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The Current Transcript for April 25, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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White colored van, just driving on the pedestrian walk and sabotaging like mailboxes, post stands. And then the next minute I see that the van is driving over a fire hydrant lifting it off the ground. And then the next minute I see a pedestrian getting hit.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Along with the shock and sadness of so many people run down Monday by a suspect in a van has been the realisation of the randomness of it all. For anyone who usually walks that stretch of Toronto's Yonge Street, there has been an uncomfortable understanding that, with a difference of even a few minutes, they too could have been one of the victims. There was little to stop that van or keep it from reaching pedestrians but architects and urban planners say there are ways to make our cities safe for pedestrians. In a moment we're asking how to keep a city vibrant and livable and protected. Also today marriageable men without wives.

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I'm still unable to find a dream woman for me. I don't know the reasons but it may be- the reasons can be many but I don't know the reason but I'm still unable to find my dream woman.

AMT: The gender imbalance in India is huge. 37 million more men than women. After decades of a sex selection technology use and in many regions a culture that prioritizes the male child. It's a double edged sword for many women. Some are able to move beyond caste through marriage and find new opportunity while others face growing violence and abuse. We're looking at the consequences in an hour. And she grew up dreaming of rocketing to Mars but would instead choose to cycle the Silk Road.

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I had no experience with camels or caravans so the historic modes of travel on the Silk Road seemed a bit out of reach. But bicycles, you can go you can go anywhere and they're fuelled by you.

AMT: Fuelled indeed. With nothing more than two wheels often patched up, Kate Harris pedalled along ten thousand kilometres of the ancient trading route romanticised by travellers over the centuries and hear her stories of her travels through lands of loss borders, in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Can urban planning protect our streets from vehicle attacks?

Guests: Jennifer Keesmaat, Alan Bell, Claire Weisz

AMT: When that wide rental van sped down Toronto's Yonge street Monday afternoon, resulting in the deaths of 10 people, injuring 14 more, it traveled to point two kilometres and even jumped curbs with no barriers to stop it. The use of vehicles as weapons is very difficult to guard against in any city as Nice, Barcelona, New York, London and other cities have learned to their horror. Many cities have responded by redesigning urban spaces to hinder these kinds of attacks. For example, putting up barricades or bollards those short metal poles between roads and pedestrian spaces. We asked Torontonians at the crime scene yesterday whether they'd want to see a city put up more of these kinds of barriers.

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VOICE 1: Think it's definitely something to look at now, being that this has happened here. You know I think we sort of felt really safe and didn't think that it could happen here. But now that it has it's probably something the city should look at.

VOCIE 2: It's more about talking about People’s mental stability and why they would do something like that. If you do that people who want to kill someone will find a way around it. So you can't live in a cell.

VOICE 3: We've lived here for many years and we have so many memories. We love the community. I don't know in this world what will make us feel safer anymore because it seems like these things are not controllable to an extent. I wouldn't want to see barricades and all that type of thing i n the residential community.

VOICE 4: I was actually here just 30 minutes before it happened and I'm just thinking back if I chose to go to Shoppers like I usually do or die chose a different path then I could have been here when it happens. The streets I feel are pretty safe. I honestly think that they should just maintain what they've been doing.

AMT: Well since the attack concrete barricades have gone up kilometres away outside Union Station, Toronto's downtown transit hub. In that same area police used fire trucks and other vehicles to barricade the streets around the Air Canada Centre before Monday night's Maple Leafs playoff game. But those measures are temporary. Urban planners and architects say whatever new permanent measures are put in place. it's important not to undermine what makes a city livable and hospitable. In a moment we'll talk to an architect in New York City who's been working on this issue. But first I'm joined by Jennifer Keesmaat. She is a former chief planner for the City of Toronto and she's with me in our Toronto studio. Hi.

JENNIFER KEESMAAT: Good morning.

AMT: What's been going through your mind since that Monday attack?

JENNIFER KEESMAAT: Well I was stunned and heartbroken. This wasn't something that of course you ever imagine. And ironically I've had many instances where I've been sitting at a Raptors game or been sitting at a Blue Jays game and I look around at all the people in the stadium and I actually have little panic attacks. How will people get out a crisis in that kind of an environment is something that I've worried about much more, from a from a public space in a public planning perspective. This is not something I had ever imagined in our city, something this intentional but also this random. I think Chief Saunders called this - he used the word deliberate - deliberately mowing down people on the streets. On the other hand pedestrian safety has been top of mind for many years in this city. We've been facing a crisis of cyclists and people on our sidewalks getting hit by cars. So on the flip side it is something that has been top of mind that we do not have good separation, that we need better separation. We created complete streets guidelines. We've been trying to redesign the streets precisely because we know we need more separation and that we can do that in an elegant way. Because of that, on the flip side I had the opposite reaction which is this is precisely what we've been seeking to mitigate against, is the mixing up of traffic with vulnerable people, with vulnerable road users like pedestrians, like cyclists.

AMT: That's a good point because obviously in this case this is seen as deliberate there are murder charges but pedestrians are vulnerable in a city like Toronto. In the local news there's often someone reading out this many pedestrians killed just because of the traffic. So that's always been a consideration. So how safe is the city from these kinds of attacks when we're talking about again not that pedestrian or cyclist kind of level.

JENNIFER KEESMAAT: From this type of attack, if we if we think about and talk about this as an attack as something that's deliberate, this is not something that I think is a concern that we need to have as a city moving forward. I think this isn't a random criminal act as opposed to something that was strategic. So I think we need to - and of course further details will unfold over the coming days. But we know we have a very disturbed individual who chose to do this for whatever reason. We will probably learn some of that thinking whether we want to or not. But I think in general this isn't something that is a widespread risk. It's not something that is inherent in the character of the city. It is random and it is criminal and it needs to be treated in that way. On the flip side we do in fact need to focus on keeping pedestrians and cyclists safer in this city. And we know how to do that through road design. We've done it on St. George. We've done it on Bloor Street. We've done it in some places on the Martin Goodman trail but we need to do it better in those areas where we have young people cycling.

AMT: So in the city planning department if there are discussions now, does that discussion about keeping people safer on roadways. Does it shift given what we've just seen?

