Impulse by David Lewis

Impulse by David Lewis

Why we do what we do without knowing why we do it.

Impulse lie at the root of most personal and social problems ranging from obesity, alcohol and drug abuse, overspending, unwanted pregnancies, smoking, emotional problems, dysfunctional relationships and school underachievement to a failure in achieving cherished life goals.

Impulse as per physicist, impulse is an indefinitely large force that acts for a very short time that brings about a change of momentum. In this book I argue that virtually everything we say and we do between waking and sleeping can be considered impulsive in that the vast majority of those actions occur mindlessly rather than mindfully.

As per Ellen Langer, when we accept an impression or a piece of information at face value... the that impression settles unobtrusively into our minds.... most of us don’t reconsider what we mindlessly accepted earlier...the mindless individual is committed to one predetermined use of the information and other possible use or applications are not explored.

Within a few hundredths of a second of meeting someone for the first time we usually get a sense of whether we like them, are sexually attracted to them are indifferent to them or are uncomfortable in their presence. The feeling of not liking someone without being able to explain why was summed up by a 17th century student named Thomas Brown in a verse dedicated to his university dean Dr. Thomas Fell:

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell

The reason why I cannot tell;

But this I know and know full well,

I do not like thee Doctor Fell.

The impulsive power of smell

We all possess an entirely personal ‘smell signature’ It is this unique smell that enables bloodhounds to track specific individuals, even in crowded urban environment. Our smell signature comprises a blend of skin, hair and glandular secretions, food and drink choices, odors in our surroundings and any perfume, after-shave or deodorant we use. But the most distinctive odor of all tends to be sweat. On its own this is capable of triggering impulsive sexual desire. The German sexologist Richard Kraft Ebbing, for example, described a ‘voluptuous young peasant man’ who boasted how he had ‘seduced quite a considerable number of chaste girls without difficulty by wiping his armpits with his handkerchief while dancing and then using this handkerchief to wipe the face of his dancing partner.

In the presence of a pleasant odor people were impulsively regarded as more likeable than when viewed with an unpleasant odor being present. Heart rate slowed in the presence of a pleasant odor and increased with an unpleasant one. Today the same fear of offensive body odor and a desire t make oneself sexually attractive and desirable are two main reasons why the manufacture and sale of perfumes and cosmetics has become a $280 billion a year global industry.

In Roman era, Civert and ambergris were esp. popular among leisured classes and given the importance of vanilla as an aphrodisiac it is interesting to note that the name of this spice is a diminutive of the Latin word vagina. When, during the 16th century, Sheikh al-Nefzawi of Tunia wrote one of the world’s earliest sex manuals, it was no coincidence he titled it ‘The Perfumed Garden’.

One substance used in modern male grooming products is androstenediol, a chemical structurally related to testosterone, the hormone produced in the tests which is found in male sweat and urine. Dr. David Benton of University College, Swansea, a researcher in this field found that females reacted more strongly to the hormone during the middle of their menstrual cycle, when it is caused them to assess their own mood as more submissive. “Sexual attraction relies on many factors including personality, social skills, past experience and present situation. If everything else is suitable then an odor may make a small difference but the product of an aerosol spray is unlikely to be the difference but the product of an aerosol spray is unlikely to be the predominant influence and compensate for other feelings.

So is pure French jasmine essence, reportedly the world’s most expensive perfume, really worth up to $300 a gram? More generally what effect does a woman wearing any sort of perfume have on the men around her? The answer seems to depend on how she is dressed. That is what research by Dr. Robert Baron of Purdue University suggests. In his tests, when assistant dressed smartly the perfume made seem cold and unromantic. When she wore the perfume with jeans and a T-shirt, however, the men’s impulse response was to regard her as warm and romantic. So the response that perfume evokes depends not just on our sense of smell but also the context in which it is worn.

