Reflections on a milestone in my academic career

I was promoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor recently. For those of you who might not be aware, here’s how things work at American universities. You start as an “Assistant Professor”; if your research and teaching record after six years is good, you are promoted to “Associate Professor” and receive something called “tenure”. Tenure is a sought-after milestone since it guarantees a permanent job at the university (and is recognized elsewhere too). If you continue to do well after tenure and you become a “Full Professor”, though there isn’t a timeline for this second — and last — promotion.

The titles are decidedly odd: it’s not clear whom one is “Assisting” or “Associating” with, or what is one is “Full” of. One colleague suggested that you become – officially – full of yourself, which may well be true!

In my case, I joined UMass, Amherst in 2008 as an Assistant Professor in Industrial Engineering. Because of my post-doctoral training at the Mayo Clinic, I was recruited to start a research program to improve healthcare delivery — a nascent field at the time but now mainstream in most Industrial Engineering departments. I was promoted to Associate with tenure in 2014.

Tenure came with a great sense of relief and allowed me to work at a more relaxed pace. I began exploring publicly available healthcare datasets that contained a wealth of interesting epidemiological patterns and started a long-running collaboration with a New Jersey-based organization called the Camden Coalition. The post-tenure years also allowed me to experiment with new ways to engage students in the classroom. Even with courses that I’d taught many times, I noticed there was always something new to learn: nuances that I had previously glossed over would come to light, or an entirely new way of explaining a mathematical concept would begin to take shape.

The benefits of tenure went well beyond my expected research and teaching duties. While academia is all about deepening one’s expertise in a highly specialized domain, I felt an urge to explore fields far removed from my own — from ecology to earth sciences to physics to geology. My desire to learn the fundamentals of these fields rose to levels that astonished me sometimes. (Where was all this curiosity and hunger in high school and college when there was more time?) Most nights, I would pick up Feynman Lectures on Physics or the college-level biology textbook, Principles of Life, or read through the latest print version of the journal Science or the magazine Natural History. I visited research stations of the Organization of Tropical Studies in Costa Rica and met biologists doing fieldwork in rainforests. So far I don’t have much to show for these forays but I do dream of one day applying my quantitative skills in ecology.

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Left to my own devices I would have probably continued along off-the-beaten paths and not worried about promotions. But the academic ecosystem runs on metrics — publications, grants, citations, and awards — that keep tugging at you. And as the years ticked by and my hair turned gray, the question of the next advancement on the academic ladder kept coming up. Colleagues asked about it at conferences. My parents brought it up all the time. And even distant acquaintances in my parents’ flat complex in Bangalore would ask: “Have you been promoted yet?” 

So in the fall of last year, not long after I received my third NSF grant and a teaching award, I decided to put that question to test. Like all other promotions, mine went through a months-long process and involved lots of committees and evaluations. In June this year, I learned it was successful. 

Credit goes to colleagues in my department and in other universities who wholeheartedly supported my case and wrote long letters of support. Take all the letters written by full professors from other universities, different university committees, and students, and it would add up to at least thirty people involved in the promotion effort. Tally all the hours – as we often do in Industrial Engineering time studies – and it might add up to more than a hundred hours of work on somebody else’s behalf. I am very grateful to anyone who gave their time. 

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Since students are such an integral part of academic life, I want to share a few graduation pictures with my former PhD students. The left image in the first panel is from May 2014, with my first PhD student Asli, and the one on the right from May 2015 is with Xiaoling and Joanne (both were co-advised by Ana Muriel). The left image in the next panel is from May 2021 with Ekin Koker (again co-advised with Ana; Ekin’s wife Mari is to his left); and finally with Prashant Meckoni in May 2022. 

I also want to acknowledge two of my current doctoral students – Sindhoora Prakash and Ali Jafari – who have worked hard in the last year to keep my research active. Both have been awarded fellowships – Ali a departmental fellowship and Sindhoora the Dean’s First Year Fellowship. They are also co-authors – along with my former master’s student Arjun Mohan and colleague Chaitra Gopalappa – on a 30-page tutorial that was recently accepted in the INFORMS Tutorials in Operations Research series. The tutorial is a distillation of my research in healthcare over the last six years and it took us the best part of this year to put it together.  