JENNIFER KEESMAAT: I think it's inevitable that it does shift. It has shifted for me in the past 48 hours. I've been- I honestly can say stunned and it has reshaped the way I've been thinking about some of our work and in fact I've long been a proponent of street side parking as a way of providing a buffer between cyclists and pedestrians. And in fact when my kids were little I did not hesitate. I always looked to the side of the street where the street side parking was and I walked with my stroller and my children on the side of the street where there were cars parked, because it acted as a natural barrier and it made a safer pedestrian environment. But recently we've been looking at taking out that street side parking because we don't need a lot of it and also because we're trying to reclaim more of the street for cyclists.

AMT: Interesting.

JENNIFER KEESMAAT: And so we've been thinking it out recently and now the thought that's running through my head is 'hold on a minute'. In the short term at least maybe we should be putting more of that street side parking on the streets protecting the bike lane as well as protecting the pedestrian realm, not just from a random criminal act but to keep pedestrians and cyclists more generally safer.

AMT: Okay well hold that thought. I want to bring someone else into the conversation. Claire Weisz is an architect and principal in charge of the New York design firm WXY. She looks at how architecture and urban design can address safety and security. She's in New York City. Hello.

CLAIRE WEISZ: Good morning. Hello.

AMT: Now we were talking to you in New York, of course New Yorkers were attacked in a similar fashion than to what happened in Toronto. What was it last October when the driver of a rental truck drove down a busy bicycle path, eight people were killed?

CLAIRE WEISZ: Yes, absolutely.

AMT: Clearly something changed there with design out there did it not?

CLAIRE WEISZ: New York had some horrifying attacks and many of you know the details. But I would say when there was this act in a bicycle lane it was because the vehicle was able to get into the bicycle lane. And I think that and the incident in Times Square woke up many both in the city and in the design community about what protection might be, especially with bollards. Now we in New York City we use this term called Vision Zero which means even one death is too much. And I think this gets to what Jennifer was talking about which is every day protecting cyclists and pedestrians.

AMT: And so how were bollards used?

CLAIRE WEISZ: So there were no bollards in that incident. So because there are areas where every bike lane a maintenance vehicle has to get in and really those points are vulnerable for a vehicle that isn't intended to be in a bike lane to go in. I mean the gold standard is separating bicyclists from pedestrians, pedestrians from cars, cars and bicyclists. So separated bike lanes are kind of safe zones for people and therefore it was incredibly disturbing to see these deaths happen and to see these injuries happen. So since then bollards have gone up immediately though jersey barriers went up. And what they did is the jersey barriers caused havoc in their own way because cyclists couldn't move around the jersey barriers.

AMT: What is a jersey barrier?

CLAIRE WEISZ: So jersey barriers is those big concrete shapes forms that you see put up I think Toronto, I heard around Union Station. They're put up to prevent cars from going off the bridge or going off an edge.

AMT: This is done of course after the fact all these things come out. You've spoken about that, that everyone works sort of like looking behind them as opposed to ahead of them.

CLAIRE WEISZ: Yes I think that's the opportunity of looking at cities as being responsible for their walkers and cyclists is you get to look ahead a little bit to a city where cars are not the only priority and the hope is that that's going to have another way of making a city safe that will benefit people when accidents happen. Because if we just look back what happens is you put a big giant Band-Aid potentially on something and you lose the vitality that place. People start avoiding the place and then pretty soon it's not the city that you want it to be.

CLAIRE WEISZ: So it was reported that some bollards kept a vehicle attack in Times Square last year from being worse than it was. How have they affected the livability of that space?

CLAIRE WEISZ: Well I think it's really worth noting that Times Square was redone, not only with walkability and the craziness that is Times Square in mind, but also with security. That work was done hand in hand. There's a giant events, New Year's, every year that has to be planned for. Smaller events are planned for knowing that horrible things can happen. And those bollards are specifically designed to hold back not only cars but actually trucks of a certain size. So that car that end up being impaled on a couple of bollards, it could only go a certain distance into 42 Street. So it prevented unnecessary further injuries.

AMT: And Jennifer Keesmaat, I want to bring you back into this conversation. When we're talking about the design of streets for pedestrians and cyclists and cars, how much to speed the ability to go fast?

JENNIFER KEESMAAT: So speed is a really important part of this and an important part of this conversation. And we know there's excellent research and data on the impact of speed and pedestrians getting hit, but also pedestrians being able to get away. The Globe has a very powerful story where they walk through the trajectory of what happened and what was interesting was that people were trying to get out of the way and a lot of people of course didn't have time to get out of the way. The slower the vehicle is going the easier it is to notice the disruption and to move out of the way. But also the slower the vehicle is going the less likely that the injuries will be traumatic. This is very well documented. It's a critical part of the Vision Zero mandate is to reduce speeds in cities. So from my perspective if we really care about pedestrian safety we need to link together this concern about speed with the separation that we provide for pedestrians and cyclists. Put those two things together and what emerges very quickly is that the places we should be most concerned about in our city are the spaces where there is a high volume of pedestrians, little separation and cars going fast. Those three things are really where the risk is elevated and those are three things that you see in North Yonge, a highway like condition with a high volume of pedestrians and no separation. Union Station, well, cars don't go fast in front of Union Station. It's a completely different type of environment. It's a very urban environment. It doesn't in any way pose the same type of dynamic although for other reasons it might pose other kinds of risks.

AMT: I want to bring a third guest into this conversation. Alan Bell is with us and he's listening in. He's a former member of the British military's Special Forces. He consults businesses around the world on security. He's the president of Globe Risk International. Welcome.

ALAN BELL: Thank you.

AMT: And so as you listen to our other two guests here how do you think cities should be trying to balance livability and security?

ALAN BELL: Well they've got to balance. When I see some of the countries I work in, they go the opposite way. You have roadblocks every hundred meters you have chicanes to keep the speed down because speed is vital to this as has already been mentioned. And if you can control the speed of the vehicles the damage is usually less than the injuries will be less. But you can't do that in a vibrant city which has got these big artery roads going everywhere because pedestrians hate the bikers, the bikers hate the pedestrians and everyone hates the vehicles. So the planners have got a major job on the plate trying to blend these people together to live in peaceful coexistence. But at the end of the day this was a one off event. And we shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction. In Canada for some reason we knee jerk reaction every time something happens. They ruined 150 celebrations on the Hill in Ottawa, purely because they overreacted. They didn't plenty properly and people walked away. So it ruined everybody's day because we put too much security in place which wasn't needed. I mean they blocked all the roads with big dump trucks and everything else. It was a dog's breakfast.

