Category: Miscellaneous

Major General R.N. Chibber

gautam Leave a comment

My grandfather passed away last night, at the age of 86. I only met him three times — the summer of 1998, when I spent my fifth birthday at his house in Jammu; a week or two in 2006, when I was 13; and last in 2018, when his illness had progressed to the point where we could no longer have conversations.

So I instead knew him mostly through stories. Stories of him growing up as a British colonial subject in what is now Pakistan, and as a 13-year-old being forced to flee to the Indian side of the Partition and leave everything behind; stories of the loyalty he earned from the soldiers under his command when he stood up to corruption in the Indian army that hurt them, even at the expense of his own career; stories of how, as a man with white skin, hazel eyes, and orange hair, taxi drivers mistook him for a foreigner and tried to overcharge him until he calmly told them in Punjabi he’d have them arrested if they did so; stories of his radical feminism by mid-20th century Indian standards, quashing all attempts to “marry off” my mother and my aunt as teenagers (as was common, even among his own family) and insisting they go to college and build careers of their own; stories of his poetry translations among the four languages he spoke.

The memories I do have are conversations about politics, world affairs, and the violence and instability that rocked his adopted home state of Jammu & Kashmir; visits to the mango grove in his backyard, where we picked them off the trees together; hearing his deep voice flit effortlessly between English, Hindi, and Punjabi; the sight of him standing outside the house waiting for me to arrive on my second visit, with “WELCOME GAUTAM” written in chalk on the driveway; the stacks and stacks of books in his personal library, from which, at his insistence, I took as many books as I wanted back with me to America.

His legacy lives on in my middle name and in the faintest of orange highlights that can be seen in my hair under just the right light; the stories will live on as an aspiration to meet his example of integrity, dignity, and quiet but firm resistance against any who would mistreat those under his care, be they his soldiers or his daughters. Rest in peace, Nana.

What a Death Row Inmate Taught Me in the Days before Black Lives Matter

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It’s not just the police. The entire justice system is broken.

I was 15 years old when I met Troy Davis, a Black death row inmate, in 2008. Troy was convicted of the 1989 killing of Mark MacPhail, a white off-duty police officer, in Savannah, Georgia. In the decades after his conviction, seven of the nine trial eyewitnesses—all of them Black—recanted their testimony. Their sworn affidavits painted a chilling picture of police coercion, harassment, and intimidation. In Savannah, which was once a purgatory for kidnapped Africans before they were sold into slavery, the case deepened simmering racial tensions. As Troy put it, “The police were rounding up Black men in Savannah, threatening them and demanding information on me.”

One trial witness, Darrell Collins, was only 16 years old when he was picked up by the police and interrogated with neither a lawyer nor his parents present. Collins initially denied seeing Troy as the shooter, but in his affidavit affirms, “After a couple of hours of the detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally broke down and told them what they wanted to hear…I am not proud for lying at Troy’s trial, but the police had me so messed up that I felt that’s all I could do or else I would go to jail”.

At a later hearing, Collins testified that the police threatened to charge him as an accessory to murder if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

Another witness, Jeffrey Sapp, claimed the police harassed him and “made it clear that the only way they would leave me alone is if I told them what they wanted to hear… I didn’t want to have any more problems with the cops, so I testified against Troy.”

A third eyewitness, Dorothy Farrell, claimed the police “gave me the impression that I should say that Troy Davis was the one who shot the officer… I felt like I was just following the rest of the witnesses. I also felt like I had to cooperate with the officer because of my being on parole.”

We’ve learned that eyewitness testimony can be tampered with and mishandled like any other evidence, and the police investigation tainted the evidence in Troy’s case by violating multiple protocols used to keep eyewitness testimony reliable. The investigation did not use double-blind photo lineups, a protocol in which neither the officer administering the lineup nor the eyewitness know which photo is of the suspect. Police gathered all witnesses together to recreate the scene, ensuring their memories would merge. And they never investigated a primary alternative suspect who had a gun that night, nor did they ever even interview Troy himself. It became clear that once the police had a viable suspect, facts, witnesses and testimonials could be manipulated to arouse suspicion and railroad a target—often a young Black man—whose peers could easily be coerced with threats.

During our in-person visits on death row, Troy shared his own harrowing initial interactions with police. While he awaited trial, officers would come by his cell, yelling, “N—-r, if I had caught you in the street, I’d have blown your brains out!” If they saw him smile, they’d scream, “Why you smiling, n—-r boy?” Their hatred toward a man still presumed innocent ran so deep that, according to Troy, he had to be moved out of solitary confinement after there were multiple attempts by the police to poison his food. They regularly engaged in small actions of cruelty to make his life more miserable. He was frequently strip-searched and forced awake after midnight to shower.

No police officer involved in the Troy Davis case ever faced any consequences.

