Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann-Reviews

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann,

Translated by Carol Brown Janeway

Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was an indefatigable naturalist and geographer, the first to describe South and Central America scientifically. Carl Gauss (1777-1855) was a mathematician and physicist of genius whose work in number theory, differential geometry and magnetism shaped those fields and many others to this day. Out of these dry bones Daniel Kehlmann(Pic) has constructed a magnificent novel, which is already a bestseller in his native Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

Both Humboldt and Gauss were concerned with the measurement of the world - with the displacement between one part of space and another and the relation of that gap to temporal intervals and theoretical absolutes. Humboldt constantly took readings during his vast journey - the height of every mountain, the line of the equator, the exact number of lice on the head of a servant - while Gauss conceived space as a mathematical reality in which even lines were merely an abstraction; yet his space was, in its way, as full of life as Humboldt's.

Given that its theme is displacement, it is appropriate that the occasion of the novel is a journey. In September 1828, at von Humboldt's instigation, Gauss left his home town of Göttingen to attend the German Scientific Congress in Berlin. Although he meets von Humboldt by the end of the first chapter, it will take the whole book for there to be a meeting of minds between these two giants of the German intellect, with Kehlmann boxing and coxing between the two chapter by chapter.

Their personalities, deftly brought to life with incisive strokes, are not quite what you expect. Although brought up to greatness - largely in competition with his philologist-diplomat brother - the patrician Humboldt is free of pride, forgiving of those less gifted than himself. By contrast Gauss - a child prodigy born in poverty - is overbearing and intolerant. Humboldt's taste for boys hardly emerges; he's the opposite of the licentious courtier, whereas Gauss ruts like a farm animal. There is nonetheless something endearing about the conjunction in Gauss of high theory and low sensuality, as exemplified by his Shandyesque pre-coital leaping up on his wedding night in order to write down a proof.

One of the products of Gauss's unions is Eugen, his poor son who accompanies him on the trip to Berlin, mainly serving as a target for jibes from his father about his stupidity and disappointing inadequacy. Very soon on their journey another of the book's major themes is picked up - the relationship between mathematical and scientific advances and the great coming wave of political revolt that would sweep over Europe in 1848: "Viewed from up close, one could detect the infinite fineness of the web of causality behind every event. Step back and the larger patterns appeared: Freedom and Chance were a question of distance, a point of view. Did he [Eugen] understand?"

After an ironic aside about novels, ("the perfect way to capture the most fleeting essence of the present for the future") and historical novels in particular ("a foolish undertaking for an author, as was becoming the fashion these days, to choose some already distant past as his setting"), we plunge into Humboldt's early life and adventures abroad. He intends, as he tells Goethe and Schiller, to explore the New World. Very soon he is correcting a ship captain's navigation in the nicest possible way, then hauling his Gaussian sidekick Bonpland off a naked brown woman in Tenerife.

Bonpland provides a foil for Humboldt's otherworldliness during subsequent landfalls, always looking for the next shag while his master measures relative dampness and scratches moss off walls. Even though it is Humboldt who is investigating the real, it seems as though the very act of measurement is seducing him away from it, while Bonpland has no such illusions.

Gauss himself has no sidekicks, unless they be numbers, which far from seducing him away from reality bring it closer, making it "clearer and more meaningful in a way it had never been before". His work as a land surveyor, sticking geodetic instruments into the ground to measure relative distances, seems like a distraction from number theory, but it will lead him to one of his greatest discoveries: that contrary to Euclid, parallel lines do meet. And that's not the end of it: space itself is "folded, bent, and extremely strange".

Alas Kant, the only person who might not think this idea mad, does not get it and Johanna, to whom Gauss has proposed, will not have him. He resolves to take curare - by mouth, which, as Humboldt will later tell him, has only a dizzying rather than a fatal effect. Gauss experiences a personal displacement, losing his own "I" as a messenger comes to tell him that Johanna will accept after all: "A knock at the door. A voice, vaguely like his own, called. Come in!" Gauss's dizzy spell is paralleled by Humboldt's encounter with electric eels on the Orinoco (the shock "seemed more like something that belonged to the outside world than to one's own body"). From thence on in the novel the parallel lines of these two life narratives come increasingly close, bringing us back towards the meeting in Berlin, where Eugen finds himself arrested by the Prussian police, after stumbling into a political meeting.