AMT: So if you have kind of like a fortress that doesn't work either.

ALAN BELL: That's right. But it gives people a wrong false perception. The perception we've got now and everyone got off their trains this morning was 'Oh there is no problem'. So they are worried. And what will usually happen in about a week's time, or even shorter, those bodies will go back to the warehouse where they all stowed and we've got them stored all over Toronto for these types of events. And when we don't have the barriers we'll bring in fire trucks, we will bring in dump trucks, we will bring in construction trucks. The thing is we have to do. We , can plan for everything but what we have to do we have to have an infrastructure in place to be able to respond to these type of events whether it's a criminal act or it's a terrorist attack. You can't differentiate if people are going to be killed using a vehicle. You've got to have all these things already preplanned in advance otherwise everyone's running around making phone calls. It does not happen.

AMT: And yet like to have an infrastructure in place to respond. But are there things we can do and lessons we can learn, Claire, to have things in place to anticipate.

CLAIRE WEISZ: Absolutely. First of all this idea of speed you can put up the kinds of roads you can. You know one example I like to cite is that the best move New York made was to move the parked cars away from the sidewalk to allow for a bike lane. So you have a sidewalk, you have a bike lane and then you have park cars and then you have moving vehicles. And that that really gives more room for regular day and more protection for when an accident or an incident happens. You have those cars there and you have a bike lane. So it wasn't just the parked cars but really the extra space. So it kind of gets to the fact that we have to really evaluate whether fast moving traffic in certain places is really a priority right now. 15 miles an hour is the new speed limit in New York in many areas and seems to be working.

AMT: Jennifer Keesmaat, can Toronto see that or would drivers complain?

JENNIFER KEESMAAT: Well you know this is about our priorities what do we care about most which is really what democracy is about. So there might be some complaining but you know I'm thrilled to hear those examples from New York because they aligned very much with what we've been seeking to do on the planning in Toronto. We've had a very watered down version of Vision Zero in this city and maybe this is a wake-up call that if we are going to be an urban place that moving cars quickly cannot be the key priority that we have to shift our priorities and keeping people safe needs to come first.

AMT: We're almost out of time. Alan Bell. Do you think Canada will see more of these attacks? Do other cities have to be aware?

ALAN BELL: You can't prejudge that because this was probably an attack by an individual who was unstable. We haven't had a major terrorist attack per se. New York's had a few. So therefore they're better prepared because that drives the process and the government particularly to do something about it when a lot of people get injured or killed and there's damage etc. and I don't think we're there yet in Canada. I think you know we were playing with this we're trying to appease everybody which is democracy again but at the end of the day we have to have an infrastructure in place capable of responding to all these types of events whether it's a criminal attack or whether it's a terrorist attack.

AMT: We have to leave it there. Thank you all of you for being part of this discussion.

ALAN BELL: Thank you.

AMT: That is Jennifer Keesmaat former chief planner for the City of Toronto. Claire Weisz architect and principal in charge of the design firm W X Y in New York and Alan Bell president of Globe Risk International, also in Toronto Stay with us. The news is next and then we're back, cycling on the Silk Road. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

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How a hunger for a wider world led Kate Harris to cycle the Silk Road

Guest: Kate Harris

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come.

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They have created this shortage of women by eliminating their own girls, children and women.

AMT: The distressing story of why so many Indian men are facing the loneliness of lives without women. But first a Canadian woman bikes through history along the legendary Silk Road.

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Why bike the Silk Road? Because it's there, sort of, in a historical and metaphorical sense. Because I wanted to seek out the world's wildness and plumb my own in the process.

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AMT: The allure of the Silk Road has drawn traders travellers and explorers for centuries and it continues to do so. In 2006 and then again in 2011,` Kate Harris and her friend Melissa Yule biked thousands of kilometres along the ancient trading route from Turkey, through Central Asia, China's Tibetan autonomous region and into the soaring heights of Nepal and northern India. Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road is Kate Harris's new book chronicling that journey. She's been named one of Canada's Top Ten adventurers. She was a Rhodes scholar whose academic career was mostly dedicated to studying science. She spent years studying space and at one point was selected to participate in a simulated Mars mission in Utah. Kate Harris joins me from Victoria B.C. Hello.

KATE HARRIS: Hello.

AMT: You know I just called it an ancient trading route but the Silk Road is so much more than that in people's imagination. How do you describe it?

KATE HARRIS: Yes I mean it really is a stretch of imagination more than anything. You know people didn't even have a word for it as the Silk Road back when it was in its heyday, and it was sort of a historical term applied in retrospect. But really I mean it's the world's oldest superhighway. It's where globalisation first began to happen and is still happening today. And of course you know explorers like Marco Polo are sort of romantically associated with it and it was his account that that made us aware of this vast trading network.

AMT: Part of what drew you to the Silk Road was the sea Siachen glacier. What is it about that glacier you find so compelling?

KATE HARRIS: Yes so this is kind of the world's highest altitude battlefield and that's what compelled me to it initially, the fact that it was one of the most stunning wildernesses as recorded by early explorers nestled in the Himalaya Mountains where the Karakorum in the Himalayan ranges meet in what is now northern India in northern Pakistan. But the glacier became this war zone when India and Pakistan couldn't figure out who actually owned it after partition, sort of an example of this staggering heights of human absurdity you know warring over what is essentially a useless space other than to science into mountaineering. And it just struck me as a example of how bizarre our borders are and our struggles over borders are what we do to wildness in the world in the process of asserting these borders.

AMT: We'll talk more about that glacier later. But why did you want to travel that road by bike?

KATE HARRIS: As a kid I wanted to be an explorer. I grew up sort of idolising Marco Polo and Shackle ton you know these of just slog long distances and then write about it after that that seemed like living the dream to me. And as I got older you know I realised a lot of the more romanticised accounts of explorers really did not touch at all on sort of the repercussions of their explorations, you know the colonial implications. I mean history of exploration is all about naming and claiming and seizing control and Marco Polo I saw him as the epitome of a sort of romantic explorer like driven by curiosity and wonder. And as I got older I realise he was mostly a merchant. I mean he was he was a traitor. That's how he travelled the Silk Road. That's why he was drawn to the Silk Road.

