This piece is part of an on-going series of blogposts from the frontlines of Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. You might also want to check out dispatches one, two, three and four.

by Aditya Dev Sood

Having commissioned a new suit of armor, the emperor Akbar was now in the process of inspecting it. Installed upon a stone mannequin in the armory workshop, black bell metal and brass accents gleamed back upon the badshah and his vazir Birbal. Fresh from recent campaigns, the emperor now said he wanted to be sure of the quality of protection it offered. And so he called for a lance, with which he reared back and then charged upon the mannequin. He was able, after a few tries, to pierce all the small slits of the helmet. He asked for a sword and tore apart the subtle slits between the body armor and the helmet. He asked for a mace and went at the now headless mannequin and cracked the chain metal links all around its torso. Even now that it had fallen upon the floor of the workshop, Akbar was still working out his PTSD on that prone suit of armor and the lifeless dummy within. When he was done, he looked up and declared it to be a lousy suit, practically the same as wearing nothing at all.

Perhaps you already know the end of this parable? Perhaps you have heard some other version of it? I'm not sure when I first encountered it, either at the back of an Amar Chitra Katha or else perhaps among a collection of stories from Iran. Either way, it has stuck in the mind, long awaiting the unraveling. There is something so shocking about seeing a new suit of armor being destroyed like that, something like a medieval crash test. One knows not what to make of what is going on, nor even how to respond to Akbar's judgement. Is a suit of armor really useless if it cannot survive many minutes of the untamed rage of a battle hardened king?

The badshah is about turn his fury onto his smith, when Birbal suggests that they give him a sharp warning and a week to build another prototype. The next week, when Akbar returns to the workshop to inspect the new piece he finds Birbal already there, wearing the emperor's battle armor and spoiling for sport. It is new and improved, he says, have at me and I'll show you. Akbar is eventually goaded into picking up a lance. He makes straight for Birbal, who steps lithely aside, pulls the lance forward, tripping Akbar forward and landing him on all four. Now that someone's wearing it, he grins, it's begun working pretty well.

On the face of it, this would seem to be a parable about how an artifact changes with use — an early instance of user-centered thinking about human artifacts. But there's something a bit tricky about how a suit of armor is best used and what its function really is. Birbal's response is cryptic, and it forces you to think about the whole the point of battle armor: it must not only resist onslaught, but allow its wearer to move about and conduct battle. This little fable sticks in the mind is because of the way it shifts between offence and defence, between object and agent. That little shift of the mind, between a closed and essentially reactive reference frame and a horizon of open possibilities is sudden and complete. It cannot arise gradually and it has no continuity with that earlier way of thinking.

You will remember, reader, that I've signed up to share a more prosaic kind of story, about the setting up of a new kind of business in a more prosaic time in a global city whose air is already thick with pollution and corruption and crony capitalism.

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Writing a New Leaf

this new page is here
just as morning’s here

without a mark upon it

virgin territory pristine as
Pleistocene snow

but the previous page below
is indecipherable

through the new white sheet
of this day’s blank uncertainty
it shows as lines of shadow

the absoluteness
of the leaf before
is now unclear

and as I look ahead
and let those pages slip
beneath my thumb
not only are those leaves
all deaf and dumb
they turn to mist
and fade and fail
and disappear

the good news is
this new leaf is here
.

Jim Culleny
1/30/15

by Jonathan Kujawa

Everyone learns about Pascal's Triangle when they are young. But I, at least, didn't learn all the wonders contained in the Triangle. Indeed, we're still discovering new things!

To construct the Triangle is easy enough: you start with 1's down the outside edges and each interior number is gotten by adding together the two numbers just above it. So the third number on the sixth line is a 10 because that's the sum of 4 and 6.

Warning! Actually we will say that 10 is the second number in the fifth line. For reasons which will soon become clear, we will choose to start with zero when we count rows and columns of the Triangle. For example, the second number of the fourth line is a 6.

With the addition rule in hand it's off to the races: the Triangle goes on forever and you can calculate as many rows as your patience allows.

