SUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA, PUNE AUGUST 2, 2015 17DEEP FOCUS
Anantha Subramanyam K & Vidya Iyengar
At the crack of dawn, a gang of around 100 boys and young men
de-scends on the lanes and bylanes of Bengalurus
Chickpet area. They swiftly slip into the deep, murky pits that
re-ceive the localitys sewage.
Inside, with brooms in hand, the youngsters start raking the
thick, oily, grey-black sludge that shimmers in the morning light.
They are looking for Element 79.
The, manholes with cov-ers removed and placed on the edge, on
Avenue Road, Cub-bonpet, Nagarthpet, Anchep-et, Siddanna lane and
Kilari Road are guarded by emaci-ated boys who warn vehicle drivers
and passers-by to look out. You could mistake them, as we did, for
manual scavengers hired by civic agencies to clean the sewers. This
is, in fact, underground scav-
enging, but with a difference.Avenue Road and its adjoin-
ing lanes is a hub for goldsmiths and jewellers. There are more
than 300 goldsmiths in this area who work for the citys top
jewellers. The gold dust from these work-
shops/units often ends up in the drains, and that is the
gossamer lode the young boys are purpose-fully hunting.
We scour the area from early morning till around 7:30 am to
col-lect the sludge from the gutters. We then take it to be
filtered, explains Karthik who makes the most of the golden hours
in the gutters before he switches to his primary job as an
auto driver. Most times, however, he finds mud and nothing
else,
complains Karthik, who joined the tribe of treasure-hunters
three years ago.
The occasional extra buck and the hope of making it makes the
task worth their while. Af-ter all, gold hovers around Rs 23,000
per 10 gm now.
At the filtering units ad-joining the railway tracks at
Okalipuram, we found around 20 people, mostly women, busy
silting the waste (brass often is a collateral find). They use
mercury to draw out any accumulated gold.
Once it is collected, the gold is sold to dealers in the same
area.
M Krishnachari, who has been a goldsmith for the past 45 years,
explains how the gold specks land up on roads and in drains. When
we melt gold, theres a small amount of wastage for every 10 gm, at
least 1 gm is lost. This ends up on our hands and feet. We usu-ally
rinse our hands and feet out-side the store which is how the
gold
flows into the gutters, he says.Vishwanatha, of Vishwanatha
Antique Dye Works who special-izes in embossed work, says it is
difficult to estimate how much gold the boys collect on a daily
basis. It is really a question of luck. Some-times when we send our
workers to get some polishing done, they put the gold in their
pockets and lose it. So these boys may get entire nuggets of gold;
at other times,
they have to separate the dirt from the gold powder, he
says.
Collecting the muck and de-positing it at Okalipuram gets the
boys Rs 400 a day. If we manage to get any gold or precious metal,
we have regular buyers who pay us a little less than the market
price. But its okay for a couple of hours job, says Santosh, a
daily wager from Okalipuram.
The wiry Babu (24) doubles up
as filtering staff. He says business has been hit badly of late.
The tribe (of collectors) has grown and everyone is looking in the
same places, at the same time, he says. Babu earns an extra Rs 400
for la-bouring over mounds of sand, most of which contains human
excreta, in search of the elusive micro particles.
The ramshackle filtering set-ups draw residents of the slum
adjoin-ing the railway lines. After finish-ing household chores we
spend time silting until sundown. We get paid Rs 250 per day for
this work, says Priya, who lives nearby.
Isnt it revolting to search for gold amid human excreta? Saar,
are people who live above these gut-ters as decent as they look?
They do worse jobs than this to lead a luxurious life, Santosh
retorts.
He then quietly shuts the lid of the manhole and walks away with
a bag full of silt and muck, hoping he has struck gold.
Courtesy Bangalore Mirror
[email protected]
Sujan Sengupta, an associate professor at Indian Institute of
Astrophysics, Bengaluru, is a much harassed man now-adays harassed
by unsolic-ited callers. One wanted to
know if the scientist has come in con-tact with an alien.
Another reported that he had found something that could be an alien
signal. I am tired of these guys, says Sengupta.
