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!

A new version of ‘Thirty Letters in My Name’

From 2005-2018, I used to write a blog called Thirty Letters In My Name — the title, as you might guess, refers to the imposing length of my first (Hari Jagannathan) and last name (Balasubramanian). That blog contained a mixed bag of topics: travel, history, literature, mathematical concepts that I taught in my courses. Many of the themes I explored eventually turned into longer essays for the website 3 Quarks Daily. I haven’t written much since 2018. The break was due to personal circumstances that required me to slow down and retreat for a while.

Now I feel like writing again. This time, I want to work my way through themes that are close to my heart: wonders of the natural world, the history and diversity of life on earth, ecology and environmental conservation. I have no formal training in these areas. What little I’ve learned of the natural world comes from bits and pieces assembled from regular hikes in the mountains, forests, and coasts of the American Northeast, and then reading about them in books.

But I suppose one has to begin somewhere. That’s what I hope to do in this version of Thirty Letters In My Name: start writing and see where it leads. Although I expect many pieces to be nature-focused, my other interests — literary fiction, history, travel, movies, concepts in mathematics and probability — are all likely to make a regular appearance; I will also post edited versions of my previously published 3 Quarks Daily essays. Let’s see how this turns out!

One Foot in Engineering, the Other in the Humanities: Reflections on My Career and Interests

This essay, first published in at 3 Quarks Daily,  is summary of the themes spanning the humanities and sciences that have interested me over two decades.

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I’ve always thought of myself as someone who is more drawn to the humanities than to math or the sciences. This can seem very puzzling to someone who looks at my career details: degrees in engineering and a career in academia in a branch of applied mathematics called operations research. Even I am stumped sometimes – how did I get so deep into a quantitative field when all my life I’ve held that literature (literary fiction in particular), history and travel are far better at revealing something about the human condition than any other pursuit?

Some follow an ambition stubbornly wherever it takes them and whatever the consequences. I did not have that kind of resolve. Growing up in west and central India, I read a lot English and American fiction – Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, Alistair Maclean – and decided that I must become a writer (English only of course for the mentally colonized, why would I write in Tamil or Hindi?). The ambition was strong enough to have a grip on my thoughts for the next two decades, but never strong enough to counter practical concerns. Like many middle class families, my parents felt I had to get into an engineering or medical college since both offered the promise of financial stability. I simply went along, following what high school friends around me were doing. After toying with majors as diverse as electronics and metallurgy I finally settled on something called production engineering. In 1996, I left home and attended what was then called the Regional Engineering College, twenty kilometers from the south Indian city of Tiruchirappalli: a semi-industrial, semi-rural middle of nowhere kind of campus where teenagers from far flung states of India came and lived in packed hostels for four years.

The ambition to become a writer, meanwhile, bided its time. All you had to do was write one breakthrough novel, something like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, become famous, then write full time: that was the naïve worldview that sustained me for a long time.

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Early Years in Arizona

Wrote this back in December 2020 for 3 Quarks Daily, to mark two decades since I moved from India to the United States. This piece is about my grad school years at Arizona State University.

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In the summer of 2000, after completing my bachelor’s degree in engineering, I had to decide where to go next. I could either take up a job offer at a motorcycle manufacturing plant in south India, or I could, like many of my college friends, head to a university in the United States. Most of my friends had assistantships and tuition waivers. I had been admitted to a couple of state universities but did not have any financial support. Out of a feeling that if I stayed back in India, I’d be ‘left behind’ – whatever that meant: it was only a trick of the mind, left unexamined – I took a risk, and decided to try graduate school at Arizona State University. I hoped that funding would work out somehow.

So in August 2000, I found myself traveling across continents to this powerful country that I knew little about. It was my first ever time outside India and my first ever flight. From Chennai, I flew to Kuala Lumpur, then, after an eight-hour layover which I didn’t mind at all, to Los Angeles and finally, after the worry of a missed connection, to Phoenix, Arizona. The gleaming, modern airports, the meals and the movies, the turbulence and the clouds: it was all very exciting, a glimpse of an elite world that had once seemed inaccessible.