The first 10 rows of the Triangle [1].

Pascal introduced the Triangle in 1653 in Traité du triangle arithmétique as part of his investigation into probability and counting problems. Questions like “If I want to choose two people out of a group of four, how many possible pairs are there?” or “What's the probability of drawing a full house when dealt five cards from a well mixed deck of cards?”. Indeed, Pascal and Fermat essentially invented probability in a series of letters they exchanged around this time. You can see the Pascal's original triangle here.

What does the Triangle have to do with probability? Well, if you want to choose k objects out of a group of n possibilities, then the number of possible choices is precisely the kith number on the nth row of the triangle. Remember, for positions in the Triangle we always count starting from zero! Using this rule we see that there are exactly 6 ways to choose two people out of a group of four. And since 84 is the third number in the ninth row of the triangle, it must be that there are 84 ways to choose three people out of a group of nine. Once you can compute these numbers it's a short step to computing all sorts of probabilities.

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by Jalees Rehman

Research institutions in the life sciences engage in two types of regular scientific meet-ups: scientific seminars and lab meetings. The structure of scientific seminars is fairly standard. Speakers give Powerpoint presentations (typically 45 to 55 minutes long) which provide the necessary scientific background, summarize their group's recent published scientific work and then (hopefully) present newer, unpublished data. Lab meetings are a rather different affair. The purpose of a lab meeting is to share the scientific work-in-progress with one's peers within a research group and also to update the laboratory heads. Lab meetings are usually less formal than seminars, and all members of a research group are encouraged to critique the presented scientific data and work-in-progress. There is no need to provide much background information because the audience of peers is already well-acquainted with the subject and it is not uncommon to show raw, unprocessed data and images in order to solicit constructive criticism and guidance from lab members and mentors on how to interpret the data. This enables peer review in real-time, so that, hopefully, major errors and flaws can be averted and newer ideas incorporated into the ongoing experiments.

During the past two decades that I have actively participated in biological, psychological and medical research, I have observed very different styles of lab meetings. Some involve brief 5-10 minute updates from each group member; others develop a rotation system in which one lab member has to present the progress of their ongoing work in a seminar-like, polished format with publication-quality images. Some labs have two hour meetings twice a week, other labs meet only every two weeks for an hour. Some groups bring snacks or coffee to lab meetings, others spend a lot of time discussing logistics such as obtaining and sharing biological reagents or establishing timelines for submitting manuscripts and grants. During the first decade of my work as a researcher, I was a trainee and followed the format of whatever group I belonged to. During the past decade, I have been heading my own research group and it has become my responsibility to structure our lab meetings. I do not know which format works best, so I approach lab meetings like our experiments. Developing a good lab meeting structure is a work-in-progress which requires continuous exploration and testing of new approaches. During the current academic year, I decided to try out a new twist: incorporating literature and philosophy into the weekly lab meetings.

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by Tamuira Reid

Sunlight slices through the window, hitting her where she sleeps. Neighborhood kids, already going hard, squeal and play happily somewhere in the distance.

I've been sitting on a cedar chest at the foot of her bed, waiting. I know better than to nudge MK to consciousness; she has a nasty right hook and isn't afraid to use it. It's the one thing her ex-husband, Frankie, a boxer turned philanthropist made sure to teach her before he left with a younger woman. Hit hard and fast. Keep the thumb outside so you don't break it. She remembered that when she slugged him on his way out the door, suitcase in hand.

The lump shifts under the heavy quilt, silver hair peeking out from the top. “Get me some water, will you love?” She doesn't look at me exactly, just gestures in my general direction.

And so our visit begins. Requests for water. For aspirin. For a foot rub. Anything to take the throttle and pain away. I can almost hear her brains sloshing against the side of her skull, eyeballs threatening to eject themselves out of socket. Fog filling the room.

Mary Kelly is no stranger to the Hangover of the Gods.

She lives most days in this fog, not, however, restricted to just her bedroom but to most areas of her life. A heavy, dense fog that moves in and around people until they eventually disappear altogether.

