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By:

Smitha Balachandran

15 October 2024 at 5:25:55 am

Of Snakes, Storms and Stateless Souls

In a literary era crowded with climate fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Gun Island’ stands apart not for its science, but for its faith in myth, in migration and in the enduring power of the tale itself. In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh performs a literary sleight of hand that merges the mythic and the modern, the ecological and the existential into an ambrosial cocktail of narrative craft. First published in 2019, the novel is at once a fable and a forecast, a story that straddles continents and...

Of Snakes, Storms and Stateless Souls

In a literary era crowded with climate fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Gun Island’ stands apart not for its science, but for its faith in myth, in migration and in the enduring power of the tale itself. In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh performs a literary sleight of hand that merges the mythic and the modern, the ecological and the existential into an ambrosial cocktail of narrative craft. First published in 2019, the novel is at once a fable and a forecast, a story that straddles continents and consciousness. It stakes fair claim to being Ghosh’s most urgent novel and perhaps his most restless, for it refuses to stay within the neat boundaries of genre or geography. The book begins with Dinanath Datta (known simply as Deen), a dealer in rare books and Asian antiquities, whose tranquil Brooklyn existence is upended by a request from his elderly aunt. She persuades him to travel to the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, spread across Bengal and Bangladesh to investigate the legend of a sixteenth-century gun merchant, BondukiSadagar, who built a shrine to the snake goddess Manasa Devi on what locals call “Gun Island.” The merchant, lore says, sought to flee the goddess’s wrath; Ghosh, however, turns this myth into an allegory for humanity’s flight from nature itself. From this premise, Ghosh constructs a web that spans oceans. In Kolkata, Deen encounters Piya, a marine biologist and a recurring figure from The Hungry Tide, whose scientific rationalism contrasts sharply with Deen’s bookish scepticism. Together with Moyna, a nurse, and her rebellious son Tipu, they navigate the treacherous waters of the Sundarbans, where myth and mangrove intertwine. Tipu, guilt-shadowed and restless, soon reveals his complicity in a migrant-smuggling network in Bangladesh. The story’s geographic drift, from the tidal creeks of Bengal to the labyrinthine canals of Venice, echoes the journeys of Ghosh’s own characters across his earlier works, from The Glass Palace to Sea of Poppies. Yet Gun Island feels more contemporary, even prophetic. Its concerns are not imperial nostalgia or colonial commerce, but displacement, climate migration, and the uncanny persistence of myth in the modern world. In Venice, the novel’s second act, Deen reunites with Rafi, a temple boy turned construction worker, whose story mirrors the real-world refugee crisis that Ghosh weaves into his narrative. Rafi’s struggle to bring Tipu to Italy through illegal migrant routes becomes a haunting reflection of a planet on the move. The lagoon city, with its sinking foundations, becomes both stage and symbol: a European Sundarbans, fragile before the rising tide. Ghosh has long wrestled with how literature can address the climate crisis. In his nonfiction work The Great Derangement, he argued that modern fiction, with its bourgeois focus on individual destiny, has failed to capture the scale of planetary catastrophe. Gun Island reads as his answer to that lament. Where earlier writers such as Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake) and Richard Powers (The Overstory) used dystopia and the arboreal to dramatize ecological collapse, Ghosh returns to the oldest of narrative devices: myth. The snake goddess Manasa, who slithers through the story’s metaphors, stands as an emblem of ecological retribution and divine indifference. The gun merchant’s flight across centuries becomes humanity’s collective denial—our refusal to reckon with the deities we have angered: the seas, the soil, the air. Ghosh’s blend of magic realism and ethnography recalls Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, yet his idiom remains distinctively Indian, rooted in the brackish delta where superstition and survival share space. Deen’s evolution from sceptic to believer, from detached scholar to participant—forms the novel’s emotional spine. His friendship with Cinta, an elderly Venetian historian who deciphers the ancient inscriptions in the shrine, introduces an intellectual tenderness that softens the novel’s apocalyptic undertone. At times, the plot teeters on excess as coincidences abound, and the magical elements verge on didactic. Yet this, too, seems deliberate. Ghosh is less interested in realism than in resonance. His musical prose evokes a sense of inevitability, as if myth itself were dictating the plot. He is writing not merely a novel, but a lamentation for a world in retreat. By its end, Gun Island offers not despair but a sliver of grace. In its final moments, as the characters glimpse the possibility of redemption amidst ruin, the novel reminds readers that migration - of people, of species, of stories - is both consequence and continuity. (The writer is a Mumbai based educator. Views personal.)