Two more pictures. The first is with undergraduate students at an end-of-semester “bar crawl” in December 2019. As the name suggests, you start at a bar at 9 pm and then to move another and then another until closing time. Certainly challenging for someone who does not drink at all! I retired early but not before this picture was taken. 

And this is a recent picture from a hike to Bare Mountain, a short distance from campus, with the current cohort of PhD students, and my faculty colleagues Ana Muriel and Chaitra Gopalappa. (Many thanks to Chaitra who organized it and for the group selfie!) I’ve gone up this mountain – a 600-foot ascent that usually takes 20-30 minutes – so many times over the last five years that I’ve subconsciously memorized the shapes of the rocks and the trees; my legs seem to know exactly where the footholds are. Like many other spots in Amherst, Bare Mountain feels very much like home.

The Fossils that Became Fuels

Did you know that fossil fuels – coal, oil, natural gas: the much-reviled hydrocarbons of today – are remains of long-dead organisms, essentially graveyards from hundreds of million years ago that were absorbed into the Earth’s bedrock? That coal is extracted from what’s left of ancient tropical forests and oil and natural gas from the remains of ancient marine microorganisms?

In these climate-challenged times, these should be well-known facts. But I wasn’t aware of them for many years. I’d thought of fossil fuels the same way I thought of minerals: as resources to be extracted from the earth, more abundant in some parts of the world than others. The qualifier fossil, which so unequivocally points to ancient life and distinguishes the fuels from the minerals, had completely escaped my attention. What kinds of fossils had left hydrocarbon molecules in such large quantities that are now fueling our lives and warming the world? How and when were they formed? I’d never bothered to consider these questions. Just goes on to show how shallow our understanding of everyday concepts can be! (Ask me about the phases of the moon or how a refrigerator works and I might struggle in the same way.) 

The upside is that ignorance can turn into a source of wonder. I see now that every time we power our cars with gasoline, or consume electricity that comes from a coal or natural gas plant, or use the myriad products of petroleum (from asphalt to plastic bags to synthetic fibers), we are linked (however indirectly) to lifeforms from hundreds of millions of years ago. Fossil fuels should never have been burned in such large quantities, but they are a fascinating illustration of how the Earth’s deep history – stuff that we think belongs only to natural history museums and geology textbooks – is tangibly a part of our daily lives. 

The Plants That Became Coal

Modern coal deposits date back to the tropical forests of the Carboniferous (literally coal-bearing) geologic period, which began about 323 million years ago. According to Wikipedia, coal is “formed when dead plant matter decays into peat which is converted into coal by the heat and pressure of deep burial over millions of years.” 

Rocks from that period reveal the haunting imprints of plants that grew in these tropical forests. Take this fossil exhibit from one of my favorite spots in Amherst — the Beneski Museum of Natural History. It shows the 310-million-year-old trace of an ancient fern in a slice of Ohio rock. While the ferns I see every day in Massachusetts are short and carpet forest floors, back in the Carboniferous, they were tree ferns that grew nearly 65 feet tall (there are still tree ferns today in the tropics: the first image below shows the silhouette of one I recently saw in Costa Rica).

The environmental journalist Janet Marinelli describes other classes of plants that dominated the Carboniferous in this article . In addition to ferns, she highlights lycopods, ancestors of today’s club mosses. I have learned to recognize club mosses (second image below) on my daily walks. They are only a few inches tall — I incorrectly thought of them as ‘baby conifers’ or ‘hemlock nurseries’ — but a few hundred million years ago, they grew to an astonishing 130 feet. Marinelli also mentions calamites, ancestors of modern horsetails that I often spot along trails (third image below). They are short, but in the swamp forests of the Carboniferous, they rose to 50 feet. 

Ancient ferns, club mosses, horsetails, and the earliest ancestors of the conifers: these, then, were the kinds of plants that got buried under dirt and rock for hundreds of millions of years. Heat and pressure slowly converted them to coal. 