In 1973 the American psychologist Philip Kotler, Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University, coined the term, atmospherics to describe the conscious planning of atmosphere to contribute to the buyer’s purchasing propensity and predicted that atmospherics is likely to play a growing role in the unending search of firms for differential advantage. Today even moderately sized supermarkets allocate space to an in-store bakery despite the fact that it is far more convenient and cost-effective for a central bakery to serve a number of stores. Managers know that by stimulating hunger pangs, the smell of freshly baked bread encourages people to buy not just bread but also other food, even frozen products.

In laundry section of a supermarket, shoppers exposed to the scent of freshly laundered sheets not only buy more detergents but also splash out on impulse purchases of products claiming to whiten whites or leave linen smelling like a spring morning.  One company has injected the smell of coconut into the shops of a British travel agent, because some sustain oils smell of coconut and the aroma is said to help trigger memories of past holidays and so encourage shoppers to book fresh ones.

In supermarket the sale of laundry products significantly increased when a fresh, lemony aroma was combined with the sound of freshly laundered sheets being folded. This, the promoters of the system claim, triggers associations with the comfort, safety and warmth of home. Perhaps by recalling childhood memories of helping mother with the weekly wash.

The impulsive power of sounds

Dr. M. Morrison of the department of marketing at Monash University says, “Music communicates with our hearts and minds; it serves as a powerful connection into our emotions. Music is versatile, it has the ability to relax or invigorate. Music is memorable, it can transport us in an instant to places we want to be. Retailers can use specifically programmed music to create links to past experience. Music can be critical components of store atmosphere and plays a role in purchase decision making process. As per the study conducted, under 25 spending more time shopping when exposed to easy listening music while those over 25 thought they had been in the store longer than when top 40 music was played.

Impulse purchases of the most expensive wines increased when Mozart, Bach and Vivaldi were played. Music preference, they found, are determined by age rather than sex of the shopper. Middle aged (25-49) shoppers spent more and shopped longer when foreground music was played whereas older shoppers shopped longer and purchased more when background music was playing.

Risk-taking personality

John Coates of university of Cambridge in his recent study, measured the length of male high-frequency traders second and fourth digits. They found that the traders appetite for risk taking could be accurately predicted by comparing the length of these two fingers. Research has shown that men who are impulsive risk takers have a ration of less than 1 if the length of their index finger (second digit) is divided by their ring finger (fourth digit). This has been dubbed the 2D:4D ratio. The ratio differs reliable by sex with males typically having a lower 2D:4D on their right hand than on their left hand. How much is less than 1, which much risk taking and how much more than 1 shows how much they are risk averse.

There is a impulsive rating link - http://www.impulsive-eating.com/measuring-impulsivity.html

In a moment when, James Joyce wrote in Ulysses: “I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes, and then he asked me would I yes.... and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me as he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes”..

In his 1971 book, The Attraction Paradigm, social psychologist Don Byrne proposed that while shared appear to form the basis of attraction, the number of similar views mater less than proportion of similar to dissimilar attitude. So consistent is this finding that one can express the probability of liking or disliking occurring in terms of the following mathematical formula

Y=5.44X =6.62

This states that the best way of predicting the extent of liking (Y) between two people is to multiply the proportion of similar attitudes (X) by 5.44 and then add 6.62. Two people who share 50% of the same views will score 9.34 (0.585.44 + 6.62).

In my lab we use eye-tracking technology to examine how men and women look at one another’s bodies. In lab conditions, men and women look at the semi-naked bodies of members of the opposite sex in a very different ways. Single heterosexual man viewing a bikini clad women; he started at her thighs and buttocks and then moved up to her groin, breasts and neck. His eyes travelled back to her breasts and up & down her abdomen and legs. He concluded at the point where her left hand points downward to her groin.  The woman by contrast, began her inspection at man's face, returning there on three subsequent occasions. Next her eyes travelled up and down his chest and abdomen, halting just above his groin. She then examined his chest muscles and left arm m his right arm, his left armpit and then his face again. She repeated her examination of his torso, stopping as before, just above the pubic region. Finally her eyes moved back his left arm, before ending where she began, at his face.  When individuals being viewed are fully clothed a different pattern of gaze occurs with more attention being directed towards face.

