17

DEEP FOCUS

SUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA, PUNE

AUGUST 2, 2015

Times of India, Pune, August 2, 2015. Pp.17

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Social justice on
social media?

GUESS WHOS COMING

TO DINNER...

Anti-caste struggles are acquiring a new visibility on Twitter

Amulya.Gopalakrishnan@timesgroup.com

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
ujan Sengupta, an associate
professor at Indian Institute
of Astrophysics, Bengaluru,
is a much harassed man nowadays harassed by unsolicited callers. One wanted to
know if the scientist has come in contact 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 announced the $100 million Breakthrough
Listen project to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. The money was big,
but so were the men Milner got to rub
shoulders with: Stephen Hawking, the
worlds most famous theoretical physicist; Martin Reese, the British cosmologist after whom an asteroid is named;
Geoffrey Marcy, the American astronomer who discovered 70 of the first 100
extra-solar planets man could find; and
Pete Worden, former Nasa Ames Research Centre director. The only Indian
in the Breakthrough Listen team is Sujan Sengupta.
If you forget the calls, says the
scientist who has been studying extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs, I am
quite excited. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) dates back
to the late 19th century when physicist
Nikola Tesla suggested that humans
could send electrical signals to Martians. But SETI got its name only in
1960 when American astrophysicist
Frank Drake launched Project Ozma
that used a 26m radio telescope to listen to signals from outer space, some
of which he thought could be from aliens. Breakthrough Listen will use the
100m telescope at the Green Bank Observatory, West Virginia, and the 64m
telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia for hundreds of hours, for ten
years. It will also search for optical signals using the Automated Planet Find-

HUNTING
FOR ET
Hypothesis
In 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 frequencies of electromagnetic
waves at which more
advanced civilizations
in the universe may at-

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 galaxies. All data will be open to the public.
Two: A $1million competition to design
a message representing Earth and humanity that could potentially be understood 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 signal from somewhere, says Sengupta.
How do we know if some signals
the radio telescopes receive are from
ET, when celestial objects continuously send out radio pulses? The
thumb rule has been that if a set of
signals is systematic and regular, without 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 discovery 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 divided 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 possibility of existence of extraterrestrial
intelligent life.
Hawking, who has been cautioning against sending radio signals

tempt to contact us. Their

technological estimations
paved the way for the
functioning of SETI.

The Red Planet

In 1965, Nasas Mariner 4 became the rst
spacecraft to make a yby

of another planet, Mars,

and send back pictures.
Our fascination with the
Red Planet continues with
as many as ve orbiters
operating around it today
and the Curiosity rover
inspecting its surface.

New Frontiers
Pioneer 10 is the rst
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

since advanced extraterrestrials

could ruin us, seems to have partially come around with the Breakthrough 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 intelligent. We must know.
To know, an array of radio telescopes at Tata Institute of Funda-

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,

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
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 improved 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 experiments including isotope analysis of

its inhabitants to any

extraterrestrial life that
may intercept it.

More letters
In 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2
left 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 detailed instructions on how

they must be sending out signals to

us. We are asking each other physicist Enrico Fermis famous question:
Wheres everybody? One day we hope
to find a watering hole where buffaloes from Earth and those from another planet can chill out, says Rao.
But, returning to Hawkings fear,
what could happen when we finally
communicate with the aliens? A radio 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.

to access this information.

Seti@home
Launched in May 1999,
Seti@home lets researchers 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 success yet.

Kepler Mission
Nasas Kepler Mission,
launched in 2009, is a

Getty Images

space telescope that

points to a eld of stars
for a period of four years.
In the time, it monitors
NASA/Reuters

Arun.Ram@timesgroup.com

1,00,000 stars to discover

extrasolar planets like
Earth by watching out for
planet transits.

n recent months, racial violence has been

foregrounded in the US, with the Charleston incident in which nine black churchgoers were gunned down and other incidents 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 #icantbreathe #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 acknowledging that it is
so much more complicated than that.
African-American
struggles have inspired and tactically
informed anti-caste
activism. But could
Dalit-Bahujan Twitter exert a similar
force, in India?
Take Round Table India, a forum of
writers that aims for
an informed Ambedkar 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 DalitBahujan voices. Unlike mainstream media, 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 scandalously unrepresentative in 1996, Pioneer journalist 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 standards when it pushes out Dalit students; it misreports caste-based violence as farmers clashes 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,