Rumor has it she came out of the womb thirsty.

Not for the sweet, dewy breast milk most babies cried for, that poured freely from the aching breasts of their mothers. Not for the powdery formula that dissolved quickly and easily into water. Milk – natural, manufactured, fresh from the body or out of a canister – did not interest her. MK (as her friends would come to call her) wanted something harder.

This unquenchable thirst sent her into the throes of what would be named, for convenience, or to spare her well-meaning but severely in-the-weeds mother from certain judgments, Gas. Her face all red and scrunched. Arms and legs flailing about like some demonic force had overtaken them. Gas, the doctors would confer proudly and leave the room.

Her mother wept and paced the kitchen and prayed to all the Saints she could remember by name. Help this child. She knew how to cook and sew and even talk about boys but this. She did not know what to do with this.

The local barmaids would insist that a little Guinness should do the trick. “Needs some iron pumping through the veins. Babe's damn near shriveled up.”

Beer into bottle. Bottle to mouth. MK drank. And drank. She drank with a fierceness that frightened her mother and dazzled the other, more seasoned drinkers in the room. “For the love of God, would you look at that!”

Two pints later and mother and child, huddled together on a barstool, breathed in the sudden peacefulness that had, until then, been eluding them both.

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by Madhu Kaza

At a Christmas gathering at a cousin's house in Maryland I mentioned to my five-year-old nephew that I don't own a television. I was sitting on a couch with him paging through a book about whales and dolphins for the sixth or seventh time. The men in the family were playing gin rummy around the coffee table; the other children were playing video games on their parents' cell phones, and the women were in the open kitchen off to the side making a succession of meals. At that moment and the whole weekend long the flat screen TV that hung above the fireplace was lit and muted. Images of CNN commentators discussing the murder of two NYPD officers, Red Wing hockey and young men singing love songs in music videos formed the backdrop of the holiday. “What's that?” my nephew asked. I looked down at the creature on the page and said, “Some kind of dolphin, I'm not exactly sure.” But I had misunderstood the question. He spoke again: “What's television?”

*

*

“Look at this. This looks like a city. Like a little model of a city. And all the houses, which are here. And streets. This is maybe an elevator to go up, up there. And here are all the wires. These wires, they really take care of all the electrons when they come through there. They take care that they are powerful enough to get all the way through to here.” This is how the musician Björk, describes the circuit board and wires of a television in an old video. She has opened the back of the television, she says, because it's Christmas time and she's been watching lots of television and is curious about how it works to cast its spell on her. She sits at a kitchen table affectionately close to “the beautiful television” and says she wants to understand “how it can put me in all sorts of situations.”

In her quest to understand how television works Björk posits a tongue-in-cheek cultural battle between her native Iceland and its former colonizer, Denmark, framed as a battle between poetry and science. She describes how an Icelandic poet explained to her that television was different from film: “This is millions and millions of little screens that send light, some sort of electric light, I'm not really sure. But because there are so many of them, in fact you are watching very many frames when you are watching TV. Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then because you're so busy doing that, you don't watch very carefully what the program you are watching is really about. So you become hypnotized. So all that's on TV, it just goes directly into your brain and you stop judging if it's right or not. You just swallow and swallow.” Björk says that the Icelandic poet's explanation caused her to become so frightened of television that she began to get headaches while watching it.

The cure for poet-induced headaches, she suggests, trying to remain deadpan, is science: “Later on, when I got my Danish book on television, I stopped being afraid because I read the truth, and that's the scientifical truth, which is much better.”

She concludes,”You shouldn't let poets lie to you.”

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by Aditya Dev Sood

This is the fourth in a series of brief pieces written from the deep and dark of Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. You might also want to read dispatches one, two, and three.

We’re fully in the fog of it now. It’s not only the startups that are stumbling and searching and feeling their way forward. The tunnel metaphor would seem to apply to me and the rest of my team as well. Where once we felt clarity and purpose, we’re now lost in detail. Every startup is different, at a different point along the path, and with such different needs. We’re scrambling to serve them all in ways that do them justice.

