Madrasis and Other Relations

At a recent family dinner, in response to something said in casual conversation, I made the offhand remark that southern Indian populace was rather more homogeneous than its northern counterpart. This, in the context of serial invasions of northern India from the west and osmotic exchange with the east over the centuries, has been a part of one's subconscious forever.

Alok was appalled by my ignorance and pointed out that the south has had a vibrant maritime exchange of peoples with other geographies and probably hosts as much of a genetic potpourri as the north. What's more, while tandoori chicken may taste the same from Amritsar to Birmingham to New York, sambhar tastes verrry different every few miles if you trouble to go by road from Chennai to Thiruvananthapuram.

His mother-in-law, not to be left behind, weighed in with the observation that for north Indians all southerners are Madrasi and they can't tell one Madrasi from another.

I can't quite recall how we got away from this awkward spot but we must have done for I live to tell the tale. However, I was tempted to look up and see how far wrong I had been.

Way Out West
The genetic make-up of Indians seems to have attracted quite some scholarly interest in the 21st century and some major studies have been carried out during the last decade or so. This write-up is based on my understanding at the time of writing. However, scientific research is an ongoing process and I am sure our understanding will improve as we go along.

Research papers on genetic studies, in keeping with the highest traditions of academia, are awash with jargon and far from unanimous. Most seem to draw conflicting conclusions to suit preconceived hypotheses from similar numbers by massaging them a bit differently.

Hence it is that, in keeping with the lowest traditions of second hand research, one can draw some fairly simple, and simplistic, conclusions:

• There has not been any major influx of Central Asian genes into India for over ten millennia.
• The Indo-European linguistic links are more recent than that and are not explained by conquest or large scale in-migration. 
• Genetically the population of India is fairly heterogeneous and the bulk of it descends from two major genetic groupings which have been assigned the names  
• Ancestral South Indians (ASI), and  
• Ancestral North Indians (ANI).
• The two major streams probably arrived in the sub-continent at different destinations along different routes at different times from Africa.
• There are no pure ASI and ANI lines left on mainland India.

• The ASI line is the older one and has very little presence in north India.
• The purest ASI line is to be found in the Andamans. It is quite possible that the ASI stream landed first in the Andaman islands and 'flew' across to south India.
• The ASI line does not seem to have any linkages beyond the sub-continent and the Andaman islands although some very weak links have been traced to the Australian aborigines.

• The ANI line has a fairly strong presence in south India.
• The ANI line is genetically linked to certain Middle Eastern, Central Asian and  Eastern European populations but not to Western European populations. These links are weak and probably date back to a pre-ice age male ancestor. 

...and Our Relations
The ANI linkages, quite counter-intuitively, do not seem to sit on a continuum but seem to exist at discrete points and at distant locations.

This has created some interesting connections. For example, the R1a1 genetic haplogroup, descendants of a common male ancestor, probably Indian, is strongly marked among Punjabi Khatris of the Indus basin; high-caste brahmins of Bengal and Konkan; certain eastern European populations; and the Chenchu tribes of Andhra.

Who would have thought that

• a certain ageing, Bangalore based golfer; 
• the world's best daughter-in-law,  rooted to a Konkan town better known for sending out terrorists; 
• a certain Illinois based, internationally noted trade economist of Bengali origin; 
• an avatar of Lord Vishnu's consort Mahalaksmi, Chenchu Lakshmi, forever ingrained, in said ageing golfer's mind as the buxom Anjali Devi  from the 1958 movie; 
• and the lithe blonde Lithuanian shaking her booty in a Bollywood number, unknowingly but comfortably ensconced among her kin, as the contemporary take on feminine allure;

are all distant cousins?

Selected Readings:

1. Large Scale Influx from Central Asia?
2. Coancestry of European & Asian Chromosomes
3. Genetic Heritage of Tribal & Caste Indians
4. The Origin of Paternal Haplogroup R1a1   (download)
5. Land of Seven Rivers (Book)

Bhagat Singh

I grew up in the early 1950s in Ferozepur, a small town within walking distance from the Indo-Pak border at Hussainiwala. The border ran along the river Sutlej, the eastern bank being India and the western one Pakistan.

Among the joys of a riverside town are the festivals that involve a dip in the river. On festival days the railways ran a special train for the short journey to an otherwise defunct railway station at Hussainiwala. There the line was blocked and beyond the block lay a barrage over which pre-partition trains used to ply into what was now Pakistan.

The Barrage on the Sutlej

An early childhood spent close temporally to the partition and physically to Pakistan meant that every visit to the river for a festival or for a picnic, incited  speculation among the youngsters about what lay on the other side.

Just across the water, in addition to the sworn enemy of India and all things good, the folklore went, lay what definitely belonged to us, the cremation place of Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Sukhdev.

It seemed  like a cruel twist of fate or laziness of Cyril Radcliff's pen which had put it just outside our reach.

Many hangovers from the partition featured regularly in the headlines. But the one closest to the our hearts, never seemed to do. There was heartburn about the apathy of those in Delhi towards, what must have been my first exposure to the phrase, "Punjabi Sentiments".

To our surprise however, it turned out that, away from the public eye, diplomatic negotiations were on. And in 1961, in a low key barter deal, the borders got redrawn. In exchange for a narrow strip of land covering the Bhagat Singh memorial, India ceded some twelve villages elsewhere along the border.

In 1965 and again in 1971, Pakistan tried, unsuccessfully, to  take back by force what had been ceded at the barter table.

My first visit to the cremation point in 1969 was an awe-ispiring moment. Where there was then a rudimentary plaque now stands a massive, if slightly gaudy, monument. I was there in 2011. The pictures can be seen here: The Martyrs' Memorial.