Along the way Napoleon has invaded Germany and been deposed, and Gauss has hardly noticed. Anyway, says Johanna, about conflict she already knows what he's going to say: "Looked at from the future, both sides would cancel each other out and before long nobody would be getting excited about the things people were dying for today." But, she adds, "What difference did that make? Cozying up to the future was a form of cowardice."

Suddenly the time-bending as well as space-bending genius of Kehlmann's construction is laid bare: we might not be able to get that excited nowadays about the Napoleonic wars - during which this novel is set - but reading Johanna's observation about cozying up makes us think about what people in the future may one day think about a present conflict, such as Iraq.

Kehlmann has the contemporary novelist's fascination with territorial politics and the poetics of space. This reassessment of the geographical perspectives and spatial assumptions in literature is in evidence everywhere, from the topomania of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd to Zadie Smith's remapping of Forster's England on America in On Beauty and Jim Crace's reversal of westward migration in The Pesthouse. Measuring the World's power is all the more acute because it harnesses to this spatial turn the sense of history in process which is key to the best historical novels. For readers in Europe today the irony of the ending, which sees Eugen heading westwards to an America that's still an icon of liberty, is no less part of the process. Yet any holder of that point of view should beware, lest they too find themselves translated to another time or place, somewhere with different values. Good novels can be perspective machines like that.

The Ancient Secrets of Plastic Surgery

Nose jobs and other forms of plastic surgery are nothing new – people have been performing them for thousands of years.

With no anaesthesia except opium, and using pieces of straw for nostrils, Indian medicine men were carrying out nose jobs in ancient times. The demand came mostly from men mutilated by war or punishment.

Walking down the dusty streets of 18th-century Mysore, India, a British officer was startled by a local merchant with a scarred forehead and misshapen nose. Intrigued, he asked about the man’s appearance, and learned that he had been found guilty of adultery and had had his nose cut off as punishment. A vaidya – a Hindu holy man – had fashioned him a replacement using the man’s own skin. This chance meeting introduced the notion of plastic surgery to America and Europe.

Reconstructive surgery had been practised in India for more than 2000 years, but it was a medical feat unknown in the West. When an account of a grafting operation was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine of London in October 1794, it attracted much interest.

It has long been accepted that ancient civilisations possessed the ability to carry out basic surgical operations. An ancient Egyptian manuscript known as the ‘Edwin Smith Papyrus’ dating from about 3000 BC contains advice on how to treat fractured noses and jaws, and directions on stitching and cauterising (sealing wounds by burning). Skeletons excavated from a craftsmen’s village near the Valley of the Kings show that when these labourers sustained fractures their bones could be reset and splinted. But medical historians are still surprised by the discovery that plastic surgery involving extensive reconstruction was carried out centuries before the invention of anaesthesia.

The Tragic Obsessions of a Tycoon

The Tragic Obsessions of a Tycoon

Legendary aviator and movie mogul Howard Hughes could afford anything he wanted. Yet he spent the last quarter of his life as a recluse, addicted to drugs and teetering on the brink of insanity.

Born on December 24, 1905, in Houston, Texas, Howard Hughes learned from an early age that money talks. His millionaire father owned the Hughes Tool company, which manufactured equipment for the oil industry and he had a comfortable childhood.

Yet Hughes never graduated from high school and was only able to attend classes at the California Institute of Technology because his father gave a generous endowment to the Institute. Hughes returned to Texas and enrolled at the Rice Institute in Houston, but when he was 18 his father died – and he left without his degree.

His father’s will decreed that Hughes was to take over the Hughes Tool Company at the age of 21. But after having himself declared to be of legal majority, Hughes appointed former racing driver Noah Dietrich as the company’s head of finance. It was a stroke of genius; over the next few years, Dietrich was instrumental in driving the company’s prosperity.