The ACLU calls the prosecutor the most powerful person in the courtroom. Spencer Lawton, the prosecutor in Troy’s case, has a checkered history of misconduct when it comes to high-profile cases. The Georgia Supreme Court overturned his conviction of Jim Williams, famously featured in the bestselling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, after it found Lawton had suppressed evidence from the defense. At Troy’s 2010 evidentiary hearing ordered by the Supreme Court, I watched with disgust as Lawton feigned forgetfulness over basic details of the case, accusations that he had instructed witnesses to “stick to their testimony” after they told him their police statements were inaccurate. Most bizarrely, he even claimed to not recall the op-ed he had written about the case just 20 months before the hearing.

Lawton’s most egregious behavior includes another conviction overturned when DNA testing exonerated the defendant, Douglas Echols, of a rape and kidnapping conviction. When Georgia’s legislature considered a bill to compensate Echols for the years he unjustly spent behind bars, Lawton wrote a defamatory letter to the legislators, falsely claiming Echols was still under indictment for rape and kidnapping. The letter ultimately killed the bill. The 11th Circuit condemned Lawton’s action as libel but opined that the doctrine of “qualified immunity” – the same that protects police officers who murder unarmed civilians—inoculates Lawton against any consequences. African-Americans, such as Echols and Davis, are more likely to be wrongfully convicted, and 15 states, including Georgia, do not have laws requiring compensation for the wrongfully convicted.

After his conviction in 1991, Troy told me, the judge declared “Mr. Davis, you will be executed by 20,000 volts of electricity until you are dead, dead, dead!” When I visited Troy on death row, he had two decades of stories to tell me—stories of guards shoving disabled prisoners against the wall and viciously beating them, making sure to wrap them in towels first so bruises don’t appear; others of guards leaving cells unlocked so inmates could attack others in their sleep, forcing inmates to take hallucinogenic drugs under the guise of mental illness and then raping them.  It was the most terrifying manifestation of what permeated throughout the American criminal justice system: no matter how much psychological or physical violence they inflicted, no matter the severity of scars or the destructive wake of their cruelty, oppressors were unconditionally shielded from the consequences of their actions.

It was only with the pro bono assistance of a white-shoe law firm—a luxury few death row inmates will ever have—that Troy had any meaningful representation in the appeals process. After several appeals, his fate rested with the five-person Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. In a 3-2 vote, the Board voted against granting clemency. But the composition of the board raises questions.

Three of the five Board members included a District Attorney and officials from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Georgia Department of Corrections. The Board had no representation of public defenders, legal scholars, civil rights activists, or former judges—those who had witnessed and fought against courtroom injustices stemming from bias, discrimination, and corruption. Instead, a case highlighting wrongdoing by law enforcement would be decided by those who had climbed to the top of the law enforcement hierarchy.

In the end, despite jurors from the original trial openly doubting their guilty verdicts and despite calls for clemency from governmental bodies, Nobel Prize winners, a President, and over half a million petitioners, Troy Davis was executed on September 21, 2011. When I witnessed police dogpile and tase an unarmed black protester outside death row that night, it felt like we had come full circle. The chants then were the same as now—“No Justice, No Peace”. The signs from that night—“Not in My Name”, “Stop the Execution”, “Don’t Let the Blood Be on Your Hands”– could be recycled for today’s protests. Then, as now, the administration of justice protected those with power at the expense of the innocent.

Since Troy’s execution, 27 death row inmates – over half of them Black – have been exonerated – although exoneration and irrefutable evidence of innocence has not always been enough to clear their names. Five months and five days after Troy Davis was executed, Trayvon Martin was gunned down. The acquittal of his shooter sparked a movement and a refrain that is on the signs and lips of protesters all over the country today: Black Lives Matter. Troy spoke for them when he declared, shortly before his execution: “I’m not afraid of death—just more injustice in a broken system.”

If you’d like to learn more about my friendship with Troy Davis and the story of his case, see my book Remain Free. Thanks to Mitch Rice, Nishita Morris, Ajit Acharya, and Kavita Chhibber for reviewing drafts of this piece.

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Eight Years Ago

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Eight years ago today, Troy Davis was executed. And four years ago today, Remain Free was published.

I still remember the night of the execution: Wednesday, September 21, 2011. I was a freshman. I had just finished my very first college exam and left Myers Hall to hop in my little red Chevy, which sputtered and struggled to get me down to Death Row in Jackson, Georgia. I remember the thousands of protesters—and the dozens of counter protesters. It was a chaotic scene—laughing, screaming, crying, praying, acrimonious chants battling each other and harmonious chants sung in unison. I remember when the riot police arrived, the prickly sound of their tasers in action, the officers downing a man who crossed the line, the muscular arms hauling him off into the back of the van while helicopters whirred overhead.

I remember the sudden hush over the crowd at 7:00 PM, the moment of execution, the sun setting, the riot police in their gear staring impassively from across the divide.

