Chemistry Nobel, yes, but what about Physics?

India-born American scientist Venkataraman Ramakrishnan may have bagged the chemstry Nobel, but the “East or West, West is the Best” policy of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has deprived India of another Nobel.

The prize for physics announced on Tuesday, October 6, recognises the work of Charles Kao for his contributions to fibre optic communications but leaves out Narinder Singh Kapany who laid the basis of Kao’s work a decade earlier by inventing fibre optics.

Kapany thus lands is in the illustrious company of Jagdish Chandra Bose, Satyendranath Bose, G.N. Ramachandran and E.C.G. Sudarshan among others who were also ignored or bypassed by the learned society of mysterious ways.

For a whiff of Kapany’s work, read excerpts from Shivanand Kanavi’s article ‘Beyond Valuations’ from Business India, September 17-30, 2001.

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Through the fibre glass

By SHIVANAND KANAVI

With his hearty laughter and easygoing nature, the ebullient Dr Narinder Singh Kapany reminds you of a neighbourhood innkeeper. But his appearance misleads. Kapany, at 74, has launched a start-up, K20ptronics, which makes tunable lasers and other components for optical networking.

The firm hopes to commercialise products based on state-of-the-art Dense Wave Division Multiplexing technology, patented by Kapany. However, not many people know that Kapany also launched what was perhaps the first hi¬tech Indian start-up in the US in 1960–when Silicon Valley’s poster boy, Sabeer Bhatia, was not even born.

Kapany’s unassuming manner does not indicate that he had demonstrated, for the first time 50 years ago, that light could be sent through glass fibre. His path-breaking project, as a PhD student at Imperial College in London, led to his being called the “father of fibre optics”.

“From my high-school days, the idea of bending light around the corner was rattling in my brain,” he says. “When I was at Imperial College in 1951 to take an advanced course in technical optics, I discussed it with my professor, who added some ideas of his own and took it to the Royal Society, which gave me a scholarship to do a PhD.”

Why the fuss about bending the path of light? The reason is that light normally travels in a straight line. But when light moving through air enters another medium, such as water or glass, part of it bends and is transmitted, while the rest is reflected. When the angle of incidence is more than a certain critical angle, light gets totally reflected at the interface.

Thus, if light has entered a totally internally reflecting pipe, it will be transmitted along the pipe, even if the pipe is bent into various contortions. British scientist John Tyndall had shown in the 19th century that light can travel through a jet of water, even if it’s curved. This effect is used in fountains, in which a coloured light source at a fountainhead gives the impression that different coloured water is springing from the fountain.

However, nobody had succeeded in using glass fibre to transmit light and images. There was even the fear that even if it were possible to pass light through the medium, the signal might suffer a loss on the way and not come out at the other end of the fibre. But Kapany was bent on trying just that.

Born in 1927 in Moga, Punjab, Kapany was brought up in Dehradun where his father had settled after retiring from the Royal Air Force. Armed with a BSc in physics, Kapany joined the local ordnance factory. Here he gained experience in designing and making optical instruments. In 1951, Kapany got the chance to study optics at the University of London, and grabbed it.

Testing his ideas in a laboratory experiment, however, was not easy. He had to get glass fibre drawn. So he went to the then famous Pilkington Glass Company, where he learned how to draw glass fibre to make glass fabric such as fibreglass. The optical quality of the glass was not important to the firm at all.

“I took some optical glass (optical glass is pure glass with no bubbles or any kind of impurity) and requested the company to draw some fibre from it. I also told them what I was going to use it for, and they humoured me,” recalls Kapany. However, what Pilkington sent a few months later were spools of fibre, made of green glass meant for beer bottles, which was very fragile and almost opaque.

“I spent months making bundles of fibre and trying to shine light at one end to see if I could see it at the other end, but no light was coming out. That was because it was not optical glass. So, I had to cut the bundle to short lengths and use strong light from a carbon arc source and finally I was able to demonstrate it in 1952-53,” he recalls.

By 1955, Kapany completed his doctorate and was all set for a return to India. However, the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester in the US drew him. He decided to go to the US for “one year”, and this eventually stretched to nearly 50 years. After Rochester, he went to the Illinois Institute of Technology near Chicago to head the Optics Department. “I did a lot of exciting work there for four years, but did not want to live in Chicago, he says, “So, I came to California and started my first company in 1960 called Optics Technology.”