Movies and women

Besotted by the burgeoning movie industry, in 1925 Hughes went to Hollywood. He produced three films, then turned to writing and directing. In his first film, Hell’s Angels, the largest private airforce in the world was used to re-create aerial dogfights from the First World War.

Two of his later films tested the limits of public morality. Scarface (1932) was censored because of its violence and Hughes had to sue to allow its release. The Outlaw (1941) was controversial for its sexually explicit advertising and content, featuring a sensational décolletage worn by its star Jane Russell. Hughes had used his engineering expertise to create the half-cup bra modelled by Russell.

In 1948 Hughes took over the RKO studio. During the McCarthy era, as Hollywood was investigated for its supposedly pro-communist leanings, he was staunchly anti-communist. The studio was closed for six months while the politics of his employees were investigated – and completed pictures were re-shot if Hughes felt that their anti-communist politics weren’t sufficiently clear.

Hughes’s affairs with women were legendary. Although married to Ella Rice, a Houston socialite, in 1925, from 1928 he was linked to a string of movie stars: Jean Harlow, Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Terry Moore, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and Janet Leigh. There were also rumours of gay liaisons with a number of actors. He divorced Rice in 1929. In 1957, he married actress Jean Peters, but they divorced in 1970.

Round the world in record time

Towards the end of the 1920s, Hughes acquired a fleet of aircraft. In 1932 he formed the Hughes Aircraft division of the Hughes Tool Company. The firm went on to pioneer many innovations in aerospace technology.

Hughes had acquired his pilot’s licence during the filming of Hell’s Angels. From then on, the most exhilarating hours of his life were spent in the air.

A childhood illness had left him with tinnitus and a continual ringing in his ears. He was too proud to wear a hearing aid, and only in the cockpit of a plane did the ringing cease.

Flying became an obsession. Hughes set a number of world records, often in aeroplanes designed by himself. In 1935 he reached a speed of 350 miles per hour in the H-1 Hughes Racer. In 1938, he flew round the world in 3 days, 19 hours, and 17 minutes.

But in 1946, Hughes was piloting an experimental US Air Force spy plane, the XF-11, when it developed an oil leak. Crash-landing to save the plane, he suffered numerous injuries included a crushed collar bone, six shattered ribs and third-degree burns. Only morphine made the pain bearable and Hughes became dependent on the drug for the rest of his life.

Who Invented the Light Bulb?

Who Invented the Light Bulb?

If you answered Thomas Edison, think again.

At the end of the Civil War in 1865, the reunited states of America entered a new era of commerce and entrepreneurship. Businessmen made their fortunes supplying the vast marketplace of the Midwest with the latest domestic appliances and tools. Lighting was one area in which huge technological strides were made. And with the development of electricity as a reliable power source, a race began in the late 1870s to patent an efficient form of electrical lighting. At the forefront of this contest were two American inventors, Thomas Alva Edison and Hiram Maxim.

Edison was already famous for his invention of the phonograph and various telegraph instruments. But he was at least as much a businessman as he was an inventor. Edison approached investors directly rather than submit himself to the industrialists and their specifications. His experience of developing prototypes of other inventions had made him familiar with the loopholes in patent laws. As a result Edison's usual practice was to patent every advance made by his research team, however small.

Hiram Maxim, on the other hand, was an archetypal inventor - ploughing away, busily working on ideas, but not giving a thought to their commercial potential until after the final "eureka" moment.

In his mid 20s he had invented the first sprinkler system in Boston, only to fail to impress investors of its worth. In 1878 he was hired by Hans Schuyler of the US Electric Lighting Company in New York. As a further incentive, over and beyond his wages of $10 a day, Maxim was due a quarter share in anything he produced for the company. Aware of the inventor's work on gas machine lighting in Massachusetts, Schuyler placed him in charge of operations to produce electric light. Within a year Maxim had installed the first electrical "arc" lighting system in the Equitable Insurance Company building in New York.

Out of the arc

Arc lights worked by building up charge on a carbon rod until an "arc" of electricity crossed to a second rod. With sustained charge build-up, the arc sparked continuously, producing light. Arc lights wasted a great deal of energy and could be dangerous. It became a question of who would be first to find a way to channel current through a filament and sustain it without burnout.

