South Asia Daily

David Coleman Headley and extradition

2012-02-19T05:32:00.001-08:00

No matter how I slice and dice it, I am unable to see how India’s plan to compel the United States to extradite confessed key Mumbai terror plotter David Coleman Headley can succeed.

I am prompted to reexamine the case in light of an Indian court yesterday clearing the country’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) to indict Headley, who is now awaiting sentencing here in Chicago. I have written extensively about the case over the last two and half years since I am in the midst of writing a book about it.

There is no way for New Delhi to compel Washington to extradite Headley, an American citizen, without the attendant diplomatic unpleasantness. I am not sure even after that India will accomplish its goal of making Headley stand trial in the country. I reported the following on December 22 last year for the IANS wire. I am repeating it if only explain again why this is going to be a messy affair.

By Mayank Chhaya,Indo-Asian News Service

Chicago, December 22 (IANS): The decision by India's National Investigation Agency (NIA) to formally file charges against David Coleman Headley is unlikely to be of any material consequence for the convicted key Mumbai terror plotter is lodged in an undisclosed US prison.

Headley's extradition to face charges and stand trial in India was an option that US federal prosecutors had taken off the table as part of a deal in exchange for which he has already pleaded guilty on all 12 counts. He is currently awaiting formal sentencing which is expected to be handed down by a court in the US sometime in spring. Another plea deal condition that won the prosecutors a full guilty plea is that he will be spared the death sentence.

There are next to no prospects of Headley's plea deal being revoked to facilitate his extradition, particularly because he was seen to have met the condition of full cooperation during the trial and helped the prosecutors win the eventual conviction of his childhood friend and fellow accused Tahawwur Hussain Rana.

Although Rana survived conviction in connection with his alleged role in facilitating Headley's travels to Mumbai to scout targets, he was found guilty of helping a plot to attack a Danish newspaper's offices.

While official sources would not publicly comment on whether India can do anything to compel the US government to revoke the non-extradition condition, it is clear that the chances of that happening are practically non-existent.

Although the fact is that Rana was not found guilty of any involvement in the Mumbai terror strike case, something the prosecutors were rather unhappy about, it was hard to lay the blame for that failure solely on Headley. From all indications, Headley did cooperate with the authorities to the extent he was required to but in the end the prosecutors could not convince the jury.

There are no compelling grounds at this stage for the US authorities to renege on the plea deal that spared Headley his worst nightmare scenario of facing Indian investigators in India. While an NIA team did interrogate him in Chicago in June 2010, it was conducted in US controlled conditions and under many ground rules. Headley ought to be aware what it might mean to be lodged in Indian judicial custody and be subjected to interrogation by Indian investigators.

Another factor that may discourage US authorities from considering Headley's extradition may have to do with strong suspicions in India of his possible role as an informer of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) who went rogue. There is no predicting what Headley might tell Indian investigators about his life as a DEA informer in order to talk his way out of tight corners.

On balance, the perception in the US seems to be that the Headley case has run its course with him awaiting sentencing along with Rana. There is no particular interest in sending him to India to face the justice system there.

The death of six US citizens in the Mumbai attacks gave the US prosecutors enough legal leverage to subject him to the law of the land in the US rather than handing him over to India under the extradition treaty between the two countries. In any case, extradition of US citizens is a rare occurrence and is almost always discouraged.

With this as the backdrop, it is anybody's guess what Indian investigators might gain by formally charging Headley along with others, including the shadowy Major Iqbal, a suspected operative of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to whom Headley has admitted to have been reporting.
Perhaps the only person the NIA might be able to lay their hands on is Rana, who after pleading not guilty, was convicted earlier this year. There is no plea deal in place for Rana that precludes his extradition. However, the fact that he is a Canadian citizen, who is also a permanent citizen of the US, now waiting to be handed down his sentence which could be anywhere between 15 and 30 years, could complicate matters.

All others that the NIA seeks to charge are based in Pakistan and they were also named in the US indictment. If the US has been unable to bring them to justice here, it is unlikely that India would be able to compel Pakistan to send them there.

Unless the NIA is working out of some undisclosed arrangement with US authorities about Headley, the formal charges could turn out to be more symbolic than consequential.

--Indo-Asian News Service

“Who was he, where was he from, what happened to him?”

2012-02-18T05:29:00.001-08:00

There is no point explaining some occurrences because explanation tends to destroy their mystique.

For instance, since yesterday morning a verse from a very popular ghazal (the video above) has been singing itself in my mind, which by itself is nothing unusual for me. I do that all the time. It goes : “Ta hadde nazar ek biyabaan sa kyun hai?” (Why does the wilderness stretch as far as the eye can see?)

The ghazal was “Seeney mein jalan, aankhon mein tufaan sa kyun hai?” by the hugely talented poet Shahryar. In fact, I was planning to put it on Facebook update this morning. What makes it unusual is just before that I discovered that Shahryar had died.

Born Akhlaq Mohammed Khan in 1936, he assumed his poetic name Shahryar in the fine tradition of Urdu poets.

Some verses have a way of escaping from their poetic confines and becoming maxims in themselves. “Ta hadde..” was one such. The line that precedes it and gives it an emotional context reads: “Tanhai ki yeh kaun se manzil hai rafiqon, Ta hadde…” (What destination of loneliness is this, friends? Why does the wilderness stretch as far as the eye can see?)

Other than listening to some of his songs hundreds of times over the years, one did not know much about Shahryar. I knew, of course, that was he was conferred India’s most prestigious literary honors, the Jnanpeeth in 2008, as well as the Sahitya Akademy award for his collection “Khwab ka dar band hai.” (‘The door to dreams is shut’).

While Shahryar remained deeply committed to Urdu literature throughout his life, he wrote for Hindi cinema sparingly because he could not adjust to the peculiar demands of the profession. Among his songs that captured the nation’s imagination, the standout collection is from his friend and collaborator, filmmaker Muzaffar Ali’s ‘Umrao Jaan.”

One definite marker of a great civilization is how easily its inhabitants remember and recite poetry. In many parts of India, it is hard to find someone who might not quote a verse or two in response to a challenging situation. It is poets like Shahryar who ensure that a great civilization does not lose its greatness.

Here is a frequently quoted verse by him.

Wo kaun tha, wo kahan ka tha, kya hua tha usey
Suna hai aaj koi shakhs mar gaya yaaron...

(Who was he, where was he from, what happened to him?

Heard someone died today..)

About Mitt Romney’s cavalier canine conduct

2012-02-17T07:17:00.001-08:00

I feel great joy at having rediscovered nuances of the expression “People often ask me….” It is a charmingly deflective way of being opinionated without the burden of sounding opinionated. Or at least that’s what I think.

What it says is that far be it for me to consider myself so important as to express an opinion, but I do so only because “People often ask me…” The other day I started my post with it. I intend to make it an occasional practice. (I have already clarified that no one ever asks me anything).

So, people often ask me what I think of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney strapping his pet dog Seamus in a kennel on top of his car during a drive from Boston to Ontario, Canada in 1983. Pet lovers and not-so-pet lovers are reportedly outraged at Romney’s conduct which may have some mildly amusing political repercussions as he goes about seeking his party’s nomination. We do not yet whether this could terminally damage his prospects or merely provide a silly sideshow for a while.

Be that as it may (another expression I love for its nebulousness), I think the outrage is entirely a case of how consciously and not so consciously we have created a caste system among animals. What if Romney had strapped a wicker basket full of chickens atop his vehicle and driven the same route with feathers flying? Mind you, the chickens are meant for a feast on arrival. I doubt very much if pet lovers would be as outraged.

People love dogs because the animal responds mostly unselfishly to every human whim unlike chickens which do not seek to strike heartwarming relationships. They do not snuggle up to their owners or slobber over them. Ironically, unlike dogs, poor chickens even provide eggs which are consumed in a million different ways. Dogs only poop which their owners have to bag.

Would people be similarly outraged if a bunch of mice was ferried in a cage on top of a car? I seriously doubt it. And how about a jar full of cockroaches or box full of skunks?

The point is pet lovers follow an unconscious caste system which is inherently discriminatory. I understand that one cannot be emotional about all sentient beings but the least one could do is not to turn certain species into deities.

Animals are not born to be domesticated to the extent humans have done in certain cases such the horse or the cow or the dog or even the chicken and the pig. And if we do indeed insist on domesticating them, let’s not pretend that they cease being animals. We do so purely out of utilitarian reasons.

If you still do not know where I stand on Romney’s cavalier canine conduct (a terrible mixed metaphor), then get in the line. Even I do not quite know what I am saying. I am saying it because people often ask me.

The rise of Kate Upton

2012-02-16T05:12:00.001-08:00

A couple of my friends asked me what I think of Kate Upton. At some level it was flattering to know that they did not feel the need to explain Kate Upton because they knew I knew.

What I still find curious is that they just so effortlessly assumed that I would be up to date with such subjects as Kate Upton. It made me wonder what they must think of me privately.

She is just 19 and I am not, and therefore I am deeply mindful of not creeping this post up.

From methane rain on Titan and limitedness of our moral definitions that I briefly wrote about yesterday or the rude interruption of the diplomatic coitus between Iran and India the day before, this may seem like quite a leap. But that’s what I do here. I leap. The weak gravity of Titan has been helpful in that leap.

My first reaction to Kate Upton is, I suppose, an obvious one—that she is a sexy young woman who does sexy young things. She is leveraging her assets in an instinctive and astute manner by intelligently exploiting the convergence of digital technologies. She is mixing the very primal—see the video above—with the very complex—the assorted technologies that propelled her rise.

Beauty has a way of distorting sociocultural gravity and Kate Upton is not the first one to use that to her advantage. Those who are good looking, particularly women, have a natural measure of the effect they have on those around them. It is as if they carry with them an invisible force field that just clears life’s hardships that might obstruct those not so endowed. If I were Kate Upton, it is possible that I would not think of theoretical physics as my first career choice. That said, theoretical physics does need beauty that needs no explanation.

