Re-discovering Fountain Pens

 

The past some months have been very hectic, work at office keeps piling up, and its a similar story at home. Trust me, being married is like working on a second job, it just can't be neglected. As a part of some late-year house cleaning, I was re-arranging things at home when I opened some old shelves, and found a Parker fountain pen. It is a red bodied Vector with a piston for drawing ink, and was gifted to me by my father when he returned from Gulf two decades ago. Somewhere circa 1997~99. Made in UK, it says. And with it I got drawn once again to my fun filled school days.

                     

A simple google turned up endless blog posts of nostalgia, kids who grew up in the 90s had a special place of the fountain pens, lovingly called the ink pen (ironical, every pen has ink, fountain or not ). I could see bloggers typing on and on about those days when you had to load your fountain pen with ink, the same way today people charge their phones before heading out to school or office. Writing instruments have gone down a one way street, and smart pens and voice-to-text converters are in use today. But I long for the days men were men and carried their own fountain pens proudly in their shirt pockets.

So here is how we progressed in school: from the kindergarten days (LKG,UKG) to about 4th grad (or 4th standard), we Indian students were equipped with the trusty pencil and sharpener (which we used to call the cutter). Then about 5th grade, we were trusted to start using pens. The cheapest pens in the market were the disposable ball-point pens, the most popular I think was the stick-eazy pen, which could be bought for 2 rupees back then.

But schools used to insist that a good student no-only required good grades, but also a good handwriting to go with it. A legible handwriting in the cursive style was the hallmark of the Oxford academia, they used to say.  And the best way one could achieve that was to write using a fountain pen, in plain white 'unruled' notebooks. The challenge was to write on plain paper in straight lines , which none of us could do except some of the girls in class. Most often , our writing would go obliquely across the page which we attempted to compensate in the next line, and fail again. We needed practice. So we were encouraged to buy good ink pens and practise writing with them in plain sheets. This opened up an arsenal of sorts, because unlike ball point pens, which were identical and everyone had the same ones, fountain pens were distinctive and different. You could either buy a cheap unheard of Indian company like Bismi, Camel, Camlin..or you could go all in and buy the coveted Cadillac of fountain pens : Hero, Parker & Sheffer.

The chinese brand Hero was specially coveted, because it was extremely light weight to use and even easier to refill ink, and had  a longer mileage. Plus spare parts were easily available and interchangeable from other pens of the same company, and the nib was , well. smooooth. It gave the smoothest writing on paper, and the ink dried instantly without smudges. It was very common for us students to carry our pens in the shirt pockets of our white uniforms, but we would also forget to remove it when we ran for the bus, causing the ink to spill onto our shirts. Apart from the regular stuff taught in school, we also learned Pen-engineering, removing and changing of the nibs, bending and forking the nibs to "correct" the ink flow, and experimenting with different brands of inks. Often our inks would run out during our class, so we would switch to the reserve ballpoint pen, and even un-luckier ones would find the ink in the ballpens have dried up. Then we would start borrowing inks from neighbours, by transferring ink from theirs to our pens ! We would carry a piece of cotton for these emergencies in our pencil boxes, yes they were still called pencil boxes, even when they did not have any pencils, and a small piece of chalk, which instantly absorbed any ink spilled in the box or on our clothes. The Parker fountain pens had a beauty of their own, small, simple design, and just heavy enough to stand out, but ink flow was heavier, and would smudge our writing in the cheap school provided answer sheets. And the ink would run out an hour after lunch break. The Hero pens on the other hand, with their friction caps and hooded nibs were better engineered (we thought) and wrote longer, in sleek lines.

The good days didn't last though. During our 10th standard board exams  we found that the  government provided answer sheets were of even lower quality, and thus played safe with the ballpoint pens. Somewhere around this time, the Gel-pen entered the Indian market, you could have the convenience of the ball point and the output of the fountain pen. You could leave in in your pocket when you ran, and it wouldn't spill ! Amazing ! By highschool  , we were all converts and adopted the ballpoints for all our scribbling. Life had turned fast, there was no spare time to waste on refilling inks every night, and our handwriting was either improved or in  a complete mess. The teacher didn't care, there were no marks for beauty on the test paper. The new weapon of choice ?, the Cello Gripper:

The last fountain pen I used was a maroon colored Hero , with a funny looking unhooded nib, which I used in first year of Engineering college. It was broken when it fell from my pocket and broke cleanly in half, where the suction mechanism met the nib. After that it was all ball point pens for me, and after entering the computer programming profession, the only time I used pens was to jot down a phone number or to fill in application forms.

Well, this Parker has come back my way, and I am trying to find reasons to start using it during work. The ball pen was designed for quick brisk writing, they say. The fountain pen is for more relaxed , laid back and flowing writing. Has to. It needs special care and time of its own, something the modern office worker has very little of.

Ohm Shanthi Oshaana

 

I had missed this movie a the theatre when it was released. So I caught up when the DVD came out. And boy, had fun watching it and reminiscing  of the good old days. It is a fresh , nice , simple movie, with it’s heart in the right place, and nothing vulgar. The story of the girl falling for and pursuing the boy has been told many times, but here there was a certain freshness to it.

In the movie’s first scene, when baby Pooja is born, and the good doctor is informed that it is a boy, an interrupting person in the room congratulates him. “Having a boy baby is much better than a girl baby”, he says, and proceeds to support it with some of his points. Doctor Mathew looks heavenwards and says “Praise the Lord !”

Then the nurse arrives and informs him , saying she had made a mistake. And the baby is a girl, not a boy. The stranger who had earlier congratulated him, now gets up and walks away.  Doctor Mathew looks heavenwards and says “Praise the Lord again !”

A simple , but important message, to love the girl child. From this point , the movie talks of only one thing- Girl Power ! Kudos for the makers to take time to weave this into the very first scene.

Easter Eggs Galore :

The main character and narrator of the movie, Pooja Mathew, played innocently by Nazriya, is born in 1983, the year I was born. And throughout the movie, the story makes numerous tributes to many things of that era. It was a fun going back in time, and here is the list I could point out.:

1. Year 1999. The grown-up Pooja is introduced in mega-serial announcement style. These mega-serials began as a boon to the otherwise entertainment drained Indian TV viewers, but is now the bane of the idiot box. Many mega-serials run for many years with a crazy twisting story line which made no sense.
2. Again, the introductory scene, various pictures in Pooja’s room point to things which were cool that time.  A scene drawing from Spadikam, the Mohanlal starrer, which gave the superstar the image of a goonda with a heart of gold, and fetched him a state award.
3. Rambo. In the 90’s the only place you could see a six pack was in a hollywood movie. Rambo established Sylvester Stallone as the action star to watch out for, and youngsters repeatedly rewatched the series just to see him flex his muscles and arrow down copters. Even today, I watch it when it is on TV. There is also a picture of Clint Eastwood, the original cowboy of Hollywood.
4. On Doctor Mathew’s table is a cassette player, and a copy of  World Book. Before the internet, the World Book encyclopaedia was our only way to gather diverse information. And the trusty cassette player was the gadget every youngster wanted. Before the CDs came down.
5. Complan. The complan boy and complan girl was one of the most successful and common ads on TV back then. It made stars of both the young models.
6. Niram. The 1999 Mayalayam campus hit movie Niram was talk of the town when it came out, and re-introduced the chocolate hero. When you watch the movie today, you could see the crappy direction, and crappy acting, unimaginative songs, and severe lack of story and coherence. But back then, people just swooned at the cute story of the young couple in love.
7. Pooja sees the Hero Honda CBZ in the movie, and gets one for herself. The  CBZ was the first muscle/sport bike to be introduced in India. Before the introduction of the CBZ, the Indian motorcycle market trend was towards fuel efficient, small capacity motorcycles (that formed the 80–125 cc class). Bigger motorcycles with higher capacity virtually did not exist (except for Enfield Bullet). The launch and success of Hero Honda CBZ in 1999 showed that there was demand for performance bikes. Other Indian motor companies would soon follow the trend and bring in high performance bikes of their own.
8. Pooja’s class goes on a tour to Veegaland , which was the first amusement park of Kerala. It soon became the preferred holiday destination of Malayalees of all ages, specially school and college trips. But the huge rid pipes of the park are as dirty today as shown in the movie !
9. Pooja’s father gifts her a new Nokia 3310 ! For many of us (at least for me!) , this was our first mobile phone. Kerala was one of the first states to launch mobile connection services, as early as 1995, cell-phones were becoming available in the market. But the call rates where highly consumer-unfriendly. In some of the usage plans, the rate of outgoing calls was 12 Rs/- per minute, while incoming calls were charges Rs 7/- per minute ! Of course, this meant that calls from unrecognized numbers where not answered :-) . In order to save on costs, many of us began to develop a system of codes using missed calls, 1 missed call meant something, 2 short missed calls meant urgent… Those who had landlines where given missed calls repeatedly so that they would call back landline  to cell phone, landline rates where still cheaper and often free for some minutes.Bigger and better cell-phones were brought to Kerala from the Gelf , and the market had limited options. The Nokia 3310 turned out to be a consumer favourite, it was small, it’s battery ran for 2 days, and the interface was extremely simple and easy to use. The ring tone composer on the device was a crowd favourite, because unlike modern smart phones, this was probably the only way to customize your phone – by getting/composing and playing the latest songs as phone ringtones.
10. More bikes ! David Kanjaany drives a Yamahaa RX 100, the cheaper 100 CC bike of boys of that age. While Giri arrives on his loud and inefficent , but sturdy Enfield Bullet.
11. Karate ! Before Keanu Reeves popularized Kung Fu in the Matrix movies, Karate was the number one marital art style taught and practised. People used to go to such Karate classes, some organized in schools too, preferring the imported art over Kerala’s own traditional art of Kalaripayattu.
12. Shakhtimaan plays on the TV at Pooja’s home. Shakhitmaan was India’s first TV superhero, (the first Superhero was of couse, Mr India, in the movies), playing every Sunday. When Shaktimaan first aired on Doordarshan, there were a lot of controversy created as children set themselves on fire or jumped off buildings hoping that Shaktimaan would save them.About 400 episodes were telecast before it finally lost its charm.
13. Video libraries. Pooja and gang go to a video cassette library and ask for Spadikam, and is told that Velliyettan has come in. Giri comes in and borrows the casette of Enter the Dragon, the Bruce Lee karate classic. Till the end of the 90s, these casette libraries were the place to get the latest movies, in every language. These casettes could be overwritten, so the library owners would just record a newer movie when they get a master copy.
14. Pooja hums the tune Cheppadikunje, from the Malayalam dub of The Jungle Book TV animation. The song, and the show was loved ones from the age.

    
15. David Kanjaany opens an Internet Cafe in the village. Internet arrived in India end of 90s, and internet cafes opened up all over the country, where people could pay and use computers to use the service. The charge were also high, some charge upto 70 Rupees per hour. Today, internet rates have plummeted in the country , and it has become cheap and affordable on smartphones.
16. Doctory Mathews drives an old Contessa Classic. It was a popular car in the 60, but was a dinosaur in the 90s.
17. That Prathikaranam show was hilarious. It used to be the weekly audience-channel interaction program of Doordarshan. The anchors where actual DD employees, and the Nirma ad , was overplayed on TV.
18. The spooky Manichitrathaazhu theme plays when Pooja asks for permission to go out from her father. Apart from being the highest grossing Malayalam film of the year 1993, Manichitrathazhu is considered as one of the best thrillers ever made in India as well as one of the best Malayalam films ever made. The Vidamaatte ! was iconic , and fetched Shobana the National Award for Best Actress. Although the movie was cheaply remade into 6 languages, none of the remakes had the aura and spookiness of the original, which did not use any computer graphics or VFX, and relied entirely on set design and background music and lighting to show its mysterious spookiness.
19. Hrithik Roshan’s entry into Hindi movies, and the hit song from Kaho Na Pyaar Hain. This was the movie which was full of cliches, but the audience lapped it all up, turning him into a superstar with his very first movie. And our generation began drooling over his body..:-)
20. The Dil Chahtha Hain song plays on Pooja’s TV. DCH released only one year later than KNPH. It was another iconic trendsetter movie which even won a Award for its debutant director.
21. The entrance coaching bit was funny, and the class and teacher was modelled on the PC Thomas’s entrance coaching centre in Thrissur. Many of us lost our money and countless days lost in his strict classes, and some of the really gifted ones even got good ranks ! Just to clarify, I never attended his classes, and spent my weekends programming away on my own PC.
22. The cassettes in the video library are replaced by CDs. The new medium promised better picture and sound quality, but soon ended up promoting video piracy because they could be easily copied onto computers.
23. Kozhikode is described beautifully, it has a culture of its own. And a timeless charm. The year is 2004. And a lot of things happened in the preceding four years. MadhuMohan stopped his serials. Veerappan is killed. The 2004 Tsunami hit India too, and affected millions of lives, and the word Tsunami entered Malayalam lexicon.
24. It is said that “Every Facebook user has had a dark past. Orkut !” Before Facebook, Indian youngsters where hooked onto Orkut, the social netwoking service launched by google in 2004. Orkut could show you who all visited your profile, so it was common for boys to lurk around and try to make as many orkut-girl-friends as possible. But after numerous scraps and spams, users got bored of it and abandoned ship to move to Facebook. On June 30, 2014, Google announced it will be closing Orkut on September 30, 2014.
25. Pooja uses a ThinkPad laptop, the design of that lines of laptops has not changed till this day, even after IBM sold Thinkpad to Lenovo.
26. The boring Doordarshan song plays in Pooja’s classroom, it has been a standard tune to denote boring situations.
27. The Classmates song plays and movie is talked about. The movie itself only came out in 2006, but it was a box office hit and has a cult following.
28. Rajamanikkyam poster in Pooja’s home. Man, I hated that movie, but everyone else loved it.
29. For some reason, Dr Mathews is reading Vanitha !

 

My only rant about this movie, Dr Mathews. Nicely played by Ranji Panikker, this father is by far the most carefree father I have seen, in movie or real life. He does not worry when his teenage daughter leaves home often, or notices the sudden changes in her mannerisms. He is not at all concerned when the grown up Pooja leaves and arrives home at odd hours, even 12 in the night. He gifts her a cell phone in high school and is not worried if it might be misused. And when he finally knows about her affair, is so cool about it, he welcomes them whole heartedly without thinking of the possible problems of this relation to his family and community. I have seen some dads who are casual to their children, bug Dr Mathews is lost in his own world, and is a lazy and careless dad.