AMT: He was looking for stuff that he could sell.

[Laughter]

KATE HARRIS: Stuff to sell. Yes. And you know all the places he disdained along the Silk Road were what drew me to it. You know the mountains and deserts that were for him just barriers to swift profit and progress.

AMT: And I get a lot of that. But on a bicycle? Like that's a lot of work.

KATE HARRIS: Well I had no experience with camels or caravans so the historic modes of travel and the Silk Road seemed a bit out of reach. But bicycles, you can go you can go anywhere and they're fuelled by you.

AMT: What does that require in terms of sheer stamina?

KATE HARRIS: Well I went with my best buddy Mel from childhood days. You can't really train to bike all day every day for almost a year on and you really have to just set off and do it. So we start to super slowly and just built up distances as our legs could handle.

AMT: .And you did it in chunks so where did the journey begin?

AMT: Well we had one initial trip on the Silk Road that was sort of a summer vacation in a way. We had just finished university. We had four months at her disposal and we decided to retrace Marco Polo's travels through western China. And in the process we snuck through Tibet without permission from the Chinese authorities. And that's really what sparked my interest in borders. And we love that journey so much that we vowed that someday the two of us would finish the whole Silk Road. And so on the second trip we started in Istanbul and Turkey and biked back to Tibet and then on to the glacier.

AMT: And what stood out to you about Turkey and the Black Sea?

KATE HARRIS: Well it was where Marco Polo set off purportedly. So we wanted to kind of as much as possible follow in his footsteps, and Istanbul as a bridge between continents Asia Minor and Europe are the two banks of the Bosphorus which is the strait that divides Istanbul. So it just felt like a fitting place to sort of step out of Europe and step into the beginning of Asia and set off.

AMT: It starts with that allure right and it just keeps on going. Let's talk about Central Asia because it's a somewhat enigmatic part of the world we don't hear much about the places like, what you call them The Stans, such as Tajikistan Kyrgyzstan. What did you learn about Central Asia by biking through The Stans?

KATE HARRIS: Well they don't make it easy for you to visit. That's for sure. Which is which is part of the appeal. These are places still very much off the beaten path. There are places that are still themselves and they're not trying to present a version of themselves to you as the tourist. So that was always compelling. And they're also very young nations. You know they were all part of the former Soviet Union which broke apart and in our lifetime I was really curious how you know identities are forming in the wake of that. You know these were countries almost invented whole cloth and where the borders were drawn between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan do not reflect ethnic identities. So yes all of that and then you know the allure of deserts and the fabled Oxus River and then these training camps in places like Samarkand and Mukura these- Just the names evoke romance and wonder and the cities really do that justice. They're incredible. You know the mosques and domes and madrassas, turquoise tiles everywhere. It's just credible that these places exist.

AMT: You write that travel is one part geography and nine parts imagination.

KATE HARRIS: Yes well I grew up you know longing to see the world. I was you know full of Wanderlust from a really young age for whatever reason. But the way I could travel was through words, through books you know my parents we never went abroad. You know we did car camping vacations and Ontario provincial parks growing up and I was just hungry for the wider world and I got there through books which means you know I was traveling just on my mind, my imagination. And in some ways that's the most vivid way to travel. A lot of actual travels filled with sort of transport and dailiness and logistics and when you read a book you get someone sort of compressed journey you know the most powerful moments, the epiphanies along the way, the wonder and the heartbreak both but sort of everything else. The miles between excised. So yeah I love travelling in the world and I love maybe even more coming home and re-travelling the same places through words and trying to get the experience down on the page.

AMT: And we get a glimpse of all of that. Like the days when you're covered in sunscreen and your clothes are a mess and people are waiting at you and you're done with all those people waving at you just like you got to keep on peddling. I was with you. And it was painful sometimes. But there's a beautiful photo on the cover of your book. It's a lot of sky, a lot of stars and two bicycles and silhouette on one person. What are we looking at? Where were you?

KATE HARRIS: Yes that was in Uzbekistan and we took to riding by night because it was so hot in the desert by day. And so we would sleep or try to sleep during the day in our tent just kind of melting and then we'd get up at dusk and get on our bikes and set off. And there were so many stars. There's just nothing. We were on the Stuart Plateau in Western Uzbekistan and there's very little infrastructure. Villages are few and far between and so the stars were just incredible and the horizon is so flat in all directions that they came right down to earth. It really felt like a form of space travel. We were biking through the stars and in a way I came to know Pakistan and more by its constellations than any sort of landmarks lit up by day.

AMT: Well you do write about the magic of that place. Can you read an excerpt from the book from your time in Uzbekistan?

KATE HARRIS: Yes during those night rides across Uzbekistan I felt like a message in a bottle myself. I tried to make it out but all I could read was the thin scroll of road lit by my headlamp. Something about potholes about grass shooting up in the pavement cracks, something about how there are places you can get to by road and places you can only get to by being on the road. A state of mind you can bring to almost any contacts especially a highway paved and stars in Uzbekistan at least until you're so sleepy you nearly fall off your bike.

AMT: You write that his breakfast stand had a similar effect on you that of being on the moon, for Neil Armstrong.

KATE HARRIS: Yes, well Armstrong sort of famously when he came back from the moon - someone pointed at the moon one day and the sky was like does that make you feel really big, the fact that you walk there. And he said no it made me feel really really small and he could blur out the earth from the moon with his thumb. And you know you don't have to go to the moon to realise how fragile and precious this planet is in the scheme of the cosmos. I mean what we have here on earth is basically the best thing going in the universe. It's the only home we have the only home we need. And I think a bike trip or any kind of travel where you see the world from a different angle than you're used to. You get a different perspective whether that's from a spaceship orbiting the earth or a bicycle in Uzbekistan. You just get a sense of that fragility and how we're all in this together. We're all complicit. We're all connected. This is our shared home.

AMT: It's interesting how you link travel and space exploration because you had a real obsession with Mars.