More than anything else, I am struck by the predictability of the way Kate Upton is being positioned and projected. The video above is a great example of that. The pre-orgasmic writhing that she engages in after defiantly shutting the door in our face only to lure us inside or the Sports Illustrated pose of “check me out but from a distance” are all very predictable elements of marketing beauty.

There is no mystery here or no effort to create mystique. It is all very straight forward. “See I am sexy, I know you covet me, I also know you don’t stand a chance ever” seems to be the unspoken theme. That is just as well because that’s what sells—something which is at once so available and yet so unattainable. The crassness of some of the comments under the YouTube video speaks to the directness of men’s intentions.

Kate Upton on the coveted Sports Illustrated cover

I do not know whether Upton woke up one morning and discovered her looks and decided to make the most of them. What I do know is that unless she messes it up willfully her life’s course is pretty much set. It looks unremittingly glamorous and loaded with wealth.

P.S.: Upton’s WikiPedia entry speaks of her “Early Life.” She is 19. He whole life so far is early life.

Methane rain in magical slow motion

2012-02-15T06:17:00.001-08:00

Droplets of methane rain as imagined on the BBC’s ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ series by Brian Cox

People often ask me what occupies my mind the most, what it is that makes me enthusiastic. Before I answer that I want you to know that no one has ever asked me that. I start my post with that sentence only because it sounds good and vaguely important.

I am mostly preoccupied with the universe, its incomprehensible vastness and our infinitesimal follies and frailties. I also occasionally marvel at those who strut about with an unshakable sense of certitude and finality on this planet about religion, culture, race, morality, immorality and other assorted themes of zero universal consequence. They need to occasionally get out of themselves and visit at least our immediate solar neighborhood. Titan, for instance, where it rains methane droplets, each over one centimeter big, that fall to its surface in magical slow motion. I know that courtesy of British particle physicist and popular science television presenter Brian Cox. That’s because Titan’s atmosphere is very dense and gravity very weak.

I am pretty sure that on a moon where it rains methane in slow motion, if life every evolved to a degree comparable to Earth, its predominant species would have, if at all, a very different sense of religion, culture, race, morality, immorality and other assorted themes of zero universal consequence. My point being that we need to slow ourselves down and ask whether it makes any sense at all to perceive ourselves as not just the definers but even possessors of what is universally right and wrong, moral and immoral, comprehensible and incomprehensible.

In a similar vein, I had written a brief post in March last year about how the earthquake-tsunami-radiation triumvirate in Japan demonstrates just how profoundly we as a civilization are shaped by a stable terra firma. Everything that has happened on this planet, particularly in the past 250,000 years since the rise of homo sapiens-- speech, language, culture, religion, conflicts, triumphs, revolutions, genocides , politics, economy, cinema, technology, bigotry, altruism, compassion, orgasm, Internet, blogs, Muammar Qaddafi and iPad2—has happened because the terra firma has generally remained stable.

We forget that we exist the way we do precisely because the ground beneath us has not slipped too much and too often. For over three decades I have thought about this theme. Some day I would like to write in detail about how the fact that we live on solid ground has so overwhelmingly created and defined the human race. What if we were a strictly water-based civilization? I am quite sure our brains would have been wired very differently and we then would have created a radically different civilization. Can you imagine territorially defined nation-states if the whole planet was just water? And how do you define boundaries in a medium that knows no boundaries?

For some strange reason we treat our incidental geological reality as our natural right and build a whole lot of mythologies around it. It is true that as a species humans are extraordinarily adaptable and flexible. One can say with a fair degree of certainty that we would have created a civilization in response to our geological conditions, however different they might have been.

The problem is that we have come so far as a solid ground-based species that we would find it practically impossible to survive if the earth were to fundamentally reshape its contours suddenly. Of course, in terms of its overall planetary impact the Japanese quake-tsunami cannot be considered even significant, but it is big enough to make us all wonder what if the earth’s crustal plates were to suddenly go into a global subduction mode.

Perhaps this short post comes across as weird and disjointed but I think it is worth examining how much of what we are is a result of what we stand on.

Those are the kinds of themes that swirl around in my mind, not that anyone has asked me. I would love to be a methanological being next time rather than a hydrological one. That way I would find oxygen toxic, as toxic as my mortgage that this post will not help in any way to pay.

India’s diplomatic coitus with Iran interrupted

2012-02-14T04:09:00.001-08:00

No one has appointed me to offer simplified, almost semi-literate, explanations of profound geostrategic forces and currents that cross and clash around the world. I have just assumed that role until such time as I am out of my depth or I am called out, whichever comes first. It has been 30 years of doing that so far without either happening.

This self-deprecating preamble is quite unnecessary but I had to get it out of my system otherwise it would have distracted me all day.

Speaking of complex geostrategic forces and currents, the other day I wrote about India charting an unusually independent course while dealing with Iran. New Delhi has stepped up its trade relations with Tehran in the face of U.S. and European sanctions and pressures over Iran’s nuclear program.

So driven India is to ensure an uninterrupted supply of its crude oil from Iran, which accounts for 12 percent of its total oil imports, that it has even signed an agreement that permits Indian companies to pay 45 percent of their import bill in rupees. That helps Iran go around having to deal with dollar or euro-based payments.

There are also reports that New Delhi wants to help Tehran build the Chah Bahar port in the country’s southeast as well as a railway line with direct access to Afghanistan and Central Asia. Chah Bahar is the only Iranian port with direct access to the ocean. It opens on the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman.

India could have explained all of this in the name of enlightened self-interest but a car bomb attack on Monday against an Israeli diplomat’s wife in New Delhi is threatening to upend it. Israel has accused Iran of carrying out the attack. If that indeed turns out to be the case, India’s diplomatic coitus is likely to be rudely interrupted. (I had to slip that in).

India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram is now calling the bomb attack that injured the wife of an Israeli diplomat a “terrorist attack.” A total of four people were injured after an apparently sulfur-based explosive device slapped on to the diplomatic vehicle by a motorcycle rider exploded.

While Iran is denying the Israeli accusation as lies, India has so far refused to point any fingers.

"We condemn this incident. At the moment I am not pointing any finger at any particular group or organization. Whoever did it, we condemn it in the strongest terms. We have friendly relations with Israel, just as we have very friendly relations with other countries," Chidambaram has been quoted as saying.

It is possible that the attack may not eventually affect India’s long-term strategy in Iran but, in the event that it shows any Iranian involvement, it could seriously slow down the current pace of bilateral engagement.

On a side note, a very side note really, what’s the point in saying after any such attack that the attacker/s were “well-trained”? Doesn’t that go without saying? Unless, of course, bikers in India, on their way to a 9 to 5 job, routinely attach such devices on random diplomatic vehicles.

Yousuf Raza Gilani and contempt of court

2012-02-13T05:23:00.001-08:00

Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani

Contempt of court feels like an almost honorable cause to lose prime ministership over in Pakistan. The country has a tradition of prime ministers fleeing into exiles either in the face of corruption scandals or military coups.

Yousuf Raza Gilani now has the distinction of becoming the first prime minister who might conceivably lose office after being indicted in a contempt of court case. The country’s Supreme Court, which has emerged as a serious power center, has indicted Gilani for his failure to reopen corruption cases against President Asif Ali Zardari.

Gilani has pleaded not guilty or as they specifically say in Pakistan he has “pleaded innocence.” Now it is up to the strength of the evidence to be presented by Gilani’s attorneys and Attorney General Maulvi Anwarul Haq, who has been assigned by the court as the prosecutor.

Politicians and bureaucrats in Pakistan enjoyed immunity under the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), which was struck down as void in 2009. Incidentally, the NRO was invoked by then President Pervez Musharraf to clear the way for former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to return from exile. Musharraf himself is in exile these days, unsure whether he should return and risk his arrest on charges of his involvement in Bhutto’s assassination on December 27, 2007.

Coming back to the current prime minister, the Supreme Court had ordered his government to write a letter to the Swiss authorities to reopen cases against the president.

The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had in 1998 accused Zardari and the late Benazir Bhutto of awarding a pre-shipment inspection contract to the Societe Generale Surveillance (SGS). It has been alleged that the contract was given in return for a six percent commission on the total amount the company received from the Pakistan government.

In August 2008, Swiss judicial authorities, acting on the request of the Pakistani government, had closed a money laundering case against Zardari and released $60 million frozen in Swiss accounts.

Keeping track of who is returning and fleeing as well as returning with what guarantees and fleeing from what threats has to be recognized as a serious political science discipline in Pakistan. It is all so mixed-up it is hard to tell who was right in the first place, if there is such thing any more.

It remains to be seen whether the contempt case will devour the 56-year-old Gilani’s career. He could potentially face up to six months in prison if found guilty. It is also not clear what President Zardari proposes to do as the ground beneath him begins to slip. I have said this before and would not mind repeating it; if there is one politician who can play the skullduggery that is Pakistan’s politics and hope to beat it it is him.

Although to an untrained eye it may not appear that way, under all the mess there are signs that Pakistan’s polity is trying to find some balance and equilibrium as it negotiates through the latest crisis. To his credit Gilani has not thrown up his hands and taken the first flight out of Islamabad. Ditto Zardari.

Four years, four agendas, four presidents

2012-02-12T04:27:00.001-08:00

I think I may have solved the Republicans’ problem of whom to nominate from among the deeply conflicting choices between Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. They should nominate all four since they like some parts of all four.

Here is how nominating and eventually electing four presidents will work.

The four-year term should be equally divided among the four, starting with Gingrich, followed by Romney (Year 2), Santorum (Year 3) and Paul (Year 4). For Gingrich, except the first day the rest of his term will be redundant for reasons explained by him.