Lasers were hot technology at that time. Charles Townes had just demonstrated a Ruby Laser and Ali Javan was building the first helium-neon laser in Bell Labs. Kapany demonstrated that Ruby Lasers could be used for eye surgery. “I made lasers for eye surgery and optical filters and other instrumentation. I took it public in 1967. They were crazy times like we had here in the Valley last year. We were very successful,” recalls Kapany.

In 1973, Kapany started another company called Kaptron, built it up and sold it to AMP. This made optical connectors for FDDI (fibre distributed data interface) “I stayed there 10 years as an AMP fellow and developed a number of new technologies and products for them. I left them a year-and-a-half ago and started the present company, K2Optronics. Last year we got two rounds of funding, totalling $42 million. We are making DWDM components, tunable lasers and so on. We specify what we need and buy the chips and produce very high quality lasers for Metropolitan and Access networks. We have some cutting-edge special designs for lasers, which is patented technology. We have a fairly aggressive programme,” says Kapany about his latest venture.

How does he view the multi-billion dollar industry his inventions have spawned? “In every place a number of friends come up and say accusingly, ‘see what you have done,” he guffaws. Kapany has taught in Stanford, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and has published over 100 research papers, besides hold¬ing over 125 patents and four books.

Besides optics, Kapany is interested in promoting Sikh heritage and culture. His collection of Sikh art has done the rounds in several museums around the world. He is also a patron of the Sikh Foundation in the Silicon Valley, which he founded in 1967. He has generously donated to academia to create a chair in Sikh studies at the Univer¬sity of California at Santa Barbara and a chair for optoelectronics at UC Santa Cruz.

Besides playing with light, Kapany’s hobby is sculpture, and he has had several exhibitions of his work. Kapany visits India almost every year and is a keen observer of the fibre optics scene here.

So thirsty I just held the cup under the water fall

When the sight (and sound) of water makes an entire State shudder, a boy takes a sip from a roadside facility against the backdrop of a BBMP wall graffiti on Palace Road in Bangalore on Tuesday.

Photograph: Karnataka Photo News

Also read: A piece of heritage to stop spread of pissiculture

‘Madi’, the mutt head, and the hand that helped

PALINI R. SWAMY writes from Bangalore: The floods in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have ravaged the lives, lands and houses of hundreds of thousands of people, and brought misery in a festive season. Our hearts go out to all those affected.

The floods have also brought the Raghavendra Swamy mutt in Mantralaya under the spotlight.

On the one hand, the water from the Tungabhadra and its tributaries cut off all access roads to the mutt. And, on the other hand, the unseemly hurry of the Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa to announce relief for a rich mutt in Andhra Pradesh even before reacting to the woes of his citizens, has raised eyebrows.

However, as far as I am concerned, there is a third, although very trivial and very peripheral, issue to debate, which is this KPN picture published by churumuri on October 2.

The picture has Sri Suyateendra Teertha swamiji, the senior seer and peetadhipati of the Mutt, being helped out of an Indian Air Force (IAF) helicopter after being rescued and airlifted from the flood-ravaged Brindavana of the Madhwa saint, Guru Raghavendra Swami in Kurnool district.

“…even the divine hand of Sri Suyateendra Teertha swamiji requires help from an air force hand to escape the wrath of nature,” read churumuri‘s caption.

That sent me wondering about the great leveller that is a natural disaster.

Madhwas, at least the many I know, are great believers and practitioners in madi. On the face of it, madi is a custom to maintain purity and gain strength to perform specific rituals or festivals.

It entails not eating in houses other than your own or in public places; it entails not having sexual intercourse.

It also entails not having bodily contact with other jathis.

By itself, madi may not be something any non-Madhwa can object to. After all, it is one community’s religious observance for rituals and festivals designed to protect the satvik nature of the priest, like it or lump it.

However, in its use in daily life, especially in the way it has come to be used by Brahmin priests especially of the Madhwa order, surely it is no sacrilege to suggest that madi has become a modern version of “untouchability”?