The most reliable of those fertility cues is the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) which, Dr. Devendra Singh contends, is the key to being regarded by males as fertile and fanciable. Between 19820 and 1980s, every Miss America winner has a WHR between .72 and 0.69.

The scarcity effect of physical desire was first investigated by Dr. James Pennebaker of the University of Virginia who was intrigued by a line in songwriter Baker Knight 1970s hit: Don’t all the girls get prettier at closing time”. This read, Ain’t it funny, ain’t it strange, the way a man’s opinion change when the stars to face that lonely night.’

Ten practical ways to beat the overrating impulse

1. Eat from smaller plates and bowls. Because we eat with our eyes as much as with our mouth, using smaller plates and bowls is a quick and easy way to reduce the number of calories consumed at each meal.

2. When drinking anything but water, use a tall narrow glass rather than a short wide one. This is known as horizontal-vertical illusion. The eye is fooled by the height of the liquid in the glass and ignores the width.

3. Eat with chopsticks, rather than a knife and fork, obliges you to take smaller mouthfuls and eat more slowly.

4. Put ice in your drink. Because the body has to use energy to beat up the beverages, around 1 calorie per ounce of fluid is consumed.

5. Eat alone. We eat significantly more when dining in company than eating alone.

6. When dining out in an up-market restaurant be aware of the effects of soft lights and classical music. Both encourages you to linger longer and so eat or drink considerably more than you realize.

7. Get a good night sleep.

8. Avoid shopping for food when hungry

9. If you have sweets or chocolates in the office, place them in opaque containers rather than clear ones and at a distance form, rather than directly on, your desk.

10. When snacking on popcorn in the cinema, use your other hand (right-hand person use left hand vice versa). If so, consumption will be less.

Inside World's most powerful selling machine:

Just walk into a supermarket, we become participants in what Jeff Chester, director of the US based Center for Digital Democracy has called a ‘marketing technological arms race. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste or touch is the result of millions of dollars worth of research, design and planning.

The first products we typically see on entering a supermarket are fresh fruits and vegetables. It is done so for two reasons. First because they make both the store and the products themselves look fresh and attractive. Fruits and vegetables look better in natural light, just as meat and fish look tired in anything but a clean white light. Furthermore they subtly convey a sense of freshness and naturalness, evoking images not of vast and soulless food processing plants but of open green fields and cloudless blue skies. The second and chief reason is to make the shopper more likely to grab a trolley than reach for a basket. Because a trolley holds more it encourages shoppers to buy more. By making the task of moving purchases around far easier it encourages shoppers to impulse-buy more.

Another factor retailer must take into account when stacking shelves is known as the invariant right. A possible explanation for this is that the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body and this hemisphere is associated with an approach response and positive emotions. Shoppers tend to stay on the right as they stroll down both supermarket aisles and high street pavements. It is for this reason that in a well-designed airport, travelers drifting toward the departure gate will find the fast-food restaurants on their left and the gifts shops on their right. Both are in position most likely to encourage impulse purchases: while people may be prepared to cross a lane of pedestrian traffic when hungry they will rarely do so to buy a magazine or souvenir.

Research has shown that when we walk down an aisle we look mainly at shelves not at eye level but slightly lower. This is because when walking past shelves, a shopper’s gaze is directed between 15 & 30 degrees downward, mainly as a result of the weight and shape of the head and how it is supported by the spine. This is the prime position for high margin impulse purchases. Lower prices lower profit products go with down to floor level or upwards so as to be out reach to all but the tallest or more agile shopper.

Going deeper into the store we come across products termed destination goods or known value items (KVI). KVIs include such core grocery lines and weekly staples as milk, bread and baked beans. Supermarkets call these traffic generators because they have to be purchased frequently and are the most price-sensitive. While the average shopper’s awareness of prices tends to be limited, most do know the price of these regularly bought items and so are able to make comparison between rival stores. By ensuring the price of benchmark KVI is kept artificially low, by selling at or even below the cost, supermarkets are able to present all their products as great value for money.

