gibreel ferishta's Profile

Everything is a consequential camera grab or a sound byte, existing in pure, isolated splendour, with no ‘before’ or ‘after’, no history or location or context. Cultural news on our TV screens becomes an inevitable orphan, with no parentage or origins. TV has become incapable now of honouring our artists. On the contrary, it only generates anger by the sheer capriciousness of the broadcast duration it assigns different artists. Canned footage of Michael Jackson, picked up from international hawkers, is endlessly relayed. But a Pattammal or a Gangubai moves from a scroll to a visual and back to the scroll in double quick time. Blink and you can miss it. The medium, rather than informing its vast viewership about the historic significance of these artistic luminaries, in fact, ends up serially disinforming.

where cinema lies in these engagements between cultures, and why.

that particular (and wondrous) moment of capitalist modernity when technology turned back on itself, declaring itself capable not only of transforming the world physically but of showing the transformation, and to consider what that stretched and elongated 'moment' has come to mean right through the tumultuous history of twentieth-century India.

As the cinema saw a near 30 per cent rise in theatre audiences through 1994-95, a Times of India report datelined 25 November 1995 said that among the recent Hollywood films finding no release outlets in Bombay were The Mask, Richie Rich, Waterworld, Forrest Gump and Apollo 13, while Hindi-dubbed versions of Cliffhanger, Street Fighter and Braveheart - distributed with considerable publicity - had "failed to even recover the cost of theatre rental". All of the nation was going to see Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (1994), while Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), produced by Yash Chopra, was grossing Rs11.9 lakh (£26,000) per week at the New Excelsior, Bombay, the highest gross in Indian film history.

growing corporatisation of capital investment in the wake of the television boom can possibly still sit alongside modes of making and of seeing the moving image that film theorists usually tell us had both disappeared sometime in the early silent era. Ex-movie star Jayalalitha, despotic Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, was unceremoniously booted out of power in May this year, at least in part because Rajnikant, the biggest star in Tamil Nadu today, campaigned for the opposition DMK-Tamil Manila Congress combine. This clash of titans has been the dominant narrative of television in Tamil Nadu since early 1995, where the DMK-controlled SUN-TV channel regularly battles it out with Jayalalitha's own JJ-TV network

when in fact it has survived not just as an Indian filmic convention but as a significant (and at times literally triumphant) element of state legislation in Tamil Nadu

The environment, then, is not a stamping machine that pounds us into a shape but a cafeteria of options from which our genes and our histories incline us to choose.

It’s a scaled-up version of the Tay-Sachs test that Ashkenazi Jews have undergone for decades

It’s thrilling to find yourself so tangibly connected to two millenniums of history

I found it just as thrilling to zoom outward in the diagrams of my genetic lineage and see my place in a family tree that embraces all of humanity.

scientifically responsible.

Assessing risks from genomic data is not like using a pregnancy-test kit with its bright blue line. It’s more like writing a term paper on a topic with a huge and chaotic research literature. You are whipsawed by contradictory studies with different sample sizes, ages, sexes, ethnicities, selection criteria and levels of statistical significance

I was using my knowledge of myself to make sense of the genetic readout, not the other way around

novelty-seeking gene, for example, has been associated with a cluster of traits that includes impulsivity. But I don’t think I’m particularly impulsive, so I interpret the gene as the cause of my openness to experience. But then it may be like that baldness gene, and say nothing about me at all.

Call it Geno’s Paradox

If that’s the best we can do for height, which can be assessed with a tape measure, what can we expect for more elusive traits like intelligence or personality?

As sequencing technology improves, more of our genomic variations will come into view. But determining what those variants mean is another matter.

Biologists discover the genetic pathways that build an organ by spotting genes that correlate with different forms of it and then seeing what they do.

. A result would be an equilibrium with a certain proportion of tinkers and a certain proportion of tailors. Biologists call this process balancing selection: two designs for an organism are equally fit, but in different physical or social environments, including the environments that consist of other members of the species. Often the choice between versions of such a trait is governed by a single gene, or a few adjacent genes that are inherited together. If instead the trait were controlled by many genes, then during sexual reproduction those genes would get all mixed up with the genes from the other parent, who might have the alternative version of the trait. Over several generations the genes for the two designs would be thoroughly scrambled, and the species would be homogenized.

But something strange happens when you take a number representing the proportion of people in a sample and apply it to a single individual. The first use of the number is perfectly respectable as an input into a policy that will optimize the costs and benefits of treating a large similar group in a particular way. But the second use of the number is just plain weird. Anyone who knows me can confirm that I’m not 80 percent bald, or even 80 percent likely to be bald; I’m 100 percent likely not to be bald. The most charitable interpretation of the number when applied to me is, “If you knew nothing else about me, your subjective confidence that I am bald, on a scale of 0 to 10, should be 8.” But that is a statement about your mental state, not my physical one. If you learned more clues about me (like seeing photographs of my father and grandfathers), that number would change, while not a hair on my head would be different. Some mathematicians say that “the probability of a single event” is a meaningless concept.

Even when the effect of some gene is indubitable, the sheer complexity of the self will mean that it will not serve as an oracle on what the person will do

So why hasn’t it stopped me from enjoying those drinks? Presumably it’s because adults get a sophisticated pleasure from administering controlled doses of aversive stimuli to themselves.

The self is a byzantine bureaucracy, and no gene can push the buttons of behavior by itself.

Many of the dystopian fears raised by personal genomics are simply out of touch with the complex and probabilistic nature of genes. Forget about the hyperparents who want to implant math genes in their unborn children, the “Gattaca” corporations that scan people’s DNA to assign them to castes, the employers or suitors who hack into your genome to find out what kind of worker or spouse you’d make. Let them try; they’d be wasting their time.

It’s our essentialist mind-set that makes the cheek swab feel as if it is somehow a deeper, truer, more authentic test of the child’s ability

The fallacy is not in thinking that the entire genome matters, but in thinking that an individual gene will matter, at least in a way that is large and intelligible enough for us to care about.