KATE HARRIS: I really I looked around small town Ontario and figured the age of Exploration was was over except in outer space. You know I saw fences and subdivisions and it didn't seem like the vistas available to Marco Polo were still around. And so I became obsessed with going to space. I really seriously set my sights on Mars and you know emigrating there one day like colonising our neighbouring planet. And not just not just to be the first person on Mars to plant flags and leave footprints but I loved the notion that Mars was once a more Earth like planet, scientists think and you know maybe harboured life at one point or maybe still does. I've always been fascinated by this question of you know are we alone in the universe? Are we like Soul incarnation of of life? Which seems pretty unlikely given how huge the universe is and the idea that Mars could offer some insight into that question was was thrilling to me as a kid and still is thrilling.

AMT: So you set off from Mars and you end up on the Silk Road.

KATE HARRIS: Yes. I mean ultimately when I was on this scientific path I have the fiercest admiration for scientists and what they do in laboratories and that large on a daily basis. But I really found I lacked the patience and diligence to just- you know there's this sort of glamour of science and what it reveals and the ideas it unleashes in the world. Then there's the daily reality of time locked in a laboratory and I just felt a big disconnect between those two. And just frankly it wasn't very good at it. It wasn't good at research. I was too much of a dreamer. Yes and for me what I got out of the Silk Road was so much of what I was seeking in going to Mars. You know you don't have to go to a new world to feel like you've entered a new world.

AMT: D and I want to ask you a little bit more about that because toward the end of your book you write 'It wasn't a different world. I craved any more so much as this world done differently, done better for everyone'. How did your time in the Tibet Autonomy's Region of China influence that perspective?

KATE HARRIS: Biking across Tibet was a pretty heartbreaking endeavour. And we did it twice. So on these two different trips and the first time around in 2006 the sort of Chinese rule over Tibet was fairly relaxed. We could travel there without being bothered even though it wasn't completely legal. And Tibetan culture still seemed from what we could tell pretty alive and well and given freedom of expression. And then the Beijing Olympics really things clamped down in the lead up to that and in the aftermath of that to the point where when we return to Tibet five years later there weren't just checkpoints marking the boundaries of the autonomous region as a whole. But the boundaries of every single village we passed through and on the road to Lhasa, the highway to Lhasa, we were passed by for hours military convoys lasting hours and every Tibetan home has a Chinese flag flapping from it which you know is survival. You know it's a matter of survival for these people. So it was really really heartbreaking and I felt like I was a tourist in an oppressed regime and that felt terrible to you know the fact that Mel and I could just scoot through on our bikes and leave. And this is a place that the year we biked through I believe 11 monks or nuns in Tibet self-immolated. Like they set themselves on fire to protest what is happening there under Chinese rule. So yes very heartbreaking journey and I widening trip compared to the sense of wonder that we felt in the Plateau the first time around and then this was much more of the sort of horror of the world. And you're doing all this with your best friend. What's it like to share such a long and intense journey with someone else like that. What was it like for the two of you. I'm glad for so many reasons I wasn't alone and high among them is having someone in the world that knows what we went through. You know what I went through, what she went through, we were almost like sisters at this point and have just shared so many phases of life. It is kind of a miracle we're still friends after being stuck together in a tent for a year.

[Laughter]

AMT: And it's a kind of a miracle you're still alive to after some of the stuff you did.

KATE HARRIS: Well. I mean she deserves- I don't know if it's credit or blame but she's the trailblazer. I mean there are a few times where I would have backed down that checkpoints and Mel led the way and so I just had to follow.

AMT: Yes like literally crawling under that checkpoint thing like getting rid of all the lights and kind of sneaking across borders in places where people go to jail for that.

KATE HARRIS: Yes.

AMT: I want to ask you about that because travelling the Silk Road meant crossing so many many borders and sneaking across some, how have your travels affected the way you look at maps?

KATE HARRIS: Oh I definitely see maps as very sort of contingent on the maker of the map, and this hit home so many times long Silk Road in contested territories where different countries have different ideas about who owns what. And you know maps are really just stories. They are fictions that we all believe in and abide by the rules for a certain period of time. But if there's any less in the Silk Road hits home it's history and it's that countries are temporary these sort of empires flare up and fade away. And what we think is permanent is really just flux on a slow timescale.

AMT: And I guess you saw that again as some of these former Soviet republics because the people who lived there hadn't changed. They still had the culture that they had had for centuries.

KATE HARRIS: That's right yes. And you know there are a bunch of ethnic Tajiks living in Uzbekistan and they've lived there their families go back many generations and yet suddenly they're Uzbek citizens. So you just see how arbitrary it is how you know there just the rules we have to live by. But that doesn't mean you have to believe in them I guess.

AMT: You know it's interesting you were you were propelled by originally by this this idea of Mars and then you're propelled by this idea of this immense glacier, the Siachen. But what did you learn in the end about travelling?

KATE HARRIS: Well it's interesting I think so much of when I was younger in wanting to be an explorer and feeling like that wasn't a viable career option, anymore on this planet. I was thinking you really you had to be like precedent mattered. You had to be the first there to be the first to figure something out. But if anything- I mean Marco Polo himself you know all he did was travel to lands that were new to him but they were old to everyone who lived along the way. And then he wrote about what he saw. And for me that's the value of travel that's the view of exploration. It's not that you need to be doing something novel or ground-breaking. It's really about expanding your consciousness and your sense of connection with the planet and maybe having a widening neighbourhood that you consider home until maybe it compasses the whole world. So for me that's what I love and travel. That's why I love reading is getting to experience other lives and other worlds for a time and seeing how they're not so different from you and your own world.

AMT: You also seem to be on a constant search for wild places. Why?

KATE HARRIS: I don't know what it is about landscapes and places in which people aren't a huge presence. Maybe it's sort of a reassuring sense of our smallness in the scheme of things which actually perversely makes you feel more precious insignificant. You know when you're a very small being in a very large desert you weirdly get insight not into the desert but into what it means to be human. And I love that sense of smallness. I think that's what I really seek out and in going to "wild" places. But I also think wildness; it's kind of a loaded term. You know we call a lot of places wild where people have been for a long time. And I actually think that's a beautiful expansion of the term. It doesn't have to exclude people. It doesn't have to exclude civilisation or cities even. Gary Snyder the poet and writer he talks about wildness as a process less than a finished state or finished place. And I love that notion. You know in that way we're all wild. We're all living our own stories and adventures and becoming who we are and maybe landscapes that are sort of dictionary definition wild remind us of that.

