Two firsts in Pakistan

This is special. It is not often in Pakistan that we get a chance to celebrate our diversity. But, we do have minorities, both in gender and in religion, who have been an integral part of this country and this land for hundreds of years, if not longer. Somehow the society does not provide enough chances for us to celebrate their successes and contributions to the society, but they continue to strive and make a difference. The picture below captures one such defining moment.

 

 

KARACHI - December 25: The Quaid’s mausoleum saw two firsts on Monday. A Sikh and six women were members of the guards’ contingent posted at the mausoleum’s gates on the occasion of the 130th birth anniversary of the Father of the Nation.—Dawn

25th December - just reflecting during travels.

It is the 25th of December. First and foremost, Merry Christmas to all my friends, near and far. Hope you are having a wondeful holiday!

This is an important winter for me for many reasons. This year, i.e. 2006, major religious celebrations of Christmas (Christianity), Hanukkah (Judaism) and Eid Al Adha (islam) are all falling very close to each other. How nice to be able to send wishes to friends from so many religions! That coupled with the celebration of the birth of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah (Dec 25), my mother’s b-day (Dec 31st), new years celebrations, and my wedding celebrations in Amman (Dec 2 and Karachi (Jan 4) make this a pretty busy year for me.

But in the midst of all this, I hope to also find some time to think and reflect. After all, I am away from work and there is less other intellectually motivating stuff happening around me to keep my mind occupied. I am thinking of a lot of things: my own personal business and career strategy in an increasingly globalized world, the Israel-Palestine conflict (read the new Jimmy Carter book on the Apartheid in Palestine), and the India-Pakistan relations.

It is the context of the last item in the list above that I viewed an online video that sent shiver down my spine. In 2002, a massacre took place in the province of Gujrat, India. Thousands of muslims were killed in retaliation for the murder of 58 Hindus, and hundreds of thousands were made refugees. Children were made orphans and women were left without husbands. Old and feeble fathers left their sons, and grand mothers were left to take care of children whose parents were brutally slaughtered. This massacre will always be remembered as a shameful moment in the history of the largest democracy of the world, and even more shameful for the muslim countries around the world who did absolutely nothing to interfere and somehow protect the lives of their fellow brethren. I have written about it before in an op-ed in the MIT Newspaper (read here).

Anyways, I really cannot say anything more about the event. This movie says it all. The movie, and my message, is not meant to incite further hatred or anger. It is supposed to teach all of us about the evil that can take residence within us, and how in the blindness that plagues us in anger, animosity, and hatred, we can turn into brutal savages. The movie is dedicated to the countless dead and those who survived. I dedicate it further to those who have since then stood up and fought the legal, social, and moral battles to bring justice to the sufferers.

Wind and Solar are Key Renewable Energy Sources for Pakistan and Middle East

I don’t believe Ethanol, cellulosic or otherwise, will play a major role in the new energy frontier for Pakistan or the Midde East, even though it will be produced in small quantities for off-setting some dpendence on fossil fuel (two regions of special personal interest to me). Part of it is because I do not really see ethanol as a renewable fuel, and partly because large scale conversion of food crop land to cash crop land has the potential of creating a serious disbalance in the agricultural economies. (A friend reminded me recently about the devastating impact on Vietnam when World Bankers decided a few years ago to support planting of coffee crops instead of food.)

But Solar, and Wind can play a major role in the new energy industry in these parts of the world. Not only is the energy souce renewable, but also abundantly available. The remaining technological barrier is the need for an increase in conversion efficincies so the economics can start to work in their favor. There are interesting technologies in the works: from high efficiency PV panels to low cost and flexible PV modules; and from efficient wind turbine designs to technologies of wind energy storage in order to improve capacity factors. Ofcourse I must also mention technologies that are utilizing solar concentrators and chemical catalysis to split water (and natural gas in closed cycles) to create fuel (Note: this year’s Euro 1 million EU Descartes Prize was shared by a colleague and friend in Greece, Athanasios Kostandopoulos, who is working on such a solar hydrogen project - Also, Fujishima and Honda, who discovered the phenomenon of solar water splitting - photocatalytic splitting - using TiO2 particles are up there for Nobel prize nominations!).

Chalo chalo, Dubai Chalo!

My brother recently moved to Dubai for work, and as I see this hilarious video from a TV skit from Pakistan in the 1980s, I am reminded of him.