Year 1

We all now know that Gingrich will need no more than six hours between his inaugural address and various presidential balls to essentially accomplish everything that he wants to during his presidency. How do we know this? Well, he has said it himself and I take him at his face value. In fact, going by his assertions the first two hours on Day 1 should be sufficient for him to basically wrap up the core business of governance of his vision. He will sign a slew of executive orders which will, in one fell swoop, set America on the right course. He can take it easy for the rest of his one year in office.

Year 2

Romney takes over with a clear-eyed plan to reform the economy, meaning abolish all taxes on people making a million dollars and more.In fact, he can put in place a system under which the government pays in perpetuity a matching amount to all those making a million and above. Given his stellar record in the private sector, reforming America’s economy will not be such a challenge for him. Under Romney America reclaims her economic supremacy.

Year 3

He then hands over the torch to Santorum who comes in with a sharply defined sociocultural-religious agenda. He goes about systematically reclaiming all the sociocultural-religious freedoms abridged by Barack Obama. Under Santorum America restores its foundational wisdom as conveniently interpreted by Santorum.

Year 4

That accomplished, it will be Paul’s turn. On day one of his one year, during breakfast he will close down the Federal Reserves and pack up the Pentagon. He can spend the rest of his term dismantling what we understand of government. Come 2016 and America will be free from the hassle of presidential election altogether. There will be no government to elect. In fact, Washington D.C. will be just another city.

Problem solved. Four years, four agendas, four presidents. End of story.

The Art of Flattery

2012-02-11T04:36:00.001-08:00

Not a real book cover but it could be (Illustration: Mayank Chhaya)

Flattery is not art but it should be. Here is why.

I have long had scholarly fascination for fame and flattery. It may be partly because one engenders the other. Where there is fame, there is bound to be flattery. In that, they are like fire and smoke.

While both fame and flattery can be found in many places in the world, nowhere has flattery been exalted to pure art the way it has been in the world of Hindi movie industry, embarrassingly known as Bollywood. Another profession that nearly rivals the movie industry in the art of flattery is India’s politics, although there are subtle differences.

Flatterers, of whom there is a legion in the movie industry, possess a unique ability to mix servility and subservience with transparently insincere praise. And then there is the master flatterer, a rare species, endowed with very high self-esteem, so much so that he has dissolved his personal pride into making flattery a truly blissful experience for the one being flattered.

I used to know one (he is dead now) who worked for a megastar. Both shall remain anonymous because theirs was a near sacred relationship. And who am I to defile sacredness? This particular person was such a master at flattery that towards the end of his life he became dangerously persuasive because one could not tell whether he was merely flattering or genuinely praising.

I recall a particular instance of his gourmet flattery. I remember it because it was addressed to me directly and that too after knowing both the megastar and the master flatterer for sometime. So it was not as if he was going through the usual routine of puffing up his employer for the benefit of an outsider.

Those who know the world of Hindi cinema would know the Punjabi expression “Praaji, tussi tope ho ji”, which very loosely translates as, “Boss, you are like a cannon.” Praaji actually means a respectable elder. With the new, more refined and hip generation of actors and filmmakers taking over Hindi cinema, this rather rustic phrase is getting extinct but one still hears it among the older filmmakers and stars. The younger ones use it more to mock the old order. But I digress.

This particular master flatterer never used that expression, at least never in my presence. However, his flattery was always detailed and well constructed. He once said of his boss in these exact words, “Mercedes ki peechewali seat mein do ungliyon ke beech aise glass pakad ke Black Label peene ka jo style hai na aap ka who aur kahan?” (The way you sit in the rear seat of your Mercedes and stylishly hold a glass of Black Label (whiskey) between your two fingers is to be found nowhere).” When he said “aise” or the way, he actually acted it out for me in the precise manner of holding the glass between his index finger and the finger (the up yours one). As if this was not specific enough, he added, “Aur hamesha glass mein chaar ice cubes hona chahiye) (There should always be four ice cubes in the glass).

The megastar rewarded his lackey with a mild smile of acknowledgement in return for this flattery.

In the world of showbiz the flattery tends to be largely harmless, if often manifestly insincere. However, in the world of politics it is more insidious and can have real consequences because it involves people in high decision-making positions. What I wrote in the aftermath of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi breaking his three-day fast on September 20, 2011, bears repeating here.

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, center, getting a helping hand. A screengrab from ibnlive.com

It took more than ten solicitous men, at least four of them some sort of religious figures, to hold a glass of fresh lime juice that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi sipped from to break his fast yesterday. That begs the question: Was the glass that heavy or was the burden of sycophancy that enormous?

I tried to lift a glass with fresh lime similar in dimensions to what the chief minister had in his hands. And what do you know? I was astonished to discover that I could actually lift it with just one hand. So I have to rule out that the obsequious men were there because they wanted to give a helping hand to a frail Modi who had fasted for three straight days.

That brings me to the burden of sycophancy. It had to be that. There is a whole class of people in public life in India, be it politics or showbiz, who has elevated sycophancy to the level of a fine art. These are men-- and mostly they are men-- who whip up a heady mix of flattery, subservience, servility and unctuousness and serve it to whomever they have chosen to be sycophantic towards, using precise body language. For instance, an accomplished sycophant has a subtle but discernible angle at which the nape of his neck thrusts forward when he is in the august presence of the one he is toadying up to. There is invariably a smile that indicates surrender that must accompany this act.

It is instructive that the kind of deference I saw in the news clips of these men practically feeding Modi was very similar to what priests display during the time of the ritual evening aarti at temples when they make an offering to the deities. Only the one designated actually holds the platter, the rest are merely touching the priest’s hand ever so gingerly and hesitantly lest they dilute the sanctity of the act by being too familiar.

The thing to remember about true sycophancy is that it is almost never practiced keeping in mind its immediate gains or rewards. It is a long-term commitment nurtured in the distant hope that the one they have been sucking up to might one day shower them with accumulated munificence.

P.S.: I am thinking of organizing a convention of sycophants and flatterers where a toad-eating contest will be a major attraction.

India’s unusual assertion of independence over Iran

2012-02-10T05:05:00.001-08:00

India’s decision to send a large trade delegation to Iran in the midst of mounting Western pressures against Tehran’s nuclear program is an unusually assertive move. What New Delhi is explicitly telling the world is that we are living in the times of enlightened self-interest and that it makes no apology about it.

What is particularly striking is a comment by India’s Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar who has been quoted as saying in respect of the sanctions and the trade delegation, “Tell me why I should follow suit? Why shouldn’t I take up that business opportunity?”

Indian bureaucrats are not known to speak out of turn. Khullar has to have specific political backing from the highest levels of the government to say that. Or at least I hope he does because otherwise the country’s foreign ministry, quaintly called the ministry of external affairs, will have to go into overdrive in European capitals and Washington D.C.

I do not think Khullar is saying something out of the ordinary because Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, on a recent visit to Chicago, said, "It is not possible for India to take any decision to reduce the imports from Iran drastically, because among the countries which can provide the requirement of the emerging economies, Iran is an important country amongst them." He was responding to a question whether US and European sanctions will prevent India, the world’s fourth largest consumer, from importing oil from Iran. New Delhi is in no position to oblige because some 12 percent India’s oil imports comes from Iran.

It is a delicate balancing act for India, sandwiched as it is between its ever rising oil demand and considerations of geostrategic ties with the United States. 2012 being a presidential election year in America, President Barack Obama not just has to be tough on Iran but has to be seen as tough. India’s continuing of its Iranian oil import does not significantly weaken the sanctions but it does have a salutary impact in so much as the world’s largest nuclear armed democracy chooses to do business with Tehran.

Now with the trade delegation India is taking its disengagement from the sanctions regime farther than what many might have suspected. Khullar has argued that there are many products that India can sell to Iran which are not covered by the sanctions.

Apart from bartering oil for wheat, Tehran, according to Reuters, is also willing to accept payment in Indian rupees. It is Tehran’s way of telling Washington that it has no compunctions about trying other currencies against the traditionally preferred US dollar.

Of course, for once India is playing a larger geostrategic game which equally serves its more near-term goals of oil imports. A looming Shia presence to a Sunni Pakistan’s west, Iran is very useful for India in the long-term. India’s overtures at the time of dire need are not going unnoticed by Iran.

Is watching porn parliamentary?

2012-02-09T05:46:00.001-08:00

You know India’s information and communication technology revolution is real and widespread when its lawmakers are not only caught watching porn on their mobile phones inside a state legislature but are caught by television news cameras and broadcast worldwide.

Three government ministers in the southern Indian state of Karnataka have had to resign after they were caught watching porn on their mobile phones on February 7. The three, Laxman Savadi, C.C. Patil and Krishna Palemar, were fired by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP, incidentally, is a party that never tires tired of boasting about the sense of decorum and discipline of its members.

I take a slightly different view of the incident which has caused considerable outrage in the country. My first reaction was to applaud the strength of their mobile phones’ signal inside the state assembly. (I must find out the network they were using). Next was to applaud the kind of data plan these politicians have. Then I thought about the bandwidth that the country’s mobile phone operators have built up. That they were watching porn barely figured in my mind because that is probably the least egregious thing an Indian politician might do these days. I think watching porn should be regarded as nearly parliamentary.

Of all the reactions to the incident, the most telling one came from former Chief Minister of Goa Manohar Parikar, who also happens to belong to the same BJP. He was quoted by the IANS as saying, “There are people all across the country who do worse things. Congress leaders have chopped women and burnt them in a tandoor… In Madhya Pradesh, a Congressman chopped his wife and fed her to crocodiles… They (the three Karnataka ministers) were only watching and not doing it in action like these Congressmen.”