AMT: That's an interesting way to look at it. What's your life like now?

KATE HARRIS: Well daily life is a bit of an adventure. I live in a tiny cabin with my partner and my dog in northern B.C. on the edge of Alaska and the Yukon. And we live off grid in a space that probably makes the International Space Station look luxurious in terms of size and in a way it's a little bit like living in a spaceship. You know you have to be very aware of like energy coming in to the solar panels and energy you're using up and water coming in water going out. And I just love daily life there. It really feels like an adventure no matter what. We look out on the landscape that there aren't many signs of people. I can see kind of a radio tower in the distance and that's it. Otherwise it's forest and mountains and moose and lynx and I love that daily reminder of that small size talking about it and that wildness. ?

KATE HARRIS: You're not that far from the Juneau ice field are you. That's right yeah. Which is how I initially came to this place. The town I live in is called Atlan. And as a wide eyed undergrad who barely skied before I signed up for this glaciology field course called the Juneau Ice Field research Program which is still running. It's amazing. And you ski from Juneau Alaska to at NBC over about eight weeks. I've never been out west in Canada. I'd never seen a mountain in Canada and Atlan just struck me as the most beautiful place I'd seen in the world and I'd seen a bit of the world at that point. And I kind of vowed that someday I would move there and live in a cabin Thoreau style.

AMT: It's so interesting because you set off on the Silk Road inspired by the Siachen glacier and now you live by another glacier and you've kind of found a place to be home.

KATE HARRIS: Yes that was one of the things that struck me on the Silk Road is you know I had been obsessed with this glacier. I had very little connection with actually other than through what I'd read in northern India and northern Pakistan when there are similar landscapes right here at home in Canada and there similarly vulnerable. You know they might not be the world's highest garbage dump because of armies living up there but the atmosphere, the global climate is impacting Siachen as much as the Juneau Ice Field. It's another reminder of how small and connected the world is.

AMT: Well it is a great journey that you share in this book. Thank you for taking us along.

KATE HARRIS: Thanks so much Anna Maria. Thanks for your interest.

AMT: Kate Harris chronicles her excellent adventure in the book lands of Lost Borders: Out ofBbounds on the Silk Road. And she joins us from Victoria B.C. Let us know what you think of her excellent adventure. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us in our next half hour the awful truth about why there are so many more men than women in India and the wide ranging consequences for everyone. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM Online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Is India's gender imbalance to blame for rise in violence against women?

Guest: Ravinder Kaur, Ruchira Gupta

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to the Current.

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Let me explain it in the Bollywood manner because I like Bollywood movies. So I would still call the way a woman finds a man and calls him 'Supnoahrajgonam'. So the dream boy. The dream girl. So in that way I would go that I'm still unable to find a dream woman for me. I don't know the reasons but it be the reasons but it may- The reasons can be many but I don't know the reason. But I'm still unable to find my dream woman.

AMT: Well in some parts of India the reasons for not finding what some call their dream woman or any woman has to do with romance rather than numbers. India's last census in 2011 found that there are 37 million more males than females in a population of about one point three billion. One explanation is the decades long use of sex selection technology on fetuses in a culture that prefers boys over girls. But the reasons are even more complex. The situation is similar to China's where that country's one child policy skewed the male female ratio. While China is trending away from that disparity, India is poised to have an even greater gender imbalance and that is having an unexpected impact. The Hooda family from northern India in the state of Haryana spoke with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about how difficult it is for their eldest son to marry.

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VOICE 1: Three of my sons can still get married but the eldest one, it's going to be impossible to find a wife for him.

VOICE 2: I never thought it would be this difficult for us to get married.

VOICE 3: My cousin told me that one of his relatives was looking for someone to marry their daughter and were in talks with other families. I reached a place that very night and got married.

VOICE 3: My sons may well remain bachelors throughout their life. They don't have a choice. I don't think there is any solution for this problem.

AMT: Well the implications for that demographic divide in India are far reaching. Ravinder Kaur is the author of Too Many Men too Few Women: Social Consequences of Gender Imbalance in India and China. Ravinder Carr is a professor of sociology and social anthropology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. She's also a visiting scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. And we've reached her in Philadelphia. Hello.

RAVINDER KAUR: Hello.

AMT: What's causing that skewed sex ratio?

RAVINDER KAUR: It's two things mainly that three decades or more now of sex selective abortions of female fetuses. But it is also excess female mortality meaning that poor girls survive after their birth, let's say up to age five. So we have the pre-birth elimination of daughters and we also have post-birth elimination of daughters. When you put the two together then there's a very high number of missing girl children or missing daughters. So in the past we used to have missing women which meant that an older woman could also die from maternal mortality or ill health not being treated. But that has changed because female life expectancy in India is now higher than that of men as in most other parts of the world. But when it comes to girls that has not changed and in fact it has worsened because of the availability of sex selective technologies.

AMT: Well let's talk a little bit more about this. Sex selective technologies. Weren't they - a lot of them - outlawed in India?

RAVINDER KAUR: Yes 1994. The Indian government brought in a law to ban sex determination. You know it all started with something called amniocentesis by which you know people could detect fetal abnormalities such as Down's Syndrome etc. But then people realised that they would but they were also able to tell the sex of the child. So that became popular to use to eliminate female fetuses as India was also bothered about its large population. And even the medical community at that point Park said this might be a good solution not to have unwanted baby girls. But that was an expensive and invasive technology and very soon they realised that they could do the same with ultrasound. Ultrasound is cheap. It is not invasive and it's you know can be used by read your letters, doesn't have to be a gynaecologist and obstetrician, so they just do the test. It's gone under cover now since it was banned in 1994-1996 when it came into effect. And so it's still pretty rampant from what I understand. There are penalties for doctors, if they're caught, but it's very difficult to get people because there is collusion between the seeker of the service and the provider of the service. Many families and couples do not want to have more than one girl child. Some of them don't want to have even a single girl child and they'll go to any extent that they can to shape their family, as a small family, but with more sons.