The initial shock of arrival and feedback taking is over for startup teams. They now have real work to do in building out their product or in making it better. This is a multivariate problem solving process that can overwhelm founders if they don’t have the tools to organize and isolate the challenges they face. It’s with a view to supporting and enhancing their ability to conceptualize, articulate and prototype their product that we led them through two exercises: First a ‘product tour’ and then a ‘customer journey map.’

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by Ahmed Humayun

Is there a method to the madness of Islamist extremism? Yes, if a voluminous literature produced by militants in Arabic and other languages is to be believed. One example of the genre is the militant manual, the Management of Savagery, a text highly influential among Islamist radicals, and translated from Arabic into English by the combating terrorism center at West Point. It is a curious amalgamation of geopolitical analysis, religious propaganda, social psychology, and military tactics. The work has some literary pretensions but it is of uneven quality and gives the impression of being pasted together from disparate sources.

Yet it also outlines a clear, coherent worldview, a theory of geopolitical change, and, when it is not recycling superficial clichés about Western decadence, offers penetrating insight into how terrorist tactics can succeed, even when they appear to fail. It is a call to action that outlines a series of concrete, often diabolically clever steps that have been followed by a wide range of militant groups. There is a striking parallel between the prescriptions in the text and the actions of ISIS, the militant group that now controls a vast chunk of territory in the Arab heartland.

The fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, and the partition of the Middle East by European powers has long been a preoccupation of radicals in their diagnosis of the ills plaguing Arab societies. The text takes the same stance, rejecting not just the current governments that prevail in the Middle East, but the global order as a whole. It sees a world in which major powers in the center – the United States, above all – ally with tyrannies in the periphery, imposing through them a foreign, 'apostate' order in Muslim majority societies.

This historical moment is not unprecedented, it is argued. After the breakdown of political order such as that occurred in the early 20th century there is always a period of transition before a new settled order comes into being. Such a transitional state prevails in the Muslim world today. Militant groups should therefore seek to 'vex' and 'exhaust' the enemy- the regimes ruling their societies, or their Western allies. This will catalyze the breakout of chaos – the weakening of political authority across the land, creating opportunities for militants to 'manage the savagery' successfully, so that the ultimate goal, an Islamic state, may be realized.

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$hip of $tate

I'm on a big boat
(which the nautically savvy call ship)

if this ship's a cocoon of light atmosphere
its steel will float, but it will tip
if its load’s unbalanced—
if its equilibrium is off
it will start to list,
if not corrected
it will end a sacrificial goat
sucked to bottom
as Neptune's universal laws
will have directed

and insist
.

by Jim Culleny
1/13/15

…………..
.
.

by Maniza Naqvi

Flogging newspapers with hate drawn up as free speech is a cheap self serving marketing trick. Nothing new there. Hate sells war. It sells weapons. It sells newspapers. Hate sells.

Floggings and cartoons to caricature Muslims as the newest kid on the block to hate, well that's relatively new in the scheme of history and things. And who does that? The House Saud for one, which has condemned a citizen blogger to a thousand lashes in 20 batches of 50 lashes each for his speech. Public floggings, though this one has been postponed, are routine in the Kingdom of the House Saud. The House Hebdo flogs Muslims too. Both flog and lash Muslims. And neither of them protests or caricatures war. A funny thing happened while the wars were being waged in these last fourteen years—Mecca was transformed into a strip Mall by the House of Saud. Charlie Hebdo and the House of Saud have another thing in common they couldn't give two hoots about the Prophet. They both sneer at him. And both probably consider their own versions of caricatures in the name of the Prophet their most sustainable profit making enterprise.

And both are supported by the so called leaders of freedom of speech. Witness how free speech and freedom were caricatured when those great defenders of human rights and freedom of speech, the Saudi foreign minister, Netanyahu and the President of Gabon formed the frontline at the march in Paris on January 11, 2015. Witness the eulogizing of the chief financier of extremism this week in Riyadh by all these leaders of freedom of speech–sellers of weapons, guzzlers of oil.