So, as I watched the picture—the swamiji and the IAF man not quite in physical contact but close—I was left wondering how an intimation of mortality can demolish some very old and strong rituals in even the most devout. And I was wondering if the swamiji went and had a bath after this interaction with someone from some other jathi.

The best case scenario is that the IAF man too was a Madhwa. And a good official defence is that the swamiji does not observer madi except when doing poojas, etc.

Probable, of course, but how likely?

Also read: Should swamijis travel abroad by air?

What role should swamijis, godmen play?

Heat, dust, haze, noise, fireworks and damp squibs

Drought relief one day, flood relief the next day

One small step for the aam appa in Karnataka is one giant leap for chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa as he visits flood-affected Hirehalla near Koppal on Monday, as Koppal MLA Karadi Sanganna Amarappa (JDS) and MP Shivarama Goud (BJP) wonder just how he does it, time after time.

Photograph: Satish Mural/ Karnataka Photo News

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The B.S. Yediyurappa photo portfolio

Is it an idol? Is it a statue? Is it a mannequin?

One leg in the chair, two eyes on the chair

Yedi, steady, go: all the gods must be crazy

Kissa Karnataka chief minister’s kursi ka: Part IV

Why did the chief minister cross the road divider?

Sometimes you are up, sometimes you are down

Dressed to thrill: Yedi-Chini bhai bhai in Shanghai

Survival of fittest is a great photo opportunity

For Rajan Bala as he waits for The Great Umpire

It speaks for the current state (and priorities) of journalism in Bangalore and elsewhere, that the news of one of India’s most knowledgeable cricket correspondents Rajan Bala—formerly of  Deccan Herald, Indian Express, The Hindu, The Asian Age—struggling for life in one of the City’s speciality hospitals, should barely make it to the pages of any one of the publications he represented.

Mr Bala went into a coma after suffering a cardiac arrest while in the studios of News9, the Bangalore-centric news channel of the TV9 group two Saturdays ago. Maybe the health of journalists is of no interest to readers, but Rajan Bala, like K.N. Prabhu before him, was no mere hack. As a writer, he was, he is, an iconic figure before cricket writing became a joke at the hands of lesser folk. As a wordsmith, he was an inspiration.

A tribute and a prayer.

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By SUNAAD RAGHURAM

As the sad news came filtering in that the great cricket writer and journalist Rajan Bala has been lying comatose after a cardiac arrest, at the Fortis Hospital in Seshadripuram, for over a week now, I achingly remembered sitting in class at Mysore’s Sharada Vilasa college in the early 1980s, on one of the wooden benches, perhaps as aged as a cask at a Scottish distillery, my twitchy mind invariably tuning itself off the lecturer’s frequency and sailing gently into the tremendously inviting and comforting world of cricket.

And cricket writing.

Rajan Bala was our hero. The final word on the game.

A guru who sent home through his writings, news and views on cricket and cricketers, which we received with reverential servitude. A man whose words on cricket were read with the same awe and fascination a child in the Himalayas would have for the formation of the sun-kissed mountains.

Rajan Bala’s cricketing sentences, to us, were formed with the same grandiose exuberance and well roundedness, the same authenticity and confidence.

To me, especially, his use of the English language, handled with phenomenal mastery, the strange novelty of certain archaic, out-of-use phrases he employed, like ‘methinks’, to denote a sense of personal opinion about someone or something; his ability to create extraordinarily catchy headlines; ‘By Lord’s, it’s India’, bringing home the news of an Indian victory on English soil in 1986 or the most memorable, ‘Marshall Law declared at Kanpur’, when speedster Malcolm Marshall rocked the ill fated Indian batting lineup during the 1983 India-West Indies test, with even Sunil Gavaskar’s bat being embarrassingly knocked out of his hands as he tried to fend towards square, were something to be feverishly discussed with friends over spicy churumuri near Ballal circle, dished out by the even-now-in-business, Dharmalingam, the Sanath Jayasuriya look-alike!

One day in 1985, I crazily travelled to Bangalore and went looking for Rajan Bala at the KSCA stadium while a Duleep Trophy game was on between South and West Zone. I knew he would be there somewhere, because I had read his report of the first day’s play in the Indian Express!

