Research flip-flops

Last week we read about the Nanavati report overturning everything that the Bannerjee committee had said about the Godhra riots. How can two wise judges studying the same sequence of events come to two totally contradictory conclusions?

Interphone, the long-term study on mobile use, has run into a similar problem. Do mobile phones cause cancer? Do they cook the brain with their radiation? Do they impair hearing? The study had to address these questions, but it has ended in a squabble with its researchers not being able to arrive at any consensus.

The mobile is the most popular electronic device in the world today, and the scientists who ought to have enlightened us about its risks are now divided into three groups with differing opinions.

The study began in 2000 and ended in 2006, cost 30 million dollars (a good Rs 140 crore), and involved around 50 scientists working in 13 countries. It tracked 14,000 people. That, by any standards, is a stupendous effort.

A draft of Interphone's findings was circulated in June, and a final paper will be submitted this month. So what do we as mobile users take home from it?

Difficult to say. Single-country reports have already made it to the media, and some suggest, to everyone's amazement, that using a cell phone actually gives you some protection from brain tumours. The Economist reported that this conclusion was so counter-intuitive that the researchers had to acknowledge their methodology was flawed.

One camp among the Interphone scientists believes any increased incidence of tumours shown in the study is because of the recall biases. (The respondents were asked to remember how many times they had used the phone in a week a decade earlier, and for how long. The wisdom now is that the respondents could have gone way off the mark in what they remembered, considering how no one keeps track of the number of minutes they talk over the phone!). Another camp thinks it really has found increased risks of tumours and wants to call for precautionary measures. A third group isn't saying a thing.

Depending on who is giving out a media statement, you could soon read headlines about whether cellphones cause cancer or not. Generally, the media believe such medical stories have little significance, and push them to some corner on the inside pages.

But such stories relate to people's everyday lives. A diabetic I know started eating lots of oranges after reading a news report that said the fruit was good for those with blood sugar problems. He later read a contradictory report and stopped, but the orange eating would have done some damage by then.

Debates are raging about low fat versus high fat, carb versus protein, and such other choices. Some say coffee has beneficial effects, while others say it harms you. So how do you make out what's good for you? Trust your luck. Toss a coin!

Goodbye Paganini

Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan, who died earlier this week, was a rare combination of violin maestro and clown.

One evening, as we sat listening to him at Bangalore's Visveswarapuram, a plane flew over the Ganesha pandal, making his music inaudible.

He stopped in the middle of his raga exposition and looked skywards. The sound of the plane didn't subside for a long time. The audience waited, slightly puzzled. It then dawned on them that Kunnakudi had captured the exact frequency of the plane, and was bowing out the sound from his violin! His face broke out in a huge smile, and his wiry frame returned to the raga with furious energy.

Kunnakudi loved playing such pranks on his audience. Like Paganini (1782-1840), the Italian violinist who stunned the world with his unorthodox technique, Kunnakudi could do many startling things with his instrument. For instance, while he played a serious Tyagaraja kriti, he could suddenly swipe his bow on a string to mimic the sound of a whistle or catcall.

Kunnakudi lived alongside some great violinists: Lalgudi Jayaraman, T N Krishnan and M S Gopalakrishnan... Lalgudi distinguished himself with his unadulterated southern classicism, while Gopalakrishnan gravitated to northern (Hindustani) classicism, and adapted some of its stylisation in his playing. (Gopalakrishnan's LP record of Bhavanuta is a good example of the path he chose: it has a traditional Karnatak opening, and progresses into Hindustani style elaboration in the later improvisational passages).

As far as I know, the three legends did not play film songs at their concerts. Kunnakudi always played some towards the end of his concerts. He played Rajkumar hits whenever he came to Bangalore. They sounded incongruous in a classical music setting. Some loved it, but those with more conservative tastes found it unacceptable. No one complained at the concerts though.

So was Kunnakudi a pioneer, an avant garde experimenter? I guess not. That last epithet can perhaps describe the veena player Chitti Babu, who created his own harmonic compositions using an ensemble of veenas. The veena is usually played solo, and the idea of a veena ensemble playing western style harmonies is in itself an innovation. Kunnakudi did not attempt such experiments, although his son Shekar is an accomplished member of the Madras String Quartet, which plays a divine mix of classical Indian and Western compositions.

Kunnakudi came from an orthodox Brahmin family, and his father was a scholar in Tamil and Sanskrit. On his forehead, he wore a vermillion mark on top of a vibhuti arch. His orthodoxy did not stop him from romancing the movies. He even produced a film called Todi Ragam. Earlier on, he had played the violin in the movie orchestras. Todi Raga wasn't a hit, and it appears its hero, the famous vocalist T N Seshagopalan, didn't much care for the experience either.

So where does Kunnakudi stand among his peers? The pace of his music was too frenetic to make him a connoisseur's delight. He was vigorous, he was good, he was entertaining, he was lovable, but when I feel like hearing a moving rendering of Mokshamu galada (Tyagaraja, raga Saramati), I play Lalgudi.

(Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan died in Chennai on Monday, September 8, 2008)

A day against pain

September 11 is Global Day Against Pain. A Chennai company is using the opportunity to promote its already famous pain balm. In fact, the balm can do little to treat the kind of pain that this day commemorates.

Patrick Wall, considered the world's foremost authority on pain, did much of his work at Columbia University. The neuroscientist wrote at least three books considered path-breaking by his peers. He had a personal interest in the subject: he suffered from cancer, and it hurt.