‘Jurassic Park’: How Have The Special Effects Held Up So Well?

Universal Pictures

Despite hitting theatres over two decades ago, the visual effects in 1993's “Jurassic Park” still hold up very well. The velociraptors, the T. Rex, and other dinosaurs are just as believable today as they were more than twenty years ago.

But why is that? How have Steven Spielberg's effects in “Jurassic Park” stood the test of time, while other movies have not aged so well?

When used properly, computer generated visual effects can help transport viewers into the world of the movie. Filmmakers can use VFX to build sets they could never build practically, or to render fantastic creatures and locales. When used poorly, though, CG imagery sticks out like a sore thumb. There’s nothing worse than being engrossed in a movie, only to be taken out of it by a bad or fake-looking piece of VFX.

In the early 1990s, movies were suddenly filled with VFX and barely any of it was up to snuff with the Industrial Light & Magic’s Oscar-winning work on “Jurassic Park.” It’s hard not to cringe looking back on some of those early efforts.

“Jurassic Park” helped ignite a revolution in Hollywood, one that saw movie studios rush to replace things like sets and creatures with computer generated. Spielberg’s film proved that almost anything could be realized with computers, and in many cases it could be achieved for less cost. It was the first step towards almost fully computer-animated films like “Avatar” and “Gravity,” but like any first steps there were a few stumbles.

As it turns out, the real secret to making VFX look realistic is lighting.

Universal Pictures

It’s no coincidence that many of the scenes featuring computer-generated dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” take place at night and in the rain. The weather and darkness helped mask what the filmmakers didn't want you to see -- that is, still fairly rudimentary computer generated creatures. Putting a dinosaur in the dark or behind an object went a long way towards convincing the audience that it was the real deal.

There's some debate in the VFX community as to how lighting should be used. "District 9" director Neill Blomkamp actually favours a completely opposite approach, playing up the harsh lighting to make the CGI look more realistic.

"We set out to work with digital creatures, lighting and compositing environments that are conducive to something photo real," Blomkamp told the LA Times in 2009. "My stuff tends to be [computer generated] in very harsh light, like sunlight. Harsh shadows. It feels real. Sometimes it’s easier to make stuff look photo real in that environment.”

Jurassic Park

Another secret of “Jurassic Park's” effects? Most of the dinosaurs were actually created using tradition practical effects, like animatronics and costuming. There is about 15 minutes worth of dinosaur footage in “Jurassic Park,” only six of which are computer-generated.

Most of the big shots featuring the Tyrannosaurus used a life-sized animatronic dino built by special creature effects guru Stan Winston (the guy behind the Xenomorph from "Aliens" and the titular "Predator." As well, many of the raptors were actually just men in suits.

Universal Pictures

Amazingly, "Jurassic Park" wasn't originally supposed to even have any computer-generated VFX. Spielberg and company originally planned to use a technique called Go Motion, a stop-motion animation technology developed by "Star Wars" effects guru Phil Tippett which added motion blur to the creature. However, after seeing early VFX tests put together by ILM without permission, Spielberg and company were convinced that CG was the way to go. Tippett stayed on as "Dinosaur Supervisor," overseeing the animation of the beasts.

via Tumblr

However filmmakers decide to create their computer-generated creatures, even today it's a huge challenge to make them look believable. Sometimes you're just better off taking a practical approach.

It's absolutely incredible that more than 20 years on, the dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park" still look as good as they do. Will we still say the same thing in another 20 years?

Manjadikuru

 

Now usually, I steer clear of the so-called Award movies; these are the art-house movies, which win awards at various national and international film festivals. These movies are usually preachy, and made for the hard core movie aficionados. They don’t cater to the masses, and most of them do not receive promotions or support from mass viewers.

But every now and then, there comes a movie which does win awards, but for the right reasons. There is something genuinely fresh or new about it, you watch it, and are surprised how such a well made sweet labor of love went unnoticed. This happened to me yesterday, when I watched Manjadikuru, the debut movie of Writer-Director Anjali Menon.

I had heard about this movie earlier, but could not get a good print to watch it, but somehow tumbled on the youtube playlist somebody had uploaded. And I ended up watching the commercial release completely online (the wonders of modern technology).

And my verdict ? It’s a keeper ! If you are from Kerala, and grew up in the 70s/80s/90s, you got to watch this. I don’t think the current teenage generation will enjoy this simple story of relationships and memories the same way we grownups would. I cursed myself for not watching it earlier.

Manjadikuru refers the bright red seeds found very commonly in ancestral homes in Kerala. They are collected by kids for their color, but are not used in food preparations. Many consider them a useless plant, as neither it’s fruit/seeds nor flower is edible. Kids growing up in towns and cities today will not be able to relate to them, but the generation before, like me, have a nostalgic attachment to them.

The entire story of the movie is set in the past, though the exact time is not specified, it is somewhere in the 1980s. In the narrator’s own words, it was when life was much more simpler, before cellphones, before facebook, and before reality shows and tv serials. I guess the viewer is allowed to set whatever time period he wants to to enjoy the movie.

The central character of the movie is Vicky, the 11 year old son of a gulf malayalee couple, who come home to their ancestral home in Kerala to spend 16 days there. And these few days leave him with a lifetime of memories to cherish and learn from. Vicky and family are summoned home to attend the funeral of Vicky’s grandfather (played by Thilakan), the patriarchal head of the family. The whole joint family of uncles and aunts and cousins and distant relatives also are summoned to the funeral. The whole tharavad (ancestral home) is full of people, who have united for the common cause of the funeral, but who have their own problems within themselves and against each other. Vicky feels lost among this cacophony, and his legs are pulled by his cousin Kannan and his kid sister Manikutti. But the small trio of young ones create a small fun filled world of their own, free from grown-up problems.

 

After the funeral, whole join family is eager to know of the partition of property, and specifically, how will own the  big ancestral home itself.  The grandfather left a legal will, and there is a lawyer who is about the read it, but the grandmother of the family tells everyone to wait for 16 more days for the will to be read. After a death in a family, the family members traditionally observer 16 days of mourning, which ends in prayers for the departing soul on the 16th day, and a hoisted lunch. This is called the pathinaaradiyantharam, and is held 16 days after the death in the family.

Eager to know of the details of the property division, everyone agrees to wait for 16 more days in the home. This gives Vicky and his gang 16 more days to spend together in the country side, which is what the movie is all about. Vicky learns so much in those few days, of life & death, rich & poor, love & hate in addition to a little swimming . The entire movie is pictured in the lush green countryside of a small village in Kerala, during the onset of summer.

The first thing which stands out, is the casting. Every character is splendidly cast, from the grandfather , right down the little kids, and Roja, the Tamil child servant the family employs. The characters are not that colorful, but are believable and relatable. If you have a bunch of relatives in Kerala (or anywhere else, for that matter), you would have come across such characters.

There is the eldest son (played by late vetran Murali, in his last role) who, after having become a naxalite at one point, discovered religion, and became a sanyasi, after tarnishing the family name. Later , he would confess to his mother and he wore the religious colors as a form of protection, because he was scared for his life.

