Cherokee Medicine

"The Cherokee lands furnished herbs to treat every known illness – until the Europeans came". This claim is from a tourist brochure I came across in North Carolina, still home to the Cherokee Nation.

Herbs to treat every known illness? A strong claim by any standards. Yet I read that claim humbly, respectfully, sympathetically. It is an assertion of Cherokee pride, an assertion worth making after the horrors of native American history. Is there a crime even worse than genocide? The annihilation of an entire civilization?

That respectful, sympathetic moment stuck in memory when I realized that I would never extend the same courtsey to the other sort of Indians, Asian-Indians like myself. This, despite the many terrible things that have been done to us through history.

When a fellow Indian seriously claims that our ancient culture had herbs to treat every known illness (this happens astonishingly often), my irritated instinct is to refer him to Ben Goldacre's excellent book/ blog on Bad Science, and ask to see the data from randomized, double blind, placebo controlled clinical trials.

Why the difference?

I guess I just can't think about India as a Wounded Civilization any more.

Lord of the Rings. At the Racsos

This is to announce a special Racso award for the worst moments in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Brought to you by Moonballs from Planet Earth. 

The nominees are: - Gandalf and Saruman. The fight in Orthanc, when the venerable wizards biffed each other's flowing robes and beards into a terrible tangle - 

The last homely house. Rivendell, with its kitschy soft-focus shots and air-brushed effects, looked like something from a Thomas Kinkade painting - 

The paths of the dead. The avalanche of skulls that nearly trapped Strider, Legolas and Gimli inside the Haunted Mountain. This could have been a solemn moment in an action-packed film - 

Arwen and Aragorn. The kiss on a bridge in Rivendell. Of course, it had to be in soft-focus. Why was this limp love-story promoted from the appendix to the main film? More screen time for Liv Tyler is not reason enough - 

Uruk Hai births. The slime-covered creatures emerging from the breeding pits under Orthanc. Some things are better imagined than seen, even in a film 

And the Racso goes to Gandalf and Saruman biffing it out in Orthanc. Thunderous applause. Nothing can beat Saruman and Gandalf twirling each other around Orthanc for sheer goofiness, especially in a film that clearly cares about production values.

Lord of the Rings. At the Oscars

This is to announce a special Oscar for the best moments in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Brought to you by Moonballs from Planet Earth. The nominees are: - Minas Tirith. The seven-circled white city on a hill, topped with the Tower of Ecthilion glimmering like a spike of pearl and silver, whose fighting men wore breastplates wrought with the White Tree of Gondor - Lighting the beacons. The bonfire relay across the snowy mountain-tops that brought the Rohirrim thundering south to fight alongside Gondor - Edoras. The setting for Meduseld, hall of Theoden son of Thengel, Lord of the Mark of Rohan. "Before the mountains of the south: white tipped and streaked with black...a tumbled mountain-mass with one tall peak stood like a sentinel a lonely height...set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of men. And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold. The light of it shines far over this land..." - Faramir's charge on Osgiliath. The futile cavalry charge Faramir led on an occupied Osgiliath, while Pippin sang at Lord Denathor's sumptuous lunch - Escape from the mines of Moria. The vaulted, crumbling staircase through flaming nothingness that led the Fellowship to the Bridge of Khazad Dum, where Gandalf battled the Balrog And the Oscar goes to...Faramir's charge on Osgiliath. Thunderous applause. All the nominations, the value-add in going from the book to the movie, are about visualization. The film stayed faithful to Tolkien's words, and yet visualized these scenes with a vividness and beauty that is far beyond my own imagination, even as a committed Tolkien fan. The unsung heroes of the film are probably Alan Lee and John Howe, two artists who have been visualizing scenes from Tolkien for decades, long before this film was even conceived. Peter Jackson had the good sense to collaborate with these outstanding old pros. Faramir's charge on Osgiliath wins the Oscar for being more than visualization. This scene is implied rather than described in the book. The movie takes this raw material, and builds it up into an emotional crescendo so intense that I almost dare not imagine it. By rights, it should have crumbled under its own weight. And yet, it works. Well done. Thanks PJ. Blog readers and Tolkien fans, please do chip in with your own Oscar nominees.