AMT: So what you're telling me is that very legitimate medical technology used to determine the health of a fetus is being used- What you're really talking about is a cultural view that the girl is somehow lesser than. That's the real issue right. The technologies, what they use, that's the issue?

RAVINDER KAUR: Yes and the technology has made it easier here. This was done to female infanticide, [unintelligible] neglect the early stages in infancy. But that's something that people don't approve of anymore, in terms of infanticide. But sex determination somehow looks more than scientific and rational. We all are not having a large family and yet having the sons that you want. And you're absolutely right that even now for different reasons than in the past, girls are considered a liability, while boys are considered an asset. So families feel they absolutely must have sons for various reasons. One is the perpetuity of the family and the lineage because we have in the parts of India where the sex ratio is bad. We have patrilineal systems of inheritance and [unintelligible]. So the name of the of the family travels to the sons and the sons continue to live that their parents up to marriage and there is expectation that the sons will look after their parents in old age. They'll take a family affair. They'll help with family mobility. So while the girls are raised by parents, but they go over to the homes of their husbands. So they're seen, you know the boys are seen as a plus plus plus plus, let's see. And the girls are seen as someone you invested in but are no returns from that particular child.

AMT: And you're talking I guess a traditional society. I'm wondering if you look at the numbers, India is a very big country. It's a modern country. Are these issues everywhere in the country or do you see them in pockets? There must be parts of the country where it's not as pronounced.

RAVINDER KAUR: Yes absolutely. You're absolutely right. This phenomenon is more prevalent in the north and north western states of the country. Let us say Haryana, the one that you know the person most often from, Punjab, Delhi which is the capital but which also has a bad sex ratio. Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh in the east, Madhya Pradesh in the central parts of India. And there are some pockets in the south in Tamil Nadu. But overall the south is much better. Some of them also have what we call matrilineal systems where inheritance might be in the female line but those are few and far between. Yet you know in the south there might be my mild son preference but they do not take action on it in the way that they do in the north. So it's mostly the north and the north western states and they have had this gender imbalance. It has been documented for over a century but it's taken a new turn from the 1980s onward. Then the child fixed ratios started falling deteriorating very steeply and so the daughter aversion. You know it's not simply some preference but the daughters are unwelcome for various reasons, some of them I mentioned. But it's home to that you know the newer political economies, the new economy. As you said India is a modern nation. So there are women willing to work. There are women in politics. The gender gap in education is almost closing. So there are going to be even more women who are educated and yet we have still- in a difficult employment market - we have more women being withdrawn from work. Recently there has been a huge decline again in the number of women in the workforce and people have been trying to understand why should that be happening when more women are more educated and capable. But you know the point about the fact that parents don't see women as contributing anything to their own natal parental families still stands, because they marry and they go away and they know that all the expectations are from the son.

AMT: So let me ask you. We heard that clip of some men lamenting that they could not find women to marry. Then what are the consequences of that, for men looking for partners?

RAVINDER KAUR: There are bad consequences, I would say negative consequences for the men and for the women. For the women because they will be in higher demand but that demand does not give them power and autonomy etc. In fact they are being looked at as people who can provide very productive and productive services who can have children to continue the families of men etc. And we do have an incidence of trafficking, bride trafficking, bride buying. We do have abduction of women for marriage because there's a desperate situation in the States of [unintelligible], Punjab and parts of Uttar Pradesh. Marriage is considered that is almost compulsory and normative. Neither men or women can have let us say adult life without being married. There is no cohabitation allowed prior to marriage. So marriage is an important social institution in the country and most people expect to get married and do get married. So when you suddenly have a huge shortage of women it translates into a huge shortage of brides.

AMT: So let me let me ask you just because we're going to run out of time. Just briefly then is the Indian government is trying to kind of address this?

RAVINDER KAUR: The Indian government has tried to address the whole issue of sex selective abortion by banning sex determination test. It's also trying to address the other end of the problem meaning the value of the girl children. So it's come up with various sorts of girl child policies but it also understand that those can only be you know a stopgap kind of an arrangement. What you really need to address is fundamental issues of gender inequality. And that it is trying to do it through changing inheritance laws so women can inherited from parents as well as sons inherit, which will enable them then to you know offer the old age support and any kind of support that the parents might need. So it is long term social process. People are not ready to accept that they will pass on their property three daughters and not to sons.

AMT: But it's interesting because what you're pointing out is that through legislation you can actually make cultural change and elevate the role of women.

RAVINDER KAUR: There's a very big media campaign also which is you know trying to do the same and it's called [Indian speech] Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter. So the government also understands that education is the key you know and economic empowerment is the key. But when the economy has to cooperate on that front.

AMT: Ravinder Kaur we have to leave it there but thank you for your insights.

RAVINDER KAUR: Thank you. Thank you.

AMT: Bye bye. That is Ravinder Kaur she's the author of Too Many Men, Too Few Women: Social Consequences of Gender Imbalance in India and China. We reached her in Philadelphia. She is a visiting scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I know my husband is much older. But then we were so poor there was not enough food not enough for simple clothing. Here we eat. We have everything.

VOICE 2: We didn't have a refrigerator, cooler, fans or television.

AMT: Well for some women, such as the ones you're hearing in that clip there, that's from a PBS documentary, marriage to men in distant regions of India brought some of them some financial comfort. But many young women who move to other parts of India from their homes to marry end up in abusive situations. Some simply disappear. Their families searched for them unsure of where to turn.

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VOICE 1: There's no use in going to the police. They would simply accuse us of selling our daughter my magic.

VOICE 2: I prayed for my daughter in the mosque and they gave sacrificial offerings and I keep praying so I can find her.

AMT: Ruchira Gupta is the founder of Apne Aap which is an organisation that battles sex trafficking in India. She's also a visiting professor whose work centers on human trafficking as gender based violence at New York University. And she's joining us from New York City. Hello.

RUCHIRA GUPTA: Good morning.

AMT: So this is the other side of this gender imbalance. How is it contributing to the trafficking of girls and women?

RUCHIRA GUPTA: What is happening is that girls from the most poor families who are also low cost forced now to be sexually available for upper class and upper caste men. They are taken away by traffickers to villages in Haryana, Punjab, UP, Rajasthan, exactly the places that Professor Khan said have more men than women. And there, they are made to work like chattel and sex lives for these men. So it has contributed to the increase in sex trafficking of women and girls from one part of India to another part of India.