Here are some artistic renditions of what a tropical coal forest might have looked like. The visual feel of such a forest and the species of animals that inhabited it would have been quite different. Flowering plants and trees that dominate landscapes around the world today had not evolved at the time – they evolved much more “recently”, in the last 100 million years. This is why you won’t find oak, banyan, acacia, or any wildflower fossils in remnants of coal forests. The earth was also much warmer and more humid during the Carboniferous and the continents were differently aligned – North America, South America, and Africa were lashed together into a single supercontinent called Pangea. Places such as Pennsylvania and Virginia, where modern coal deposits are found, were at that time closer to the equator.    

(If all this talk of geologic periods and tectonic activity is too much, I totally understand! There was a time when my eyes would glaze over too — the esoteric names and jargon-filled descriptions seemed so inaccessible. It wasn’t until I began to connect them with what we now take for granted that the Earth’s deep history started to resonate powerfully. Take something as vital as oxygen — the planet didn’t have much oxygen at all until the photosynthetic activity of cyanobacteria, starting two billion years ago, made it abundant on Earth, in the process creating the ozone layer that now protects us from harmful radiation. Or consider how plants and fungi established a symbiotic partnership on land 400 million years ago, turning barren continental rocks into the fauna-filled forests, savannas, and agricultural landscapes of today. Or consider how a large asteroid crashed into the Earth 66 million years ago, ending the reign of the dinosaurs, but not all of them – for we still have some of their descendants, the 9000-odd species of birds on Earth today.)

The Microorganisms that Became Oil and Natural Gas

The story of oil and natural gas is more complicated – at least for someone like me with only a faint idea of geology and microbiology. The current theory is that oil comes from the remains of tiny organisms that once thrived in warm, shallow seas in the Cretaceous and Jurassic geologic periods. This is roughly 200 to 66 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs. The sources of oil and natural gas are therefore younger than the coal forests of the Carboniferous. 

I recently learned that plankton is the name given to a diverse class of marine micro-organisms that turned into oil and natural gas. A common feature of plankton is that they drift in the water and are unable to propel themselves against currents of water or wind. They include both microscopic plants (phytoplankton), which serve the same indispensable purpose as land plants, fixing the sun’s energy and thereby enabling other lifeforms; and microscopic animals (zooplankton) which feed on phytoplankton. The zooplankton in turn are a major source of food for larger organisms – whales, for example, feed on a type of zooplankton called krill. 

Unlike land plants, which I can see and appreciate easily, these microscopic lifeforms are harder to relate to. (I can’t remember the last t­ime I peered into a microscope – was it back in college or high school?) A 2010 New York Times article by William Broad discusses a type of single-celled phytoplankton called diatoms and claims they are “the source of the vast majority of the world’s oil”. There’s a lovely image in that article (below) that shows the varied geometry of diatoms – elongated, triangular, circular, star-shaped – and their iridescent colors. 

If the marine micro-organisms theory is correct, then it implies that any oil-rich terrestrial region – North Dakota, Texas, the Middle East – must have been underwater once. (Such is the nature of continental movements that even North Dakota which seems so far inland and landlocked now was once covered by a shallow sea!) Just as important, the seas that covered the region must have had plenty of sunlight and nutrients that enabled an abundance of marine micro-organisms. When the shallow seas withdrew to expose land, the sediments – accumulated remains of dead micro-organisms collected over millions of years – became a source of oil and natural gas. The graphic above (from here) conveys it quite well.

The Middle East, which used to be under the Tethys Ocean, is an excellent example. The Tethys no longer exists but it was a predecessor to today’s Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Black and Caspian Seas. When the continents slowly changed their alignments, the Tethys receded, exposing the sediment-rich Middle East. Thus, a fortuitous combination of tectonic activity and ancient marine life made the Middle East rich in oil and geopolitically important in the 20th century. Another example, I suppose, of the Earth’s deep history manifesting in the modern world!

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In closing, I should mention two books I leafed my way through while researching this article. They provide further context on the topics I’ve discussed here. The first is Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal about Earth History and the second is Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World. I also highly recommend the Deep Time exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — it provides an engaging and awe-inspiring overview of Earth’s four-billion-year-old history.

The Farm in Sathyamangalam

In January this year, I visited my perippa and perimma’s (uncle and aunt’s) farm in a small town called Sathyamangalam. Sathy, as it is fondly known, is one of a series of agricultural towns in the southern state of Tamil Nadu along the Bhavani River, a tributary of the better-known Cauvery. On either side of the roads in this region, you’ll find plots of banana trees organized in neat rows, rice paddies sparkling with water, and – ever pleasing to look at – tall coconut trees with thin, elegantly curving trunks.

