Musings: Into India

New Delhi is a cacophony of sounds — especially horns — and color.

The horns honk continuously and seemingly without any effect, as cars, bicyclists, trucks, scooters and motorcycles jockey for position in a rapidly-moving stream of traffic that regularly oozes out of its allotted lanes.

But no diesel smoke or exhaust fumes hang heavy in the air, because much of the motor vehicle fleet has converted to compressed natural gas that the country produces itself.

The color is found in the bright clothing that women seem to favor, and in the flowers that are still blooming riotously, thanks to a cool, wet winter, in parks, college campuses, open spaces and countless trees. It's one of the world's few major metropolitan areas that has seen an increase in green space even as the city has grown.

In contrast to its lush greenery, New Delhi takes security seriously. The hotel has a round-the-clock guard and metal detector, and all bags and purses must be screened before they can be carried in. We also passed through a detector when we entered a side street biza
bizaar, though from its rough design, I wasn't sure it was too effective.

Other observations: there are far more men than women on the streets, though women and men can be found in roughly equal proportions at institutions of higher learning. And men and women alike dress modestly. Though the weather was as warm as a summer day in Hawaii, no one was wearing shorts or tank tops or mini skirts or skimpy little camisoles. I saw no bare shoulders or legs (save for the calves of a man sleeping on a sidewalk), no yoga pants, no bra straps, no hip huggers, no skin tight jeans.

But I did see a waxing crescent moon sidle up to Venus in the orange glow of the western sunset sky.

I also saw genetically engineered dahlias that were bigger and bolder than any I'd seen before, though they were already a few days past their prime, and rice plants that were being engineered to withstand drought and salinity, while also increasing yield and removing heavy metals from the soil.

The rice plants were growing in green houses at research facilities. The most promising strains were about to be field-tested in neighboring Bangladesh because India currently does not allow its scientists to conduct the crucial step that allows plants to move from a science experiment to a viable commercial crop.

That policy is purely political, and word is that it's about to be reversed. But in the meantime, scientists are pursing field trials in biotech-friendly Bangladesh, where farmers are already growing Bt cotton and brinjal (eggplant). Brinjal, a traditional Indian food staple, is typically sprayed with insecticides every other day to stave off the destructive effects of various burrowing bugs. Bt brinjal, on the other hand, doesn't require such spraying because a gene of Bacillus thurengiensis, a soil bacterium used in organic farm pest control, has been engineered into the plants to ward off insects.

I asked Ashwani Pareek, a plant scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, if he thought genetically engineered plants represented any danger. "No," he replied. "I work with them all the time, so I understand the science and know they are not harmful." 

"So why is there resistance to their cultivation?" I queried.

“I think it's just ignorance,” he replied. “People don't understand what we're doing, or how the process works.”

As he showed me some of his research in isolating an enzyme that a plant uses to kill an insect, similar to a venus fly trap, in order to obtain the nitrogen that it needs, it struck me that this is another method for understanding nature a little bit better, and that doesn't seem to me a bad thing.

And I couldn't help but recall Michael Pollan's book, "Botany of Desire," and wonder whether this was another way that plants were getting us to do their bidding and spread their genes.