On counters displaying clothes, high-margin items such as expensive and exotic foods, enticing gifts, must-have gadgets, these products are frequently laid out in such a way as to exploit the power of what is called the triangular balance. it is based on the fact that your eye will always go straight to the center of a picture says Karl McKeever. ‘Here, they put the biggest , tallest products with the highest profit margin in the center of the each shelf and arrange the other sizes around them to make it look attractive. When you look at the triangle on the shelf, your eyes goes straight to the middle and the most expensive box. It is used everywhere and it is very effective.

In fashion areas of stores, tables are often positioned next to clothes racks to allow customers to handle the items; Younger shoppers esp. are drawn more towards scuffed-up displays of cloths because this suggests they are popular. When the piles of garments appear overly neat, by contrast, it sends a message that no one else is interested in buying them.

Disordered piles and mounds of products are more likely to attract buyers than neatly ordered displays. There is a natural reluctance on the part of most shoppers to be the first to interfere with the symmetry of perfectly stacked items of food or ordered lines of fruit in an elegant display. Most products are handled many times by browsers before being purchased. The average lipstick, for example, is examined 6 to 8 times before it leaves the store and a greeting card 25 times.

Research has shown that the main limit on exercising our willpower is willpower itself. By exerting self-control in one situation we diminish our capacity to do so in another.

(See, how Ulysses listened, but escaped unhurt with Sirens’ Song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtiPgvTRrdk)

For more than 3 centuries, worries about one type of impulse above all others dominated the lives of many adults and ruined the lives of their children. That impulse is masturbation. Fear of the supposed consequence of what they called self-abuse led parents, doctors and ministers of church to seek ways of eliminating the practice by means of extremely cruel and humiliating.

The anonymous author of Hippolytus Redivius (1644) regarded it as a remedy against the dangerous allurements of women.

The idea that a conflict exists between impulses and self-control between passion and reason as the Greek philosophers put it. Socrates suggests that weakness of will cannot exist since no one would willingly act against his or her better judgment. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, addiction and sexual arousal all create the desire to satisfy a physical need, by eating, drinking, sleeping, taking drugs, or having sex. Called ‘visceral drives’ they can lead to impulses which undermine long-term goals.

Crossing the Bay of Bengal by Sunil S Amrith

Crossing the Bay of Bengal by Sunil S Amrith

The furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants.

[The story of Indian population (esp. Tamil) who migrated around Burma, Ceylon, Malaysia/Singapore and the importance of the sea route]

The Bay of Bengal’s circuits of migrations both responded to and fueled change on a global scale. Malaya’s rubber - tapped by Tamil migration workers - fed the American automobile industry. Malay became the most economically valuable tropical colony in the whole of the British Empire. Burma became the largest rice exporter in the world, in a boom backed by Indian capital and drawing millions of Indian migrant workers into every sector of its economy. Somewhere in the region of 28 million people crossed the Bay of Bengal, in both directions between 1840 and 1940, The region was home to one of the world’s great migration - but almost certainly the least well-known.

[The entire area was under the British rule and the subjects were free to travel across]

The world of Bay of Bengal collapsed with astonishing rapidity in the middle decades of 20th century. Crossings were interrupted, first by the global economic depression and then by WW II, with the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia. New, revolutionary visions of citizenship and belonging emerged from the trauma of war. But the ultimate effect of the conflict was to cement the division between South Asia and the lands across the Bay (Southeast Asia). This forced choices upon many who previously had seen no reason to choose between homes and had circulated between India or China and Southeast Asia.

As the turn of 21st century, the Bay of Bengal is once again at the heart of international politics. First the Bay of Bengal is now as it was in the 18th century, an arena for strategic competition between rising powers. Today these powers are Asian rather than European: India and China both eye the Bay of Bengal as a crucial frontier in their competition over energy resources, shipping lanes, and cultural influence. Second, the Bay of Bengal’s littoral stands at the front line of Asia’ experience of climate change.

The Bay of Bengal is a large triangular basin in the Indian Ocean and the largest bay in the world. It is an enclosed sea, surrounded by thousands of miles of coastlines. Many of the Asia’s great rivers empty into the bay of Bengal: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Meghna, the Godavari, the Kaveri, the Krishna.