For those who cannot understand Urdu in the skit, basically it is making fun of the people who left Pakistan en masse in the 70s and 80s to go to Dubai. It was then that the phrase “chalo chalo, Dubai chalo” (lets, go, lets go to Dubai) became commonsay. Anybody who could madeit to Dubai, and those who could not wondered what paradise their loved ones had migrated to. A large majority of those who moved were the less educated worker bees, exactly what Dubai needed at the time. In this video, the wife is singing to her villager husband to not forget to bring gifts back for everyone in the family when he returns. The words are set to a famous song and that adds to the fun of it.

I am also laughing as I watch this because even now, it is fairly common for relatives to still ask for all kinds of gifts when somebody returns from abroad. I have seen requests ranging from chocolates, and coffee to Joggers and cordless phones. Some of the more interesting ones have included baby formula (its really not that much beter here, women!), aspirin pills (do they really add impurities on purpose in medications in Pakistan), and T-shirts (like there were not enough Tshirts already in Pakistan with Nike, Chicago Bulls and NY Yankees logos on them). The funniest was when a young cousin was disappointed that I did not bring him a US made school bag. Now maybe you can understand why the 50lb weight limit on luggage in international flights is such a problem for some of us…..

Ali Azmat - another wonderful song

Those who know me also know of my liking of Junoon and its band members. I have written about Junoon before (see here and here), and I think there is plenty available online on them for those who wish to read more about them. Junoon is now mostly split between Salman Ahmad and Ali Azmat, both pursuing their solo careers.

I just watched another video by Ali Azmat and think it is very much worth sharing with colleagues and friends who occasionally visit this blog. It is for Na re Na. The song is OK, not the best by Ali, but the video certainly says much for his excitingly creative mind. I have known Ali for several years now, and I have followed his somewhat eccentric career (and showmanship) ever since his Jupiters days. This video provides a glimpse into the creative genious that has been hiding in Ali’s skin for a long time, and is only now trying to come out. I look forward to some wonderful work by him. He is a good friend, and I wish him well as he continues on.

p.s. yes, that is Junoon in the picture (in 2002) at a concert I organized at MIT. I recognize several old friends as well. Hey guys!

Re-Imagining Pakistan: Mr. Jinnah’s Pakistan Isn’t Working. What Can?

Re-Imagining Pakistan: Mr. Jinnah’s Pakistan Isn’t Working. What Can?

By Pervez Hoodbhoy

[Commencement lecture by Pervez Hoodbhoy at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, 9 December 2006.]

It is indeed a pleasure to see the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture emerge as a thriving educational institution. I remember my first visit here around 1994 when it had barely come into existence. The Nusserwanjee Building in Kharadar had just been pulled apart and transported brick-by-brick to this site. Over the years it was patiently put together again, and this innovative experiment has now born fruit. To those who will graduate today from the School, I extend my congratulations. You are ready to set sail into the big, wide world as artists, designers and architects. Many of you will doubtless become rich and famous, and I hope all of you do.

But, as a general fact, the success of individuals does not always lead to the betterment of the larger milieu in which they live and breathe. Improving the state of society is a far more difficult and complex matter, and it involves much more than just increasing the consumption of material goods and services. Societies change when people change their ways of thinking. It is on this that we shall reflect upon today.

To help us along, let’s imagine a film like “Jinnah”. You die and fly off to the arrival gate in heaven where an angel of the immigration department screens newcomers from Pakistan. Admission these days is even tougher than getting a Green Card to America. You have to show proofs of good deeds, argue your case, and fill out an admission form. One section of the form asks you to specify three attitudinal traits that you want fellow Pakistanis, presently on earth, to have. As part of divine fairness, all previous entries are electronically stored and publicly available and so you learn that Mr. Jinnah, as the first Pakistani, had answered – as you might guess – “Faith, Unity, Discipline”. This slogan was in all the books you had studied in school, and was emblazoned even on monuments and hillsides across the country. Since copying won’t get you anywhere in heaven, you obviously cannot repeat this.

What would your three choices be? As you consider your answer, I’ll tell you mine.

The First Stamps of Pakistan

This post is also at ATP

Somewhere around class 6 I realized that I needed to have a hobby?

Playing cricket on the streets or reading Ishtiaq Ahmad novels were not considered real ‘hobbies’ in my peer group. Popular hobbies were: stamp collecting, coin collecting, paper plane making, collecting dinkie cars, or drawing transformers in your school notebooks.