But lashes, words and caricatures can be survived. You cannot survive bombs and bullets. The House Saud and stunts like the House Hebdo sell hate and ensure that bombs and bullets will continue to be produced and used without question. France is the largest seller of weapons to Saudi Arabia, followed by the UK and Germany and Sweden and the US. Germany has announced its decision yesterday to stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. The majority of the Germans want Germany to stop all trade with Saudi Arabia. That is a good step.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Fish stews occupy a wonderful middle ground between delicacy and robustness, suggesting sun and warmth and brine, and yet also being mouth-filling and meaty and deeply flavorful. They’re happy at simple weeknight dinners and at parties, and can be dressed up with more varied sets of ingredients (crabs, mussels and clams, shrimp/prawn). And they’re good for the imagination, encouraging the mind to wander through seaside towns and small fishing villages strung along the coasts (looping along the Atlantic, detouring through the Mediterranean, encircling Africa and heading up the Arabian Sea, along India, then getting briefly distracted by the thousands of south-east Asian islands before encountering the grand Pacific).

The basic route to making a fish stew is simple and similar to many other soups and stews: sauté aromatics (like garlic, onions, fennel, ginger) until translucent, add some herbs/spices and stock or wine or coconut milk, simmer for a while to let the flavors blend, and then add the seafood and cook till done. Two templates I use frequently are a vaguely Mediterranean seafood stew built around fennel, anchovies, olive oil and white wine, and an Indian Ocean mixture of ginger, chilli, coconut milk, fish sauce, and tamarind.

The recipes described below are neither of these (those templates are easily found elsewhere on the Internet), though they are closer to the second and reflect the flavors of South India. The two recipes are fun to contrast: both use very similar ingredients and derive from the same culinary vocabulary, but they employ two different strategies. The first is lightly flavored and clean, a simple mix of vegetables and fish simmered in a delicate white coconut milk broth, and lives at the same Indo-Western intersection that produces the spiced versions of European roasts and stews that dot the colonial and post-colonial South Asian landscape. The second is sharper, richer, and more aromatic, and is distinguished by its use and treatment of whole spices and by the browning of the aromatics.

Both recipes are for about 1 pound or 500 grams of seafood (a good size for 2 or 3 people), with the first described using fish, and the second with prawn/shrimp. But both go well with other seafood, and are excellent with a mixture of fish, prawns and mussels/clams. If you’re using a mixture, you could add the thicker fish pieces first and the thinner pieces and shellfish a little later, so as to make sure they don’t overcook.

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A RESURRECTION

My mother tells this story
about her childhood in Kashmir
years before she married my father.

“I remember our horse Burak,
hoofs scuffing snow, nostrils fuming,
hitched to an open cart. Relatives,

showering rice and rose petals
on Mohammed’s shrouded body—
the son my father always wanted

to whom I was betrothed—
wailed not for a soul departed
but sang of a bride waiting

for an intended groom
who succumbed
to the Mother Of All Chills.”

Four score and three years later
Mother rises from the bright
Ethan Allen tightback couch

at her son’s home in New Rochelle
to do what now she does best
—merging time past and time present—

whispers across Long Island Sound,
Mohammed,
have they given you a transfusion

By Rafiq Kathwari, whose first book of poems is forthcoming in September 2015 from
Doire Press, Ireland. More work here.

This is the 3rd of a series of brief weekly pieces on the unfolding journey of a new incubator based in New Delhi: www.startuptunnel.com, @StTnL. Checkout earlier pieces in the series: Entering Startup Tunnel and What Makes an Incubator Tick?

by Aditya Dev Sood

Prashant and Ishita came to see me on Monday afternoon. We’re a bit uncertain at this point about our startup concept, Ishita began… Maybe you can tell that we don’t perfectly align on the idea anymore…? I could tell no such thing, so I just looked intently back at them as they continued. Basically, I would like to use the remainder of the incubation program to pursue another idea, said Prashant, having to do with music, which is what I’m really about. Ishita has several ideas up her sleeve that she’s considering, including the one we came in with.