The Man who could make Gold dance

His name was Bobby Randhawa and he was on his way to see me. He had landed that morning in Bombay from Boulder, Colorado. Too late to catch the flight he was booked on, he spoke to me briefly before taking IC605. It crashed that afternoon in February 1990 short of the runway at the Bangalore airport and came to a halt within the Karnataka Golf Course.

Key cause: pilots not fully conversant with the fly-by-wire technology of the recently commissioned Airbus A-320. 

Fellow ISI alumnus Srinivas Bhogle, who was then with National Aerospace Laboratories, recently wrote about the crash in detail here and triggered this memorandum on the events set off by Bobby's death. There are 89 other stories out there.

Around the time of the crash, I was going through the background papers and wondering how to deal with Bobby.

At about 1:30 p.m. the secretary buzzed to say that the flight had been delayed. Two more such calls happened over the next one hour. No official announcements, but rumours of a plane crash had started floating around town and phones had started ringing. 

Background
Bobby was the Technical Director of Vac-Tec, a company working at the cutting edge of thin film technology. I had met him a few weeks earlier when a colleague and I visited Vac-Tec in a four nation sweep to select a 'physical vapour deposition' (PVD) based decorative coating plant for watch cases.

Using this technology expensive gold electroplating is replaced by a coat of gold-lookalike titanium nitrate, a very hard substance. A sparse dusting of actual gold on top creates the illusion of real gold colour much coveted by the human race. PVD thus offers enormous gold savings and phenomenally increased durability.

The alchemy happens in a vacuum chamber where an Argon plasma is created, and in a process reminiscent of sci-fi movies, gold is literally vapourised off a solid gold bar, dances across to the desired object and condenses there in a magically fine and uniform layer.

Worldwide, only four or five equipment manufacturers were then able to achieve the desired results consistently. We adopted an accelerated learning-evaluation-selection cycle by visiting all of them in quick succession. Vac-Tec was our last stop. After a courtesy meetings with top management, Bobby took over for the next two days for a thorough presentation of what they had to offer.

Bobby was from a small village in the Punjab. The only one from his village to have gone to college in a nearby town. He did well and landed in the U.S. on a scholarship for graduate studies. A well built, presentable, cusp-of-thirty young man, he was one of the few Indians then in Boulder. 

And one of the half a dozen acknowledged technology leaders in his field worldwide - he could make gold dance exactly the way it needed to.

By the time we were done in Boulder, though highly impressed by their product and technology, we were convinced that Vac-Tec were not really equipped to provide support and service to a novice customer in far away Bangalore, and we decided to go for one of their competitors.

Back to the crash
Vac-Tec, who had been following up vigorously for the mega-bucks order, were not willing to give up. In spite of our telling them that it was of no use, Bobby embarked on a journey, punctuated by the delayed London-Bombay leg, the missed domestic connection and the not-missed alternate flight that crashed that afternoon.

Around 5 p.m. I was told that the injured, as also the 90 or so who had perished, were being shifted to the Air-force Hospital.

I hauled myself over there. Bobby was not among those injured. Nor among the recognisable bodies, covered in white sheets and lined up on the lawn.

Aftermath
Turned out Bobby had no Indian friends in Boulder. And his family had no phone at home or anyone in the family who spoke english. Our associate Timex, also a Vac-Tec customer, with offices in the U.S. and in Delhi, helped co-ordinate the disposal of his assets and entitlements.

A few months later the phone buzzed and a bewildered secretary announced the unexpected arrival of a Mr.& Mrs. Randhawa. That would be Bobby's brother and sister-in-law. They had come straight from the train station by the simple device of telling the auto driver: Titan office ko le chalo.

They needed some sort of closure by visiting the place where Bobby's life had come to an end. And by talking to the one person they could reach who had last spoken to Bobby. Over the years he had visited them occasionally but they had never gone over and had no idea what he did. They had been surprised to receive a veritable fortune as the proceeds of his estate.

There was not much we could say to each other. They ended up crying inconsolably for what must have been about half an hour but seemed much longer. Later that day we arranged for them to be taken to the very spot where the plane had crashed.

Aftermath
About a couple of years later, Paul, who had been Bobby's deputy in Vac-Tec called out of the blue. The company was liquidating stocks. Would we be interested in buying a coating plant at fire-sale prices?

Our technical people were by now conversant with the technology and felt that if we were getting a great deal we should look at it. I was headed westward on other business anyway, so I landed once again in beautiful Boulder. I was received by the company's Corporate Secretary and taken to the factory.

The empty parking lot had not prepared me for the shock awaiting me in the lobby. What had been a tastefully decorated space abuzz with activity was now bare. Where there used to be an attractive secretary at a glass and steel counter now stood, leaning against the wall and smiling, Bobby Randhawa. It took a couple of moments to register that it was just a life-size, and life-like, portrait.

In the cavernous, dark shop floor stood a number of tall cylindrical systems of different sizes in various stages of completion - looking like a George Lucas movie set. There around a work platform I met Paul and the remaining skeletal technical team.

Over the next couple of hours as Paul tried to sell me a plant, the story of how Bobby's departure had killed a vibrant business unfolded. As he spoke about what they could offer us, Bobby turned up every few minutes in some context, and Paul had to stop to wipe away silent tears. He had lost a boss he admired and a friend he loved; the company an asset it had not been able to replace.

They had tried various people from the academic space but no one could comfortably manage the move from lab scale to production scale. Regular customers, who were used to calling up Bobby directly for help in dealing with problems, or designing jigs and fixtures, or developing new coatings, had peeled off and new ones were hard to come by. Product development had come to a halt. Vac-Tec had gone into liquidation under Chapter 7.

Epilogue
This technology till today remains in a few hands. Out of the ashes of Vac-Tec was later born a new company Vapour-Tec, in Boulder. They do not offer gold coating in their regular line-up.