The calls started on July 20, when Russian billionaire Yuri
Milner an-nounced the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project to
look for extraterres-trial intelligence. The money was big, but so
were the men Milner got to rub shoulders with: Stephen Hawking, the
worlds most famous theoretical physi-cist; Martin Reese, the
British cosmolo-gist after whom an asteroid is named; Geoffrey
Marcy, the American astrono-mer who discovered 70 of the first 100
extra-solar planets man could find; and Pete Worden, former Nasa
Ames Re-search Centre director. The only Indian in the Breakthrough
Listen team is Su-jan Sengupta.
If you forget the calls, says the scientist who has been
studying extra-solar planets and brown dwarfs, I am quite excited.
The search for extrater-restrial intelligence (SETI) dates back to
the late 19th century when physicist Nikola Tesla suggested that
humans could send electrical signals to Mar-tians. But SETI got its
name only in 1960 when American astrophysicist Frank Drake launched
Project Ozma that used a 26m radio telescope to lis-ten to signals
from outer space, some of which he thought could be from al-iens.
Breakthrough Listen will use the 100m telescope at the Green Bank
Ob-servatory, West Virginia, and the 64m telescope at Parkes
Observatory in Aus-tralia for hundreds of hours, for ten years. It
will also search for optical sig-nals using the Automated Planet
Find-
er of Lick Observatory in California.Breakthrough Listen spells
out its
first two initiatives on its homepage. One: A complete survey of
one million nearest stars, the plane and centre of our galaxy, and
the 100 nearest galax-ies. All data will be open to the public.
Two: A $1million competition to design a message representing Earth
and hu-manity that could potentially be un-derstood by another
civilization.
Its a funny project because we are looking for something which
we know nothing about, says Sengupta. But then, there are 200
billion stars in our galaxy and there are some 200 billion galaxies
in the visible universe, so there must be someone sending a sig-nal
from somewhere, says Sengupta.
How do we know if some signals the radio telescopes receive are
from ET, when celestial objects continu-ously send out radio
pulses? The thumb rule has been that if a set of signals is
systematic and regular, with-out the sidereal characters associated
with celestial bodies, it should be from an intelligent source. In
1967, Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell Burnell were excited when they
recorded pulses separated by 1.33 seconds emanating from the same
location in the sky. They named them LGM (little green men). Soon
they turned out to be coming from a hitherto unknown celestial
source. And Hewish went on to get the Nobel Prize in 1974 for
aiding the dis-covery of pulsars.
Breakthrough Listen, however, is not all about listening, it
will also send out some radio signals for ET to detect.
Astrophysicists remain sharply di-vided on the origin of the
universe many hailing Hawkings Big Bang theory, and some others
like Jayant Narlikar who flay it as pseudoscience but everyone
agrees on the possibil-ity of existence of extraterrestrial
intelligent life.
Hawking, who has been caution-ing against sending radio
signals
since advanced extraterrestrials could ruin us, seems to have
partial-ly come around with the Break-through project. Hawking, who
said in 2010 that aliens would be looking to conquer and colonize
whatever planets they could reach, has now said: We are alive. We
are intelli-gent. We must know.
To know, an array of radio tele-scopes at Tata Institute of
Funda-
mental Research in Pune has been tuning in for alien signals, so
far with no luck. However, Jayant Narlikar, founder of
Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune,
went a different way. His team sent out balloons from Hyderabad in
2001, and collected microbes from an altitude of 41km, in
sterilized cans. They didnt find much more than a few varieties
which are unusually resistant to UV radiation. The team tried the
experiment again with im-proved methods in 2005, and got three
types of microbes which were so far not seen on Earth. Did they
rise from Earth or were they falling to Earth? says Narlikar. And
we dont have the answer yet. For this, he is planning another round
of experi-ments including isotope analysis of
the microbes.The two missions are looking for
different ways to answer the same question is there life beyond
Earth? Breakthrough, though, is looking at intelligent life. Former
Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) chairman U R Rao, who was
part of Narlikars experiments, says listening is the best thing to
do now. As we send out radio signals for ETs,
they must be sending out signals to us. We are asking each other
physi-cist Enrico Fermis famous question: Wheres everybody? One day
we hope to find a watering hole where buffa-loes from Earth and
those from an-other planet can chill out, says Rao.