I remember the jubilation when the news spread that the execution wasn’t happening tonight, that the Supreme Court had issued a one day stay of execution. I hopped in my sputtering red Chevy and drove back to Myers Hall, promising to come back the next day. I remember the horror when I learned that the execution had only been delayed for a few hours, and so all I could do was sit in the Myers lobby and watch Anderson Cooper on CNN countdown and then announce that Troy Davis had been executed. I remember the confusion, the fear, the numbness when the next day I opened Myers mailbox 382A and saw a letter from Troy, the last one I would ever receive.
—
Four years later, on September 21, 2015, Remain Free was published. There was no launch party, no fanfare. Instead, we drove to Savannah and visited Troy’s grave. He’s buried next to his mother and his sister—they all died in 2011. I wrote a note in the front cover of the book and placed it on his grave, along with a replica of the wristband I first got in Wright Square in Savannah in 2010, outside the federal courthouse where Troy’s evidentiary hearing was being held—the first time Troy had been back to his hometown since his conviction in 1991. It’s the same as the wristband I still wear today, blue with white letters illuminating two sentences:

I AM TROY DAVIS. INNOCENCE MATTERS.

Naveen and Troy

gautam 3 Comments

Today is the one year anniversary of my father’s sudden and unexpected death. It’s also the birthday of Troy Davis, my friend who was executed on death row in 2011 and whom I wrote Remain Free about. These were the two most influential men in my life, so I thought I’d share a few words on their relationship.

Both my father and I were moderate supporters of the death penalty in 2008, before we met Troy. So when we first heard about Troy’s case, we were both skeptical of this death row inmate’s claim of innocence—for me, it was because I had this naive, childlike faith in our justice system and institutions; for my father, I think there was a certain cynicism that that led him to distrust people by default, and who less trustworthy than a convicted cop killer?

Nonetheless, on September 23, 2008, the day Troy came within 90 minutes of execution, it was my father who was the first to tell me the execution had been stayed. My mother was adamant we accept Troy’s offer to visit him on death row six days later, but my father did not share her enthusiasm. By design, he had built a bubble in the suburbs for his kids—a safe, if a bit dull, life, far enough away from the city to be mostly free from the drugs, gangs, and violence that plagued Atlanta and the neighborhoods in Savannah where Troy grew up. I think he was afraid of us puncturing that bubble to enter the world that he had fought so hard to stay away from.

He came with me the first time I ever went to a Troy Davis rally, a few days before Troy faced another execution date in October 2008, I was transfixed. I was 15 years old, and captivated by these speakers talk about justice and freeing Troy. But he was unimpressed. He grew up in India, a bustling, chaotic democracy that was never bereft of rallies, protests, or the occasional bandh (general strikes and infrastructure shutdowns by political activists). For him, this was just another street corner rally.

I think his mind changed when he finally met Troy. Troy was so genuine and warm and kindthat nobody could meet him and not want to fight for him, to save him. I can’t remember exactly what they spoke about on those visits, but when I left for college, Troy, in his final letter, said, “I know he misses you more than you’d even imagine.” He was right, of course. He usually was about these sorts of things.

After two or three visits, my father stopped coming to see Troy on death row. Not because he didn’t care, but because “it is too depressing seeing Troy in there.” From his voice, I could tell how deeply death row disturbed him. This was not the safe life in the suburbs he had worked so hard to build for us.

But he would still wake up early in the mornings on those Saturdays we visited Troy, make the 90 minute plus drive to Jackson, Georgia, and wait across the street at the Wendy’s while we met with Troy for six hours. He would still drive me to rallies, and drop me off and pick me up at the train station when I interned at Amnesty International but couldn’t drive. Like me, he was no longer a supporter of the death penalty. And on September 21, 2011, the night Troy was executed, only five years and 19 days before his own death, he was there protesting with me outside death row, chanting “I Am Troy Davis” into the setting sun.

—

If you knew my father or would like to honor his memory, please make a donation to an education-related charity of your choice—education was a cause he cared deeply about. If you’re not sure where to donate, two organizations I like are Pratham and DonorsChoose.

If you knew Troy or would like to honor his memory, please make a donation to the Innocence Project, a non-profit that helps free wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and works to prevent wrongful convictions from happening in the first place.

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Keynote Address at the Cornell International Affairs Conference VI

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Keynote Address at the Cornell International Affairs Conference VI, November 5, 2015

Good evening. Before I begin, I’d like to thank the Cornell International Affairs Society for giving the opportunity to speak to you all tonight, and for organizing this wonderful conference.

Tonight, I want to tell you a story. It begins when I was 15 years old, on September 3, 2008, in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. I received a phone call from a friend. He was an intern for Amnesty International, a human rights organization I had never heard of. He told me about this man on death row in Georgia named Troy Davis. Troy Davis was convicted in 1991 for the 1989 murder of a police officer in Savanah, Georgia. There was no gun, no DNA evidence. Instead, his conviction rested primarily on nine eyewitness testimonies. In the years that followed, seven of the nine eyewitnesses recanted their testimonies. Many of them said the police coerced or intimidated them into testifying against Troy Davis. Despite all this evidence that he may be innocent, Davis was going to be executed in just 20 days.

At the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal. I was a supporter of the death penalty, as most other people in Georgia are. Troy Davis couldn’t possibly be innocent—we had a justice system that protected the innocent and dispensed fair, just punishments to the guilty. If he were innocent, he wouldn’t have lost appeal after appeal.