AMT: I had read that it was also that women - because of the caste system - there were women in lower castes who could actually marry outside of a caste and it could be beneficial but you're saying in fact they're being used as opposed to being helped.

RUCHIRA GUPTA: Yes. In fact it did not beneficial these days because the ruling party in Haryana and in Delhi and nationally the BJP has actually been running a campaign which it calls Love Jihad. And what they are trying to do is stop people from getting across caste lines or religious lines. And they're a actually vigilante groups in these states in northern India who go around killing men or women if they marry people from the opposite caste. And mostly the people who are punished are families of the lower caste girl, the Dalit girl. And the punishment is that her sisters could be raped and she could be murdered. Just recently in January four Dalit girls in four different incidents were found raped and murdered in Haryana, the very state where the gender issue is the most skewed in India.

AMT: So again, and we heard that that clip about kidnappings. How common is that?

RUCHIRA GUPTA: It's common; kidnapping, seduction, trickery, bribing all of it is used by traffickers to take girls from one place to the other and to sell them into sexual slavery and prostitution, because the know there's a market out there. There are men who want to buy very young girls and they are willing to give some money for its. So traffickers see a profit and they go on preaching on what I call the last girl. The last girl is someone who is the most vulnerable human being I know in Indian society. She's that 13 year old in a brothel or that 13 year old in a caste ghetto or slum who is the most marginalised because she is poor, because she's female, because she's low caste and because she's a teenager. Now the intersecting vulnerabilities make her lose control of her access to food, clothing, shelter, education and also job training. And you know because she is devalued in many ways, she is of less value than even her brother who may be sent to school and be given better food. Dr. Kaur spoke about the fact that that girl is likely to be anaemic or stunted and you know may die early. Now one thing that I want to emphasise is that you know we were talking about the son preference in India. And the discrimination against women and girls which has led to this skewed sex ratio, one of the things that I do want to mention is that women and girls are in danger because of the son preference and the devaluing of daughters - daughter devaluation. From the moment they are conceived till the time they die into old age. So a girl could very easily be killed when she's conceived as a female fetus and the [unintelligible] is called after amniocentesis. If it is found that the female fetus she could be killed and that's called feticide. When she is born she could be the victim of something called infanticide because the family doesn't want a child that he might poison her a little bit, and she goes to sleep and then they throw away the baby. Should she survived that she could be the victim of being sold into prostitution when she attains puberty or she could be sold into domestic servitude, where she will also be sexually exploited. Or she could be sold into child marriage and there she could die of maternal mortality because her body is not fully formed and she has to give birth to a child before she has given birth to herself. She's also weaker because she's already malnourished, she's already stunted, she has no job skills.

AMT: Right. So I'm going to stop you there because we get the message. But you are outlining then a culture that totally devalues women and now they're paying for it.

RUCHIRA GUPTA: That's right. They're paying for it and they still don't understand because what this is doing is promoting a very aggressive toxic masculinity which is putting women and girls more in danger. So they can't go out in public spaces. Dr. Carr spoke about the fact that women's participation in the workforce has dropped by 24 percent. And one of the reasons is women are scared to go out in the public because the number of rapes has increased drastically in India. In the last year alone, the rates of children increase by 82 percent of women by 12 percent.

AMT: So what needs to happen? I know you're working with your organisation to help individuals but in terms of the wider picture- we're almost out of time - I need you to talk to me about what you need to see happen with the Indian government.

RUCHIRA GUPTA: The first thing which needs to happen is that the Indian government needs to ban the hate speech which is being targeted at women and girls and especially of women and girls of minority religions like Muslims and of the marginalised castes, like Dalits. So you know their own ministers like the chief minister of Haryana says if a girl wears short clothes she deserves to be raped. Another minister asked his followers to go and dig out the corpses of Muslim women from the graves and rape them. A trade minister went out and rallied outside a police station to protest to stop the police from filing a charge sheet against the eight year old girl who was raped recently in January. So there is impunity for those who rape and who devalue women. Another member of parliament of the BJP has said that women should stay at home and have four children. The rule is already being restricted for women. So first of all the government needs to pass a law banning hate speech which devalues women or targets of violence against women.

AMT: Ruchira Gupta. We have to leave it there but you're awesome. It's very important to hear your voice because you're obviously a woman who is speaking up and trying to speak for these women to try to force change. So thank you for your time today.

RUCHIRA GUPTA: You're welcome.

AMT: Ruchira Gupta she is the founder of Apne Aap. It's an organisation that works against sex trafficking in India. She's a visiting professor right now. She's teaching in the area of human trafficking as gender based violence at New York University. And we found her in New York City today. Let us know what you think of what they are saying. Tweet us we're @TheCurrentCBC find us on Facebook go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. Stay with radio 1 for q. Jill Deacon is the guest host today. This has been a time of grief and disbelief in Toronto with the violent deaths of 10 people, the wounding of 14 others on a warm sunny afternoon where they were just walking down the sidewalk. Scenes of destruction on Toronto's iconic thoroughfare are now hard to forget. Yonge Street is a big part of Toronto and its identity. So we're going to leave you with an ode to the longest street in the world with Gordon Lightfoot and on Yonge Street. I'm Anna Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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[Song: On Yonge Street by Gordon Lightfoot]

See the people walkin' up and down

See the people movin' all around

On the streets of my hometown on Yonge Street

Longest street in the world they say

Summertime soon slips away

I hope I'll see you one fine day on Yonge Street

Everywhere you go in a city by the lake

Back there in the flow you may give a hand a shake

Everyone you pass seems to wanna say hello

Even late at night on the freshly fallen snow

See the children jumpin' all around

See the parents looking up and down

Upon the streets of my hometown on Yonge Street

It's a mean street if you choose

It's a lean street when you lose

An in-between street when you cruise along Yonge Street

Everywhere you go in a city by the lake

You'll be sure and find it's a case of give and take

Everyone you pass seems to want to say hello

Even late at night when the streets are all aglow

It's the longest street in the world

With the most feet in the world

Another street where boy meets girl on Yonge Street

See the people walkin' up and down

See the people movin' all around

Those are the streets of my hometown on Yonge Street

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Wednesday April 25, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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