DDT- Not a Dirty Dozen but a Godsend

Today is International Environment Day. For many people, on such a day it may be inappropriate to praise DDT, which stood for Dirty Dreaded Term after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”.

I was raised in Miraj, a small town in Maharashtra, and distinctly remember how our locality became almost mosquito-free when DDT was sprayed there regularly. Sight of white powder DDT spray itself was a promise of a good night's sleep and no nightly fever. When DDT’s usage was reduced, swarms of mosquitoes returned to torment us. Swat in Alan Dunn’s picture below was our only resort and that was not very effective while sleeping. Mosquitoes feasted on our bodies like a breakfast buffet.

Michael Crichton’s "State of Fear" states:
"......... I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.".

But for some Crichton is as toxic as DDT!

For all of those, JOHN TIERNEY has written an excellent essay- “Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science “- in NYT June5, 2007. The essay proves it’s possible to fool all the people for considerable amount of time. That’s what Carson’s book did.
Some excerpts from the article: “For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school — and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it……
If students are going to read “Silent Spring” in science classes, I wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962, titled “Chemicals and Pests.” It was a review of “Silent Spring” in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin.He didn’t have Ms. Carson’s literary flair, but his science has held up much better………….
Ms. Carson used dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass……..
Ms. Carson presented DDT as a dangerous human carcinogen, but Dr. Baldwin said the question was open and noted that most scientists “feel that the danger of damage is slight.” He acknowledged that pesticides were sometimes badly misused, but he also quoted an adage: “There are no harmless chemicals, only harmless use of chemicals.”……
She cited scary figures showing a recent rise in deaths from cancer, but she didn’t consider one of the chief causes: fewer people were dying at young ages from other diseases (including the malaria that persisted in the American South until DDT). When that longevity factor as well as the impact of smoking are removed, the cancer death rate was falling in the decade before “Silent Spring,” and it kept falling in the rest of the century. Why weren’t all of the new poisons killing people? An important clue emerged in the 1980s when the biochemist Bruce Ames tested thousands of chemicals and found that natural compounds were as likely to be carcinogenic as synthetic ones. Dr. Ames found that 99.99 percent of the carcinogens in our diet were natural, which doesn’t mean that we are being poisoned by the natural pesticides in spinach and lettuce. We ingest most carcinogens, natural or synthetic, in such small quantities that they don’t hurt us. Dosage matters, not whether a chemical is natural, just as Dr. Baldwin realized.
But scientists like him were no match for Ms. Carson’s rhetoric. DDT became taboo even though there wasn’t evidence that it was carcinogenic (and subsequent studies repeatedly failed to prove harm to humans). It’s often asserted that the severe restrictions on DDT and other pesticides were justified in rich countries like America simply to protect wildlife. But even that is debatable (see http://www.tierneylab.com/), and in any case, the chemophobia inspired by Ms. Carson’s book has been harmful in various ways. The obsession with eliminating minute risks from synthetic chemicals has wasted vast sums of money: environmental experts complain that the billions spent cleaning up Superfund sites would be better spent on more serious dangers.
The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned. Malariologists have made a little headway recently in restoring this weapon against the disease, but they’ve had to fight against Ms. Carson’s disciples who still divide the world into good and bad chemicals, with DDT in their fearsome “dirty dozen.” “


Artist: Alan Dunn The New Yorker 29 Apr 1950

p.s. DDT is not going away. Read A New Home for DDT by DONALD ROBERTS (NYT August 20, 2007) here

Let them eat cake.....Have no power of 220V? Take some lightning of 300 million volts

Maharashtra, India’s richest state, has many problems but this is kind of ironic.

It does not have electricity to support its burgeoning economy. Most of its towns and villages are suffering from planned and unplanned “load-shedding”. When a commodity become so precious you would think the state must be guarding it well.

Far from that. Indian Express dated June 3 2007 reports that even the city of Pune has large-scale theft of power. In some areas it goes as high as 36%.
India’s powerful central minister SharadPawar’s constituency- Baramati (adjacent to Pune)- has as much as 45% theft. (No wonder his voters are so happy with him!)