Parrikar has kept the standards of decent conduct by politicians so low that as long as they do not chop up women and either make tandoori out of them or feed them to crocodiles, everything else is fair. I mean you can always feed tandoori women to crocodiles but as far as I can tell crocodiles are not particularly fussy about whether their meat is well done, medium or rare. I am guessing they would like it rare.

It is equally reassuring that Parrikar will draw the line at watching porn inside the state legislature and not actually engaging in it on the floor of the house, like a floorshow I suppose.

Apart from everything else,I also worry about what these three men would have told their wives and family by way of explanation. Here is a suggestion: “The house was getting ready to debate a piece of legislation named Curbing Porn via Mobile Telephony Act, 2012. We had to see for ourselves how deep the penetration is.”

Separately, jokes about this incident write themselves. For instance, the ministers’ had put their mobile phones on the vibrate mode.

Multimo is the latest office attraction

2012-02-08T04:36:00.001-08:00

Multiple monitoring (Illustration: Mayank Chhaya)

Matt Richtel of The New York Times reports about a growing trend of companies providing more than one computer screen to their employees as they negotiate through massive data. I call it multi-monitoring or multimo.

Incidentally, multiomo has been copyrighted by my copyright lawyer in Calfironia whom I woke up at 3 a.m.

The trend is serious enough for companies to use it as a recruiting tool, according to Richtel. So next time when you see multiple computer screens prominently mentioned as part of your compensation package do not be surprised. What this means is that how consequential you are in an office will now also be determined by how many monitors you have on your desk.

Pretty soon engineers will be sitting in the center of a cylindrical display wall and spin around at ever increasing revolutions per minute to track data and information. The next would be to have tiny display chips embedded in our eye.

More seriously, it is a measure of how much data an average engineer/office worker has to deal with daily that it is no longer feasible to do it on one monitor. Companies believe that more computer screens would ensure greater productivity. In fact, Richtel quotes James A. Anderson, a professor of communication, who conducted a study, as saying multimo saves ten seconds for every five minutes of work. That makes it 12 seconds every hour and, if you take the average working day to be eight hours, you are looking at a staggering 96 seconds or one minute and 36 seconds. (I am being sarcastic or as Sheldon Cooper might say in ‘The Big Bang Theory’ ‘Bazinga’).

The rise of the information age and its attendant gadgetry has introduced a powerful wall of separation between people in the form of the computer monitor. Think of it as the modern day moat and the broadband connection as the drawbridge.

He sank faster than his island nation

2012-02-07T04:34:00.001-08:00

Former President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives (Pic: A grab from the documentary 'The Island Nation')

The presidency of Mohamed Nasheed sank faster than his island nation of the Maldives which is facing a real threat of being submerged by rising sea levels.

Nasheed, who made the issue of rising sea levels caused by global climate change the signature issue of his government, has had to resign in the face of a police mutiny and widespread opposition protests. It turns out political tides are way more devastating than those in the ocean.

It is ironic that Nasheed’s ouster coincides with the upcoming release of a critically acclaimed documentary ‘The Island President’ by John Shenk about his campaign to save his tiny Indian Ocean island nation. I wrote about the documentary on February 2.

The Maldives has been in the grip of opposition protests following the arrest of senior judge Abdulla Mohamed by the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) two weeks ago on corruption charges. The protests were organized by the supporters of former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom whose three-decade-long rule over the island nation ended in 2008 and brought in Nasheed.

Reports say that Nasheed was practically led to the studio of the state-run television by the army where he said, "I resign because I am not a person who wishes to rule with the use of power. I believe that if the government were to remain in power, it would require the use of force which would harm many citizens," he said in a statement broadcast on state-run television seized by rogue policemen.

"I resign because I believe that if the government continues to stay in power, it is very likely that we may face foreign influences," he said. "I have made this decision." Now his whereabouts are unknown.

There has been strong speculation that there was a coup but the Maldivian authorities have strongly denied it. Those who have some idea about the Maldives would know that one could stage a coup there on the way to a Starbucks. I exaggerate but the point is it is not that difficult.

Gayoom had faced one in 1988 when a band of some 80 Tamil mercenaries tried to take over by practically walking into his palace. Then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi sent 1600 troops who thwarted the coup within hours. The capital Malé was secured and returned to Gayoom.

With Nasheed ousted the documentary makers must wonder what now? What they can probably bank upon is that hardly anyone in the West knows what the Maldives is, far less who its president is and even less that the island faces submergence.

For those who might be interested, the Maldives is a collection of 1200 atolls off the southwest tip of India with a population about 400,000 mostly Sunni Muslims. Its waters are so turquoise you could be fooled into thinking someone painted them.

Rising self-immolations in Tibet

2012-02-06T05:14:00.001-08:00

As forms of protest go, there is nothing more brutal and pure at once than self-immolation. Its brutality is obvious while its purity a little more complex. This is the only form of protest where the protester deliberately and decisively seeks to harm and kill oneself.

Fire is seen by many cultures, especially in India, as a symbol of purity. That is part of the reason why monks and renunciates wear saffron or ochre robes.

It is this primal protest that is making China increasingly anxious as it battles the worst outbreak of unrest among Tibetans since 2008. That year in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics Tibet’s capital Lhasa and many other towns exploded into widespread frenzy.

Four years hence there are worrisome signs all over again that the Chinese policy of harmony may not be working that well when it comes to Tibet, particularly in Sichuan Province. With three more Tibetans setting themselves on fire February 3 there, the number of self-immolations in the past 12 months has risen to 19.

What is unusual about the latest self-immolations is that it was probably for the first time they were committed by lay Tibetans, as opposed to the members of the Buddhist sangh. The New York Times' Shraon LaFraniere reports from Beijing that the three were livestock herders.

Although 19 self-immolations may not seem like a very high number in purely statistical terms, they have to be understood in the context of their profoundly potent symbolism. Self-immolation says that one committing it has so totally lost hope in the existing order that they see this brutal death as the only way out. The inherent despair of the act has the power to move a large populace. With that as the backdrop, self-immolation becomes uniquely consequential.

Another point to bear in mind is that in terms of official response to any protest is that unlike most other mass expressions of dissidence self-immolation is so individualistic, unpredictable and eventually unstoppable that it defies any official strategy. Couple that with its harrowing symbolism and you have the perfect form of protest.

The fact that the self-immolations took place in the remote Seda County only underscores the extent of disenchantment among Tibetans.

On a separate but related note I have been struck by the January 24 by US Special Coordinator For Tibetan Issues Maria Otero. It is remarkably detailed, specific and direct. Oteroa has said in response to the growing tensions between the Tibetans and the Chinese authorities, “As I have noted previously, these policies include dramatically expanded Chinese government controls on religious life and practice; ongoing “patriotic education” campaigns within monasteries that require monks to denounce the Dalai Lama; the permanent placement of Chinese officials in monasteries; increasingly intensive surveillance, arbitrary detentions and disappearances of Tibetans; and restrictions on and imprisonment of some families and friends of self-immolators. Over the last year, Chinese government security and judicial officials also have detained and imprisoned Tibetan writers, artists, intellectuals, and cultural advocates who criticized Chinese government policies.”

Wealth just does not like me

2012-02-05T05:30:00.001-08:00

Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai (Pic: Chandu Mhatre—www.chandumhatre.com)

It has taken me 30 years of working life and an intense process of elimination to reach a defining conclusion—Wealth just does not like me.

Our relationship has been one of perfunctory courtesies. She has always sought and found the least heartfelt, albeit it civil, way to greet me. Occasionally, when she has seemed to come on surprisingly strong, it has always turned out to be for someone standing behind or beside me. You know someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Mukesh Ambani. I mean figuratively because I have never met Zuckerberg and Ambani but only once. There is nothing more infuriating than being within earshot of wealth and being brushed off.

I have discovered that wealth is not contagious. It is not airborne. It cannot be contracted by sleeping with someone wealthy. You can get syphilis by sleeping with someone wealthy but not wealth. I can go on with some more STD comparisons if you insist but I think you get the picture.

So it is time for wealth and I to go our separate ways. Penury is always flashing me. She is hideously available and annoyingly faithful. She slobbers over me when I least want her. And I always want her the least. She firmly believes that relationships are for life. Sometimes she wants to get into a generational relationship. All those negatives notwithstanding, penury is always reliable and always at hand.

Another truth I have discovered is that while wealth is incestuous, penury is promiscuous. This one needs no elaboration.

Among a series of Buddha moments that I have had sitting under an unfinished ceiling of my basement one is that penury is painfully possessive, while wealth is delightfully self-absorbed. Penury is expansionist and wealth is exclusivist.

It is a measure of how much I want to escape penury that the other day I bought a lotto ticket based on the numbers that came out of a fortune cookie. But I realized that as pick up lines or techniques go, buying lotto is something wealth finds most offensive. “Am I so bereft of class that you think you can pick me up at a convenience store?” is what she wonders.

I was looking for an illustration for today’s post. My photographer friend Chandu Mhatre just happened to send the excellent photo above that he took at Mumbai’s annual Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. Although the golden figure in the statute seems like a male, it is androgynous enough for me to see it as representative of wealth. The man in the picture apparently staring into the statue’s groin could be me. The caption could be ,”You may look but not touch.”

‘The Card Players’ in Qatar

2012-02-04T05:41:00.001-08:00

Paul Cézanne’s ‘The Card Players’

As news comes of Paul Cézanne’s ‘The Card Players’ having been sold for a staggering $250 million to the royal family of Qatar, I have a question or two that may not be asked by others.

But before I raise them let me tell you how much $250 million is. If Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney were to buy this painting, he will have nothing left of his fortune, which in turn might make him understand what penury is. But Romney being Romney, he might sell it a few years down the line for twice that price and solve the problem of penury.