Well, I chose stamp collecting to be my hobby for two simple reasons: (a) an aunt gave me a stamp collecting book as a birthday present, and (b) I realized I could start a collection right away by simply going through letters mailed to my family over the past few years.

I was a hobbyist for a long time. I collected hundreds of stamps and even learnt how to trade them with friends and pen-pals. Some of my favorite stamps came from the United States and Nicaragua. Some of the most boring were from the Middle East. But anyways, I wanted to write today about the early stamps of Pakistan. I will follow up with a post on the early currency notes from Pakistan, which happened to be my brother’s hobby.

Pakistan started its journey on the 14th of August 1947. However, there was plenty of other things to worry about in managing a nascent independent country than its official stamps. So the first stamps of Pakistan were actually British Indian stamps overprinted with the word “Pakistan”. Shown here are the pictures of the 1 Ana and 6 Ana stamps. Would these qualify as Pakistan’s first stamps?

Splitting Water to Get Hydrogen!

THIS, I dare say, is the holy grail for those trying to extract energy from H2 without creating CO2 greenhouse gas. Fuel cells would thrive if a cheap, efficient and renewable source of H2 was to become possible. And what is THIS? By THIS I mean the science of splitting water into its components H2 and O2 at close to room temperature using free energy such as sunlight.

Lately I have seen several interesting technologies that are helping move the ball closer to that goal. I can’t highlight all of them here - some I am under a confidentiality agreement on - but things do look good, and I am hopeful that a fundamental (and major) breakthrough may be just around the corner, and the field may be ripe now for entrepreneurship and commercialization to take hold.

I will use this post to highlight one such discovery that was reported in the Journal of American Chemical Society. I thank Green Car Congress, and Mike Milliken, for highlighting it on their blog.

HR-SEM images of Fe2O3 films on SnO2:F-coated conducting glass. (A) Cross-section of 500 nm thick mesoporous Si-doped Fe2O3 on 400 nm thick compact SnO2:F. (B) Top view (45° tilted) of the Si-doped Fe2O3 film. (C) Top view (45° tilted) of an undoped Fe2O3 film. Click to enlarge.

Michael Grätzel and his colleagues have developed a device that sets a new benchmark for efficiency in splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using ordinary sunlight. The research will be published in the 13 December issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Previously, the best water photooxidation technology had an external quantum efficiency of about 37%. The new technology’s efficiency is 42%, which the researchers term “unprecedented.” The efficiency is due to an improved positive electrode and other innovations in the water-splitting device.

Grätzel and collaborators developed the Grätzel Cell, a dye-sensitized photoelectrochemical cell that uses photo-sensitization of wide-band-gap mesoporous oxide semiconductors. The work originally appeared in a paper in Nature in 1991.

As reported in the Nature article, the original overall light-to-electric energy conversion yield of a Grätzel cell was 7.1–7.9% in simulated solar light and 12% in diffuse daylight.

Iron oxide (-Fe₂O₃, or hematite) is an especially attractive photoanode due to its abundance, stability, and environmental compatibility, as well as suitable band gap and valence band edge position. Unfortunately, the reported efficiencies of water oxidation at illuminated hematite electrodes are notoriously low.

Grätzel and his team tackled that in this most recent work by producing Fe₂O₃ photoanodes via deposition of silicon-doped nanocrystalline hematite films by APCVD (atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition).

The result was a highly developed dendritic nanostructure of 500 nm thickness having a feature size of only 10-20 nm at the surface. The dendritic nanostructure minimizes the distance photogenerated holes have to diffuse to the Fe₂O₃/electrolyte interface in a film that is thick enough for strong light absorption.

The efficiency is further enhanced by deposition of a thin insulating SiO₂ layer below and a cobalt monolayer on top of the Fe₂O₃ film.

Under illumination in 1 M NaOH, water is oxidized at the Fe₂O₃ electrode with higher efficiency (IPCE [incident photon to current efficiencies] = 42% at 370 nm and 2.2 mA/cm² in AM 1.5 G sunlight of 1000 W/m² at 1.23 V_RHE) than at the best reported single crystalline Fe₂O₃ electrodes.

Resources:

· “New Benchmark for Water Photooxidation by Nanostructured -Fe₂O₃ Films”; Andreas Kay, Ilkay Cesar, and Michael Grätzel; J. Am. Chem. Soc., ASAP Article 10.1021/ja064380l S0002-7863(06)04380-0