The Asian monsoon animates the Bay of Bengal: it is one of the most dramatic climatic phenomena on Earth. The monsoon - from the Arabic mawsim or season - is a weather system of seasonally reversing winds. Between April and September, the southwest monsoon moves roughly from southwest to northeast; between November and March the northeast monsoon moves in the opposite direction.

The bay of Bengal marks the eastern frontier of the Hindu cosmos. Of the four dhams (sacred dwellings) of Hindu mythology that span the four corners of the subcontinent - Badrinath, Puri, Rameshwaram and Dwarka - Puri fronts the Bay of Bengal along the Orissa coast, and the island of Rameshwaram, where the Indian subcontinent just into the sea, is the southernmost of the dhams. Today, as in the past, the footsteps of pilgrims create a lived landscape. Many Indian pilgrims believe that a visit to the holiest of cities on the banks of the Ganges, Varanasi (Banaras), should be followed by a journey to Rameshwaram.

In the first half of the 18th century huge quantities of silver entered China to finance Chinese tea, a lot of it by way of India. Much of this silver was in the form of Mexican pesos, of which well over a billion were minted in the 18th century - they were widely trusted, their silver content guaranteed. Eventually the Chinese market grew saturated with silver; as the relative value of silver declined in China, an alternative medium arose to finance the relentless demand for tea. That alternative was Indian opium.

[With the drain of silver and the growing number of people addicted to the drug, the Daoguang Emperor demanded action. Officials at the court who advocated legalizing the trade so the government could tax it were defeated by those who advocated suppression. In 1838, the Emperor sent Lin Zexu to Guangzhou, where he quickly arrested Chinese opium dealers and summarily demanded that foreign firms turn over their stocks. When they refused, Lin stopped trade altogether and placed the foreign residents under virtual siege, eventually forcing the merchants to surrender their opium to be destroyed.

Edward Thornton, chief statistician at East Indian House put it this way: “Indian, by exporting opium, assists in supplying England with tea. China, by consuming opium, facilities the revenue operations between India and England. England consuming tea, contributes to increase the demand for opium of India” - A perfect equation

In response, the British government sent expeditionary forces from India, which ravaged the Chinese coast and dictated the terms of settlement. The Treaty of Nanking not only opened the way for further opium trade, but ceded territory including Hong Kong, unilaterally fixed Chinese tariffs at a low rate, granted extraterritorial rights to foreigners in China (which were not offered to Chinese abroad), a most favored nation clause, and diplomatic representation. When the court still refused to accept foreign ambassadors and obstructed the trade clauses of the treaties, disputes over the treatment of British merchants in Chinese ports and on the seas led to the Second Opium War and the Treaty of Tientsin.[8]

These treaties, soon followed by similar arrangements with the United States and France, later became known as the Unequal Treaties, and the Opium Wars represented the start of China's "Century of humiliation". - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars]

The three islands - Ceylon, Penang and Singapore - reflected the competing imperatives of imperial rule around the bay. Singapore developed as free port. Ceylon as an agricultural plantation and Penang as a port city that would become the gateway to the Malay Peninsula. The free trade of Singapore might have been more valuable than the ‘whole continents of territory’ to profit from it.

The power of steam promised the conquest of the monsoons. less than a decade after opening of the Suez Canal, the monsoon demonstrated enduring power over human life - they failed. The failure was global and catastrophe. The rain failed across lands as far apart as southern India, China, Java, Egypt and northeastern brazil. In India, the famine was worst in the Southeast and across Deccan plain. At the time, observers assumed a direct connection between the famine of the 1870s and the increase in Indian migration, which accelerated at that very moment. Famine was the ultimate ‘push factor’.