‘The Card Players’ is a group of five paintings created by Cézanne sometime between 1890 and 1892. The French post-impressionist master used local farmhands, some of whom working on his own family estate, as models for the series. This fact brings me to my questions. Since the painting has been sold for $250 million do the descendants of the French peasant models get any cut out of that? And what about the painter’s descendants themselves? Do they get anything out of this too?

I am not sure how life worked in the French countryside in the late 19th century when it came to modeling fees. I suspect these farmhands were not paid anything other than the sheer pleasure of being painted by the master. May be some of them were asked to keep the deck of cards as their remuneration. Perhaps the tobacco in their pipes was paid for as part of the sitting fee. Or may be the clothes were the fees. I don’t know; I am merely speculating.

I have a tendency to wonder about such sidelines to any epic work of art. For instance, what if I were a great granddaughter of the card player on the right (the one without the pipe)? Can I go and ask the Qatari family for some cash on behalf of my grandfather?

Vanity Fair magazine reports that the sale of ‘The Card Players’ took place in 2011 but it is only now that the details are emerging. The secrecy is understandable given the value of the painting. Speaking of which, I also wonder about how masters whose works sell for such enormous sums would react if they were alive. What if Cézanne walked in on wherever it is that the Qatari royal family has displayed the painting? Would he say, for instance, this is my painting, I want it back? Or would he ask for half of the amount it sold for?

Incidentally, this is the same Qatari royal family which hosted India’s master painter M F Husain who was hounded out of India under threats from fundamentalists who objected to his depiction of nude paintings of Hindu goddesses. At the time of his death Husain had become a Qatari national and was under a contract to produce an ambitious series of paintings.

Republic of Facebook

2012-02-03T09:42:00.001-08:00

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg’s desk (Pic as uploaded by him on Facebook)

What if there is a real country of 845 million people whose fulltime vocation is to tell the rest what they are doing at any given moment? And what if the man running that country is just 27 years old who believes that those people will betray their most intimate secrets with little or no encouragement or incentive whatsoever?

Well, I am happy to report that there is nation just like that. It is called the Republic of Facebook. It is the third largest collection of people behind China (1.34 billion) and India (1.22 billion). Entering this republic requires no passports or visas. Its borders are undefined and ever-changing. There is no customs or immigration declaration. All that you need is access to the Internet, a username and a password.

As Facebook prepares for its much anticipated Initial Public Offering or IPO, it strikes me that if the offering pans out the way it is projected to, then the company will be valued at $100 billion. That will make Zuckerberg, who controls 28 percent of the company, worth $28 billion or a little more than a billion dollars for every year he has been on the planet.

Since I am one of those 845 million suckers I too have contributed to Zuckerberg’s wealth by frequently updating information on Facebook for no reason other than the fact that because I can. What Zuckerberg has done is offer us all a virtual town square with a few fountains to gather around and just blabber. That blabber is now poised to generate an enormous amount of money for him and those who helped him found the company. Even the two caricaturized twins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, are likely to make up to $300 million for their holding of 1.2 million shares on top of the tens of millions they have already made as part of a settlement over intellectual property dispute with Zuckerberg.

My point is Facebook users have built up real wealth for its founders and investors by talking about the color of their thongs and the status of their love life. I exaggerate but you get my point.

Just how much inanities and banalities are unleashed on Facebook everyday can be gauged by the fact that over 72,000 users have “liked” the picture of Zuckerberg’s desk above.

Reports suggest that Facebook will raise $5 billion which will give the company a market capitalization of between $80 and 100 billion. The estimated five billion it is set to raise is real money. The valuation is a matter of complex market jugglery but it can be leveraged by those who own stocks in the company to generate some real cash too.

‘The Island President’

2012-02-02T04:26:00.001-08:00

President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives

In 1990, I was probably among the first journalists to write about a serious existential threat to the tiny Indian Ocean island nation of the Maldives. Twenty two years later the threat of the Maldives being submerged by rising sea level remains undiminished but the awareness about it has increased manifold.

The rising sea level is a direct consequence of the climate change, leading to global warming and polar ice melting. Even in 1990, when I visited the Maldives as part of the media team accompanying the late Prime Minister V.P. Singh, the few who understood the problem were very vocal in talking about it.

Documentary filmmaker John Shenk has made what seems like a compelling documentary on the very subject and used the island nation’s charismatic President Mohamed Nasheed as the protagonist to tell the story. Nasheed has understandably made saving his country from being gobbled up by the ocean his signature political issue. The documentary ‘The Island President’ tells that story.

Nasheed rose as a political opponent against the three-decade-long rule of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who took over as president in 1978 and continued until 2008. Nasheed was arrested 12 times and tortured twice during his political opposition days. He spent 18 months in solitary. The 45-year-old Nasheed was elected president in October, 2008. Since then he has made the survival of his country in the face of the consequences of the climate change caused by the rest of the world his defining mission.

It is hardly surprising that Shenk saw great drama for a documentary in the story. I look forward its release in March this year.

The Maldives is a collection of 1200 atolls, of which 80 percent barely manage to rise three to five feet above the sea level. That low elevation makes it the world's lowest nation. I remember one senior government official, who was surprised that I was interested in this story at all, took me to a spot and said, "Now you are standing on the highest spot on the Maldives." It was six feet above the sea level.

Nasheed made news in 2009 when he began shopping for an alternative homeland for his country's 330,000 people. He has considered both the neighbors India and Sri Lanka as possible countries where the Maldivians can be relocated once the atolls become uninhabitable.

Of Messrs Gingrich and Paul

2012-02-01T05:45:00.001-08:00

US Republican Congressman and presidential aspirant Ron Paul (Pic: www.roanpaul2012.com)

Of the four remaining Republican aspirants for US presidency, the two most compelling are former Speaker Newt Gingrich and Congressman Ron Paul. They both dislike the idea of federal government so much that they want to preside over it. It is a paradox I have now given up trying to understand.

Both Gingrich and Paul, particularly Paul, believe the less there is of government, the better off everybody is. And yet they both court that very government with such passion. My rational mind would tell me to stay away from something I profess to so strongly dislike and disapprove of. The idea that the more you dislike something, the more you want it is beyond my comprehension.

I have always been fascinated/captivated by delusion. Think of delusion as a highly unstable but extremely potent fuel that can propel you into a high orbit. It has to be handled with utmost care otherwise it can explode in your face. Used sparingly and astutely, delusion can be rather beneficial. That is precisely where the rub lies. Those who are delusional generally do not know that they are delusional. For them that is their real world, a world that they can ordain and alter at will.

I am saying all this to make a point about Gingrich. Listening to his speech in Orlando, Florida yesterday, where he lost the Republican primary to his arch rival Mitt Romney, I kept marveling at how utterly unselfconscious this man is. Even in his resounding defeat, he is vehemently talking about a slew of executive orders he will sign on day one of his presidency, just two hours after his inauguration. Even before he goes to the “various balls that night” because there is “no point in hanging out and having fun.” Those include abolishment of all “White House czars”, immediate deployment of the Keystone oil pipeline, opening of a US embassy in Jerusalem and recognize Israel, stoppage of all US money in foreign aid than can be used in abortion and repeal of all anti-religious act of the Obama administration.

Someone who has thought through such specifics of how his presidency will perform within the first two hours of having been inaugurated, even before having been nominated by his own party, not to mention winning the election, has to have successfully harbored delusions of grandeur for a very long time. And I mean it as a compliment. Speaker Gingrich appears to have reached a stage where he can no longer contain his ambition to be the next president of the United States. Left to him he would like to shift to the 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue this morning and ask the current occupant, one Barack Obama, to get packing. He seems baffled that the rest of America does not see so clearly what he does—namely that he belongs there in the White House now, in the next 46 seconds or so.

As for Congressman Paul, he seems a little less consumed by the ambition to be president than Gingrich, but make no mistake he wants it as badly, if only to prove how irrelevant the federal government is. He wants all wars stopped, America to shed its global cop uniform and the Federal Reserves dismantled and mothballed. His overriding philosophy is that the government’s primary job is to foster, guarantee and protect individual liberties and that is all. Everything else can be taken care of by individuals with the help of their neighbors and communities. It is grandiosity of a different kind, the one which says I do not want anything but I don’t mind if I get it all anyway.

As for permanence, what’s that?

2012-01-31T06:10:00.001-08:00

Author Jonathan Franzen (Pic: http://us.macmillan.com/author/jonathanfranzen)

In calling ebooks “damaging to society” celebrated author Jonathan Franzen is making the classic mistake of confusing the carrier with the content.

"Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough,” Franzen has been quoted as saying at the Hay festival in Cartagena, Colombia.

At the core of Franzen’s grouse is that ebooks do not seem permanent enough for him. “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.”

These are all valid responses of an imaginative writer except that they are not because ebooks are a sort of PDF files that cannot be altered by the reader, nor can they be erased by rubbing across the touchscreen. I understand that Franzen is not being literal but literary when he says all that but still it is important to point out the distinction. Ebooks are as permanent as anything else on this planet is, meaning they are impermanent.

More than anything else I cannot comprehend Franzen’s objection to ebooks on the ground that they are alterable. He probably means that unlike paper books, which once set in cold print, will remain as they are until the elements destroy them, ebooks are vulnerable. If his concern is that content might be lost or changed, I think it is unfounded.

Perhaps Franzen’s comments stem from his overall wariness about technology. The Guardian says that the author seals his computer’s ethernet port to prevent himself from accessing the internet when he is in the midst of his writing. That’s a charming little quirk but he can try something simpler like taking the ethernet cable off or, better still, not going online. Having an internet connection does not make it mandatory for people to go and stay online.

I have never quite understood the critics of technology because anything anyone does after being born—not to mention even while being born—is a result of some technology or another. The fact that Franzen’s damning disapproval of a form of technology got disseminated so quickly and became so widespread, something I am sure he approves of, is entirely a result of the very technology he may find damaging. Ironic, is it not?