And so it begins, I thought. We’d accepted eleven startups to the program. Ten got back to us saying they would join but then we realized with had a conflict between two of them who were both working in the social health space. We withdrew our offer to one of them, bringing the cohort down to nine teams. One cofounder bailed when he finally got around to reading the fine print of our contract, leaving us with eight. Or perhaps we’re back up to nine given that Prashant and Ishita now represent two startups? Or perhaps, more realistically speaking, we’re actually down to seven?

It’s really hard for me to tell you guys what to do, I finally said.

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by Charlie Huenemann

(Image from “AhtheMacabre” on Etsy)

As I'm closer to death than birth, I think from time to time about what to do with my dead body. Of course, in the main I don't really care. I'll be done with it, and it will be nothing other than Other People's Problem, in the deepest existential sense of those words. But sometimes I try to imagine what would be most meaningful to my surviving friends and family. For the most part, I come up empty.

My own parents are buried alongside their relatives far away in a country churchyard – and that sounds nice! – but the fact is that none of their descendants visit it with any regularity. I do think often of my parents, whom I loved and miss. But I don't know what further emotional or spiritual charge I would get by looking at a stone with their names on it and reflecting on the fact that, six feet down, there are some organic materials that once constituted their bodies. My father-in-law's ashes are in a simple wooden box which I see from time to time, and when I see them I say to myself, “Alas, poor Gerald! I knew him!” – but the experience doesn't amount to much. At best the box serves as a momento mori, and at worst it poses the problem of who's going to care for this box for the rest of time. So I don't have any good examples to follow.

I could donate my body to medical science, and I see clearly the virtue of doing so. Let the dead teach the living! But I can't quite commit myself to the idea. This raggedy donkey has been my good and true companion, for the most part, and I feel like I owe it some respect. I know it's irrational, but the thought of giving it over to medical students to cut open and explore strikes me as ingratitude. (I lived with a med student many years ago, and wasn't much reassured by the experience.)

What I would like best, of course, is for my body to be laid out on a wooden Viking ship and sent into the middle of the lake as a flaming arrow arcs overhead into the sky and delivers the fire to the pyre. But goodness knows what health and safety officers would have to say about this, and I'd hate to bequeath to my children the labors of such paperwork and legal expense – let alone the trouble of finding a builder of Viking ships. The myriad hassles and expenses would suck all the meaning and fun out of it.

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by Brooks Riley

Remember the winter scarf? A long strip of knitted wool, the two ends knotted, crossed, or wrapped around the neck. I’ve worn them all my life, struggling to keep the ends from unwinding in a cold wind, or retrieving a loose end from my latte as I reach across a table to shake someone’s hand. A shroud would be an improvement, long and fulsome, but it too comes with loose ends, to be saved for later.

Loose ends, the obvious metaphor for a life in limbo, is simplistic. And just what are those ends anyway? Bookends to the main event, the Alpha and Omega of existence, birth and death—useless but inevitable.

Recently, in search of a new scarf, I came across a woolen loop, slightly elasticized so that it could be wrapped twice around my neck. Look, Ma, no ends! It’s nothing special these days, but for me it was a revelation: I was liberated from the struggle to make ends meet or stay put. Now I felt safe, in more ways than one: A woven furnace caressing my carotid arteries, I was wrapped in a security blanket without issues, clearing the way for worries of the endogenous sort, the kind that don’t come bundled with small physical irritations.

Delighted with this new-millennial improvement on age-old warmers, I shopped for another one. My second scarf went the first one even better: a brilliant woolen Möbius strip that didn’t even have to be doubled—a fat Möbius which sits firmly on the shoulders, its twist neatly snuggled at the nape of the neck, allowing the fullness of the rest to fortify the shoulders and throat. While others might be drooling over the latest wearable tech, my needs were answered by a 5 € purchase, made possible by two 19^th century mathematicians, August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing, who came to the same conclusion simultaneously in 1858 in their land of Zeitgeist or the zeitgleich. (Poor Herr Doktor Listing: Möbius won the posterity game.)

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