Edison witnessed demonstrations of an early version of an unstable arc light in 1877, and in an interview with the New York Tribune in 1878, announced his intentions to design an incandescent lamp. When asked about the financial rewards of being the first man to make such a product, he replied: "I don't so much care for fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellow." He revealed that his platinum wire filament kept melting, and said, "I want to find something better." To help him in this quest, he founded his own fully staffed laboratory, complete with skilled glass blowers.

For all his rhetoric Edison had a lot of ground to make up. By 1878 Hiram Maxim had built a working light bulb using a filament made of carbon inside a bulb filled with gasoline vapour. The bulb stayed lit and did not burn out. Maxim applied for a patent on October 4 "on the principle of preserving and building up carbons in an incandescent lamp". If his application had been successful he would now be recognised as the official inventor of the light bulb. But he was to run into a quagmire of bureaucracy, bitter lawsuits and deliberate obstruction.

Nano - The Next Big Thing

Scientists predict it could have as much of an impact as the industrial revolution did.
Michael Franco

First there was plain old small. The Japanese perfected that with the transistor radio, then the Walkman. Then we had mini - Alex Issigonis shrunk the car down to city-friendly proportions. Next came micro, as Gordon Moore introduced the microprocessor and founded Intel on the strength of it. Now we have gone even smaller: nano.

Derived from the Greek word for "dwarf," nano refers to all things that take place at the sub-microscopic level. The usual measure of length at this level is the nanometre, which equals one one-millionth of a millimetre. That's small - very small

If you shrunk human beings down to this size, you could easily line up every single person on the planet from one side of an average bedroom to the other - with plenty of space left over.So while things at the nanoscale are tiny indeed, many expect the work being done in this field will have a gargantuan an impact on society. Scientists predict it could have as much of an impact as the industrial revolution did. You could almost say small size matters big.

Nanoparticles

Because they can enter and be absorbed by the body more effectively, nanoparticles - which have at least one dimension of less than 10 namometre - are now appearing in a whole host of consumer goods. This includes hairsprays, bug repellents, moisturisers, sunscreens and deodorants. And thanks to a company in China, you can even drink nanoparticles of pulverised leaves in a bottle of nano-tea.

Ironically, the super-absorbability of nanoparticles has consumer watch groups uneasy, and several have called for studies to track the effects of such tiny particles inside the human body.

Sometimes though, the theoretical risks of nanoparticles are outweighed by the tangible benefits. That's certainly the case at the Emory-Georgia Tech Nanotechnology Center where scientists have linked gold nanoparticles to antibodies which are drawn to cancer cells. Once inside the rogue cells, the golden hitchhikers can be beamed with a laser to determine tumour size and location, acting as an early detection system

Other researchers find silver more attractive than gold because of its natural ability to resist and fight bacteria. They're embedding silver nanoparticles into everything from soaps to mobile phones. Pooghe Laundry in the United States has even created germ-resistant nanotech underwear.

And soon, movie-goers might be able to enjoy a ring-free entertainment experience - once the theatre walls are coated in a new nanoparticle paint that blocks mobile phone signals.

Nanofibres

Nanofibres are defined as fibres with diameters less than 100 nanometres, roughly one-thousand times thinner than a human hair.

These liliputian filaments have already woven themselves into our lives in the form of substances like Nano Tex, used by clothing manufacturer Eddie Bauer to keep shirts and pants stain resistant. Researchers at Ohio State University, by treating nanofibres with certain chemicals, can alter their properties to attract or repel various substances like oil. Coating a sheet of glass with such dirt-repelling fibres, which are invisible to the human eye, could mean never having to wash windows again

Nanofibre bandages that would heal wounds faster and fight infection harder than traditional wraps have already been through clinical trials and may be on the market later this year.

And, most significantly, Northwestern University science professor Samuel Stump has just developed a method of restoring the mobility of paralyzed mice. He injects them with a liquid that assembles itself into a nanofibre scaffold along which nerves can grow to repair damaged spinal cords. Which proves once and for all that sometimes, the biggest things really can come in the smallest of packages.