Faced with a chronic shortage of labor, British administrators across the Bay of Bengal saw opportunity in the famine. The number of Indian laborers arriving in Ceylon doubled between 1875 and 1876 and exceeded 160,000 in each of the two worst years of the famine. The migrants to Ceylon came almost entirely from those regions ‘already accustomed to short-term migration’; the dry region of Thanjavur and southeastern Madurai,

The ‘kangany’ dominated recruitment from the start in Ceylon. The Tamil word means, overseer; in the Tamil Bible, kangany is the term for a bishop - overseer of the congregation. The Calcutta nationalist daily, Amrita Bazar Patrika, mocked the kangany as ‘like a tin god clothed in gorgeous velvet coat and lace turban and bedecked with costly jewels in his ears and his fingers’. Another newspaper commented that ‘kangany instils in the minds of these ignorant seekers of fortune’.

In Burma, a similar system of recruitment prevailed under a different name and under different conditions. The recruiter name as ‘maistry’. The movement from India to Burma really took off in the 1880s and most of the migrants to Burma came not from Tamil districts , but Telugu-speaking area north of Madras. They were joined by migrants from Orissa and the Bengal. Migration to Burma was the freest of the three (Ceylon, Burma and Malaya) . Burma was ruled as province of British India and in Burma, south Indian capital, not just labor, was essential to the metamorphosis of the late 19th century.

Chettiar community was the main money lenders in Burma. Once in a week, the community’s elders convene at the Chettiar temple in Mogul Street, Rangoon. They discuss community affairs, set interest rates for different kinds of loans and deposits, beginning with internal rate for transaction between Chettiar firms. They assess market conditions. They distill rumors of war, faltering monsoons and new shipping lines into a single figure: the interest rate. They do business with European exchange banks, which are quite willing to lend to Chettiar firms than Burma farmers. By the turn of the 20th century far more Chettiar capital was invested overseas than in Madras; above all they invested in Burma.

Tamil migrants were not accustomed with Malay climate and mostly got sick with the climate. On Malayan official wrote, contemplating a new stream of migration to British North Borneo, ‘natives of Malabar and South Canara would probably thrive better in Malaya than Tamil migrants.

The world of the Bay of Bengal was, for centuries, a world of men,. men crossed the sea while women stayed behind. In the 18th century and 19th centuries Muslim traders from South India maintained families on both sides of the Bay as they made second wives of local women. E.J.L.ASndrew (retired protector of immigrants) wrote: “the life of prostitutes is pitiable in the extreme. Once in the power of a keeper the girls are not allowed freedom of any kind and they eventually become wrecks”. “In mainly cases, the alliance is based on sentiment. A peculiar system of selling women is common. A labor returning to India (very often to his wife and children) would ‘sell’ his local mistress to another man, ‘reserving his right to purchase her on his return’.

[Malaya;s rubber changed the world - 70 to 80 % of the world market.].

Bruno Lasker a German social reformer noted that in 1930s, “international migration in eastern Asia was to a large extent arrested and even reversed in its course.  But most people who lived through them, the changes of the 1930s did not feel so decisive. The depression - with its bouts of unemployment and deflation, its new controls on migration - seemed more like a harsh setback than a lasting shift. After WW II, did these cracks in the web connecting lives around the Bay of Bengal appear to be permanent reversal. Things changed suddenly in the 1930s: arbitrary rules blocked movement and fluctuating markets undue fortunes.

In the assessment of one economic historian, “ few economies can have undergone a macroeconomic shock more severe than that experienced in the 1930s depression by Malaya. The decline in rubber’s price was almost entirely because of reduced demand from the American automobile industry; the general slowdown in the industrialized world weakened demand for tin. The value of copper exports from Singapore fell by 84% between 1929 & 1932 and the real wages across the Malaya fell by half. The market value of rice dropped even faster than that of other commodities, and it took much longer to recover.

In Burma, the pressure on rice growers provoked a crisis in social relations in the countrywide. When the bottom dropped from the world market for rice, the web of debt on which Chettiar moneylenders fortunes were built went awry. Unable to recover loans, Chettiar firms foreclose on mortgages and acquired significant proportion of Burma’s agricultural land (25% of the agricultural land). Liquidity was essential to the Chettiar’s business model, now debted Burmese cultivators suffered a loss of land and livelihood. In this climate of fear, some Burmese turned against not only their Chettiar creditors but also all immigrant Indians on their land.