But there was one small detail that stood out to me, one tiny thing that, in hindsight, changed my life forever. Davis was scheduled to be executed on September 23, while the Supreme Court was due to review his case on September 29. Why? He had been on death row for nearly two decades. Why couldn’t Georgia wait six more days for the highest court in the land to review his case? A fair justice system wouldn’t do that.

On September 23, 90 minutes before the scheduled execution, the US Supreme Court intervened and prevented Troy Davis from being executed. The next day, I sent him a letter. At his invitation, I visited him on death row five days later.

Before I went there, my idea of death row was Alcatraz blended with the gulag. I imagined death row to be dark and dank, filled with angry muscular men, killers and rapists who were destroyers of lives and families. They seemed more beast than human. They were monsters.

Before, everyone in here was just a mugshot and a name written in fine newsprint. But now, as I saw them talking and smiling and laughing and crying, no different than me, it was inescapable that they were . . . human. These were bodies and souls that had known loss and love, cruelty and kindness, pain and joy—beings that had known life. One inmate held his four-year-old daughter up with tears of joy. A boy my age was clad in a shirt with the words “Free My Dad” on the back. Troy told me about the background of many of the other death row inmates—how they had suffered from neglect, child abuse, and drug addiction. He told me about a man who was abandoned as a child. His mother was addicted to drugs, his father was nowhere to be found, and he slept in a dog kennel for shelter. That began the downward spiral that resulted in him on death row.
He told me his own story, about growing up as a quiet kid struggling to fit in, about seeing his hometown get taken over by drugs and gangs in the 1980s. He saw his friends start doing drugs, dealing drugs, or both. He told me his version of what happened the night of the shooting. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t shoot the police officer; he didn’t even have a gun that night. But once somebody else said he did it, the police didn’t consider any alternative suspects and the media started a witch hunt and convicted him in the court of public opinion. He turned himself in, because he thought he could tell the police his side of the story and they’d let him go. When he turned himself in, they hurled racial slurs at the black man who had taken one of their own. They tried to poison his food in the county jail when he was awaiting trial.

He told me he no longer celebrates his birthday, or Christmas, or New Year’s. Why bother, he told me, when it’s just another day you can’t be with the people you love? He said every time he sees his family it’s like they instantly age 20 years, because in his dreams and memories he always sees them as they were in 1989, when he was first locked up. In those 20 years, his father had died, his sister had been diagnosed with cancer, and the rest had aged, lost muscle, gained wrinkles. Every time they visited, he relived all of that. He said the first thing he was going to do when he was a free man was go to his mother’s house and sleep at the foot of her bed so that, when she woke up, she’d know this wasn’t a dream and that her son was finally home.

We grew close. The prison only allowed me to visit him every few months, but in between visits we wrote letters and talked on the phone. He began calling me his “adopted nephew” and signed his letters “Uncle Troy.”

While all of this was going on, Troy’s story attracted a lot of international attention, in part because of the growing international trend against capital punishment. The United Nations began angling for restricted use and eventual abolition of the death penalty in the 1960s. This has culminated in a series of successive resolutions since 2007 (the year Troy Davis first faced execution) that have imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, with the long term goal of its abolition. Year after year, the United States stands in the minority of countries voting against those resolutions, along with countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has openly stated that the death penalty has no place in the 21st century. The UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights specifically spoke out against Troy Davis’s execution.

The European Union, where the death penalty has been abolished, wrote directly to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to speak out against Troy Davis’s execution. The European Parliament passed a resolution calling for Troy Davis’s sentence to be commuted and for Georgia to grant him a retrial. Two Nobel Peace Prize winners spoke out against his execution. So did the Pope. All of these international institutions and figures didn’t speak out about Troy Davis because this was just a specific case of an innocent man slipping through the cracks. Rather, it was because his case was one of the most egregious examples of a system that was in itself a human rights violation.

That got me thinking, how do these human rights violations occur? What makes them possible? They occur when we successfully dehumanize the victims. And by only presenting mugshots and rap sheets, our society has dehumanized those on death row. I saw whole human beings as nothing more than the worst mistake they had ever made, as mugshots and rap sheets. And it was only by going to death row and building a personal connection with the people there was I able to break through that.

I think I would’ve eventually opposed capital punishment if I hadn’t met Troy Davis. There are plenty of practical reasons to oppose it. But I wouldn’t be here talking to you tonight. I wouldn’t have signed petitions. I wouldn’t have organized meetings. I wouldn’t have joined rallies. I wouldn’t have become a human rights activist. I wouldn’t have written a book. I wouldn’t have built the personal connection with many other people that convinced them to turn against the death penalty. I wouldn’t have a life’s mission like I do today, which is to fulfill Troy’s dream of a nation without any more Troy Davises.

My challenge to you is to find your Troy Davis. Find that personal connection to your work, whatever it is. If you’re a writer, go and talk to the people who read what you write. If you’re a programmer, meet the people who use your code. If you’re a teacher, truly understand your students. If you’re a fashion designer, meet those who wear your clothes. Find the people who are directly impacted by what you do.