And, most significantly, Northwestern University science professor Samuel Stump has just developed a method of restoring the mobility of paralyzed mice. He injects them with a liquid that assembles itself into a nanofibre scaffold along which nerves can grow to repair damaged spinal cords. Which proves once and for all that sometimes, the biggest things really can come in the smallest of packages.

Buckyballs

If you've ever seen a dome-shaped house, then you have some idea of what a buckyball looks like. These tiny particles are named after the inventor of the geodesic dome home - architect and engineer R. Buckminster Fuller - and are also remarkably similar to traditionally-stitched footballs. Just like their inflated cousins, buckyballs can bounce and spin. But crush one under extreme pressure, and it snaps back into shape when the pressure abates.

What makes buckyballs so tough? The lines that make up their cage-like structures consist of carbon bonds - the strongest molecular bonds found in nature.

Because of their incredible might, researchers at Rice University have figured out a way to use them as mini-crates to store compressed hydrogen. Before this discovery, there was simply no way to compact this potential fuel-of-the-future for efficient storage in a car's gas tank.

Medically, buckyballs are being studied for their sneeze-stifling abilities because they can prevent certain cells from releasing histamine into the body. They're also great free radical sponges and may someday work to soak up these cancer-causing substances in our blood streams.

In a truly futuristic development, buckyballs have been used as the wheels of the world's smallest car which measures just 3x4 nanometres. The hope is that one day small vehicles like this could work as pick-up trucks delivering atoms around molecular-sized nanofactories.

Carbon Nanotubes

If you held a piece of paper on its edge and tried to balance a teacup on it, the results would be obvious, and messy. Roll that paper into a tube however and then put the teacup on it. Voila, you have something very light supporting something relatively heavy.

This is the idea behind carbon nanotubes which are formed by rolling up a sheet of honeycomb-like carbon molecules. The process creates the strongest substance on earth - tiny tubes that are 100 times stronger than steel, yet six times lighter.

Researchers at the University of California have exploited the electricity-producing ability of carbon nanotubes by using them in artificial muscles that can not only repair themselves but can generate enough power through their expansion and contraction to actually charge your iPod.

Nanotubes can also channel sound frequencies and, in fact, one has been used as the world's smallest radio, appropriately broadcasting "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys.

Scientists at Rice University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in America have even produced a darker colour black by stacking carbon nanotubes on end like bristles on a brush. Because light slips between the tubes and gets swallowed instead of reflected, the colour appears much darker than any black to date. This new material can store energy from light sources, including the sun, and militaries worldwide are interested in its ability to make the "cloak" part of "cloak-and-dagger" even more clandestine.

Discover More:

http://www.nanotechia.co.uk/content/aboutus/

http://www.crnano.org/

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2008/04/SpinalCordInjury.html

Unfair Advantage

Today’s stealth technology is close to making every warrior’s ultimate goal of being invisible to the enemy a reality. Using plasma clouds, radioactive paints, light-bending cloth and deadly-silent power plants, the prospect of war could turn into a decidedly one-sided proposition.
By Mark Davis

(Stealth technology also known as LO technology (low observable technology) is a sub-discipline of military electronic countermeasures which covers a range of techniques used with aircraft, ships, submarines, and missiles, in order to make them less visible (ideally invisible) to radar, infrared, sonar and other detection methods.)

Barricaded behind the rubble of a shattered village, heavily armed fighters watch as enemy troops pick their way down a distant hillside. It is daytime and the glaring sun can easily play tricks on even the most experienced eyes, but the defenders watch in bewilderment as one by one, the approaching soldiers reach up to their helmets, flip a switch and seem to vanish from sight. Without the slightest warning of any sound, there are suddenly a half dozen helicopters, bristling with weapons, hovering above the encampment like a swarm of deadly insects, soundless and fading in and out of sight behind shimmering waves of heat.

Off balance, unsure where to shoot first, one of the better-hidden fighters takes aim at a still-visible foot soldier. The instant his bullet leaves its barrel, a cluster of geo- metrically arrayed microphones on an approaching vehicle triangulates the shock wave and delivers 3D co- ordinates to a soldier's aiming aid. One shot, threat eliminated.

