in string theory had no immediate correlation or relevance to the observable world.

It’s not that Unni’s lab was short of technology. Two PhD students were manipulating an assembly nearly the size of a small car, at the heart of which was a Bose Einstein Condensate (or BC in lab slang), an exotic state of matter in which supercooled atoms collapse into a dense clump. This is trapped in the intersection between two laser beams, and experiments can then be performed on it, such as bouncing the BC off its own reflection. Since the jitteriness due to thermal energy and quantum effects is largely absent, other aspects of these interactions can be more clearly observed. What I particularly liked was that the output of the experiment was visual, a shadow pattern created by flashing another laser beam through the BC.

Bombay has boulevards with shady arcades, pavements for the use of pedestrians, night time streets where one can wander from food stall to bar to restaurant. Unremarkable, perhaps, unless you've been spending a month in Delhi. There is dirt, but this seems like functional dirt from the intensive use of a very high density environment, an equilibrium between waste and cleaning, not the pointless squalor of despair. And of course Bombay still has whole families living on the street. No way of knowing if they'd prefer to be in Delhi. But there's a kind of economic apartheid there that seems to be lacking in Bombay, where the city itself means that everyone has to rub along. At TIFR, the Tata institute for Fundamental Research which was the reason for my visit, most of the scientists seem to travel on the local buses and trains. No way would their counterparts consider doing so in Delhi. The inhabitants of Bombay identify themselves as belonging to the city, whereas in Delhi everyone tells you how many hours it takes to get to their village on the bus.

My journey from the airport to Colaba, at the tip of Bombay's peninsula, took one and a half hours due to congestion. There was some hooting, but usually recognisably necessary, rather than blindly imperious egotism. It was as hot as Delhi, but tropical heat that imposed a relaxed acceptance. The taxis are all spivvy little black and yellow Fiats from the 1960's.

I just got back from 4 days in Bombay. As soon as I arrived there, I realised that my problems with Delhi arise from the fact that Delhi is sick, a place where a sane and healthy life is impossible. Cancerous urbanism is entwined with mass psychosis, and the patient is receiving open-heart surgery without anaesthetic.

11/9 – The weekend in Kashmir began with an unforgettable ride to the airport, and to Ashok’s many fine qualities I must now add ruthlessness and creativity. Sitting in the back seat was like watching gladiatorial combat, as he sliced, thrust and carved his way through a 6 lane tangle of hopelessly snarled traffic. Actually, the notion of lanes is rather abstract in Delhi, since if there’s a gap of any kind, you fill it with your car. That morning, even this strategy was inadequate, and at times we were bumping along the dirt bordering the highway, weaving through bushes.

There were a few extra security precautions at the airport, but it didn’t really prepare me for Srinagar, which is a city under full blown military occupation. There are check points or military bases every couple of hundred yards, patrols everywhere, and heavily armoured vehicles at junctions. It’s not what you’d call a hearts and minds policy. I caught a glimpse of what it must be like for the average Kashmiri when the next day I was visited on my houseboat by a soldier, who asked if I had any booze, and would I give him a small bottle. I was teasing him, illustrating increasingly tinier sizes of bottle, until he gave up and went away. Fine, I’m a tourist, and there was no real threat. But if he’d wandered up to my market stall and helped himself to a T-shirt, then it would be a different story.

Not that I think independence for Kashmir is the answer. With the whole of India currently remembering the atrocities of Partition in ’47, and with the recent example of Yugoslavia, you’d have thought the idea might have lost some of its attraction. Little details like that don’t bother the nationalists though, some of the most fervent of whom seem to be expatriates, like the gentleman I met on Saturday, who was visiting from his home in Los Angeles. He was a cousin of the effusive Mr. Butt, who manages the houseboats where I’m staying, and I suspect US$ bankrolled the operation during the lean years when Kashmir was really a war zone. While we were talking there was a major event taking place next door, involving a fair amount of amplified ranting. It was the tomb of Sheikh Abdullah, prime minister for a few years of a Kashmiri government after Indian independence. His son, a politician booted out a couple of years ago for gross corruption, was attending the ceremony to commemorate his fathers death, so the security presence was intense, with a mobile crane examining the trees along the street outside. Being a foreigner, I was able to stroll through the security cordon, and the fact that I was still wearing my pyjamas gave the whole thing a very dreamlike feeling.

The day I arrived, a Friday, all the mullahs were in full flow, and a lot of them sounded quite angry too. I’d love to record the public utterance of the major religions and play it back to a group who spoke none of the languages involved, to see what they thought was being said. On Sunday there was a visit by Sonia Gandhi, followed by a minister visiting the university, and I’m flying out on 9/11, so perhaps the situation was a little more tense than usual. But even if you manage to ignore the hordes of men walking around with guns or shouting through loudspeakers, I still don’t see how Srinagar earns this ‘Paradise on Earth’ tag that everyone is still so keen to ram down your throat. Okay, it’s got a lake surrounded by mountains. Switzerland is superabundantly endowed with mountain lakes, into which no-one throws their rubbish, but everyone simply parrots Orson’s stale gag. Reading the guestbook at the Butt’s Clermont you feel that there’s some kind of mass hypnosis going on. Some of this must be due to Mr. Butt himself, who is so keen to please, and so proud of the paeans of praise filling the previous 14 guestbooks, which you are more or less obliged to read, that you feel a single note of discontent might cause him to commit hari-kiri. This is terribly mean of me, because he is a very sweet man, and looks after his guests incredibly well. There is an entire room devoted to photos of the more famous of them, who have included Nelson Rockefeller, George Harrison and Joan Lafontaine. To some extent, the place is trading on these glory days, and the houseboats themselves have the slightly shabby elegance that was always popular with the British upper class. They’re moored alongside a flower filled garden, also rather English in style, and it was a great place to sit around and read Penrose’s “Road to Reality”. It’s rather like hacking one’s way through a jungle of mathematical notation, but worth it for the occasional clearing that one finds.

One day I took a car and driver. Leaving Srinagar, the air was sweetly scented by the marijuana growing wild along the verges, succeeded by fields of rice ready for harvesting, the leaves finely striped in yellow, green and red (isn’t that the Jamaican flag, curiously?), the colours optically combining into a fresh and luminous gold. We took the road towards Ladakh, turning left at Kangan, up to the roadhead at Narayan, where there are the ruins of a temple constructed from massive blocks of weather-worn granite. From here we walked, following a path uphill alongside a crashing mountain torrent of total clarity. The people we met were Guja, though this may just mean ‘mountain people’. More specifically some were Wakarwal, or a word like that. Some were living in settlements of low, square timber cabins with earth roofs, but others who crossed our path were descending from tents pitched way up on the summer pastures. It must be a tough life, but, had they told me this was paradise, I would have been more inclined to believe them. The women had a confidence of manner and a bodily freedom that was very attractive, in marked contrast to their sisters of the plain, hobbled by the repressive strictures of caste, islam or consumer fashion.