Having proximity to your work changes you. It makes you believe that what you’re doing truly makes a difference, because you’ve seen it with your own eyes. It makes you understand that what you do actually has a real impact on other people. It’s so easy for us to get caught in the ivory tower, to write memos and join committees and make resolutions, without actually doing the hands-on work needed to see the actual, on-the-ground impact of our work. It’s like having a super power, because when you have that inspiration, when you have that motivation, you will always be better and more effective than the people who don’t.

In the end, by a margin of one vote, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles let Troy Davis be executed. But he wasn’t afraid to die. I talked to him, and he said, “God hasn’t failed me. He just isn’t ready for me to come home yet. Look at all the people I’ve inspired, people like you. Millions of people around the world know my name, and know I’m not the only one. If I die, I don’t want my supporters to fade away in sorrow. I want them to get angry and fight for other Troy Davises out there, and fight for human rights all round the world.”

Go out and find your Troy Davis. Gain your superpower. It may not be easy, but in such cases I always remember what Troy told me whenever I doubted myself: The only person who can stop you from doing something is you.

Thank you.

(Photo courtesy of the Cornell International Affairs Society)

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Five Ideas for the Future

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Five Ideas for the Future

Lists predicting future innovations are pretty common these days. There are usually a few recurring themes, like artificial intelligence, personalized medicine, and the “Internet of Things.” This list is five ideas that could make a big change in the future but haven’t really been explored yet.

  1. The Sharing Economy of Goods

The sharing economy is an economic system where an individual’s (or group’s) excess resource is provided to another individual (or group) that needs that resource. My favorite example Is Airbnb, a company that helps people with excess rooms rent them out to travelers in search of accommodations.

I think there is a huge opportunity to create the sharing economy for goods. The first modern iteration of the sharing economy for goods was Craigslist, which allowed people to sell their unused stuff to local buyers. eBay provided a similar marketplace on a national scale, with auctions and electronic payments to automate pricing.

The main issue with the existing methods of peer-to-peer commerce are that they involve too much friction (contact seller, haggle over price, arrange meetup, travel to meetup location, transfer money and goods) and there is no trust (Craigslist repeatedly warns you of scams, selling on eBay is fraught with scams as well, Craigslist murderers, etc). However, Craigslist were combined with Amazonesque logistics, the volume of goods sold locally would explode.

The other big missing piece is rentals. In my neighborhood, every home has its own lawnmower, even though no lawnmower is ever used for more than two hours a week. There are many other goods, like lawnmowers, that sit idle most of the time*. Peer-to-peer rentals would create the true sharing economy of goods. Standards of living would go up as people would consume and waste less. Lower consumption is better for the environment by reducing trash volume and reducing resources needed to produce items.

The above is why I’m working on Circa, a startup that removes the logistical barriers of local buying and selling.

  1. Personalized Education

The advent of MOOCs and flipped classrooms in the last decade has begun changing the way we learn. I think we can take it one step further, by using machine learning to personalize education.

Imagine if, for every class, a large set of problems was created, covering all the topics in the class and of varying difficulty levels. Imagine that, using a mobile app, website, or even (shudder) desktop software, every student began completing those questions. Now imagine aggregating this over hundreds or thousands of students. The results is that, using machine learning, you could quickly determine with a high level of accuracy what a student’s individual strengths and weaknesses were, and only show them questions/content in their weak areas so they’re not wasting time reviewing what they already know.

It’s possible that you could build a platform for this, where any content could be “plugged-in” and individualized for each user, ensuring they learn the most material in the shortest amount of time. I actually started building this, but had to shelve it when other projects came up.

  1. The Personal API

I think the “Internet of Things” is overhyped, but one aspect that excites me is devices that monitor biometrics. I eventually see a future where data like heart rate, serum nutrient and hormone levels, sleep/REM cycles, and even stool composition are regularly collected and analyzed. This data could be collected and accessible through one API, which developers could build apps atop of. While there would certainly need to be thought to privacy and security, creating a personal API that could be accessed in a standardized way could lead to useful analysis, such as:

  • Relationships between nutrition and sleep
  • Relationships between when meals are eaten sleep
  • Relationships between nutrition and mood
  • Relationships between exercise and mood
  • Preemptively discoveries of allergies
  • Preemptively discoveries nutrition deficiencies

The above is by no means an exhaustive list—I could write a whole article about the beneficial analysis that could come out of a Personal API. With machine learning, all of this analysis could be personalized, while at the same time being anonymized and uploaded to the crowd, where it would be aggregated and provided to researchers.

  1. Unlimited Energy

I believe, within our lifetimes, most (if not all) of our energy needs will be met by solar energy (or we figure out how to harvest lighting). What’s most exciting is that lack of clean energy is the base case for many modern problems as “[a] lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to the energy problem.”

There could be some revolutionary breakthrough, but I think the most likely route is simply the continual, evolutionary increase in efficiency (both cost efficiency and energy efficiency) of photovoltatic cells and decrease in cost of solar power. Solar energy is already cheaper than conventional fossil fuels when accounting for negative externalities.