Ebooks are merely a method of distribution on various devices. In and of themselves they control nothing. It is still the author and the editor and the publisher who call the shots. As for permanence, what’s that?

Sheikh Newt Gingrich Chilli

2012-01-30T05:17:00.001-08:00

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (Photo: www.newt.org)

All politicians are, to some extent, powered by raw self-belief. Then there is former Speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich who feasts on it.

You might have noticed that very frequently Gingrich spreads his arms to make a point. That is a subconscious behavioral attribute of someone who rides wave after wave of self-belief. He is a surfer on the ocean of ambition. However, the boundaries between positive thinking, delusion and lunacy are rather porous.

During a speech in Cocoa, Florida, on January 28, Gingrich said, “By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.”

Of all the grandiosity that Gingrich should be slammed for, his proposal to colonize the moon should be the least slam-worthy. It is at least entertaining.

His statement is loaded with so much presumption and grandiosity that I cannot help but applaud him. When you analyze his statement, you are struck by several things in it. To begin with, he has concluded that he will be the nominee of the Republican Party. That is presumption number one.

Presumption number two is the belief that he would defeat President Barack Obama. Even he knows that that is easier said than achieved. Presumption number three is that he would be so good in his first term that he would win a second term.

Simultaneously, there are many other presumptions that relate to putting together an intensely complex plan to colonize the moon with all its attendant technological pieces in place before his second term ends. There are also those presumptions that relate to the cost of such a mammoth undertaking, not to mention its profound political implications. And yet Gingrich has pole-vaulted over all of them to promise a colony on the moon.

Of course, as a president he can always edit that ambition and be content with a small shed somewhere on the moon and declare it to be the first step towards building a base to be inhabited by Americans at some future date.

There is a character in north Indian folklore called Sheikh Chilli to describe someone who dreams up grandiose schemes. It is meant to describe someone who inhabits a world of fantasy where castles are not only built in the air but occupied. I am on a shaky ground about the precise origin of the legend of Sheikh Chilli but this is the one I grew up with. So I am sticking to it. Gingrich reminds me of that.

Gingrich has said that once the base is built some 13,000 Americans can shift there and petition the US Congress to become an American state. What it means is that at its heart, Gingrich’s grandiosity seems merely about extraterrestrial territorial expansion, which to my mind, is a rather petty ambition.

That said, I think a human colony on the moon is an eminently laudable objective.

India unlikely to reduce oil imports from Iran

2012-01-29T12:50:00.001-08:00

U.S. and European sanctions will not prevent India, the world’s fourth largest consumer, from importing oil from Iran, its Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee says.

As Washington ratchets up pressure on countries around the world, particularly large consumers of oil, to cut down their imports from Iran, New Delhi is in no position to oblige. Some 12 percent India’s oil imports comes from Iran.

"It is not possible for India to take any decision to reduce the imports from Iran drastically, because among the countries which can provide the requirement of the emerging economies, Iran is an important country amongst them," Mukherjee told a news conference here in Chicago, after concluding a short, day and a half long visit. I was at that news conference and was preempted by a fellow journalist in my question about the implications for India of the Iran-U.S. tensions over Tehran’s threat to blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

In terms of India’s broad economic outlook Mukherjee acknowledged that the economic growth is expected to slow down to seven percent this year compared to 8.5 percent last year. Although most major economies would not only accept seven percent but even celebrate it, in the Indian context it is regarded as low because it has averaged over 8.5 percent over the last decade and there were projections it could hit the double digit mark until the global economic meltdown of 2008.

An advisory on a late posting

2012-01-29T05:02:00.001-08:00

In keeping with my jetsetting lifestyle as a journalist (not true at all), I have to leave for downtown Chicago early morning (totally true) today.

Those who may be waiting with bated breath to read what I have written (not true at all), I would counsel patience for a few more hours.

Of disembodied voices and masquerades

2012-01-28T05:56:00.001-08:00

Terry Gross, the iconic host of NPR’s signature interview show ‘Fresh Air’ (Pic: Will Ryan, www.npr.org)

Have you noticed how a disembodied radio voice almost invariably fails to live up to one’s feverishly imagined image of its possessor? For me it began in my childhood with the two most pervasive voices on India’s airwaves for generations—those of singers Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi.

If memory serves me right, I think I saw the pictures of the two more than 20 years after I had so intuitively known their voices. The mystique was broken that day. I had by no means imagined Mangeshkar and Rafi to be the world’s most beautiful people. In fact, beauty was not even part of my imagination, even though I had a very definite expectation what they ought to look like on the basis of their voices.

However, the chasm between what the two really looked like and what I had wanted them to look like was enormous. It was as if I had been swindled by their faces long after I had been seduced by their voices. Of course, that reaction was entirely a reflection on me rather than Mangeshkar and Rafi. When I say the mystique was broken what I am actually saying is that a disembodied voice is poor clay to build a whole person out of.

I never met Rafi but did get to interview Mangeshkar once, thanks entirely to my friend Shireesh Kanekar. When she asked “Chaha ghenar ka? (Will you have tea?)” in Marathi, the voice behind that banal question sounded so arrestingly familiar that I looked around the room to make sure that it was not coming from some invisible source.

Since then there have been other voices which have not matched their mental images. There was the voice of Ameen Sayani, for decades India’s most familiar host conducting its most enduringly popular radio hit parade. It would be safe to say that Sayani was the voice that arbitrated popular Hindi cinema music. I met the man close to 20 years after I had grown up listening to his voice. When he greeted me at his office in Bombay in the mid 1980s, for a moment I thought he was a mimic channeling Sayani and not Sayani himself. It was as if some strange man was lipsynching Ameen Sayani.

Another voice, which has mercifully remained a voice after decades, was that of Shameem Qureishi, a broadcaster on the All India Radio’s Urdu Service. I don’t know what he looks like to this day, which is just as well because who knows what might happen to the mystique around his voice if I found out what he looks like?

Yet another radio voice that has become a subject of that feverish imagining in the last five years belongs to Terry Gross, the iconic host of NPR’s signature interview show ‘Fresh Air.’ Hers was not an image that was fully formed in my mind like those of Mangeshkar, Rafi and Sayani but my mind had begun to extrapolate a look from the voice. Then I saw her on ‘The Colbert Report’ the other day. The mystique was radically rearranged. It was not broken because it had not yet been fully formed.

There is a common underlying theme to my reactions to all the disembodied voices. I feel as if the person out of whom a particular voice is coming is a masquerade. So when I saw Terry Gross talking to Stephen Colbert I had this weird sense of having been tricked.

None of what I feel has anything to do with the people I am talking about. It has everything to do with the way my mind works.

Some ideas for Jaipur Literature Festival, 2013

2012-01-27T06:22:00.001-08:00

Given my unique standing in the world of literature, journalism, security and graphic art I have designed a possible logo for The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), 2013. It is still early days but the one above could make the cut.

I am also suggesting that the organizers lay down the following conditions for participating authors and panelists.

It is mandatory for authors and panelists to carry a/an:

* Reinforced steel helmet

* Bulletproof vest

* Firearm

* Attorney

* Olympic grade running shoes

The order of the conditions above is not random but very carefully thought through. If the first two do not work, try the third, failing which turn to the fourth and, if everything fails, just run. We learned that in the festival that just concluded some authors exercised the last option first which was a bad idea, not to mention an embarrassing one.

The festival authorities should set up a store at the entrance of the venue to sell JLF branded helmets, vests, firearms, running shoes and attorneys. To make the merchandise attractive, the festival should offer early registration discount. The money earned from the sale of the branded merchandise can help minimize the festival’s dependence on corporate sponsors whose balls can be easily twisted by the government.

Additionally, the festival organizers should require a disclosure from all those who are planning to read passages from works banned in India to bring their own handcuffs to save the local police the trouble to bring so many.

This is just the first draft of what can be done. I propose to have a more comprehensive blueprint ready soon. I will not be able to share this for reasons of client confidentiality.

A few uncalled for observations on January 26

2012-01-26T06:24:00.001-08:00

(Left to Right) Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, India’s President Pratibha Patil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the annual Republic Day Parade on January 26 in New Delhi (Pic: The Press Information Bureau of India)

On India’s 63rd Republic Day today, a few uncalled for observations.

As I see the picture above I am paralyzed by an utterly frivolous urge. Let India and Thailand exchange prime ministers, Manmohan Singh for Yingluck Shinawatra, even if it is for a short while. I hardly need to tell you why but I will.

The 45-year-old Shinawatra fits the Indian demographic so much better when you consider that there are 550 million Indians under the age 25. At 79, Dr. Singh is several generations removed from the aspirations of nearly half of the country’s population.

It might also help to have a president whose handshake is not limp. See the picture below showing Shinawatra’s hand on the left and Patil’s on the right. It almost feels as if Patil is palming off a blob of play doh to Shinawatra. Incidentally, Dr. Singh has a similar handshake.

While I am on the subject, India’s Defence Minister A K Antony is in dire need of sartorial rescue by the US Navy Seal team 6. If you don’t believe me see Antony’s picture below.

India’s Defence Minister A K Antony

A lot of Indian politicians labor under the impression that they look handsome in that Himachali headgear of the kind Antony is wearing. Most of them look like clowns that circuses superannuated.

And finally, I think Dr. Singh can do with some animation in his public engagements. If you don’t believe me, see the picture below.

Prime Minister Singh

Give war of words a chance

2012-01-25T07:00:00.001-08:00

A war of words has broken out between the US and Iran. The US fired question marks and exclamation marks with occasional dashes and hash signs even as Iran shot back a barrage of semicolons,comas, hyphens and full stops. There was an occasional diplomatic exchange over syntactical correctness but mostly it was an explosion of bombastic words.

