With all the mindless urban violence and controversy recently, two events went relatively unnoticed. The first was the suggestion that we move over to time zones. Now this one has been around for some time.
I thought it was a great idea the first time I heard it. The son of an army man who served in Kolkata, everytime I went back home to the Punjab (now in Pakistan), it was not only cold in the foothills of the Salt Range (think of them as the Shivaliks but much more to the North and West), but what was worse, it would get dark very early. I would not only miss my father fighting for the British out of Manipur, but also feel cold and lonely. Now, the same feeling is back again, when at 68, I go to Dimapur and further on in the hills as Chancellor of Nagaland University. But now I have Thiejo Vienhue, who studied in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and is currently Registrar of the Nagaland University. He is good company and like most who have passed out of JNU, he loves his former VCs against whom he had agitated while he was a student. So I am no longer lonely. But it is such a horrible waste ? very early in the morning when you wake up, the sun is blazing, and in the afternoon it is dark. Fortunately, most of the time there is no wastage of energy, because more often than not, there is no electricity.
The Nagas are a proud self-contained people and don?t behave cantankerously with a friend. But it is obvious that the citizens of the seven sisters in the North East see this business of centering time and life somewhere in the longitude around Nagpur, if Tughlaq (the original one and not the Tamil clone) got it right, another piece of evidence of mainland cussedness. The Naga geologists in the University?s Science establishment told me they had built up the case for time zones, but like most ideas of creative people in the North East, they didn?t get a hearing. I came away with a paper from them, lobbied at Delhi, but was told by a Burra Sahib that time zones create a lot of confusion and that we are a big country and nationalism is okay. I remonstrated that other big countries like the US, Russia and Canada have time zones and are reasonably nationalistic. People, he said, get used to their time, whatever that means, so I called it a day.
In every way I think it is a good idea. It saves energy, it is bio friendly in terms of life rhythms, and it is efficient. So it will be opposed by all those who matter, because they are at the centre of the centre. This one will succeed only if the top pushes it, since India matters out there. In my first job at the Planning Commission, I succeeded Pitamber Pant. He was a friend of Indira Gandhi?s. I have a sneaking feeling I got listened to by others not because of my Wharton degree, but as a matter of habit. Every time I looked at an important file, it would be addressed as ?Dear Indu? and would be signed ?Pitamber?. He had a singular disrespect for the intelligence of the Indian bureaucracy, sometimes to the extent of abusing them unfairly. He single-handedly bamboozled the country into accepting the decimal system and then set up the systems to follow it through. In 1974, the files were still operative. So if the Gods are listening, will somebody up there do something this time?
The other thing that didn?t get talked about much recently was the successful launch of the GSLV. It?s something that warms the cockles of our hearts. A country which puts two tonnes in space and then directs it to go where it wants, has made it, for there are only four others. I remember in the late ?80s we had negotiated with the Soviets so that they would work with us. Then Russia opted out and our boys in the mid ?90s, rubbing their hands in glee, said ?we are going to do it by ourselves again?.
One of our top space scientists tried to convince me that the cryogenic engine was actually very simple and was working on the principles of milk. More important, by 1997, successful tests were conducted under stationary conditions. From then on it was history. They knew they had it sewed up and I believed them. Space is important to us.
The science establishment is right in saying that if the foodgrains mission is to succeed, then FASAL, which uses space to track land and water and crops as it were through real time (because the Indian bird flies there ever so often), has to be integrated with it. It was Rajiv Gandhi?s dream to integrate the Indian satellites with crop planning and super computers which would give those critical five-day weather forecasts in 145 agro met zones to save the farmer that extra irrigation. He had promised it to Parliament then. And, you can only keep a good idea down for some time.
This column argued for thorium-based nuclear power, when the sahebs concentrate on uranium, because thorium is the only way to complete the fuel cycle and we cannot replace the uncertainty of limited oil deposits with those of uranium.