Facial Hair and Radioactive Cats
Have you ever wondered how to transmit information accurately across 10,000 years?
Vanakkam,
If you have heard Salem Junction on Twitter Spaces, then you know what it’s about. If you haven’t, it’s random banter between Sidin Vadukut (Author of several lukewarm-selling books and the Oh Man Booker prize winner for Twitter humour) and Krish Ashok (author of Masala Lab and expert at explaining everything using the Maillard reaction), and features interconnected stories from history and their personal lives. If you are expecting a serious, erudite exposition of important matters, you will be in for a rude surprise. We elaborate on the absurd and occasionally revel in the sublime. It’s called Salem Junction because it’s a railway head in Tamil Nadu into which multiple lines arrive and depart in various directions, much like the stories we share.
Consider Rajaraja 1, the Chola emperor from the 10th century who conquered, in addition to all of South India, Sri Lanka, Lakshadweep, Maldives, and even a good chunk of Srivijaya (Sumatra today). He also built the Brihadeeswara temple. Ok, he funded its construction because we are reasonably sure he did not personally do the masonry work. He is also one of the lead characters in one of Tamil’s great 20th century works of fiction, Ponniyin Selvan, where he is referred to using his birth name, Arulmozhi Varman. What about him, you might wonder? His conquests? No. Economic policies? No. His contributions to Tamil culture? Well, partially. It is his facial hair, or its lack, depending on whether you see representations of Rajaraja 1 from before the 20th century or ones that came afterward.
Anyone who has seen Tamil movies will know that a moustache is de rigueur for the leading man. From the pencil-line of Sivaji Ganesan to the handlebar of Napoleon in Seevalapperi Pandi, facial hair has become a symbol of Tamil masculinity (and a near-certain indicator of the ownership of a Royal Enfield Bullet). So, it’s not surprising that most modern visual representations of Rajaraja 1 feature facial hair. He is after all the greatest Tamil emperor of all time and it is absolutely unthinkable that he looked like a 20-year-old Aamir Khan in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. Except, that is exactly what he looks like in the mural found in the Brihadeeswara temple. There is a complete and utter absence of facial indicators of Royal Enfield ownership.
Moving on from Arulmozhi Varman’s chocolate boy looks, we consider biological Geiger counters from the 1980s. When the United States government was grappling with the issue of where to store radioactive waste from all its nuclear power plants, they settled on Yucca Mountain in Nevada. And they asked themselves a rather interesting question - “How does one communicate with human beings living 10,000 years from now that they must not build habitations near Yucca Mountain?”. Signboards will erode. Languages may change. So, they posed the problem to linguists and semiotics experts (people specializing in how meaning is communicated via symbols), and one of the most astonishing solutions featured…radioactive black cats. The idea was to genetically modify black cats so that their fur would change colour in the presence of radioactivity, and then also write a catchy earworm that was expected to be communicated over 10,000 years through continuous cultural transmission. The lyrics of the song went
Don’t change color, kitty.
Keep your color, kitty.
Stay that midnight black.
The radiation that the change implies
can kill, and that’s a fact.
This reminds us of what is possibly one of TV’s most moving lines of dialogue. This segment from the West Wing dealing with Voyager’s mission to transmit the crux of human civilization to whatever extra-terrestrial civilization runs into it millions or billions of years from now:
Josh Lyman : We're the most dominant nation on earth. But too often the face of our economic superiority is a corporate imperialism, our technological dominance shown by Smart bombs and Predator drones. We could do something else. Something generous and uplifting for all humankind. We could send the first representatives from Earth, to walk on another planet. We could land people on Mars. Needs work.
Donna Moss : Needs something.
Josh Lyman : Yeah, that inspiration thing.
Josh Lyman : Voyager, in case it's ever encountered by extra-terrestrials, is carrying photos of life on Earth, greetings in 55 languages and a collection of music from Gregorian chants to Chuck Berry. Including "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" by '20s bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, whose stepmother blinded him when he was seven by throwing lye in is his eyes after his father had beat her for being with another man. He died, penniless, of pneumonia after sleeping bundled in wet newspapers in the ruins of his house that burned down. But his music just left the solar system.
Donna Moss : Okay, that got me.
We then move to the legendary Terracotta army of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. This astonishing work of funerary art from the 3rd century BCE features almost 8000 full-sized soldiers and of course, in keeping with the theme of this episode, consider their facial hair. It turns out that despite the well-worn stereotype about East Asian men and their difficulties with facial hair, almost every single one of those 8000 soldiers features one of these 7 types:
Arrow-like Handlebar Moustache
Plate-like Handlebar Moustache
Bushy Whisker
Waterdrop-like Moustache
Long Moustache
Upward Handlebar Moustache
Downward Handlebar Moustache
Some 10 of them do not feature facial hair and it is assumed that they were child soldiers.
And moving just across the Himalayas from Qin Shi Huang’s kingdom, we run into one Chandragupta Maurya roughly around the same time in Pataliputra (modern-day Patna) and the rather fascinating observations made by Megasthenes, a Greek traveler from what is today the Arghandab valley in Afghanistan, named after a river that is one of the more likely candidates for being the Rig Vedic Saraswathi river. He spent time in Pataliputra and was a conversational companion to one of the emperor’s wives, who happened to be the daughter of Seleucus Nicator, one of Alexander’s generals who was put in charge of a fair bit of territory in the North West of the subcontinent after his departure. Now, we don’t actually have the original version of his monumental Indika, since it was lost and we only have a translation of a translation, so it’s possible that much has been lost or distorted, but one utterly fascinating observation by Megasthenes about masculine fashion choices of Pataliputra circa 3rd century BCE stands out. The men apparently dyed their beards in various bright colours - purple, green, red, and yellow. Picture that.
On that note, please consider donating to the Mercy mission in Bengaluru. They are doing stellar work helping the city deal with the Covid-19 pandemic - arranging for oxygen, drugs, ambulances and cremations.
We will see you next week!
Sources
Book: Namit Arora’s “Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization”
Book: Command and Control by Eric Schlosser