But, returning to Hawkings fear, what could happen when we
finally communicate with the aliens? A ra-dio signal from a
probable intelligent civilization takes light years to reach Earth,
which means that civilization is light years ahead of us in terms
of prowess. If they decide to check out the source of our signals
and set out on their spaceships earthwards, what would they do?
Holler what on earth are you doing here? or croon honey, Im
home?
Nobody knows.
[email protected]
In recent months, racial violence has been foregrounded in the
US, with the Charles-ton incident in which nine black church-goers
were gunned down and other inci-
dents of police brutality that are no longer possible to deny.
And all of a sudden, Black Twitter has become a preoccupation with
the US media, reminding it of its own evasions.
Hashtags around race like #icant-breathe #Blacklivesmatter found
their way into many feeds, pushed themselves into wider view, and
forced a reckoning. The LA Times recently even assigned a reporter
to cover Black Twitter, while ac-knowledging that it is so much
more compli-cated than that.
African-American struggles have in-spired and tactically
informed anti-caste activism. But could Dalit-Bahujan Twit-ter
exert a similar force, in India?
Take Round Ta-ble India, a forum of writers that aims for an
informed Ambed-kar age and sees caste as the primary fissure in
Indian society. They aggregate news on politics, society and
culture, they comment and critique, and try to be a hub for
Dalit-Bahujan voices. Un-like mainstream me-dia, we arent casteist
we have many upper castes writing, at least as much as their share
in the population, says Naren Bedide, one of the founders.
Its only half a joke. The media is scandal-ously
unrepresentative in 1996, Pioneer jour-nalist B N Uniyal found that
he hadnt met a single Dalit journalist in his entire working life.
In 2006, a Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)
study found that 90% of the decision-makers at English newspapers
and 79% of TV journalists were upper-caste.
In other words, the media frames national events, but does not
include most of the nation. It speaks with near-unanimity on IITs
stand-ards when it pushes out Dalit students; it mis-reports
caste-based violence as farmers clash-es or lovers quarrels when it
reports them at all; and it often misses the real import of
events.
When others interpret the world for you,
can you change it? is the question that drives Round Table
India. We dont have, and dont expect access in the media. Its a
conscious deci-sion to build spaces of our own, says Bedide. As he
sees it, it is a structural conflict, and one cant use the tools of
savarnas, like mainstream media, to dismantle their edifice of
hierarchy.
There are blogs like Atrocities News that wrenched attention to
the Khairlanji killings and continue to document caste-based
attacks. But there are also blogs with entirely different missions,
Facebook and Twitter accounts, mail-ing lists and Whatsapp groups
and to club them all together as Dalit social media flattens their
diversity. Shared Mirror, for instance, is a platform for Dalit
poetry, translated and new.
Savari, a space by Adivasi, Bahujan and Dalit women, speaks with
its own distinctive voice.
There are forums dedicated to history and to challenging
narratives and erasures, like Dr Ambedkars Caravan, which has over
500 arti-cles so far. In April, activists across the board
celebrated Dalit History Month, creatively re-sisting the attempt
to reduce Dalit history solely to one of atrocity. This was, again,
a nod
to Black History Month. Hashtags like #Dal-itlivesmatter are
often used to
galvanize others.Twitter, though, is still a
hostile medium, say many of these writers. It is full of ei-ther
Internet Hindus or Con-
gressis and left-liberals, there is no understand-ing of other
issues, says Bedide. Facebook, which nurtures more like-mind-ed
groups and longer con-versations, is more use-ful, says Ashok
Bharti, chairman of the National Confederation of Dalit
Organisations (NAC-DOR). If any incident happens anywhere, it is on
my Facebook page in five minutes. Its better than a wire service,
though the stories are of-ten raw, he says.
Dalits are still un-touchable on social me-dia; if I post
anything about Dr Ambedkar or Dalit history in a general forum, I
get blocked in a few minutes, says Par-deep Attri of Ambed-
kars Caravan.
Of course, there is no unified Dalit social media, any more than
there is a single Dalit politics across the country, fragmented as
it is by sub-caste, region, gender, class and ideological
preference. And yet, social media offers some-thing new. Dalit
Camera, a YouTube channel, records life from untouchable eyes.