There is the younger son Raghu (Rahman), who has shifted from the family home and is living in a smaller house in the same land property. There is a case between him and his late father regarding the separating wall. He is the only child who stayed back in the countryside to look after his parents, while everyone else went abroad or away in search of better life. But according to the remaining family members, Raghu did not leave, because he had no where to go, and ended up becoming nothing in life. He and his wife are the parents of the mischievous Kannan and Manikuttee.

There is middle daughter Sujatha (Urvashi), mother of Vicky, who chose to marry a Gulf employed Hari, because she wanted a better life for herself and her family. It is revealed later that she was once in love with someone in the village, but decided to marry a better employed and settled Hari, following her head instead of her heart. She is constantly bickering to everyone, even to her son.

There is the younger daughter Ammu, who is married a government official in Delhi. To outsiders, hers looks like a perfect happy marriage, but her husband (Jagathy) is very unhappy with her, and overworks her at home too. Their teenage daughter having been brought up in the city, hates village life , and wants to run back home. She is having an affair with another distant relative ,a teenage boy.

The youngest daughter , Sudha, is married to someone in the US, and is visibly pregnant. Her husband has not accompanied her, apparently due to his work, but it may also be due to already developed cracks in her  marriage. A few years abroad has already transformed her to life’s luxuries; the others are already jealous of her comfortable US lifestyle.

And then there are …the kids. The crown jewels of the set. The three kids who try to enjoy life and the countryside the most are absolute gems ! They first face off, the friction between Gulf educated , well to do Vicky, and the relatively unfortunate Kannan and Manikutty made very visible. Vicky is humble, keeps to himself, and adheres strictly to being neat and tidy. But he is kind at heart, and ready to share his toys and many chocolates as well. The entire movie is narrated by grown up Vicky, so it is his point of view, that we get to see.

Kannan and Manikuttee, on the other hand, grew up in the village. They are smart, mischievous, and talk a loot. Kannan has most of the smartest dialogues among them. And he is also the protective elder brother to his kid sister. His pre-conceived notions about Vicky and the Gulf malayalee lifestyle breaks down fast, when he starts bonding with the every generous Vicky. In the final scenes of th movie, you can see their heart break when Vicky has to return to Gulf, with chances that they may never ever meet each other once the property gets divided.

 

 

But the star of the casting show here is Roja, the migrant Tamil teenage home maid. She speaks broken Tamil and Malayalam, and is made to do every chore in the grand house. She does not complain though, even after being over worked and beaten and punished by the family. The grandmother in the family is the only who does not shout at her. Her pain is visible only to the kids, who together hatch a scheme to save her, and to send her back to her hometown in Sivakasi. The kids succeed, of course, and put Roja on a bus home, but she has is found and has to return in the final moments, her return having something to do with the climax of the movie.

 

The screenplay flows, covering both the wonderful kid’ world, as well as the tumultuous life of the elders equally well. The background music and theme imprints on the nostalgia factor. The scenes are sure to take you back on a journey to your childhood.

My only gripe would be in the songs section. I watched the longer theatrical release, which according to wikipedia, has more scenes and songs than the initial release. None of the songs stayed in my memory. But these can be skipped, as the songs themselves do not add anything new to the movie. The one scene which stood out was the ending of the thiruvathira song, where characters move from the thiruvathira dance steps to taking aggressive fight steps, waking Vicky from his dream turned nightmare.

The dialogues are nicely written. The young ones speak their characters, Vicky, having been brought up abroad, uses English when he is confused about the true Malayalam words. Towards the end, however, his Malayalam vocabulary increases, along with his confidence. The sanyasee maamman speaks in riddles, due to his religious believes. The women in the household all are quick tounged, speak aggressively, along with Raghu, who despises everyone. But, none of the characters speak in the trademark Thrissur region accent. The village is revealed to be in Thiruvillamalai, in Thrissur, where the locas speak in a characteristic regional up-and-down accent. But none of the characters show even a hint of this trait.

After all these problems, the movie ends on a happy note. A happy ending is what the this nostalgic and fun journey down memory lane.

Ham on Nye: The high cost of “winning” an evolution/creation debate

The well-publicized debate at the Creation Museum was not about two minds sparring.

 

original

Enlarge / Adams' Synchronological Chart of Universal History.

 

In 1878, the American scholar and minister Sebastian Adams put the final touches on the third edition of his grandest project: a massive Synchronological Chart that covers nothing less than the entire history of the world in parallel, with the deeds of kings and kingdoms running along together in rows over 25 horizontal feet of paper. When the chart reaches 1500 BCE, its level of detail becomes impressive; at 400 CE it becomes eyebrow-raising; at 1300 CE it enters the realm of the wondrous. No wonder, then, that in their 2013 bookCartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton call Adams' chart "nineteenth-century America's surpassing achievement in complexity and synthetic power... a great work of outsider thinking."

The chart is also the last thing that visitors to Kentucky's Creation Museum see before stepping into the gift shop, where full-sized replicas can be purchased for $40.

Further Reading

How did we get here? A brief history of the evolution vs. creationism debate

Gap theory, "old Earth creationism," and more.

That's because, in the world described by the museum, Adams' chart is more than a historical curio; it remains an accurate timeline of world history. Time is said to have begun in 4004 BCE with the creation of Adam, who went on to live for 930 more years. In 2348 BCE, the Earth was then reshaped by a worldwide flood, which created the Grand Canyon and most of the fossil record even as Noah rode out the deluge in an 81,000 ton wooden ark. Pagan practices at the eight-story high Tower of Babel eventually led God to cause a "confusion of tongues" in 2247 BCE, which is why we speak so many different languages today.

Adams notes on the second panel of the chart that "all the history of man, before the flood, extant, or known to us, is found in the first six chapters of Genesis."

Ken Ham agrees. Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis (AIG), has become perhaps the foremost living young Earth creationist in the world. He has authored more books and articles than seems humanly possible and has built AIG into a creationist powerhouse. He also made national headlines when the slickly modern Creation Museum opened in 2007.

Enlarge / Ken Ham meets the press before the debate.

He has also been looking for the opportunity to debate a prominent supporter of evolution.

And so it was that, as a severe snow and sleet emergency settled over the Cincinnati region, 900 people climbed into cars and wound their way out toward the airport to enter the gates of the Creation Museum. They did not come for the petting zoo, the zip line, or the seasonal camel rides, nor to see the animatronic Noah chortle to himself about just how easy it had really been to get dinosaurs inside his Ark. They did not come to see The Men in White, a 22-minute movie that plays in the museum's halls in which a young woman named Wendy sees that what she's been taught about evolution "doesn't make sense" and is then visited by two angels who help her understand the truth of six-day special creation. They did not come to see the exhibits explaining how all animals had, before the Fall of humanity into sin, been vegetarians.

Further Reading

A visual tour of the Creation Museum

Ars takes in the sights and sounds of Ken Ham's magnum opus.

They came to see Ken Ham debate TV presenter Bill Nye the Science Guy—an old-school creation v. evolution throwdown for the Powerpoint age. Even before it began, the debate had been good for both men. Traffic to AIG's website soared by 80 percent, Nye appeared on CNN, tickets sold out in two minutes, and post-debate interviews were lined up with Piers Morgan Live and MSNBC.