Since the sun’s useful energy is limited only by our ability to harness it, I think we’ll eventually reach a point where we’ll have virtually unlimited energy. What kind of future can we build where energy isn’t a concern? Perhaps we could eliminate water scarcity or alleviate the intensity of droughts via mass desalinization, which is currently too energy intensive to do in most places. Maybe there are incredible materials currently requiring too much energy to produce on a mass scale. It’s exciting to think about.

  1. Green Roofs

Green roofs are roofs covered with vegetation—essentially, mini-parks atop buildings. The American Planning Association notes parks have all sorts of benefits, such as reducing air pollution, reducing the heat island effect, decreasing stress levels, promoting exercise, reducing crime, increasing happiness, and making cities more aesthetically pleasing. If every or nearly every urban rooftop was a green roof—that is, every resident of a city was within a 100 second walk from a park or garden—it would revolutionize urban living.

I’ll admit I don’t know quite as much about this topic, and there are certainly quite a few practical considerations (weight bearing capabilities of rooftops, altitude limits, possibilities of storms knocking trees over, etc.). Wikipedia claims, “[These issues make] it unlikely for intensive green roofs to become widely implemented due to a lack of buildings that are able to support such a large amount of added weight as well as the added cost of reinforcing buildings to be able to support such weight.” But if we went in with the attitude that this is the default normal roof, rather than as a peculiar exception to normal roofs, I think we’d figure out a way to scale it, and I think it’d be shocking just how drastically improved all aspects of urban life would become with such a simple change.

 

* My neighborhood has about 250 houses, each with a yard. Currently, each house has its own lawnmower. During the summer, there are 12 suitable hours for mowing the lawn, or 84 hours a week. Assuming each homeowner wants to mow the lawn once per week, that means there is demand for 250 hours of lawn-mowing per week. Even if we only assume 50 percent efficiency in lawnmower allocation, that means six lawnmowers could service the entire neighborhood! Lawnmowers are about $200 (on the lower end, anyway), so the neighborhood would collectively save about $50,000 on lawnmowers.

Computer Science Should Be Two Separate Majors

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Computer Science Should Be Two Separate Majors

I college, I majored in Computer Science and Political Science. The poli sci kids could be divided into two camps—the people who wanted to go to law school (60 percent), and the people who wanted to get into politics (40 percent). Similarly, there was a divide in CS—the people who wanted to become software engineers (80 percent), and the people who wanted to become computer scientists in some form (20 percent). The aspiring computer scientists often double majored in CS and math.

Ultimately, both groups were left unsatisfied. The future software engineers found themselves unprepared for the job market, while the future computer scientists had to add on another major to get the theoretical, math-heavy content they enjoyed. The solution is to split CS into two majors—Computer Science and Software Engineering.

The new, purer CS major would focus on more theoretical topics—algorithm analysis, data structures, artificial intelligence, database design, automata, design of programming languages, artificial intelligence, cryptography, graph theory, etc. The newly created Software Engineering major would focus on the skills software engineers need on the job—version control, collaboration tools, environment configuration, test-driven development, basic web development, security practices, performance optimization, software development methodologies (waterfall, agile, etc.), creating and consuming APIs, etc.

There would naturally be some overlap, as every engineering discipline has a theoretical basis, and many software engineering skills (such as using version control) would prove very useful even in a CS research environment. Ultimately, the two would be distinct but related disciplines, in the similar fashion to two separate spoken languages that evolved from the same ancestor language.

While I believe this would lead to better outcomes for students, I can think of two counterarguments. The first is that such a separation is unnecessary. This argument contends that CS majors are doing fine as they are –salaries are high and the job market robust for a CS grad fresh out of college. Why fix what isn’t broken?

My counterargument is that it is broken. I have friends who studied CS but felt woefully unprepared for the software engineering jobs available, though internships alleviated this somewhat. Many of them were not only uninterested in some of the more theoretical topics they learned in college, but honestly didn’t need to know them for their jobs. On the flip side, I’ve known people hiring software engineers who’ve complained about having to spend six months training recent graduates. This is all anecdotal since there’s no hard data on any of this, but I think there is a broad consensus that there’s a wide gap between college CS and industry software engineering. I’ve heard some universities already have a software engineering major for exactly this reason.

The second argument is that such specialization goes against the philosophy of a college education, which places a broader emphasis on learning for its own sake, critical thinking and “learning how to learn”, and the broadening of the mind that occurs from a college education. College isn’t vocational school and creating a software engineering major, which is clearly designed to train people for a specific profession, pushes universities away from that philosophy.

The counterargument here is that STEM majors, by their inherent nature, tend to be much more specialized and narrow than traditional liberal arts majors. There is no fixed career path for an English major, while an Electrical Engineering major is expected to become an electrical engineer. The “college is for learning for its own sake” argument (which I saw on many college admissions pamphlets when I was applying to college) lost credibility once college became exorbitantly expensive. While I agree in principle with the tenets of broad, liberal education that concerns itself with the expansion of the mind rather than a specific vocational goal, it’s naïve in today’s abysmal job market. When students are burdened by tens or even hundreds of thousands of student debt, there must be a concrete return on that investment to justify it—and at that point, a job that pays the bills means much more than the lofty goals of a liberal education.