The farm in Sathy has been and continues to be a special place for everyone in my extended family. I’ve always felt welcomed and at home there, and my perippa and perimma have guided me through some vexing and important personal decisions. I’ve been visiting the farm since middle school. When I went to college in Tiruchirappalli (also in Tamil Nadu), I used to take inter-city buses to Sathy during the holidays. Even after moving to the United States, I’ve managed to return once in a few years.

As a town, Sathy has grown considerably, but the farm still looks about the same. There’s the white house with the slanting red roof that comes into view soon after you enter the dirt road off the highway; there’s the spacious patio where my perippa often sits to work these days. Walk around a bit and you run into the sheds for the cows, the wells for water, and the rectangular plots for crops — turmeric, coconut, areca nut this year, and in the past rice, sugarcane, and Casuarina trees. I love standing on a ledge of the wells to see the steeply rising mountains in the distance. The cloudy weather on the days that I visited only enhanced the beauty of the farm. I spotted kingfishers, peacocks, owls, and woodpeckers with little effort. The place felt more a wildlife preserve than a place for cultivation.

My perippa’s family has owned the farm for at least two centuries. In the 1960s, with the coming of the Green Revolution and high-yielding crop varieties to India, the family started to use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Perippa wholeheartedly adopted these newer Western methods: what he now calls “chemical farming”. His brother worked in Rallis, a company that sold agricultural products. The farm served as an informal center for R&D. Agricultural scientists and researchers from Rallis visited Sathy to test the effectiveness of the company’s products.

In the 1990s, however, after noticing the detrimental effects of chemical farming on soil health – and in fact his own health – perippa shifted to organic farming. Perimma has jointly managed the farm since her marriage in 1973 and has been an equal partner in this transformation. The two of them have turned the 10-acre plots into a model organic farm that is famous in southern India.

Every day my perippa – now 82 years old and unmistakable in his lean, upright frame – attends to a constant stream of messages and calls from other farmers who need his assistance. His six decades of experience, equally split between chemical and organic farming, is highly valued. Visitors from far-off villages drop by unannounced. He is invited often to give seminars and workshops in Tamil Nadu and other states. There are plenty of YouTube videos (in English as well as Tamil) in which he tells his story. (The first video has some good views of the farm.)

In all his interviews, perippa credits other farmers who have successfully tried alternative cultivation approaches and whose methods he adapted. Names that often come up include G Nammalvar, an early pioneer of organic farming in Tamil Nadu; Shripad Dabholkar of Maharashtra (whose book Plenty For All has been a major source of inspiration); Bhaskar Save of Gujarat; and Narayana Reddy of Karnataka (who often visited the Sathy farm to provide guidance; Reddy, in turn, was influenced by Masanobu Fukuoka’s One-Straw Revolution). In investigating the life and work of these farmers, I got the impression that a robust response to the negative effects of the Green Revolution had quickly emerged in India. Today, however, the declining labor supply in agriculture poses a bigger challenge: no one aspires to be in farming anymore, and all over India, there’s been a hollowing out in rural areas as people move to urban centers.

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I would often mention the Sathy farm with great pride to my friends in the United States. However, the truth is that I was unaware — and am still unaware — of the basics of farming. Perippa often explained his techniques when I visited, and though I sensed his passion each time, I had not made the effort to follow the details. But this time was different. This time, when he took me around the farm, bent down to pick a handful of topsoil and explained how his goal was to increase the diversity of microorganisms in it; or plucked a plant to illustrate the structure of tap and feeder roots; or described how he was using certain plant species called cover crops to fix much-needed nitrogen in the soil – this time, I tried to learn as much as I could, and there was far greater emotional resonance.