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 articles so far. In April, activists across the board
celebrated Dalit History Month, creatively resisting the attempt to reduce Dalit history
solely to one of atrocity. This was, again, a nod
to Black History Month. Hashtags like #Dalitlivesmatter are often used to
galvanize others.
Twitter, though, is still a
hostile medium, say many of
these writers. It is full of either Internet Hindus or Congressis and left-liberals,
there is no understanding of other issues, says
Bedide. Facebook, which
nurtures more like-minded groups and longer conversations, is more useful, says Ashok Bharti,
chairman of the National
Confederation of Dalit
Organisations (NACDOR). If any incident
happens anywhere, it is
on my Facebook page in
five minutes. Its better
than a wire service,
though the stories are often raw, he says.
Dalits are still untouchable on social media; if I post anything
about Dr Ambedkar or
Dalit history in a general
forum, I get blocked in a
few minutes, says Pardeep Attri of Ambedkars Caravan.

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

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 something 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 offers, has broadened the
views and values of Dalit
activists around the country.
Social media only supplements, in a small way, the
grassroots work that goes on
around the country, he says.
Others are skeptical of
the reach and representativeness 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. AccordTWEET POWER: Though they are clubbed together as Dalit social
ing to him, a sharpened sense
media, these forums deal with a range of diverse issues
of caste and sub-caste idencan you change it? is the question that drives tity makes it harder to make common cause with
Round Table India. We dont have, and dont others, and only props up their elite adversaries.
Meanwhile, groups like NACDOR prefer to
expect access in the media. Its a conscious decision to build spaces of our own, says Bedide. engage with mainstream media and instituAs he sees it, it is a structural conflict, and one tions, and use social media for direct access
cant use the tools of savarnas, like mainstream and advocacy. So does the Ambedkar-Periyar
Study Circle (APSC) at IIT Madras, which has
media, to dismantle their edifice of hierarchy.
There are blogs like Atrocities News that a vocal social media presence. Akhil Bharwrenched attention to the Khairlanji killings athan of APSC thinks that caste, as an alland continue to document caste-based attacks. encompassing framework of oppression, also
But there are also blogs with entirely different compels one outwards, to think of gender,
missions, Facebook and Twitter accounts, mail- class, and minority justice, and to form alliing lists and Whatsapp groups and to club ances. While these voices may now be a counthem all together as Dalit social media flattens terpublic, drowned out in the din of powerful
their diversity. Shared Mirror, for instance, is a interest groups, the ultimate aim is to be the
platform for Dalit poetry, translated and new. public, says Bharathan.

GLITTER IN
THE GUTTER

Photos: Anantha Subramanyam K

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 labouring over mounds of sand,
most of which contains human
excreta, in search of the elusive
micro particles.

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
Anantha Subramanyam K
& Vidya Iyengar

t the crack of dawn, a

gang of around 100 boys
and young men descends on the lanes and
bylanes of Bengalurus
Chickpet area. They swiftly slip
into the deep, murky pits that receive 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 covers removed and placed on the
edge, on Avenue Road, Cubbonpet, Nagarthpet, Anchepet, Siddanna lane and Kilari
Road are guarded by emaciated 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 adjoining 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 purposefully hunting.
We scour the area from early
morning till around 7:30 am to collect 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 treasurehunters three years ago.
The occasional extra
buck and the hope of
making it makes the
task worth their while. After all, gold hovers around
Rs 23,000 per 10 gm now.
At the filtering units adjoining 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.

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

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

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 usually rinse our hands and feet outside the store which is how the gold

flows into the gutters, he says.

Vishwanatha, of Vishwanatha
Antique Dye Works who specializes 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. Sometimes 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 depositing 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

The ramshackle filtering set-ups

draw residents of the slum adjoining the railway lines. After finishing 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 gutters 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