Two Years Ago

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This post was originally published on September 21, 2013 at www.remainfree.com.

Troy Davis was executed two years ago today.

I woke up shortly after sunrise. Today was gameday in Athens, Georgia, and as I hustled out of my apartment I saw families sprawled among dozens of red UGA tents, chatting excitedly and huddling around the television in anticipation of the big game. A few children were tossing a football back and forth, while a group of teenagers cackled as they played cornhole. There wasn’t time to join the festivities. I was already running late.

My mother flew in last night from Boston. Last year, it was just the two of us. This time we were joined by my father and my younger sister. It rained for the first hour of the drive, but occasional rays of sunshine poked through. As we passed Jackson, Georgia, I remembered the last time I was there, on this very day two years ago. The chants still resonated in my mind. I was transported back in time, an observer from the future watching as the hope and tragedy of that night unfolded.

We stopped at a rest area a little past the half way point.

It wasn’t too far from Dublin, Georgia. The last time I was there was in 2010, when the staff and interns of Amnesty International and I stopped there on our way to the historic Troy Davis evidentiary hearing. Today I was clad in the same blue “ I Am Troy Davis” t-shirt that I first wore in Savannah during the hearing. I was only sixteen years old then, a bit chubby and sporting long, shaggy hair. But what I saw in the courtroom furthered my conviction that Troy Davis should not be executed.

As we continued to drive the rain cleared, and the grayness gradually gave way to blue.

We drove past a few farms, but the cotton fields stood out the most. The other crops gave way to shoots of bright, billowy cotton, as if a snow storm had delicately placed bundles of flakes upon each plant.

As we neared the city, we crossed Clarence Thomas interchange. I thought back to the spring of 2012, when Justice Thomas and I sparred over the case. He had voted against giving Troy the evidentiary hearing. He held no doubts that justice had been done with Troy Davis’s execution. And yet, he was also the one who issued the reprieve on September 21, 2011, the one that delayed Troy’s execution for another four hours.

We passed Savannah’s city hall. The building was grand and elegant. But it wasn’t by the Savannah boardwalk or park-like squares that dotted downtown. It was out here, in the Savannah hinterlands, surrounded by overgrown forest and weeds and a half empty strip mall with signs for a Subway and World’s Most Famous Asian Cuisine.

Magnolia Memorial Gardens was exactly the way I remembered it last year. The front office was a small hut, large enough to fit maybe a dozen people.

Last year we rushed to arrive before the staff left, so they could show us where Troy’s grave was. This year, September 21 fell on a Saturday, and the whole place was deserted.

As I thought about the first time I walked here, when Troy was first buried, my mother had already walked far ahead to Troy’s grave.

The three graves were all there. Troy Davis.

Buried beneath him, his mother, Virginia Davis.

Buried beside them, Troy’s sister, Martina.

We placed a note and blue flowers (Troy’s favorite color) on the grave and remained there for a few minutes.

The only flowers on Martina’s grave were dead and wilted. The only ones on Troy and his mother’s grave were beginning to wilt and must have been there a few days.

My thoughts were similar to last year’s, so I won’t repeat them.

We began walking away from the graves. There was only one exit path.

As I walked, keys in hand, I noticed a police car nearby. It had been sitting there, watching us the whole time. As we left I heard the car start up and drive off into the distance.

We began the long drive back. Less than an hour into the drive, the rain began. It bombarded the car, angrily striking the windshield and blinding my view.The sun had set and the two lane interstate had no lights. One of the lanes was closed for construction so all of the cars were crammed into one narrow, bumpy lane. The car began hydroplaning, skidding and swerving every few seconds as I desperately tried to maintain control. Other drivers were tailgating me and each other, apparently oblivious to fact that one small mistake could send us all careening into each other at 70 miles per hour. I was sleep deprived and hungry, and my eyes were straining to see the road amid the whirlwind of mist, rain, and headlight glare. We had four hours left to drive, and the rain was not expected to let up anytime soon. It was too dangerous to pull over–a skidding car could slam into us on the shoulder.

This wasn’t just about me. My father sat beside me, advising me as I drove. My mother and younger sister were in the back seat, blissfully ignorant about how much danger we were in. My life and the lives of my family were in the hands of other people and other forces. No matter how carefully I drove, I wasn’t in full control. Was this how Troy and Martina and Virginia felt, as their lives were eaten away by imprisonment and cancer? I thought back to the cemetery, where the three Davises lay, their lives all snuffed out in 2011. Would the same fate befall my family in 2013? I couldn’t shake the thought.