A few nervous enquiries later; I had never seen him in flesh and blood until then after all; one of the groundsmen wearing a khaki uniform pointed in the direction of a portly man with a receding hair line smoking a pipe, and engrossed in clanking the day’s report on a clearly derelict type writer placed on an old table in the administration office of the stadium.

A nervous ‘excuse me’, a few uncertain steps in his direction and he looked up.

“Hello,” his voice rose above the clatter of the Remington and a wave of his hand bid me to sit down.

“Pull up a chair,” he said. I was so excited and happy to be in his midst, the cricketing equivalent of a bowler bagging a wicket off his first ball on debut!

The day’s report was over soon and so was my introduction. He seemed amused when I shakily told him that I aspired to be a sports reporter and that my first love was cricket.

“Come tomorrow. Let’s chat,” he said before walking away from the room, presumably to beat the deadline at the office.

Krishnamachari Srikkanth got a big score the next day and after he got out, I remember him smoking, sitting on the parapet wall of the dressing room, wearing a lungi! As I took in this funny sight and hung around the pavilion area—back then, the KSCA was not really the fortress it is now and I could quite easily gain access—I was greeted by Rajan Bala who said, “So you are from Mysore, you said.”

“My uncle was the director of CFTRI,” he began. “Dr Swaminathan. I remember spending a few of my summer holidays in his house on, what road is that…ah, Geetha road,” he smiled, reminiscing. I for one found it so terribly improbable, in my rather infantile imagination, that a globe trotter like Rajan Bala could have even visited Mysore or played around on Geetha road, of all the roads in the world!

As we talked and I got a bit bolder to keep a conversation going with him, in walked into our midst, the venerable M. Chinnaswamy after whom the KSCA stadium is now named.

“So how are you, you irascible old man,” joked Bala, with one of the doyens of Karnataka cricket. I could easily make out that Rajan Bala had a certain presence born of tremendous confidence in himself and his role as a cricket writer, a certain way with words, a certain form of appeal, a certain ease with people, even with terribly important men like Chinnaswamy; not to mention cricketers, one of whom, I distinctly remember, was the promising opener Carlton Saldanha, who sat in close proximity to us that day, with a sense of well proportioned acquaintance with the imposing journalist.

Cricket journalist Joseph Hoover, who was one of the youngsters in the 1980s groomed by Rajan Bala, tells me simply, emphatically, that there has never been an Indian journalist with the cricketing knowledge of Rajan Bala.

“His strength as a writer of cricketing matters was way ahead of the others in his tribe, the knowledge stemming from his innate, instinctive talent as an observer of the game; as a formidable opener himself for Calcutta University in the good old days when he was very hard to get out; his voraciousness as a reader of books, not just on cricket but on most subjects ordinary men couldn’t even think of; English literature, science, philosophy and even business journals. He had some 3000 books in his personal library.”

Rajan Bala in his heyday could sit with a man like Sunil Gavaskar and discuss the importance of footwork at a cricket crease, and more than once had he pointed out a tiny chink or two in the otherwise impregnable armour of the legendary opening batsmen, which ordinary journalists, either couldn’t even detect or were afraid to tell.

When a pompous cricketer once took offence when a flaw was pointed out in his batting and said that journalists did not have the right to talk about technique because they hadn’t played the game at the highest level, Rajan Bala quoted Neville Cardus who had once said, “I may not have laid an egg but I can tell when I see a bad one!”

That’s how much cricket literature Bala knew.

Rajan Bala belonged to another era of cricket reporting, an era when journalists did not fall over each other to please cricketers “because we were not expected to write about a cricketer’s underwear! Most of today’s cricket journalists have unfortunately become chamchas of cricketers, who feel happy in their status as non-playing members of the team,” he once remarked with cold sarcasm.

It’s the Great Umpire above who will decide whether Mr Rajan Bala will come out of his coma and open his eyes ever again to the world. If that happens, the news would be that a man, who batted so fantastically, capably, all his life with a pen in hand, and carved out masterly strokes all around the wicket of life, to think of a turn of phrase, is ready to play ball again.

Otherwise, it would be that he played out his last over before draw of stumps, in silent anticipation of another game. Somewhere else. On some other ground that He wills.