What’s changed in the last few years is my curiosity about the history of life on Earth and how all life is interrelated. At its core, perippa’s organic farming vision was to create a healthy soil environment that allowed symbiotic relationships between plants, fungi, insects, and microorganisms to prosper. These relationships, in which there is a lot of give and take of nutrients, are hundreds of millions of years old. For instance, plants provide carbon to fungi living in their roots; in exchange, the fungi extract nutrients such as phosphorous from the soil, which the plants absorb. In popular culture, evolution is often presented as a competitive struggle for survival and it is to some extent that. But there are also myriad examples of species collaborating in mutually beneficial ways. We are yet to fully fathom the magnitude and complexity of such partnerships.

I’d read about these concepts in books such as Lynn Margulis’s Symbiotic Planet and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life. The great pleasure of my visit to Sathy was to see them in action. I still don’t understand enough about farming but if I do learn something in the future – that’s a big if, given my academic commitments! – then I’ll view this trip as a true start.

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I took all the pictures above except for the picture of my perimma — that’s from an article in the newspaper The Hindu in which she was interviewed about traditional varieties of rice. (Unfortunately, this article is behind a paywall.)

Revisiting C Rajagopalachari’s Mahabharata

I am reading C Rajagopalachari’s Mahabharata again after more than twenty years. This is the abridged prose version of the epic Sanskrit poem: at 1.8 million words, the longest in the world, with countless retellings and adaptations across millennia. Although the historicity of the Mahabharata is still being worked out, the story is set in North India in the millennia before the common era.

I chose to revisit the Mahabharata to alter my reading habits a bit. I’ve been absorbed with Western books on natural history, biology and science in the last few years. They have helped me look at the world in a completely new light. But I also felt the need to read something with a totally different worldview — at least something outside the bubble of Western science. So, as I flew to Bangalore, India, to be with my parents for a few weeks this winter break, I decided to take the Mahabharata along. My parents are devout Hindus and their 9th story flat is so full of images of the deities they worship and the television they watch is so full of commentaries of old Hindu texts, that the milieu of the Mahabharata fits seamlessly here.

Ninety odd pages in, I am really enjoying it. The stories in the book seem charged with a deeper meaning, now that I am much older than when I first read them. Each chapter features a character, sub-plot or theme, with a clearly defined beginning and end. Yet each chapter also fits into the larger narrative of dynastic conflict and war between two groups of cousins: the Pandavas and Kauravas.

In addition to the primary cast — Bhishma, Kunti, Drona, Duryodhana, Krishna, Arjuna, Bhima, Draupadi: all household names in India — dozens of fleeting characters come and go, playing small but important roles. There are forest sages with yogic powers who can foretell the future and deliver powerful curses (and yet soften their impact if sincere pleas are made). There are celestial deities, demons and monsters who seem quite apart from humans in their special abilities but still remain very human in their desires and foibles. The chain of cause and effect — actions at one time resulting in karmic consequences in another — is a recurring theme throughout. The stories involve  exceptional acts of generosity and sacrifice but deceit, long-standing grudges and a yearning for revenge play an equally important role. In fact, it is the vices, which most characters succumb to, that make the Mahabharata so interesting.

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One of my favorite stories is of a king named Yayati, an ancestor of the Pandavas and Kauravas. Yayati marries Devyani, the daughter of a famous sage named Sukracharya (Devyani has her own chapter in the book and an equally fascinating story). Without telling Devyani, Yayati secretly also marries Devyani’s attendant, Sarmishta. Devyani is naturally distraught when she finds out. Her furious father Sukracharya curses Yayati with premature old age which takes immediate effect.

Shocked, Yayati begs Sukracharya to remove the curse. Sukracharya says that the curse has to take its course, but relents that if Yayati “can persuade anyone to exchange his youth for your age the exchange will take effect”. Yayati desperately wants his youth back since he is “still haunted by the desire for sensual enjoyment”. He still wants to enjoy the company of women. He turns to his five sons, and this is what he asks them:

“The curse of your grandfather has made me unexpectedly and prematurely old. I have not had the fills of the joys of life… One of you ought to bear the burden of my old age and give his youth in return. He who agrees to this and bestows his youth on me will be the ruler of my kingdom. I desire to enjoy life in the full vigor of youth.”

What an extraordinary request — of course no one wants to give their youth away even if a kingdom is received in return! The first four sons refuse. But, in an astonishing act of selflessness, the youngest son Puru agrees to his father’s request. Moved and delighted, Yayati embraces Puru and immediately finds that his youth is back while Puru has turned old. He tells is son he will “enjoy life for just a while more and then give you back your youth.”