Sounds far-fetched, but the world's major military powers aren't just dreaming about such systems.

"Take Michael Callahan of the Pen- tagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He is tasked with making the futuristic scenario hap- pen today for the US military. "It is my goal to provide our men and women with an unfair advantage over the enemy," he says.

Up in the Air

While military technology co-opted the term "stealth" 40 years ago, the first large-scale attempt to hide armies and weapons goes back to World War II, with the introduction of patterned camouflage uniforms.

"Stealth," as weapons expert Da- vid Hambling puts it, "comes down to not being spotted by whatever is most dangerous to you.

"This is as easy as sticking grass in your helmet for infantry soldiers, but WWII aircraft engineers grap- pled with ways to minimise airframe silhouettes against the daytime sky.

At first they tried painting the underbelly of the airplanes white, or pale blue, to match the sky. They soon realised, however, it was the shadow - not the colour - that made the dark dot in the sky. To get rid of the incriminating shadow, engineers attached fluorescent lights under the fuselage and wings that pilots could dim or brighten to match the time of day. It wasn't perfect, but gave pilots some virtual invisibility.

The quest to make planes invis- ible received an unexpected boost when US space programme scien- tists from NASA noticed that early spacecraft went dead to radar and radio waves upon re-entering the atmosphere. This occurs because the friction heating on re-entry creates a plasma "bubble" around the craft, making it vanish from radar screens. Called plasma aerodynamics, the concept seems right out of an episode of "Star Trek," but several inventors say they have a way to cre- ate "cloaking devices" for real.

One suggestion involves an on- board particle accelerator that zaps the atmosphere immediately in front of the aircraft, laying down "a carpet of invisibility" to fly into.

Another method advocates us- ing an on-board super-conductor magnetic coil to engulf the craft in a radar-absorbing plasma cloud. A third suggestion involves painting warplanes with radioisotopes that would ionise the surrounding atmo- sphere, creating a plasma sheath.

The beauty of flying your airplane in a plasma sheath is that it also sig- nificantly reduces drag, by as much as 3 percent. The one drawback of painting a fighter, bomber or recon- naissance plane with radioactive isotopes is that they will glow in the dark. There is speculation that some of the glowing in the night skies over the notorious "area 51" in the US state of Nevada, widely speculated as being caused by UFOs, might instead have been the result of the US Air Force's top-secret experi- ments using radioactive paint on U-2 spy planes.

Other stealth approaches involve using high-tech materials that could either scatter incoming radar waves, or even switch their wavelengths, thus confusing the trackers by turn- ing the aircraft's radar signature into random noise.

Lost at Sea

The Swedish Navy leads the way to invisibility on the high seas with its corvette-class Visby warship. Made from the same ultra-hard, carbon- fibre material used in Formula One racing cars, the Visby is light and quick and uses less fuel than more conventional ships in its class.

NAIR-SAN

Pic:orginal Nair-san with his family

AN INDIAN FREEDOM FIGHTER IN JAPAN
A.M.Nair known as NAIRSAN

Youth leader, patriot, colonial Britain’s Bete Noir, technocrat, linguist, advisor to the Indian diplomatic mission in Tokyo and eventually a business entrepreneur, Ayyappanpillai Madhavan Nair.

Following his schooling in his home state of kerala, he graduated as a civil engineer from Kyoto University in Japan. After a short stint as an engineer he was drawn inexorably into Japanese politics in which he functioned sometime as a Ronin, that character of rightwing activists who sought no personal rewards but wielded the highest influence in the country.

Nairsan, as he is commonly known, has lived in Japan for over half a century and also spent several years in Manchuria. Here he was an unofficial advisor to the Manchukuo government and the Kwangtung army and also conducted anti-colonial movements against British imperialism in India and other parts of Asia.

His advisory function was invariably marked by complete objectivity, integrity and independence, quality which earned him deep respect all round. For various purposes of his dealings with them the Japanese government recognized him as a personally equivalent in status initially to a major general and later to a lieutenant general.