At the Phoenix airport, someone from the Indian Students Association at ASU came to pick me up. After what seemed like a recklessly fast drive – in fact it was normal: it’s just that I’d never experienced a 70-miles-an-hour ride on a highway before – he dropped me off at an apartment shared by three Indian grad students. One of them, my host until I found an apartment, wore a veshti, the wraparound skirt common in south India. He spoke Tamil fluently; he spoke it so well that I could well have been in my home state. I had a nagging suspicion at the time that people might change as soon as they landed in a foreign country – that they might change their attire, even forget their mother tongue. It was reassuring to know that wasn’t true. At the heart of such doubts, I see now, was a fear that I would quickly surrender my Indianness.

I slept well on the couch that first night, and when I woke up next morning, everyone was gone.  There was a massive, just-opened bag of potato chips on the dining table. What better way to experience America on your first morning than digging into a big bag of Lays that grad students, making good use of buy-one-get-one-free, always had in good supply? I had never seen a bag that size! I ate some with guilt, consoling myself that nobody would notice. Not that anyone cared, of course. It was only the first of many ‘big’ things I encountered in those early days: a massive warehouse – a Costco store – where you could pick out things in bulk at cheap prices; gleaming red tomatoes as large as cricket balls (but strangely tasteless); monster trucks with 53-foot long trailers hurtling down the highways and interstates, looming behind small cars until they yielded.

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Reflections on Phenology, Species Relationships and Ecology

This essay was first published at 3 Quarks Daily.

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The slim, green book Natural History of Western Massachusetts is one of my favorites. Compressed into its hundred odd pages are articles and visuals that describe the essential natural features of the Amherst region, where I’ve lived since 2008. I turn to it every time something outdoors piques my interest — a new tree, bird or mammal, a geological feature.

One section that I particularly enjoy is the ‘Nature Calendar’. The calendar gives predictions on what to expect in each phase of a month; there’s approximately one prediction for every 3-day period. In early November, for example, it says “dandelions may still be blooming in protected areas”, and indeed some wildflowers do retain their bright colors despite freezing fall temperatures. It also says for the same month that “flocks of cedar-waxwings may be migrating through the region”. This was such a specific claim, but it is accurate: I was startled to see a flock of nearly a hundred waxwings swirling around bare trees on a rocky mountaintop this November.

The scientific analysis of such seasonal patterns is called phenology. Wikipedia defines it as “the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations, as well as habitat factors (such as elevation)”. It’s a clunky, textbook kind of definition but the gist is clear enough.

I find myself drawn to phenology for many reasons. After thirteen years in Massachusetts, the seasons are familiar, yet each season there are always new details that capture my attention. One year I might realize how pine needles carpet the forest floor in the summer, creating a distinct soft texture on hiking trails; in another I might notice that only the chipmunks disappear in the winter while the squirrels stay active. The number of such details that I am yet to observe seems endless. They remind me that familiarity — and the boredom that appears to lurk beneath — are only mental constructs, that there is always something interesting to discover.

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New-Gen Malayalam Cinema

I’ve seen some good Malayalam movies this year. I started with the sequel to Drishyam in February, then over the course of the summer I saw Nayattu, Joji, Thondimuthalam Driksakhshiyum, and Kumbalangi Nights. 

In watching these films, I felt I was encountering a different sensibility altogether, even though the sentimental themes central to Indian plots, such as  family conflicts and romance, were still dominant. A striking feature was the choice of the actors: rather than cast people who look good in the air-brushed, movie-star way — as often happens with the Hrithik Roshans, Aamir Khans and Aishwarya Rais of Bollywood — these movies appear to have chosen actors straight out of the streets and homes, with mannerisms and gestures that are familiar to everyone. The movies also used the natural beauty of Kerala — streams, backwaters, lush green vegetation — to great effect. Indeed, the directors seemed to revel in portraying the sights of Kerala, its urban and rural landscapes, and there wasn’t a single scene in any of these movies that was set outside of the state.