Yayati indulges himself for many years. He spends time with a beautiful woman (an apsara) in an exotic location (Garden of Kubera). But after years and years of trying of fulfill his sexual desires, there’s a key moment when he realizes that repeated gratification has not helped him. He returns to Puru with this realization:

“Dear son, sensual desire is never quenched by indulgence any more than fire is by pouring ghee on it. I had heard and read this, but till now I had not realized it. No object of desire — corn, gold, cattle or women — nothing can ever satisfy the desire of man. We can reach mental peace only by a poise beyond likes and dislikes. Such is the state of Brahman. Take back your youth and rule the kingdom wisely and well.”

Yayati retires to the forest to lead a simple life of austerities. The chapter, thus, ends with a well known teaching of Indian spiritual traditions: that one must develop the wisdom to not run after sense pleasures. The interesting part is that Yayati was quite aware of this, yet simply hearing or reading about it did not compel him to act differently. Only repeated experience — seeking gratification again and again and failing to find anything substantial or lasting — convinced him. Perhaps the true message of Yayati’s story, then, is that there is no short-cut to such realizations, that the path can be long and convoluted.

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An interesting footnote: A few days after publishing this post, I was browsing at a bookshop in Bangalore when I stumbled upon a novel by V.S. Khandekar titled Yayati. This chance encounter with Khandekar’s novel — just a few days after publishing this post — belongs to the department of interesting coincidences! (Much like how I saw a slug for the first time in Amherst, a few days after reading Elizabeth Tova-Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.)  It turns out that Yayati is a classic of Marathi literary fiction in which Khandekar re-imagines and elaborates on the story through different first-person narratives.

Some Thoughts on Joyce Carol Oates’ Fiction

I hardly read any fiction these days! Books on science and history have all but taken over. Maybe it’s the terrain that comes with being an academic — too much scholarly, intellectual stuff . The one exception is Joyce Carol Oates: I keep returning to her fiction again and again. In 2017, I read her exceptional short story collection Lovely Dark and Deep. Two recent collections of novellas — Evil Eye and Cardiff by the Sea — have left an even stronger and lasting impression*.

Most stories in these books are about women (students, junior co-workers, younger family members) who find themselves, willingly or unwillingly, drawn into the orbit of influential and successful men (wealthy patriarchs, distinguished poets, famous scientists and professors, or just husbands, sons, fathers, grandfathers). The men are the unequivocal villains of most stories: they are manipulative and sinister, often using their power, either at work or in a family relationship, to coerce or harass the women their lives. Still, Oates endows them with an intriguing complexity**.

Ensnared in relationships with such troublesome men, the women find themselves disoriented and sometimes physically threatened. A sense of foreboding pervades the stories and deepens as the narrative progresses. The suspense comes not from the plots (which tend to be straightforward) but from the psychological portraits of the characters, a slow unveiling of past traumas and sudden shifts in perspective. I am also amazed at the precision with which Oates sketches, in a few quick sentences, details of a coastal landscape, a large centuries-old house, a small New England town, an office building, the dresses and physical appearance of her characters. These details and the often tumultuous inner worlds of her characters blend seamlessly in Oates’ signature narrative style: short, urgent paragraphs interspersed with italicized words and phrases.

Not since The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories — a dazzling collection of Tolstoy’s fiction — have I come across such powerful short stories and novellas.

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* I also read Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, Oates’ 2020 novel last summer. I wasn’t as taken by it, but some scenes, characters, and passages  were as astonishing as the best of her short stories.

** The uncle of the female protagonist in the lead novella of Cardiff by the Sea — a story that does not quite follow the narrative template I’ve outlined above — is the most interesting of the male characters.

A Week in Santiago, Chile

I was in Santiago, Chile recently for the IFORS conference. Two universities — the University of Chile and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile — jointly hosted the event. There was the usual socializing, dining and fun that happens at conferences. I met colleagues and friends from Latin America, Asia and Europe, and was able to explore the city a bit.