Early reports about casualties were unclear but eyewitnesses spoke of many fractured and fragmented sentences strewn along the border. Several dictionaries were standing by to receive badly wounded words for emergency surgeries. Synonyms, a sort of national reserve guards, were on the ready to replace the wounded and antonyms were being dressed up to counter Iran’s phraseology.

While most of the exchange was conducted in English in keeping with the Geneva Convention, Tehran craftily employed its ancient war tactic of waylaying the enemy by using some complex Farsi phrases. War experts were surprised that Iran would use its choicest weapons so early in the conflict but that was attributed to their new war strategy to overwhelm the adversary early.

Unprepared for the rarely used weapon of Farsi, the US forces had to go into a strategic retreat, reload its arsenal with Google Translation and return. What was expected to be a brutal ambush, in fact, turned out to be surprisingly gentle as the translation revealed that Iran was actually using Saadi’s more spiritual poetry.

I can go on about the war of words but I suppose you get the drift. I think the world should try war of words more often than it does whenever countries have serious disagreements. Words don’t die and they certainly don’t cost. So why not?

I nearly told you so, twice

2012-01-24T04:31:00.001-08:00

Far be it for me to say I told you so but I almost did tell you so.Not once but twice in a span of four days.

My January 20 blog said this about the threat to author Salman Rushdie's life in India. "I hope the intelligence reports are not just an expedient device that someone in the bureaucratic establishment is using to get around this ticklish issue. Perhaps that someone reasoned that if Rushdie were to be warned of a “credible” plot to assassinate him, would he still take the chance and visit for the greater glory of the freedom of speech?" Well, that earns me some bragging rights to at least say, "I nearly told you so."

There are already news reports in India that the threat was manufactured to keep Rushdie from the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF).

Then yesterday I wrote what I thought was a spoof about fictional Mumbai mobsters planning a hit on a fictional author by shutting down his video address at an event. I was careful enough not to make it an obvious reference to Rushdie by describing the fictional author, in the immortal words of Pistool Ganja, as “chusa hua aam” or sucked out/shriveled up mango. Rushdie is still like a ripe Kashmiri apple. So no similarity there.

This morning I read the news that Rushdie’s video address to the JLF was canceled in the face of a mob of angry Muslims threatening violence. One of them was quoted by the IANS as saying, “He (Rushdie) is a criminal writer as far as Muslims are concerned. He has insulted Prophet Mohammed and there is no way we will let him speak even if he is doing so from abroad. There will be trouble if the speech by Rushdie goes ahead. Muslims are never afraid of dying.”

So what is going on is that real life is writing the next plot of Rushdie’s novel. All that he has to do is report what is going on. There is enough magic realism and the theater of the absurd in it.

Speaking of the theater of the absurd, what Rajdeep Sardesai, a high profile news anchor (Aren’t they all high profile?), tried to do was priceless. During a debate on the Rushdie visit controversy, Rajdeep tried to end his show on a high note. Among the four panelists were Asaduddin Owaisi, a Member of Parliament representing Hyderabad, and writer and freedom of speech activist Ruchir Joshi. Before I quote the exchange, here is a bit of a background on the two men in the context of the controversy.

Owaisi has found in the embarrassing controversy an embarrassment of political riches to assert himself as the new uncompromising voice of the Muslim community. He seems to have succeeded. And Joshi has cast himself on the other side, having controversially read excerpts from ‘The Satanic Verses’, Rushdie’s 1988 book which is banned in India. It is hardly surprising that the two men can’t stand each other.

So Rajdeep, in keeping with the highest tradition of journalism, tried to extract an invitation for a sumptuous Hyderabadi meal from Owaisi to Joshi on national television.

Rajdeep: Will you invite Ruchir Joshi…you you cook some of the best Hyderabadi food I know? Is it possible to bring you and Ruchir Joshi together and resolve this?

Owaisi: No, I am extremely sorry Rajdeep, I cannot invite to my house a person who blasphemes my prophet. The lessons that can be learnt from this debate is please be within the confines of law…Criticize Islam, you have all the right but there is a difference between blasphemy and criticism… You cannot question my identity in the garb of your liberalism.”

While Owaisi was smacking down social graces Joshi’s hand reflexively went up to his forehead as if to scratch an non-existent itch. It was an involuntary gesture of exasperation.

Joshi responded saying this: India is a vast and plural country where 90 percent of the people can’t read. We have waited 23 years to hope that some kind of reasonable attitude will be shown by the extremists. We are now done with patience Chetan (Bhagat). We have tried to hope that they would see sense…We would continue to our non-violent protest. If the law is bad, it will go. New, better laws will be replaced through our efforts and we will continue to lodge our nonviolent protest and whatever that entails we are all willing to do. Okay?”

So okay. There you have it. Both sides are intransigent and therefore perfect for the hungry 24/7 broadcast news beast.

On a slightly trivial note, India is not 90 percent illiterate as Joshi said. The general literacy rate is 75.06%, 82.14% for men and 65.46% for women, according to the 2011 census. Even if you factor in political exaggeration it is not less than 70% overall. Even in 1947, when India became an independent country, the literacy rate was 12%, which makes the illiteracy then lower than 90%.

That said, literacy does not necessarily translate into education, knowledge and enlightenment.

Ganja Pistoolwaley plans a hit

2012-01-23T05:36:00.001-08:00

Ganja Pistoolwaley a.k.a. Pistool Ganja nervously pulled his underwear wedged deep inside his buttocks. Unexpected phone calls from his boss Raqeeb Tadipar had that effect on him.

Pistoolwaley stood up whenever Tadipar called. Unlike in the past, with video phones Tadipar would know instantly if his underlings were sufficiently deferential when he called. He didn’t like his men sitting around because he thought that made them slow on the draw.

It was only during extreme emergencies when Tadibhai (as Raqeeb was known) would call himself. The hit Tadibhai was calling Ganja about involved a high profile author.

“Han Tadibhai. Mein khada hai na. Mein to kabhi kidhar baithta hai?” Ganja said with insincere obsequiousness. (Yes, Tadibhai I am standing up. Do I ever sit down?)

“Saaley, yeh video phone hai. Mein dekh sakta hai. Abhi supari ka photu SMS kiyela hai,” Tadibhai said. (This is a video phone. I can see you. I have just SMSed a picture of the hit).

Ganja: “Han bhai mila na. Dekha. Boley to aadmi to chusey hue aam ki mafik lagta hai.” (Got it. The man looks like a shriveled up mango.)

Tadibhai: “To yeh kaun sa chikna hero hai. Sala kitaab likhta rehta hai.” (He is no slick movie star. The bastard writes books).

Ganja: “To likhne do na bhai. Apney ko kya karne ka hai? Apan log kidhar padh sakta hai?” (So let him write.What do we care? We are illiterate anyway.)

Tadipar: “Arey who sab mereku mat sikha. Aaj kal teri zabaan pistul se zyada chalti hai) (Don’t teach me all that. These days you talk more than your pistol.)

Sensing Tadibhai’s irritation, Ganja immediately corrected himself. “Tadibhai, mein to aise hi gammat kiya. Aap ne bola aur sala writer dola.” (Tadibhai, I am kidding. You say the word and the writer is gone).

Tadibhai: “Arey Pistool teri ma ki usko dolane ka nahi hai rey. Woh video pe aa ke kuch bhashan dene wala hai. Uska bhashan rokna hai.” (Hey Pistool, he is not to be bumped off. He is giving a video speech. That speech should not happen.)

Ganja: “Boley to zinda rakhne ka par acting nahi karne ka” (That means he may live but not act)

Tadibhai: “Ab ghusi baat tere bheje mein goli ka tarha. Yeh hona mangta hai.” (Now sense has entered your brain like a bullet. This needs to happen)

Tadibhai’s menacing face went off Ganja’s phone. Ganja placed a call, also a video call, to his trusted tech support Chandu Ghaslet.

Chandu stood up as he answered the call. “Han Pistoolbhai. Mujhe kyun yaad kiya?) (Yes Pistool, how come you remembered me?)

Ganja: “Yeh address likh. Idhar kal ek video bhashan hai. Who bandh kara.” (Take this address. There is a video speech scheduled there tomorrow. Stop it.)

Chandu Ghaslet, who hardly ever figured in any of the exciting hits that his gang carried out, was thrilled to have been called. Naturally, he felt he needed to make this his best job.

Ghaslet: “Video bhashan matlab bandwidth bada zyada hoga. Mein 30 mein se 15 frame drop kara dunga. Sala breakdance ke jaisa lagega woh writer.” (Video speech means high bandwidth. I can drop 15 of the 30 frames. He would be so jerky he would look like a breakdancer).

Ganja: “Ey Ghaslet, baat sun le. Band wand kuchch nahi. Udhar ja, do kan ke neeche baja aur cable kaat dal.” (Hey Ghaslet, listen to me. Forget bandwidth. Go there, thrash a couple of them and cut the cable).

Ganja disconnected.

So now we wait to see what happens.

Note: Excuse the inordinate use of the Mumbai street lingo. I had no choice because that’s how these tough guys talk.

A few observations about Oprah Winfrey in India

2012-01-22T06:21:00.001-08:00

Oprah Winfrey (Pic: screen grab from ndtv.com)

I have been looking for a standout gig on the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) for myself. I found one this morning. Not having ever attended it, I think it is a great gig never to attend it in the future. And yet feel no compunctions whatsoever in holding forth on it.That could well be a defense mechanism going up against the fact I never get invited to such events. It is not a case of grapes being sour but grapes being non-existent.

There, with that out of the way let me say a thing or two about Oprah Winfrey’s interview by NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, India’s most high profile television anchor, at the festival. Winfrey has been in India for the past few days on her first visit, partly to shoot a chapter of a new show and partly to see for herself a country frenzied on her surface and tranquil at her core. That’s a great myth about India but it is so compelling that I will let that pass.