I picked up Pain: The Science of Suffering, which Wall published in 2000, at a sale in Bangalore. It offers fascinating case studies. When a farmer's hand accidentally got trapped in an agricultural machine, he chopped it off with his other hand and carried it to a neighour. He later said he had felt no pain. Wall uses such instances to illustrate that pain is not a “simple signaling system” that switches itself on and off in response to injury. The mind plays a big role in the way pain signals are processed.

In 2004, my aunt was run over when she was crossing the tracks at the city railway station. I know she must have suffered the most extreme pain, but she wasn’t crying when I rushed to where she lay. She was unconscious, but drank some water. She died about an hour after the accident. Some weeks later, I developed severe pain and burning first in my legs and then all over my body. I had suffered no physical injury.

What is the connection between pain and the mind? Doctors, philosophers, scientists, and even lay people ask themselves that question. I owe my interest in Wall's book to the chronic pain that seized me in 2004. The problem took me to doctors and healers of all kinds, and to books such as V S Ramachandran’s Phantoms of the Mind. Ramachandran has cured soldiers and accident victims suffering from phantom pain (pain in a limb that has long been amputated) by tricking the brain with a mirror!

As I look for relief, it occurs to me that pain, or for that matter any illness, could actually be interpreted in multiple ways. The principle of "one truth, many paths" applies to the diagnostic sciences. Or if you were cynical, you might say doctors fit an illness to whatever limited tools they have acquired. For instance, doctors have said my symptoms were caused variously by diabetic neuropathy, nerve infection, fibromyalgia, nerve entrapment, and so forth. A healer from a wrestling family believes the pain is caused by poor blood circulation in my back.

Pain is the subject of much philosophical debate. Philosophers make a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is neuron-related, Meera Baindur, who studies environmental philosophy at National Institute of Advanced Studies, once told me. Suffering is not.

“If suffering were limited to the pain generated by neurons, we won't be able to say trees and plants suffer and so one has to be kind to them," she said in the course of an impromptu Gmail chat. “To shift ethics from humans to nature, we have to see what suffering is common to all creation.”

A Tibetan Buddhist doctor I know tells his patients their pain would ease if they could see it as part of the larger suffering of the world. Pain isn't just a physiological problem: it has psychological, philosophical dimensions.

Wall’s book puts it this way, “Pain involves our state of mind, our social mores and beliefs, and our personal experiences and expectations.”

The World Health Organisation came up with the idea of a Global Day Against Pain in 2004 to draw attention to the plight of cancer and HIV Aids patients.

To desire freedom from pain is perhaps as futile as desiring freedom from death. But let us hope the world will do what it can to treat the pain of those chronic sufferers. Pain is difficult to understand, but it is even more difficult to live with.

100 days of an airport

The Kingfisher Sports Lounge, with its wine-red interiors, is a stylish little nook inside the new airport. Albert Brunner, CEO of BIAL, chose it as the venue to make a presentation to about a dozen journalists yesterday.

The airport has just completed a hundred days. It can't be easy building an airport and getting it going, and Brunner, by his own admission, has lost a bit of hair trying to do so. He represents the Swiss-led consortium that took up and executed the project. The Indian government holds a stake in the airport.

Among the things that brought the airport a bad press was the lack of adequate toilets. Brunner said the number had increased by 70 per cent, and took us on a tour through the new additions. The toilets are spacious, and have sparkling new sanitaryware. Not many guests had anticipated such a walk through, but then, you never know where journalism can take you.

Our paper has been covering the campaign for the retention of HAL Airport, and we have a story today about a shocking clause in the BIAL concessionaire agreement that seems to question the very sovereignty of India.

Soon after the old airport was closed, we tried to find out whether it was indeed better to drive to Chennai than to take a plane. We sent two reporters, both starting from Koramangala, to Chennai, one by plane and the other by bus.

Savie, who flew, reached a destination in central Chennai just 40 minutes before Sanchita, who took the road. That experiment has settled a debate. If you are travelling to Chennai from southern Bangalore, you would save about Rs 4,500 by just taking a bus. And you wouldn't lose too much time either.

Our reporters have come up with stories that haven't always been sympathetic to BIAL, but that doesn't mean we blame Brunner and his team for all citizens' woes. When the government didn't take up work on the trumpet-shaped flyover that connects the highway to the airport, he took it upon himself to build it, and he completed it in seven months. That should shame officials and contractors in charge of our civic projects.

If you've ever tried to do something on your own that requires a licence or permit, you will have a fair idea of what Brunner must have been up against. Officials think you are fair game if you are an entrepreneur, and harass you to the point of exhaustion. In projects of BIAL's scale, politicians come in at every point and make life hell till their demands are met. One of the complaints against the new airport is that it doesn't have a special lounge for MLAs. BIAL is building one now.

So who is to blame if BIAL ignores local taxi drivers and gets into profitable deals with new cab firms? Whose job is it to ensure connectivity to the new airport? Who carelessly signed away India's sovereignty? Who ought to have got MSIL to gear up to handle cargo at the new airport? Who ignored the problems of short haul passengers? The answer to these questions isn’t BIAL, but people who represented us. Had they insisted on safeguarding citizens' interests, everyone would have been happier.

Luxury stores inside the airport are offering discounts. The revenue for BIAL in the last three months hasn’t been up to its board’s expectations. The global economy is slowing down. Airlines are bleeding. But Brunner is upbeat, and hopes to have a second express terminal ready by July 2009.

Hundred days is a landmark, even if it is a minor one. Let us congratulate BIAL,
and wish them luck.