Santiago, home to 7 million Chileans, sprawls along the foothills of the Andes. Majestic, snow-capped mountains loom in the eastern skyline. Smog from the traffic, unable to escape the wall of mountains perhaps, lay suspended in a haze over the high rises. I noticed graffiti everywhere, with no wall or building left blank — this gave the city a somewhat edgy look. Still, when compared to the other Latin American cities I’d visited — Lima, La Paz, Quito, Mexico City — Santiago seemed wealthier.

The conference included a day trip by bus to the towns of Valparaiso and Vina Del Mar along Chile’s rocky coast. The drive took us through small towns, wineries, farms, and hills with cacti, palms, and eucalyptus trees. Our tour guide, Rafael, spoke of Chile’s history during the journey: how the Spanish, after their success in toppling the mighty Incas in the north, arrived in Santiago in 1541, after an arduous crossing of the Atacama Desert. They came looking for gold, a recurring fantasy of Spanish conquests in the Americas. In the decades that followed, they faced fierce resistance from the indigenous Mapuche. Like other Andean countries such as Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, Chileans have a mixed Spanish-indigenous ancestry. However, according to Rafael, Chileans are more European and are therefore lighter-skinned. He had the precise numbers for himself: “I am 54% Spanish, 44% Mapuche, and 2-3% African.”

Rafael also spoke of the country’s modern history: the coup d’état against Salvador Allende’s government; the adoption of neoliberal policies by Augusto Pinochet‘s regime; the massive protests of 2019-20 and ongoing turbulence in the country’s politics related to the re-writing of its constitution. In a memorable phrase, Rafael called Chile a ‘bipolar country’, swinging between the extremes of the left and right. Born in 1977, Rafael grew up during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. His father, a construction worker, was once detained by authorities. But his father’s hands were so battered from bricklaying and cement work that the authorities released him. Because of that incident and the detention and disappearance of thousands of other Chileans, Rafael grew up disliking Pinochet. But now he has a more ambiguous view. He feels that had Pinochet not intervened, the situation in Chile might well have been worse.

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After the conference, I climbed up the San Cristobal hill and visited the Chilean Pre-Columbian Art Museum. I found some thought-provoking exhibits at the museum. Such as this 7th century pot from Peru’s southern desert region with a painting of three hummingbirds feeding on a flower. Because I’d seen a hummingbird the previous day in Santiago, hovering around and dipping its bill into an orange-petaled flower, I felt an instant connection to the unknown artist (or artists) who had painted a similar scene 1500 years ago. (Though I doubt that three hummingbirds can amicably feed together as depicted!)

And this beautiful, abstract-looking exhibit below is a quipu . The Incas, who commanded a vast Andean empire, used quipus for administrative purposes. Each quipu consists of a primary “inner” cord to which all the radiating secondary strings are attached; each secondary string has a cluster of knots. Variations of this basic arrangement were used to record and convey quantitative data using a base-ten numeric system. Exactly what the logic is, I don’t quite understand; I guess you could think of the quipu as the string or textile version of an abacus. But — as I learned from the appendix of Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus — some scholars have hypothesized that quipus were not just for storing numbers, they may also have been an unusual kind of writing system that is yet to be deciphered.

Skunk Cabbages And Ferns

Living almost halfway between the equator and the north pole — the 45 degree North line is a few hours drive away from Amherst, in Vermont — has its downsides in the winter. But spring always brings great relief and beauty. And so many changes mark the coming of spring! You can track the arrival of migrating birds, watch turtles sun themselves on exposed logs, or — with the air so thick with pollen — simply enjoy a fit of morning sneezes.

A few days ago, while walking through the Lawrence Swamp conservation area in Amherst, I came across these skunk cabbages (Symplocarpus foetidus). In February and even in March, there was no sign of them. Yet by mid April scores of these low-lying plants carpet the moist, swampy parts of the Massachusetts. Skunk cabbages are named for their pungent odors but I don’t smell anything in their presence. I am always struck, though, by  how vividly green they are (at least at this time of the year) and the very particular way in the leaves open up and curl.