Lord of the Rings. On film?

I recently re-watched the Lord of the Rings Trilogy on DVD, and thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle, all nine hours of it. Yet I came away with a nagging sense that something was missing. And having mulled it over, here is my take.

Superficially, the Lord of the Rings is about Frodo’s hero-quest to destroy the ring of power. At this level, Frodo’s quest is no more or less compelling than that of Luke Skywalker, Clark Kent, Eragon, Zorro, Captain Kirk or Harry Potter. What makes Lord of the Rings special is the richness, the detail, the layered folk lore and the resonances of the vast Middle Earth within which Tolkien sets Frodo’s hero-quest.

Clearly the hero-quest matters. Anyone who ever picked up the Silmarillion was already a Tolkien fan. But what differentiates Tolkien from mere mortals is the texture and the staggering scale of the Middle Earth he imagined.

When the book was translated into the movie the balance shifted away from the folk lore and resonances of Middle Earth, towards the driving action of Frodo’s hero-quest. Film, even nine hours of film, doesn’t have much room for discursive reflection. Something was necessarily lost.

Some of this loss is obvious. Parts of the book have just been edited out. Leaving out Tom Bombadil and his wife Goldberry, daughter of the river Withywindle, was sacrilege to many old-time Tolkien fans. There is no room either for Radagast the Brown, the wizard steeped in the lore of wild animals, or for Gil Galad the elven king, of whom the harpers sadly sing. One would never know from the movie that Pippin’s Took clan had a reputation unusual behaviour, perhaps because a Took ancestor may have married a fairy. When Sam sees an oliphaunt, he has no time to put his hands behind his back and “speak poetry”, to trot out the fireside rhyme about oliphaunts he learnt back in the Shire.

A more subtle loss also runs through passages that were amplified in the movie.

Consider Anduril, Aragon’s sword. The sword is a big part of the movie. It is shown in the first scene, slicing the ring of Sauron’s hand. The movie introduces new scenes starring Anduril, like when Arwen and Aragon share a special moment over the broken blade, and when Elrond presents Aragon with the re-forged sword on the eve of battle (Aragon leaves Rivendell carrying Anduril in the book). Yet, the meaning of Anduril is overwhelmed by the urgency and tumult of war all around; the sword remains just a weapon.

Reading the book, I had time for my own imagination to work on Anduril, to transform Anduril from a weapon into a talisman. I knew that Boromir had come to Rivendell because he heard a voice saying:

Seek for the sword that was broken
In Imladris it lies…
For Isildur’s bane shall waken
And the Halfling forth shall stand.

I could let the rhythms of Bilbo’s little poem to Aragon ring in my ears:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost…
Renewed shall be the sword that was broken,
The crownless shall again be king.

I had time to understand that Aragon is Elendil’s heir because he is the man who wields Elendil’s sword. A great sword forged by elvensmiths can’t be handled by just anybody. The sword chooses its wielder, and in so doing, defines the wielder’s destiny. I simply wouldn’t have understood that if I had watched the movie first.



That said, if something was lost, something was also created. There were scenes in the movie which were way more powerful than anything I’d imagined before. More about that in my next post.

Looking back, I am very fortunate to have experienced Lord of the Rings in three different mediums, in the right sequence. First, as a story told by a favourite aunt to the children in the family, second, as a summer holidays’ reading along with my cousins (competitively exchanging cool Tolkien trivia), third, as a big-budget film.

The only other works I’ve experienced in roughly the same media, in the same sequence, are the great Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Am I comparing Peter Jackson to Peter Brook? Or to Ramanand Sagar?

Atonement

Within minutes of starting Atonement, I had transcended time and gender and stepped into Briony Tallis’ skin. I knew her: her vanity, modesty, self-absorption, idealism. I felt her intoxication, the acuteness of her need. I was in thrall. This clearly was outstanding fiction.

But then, while surfacing for a breath, I made the mistake of reading the blurb on the back cover. The blurb hinted at a sad story. It talked about “Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start. Briony will have…committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone”.