Bathran
Ravichandran, who founded it, says that social media, with the
many perspectives it of-fers, has broadened the views and values of
Dalit activists around the country. Social media only supple-ments,
in a small way, the grassroots work that goes on around the
country, he says.
Others are skeptical of the reach and representative-ness of
social media Dalit voices. Political analyst and activist Anand
Teltumbde describes them as a small fraction of Dalits, who just
talk to each other. Accord-ing to him, a sharpened sense of caste
and sub-caste iden-
tity makes it harder to make common cause with others, and only
props up their elite adversaries.
Meanwhile, groups like NACDOR prefer to engage with mainstream
media and institu-tions, and use social media for direct access and
advocacy. So does the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle (APSC) at IIT
Madras, which has a vocal social media presence. Akhil Bhar-athan
of APSC thinks that caste, as an all-encompassing framework of
oppression, also compels one outwards, to think of gender, class,
and minority justice, and to form alli-ances. While these voices
may now be a coun-terpublic, drowned out in the din of powerful
interest groups, the ultimate aim is to be the public, says
Bharathan.
they may not be, after all, little green men. As the $100m
Breakthrough Listen opens doors for alien signals, Sunday Times
talks to some Indians who have been trying to reach out to yonder
skies
Twitter is still a hostile medium for Dalits, say writers. Posts
on Dr Ambedkar or Dalit
history, for instance, get blocked quite fast on social
media, they point out
Anti-caste struggles are acquiring a new visibility on
Twitter
TWEET POWER: Though they are clubbed together as Dalit social
media, these forums deal with a range of diverse issues
Social justice on social media?
Getty Images
Bengalurus streets may not be paved with gold but its drains are
specked with it. And a group of boys is turning the dust into their
daily bread
GLITTER INTHE GUTTER
GOLD SLUSH: Youngsters who spend their mornings sifting sewage
in Bengalurus drains to find gold dust often make around Rs 400 a
day. The dust comes from the workshops of goldsmiths dotting the
roads in Chickpet
The dust from jewellery workshops and units often ends up in the
sewers, and that is the gossamer lode the young boys
are purposefully hunting
GUESS WHOS COMING TO DINNER...
Indias best-known alien seeker Jayant Narlikar and his team sent
out balloons in
2001, and again in 2005. In the second experiment, they got
three types of microbes which were so far not seen on Earth. Did
they rise from Earth or were they falling to Earth? says Narlikar.
We dont have the answer yet. For this, he is planning another round
of experiments
Photos: Anantha Subramanyam K
HypothesisIn September 1959,an article in Nature magazine
authored by two physicists at Cornell marked the beginning of our
quest. It went on to speculate the frequen-cies of electromagnetic
waves at which more advanced civilizations in the universe may
at-
tempt to contact us. Their technological estimations paved the
way for the functioning of SETI.
The Red PlanetIn 1965, Nasas Mari-ner 4 became the first
spacecraft to make a flyby
of another planet, Mars,and send back pictures. Our fascination
with the Red Planet continues with as many as five orbiters
operating around it today and the Curiosity rover inspecting its
surface.
New FrontiersPioneer 10 is the first probe to have left the
solar system. Launched in 1972, it carries a plaque designed by
Frank Drake and Carl Sagan that seeks to introduce Earth and
its inhabitants to any extraterrestrial life that may intercept
it.
More lettersIn 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2left Earth with 115
videos,images and sounds that represented the diversity on this
planet. Apart from telling any possible aliens in distant galaxies
how birdsong, thunder and ocean waves sound on Earth, the Voyager
Golden Record also carries de-tailed instructions on how
to access this information.
Seti@homeLaunched in May 1999,Seti@home lets research-ers
piggyback on your computers processing power, if you sign up for
it, to process parts of the astronomical amounts of data generated
by listening for alien signals. It hasnt found any suc-cess
yet.
Kepler MissionNasas Kepler Mission,launched in 2009, is a
space telescope that points to a field of stars for a period of
four years. In the time, it monitors
1,00,000 stars to discover extrasolar planets like Earth by
watching out for planet transits.
HUNTINGFOR ET
Getty Images
NA
SA
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