A familiar language of nationalist resentment echoed around the bay. A Burmese newspaper invoked Hitler approvingly in discussing the ‘Indian problem’. The newspaper ‘now remembers a speech delivered by Hitler before he came into power. Hitler said, “ I have studied the histories of all countries and I find that the retardation of a country’s progress is not due to its economic affairs, but due to the influx of foreigners”.  resentment of Indian immigration across the Bay was mirrored by Indian nationalists’ increasing hostility to emigration. “Burma divorces India’, John Christian wrote in Current history in 1937; making Burma’s autonomy from Indian control after a century.  Faced with eviction, the Chettiars cried foul. The assumption under which they had invested millions of Burma had been overturned; the imperial rug had been pulled from beneath them.  Fearing the worst, some Chettiars moved their money out of Burma, others did the opposite, travelling to Burma in even greater numbers in case their entry should be restricted in the future.

[During the outbreak of WW II, Japanese army overtook, the bay of Bengal area - Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, Indonesia,..]

Three moments marked the Bay’s rise and fall as a region at the heart of empires and global capitalism. The first was the British conquest of eastern India and the establishment of Penang and Singapore on the other side of the Bay in the midst of the revolutionary upheavals of the early 19th century. The second was the steamship revolution in the last quarter on the 19th century which produced a new level of interconnection across bay as people, goods, and ideas moved back and forth at higher velocity and on a greater scale than before. The third came with WW II, which brought to sudden and decisive end the connected world of the Bay of Bengal, breaking bonds that the depression had already put under strain.

Bhimrao Ambedkar - the fiercely independent leader of India’s dalits and brilliant legal architect of India’s constitution - looked across bay in his search for a spiritual alternative for India's former ‘untouchables’ convinced that Hinduism offered them only humiliation. Ambedkar considered both Islam and Christianity, but eventually he settled on Buddhism as the most appropriate path for himself and for his followers. Before his death, Ambedkar led a mass conversion ceremony in the central Indian city of Nagpur, when half a million dalits embraced Buddhism.

Visiting Chennai in July 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provided a resonant narrative of the decline and rise of Chennai as a port city of bay of Bengal, facing east once again, after a half-century’s interruption. “There is no better place to discuss India’s leadership in the region to its east than here in Chennai” she said. “In this port city, looking out at the Bay of Bengal, and beyond to the nations of East and Southeast Asia, we are easily reminded of India’s historic role in the wider region, for thousands of years, Indian traders have sailed those across the Bay and beyond. Today, the stretch of sea from the Indian ocean to the Pacific ocean contains world’s most vibrant trade and energy routes, lining economies and driving strength”.

Since 1990s Hambantota in Sri Lanka has been the site of one of the largest port construction projects in the world. Along the northern arc of Burma’s littoral, the new port at Kyaukpu, on Ramsree island has been built and financed by the Chinese government and private investors. Beijing undoubtedly remembers Burma’s role in WW II when it provided China access to the Indian Ocean, while China is a littoral power in the western pacific in the Indian Ocean it is landlocked. On the eastern coast, India’s fleet is based in Visakhapatnam, from where hundreds of thousands of embarked for Burma in search of fortune in the early 20th century. India forces ‘keep a hawk-eye on the strategically important Malacca strait. Alongside closer relations with Sri Lanka, the Indian state competes with China for Burma’s coastal resources: taking share in the natural gas fields off the coast, investing in the construction of airfields, contributing to deepwater harbor in Dawei. The value of India’s trade with Southeast Asia has more than doubled in a decade, reaching $80 bn in 2012.

[The design of Loyang Tua Pek Kong temple in northeastern Singapore is unlike any other. Inside the temple complex, shrines to Daoist, Buddhist and Hindu deities and the grave site of a Muslim holy man sit next to one another.]

Oceanic history is itself kind of cartography. By foregrounding the bay of Bengal - linked by journeys, memories, and the sinews of power - we can see beyond the borders of today’s nation-states, beyond the borders imposed by imperial mapmakers and immigration officials to a more fluid, more uncertain world; a world that resembles our own. As the furies of nature grow clamorous, the fortunes of migrants are even fickle.