‘People refused to have water which passed through the turbines of the hydroelectric plants of Bhakra Nangal projects, thinking the turbine blades had taken away the “properties” of water,’ my Geography teacher quipped in his ultra Malayali accent . We all laughed, made more fun of the sardars in the class, and proceeded to hear his next take on justifying Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda. ‘The Indians were selling Bata shoes , charging in Ugandan shillings the equivalent of Rs. 55.95 for the left foot, and ditto for the right from the poor Ugandans!’ he delivered in his nasal twang to the class of ‘79.
But while the Sardars not only got over their scepticism of turbine treated water and even took to relishing lassi churned from the blades of washing machines, the Americans, or rather 51% of them, even today think that stormy weather “affects” Cloud Computing , though usually remaining “ foggy” about what Cloud really is! This is as per a survey conducted by Wakefield Research in 2012. The world’s most preferred educational destination is a country where 11% of the population thinks HTML is a sexually transmitted disease, 42% regard Motherboard the deck of a cruise ship, 27% thought gigabyte is a South American insect while 12% are of the belief that USB is an acronym for a country in Europe!
This set me thinking. What is really going on in the name of surveys and research? For me , research and surveys were usually shackled with matters very serious, not for something as flippant as say who amongst siblings would tend to be a better driver and who a criminal.
Scientists at Vrije University , Amsterdam found the eldest with higher IQ , (probably due to the attention parents lavish on the first born), dominant, religious and neurotic - but at the end of the spectrum, the youngest , who despite usually being the dullest, would be the most favoured. The researchers are not exhausted by the eldest and the youngest, there is something for the second as well. The second born have a number of fantastic qualities - diplomatic, outgoing, natural mediators , competitive , and social in addition to being rebellious, less religious and impulsive. A research in progress being conducted by the National Bureau of Economic research has already indicate that second born are more likely to become criminals!
The studies are usually limited to American families of single , two or three children or mixed ( the steps after multiple divorces) but still a small one digit number. Not much study has been done about the eleventh or the child who suddenly ran to greet his Afghan warlord father only to make him jump with a scare of fidayeen attack, not realizing that it was actually his seventeenth child .
While such surveys and researches do promote arguments and banter at the dining table, they don't do any further damage. But sometimes, the researches are commerce driven, sometime centre around peer rivalry. When British scientist Yudkin in his book Pure, White and Deadly sounded the alarm on sugar way back in 1972, a battery of scientists led by one a scientist in Minnesota Ancel Keys and his allies in most influential bodies in American healthcare as well as the Sugar Lobbyists like British Sugar Bureau and the World Sugar Research Organization debunked Yudkin’s work as “emotional assertions”, “ science fiction”, sold the idea of diet- heart hypothesis, basically painting cholesterol and saturated fats as public enemy no 1.
Internal sugar industry documents,recently discovered by researcher in University of California, San Francisco and published in JAMA Internal Medicine suggest that many of the dietary recommendations against saturated fat were considerably hewed by the sugar industry which derailed discussion on sugar for five decades and even paid three Harvard scientists in 1967 to publish a review on research on sugar, fat and heart disease.
Perfidy was further alleged by Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at Council of Europe, against pharma firms whom he accused of influencing scientists and official agencies , responsible for public health standards, in declaring what was a minor flu( the bird flu) of the H1NI virus as a pandemic , ‘clearly one of the medical scandals of the century’ when governments were forced to stockpile billions of dollars of vaccine.
The chaotic findings in medical researches are quite bugging. I am at my wit’s ends to decide once and for all whether or not to eat the yolk of the egg and my wife to consider my intake of red wine as safe or not. I am unsure as to when is the best time to have a banana - morning or before sleep, and whether to cover myself in blanket and bleed the fever or avoid it altogether when running temperature. Confusion reigns not only on what we eat, but now also on what we release, how we interact with the opposite sex and with obese people.
Yes, research scholars at western university like Exeter’s found medicinal qualities in hydrogen sulphide, exploiting it to make a compound called AP39, administered to the mitochondria ( the energy powerhouse of our cells) as assisting treatment of dementia, diabetes, arthritis , heart failure and ageing. So now anal egress of pungent intestinal gas would no more be considered embarrassing- it seems such a shame that the late Indian Prime Minister was ridiculed for his shivambu.
Researchers from Radboud University of Nijmegen have confirmed what every every Bihari emigre to Delhi University used to think about someone who would stray from the herd and start interacting with “chicks’ . Yes, interacting with women make men stupid, the researchers conclude. And if that was not enough, Spanish researchers from the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid found that men who participate more in housework done typically done by report like cooking, cleaning and shopping report having sex less frequently than those who participate more in traditionally masculine tasks- auto maintenance, paying bills, etc!
I always used to think that flu, yawning, coughing and piddling were contagious, but now in a paper published in New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 researchers have concluded that obesity can spread like flu- their findings suggest that when people become obese, the risk of their closest friends becoming obese over the next 2 to 4 years increases by 171%.
And if this is not enough, the modern research papers can have fairly exciting , wacky, titles -
Wax on , wax off: Pubic hair grooming and potential complications;
Nifty Ways to Leave Your Lover: The Tactics People Use to Entice and Disguise the Process of Human Mate Poaching;
Carbon Monoxide: To Boldly Go Where NO Has gone Before;Ashes to Ashes:
Thermal Contact Burns in Children Caused by Recreational Fires;
A Lucky Catch:Fishhook Injury of the Tongue;
”Here’s Egg in your Eye”: A Prospective Study of Blunt Ocular Trauma Resulting From Thrown Eggs;
Hung Jury: Testimonies of Genital Surgery by Transexual Men
Of course, you all must have heard of the Ig Nobel prizes, awarded for scientific research which “make you laugh at first and think later” every year, sponsored by science Humour magazine Annals of Improbable research, the Harvard- Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard- Radcliffe Society of Physics Students. Prizes have been awarded for Digital Rectal Massage for Termination of Intractable Hiccups, Pressures produced when Penguins Pooh,Extraction of vanilla from Cow Dung, Effect of Country Music on Suicide, whether Coca Cola is an effective spermicide and for such other banalities.
On 24/9/2017, the Ig Nobel awards, awarded prizes to a group of four scientists for their discovery of insects with genitalia that reverse the traditional sex roles as well as for a treatise On the Rheology of Cats which argues that cats can technically be regarded as simultaneously solid or liquid due to their uncanny ability to adopt shape the shape of their container.
And the prizes for Ig Nobel at $10 trillion cash prize is way above the Nobel Prize of $1 million. There is this small difference , though- yes, of the currency. Unlike the US dollars for the Nobel, the Ig Nobel prize recipients receive in trash Zimbabwean dollars !