AI in Sperm Sorting: An Unbiased Decision for A Better Outcome

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Artificial Intelligence or AI is revolutionising fertility treatments of the future. The inclusion of AI enhances the accuracy, efficiency, and objectivity of sperm selection, hence potentially improving fertility outcomes by leaps and bounds. Traditionally, sperm sorting through manual methods is subjective to judgments. Processes like centrifugation and swim-up methods are used to separate sperm based on motility and morphology. Although they are effective, they have their limitations, leading to human errors that affect the success rates of fertility treatment. For instance, studies have shown that traditional sperm sorting techniques can have variability in success rates, with reported live birth rates ranging between 15 per cent to 25 per cent per cycle depending on the method and quality of sperm. Hence the introduction of AI helps in maintaining consistency in evaluations of sperm, using the same data set for every sample which leads to better judgments.


Automation and Standardisation- Automation of sperm selection and also introduction of AI in the process have improved the results in ART. AI-assisted sperm selection improves the accuracy in choosing high-quality sperm for fertilisation purposes, and also, pregnancy and live birth rates might be improved. Technologies like Intracytoplasmic Morphologically Selected Sperm Injection along with AI ensure the chances of pregnancies increase by about 10-20 per cent compared to the standard procedures. AI and Automation will decrease time taken to analyze sperm and increase opportunities to select better sperm with DNA integrity for better development and higher success rates in embryo selection. These processes ensure that the sperm selection process follows consistent criteria, reducing variability in outcomes caused by human error.


Analysing Complex Data for Better Outcomes- AI plays a crucial in improving IVF outcomes by analysing complex data and providing tailored recommendations. AI-driven tools and models such as those on SpOvum.ai point towards an opportunity to optimise ovarian stimulation decisions by assessing patient characteristics and follicle growth patterns. A study revealed that the use of AI in IVF improved egg yield and reduced medication costs. AI enables fertility specialists to make data-driven choices, improving overall IVF success rates and streamlining treatment processes.


Reducing Human Error- AI models can continuously learn and refine their performance by being trained on newer data. This adaptability ensures the technology remains unbiased and up-to-date with the latest scientific insights into sperm quality and fertility success rates. Studies have shown that AI-driven sperm sorting can decrease human-related errors by up to 25 per cent, improving sperm selection quality in terms of morphology and motility.


Reduction of Sperm Damage- The new AI-driven sperm sorting techniques also include microfluidic systems that are known to exhibit several advantages over the most commonly used conventional method, which is centrifugation. Traditional centrifugation methods, such as density gradient centrifugation, also cause severe oxidative stress and DNA fragmentation of the sperm because of the very high mechanical forces involved. The AI-infused microfluidic sorting minimises this damage significantly by involving gentler processes that mimic the natural pathway of sperm selection. The studies show that the process of microfluidic sorting decreases DNA fragmentation in sperm, which gives improved opportunities for success for IVF. For example, DNA fragmentation is 20 percent lower in sperm sorted using microfluidic processes than in traditional processing methods.


AI is bound to play an increasingly definitive role in fertility treatments, which will improve the outcomes for couples experiencing infertility.


(The author is a Co-Founder & CEO at SpOvum® Technologies. Views personal.)

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