My credit-crunch wearied soul had no appetite for more sadness. For instance, I have no intention of reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, however well it is written. So I put Atonement down and moved on to the (mediocre) consolations of Eragon.

Fortunately, Atonement remained in the stack of books on my bedside table. I picked it up again, and on this second go, I couldn’t put it down. And, best of all, it is not a sad story. I just finished the last chapter, and I was standing on my chair and cheering as I read the words

Here’s the beginning of love at the end of our travail
So farewell,kind friends, as into the sunset we sail.

Or more accurately, despite finishing the last chapter on a transatlantic flight, my spirit was standing and cheering.

I haven’t seen the movie. I know Keira Knightly is in the film, and she could only play Cecilia. I let myself imagine Keira’s face on Cecilia, and that worked fine. Good casting.

But how would this book work on film? The tension in the book is between reality, and another reality that might have been. In a book, that alternative reality can be hinted at, and the imagination will do the rest. In a movie, the imagination does not have the time to conjure up an alternative reality. Mind-states, or streams of consciousness, which are created so precisely in this book, rarely communicate on screen. Recreating a period only goes so far. Where will the narrative tension that drives the film forward come from?

I believe the film is good. Looking forward to it…

BTW…being in thrall, being immersed in a complete world which is known only through the imagination, has got to be the greatest joy, the most important purpose, of fiction. Film doesn’t work that way. Film works by saturating the senses, not by engaging the imagination.

For the exception which proves that rule, watch Picnic at Hanging Rock. Its probably the most gripping suspense film I've seen; first watched as a teenager in Madras, back when a late night English film on Doordarshan was a rare treat.

Bad Science

Read this book. Ben Goldacre is a doctor + blogger. This is his good-natured rant about the manipulative tricks of money grubbing charlatans who adopt the trappings of science. His targets include homeopaths (homeopathic drugs are no better than placebos), pharma companies (trials which show expensive drugs to be ineffective are not published), and the media (who publicise a fake health scare a week). Great fun.

I hereby proclaim that Moonballs from Planet Earth and Bad Science are kindred souls.

The trouble with bad science actually starts where the book leaves off, when one moves beyond pharmacology. There are many fields worthy of scientific enquiry, where placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized trials are not possible.

For instance, Earth Sciences. It is worth knowing if we are making our planet uninhabitable. However, we can't find out by doing an experiment. We can't hold out a control sample of several dozen similar planets where the fossil fuels were never burnt, and compare the richness of life-forms observed a few thousand years later in the test and control. So scientists have to use models, which are intrinsically fallible.

Calling out the shortcomings of the models used is central to being an honest scientist. However, lists of model caveats don't make for good TV (or for good top-management presentations). So the media coverage of global warming is about as alarmist as the fake-health-scare-a-week stories that Ben Goldacre rants on about.

The guy who first called this non-science, was Bjorn Lomberg, in the Skeptical Environmentalist. It is not light reading, but it is also worth looking up, just to get a sense for how hard it really is to construct good science, with limited data, in the thick of an emotionally charged, politicized debate.

Slumdog Smarts

Slumdog Millionaire makes a good point about intelligence: the chaiwallah knows a lot of answers, if the questions relate to his life experiences.

This thought sits on a serious problem with IQ testing, or with most standardized tests like the SAT, GRE or CAT. They don't test native intelligence. They test familiarity with a specific way of thinking, which is embedded in culture.

This is the reason why cultural minorities tend to do poorly on standardized tests. A favourite example from this piece by Malcolm Gladwell illustrates this point: Kpelle tribals from Liberia naturally group knives with potatoes, because knives are used to cut potatoes. While this is quite logical, standardized tests generally expect knives to be grouped with other tools, and potates with other root vegetables.

Unfortunately, this unsurprising and well understood limitation of standardized testing has led to horribly complicated racial profiling for university admissions in the USA, and in explicit, even more divisive, quotas in India.

Surely the more creative route is in designing culture-neutral tests? And in validating these instruments sufficiently to bring them into mainstream use?

This blog is idealistic enough to believe that better technology can at least alleviate really knotty political problems.