Now surely such electricity-less (remember both electricity and lightning have a single word in Marathi ‘Veej’) state should not suffer from deaths by lightning.

No such luck. In past one year alone, more than 650 people have lost their lives to lightning. This is as per survey done by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. For past few years, IITM has been studying killer lightning during monsoon.. Are its researchers as dumfounded as below?


Artist: Robert J. Day The New Yorker 28 March 1964

Brahmaputra

When I decided to join a tea plantation company in upper-Assam, leaving a cushy job in Nashik, Maharashtra, most people’s fear about my mental state came true! But I did not care. I had tryst with Assam. At IIT, Madras, I had stayed at the hostel named after India’s mightiest river- Brahmaputra. Since then and even before Brahamaputra had called me and I was determined to meet her in Assam.

The day I landed in Assam was a Sunday in July 1989. I was asked if I wanted to visit any place or any one. I immediately asked to be taken to Brahamaputra. I cannot describe my feelings when I reached her bank in the town of Dibrugarh. There she was. So MIGHTY, I could not see her other bank.

In Maharashtra, one may not even notice a river if there was no water in it-which is the case most times- and here was a river that looked like a sea.

My decision to come to Assam was vindicated.

But the same day, I heard some sad stories about the havoc caused by the river. They said she has swallowed whole of Dibrugarh once and she might do it again.

Asian Age of June 2 2007 reports:
“Assam is losing an average of 8,000 hectares of fertile land every year in erosion caused by stream of Brahamaputra. Assam water resources minister also admitted that a series of measures taken over the last 10 years had also failed to arrest this trend.
Minister said: "The mighty river Brahmaputra, that runs from east to west through Assam, had alone eroded away over 3.88 lakh hectare of land between 1954 and 2002. Loss of vast tracts of fertile land has made thousands of families homeless and landless in the state in the past five decades. The damages caused by flood could be repaired but river-bank erosion is engulfing the land.
If experts are to be believed the problem of erosion caused became a major problem after the great earthquake of 1950, during which the river also changed its course. The Brahmaputra took away the entire town of Sadiya and also a large part of Dibrugarh town while the entire township of Palashbari, hardly 30 km west of Guwahati, also disappeared due to river-bank erosion in the subsequent years.”

When Brahmaputra changes her course........


Artist: Rober J. Day The New Yorker 13 Oct 1934

Doc, talk to us, please

In India, tradition of friendly family doctor is dying if not dead. Doctors feel no need to talk to their patients about either ailments or medicines. They seem to be very keen to admit you to the nearest hospital.

Few years ago I was suffering from some allergy that was affecting my vision. Two of the top eye specialists at Pune did not even bother to ask me what I do with my eyes whole day. It was an allergy and I am almost fully cured by making few changes to my life style.

MICHAEL CRICHTON “although the medical profession has long recognized that doctors communicate poorly with patients, physicians receive little training to improve that interaction. Historically, medical education has regarded communication skills with an indifference that approaches contempt. It’s unscientific, it’s hand-holding, it’s bedside manner. Yet it’s clearly important.”


Artist : Richard Decker The New Yorker 8 Dec 1945

Of mice or men?

Ingmar Bergman
"I've a strong impression our world is about to go under. Our political systems are deeply compromised and have no further uses. Our social behavior patterns, interior and exterior, have proved a fiasco. The tragic thing is, we neither can nor want, nor have the strength, to alter our course. It's too late for revolutions, and deep down inside ourselves we no longer even believe in their positive effects. Just around the corner an insect world is waiting - and one day it's going to roll over our ultra-individualized existence. Otherwise, I'm a respectable Social Democrat."


Artist: George Price The New Yorker 20 May 1944

Is that enough to build a marriage on?

On May 24, 2007, Prime Minister Singh issued Ten Commandments to industry. During the speech, he decried cartelisation, spiralling salaries and corruption. This comes on top of his strong condemnation of crony capitalism few days earlier.