If you ever went by what the Vedantic sage Shankaracharya propounded: ‘Punarapi maranam, punarapi jananam…’

I’m sure Rajan Bala would have read this philosophy too.

Also read: Who killed (good) cricket writing?

Is this the best Indian XI of all time?

Express Buzz: Rajan Bala’s blog posts

Everybody’s hands are up for the photo cameras

P. Mahamud, the hard-hitting cartoonist of the Kannada daily Praja Vani, captures the week’s biggest events—the “prabhugalu” going through their yoga callisthenics in Suttur, and the “prajegalu” going through hell in North Karnataka—in a pocket cartoon that every MLA and minister, every bureaucrat, babu and clerk, and indeed every mediaperson, should frame and keep.

Link courtesy Gagan K.

Also by Mahmud: Classical language status for Mandya Kannada

End of the beginning? Beginning of the end?

The rope on which hangs the hope of Yedi

Desh ki neta kaise ho? Abdul Kalam jaise ho

Wah, Taj! The 8th wonder of the world is this one

We are not, repeat not saying it’s that Gowda’s

Ever on the lookout for a good bargain, veteran political reporter M.K. VIDYARANYA spots a very important organ of a very important person on sale on the clogges streets of Bangalore.

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VIJAY M. directs our attention to some hilarious signboard bloopers in Mysore, captured by Arjun Choudary of Rekindled  Imaginations, including “Babycone Churmuri”.

Also read: It takes all types to keep a City clean and green

So that your childrens doesn’t learn English

Arly to rice makes menu helthy, velthy and vice

When akrama becomes sakrama, a pralaya is next

E.R. RAMACHANDRAN writes: Ajji steadied herself, holding on to the towel rack, while the rain waters that had gushed in to the bathroom, swirled around her.

I lifted her and took her upstairs. She changed her seere and refused coffee and made some kashaya to keep herself warm.

“Idu enu yamagalige bantho, Ramu? Idu Bengaloor-o athava Mathsya loka-vo? A couple of more downpours like this, and the city will drown like the Titanika we saw on TV the other night.”

“It’s Titanic, Ajji! You’re right. It can happen to Bangalore sooner.”

“With rains everyday from 4 ’o clock in the evenings and the kind of drains we have for rain water to escape, the City will soon become Bangalore Island.”

“Nija, Ajji.”

“Alvo, only a couple of days back they were saying ISROPPA found water on moon.”

“It’s not Isroppa, it is ISRO an organization headed by Madhavan Nair.”

“Nair and his boys went all the way to find traces of water in moon?  Our neighbour Software Subbamma (both her children work as software engineers) told me she heard on TV that if you scrape a ton of moon rock you will get only 32 ounces of water which is just enough to remove the bitter taste once you drink kashaya. Here we are drowning in our homes, in buses, under the huge potholes which is Bangalore now. We can ourselves give Nair hundreds of kodas of water provided he and his boys take it away all night and return the koda.”

“Yes, Ajji.”

“I don’t know why they have introduced so many Volvo buses under JURM or JURMANE or some thing like that.”

“Ajji, I have already told you it is JNNURM named after Jawaharlal Nehru.”

“Whatever they call it! Instead of Volvo buses, what we need here are speed boats to wade around our streets. It will be easier to navigate in Bangalore.”

“Ha-ha-ha. Ajji.”

“We need submarines like Akula for our namma Metro network. Only we should identify high rise places like Naraharirayana Gudda, Bugle rock , Kempe Gowda’s gate in Lal Bagh and Vidhana Soudha to make stations.”

“Ajji, ninna plans sakkath aagide.”

“Innondu vishaya kano. Government has already spent thousands of crores. They should spend another savira koti and ask ISROPA to do some specific works.”

“To do what, Ajji?”

“To find out how much cement have been used by our PWD Engineers and their contractors while making the roads. I think they have used budhi (ash) or vibhuthi (sacred ash) in place of cement. They have diverted all the cement to the sites where they have built palatial houses to accommodate 365 shirts to wear  each day of the year, commercial complex for a 100 cars rental agency in wife’s name!”

“Nija, Ajji.”