There’s nothing like a cemetery to make you feel stupid. Yes, stupid. This week had been a rough week for me. At least, I thought it had been a rough week. I seriously injured my eye during a game of frisbee, caught a cold that caused me to miss several important classes and miss a week at the gym, and had a stressful situation with a close friend. But seeing so many graves dug for so many young people makes you realize how petty most of your worries really are. I felt stupid for being angry at such minor things.  At the risk of being cliche, l was reminded that life is short, and I wasn’t making the best use of the time that remained.

When Troy was alive, we would talk about how to live life. Troy noted just how unhappy people outside of prison were. He looked at me sadly and said, “People out there are living to die. I’m dying to live.”

When we made it home safely, I resolved to renew my commitment to live life to the fullest. Tell people how you feel. Help others. Be adventurous. Follow your dreams. Remain free.

FAQ About My Name

gautam 9 Comments

FAQ About My Name

I get a lot of questions about my name. Here’s a handy list of answers to soothe your inquisitive mind so you can finally sleep at night.

How is your name pronounced?

“Gotham,” like Gotham City from Batman.

Wow, that’s really cool!

That isn’t a question.

Is it really pronounced like that?

I often hear this question. Indians or people of Indian descent assume I’m “Americanizing” the pronunciation of my name because they’ve heard a different pronunciation. Non-Indians assume I’m not giving them the “authentic” pronunciation because it would be too difficult to pronounce.

There is actually a spectrum of valid pronunciations of my name, based on how strong an inflection you want to put on the ‘au’ sound. On one end is my pronunciation, “Gotham,” which pretty much eliminates the inflection. On the other end is “Gow-tham,” a pronunciation which is common in south India. There is a range of pronunciations in between those two, and they are all correct.

No, but is that really how it’s pronounced?

Yes.

Really?!

Yes.

You?!

Nice Simpsons reference. That was a good episode.

So did you choose that pronunciation because of its relation to Batman?

I didn’t choose anything. My parents are north Indian, and north Indians tend to put less of an inflection on the ‘au’ sound. I’ve been called “Gotham” since I was born. They did not realize that I would forever be associated with The Dark Knight when they named me.

Why isn’t your name spelled with an ‘h’?

Probably because of British imperialism. North Indians pronounce the English “th” with a really strong emphasis (I don’t know how to write it out, but try making the “th” sound and then do it much more forcefully). To avoid having people pronounce my name with the overpowered “th,” some North Indian transliterated my name from the Devanagari गौतम to the Roman script “Gautam.” They were probably transliterating the name in the first place since English became the lingua franca in India following British colonization. My mother’s name also has a ‘t’ that is pronounced ‘th’ for this reason.

Nonetheless, I have seen alternate spellings, such as “Gowtham.” Deepak Chopra’s son even changed the spelling of his name from my spelling to “Gotham” to end the mispronunciation.

Personally, I prefer my name’s spelling. Although it isn’t phonetic, I find the combination of letters aesthetically pleasing. I get a better vibe from “Gautam” than I do from “Gotham.”

Edit: Gautam Arya pointed out that the reason Gautam isn’t spelled with a ‘th’ is because  the Hindi letter त is a voiceless dental stop.

Are you sure it isn’t spelled ‘Guatam’?

Yes. Please stop sending me emails beginning with, “Dear Guatam,” especially when my correctly spelled first name is part of my email address. I’d also appreciate my elementary, middle, and high school reprinting all the certificates awarded to “Guatam Narula.” Please. Those certificates comfort me on those lonely nights at sea.

What are other misspellings/mispronunciations?

Guatham, Guaram, Garfield, Gus (Seriously. Gus.), Garfam, Gotham, Gautham, Guatham, Gaytam, Guavam, Gutam, Gautum, Gowtam, Gotem, Gautman, etc.

What nicknames emerged from your name?

Batman, Got ham?, Guantanamo Bay, Guantum Mechanics, Guatamala, Got’em, Siddhartha Guatananama, Gotham City, Goatman, and every single mispronunciation.

What does your name mean?

I was named after Siddharth Gautam (Siddhartha Gautama in the west), the founder of Buddhism. My parents almost named me Siddharth, but didn’t want me turning into “Sid.” The name means “The Enlightened One” or alternatively, “The Remover of Darkness.” In both cases the “light” symbolizes knowledge and the “darkness” symbolizes ignorance. Basically, I’m the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four, if his super power was educating others.

So does this mean you’re Buddhist?

Nope. My parents aren’t Buddhist either. Guess they just thought the dude was legit or something, man.

Is your name common in India?

Not super duper common, but common enough that I can’t get a decent Twitter username.

So there are other Gautam Narulas?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKie-vgUGdI

What was it like watching the Batman movies?

Weird. When Gordon said, “Gotham needs a hero.” I felt the need to tell him I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I didn’t appreciate Bane saying stuff like “I terrorize Gotham,” “We will destroy Gotham,” “We take Gotham from the corrupt!” etc. Seriously bro, what’d I ever do to you?

What are the best pickup lines related to your name?

“Hey baby, I may not be Batman but I can give you a tour of Gautam city.”

“Ay girl, you wanna see downtown Gautam?”

“Hey beautiful, what are you looking at him for? You’ve already Gautam man you need.”

Do any of those actually work?

I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.