Singh said: “The electronic media carries the lifestyles of the rich and famous into every village and slum. Media often highlights the vulgar display of their wealth. An area of great concern is the level of ostentatious expenditure on weddings and other family events. Such vulgarity insults the poverty of the less privileged, it is socially wasteful and it plants seeds of resentment in the minds of the have-nots.”

Dear PM,

We appreciate your concern and thank you. We know you are the most incorruptible politician in the world today. We know you have a Spartan life style. We know you do not suffer from the most contagious disease of Indian public life- nepotism-at all.

But as you would be the first to acknowledge, you are not the first prominent economist/ public figure to air similar feelings about capitalism.

Your thoughts sound a lot like Paul Krugman’s NYT columns. Adam Smith’s later work was dedicated to attacking not just big government, but big corporations in general and the East India Company in particular. Through its monopoly on Indian trade East India Company had, Smith said, contrived to raise prices to customers while reducing them for suppliers. It was rife with fraud, cruelty and corruption and was “a nuisance in every respect”.

But is this expression of anguish by Indian PM good enough foundation "to build a marriage of Congress and its voters on".



Artist: Lee Lorenz The New Yorker 10 Mar 1962

Live with that the rest of your life!

Indians now live longer and healthier. My in-laws celebrated 50th anniversary of their togetherness yesterday.

In India, we are supposed to discover our ‘partner’ as we are not likely to know him/her much before the marriage. But I guess when discovery stops or ceases to be interesting, competition starts. Competition brings little games and games bring a lot of fun for onlookers like me.

I have been enjoying these little games of aging couples for a while now. Soon my wife and I will start playing them if we are not already doing so!

Following picture is a classic example of it. Wife, instead of applauding her husband’s birdie, is more worried about his boasting about it for rest of his or her life!

Artist: Chon Day The New Yorker 16 July 1960

Better to be the victim of comedy?

Mel Brooks : Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Monsoon is almost upon us in India. Media are full of stories on how city administrations of Mumbai and Pune are better prepared this year to handle the downpour. I hope so.

But knowing their track record thoughts of death by falling in an open sewer are not all that wild! I have walked past such booby traps.

Small consolation-one will be the victim of comedy and not tragedy.

Artist : William Hamilton The New Yorker 10 March 1980

Divine Comedy

For my taste, Julian Gough has written one of the best essays of 2007 - “Divine comedy “ (Prospect Magazine Issue 134 May 2007).

Its summary : “The Greeks understood that comedy (the gods' view of life) is superior to tragedy (the merely human). But since the middle ages, western culture has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. This is why fiction today is so full of anxiety and suffering. It's time writers got back to the serious business of making us laugh”

Some excerpts: “…..Many of the finest novels—and certainly the novels I love most—are in the Greek comic tradition, rather than the tragic: Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and the late Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. Yet western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar…….
The problem is not specific to Christianity. Islam has always had a problem with comedy at its expense,…….
The resistance of the monotheisms to comedy has another, more subtle, cause. The comic point of view—the gods'-eye view—is much more uncomfortable for a believer in one all-powerful God than it was for the polytheistic Greeks. To have the gods laughing at us through our fictions is acceptable if the gods are multiple, and flawed like us, laughing in recognition and sympathy: if they are Greek gods. But to have the single omnipotent, omniscient God who made us laughing at us is a very different thing: sadistic, and almost unbearable. We do not wish to hear the sound of one God laughing…….
The various eastern philosophies give us other high vantage points. Indeed, both physics and Zen can handle laughter, and are superb tools for writing the western comic novel because they do not require absolute faith and they do not claim absolute certainty. With freedom from a death-obsessed monotheism and new tools, new places from which to view humanity, we should have entered a golden age of comedy……..
A comparison between The Simpsons and a soap opera is instructive. A soap opera is trapped inside the rules of the format; all soaps resemble each other (like psychologically plausible realist novels). What the makers of The Simpsons did was take a soap opera and put a frame around it: "this is a cartoon about a soap opera." This freed them from the need to map its event-rate on to real life: they could map its event-rate on to cartoon life. A fast event-rate is inherently comic, so the tone is, of necessity, comic. But that is not to say it isn't serious. The Simpsons is profoundly serious. And profoundly comic. Like Aristophanes, debating the war between Athens and Sparta by writing about a sex strike by the women of Athens and beyond.
With its cartoon event-rate, a classic series of The Simpsons has more ideas over a broader cultural range than any novel written the same year. The speed, the density of information, the range of reference; the quantity, quality and rich humanity of the jokes—they make almost all contemporary novels seem slow, dour, monotonous and almost empty of ideas.”