Farther up, I found a section of the forest floor completely covered with skunk cabbages. Coiled spirals of ferns — called fiddleheads around here — will slowly begin to unfurl among them, adding to the visual drama. In fact, if you zoom in and look closely, a few tentative fern stalks are there already. For a few weeks in this patch of the forest, the two species will seem conjoined. But by mid summer, the ferns — equally striking in their appearance — will be tall enough to hide the skunk cabbages underneath. So the seasonal rhythms go!

Update, June 21st: This is how the same patch now looks, with the ferns very dominant.

The Wonder of Observing Another Species

When I was down with COVID in mid-September this year, two friends lent me Elisabeth Tova-Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating — a short, beautifully written account of a year in the author’s life. It was just the kind of reading I needed as I recovered. I finished the book a few weeks later at my usual slow — snail-like? — pace, completing a few paragraphs or a few pages each evening.

A viral infection — not COVID, for this was some decades ago — is also the central event in Tova-Bailey’s book. She catches it after a trip to Europe and finds herself in the middle of a debilitating illness that lasts two decades. The virus, she says, “re-wrote the instructions followed within every cell in my body, and in doing so, it rewrote my life, making off with nearly all my plans for the future.” The year that this book documents, Tova-Bailey is largely bed-ridden. Even standing or sitting up for a few minutes is hard.

On a whim, a visiting friend brings a wild snail (Neohelix albolabris) from the woods into her room. The snail makes its home in a pot of violets and in its early days — finding itself suddenly removed from its natural habitat and with nothing else to eat — consumed whatever paper it could find, paper being the only ‘woody’ thing in the room. This is the first of many remarkable details in the book:

The night before, I had propped an envelope containing a letter against the base of the lamp. Now I noticed a mysterious square hole just below the return address. How could a hole — a square hole — appear in an envelope overnight? Then I thought of the snail and its evening activity.

When Tova-Bailey puts some withered blossoms, the “snail investigated the offering with great interest and began to eat one of the blossoms”. Realizing that the snail needs a home that is closer to its woodland habitat, Tova-Bailey arranges for terrarium, a small habitat put together in a large glass bowl consisting of soil, mosses of various kinds, ferns and rotting bark. She feeds the snail with portobello mushrooms. (Check this Vimeo link to see the terrarium and hear a recording of the snail eating.)

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Excerpts From The Diversity of Life

I’d tried getting into The Diversity of Life twice before — 2018 or 2019 I think — but could not persevere beyond a few dozen pages. I wasn’t ready then for the kind of dense biology content that E.O.Wilson (the famous Harvard naturalist, known for his research on ants) was trying to communicate to lay audiences. In August last year — the beginning of my two semester teaching break — I picked up the book again. This time I sailed comfortably through. I read it over many months, savoring the details. Interesting how content that is so bumpy at one time can feel so seamless at another. (There was also an odd coincidence: I was about three quarters through the book when I heard of Wilson’s passing at age 92.)

The Diversity of Life exudes a kind of mystery that I found enticing. It was as if I’d stepped into a strange new world, not unlike Alice’s Wonderland or Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Except that Wilson’s world — populated with  the innumerable lifeforms of our planet and the ecosystems they inhabit — is very real of course. (Innumerable quite literally: for no one knows how many species there are on earth.) In the excerpt below, one of my favorites in the book, Wilson illustrates that to fathom the diversity of life one cannot think of space in “ordinary Euclidean dimensions”. Rather one has to think in “fractal dimensions”, with microscopically smaller ecosystems nestled within larger ones:

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A Birthday Seminar

On August 8 — my birthday! — I gave a talk at a seminar series organized by Sanjay Mehrotra, a professor at Northwestern University who directs the Center for Engineering and Health.

It’s hard to listen to someone talk on video for over an hour, so I don’t expect anyone — except those doing very similar work — to actually watch the entire talk. And the theme is rather sobering: patterns among patients in the United States who have multiple chronic conditions.

Still, those of you — friends, colleagues, family members, current and prospective students — who are here can get a glimpse of how I look and communicate my ideas. I myself learned from watching the recording that I wave my hands a lot when trying to explain something (it’s as if the whole body moves in the effort to communicate a concept); that I seem to be quite excited, often speaking too fast; that my accent and intonation is very American now, maybe irreversibly so (at one time, Indians who developed an American accent used to bother me; now I am one of them).

Skip through the video to enjoy such extraneous but juicy details!