While plenty of Ham supporters filled the parking lot, so did people in bow ties and "Bill Nye is my Homeboy" T-shirts. They all followed the stamped dinosaur tracks to the museum's entrance, where a pack of AIG staffers wearing custom debate T-shirts stood ready to usher them into "Discovery Hall."

Security at the Creation Museum is always tight; the museum's security force is made up of sworn (but privately funded) Kentucky peace officers who carry guns, wear flat-brimmed state trooper-style hats, and operate their own K-9 unit. For the debate, Nye and Ham had agreed to more stringent measures. Visitors passed through metal detectors complete with secondary wand screenings, packages were prohibited in the debate hall itself, and the outer gates were closed 15 minutes before the debate began.

Enlarge / The scene inside the auditorium.

Inside the hall, packed with bodies and the blaze of high-wattage lights, the temperature soared. The empty stage looked—as everything at the museum does—professionally designed, with four huge video screens, custom debate banners, and a pair of lecterns sporting Mac laptops. 20 different video crews had set up cameras in the hall, and 70 media organizations had registered to attend. More than 10,000 churches were hosting local debate parties. As AIG technical staffers made final preparations, one checked the YouTube-hosted livestream—242,000 people had already tuned in before start time.

An AIG official took the stage eight minutes before start time. "We know there are people who disagree with each other in this room," he said. "No cheering or—please—any disruptive behavior."

At 6:59pm, the music stopped and the hall fell silent but for the suddenly prominent thrumming of the air conditioning. For half a minute, the anticipation was electric, all eyes fixed on the stage, and then the countdown clock ticked over to 7:00pm and the proceedings snapped to life. Nye, wearing his traditional bow tie, took the stage from the left; Ham appeared from the right. The two shook hands in the center to sustained applause, and CNN's Tom Foreman took up his moderating duties.

Enlarge / Ken Ham makes his opening remarks as Bill Nye looks on.

Ham had won the coin toss backstage and so stepped to his lectern to deliver brief opening remarks. "Creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today's modern scientific era," he declared, blasting modern textbooks for "imposing the religion of atheism" on students.

"We're teaching people to think critically!" he said. "It's the creationists who should be teaching the kids out there."

And we were off.

Two kinds of science

Digging in the fossil fields of Colorado or North Dakota, scientists regularly uncover the bones of ancient creatures. No one doubts the existence of the bones themselves; they lie on the ground for anyone to observe or weigh or photograph. But in which animal did the bones originate? How long ago did that animal live? What did it look like? One of Ham's favorite lines is that the past "doesn't come with tags"—so the prehistory of a stegosaurus thigh bone has to be interpreted by scientists, who use their positions in the present to reconstruct the past.

For mainstream scientists, this is simply an obvious statement of our existential position. Until a real-life Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown finds a way to power a Delorean with a 1.21 gigawatt flux capacitor in order to shoot someone back through time to observe the flaring-forth of the Universe, the formation of the Earth, or the origins of life, or the prehistoric past can't be known except by interpretation. Indeed, this isn't true only of prehistory; as Nye tried to emphasize, forensic scientists routinely use what they know of nature's laws to reconstruct past events like murders.

Enlarge / Ken Ham's starting point for doing "historical science."

For Ham, though, science is broken into two categories, "observational" and "historical," and only observational science is trustworthy. In the initial 30 minute presentation of his position, Ham hammered the point home.

"You don't observe the past directly," he said. "You weren't there."

Ham spoke with the polish of a man who has covered this ground a hundred times before, has heard every objection, and has a smooth answer ready for each one.

When Bill Nye talks about evolution, Ham said, that's "Bill Nye the Historical Science Guy" speaking—with "historical" being a pejorative term.

In Ham's world, only changes that we can observe directly are the proper domain of science. Thus, when confronted with the issue of speciation, Ham readily admits that contemporary lab experiments on fast-breeding creatures like mosquitoes can produce new species. But he says that's simply "micro-evolution" below the family level. He doesn't believe that scientists can observe "macro-evolution," such as the alteration of a lobe-finned fish into a tiger over millions of years.

Because they can't see historical events unfold, scientists must rely on reconstructions of the past. Those might be accurate, but they simply rely on too many "assumptions" for Ham to trust them. When confronted during the debate with evidence from ancient trees which have more rings than there are years on the Adams Sychronological Chart, Ham simply shrugged.

"We didn't see those layers laid down," he said.

To him, the calculus of "one ring, one year" is merely an assumption when it comes to the past—an assumption possibly altered by cataclysmic events such as Noah's flood.

In other words, "historical science" is dubious; we should defer instead to the "observational" account of someone who witnessed all past events: God, said to have left humanity an eyewitness account of the world's creation in the book of Genesis. All historical reconstructions should thus comport with this more accurate observational account.

Mainstream scientists don't recognize this divide between observational and historical ways of knowing (much as they reject Ham's distinction between "micro" and "macro" evolution). Dinosaur bones may not come with tags, but neither does observed contemporary reality—think of a doctor presented with a set of patient symptoms, who then has to interpret what she sees in order to arrive at a diagnosis.

Given that the distinction between two kinds of science provides Ham's key reason for accepting the "eyewitness account" of Genesis as a starting point, it was unsurprising to see Nye take generous whacks at the idea. You can't observe the past? "That's what we do in astronomy," said Nye in his opening presentation. Since light takes time to get here, "All we can do in astronomy is look at the past. By the way, you're looking at the past right now."

Those in the present can study the past with confidence, Nye said, because natural laws are generally constant and can be used to extrapolate into the past.

"This idea that you can separate the natural laws of the past from the natural laws you have now is at the heart of our disagreement," Nye said. "For lack of a better word, it's magical. I've appreciated magic since I was a kid, but it's not what we want in mainstream science."

How do scientists know that these natural laws are correctly understood in all their complexity and interplay? What operates as a check on their reconstructions? That's where the predictive power of evolutionary models becomes crucial, Nye said. Those models of the past should generate predictions which can then be verified—or disproved—through observations in the present.

An artist's conception of Tiktaalik roseae.

For instance, evolutionary models suggest that land-based tetrapods can all be traced back to primitive, fish-like creatures that first made their way out of the water and onto solid ground—creatures that aren't quite lungfish and yet aren't quite amphibians. For years, there was a big gap in the fossil record around this expected transition. Then, in 2004, a research team found a number of these "fishapods" in the Canadian Arctic.

"Tiktaalik looks like a cross between the primitive fish it lived amongst and the first four-legged animals," wrote the research team as they introduced their discovery to the world.

"What we want in science—science as practiced on the outside—is the ability to predict," said Nye, pointing to the examples of Tiktaalik in biological evolution and the results of the Cosmic Background Explorer mission in cosmology. Mainstream scientific predictions, even those focused on the past, can in fact be tested against reality. So far, however, "Mr. Ham and his worldview does not have this capability," Nye said. "It cannot make predictions and show results."

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At the infamous Scopes trial of 1925, the state of Tennessee prosecuted a young science teacher for teaching evolution in public schools. The trial became a sensation after two of the most famous lawyers in the country showed up to the courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee and argued opposite sides of the case.