How does comedy fare with us- largely polytheistic Indians? Not well at all. In fact, our art and we seem to be getting stuffier by the day.

We never had the great “The Simpsons”. Closest we had was “Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi"” or later to some extent “Filmi Chakkar”. The last great comic film we made was “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983)” ( we did make few good-not great-comedy films since then e.g. Chachi 420(1998), Bollywood Calling (2001),Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006)).Era of great film comedians (Johny Walker, Mehmood, Om Prakash) is clearly behind us.

In Marathi, forget writings of S K Kolhatkar, C V Joshi, P K Atre, P L Deshpande, we are struggling to get even another Jaywant Dalvi.In films, Master Vinayak's masterful comedy "Brahmchari" remains a distant dream.

The merely human view of life seems to have prevailed. We have forgotten- serious does not mean solemn.

It was not always so.

Tukaram, Shripad Krishna Kolhatkar, Natyachhatakar Divakar, Chi Vi Joshi, Arun Kolatkar were deadly serious but seldom solemn, humourless. Marathi playwright, more famous for his tragedies (e.g."Ekach Pyala") , Ram Ganesh Gadkari (1885-1919) almost became founder of Theatre of the Absurd (read M V Dhond’s “Chandra Chawthicha” -Mauj Prakashan-1987).

Artist : Robert Menkoff The New Yorker 15 June 1987

Chopin could not compose unless he was coughing blood.

In picture below a mother is consoling her tearful daughter after viewing "The Song of Bernadette" (based on a novel by Franz Werfel and winner of four Oscars in the 1943) that Bernadette would not have suffered as much as she did (tuberculosis of the bone) if penicillin was available in 1858.

So is tuberculosis-causing bacteria all evil?

Chris Lowry, of Bristol University, and his colleagues think a particular sort of bacterium might alleviate clinical depression. The Economist (April 7,2007) reports: “Dr Mary O'Brien was trying out an experimental treatment for lung cancer that involved inoculating patients with Mycobacterium vaccae. This is a harmless relative of the bugs that cause tuberculosis and leprosy that had, in this case, been rendered even more harmless by killing it. When Dr O'Brien gave the inoculation, she observed not only fewer symptoms of the cancer, but also an improvement in her patients' emotional health, vitality and general cognitive function.”

In response to this, Dr Dermot Kennedy has written a letter to the magazine (May 12, 2007): “Your article on the unexpected improvement to patients' emotional health after they were injected with a bacterium recalls a similar effect that has been long identified in people suffering from tuberculosis. Known as Spes phthisica, or the euphoria of the tuberculous consumptive, this partly explains the disease's impact on a long list of aesthetes, including George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and Amedeo Modigliani. Frédéric Chopin complained that he could not compose unless he was coughing blood. John Keats, “With anguish moist and fever dew”, poured out his ineffable poetry as the disease accelerated. An interesting aside to this is the aphrodisiac effect of tuberculosis, so familiar to staff working in sanatoriums. As a nursing sister in my hospital once said, “You need a blowtorch to separate them.”

In India too history of creative arts is full of interesting characters suffering from tuberculosis. Do they all owe part of their greatness to the bugs? And who would have thought you could do with small amount of free bacteria instead of expensive Viagra?

Artist : Alan Dunn The New Yorker 4 March 1944