Waging a most hazardous one-man crusade against the wool trade from Mongolia and Tibet to England, he successfully stopped the shipment of the goods to Manchester and Lancashire. During his Mongolian adventures which took him to regions some of which no other Indian has ever visited, he assumed many secret identities - a living Buddha, a camel caravan expert and a Muslim priest among them.

With Japan’s entry into the second world, Nairsan joined the Indian independence league in Japan and the south East Asian countries under the leadership of Rash Behari Bose – the legendary revolutionary in exile. Here he served as co-founder of the league and the chief link between the Indian freedom movement and the Japanese government.

In their forthright approach these memoirs constitute a valuable contribution to the history of India’s freedom struggle abroad.

In recognition of his dedicated and sustained contribution to the strengthening of friendly and cordial relations between India and Japan, Mr. Nair was awarded the exalted decoration of the order of merit of the sacred treasure (Kun zuihosho) by emperor Hiorohito in November 1984.

NAIR SAN: The legendary indian patriot in world cinema

1964 Japan Olympics. It was a thrilling moment for India when Indian Hockey Team won the Gold. But when the National anthem was being played at the medal distribution ceremony one among the crowd began shouting at the Japanese Government only because of the fact that instead of India ’s National Anthem the authorities played Pakistani National Anthem. Even though there were many officials and great personalities from India who were witnessing the incident none raised their voice other than this great Indian. That was the Indian legendary hero Ayyapan Pllai Madhavan Nair famous as Nair San in Japan. This is only one of the incidents which show the patriotism of this great man who became the reason for ending the Asian exploitation by the British during the freedom struggle.

For those who know Nair san personally he is special in different ways. Nair San had to leave his native land Kerala at the age of 18 as he campaigned among the students and led protests and marches against the social injustices of the British. He rebelled against the Education tax polled by English rulers. Being settled in Japan he struggled hard to root out the imperialism in Asian Countries. At the same time freedom fighters in India assembled men against English rulers. His efficiency in Japanese, Chinese and Spanish languages lifted him above all other Indian freedom fighters in Japan such as Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Rash Behari Bose, Pratap Singh, Barkathullah etc. Thus Nair San became an ever lively presence in the strong and well arming agitation organized by Indian National Army and Indian Independence League.

Many thrilling moments in the life of Nair San are unknown.. His strange experiences and dangerous encounters taking the roles of a trader, a Holy lama and a Soofi during his one man expedition and exploration through the deserts and Plateau of Manchukia , Ala Shaan , Mongolia , Tibet , and China in 1933 paved the way for ending the illicit wool trade of the British which contributed the major source of their income.

When a renowned film Director from Kerala like Albert honored with awards for his debut film decided to take up the story of Nair San for his next film it is a prestigious moment for the whole of India as the film is being designed in such a way so as to attract the aesthetics of the International audience. Albert’s passion and vision on Nair San is complemented by his tremendous urge to discover new eras on the subject and to create a truly international class Asian film spanning different cultures, languages and religions. The adventurous life of Nair San lighted the flame in Albert’s mind to create such a film where the Director’s creative concept is used more than the mere historical approach. The story is based on ‘Memories of Nair San’ the biography of A.M.Nair and the creative concept is developed by Albert himself.

Padmasree Mohanlal acts the lead role in the first Japanese film directed by an Indian. The other two famous actors in the film are selected from Bollywood. The leading Japanese actress is preferred to be the heroine of Mohanlal. As Nair San married a Japanese lady it is the perfect recreation by the director himself to select a Japanese actress as the heroine.

The world action hero Jackie Chan also in this film to play the role of a Cameo”,

Music maestro A.R.Rahman will be doing music for the film. The traditional Mongolian & Japanese songs included in the film will be a different experience for the music lovers. The $7.5 million budget film is said to be a different experience for the film lovers worldwide as it is the result of the hard work and enthusiasm of a handful of talented artists. As Japan is the second largest film market in the world the revenue calculated from the movie will be much more than the budget of the film. The major location of the film is Japan, Mongolia and India . The schedule of the film is planned within 145 days and it is expected to release by the end of 2008. Albert had been in hazardous attempt to secure all the detailed knowledge for the perfection of the film.