On the seventh day of the trial, a rumor went round the courthouse that the courtroom floor was failing and might collapse beneath the weight of so many spectators. The judge then moved the entire proceedings outside onto the lawn.

Clarence Darrow, the lawyer defending Scopes, immediately saw a problem with this new arrangement: a sign hanging on the outer courthouse wall.

"Right before [the jury] was a great sign flaunting letters two feet high, where every one could see the magic words: 'READ YOUR BIBLE DAILY,'" he later recounted.

Darrow objected to the sign and asked the judge to remove it.

"If your honor please, why should it be removed?" asked a lawyer for the state, according to the trial transcript. "It is their defense and stated before the court that they do not deny the Bible, that they expect to introduce proof to make it harmonize [with evolution]. Why should we remove the sign cautioning the people to read the Word of God just to satisfy the others in the case?"

But Darrow was firm. If the sign wouldn't go, "We might agree to get up a sign of equal size on the other side and in the same position reading, Hunter's Biology or Read your evolution," he said. "This sign is not here for no purpose, and it can have no effect but to influence this case."

The judge made his own position clear, saying, "If the Bible is involved, I believe in it and am always on its side."

Darrow found himself working against all three branches of government: the legislature (which had passed the anti-evolution law), the executive (which was prosecuting the case), and the judiciary (which had just decreed its allegiance to the Bible in all cases).

In the end, the sign was removed, but Scopes was eventually found guilty and fined $100 (the decision was reversed on a technicality during appeal).

90 years on, the cultural landscape has changed dramatically. The Supreme Court has outlawed the teaching of creationism in public schools as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by the state. Courthouses no longer sport signs telling people to "READ YOUR BIBLE DAILY." State laws don't ban the teaching of evolution (though there are regular attemptsto endorse intelligent design or "teach the controversy" approaches to the subject).

Whatever doubts about evolution that remained in the mainstream scientific community in 1925 have largely been expunged by a flood of new information, especially from genetics. In 1950, the Catholic church even explicitly allowedresearch on "the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter" (the soul, however, was reserved for God alone). Among mainline Protestants, only 15 percent or so deny evolution.

Six-day, young-Earth, special creationism might therefore be expected to occupy a niche position today—but it does not. In 2012, a Gallup poll found that 46 percent of all Americans "believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." In December 2013, a Pew poll found that 33 percent of Americans reject all forms of evolution.

Enlarge / The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.

Ham's AIG has been able to capitalize on this wide support for creationism. According to Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education, AIG is now the largest young-Earth creationist group in the United States. Ken Ham started AIG in 1993 after moving on from another young-Earth organization and moving to Kentucky; by 2007, he had dreamed up and then built the $27 million Creation Museum. Two million people have visited since.

According to the most recent data submitted to the Internal Revenue Service, AIG now pulls in $22 million a year and employs 351 people—including Ham's brother, three of Ham's daughters, one son, a son-in-law, and a daughter-in-law. Most of the cash appears to be spent on operations; Ham is the only employee to make more than $100,000 (he gets a $134,000 salary). Even with a $30 ticket price—more than it costs to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—the Creation Museum cost almost $8 million a year to run in fiscal year 2012 but generated only $4.9 million from admission fees.

Enlarge / Like every other museum and zoo exhibit, the exit goes through the gift shop.

More lucrative is AIG's bookstore and shipping operation, which made $2 million in profit by selling books and DVDs like The Homosexual War, The Lie, and The War on Christmas. AIG's quarterly magazine, Answers, shipped 300,000 copies around the world in 2012, while its website served 31 million pageviews.

Despite the movement's success, however, many creationists feel "looked down upon" by social, media, and scientific elites. Creationism might have plenty of adherents, but those adherents would also like respect.

Ham used the debate as a way to argue that young Earth creationists deserved that respect. His presentation was peppered with video clips from scientists like Raymond Damadian, inventor of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique. Ham's point was that, whatever views of origins someone holds, they are not necessarily Luddites—and they can still practice excellent "observational science."

The world of 1925 might never return, but the debate gave Ham a broad platform to make his case that the mainstream scientific establishment has made too many creationists scared to speak up; they need scientific "freedom," he said.

“My Kentucky friends”

"Scientists should not debate creationists. Period," wrote Dan Arel in a piece published on the Richard Dawkins Foundation website last month. "Creationism is a worthless and uneducated position to hold in our modern society and Nye is about to treat it as an equal, debatable 'controversy'."

Nye's appearance with Ham has broken a widespread taboo in science against engaging in such debates. Why the refusal to debate? In her 2004 article "Debates: The Drive-By Shootings of Critical Thinking," published by the National Center for Science Education, professor Karen Bartelt argued that the complete evidence for evolution is simply not possible to summarize in a two-hour debate, and that the audience is often not equipped to evaluate competing claims in real-time.

Besides, mainstream scientists see the evolution issue as settled. "Scientists do not debate whether the Earth goes around the sun, whether the Earth is spherical or flat, or whether humans have 46 chromosomes; instead, they evaluate evidence," she wrote. "It is wrong to imply to general audiences that [debates are] the way science is done."

Scientist and author Richard Dawkins subscribes to the same view. He once told the story of how he was invited to do a similar debate with a leading creationist in the US during the 1980s. He called fellow scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould for advice.

[Gould] was friendly and decisive: "Don't do it." The point is not, he said, whether or not you would "win" the debate. Winning is not what the creationists realistically aspire to. For them, it is sufficient that the debate happens at all. They need the publicity. We don't. To the gullible public which is their natural constituency, it is enough that their man is seen sharing a platform with a real scientist.

For all these reasons, Nye came in for significant criticism from the scientific community. Though well-spoken and a gifted communicator, Nye's own background is as a mechanical engineer, not a biologist. He had also agreed to do the debate at the Creation Museum itself, as far from a "neutral" site as one could imagine. Would he manage any more than publicizing Ken Ham's face, ideas, and exhibits?

But 150 years of post-Darwin science has not convinced huge swaths of the American public of evolution's truth. The debate promised Nye a huge platform for speaking directly to that public about science education—over 500,000 people watched the live YouTube-hosted stream alone—and he took it, speaking directly to the audience in a way Ham never attempted.

"My Kentucky friends, I want you to consider this," Nye said earnestly, sometimes addressing those in the room but more often speaking to the cameras. "We're here in Kentucky upon layer upon layer upon layer of limestone."

Nye told the audience how he had stopped by the side of the road and picked up a piece of limestone with a small fossil in it—and then he held up the stone for everyone to see.

"We are standing on millions of layers of ancient life," he said, arguing that ancient animals could not have lived their lives and formed limestone's many layers in just a few thousand years, given what we know about fossilization and sedimentation.

He then implored voters in Texas, Oklahoma, and other states to support mainstream scientific education, saying that they didn't want a generation of kids who didn't understand natural law.

Nye spoke clearly, with bits of folksy humor thrown in, and made a compelling case for his side. On the science, his most devastating pieces of evidence simply went unchallenged; Ham just argued that they relied on the "assumptions" of "historical science."