As I learned later, all is this part of  what’s called New-Gen Malayalam Cinema. Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia page:

“Erosion of the so-called “superstar” system in popular Malayalam films coincided with rise of the new wave where screenplay got rooted-to-reality, closer-to-life and lead characters became ordinary men and women. Influx of new actors, the absence of superstars, rise of metro-centric/urban and middle-class themes and different story-lines were also noted in the wave. While formats and styles of the new directors are deeply influenced by the global and Indian trends, their thematics were firmly rooted in Malayali life and mind-scape.[6] A recurrent trope in these new narratives is accidents, coincidences, casual encounters and chance meetings that set in motion an unexpected chain of events affecting the lives of the characters…”

The movie I liked the most was Dileesh Pothan’s Thondimuthalam Driksakhshiyum (The Exhibits and the Witness). It is about a newly married inter-caste couple, Sreeja (Nimisha Vijayan) and Prasad (Suraj Venjaramoodu). During a bus journey between towns, Sreeja loses her valuable wedding necklace to a petty wandering thief — incidentally also named Prasad (played by Fahaad Faasil). The thief is caught red-handed in the act but the necklace has disappeared.

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Wonders of the Scientific Backstory

Earlier this year, on my usual walk through the UMass campus, I passed by a rock that was on display next to the Science Center. I had probably passed it dozens of times before but never noticed it. (Why do things that we miss all the time suddenly catch our attention one fine day?) The rock – dark grey, about four feet wide, two feet tall, sliced to reveal contours in the cross section – was like others in northeastern US: so common and ordinary, it blended into the landscape. But that day I stopped to look at the plaque that was attached to the rock. This is what it said: 

“Hawley Formation Pillow Basalt. This basalt was erupted from an arc volcano during subduction and closure of the Iapetus Ocean, approximately 475 million years old. Quarried from Hawley, Massachusetts.”  

475 million years! I was intrigued: Was this the oldest inanimate solid body that I had ever seen? Had it always more or less retained its shape over millions of years? And what about the exposed rocky cliffs along interstates and the glacier-strewn boulders along hiking trails which I saw so regularly – how old were they?

I had paid little attention to rocks and boulders, but now they have moved to the foreground of my awareness. They have turned into sources of wonder, quiet messengers from an ancient time. And geology itself, which for a long time seemed like a forbidding science – with esoteric terms such as subductions, mantles and moraines – now seems indispensable to understanding the earth’s deep history.     

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A monarch caterpillar

Although I’ve seen a lot of monarch butterflies in my years in Massachusetts, and even traveled to the forests of Michoacan in Central Mexico to watch millions of them congregate the winter, I’d never — surprisingly — come across a monarch caterpillar. But last month, at a roadside stop in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, I finally saw one squirming on the leaf of a milk weed plant. 

If everything goes well this caterpillar will metamorphose into a butterfly and will — all by itself — make the epic 2000-mile journey to Mexico.

The caterpillar sighting led me to check how monarchs have been doing in recent years. A good estimate of their numbers comes not from raw counts — it is very hard to count swarms of butterflies — but from the number of acres occupied by the migrant generation in Mexico at the peak of the winter. That’s the time of the year the butterflies are densely packed together on oyamel (fir) trees. So it’s a matter of identifying clusters of such trees, determining the perimeter of each cluster, and finally calculating the total area enclosed across all clusters. Mexican researchers, led by Eduardo Rendon Salinas, do this on an annual basis.

According to some recent references, the number of acres occupied by overwintering monarchs starting 2014-2015 (the year I visited) reads as follows:

2.79,  9.91,  7.19,  6.13,  14.95,  6.99, 4.9

A lot of ups and downs there with a seeming decline in the last couple of years. In contrast, the average acres monarchs occupied in the 1990s and 2000s was well over 15, and individual years frequently exceeded 20.