“Government is also helping akrama to become sakrama by collecting some sakkare! I read all the ministers are now doing ‘Chinthana’ in Suttur.  Along with the opposition parties, the CM and his colleagues should do ’Manthana’   in low lying areas of Bangalore and out of the churning, if not the bodies of drowned children,  at least come out with solutions how to save the city and the State from drowning.”

“Nobody knows when they will take such steps Ajji.”

“We don’t know whether the world will end in deluge, but this much is certain. Thanks to unscrupulous politicians of successive governments, greedy town- planners and beppuBMP officials, Bengaluru ondu divasa prayalayadalli kocchikondu hogodu khanditha,” concluded Ajji.

Nature has no obligation to be peaceful of Oct 2

It takes a monstrous downpour to reveal how perilous life can be, even on Gandhi Jayanti.

In Raichur, railway sleepers are held aloft by hope; in Bellary, the road attains an earthy hue; in Hubli, the difference between land and water, road and bridge is obliterated on the Navalgund road; and in Mantralaya, even the divine hand of Sri Suyateendra Teertha swamiji requires help from an air force hand to escape the wrath of nature.

Photographs: Karnataka Photo News

‘Largest crowd for a journo’s funeral in 40 years’

M.K. VIDYARANYA writes from Bangalore: A multitude of friends and family members gathered at the 150-year-old St Patrick‘s church in Bangalore on Thursday evening to bid goodbye to Allen J. Mendonca, the journalist turned entrepreneur, who passed away in his sleep three nights ago, at the age of 49.

Just how the sudden passing of Allen—a friendly, ever-smiling, never-say-no, hard-as-knuckles journalist at City Tab, Evening Herald, Indian Express and The Times of India—had touched so many was evident from the sea of mourners at the funeral services held at what is considered to be the second oldest Catholic church in India.

The 18-pillared intricately designed prayer hall was filled to the gills and the friends, subjects and sources were overflowing outside the church premises on to the main road.

I had never seen such a large crowd of mourners attending the funeral of a journalist in Bangalore in the last four decades.

I have lost a dear freind who was my neighour before his marriage. May Allen’s soul rest in peace. I pray god to give courage and strength to Allen’s wife, Sandhya, their son Aditya and his parents Mr and Mrs Charles Mendonca to bear the loss.

Photograph: Krishnamurthy Vidyaranya

Also read: Allen J. Mendonca: rest in peace

Allen J. Mendonca: Here’s looking at you, kid

‘I am just a (luxury) pen in the left arm of Doshi’

On the eve of Gandhi Jayanti, the luxury pen maker Mont Blanc has announced a “limited-series” pen on the Father of the Nation to commemorate the 1930 Dandi March.

The cost: Rs 14 lakh, yes, Rs 1,400,000.

Exactly 241 pieces of the pen will be available worldwide to mark the 241-mile march.

Each pen will come with a gold wire entwined by hand around the middle, which “evokes the roughly wound yarn on the charkha with which Gandhi spun everyday.” And the nib of each pen, which will have an inscripition of Gandhi holding his lathi, will be made of hand-crafted rhodium plated 18-carat gold.

There is also the ‘Mahatma Gandhi Limited Edition 3000’ pen. Three thousand pieces each of the fountain and roller ball point will be available worldwide.

Its cost: Rs 1.7 lakh and Rs 1.5 lakh respectively.

***

The “limited edition” pens celebrating a man of the masses has the approval of the Mahatma’s maverick great-grandson Tushar Gandhi (in picture). And there’s a parochial link to the project. The head of Mont Blanc’s Indian operations is the former Indian left-arm spinner,Dilip Doshi, born, like the Mahatma, in Vibrant Gujarat.

Still, there are some obvious questions to be asked of this monetisation of the Mahatma’s image. And reader Sujatha Vijayaraghavan, in a letter to the editor of The Hindu, asks one of them:

“Is it not ironical to remember one who lived like the poorest of the poor by issuing a pen that only the richest of the rich can buy?

“If Mont Blanc wants to pay homage to the Mahatma, it should contribute the sale proceeds towards providing roads, drinking water, electricity, sanitation and schools to 241 villages in India. And if the company wants to spread the message of Gandhiji, it should bring out an inexpensive, unlimited edition of pens with his face and message and offer it free to every child the world over.”