Nye misfired a few times when moving away from the science. For instance, he repeatedly blasted Ham's reliance on biblical "verses translated into American English over 30 centuries," comparing the process to a game of telephone in which words get mangled. Since we still have the many early texts used to generate all those translations, and since scholars can still read them, and since all serious English translations are translated directly from them, the point lacked rhetorical force.

In the debate's aftermath, many of Nye's critics agreed that he had acquitted himself well. But did the strength of the performance even matter? As though confirming the fears of Dawkins and others, even some creationists admitted that Nye won the debate—but they argued that Ham "won by losing" in raising "huge awareness about Biblical Creationism on a mammoth scale. Over 500,000 computers logged in? Not bad! He planted seeds of hope that the Bible is true and seeds of doubt that evolution is our only model."

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The origin of species

Noah's Ark resting on Mount Ararat.

Six feet into the Adams Synchronological Chart sits a beautiful color illustration of Noah's Ark resting on Mount Ararat, a rainbow spanning the sky above it. Adams follows the biblical account in claiming that the Ark carried eight individuals: Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives. In 2247 BCE, after the waters drained away and this small family left their boat for the wider world, they had to repopulate it. Adams accepts an old Armenian tradition that links each ethnic group to one of Noah's grandsons—Shem's son Aram produced the Syrians, for instance, while Japheth's son Javan gave us Spaniards.

Accepting this history creates problems, however, even on its own terms. In the 4,000 years said to have elapsed since the Flood, humans have populated the whole Earth but have remained the same species, with the ability to interbreed with any other human. How then did the pairs of animal "kinds" on the Ark produce the millions of species we see today in such a narrow window of time?

That question became Nye's single most effective attack of the night.

Enlarge / Given the number of species in the world, we should have been discovering about 11 per day since the flood, if the chronology presented by Ken Ham were correct.

Nye offered a simple equation that accepted Ham's logic: in the 4,000 years since the Flood, 7,000 "kinds" of animals have led to at least 16,000,000 species today. (Ham believes that God only stocked the Ark with "kinds" of creatures, which are roughly equivalent to "families," and these later diversified. One pair of dogs, for instance, became all dogs we see today.) This would mean that, on average, 11 new species have emerged on Earth every single day since the Flood—which is plainly not happening. (In reality, the situation is even worse, since Ham believes only 1,000 "kinds" were on the Ark and Nye argues there may actually be as many as 50,000,000 species on the Earth today.)

This is literally incredible, even to Ham. A hundred yards away from the sweltering debate hall, in the middle of the winding path through the Creation Museum's exhibits, just around the corner from the animatronic Noah, an exhibit shows the way "Life Recovers" after the Flood. It depicts the speciation of horses, but some tiny text at the bottom explains that the math doesn't really add up. "Present changes are too small and too slow to explain these differences," it says, "suggesting God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly."

Enlarge / "Present changes are too small and too slow to explain these differences, suggesting God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly."

No evidence is offered for this position, which is textbook "God of the gaps" thinking in which God's miraculous power can be used to plug up the holes in an argument.

The speciation question revealed just how far Nye and Ham were talking past one another. Nye wanted evidence; Ham had his eyewitness account, which no evidence could alter. Near the end of the debate, one audience member had a question for both of them: what might change your mind?

Nye said that he could be convinced by fossil record evidence, by some compelling explanation of how we can see the light from stars that are millions of light years away, by an explanation of how radioactive decay rates might have differed in the past.

But not Ham. "No one's ever going to convince me that the word of God isn't true," he said.

That sets Ham apart from people like Sebastian Adams, who penned a short note on method at the beginning of his Synchronological Chart. While the best records he had indicated that Adam was the first human, Adams was open to new evidence.

"If any critic has historic information of any person and people that antedate those given, having all these specified dates," he wrote, "it will be most thankfully received and properly considered in subsequent editions of this work."

“Just nonsense"

Enlarge / A church a couple of miles up the road from the Creation Museum has a different take on Genesis.

A mile up the road from the Creation Museum sits the small Bullittsville Christian Church. On the day of the debate, its sign read, "The book of Genesis is about who, not how."

As with "historical science," texts in the Bible don't come with tags; they always require interpretation. The early church father Origen famously trashed those who believed a literal account of the Genesis creation story, writing in his De Principiis:

For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? And that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? And again, that one was a partaker of good and evil by masticating what was taken from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.

And Augustine of Hippo, the famous bishop of the early church, also expressed openness to an evolving world, a single moment of creation, and a non-literal reading of the Bible. His concern was that Christians, by using the Bible in ways that contradict human reason, would make themselves ridiculousand damage the power of their witness:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the Earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics...

Allegorical interpretations have a long history among Christians, though a historically recent push for the idea of Biblical inerrancy and literal readings has led many American evangelicals to embrace creationism. (Pew's 2013 survey found that among white evangelical Protestants in the US, 64 percent believed that "humans existed in present form since beginning"—the highest of any religious group.)

But even among evangelicals, people like televangelist Pat Robertson—yes, Pat Robertson—fear Ham is making Christians look bad.

"We have skeletons of dinosaurs that go back 65 million years,” Robertson said this week on his TV show, The 700 Club. "To say it all dates back to 6,000 years is just nonsense... Let's be real; let's not make a joke of ourselves."

A new Noah

Inside a glass case near the end of the Creation Museum's exhibits rests a picture of Ham's parents, along with a miniature Noah's Ark. Ham's father Mervyn built the model in the 1990s and hoped to present it to his son when Ham visited Australia in 1995. Instead, though, "Ken's dad passed into the presence of his Creator and Lord two weeks before Ken's visit." Next to the model is Mervyn Ham's Bible, opened to the first page of Genesis, a mass of notes and underlines.

For Ham, his life's work is also his family legacy. "Winning" or "losing" a debate with Nye doesn't matter; spreading the message does.

Enlarge / The Ark Construction Site at the Creation Museum.

Next up for Ham's message is a 500 foot long reproduction of Noah's Ark, to be built just off I-75, 45 minutes south of the Creation Museum at a cost of $25 million dollars (only $14 million has been raised so far; Slate recently charged that the project is being funded by junk bonds). Many millions are needed to flesh out the project's future phases, which include a replica Tower of Babel, a walled city, and a first-century village.

Ever grandiose, Ham says that his Ark Encounter will "become an attraction that will capture the world's attention." A flyer encouraging people to sponsor Ark pegs for $100 a pop or planks for $1,000 also notes that the Ark could be "one of the greatest evangelistic outreaches of our time."

But while this modern-day Noah waits to build his Ark, he still has the Creation Museum and a newly public platform to promote its ideas. The debate with Nye "has drawn countless believers and unbelievers alike to consider the Creation Museum’s teachings about the true history of the universe,"wrote an AIG staffer after the debate.

For mainstream scientists, it's a terrifying thought.

India’s Odd Relationship With Swiss Watchmaking

 

The watchmaking world might well be fixated on China these days, but it’s not the only emerging market with attractive growth prospects. Among the other new industrial giants of the world economy, India has the biggest claim to our interest, not only because her population of more than one billion adds up to a huge potential market, but also because of the peculiar relationship India has maintained with Swiss watchmaking since the late 19th century.

