Breaking Down News: Telly truths

The pious festivities may have been somewhat dampened if the celebrants had bothered to look at the other episodes on What On Earth: ‘Finding King Arthur’, ‘The Minotaur’s Lair’, ‘The Lost City of Goliath’, ‘Village of the Damned’ and ‘Mystery of Fang Forest’. Not exactly scientific American (current attractions: ‘Why solar trade policy matters’, ‘Slowing the spread of drug resistance, ‘Oddball object tumbling among the stars could disrupt planetary science’).

And certainly not nature (boring highlights of the current issue: ‘Bureaucratic drag dents Japan’s nuclear science’, ‘Five priorities for weather and climate research’, ‘Tasmanian tiger genome offers clues to its extinction’, offset by the wildly exciting ‘Argentinian geoscientist faces criminal charges over glacier survey’.) What On Earth is clearly in a different class. One which should give pause to reflect, before hitting the tweet button.

Besides, 10 minutes on a search engine would let you know that the Ram Setu story is a recurrent phenomenon, like Halley’s Comet. The last time it swung by was in 2014, and that was a rehash of a 2013 story, which owed something to an outbreak in 2002. There’s a timeline of Ram Setu hysterias in the blog of Canadian editor and writer Ian Chadwick (at ianchadwick.com), which elaborates on a web page authored by CT Evans at the Northern Virginia Community College (at novaonline.nvcc.edu).

Nasa has a bad habit of turning its cameras on this controversial stretch of water in the Palk Straits, knowing full well that the images set pulses racing dangerously in India. In 1966, Gemini 9 achieved almost none of its mission objectives, and even the spacewalk was aborted, but the two-man crew caught a glimpse of that setu and brought back some nice pictures. But, as Chadwick notes, the internet wasn’t around at the time to set wild claims flying across the gulfs of the ether.

But another Nasa picture taken in 2002, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on board the Aqua satellite, burned up the undersea cables when it was hailed as firm proof of the historicity of Valmiki’s epic. Intriguingly, that image appears to have vanished from Nasa’s Visible Earth website.

Was it quietly taken offline, since Nasa has reason to be quite tired of this epic controversy? At the last outbreak, it had issued a statement clarifying that it had conducted remote sensing of the area for decades, but the data could not possibly establish either the age or the provenance of structures photographed from orbit.

But then, Indian enthusiasts pay no attention to Nasa’s helpless protests. For decades towards the end of the 20th century, it was embattled in correspondence with the celebrated KC Paul of Howrah, who spent those years painting the walls and lampposts of Kolkata with a pre-Copernican depiction of the solar system, accompanied by the slogan: “The sun goes around the earth once every year.”

He spent thousands of rupees every year on tar-paint and whitewash for his corrective campaign. It meant a fortune to him, for he was a man of slender means — when I first met him, he was straddling a ditch outside his home, catching tiny fish for his dinner with the help of a superannuated hospital basin.

Over the years, Paul wrote hundreds of letters to Nasa, and the world’s leading space agency answered all of them with dogged politeness, explaining that none of its missions had yet brought back any evidence for a geocentric universe. Just as doggedly, Paul had preserved the correspondence in a beat-up briefcase, which he was happy to show all visitors, and explain, page by page, why Nasa was barking up the wrong tree — or the wrong satellite.

The Anandabazar Patrika reported in 2013 that Paul had been rendered homeless but had not relinquished his calling. His project to prove Nasa wrong is no more absurd than the movement to find evidence of human intervention in the Ram Setu from a couple of Nasa images.