Exports to British colonials
Up to the middle of the 19th century, Europe and the United States were the traditional outlets for Swiss watchmakers, but the second half of the century saw a far-ranging diversification in markets. One of the causes was the appearance of American watch factories, like Waltham Watch and Elgin Watch, which made the United States the world’s most competitive market. Another factor was the technological revolution in communications and transport that multiplied global trading possibilities with the development of telegraph, steamships and railways. The orient could thus become the new outlet for Swiss watchmaking.

India was a new market that first commanded the attention of Swiss watchmakers between 1890 and 1914, thereafter expanding strongly into the 1920s. The value of Swiss horological exports to the Indian subcontinent rose from 658,000 francs in 1885 to 1.7 million in 1900 and reached beyond 21 million francs in 1920. Furthermore, finished watches were overwhelmingly responsible for this growth, representing 97.4% of watchmaking exports between 1885 and 1920. Swiss watchmakers refrained from setting up assembly plants in India as they did in Russia and Japan for example, nor was there a local watchmaking industry on the Indian subcontinent. It remained the exclusive hunting ground for Swiss-watch dealers.

Most of their watches were simple and cheap. Indeed, their average value declined from 22 francs in 1885 to 6.5 francs in 1915, before recovering to 17 francs in 1920. The trade was thus not just about luxury items for the wealthiest classes, but mainly watches for the middle classes that were emerging with the urbanisation and industrial development of India. The British colonial administration was an important consumer of Swiss watches. The railways and armed forces were also major clients, judging from the advertisements of Swiss companies active in India.

By the early 1920s, India had become a crucial market for Swiss watchmakers, taking an increasing share of the global exports of Swiss watches. In 1885 India accounted for only 1% of Swiss watch exports but this grew to 1.8% in 1900 and to 8.8% in the exceptional year of 1920, when the Indian market became nearly as big as the American market.

Watches for the people
Thereafter the export figures reveal a very stable Indian market in the interwar years of 1925 to 1940, when annual exports averaged 4.6 million francs worth of complete watches for the most part (95.4%). The half-a-million watches exported to the subcontinent each year represented more than 3% of total Swiss watch exports.

Nevertheless the structure of the market was transformed during the 1930s. In response to the world economic crisis, Swiss watchmakers brought new kinds of simplified and standardised watches on the market. In 1933 the West End Watch company, one of the biggest Swiss watch concerns in India since the end of the 19th century, launched the Secundus model both as a pocket-watch and as a wristwatch. The following year the company reintroduced its Sowar brand in a new low-cost wristwatch. They were aimed at the working classes and did much to make watches popular among India’s city dwellers.

Relocating to India?
When it became independent in 1947, India also broke away from the economic policies of the colonial era. In the 1950s and 60s, the state became a major player in the country’s industrial development. Import controls, followed by the second five-year plan of 1956-1961 revealed a state policy of promoting national industries while limiting foreign intervention in the domestic economy. For the watch industry, the government imposed quotas on watch imports through a system of licences for companies trading in India. These restrictions, which remained in force until the end of the 1990s, were meant to favour the development of a local watch industry.

The Swiss watchmaking establishment was well aware of the issues at stake but divided on how to respond: should it get involved by locating production in India to retain market share against foreign competitors? Or should it ban the practice in favour of exporting finished products? A Swiss watchmaking delegation was accordingly sent to India in 1958 to look into the possibilities of manufacturing locally. However, for the time being the Statut horloger that governed the Swiss watch cartel (see Watch AroundN°10) did not allow Swiss companies to invest directly abroad. A relaxation of the cartel’s restrictions in 1961 opened the possibility of a partial transfer of production to India. Thus half a dozen Swiss companies, including some that had been long present in the Indian market, hoped to set up local production units. In 1964, Tissot and Omega in the SSIH group, Favre-Leuba, Enicar, Degoumois, Benrus (an American firm with a branch in Switzerland) and Langendorf sent a joint petition to the federal authorities to be allowed to invest directly in India. However neither the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (Fédération Horlogère) nor the Swiss chamber of watchmaking managed to get industry consensus on the issue through ad-hoc committees. Some manufacturers put up stiff opposition to the transfer of production. In fact, until the end of the 1960s, no significant industrial venture involving Swiss watch firms succeeded in getting off the ground.

Abandoned to the competition
Meanwhile, the Swiss watch industry’s main competitors were on the warpath, investing in India and contributing to the birth of watchmaking in that part of the world at the start of the 1960s. Industrialists from the French watchmaking town of Besançon, for example, set up the Indo-French Time Industries company in Bombay with Indian partners, while the German firm, Kasper & Co. of Pforzheim, founded Asika Time Industries at Coonoor with local associates. Both assembled movements imported from France and Germany respectively. However, Japan’s Citizen Watch Co. became the leading player in India by setting up a joint venture in Bangalore with Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT), a state enterprise created in 1953 to make machine tools and precision instruments. The Japanese watch company, which had also been producing machine tools since the mid-1950s, sent some over to equip HMT’s watchmaking workshops. It then went on to supply movement blanks and parts until its Indian partner was ready to manufacture its own movements. The closest cooperation was in the training of technical staff. In 1961 Citizen invited 51 Indian engineers to spend a year studying at their factories. In June the following year a team of Citizen engineers was sent to India to help their returning Indian colleagues set up production. The Indian plant was complete by December 1962. During the 1970s HMT emerged as the leading Indian watch manufacturer. Even though Indian production consisted primarily of assembling parts imported mostly from Japan, it expanded strongly in the 1960s and 70s. From 1965 to 1980, domestic watch production soared from 208,000 units to 4.8 million. From the end of the 1980s, the Titan company joined in as driver of the Indian watch industry with its quartz watches and became HMT’s main challenger. In 1993, India’s output of watches reached nearly 30 million units with HMT claiming 47% of the market and Titan 37%.

The result of this policy was the stagnation of watchmaking exports to India, which did not have the freedom to expand. Exports of finished watches (93.8% of the watch trade with India in 1955) had continued and even increased significantly until 1955. But HMT’s watchmaking debut during the sixties triggered a drop in exports from 918,000 finished watches in 1955 to 30,000 in 1970 and just 12,000 in 1980. While watchmaking exports to India remained high, they consisted mainly of components for Indian companies. The share of complete watches in the horological exports to India likewise slumped from more than 90% in the 1950s to 46% in 1970 and 24% in 1980.

A free market at last
Economic liberalisation policies adopted from the end of the 1990s enabled Swiss watchmakers to return to the Indian market in strength. All import restrictions on Swiss watches were gradually removed, notably the import licences in 1998 as well as the lower price limit for imported watches – 35,000 rupees (about 1,000 US dollars) until 2000, then 4,000 rupees ($120) until 2002 when India lifted all trade restrictions on watches.

With trade liberalisation, exports to the subcontinent rose from 14 million francs in 1990 to 21.9 million in 2000 and to more than 77 million in 2008. Furthermore, the proportion of finished watches in the horological exports leaped from 24.3% in 1980 to 95.9% in 2000, also reflecting the changes that took place in the 1990s.

Despite this strong growth, India ranked only 26th among the Swiss watch industry’s markets in 2009. However it shares with a number of far-east countries the distinction of being among the fastest growing markets. The recent opening of single-brand boutiques in Bangalore and in India’s other urban centres (Omega, a pioneer, had five by 2010) is a sure sign that this market has potential.