Mutual admiration societies have a way of forming effortlessly in the kind of convivial and salubrious setting of festivals in India. The JLF being one such festival it is not surprising that people try and put their best foot forward, unless, of course, if you happen to be Salman Rushdie. Then the foot is on your throat. But I digress.

Dutt introduced Winfrey with somewhat breathless, albeit fully deserved, praise. Winfrey in turn seemed awestruck by the fact that Dutt said all that she did without a teleprompter. My immediate thought at the exchange, admittedly churlish and sophomoric, was that from now on it has to be Barkha Winfrey and Oprah Dutt. The switch has a certain cadence to it. (Check, one more gratuitous comment out of the way).

I can review the whole interview but I think it would be sufficient to make an observation or two about a couple of points. Among the things that Winfrey says she was struck by immediately on her arrival in Mumbai (being reflective and contemplative not to mention ruminant, she noticed more profound things too) was how Indian drivers treat traffic lights.

“What is it with the red lights? I mean does the red light mean stop or not? Or is it just there for your entertainment? What is this? The light is red and everybody just keeps going. You all seem to know what you’re doing,” Winfrey said in her world famous tone of polite and amused incredulity.

I think Winfrey unwittingly raised a deep civilizational question when she wondered like Seinfeld, “What is it with the red lights?” I will tell you what the deal with the red lights is. The red light is to the the average Indian driver, of four wheelers, two wheelers, three wheelers and occasionally uni-wheelers, is what the red rag is to a bull. It is an invitation to charge and not stop. Because it is a rule, not only must it be broken but trampled upon. In laws lies the irresistible possibility and thrill of breaking them. The first instinct in India is to how to get around doing something that is mandated by law. It is a civilization that has for long had gloriously comprehensive laws on its statute books and that’s where they have mostly stayed.

Another point that Dutt touched upon was Winfrey’s visit to the widows of Vrindavan. These women are a profoundly shameful rebuke of the lofty claims of family values. These are the women who have been not just cast aside but castigated simply because their husbands died before them. Although the practice is not as widespread as it seems, it is prevalent enough to have a large number of them living in the ancient town of Vrindavan, the putative of hub of Krishna’s childhood in Uttar Pradesh. A lot has been written and filmed about this revoltingly obscurantist and abhorrent practice.

I am sure Winfrey was struck by the cruel contradiction of a country that still prides herself in her joint family system and yet tolerates the widows of Vrindavan. Answering Dutt’s question what struck her the most about her visit, Winfrey spoke of three things. One of which was the sense of family.

“The sense of family tradition..I now get it. I really get the sense of how glorious it is that this is a country that has no respect for nursing homes because you take care of your families and you don’t put your families in nursing homes,” she said.

Unless of course if you are a widow in northern parts of India, in which case you are likely to be packed off to Vrindavan to be among other widows leading this grotesquely imagined life of loneliness away from your family simply because the husband died. And without a husband what are you if not a wretched shadow of a human being shrouded in a white sari and tonsured head stewing in your own misery?

I am sure Winfrey could not square the “glorious” practice of taking care of one’s family with the widows of Vrindavan. She should not even try it because it would be like trying to understand why drivers do not stop at the red lights. They do either because they can.

‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’

2012-01-21T05:54:00.001-08:00

A book that is getting a lot of buzz these days is “Behind the Beautiful Forevers—Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity’ by Katherine Boo.

The book is preceded by high praise, some of which calls it the best book of narrative non-fiction in a quarter century. Author and historian Ramchandra Guha says, “Without question the best book yet written on contemporary India. Also, the best work of narrative nonfiction I’ve read in twenty-five years.”

Kirkus Review calls it “The best book yet written on India in the throes of a brutal transition.”

Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen says, “A beautiful account, told through real-life stories, of the sorrows and joys, the anxieties and stamina, in the lives of the precarious and powerless in urban India whom a booming country has failed to absorb and integrate. A brilliant book that simultaneously informs, agitates, angers, inspires, and instigates.”

There is a word for something that “simultaneously informs, agitates, angers, inspires, and instigates” –- it’s called life.

The book’s publishers, Random House, describes it thus:

“In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.”

P.S.: You can see that I have taken the path of least resistance in this post by merely copy-pasting publicity blurbs. There is a reason for that. I woke up with pure ennui this morning. I think it was set off by having to shovel six inches of snow yesterday. And snow, I can assure you, does not take the path of least resistance while being shoveled.

Why bite the bullet?

2012-01-20T04:39:00.001-08:00

What woke me up this morning a little earlier than my normal 4.30 a.m. was muffled but distinctly audible exultation. At first I attributed it to the dawn dreamscape that often washes over me. However, as I opened my regular news source of the IANS wire I knew what I heard probably emanated from the direction of Deoband in India.

I found out that author Salman Rushdie has called off his visit to India. Here is how the 64-year-old author explains the reason:

“For the last several days I have made no public comment about my proposed trip to Jaipur at the request of the authorities in Rajasthan, hoping that they would put in place such precautions as might be necessary to allow me to come and address the Festival audience in circumstances that were comfortable and safe for all.

I have now been informed by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to 'eliminate' me.

While I have some doubts about the accuracy of this intelligence, it would be irresponsible of me to come to the Festival in such circumstances; irresponsible to my family, to the festival audience, and to my fellow writers. I will therefore not travel to Jaipur as planned."

What this means immediately is that while the original fatwa issued against Rushdie’s life on February 14, 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran may have lapsed, its mutations are still very much around nearly a quarter century later. The advent of information and knowledge century in the interim, it seems, has done nothing to contain our primal barbarism.

Let’s for the sake of argument take the Indian intelligence reports to be accurate. Does that mean that somewhere along the line the extreme Islamic religious establishment, such as it is, would at the very least take the path of least resistance were paid underworld assassins to carry out the hit? And who paid them? Also, at whose behest? I hope the intelligence reports are not just an expedient device that someone in the bureaucratic establishment is using to get around this ticklish issue. Perhaps that someone reasoned that if Rushdie were to be warned of a “credible” plot to assassinate him, would he still take the chance and visit for the greater glory of the freedom of speech?

It makes the question that I raised the other day—Should Rushdie be in a lifelong battle-ready mode?—particularly relevant. He does speak about his responsibility towards his family, the festival audience and fellow writers while choosing to cancel the visit. It is not worth his while even if the plot to assassinate him may be nothing more than some crafty intelligence bureaucrat’s way of preempting the difficult challenge of protecting him inside a chaotic literary festival.

It is safe to say that at least for the foreseeable future Rushdie will not be able to openly visit the country of his birth because the so-called paid assassins are unlikely to dismantle their weapons and mothball their telescopic sights right away. A doubt about his personal safety has been introduced not just in Rushdie’s mind but that of his family and friends who may advise him that it is simply not worth it.

In a way Rushdie’s decision to cancel can also be attributed to the bizarre calculus by India’s political establishment that they are better off not annoying nearly 20 million Muslims in the election-bound state of Uttar Pradesh, even though those 20 million have said nothing to indicate that they care whether the author came visiting.

Next time when Indian leaders brag about the country’s rising status as a “global superpower” let them remember that a mere a cleric in a grimy town can undermine their grandiosity.

‘Ukraine is not a brothel’

2012-01-19T05:38:00.001-08:00

Ukrainian women’s rights group Femen members protest at the residence of Indian ambassador to Kiev. (Pic: femen.livejournal.com)

A group of topless Ukrainian women stormed the balcony of Indian Ambassador Rajiv K. Chander’s residence in capital Kiev. They were protesting because they believe the Indian embassy is denying visas to women between 15 and 40 amid reports that some of them go to India to engage in prostitution.

A newspaper report in India alleged that the issuance of visas to women between 15 and 40 had been made more rigorous because of the allegations of prostitution. The protestors belong to Femen, a women’s group that stages topless protests against various issues.

There are reports that India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had instructed embassies in former Soviet republics such as Ukraine, Georgia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to vet visa applications from young women with greater scrutiny. The Indian embassy in Kiev has denied that it is following any such practice.

The Telegraph newspaper of Kolkata that reported the story said this:

“A senior MEA official said the report was “weird, if not mischievous and misplaced”.

“No such instructions have been issued. Visa officials are continuing to use their judgement in the issuance of visas, but there is no discrimination,” the official said, adding such restrictions would make every man a potential terrorist and every woman a potential sex worker.”

I went to Femen’s blog to get some more details about the protest. Since the blog is in Russian and its Google translation poor, I am not able to say precisely what it asserts. But the general tone is one of anger and rejection. “Ukraine is not a brothel! Ukrainka not prostitutes!” it says. I would not depend on the translation because of a line like this one: “Daily hundreds ukraynok, pыtayuschyhsya get visas, passes vыnuzhdenы pozornuyu procedure opravdanyya, dokazыvaya officials that they are not fucking.”

“Indian prostitution is directly conducted with impunity of the country’s criminal business. Blaming it on women is a shame for the heirs of such a rich and old culture,” The telegraph quotes the blog as saying.

Femen’s outrage is understandable because if the embassy operates under that particular instruction, it does amount to profiling. I am willing to take the Indian foreign ministry’s assertion that it does not practice discrimination at its face value, even though I would not be surprised if there are at least discreet guidelines to the effect.

Notwithstanding Femen’s protest, it is no secret in New Delhi that a number of women from the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, do come to the Indian capital because “the business here is good”, as one young politician told me last year. It was a poorly disguised euphemism for prostitution.

The way the business operates is that young women from Central Asian countries visit on tourist visas for short durations and use their time in New Delhi to make tidy sums of money from businessmen and politicians. India’s booming economy has spawned a generation of young and successful businessmen with substantial spare cash to spend on personal entertainment. It is also a well known fact that there is a preference for white women among these businessmen.

On this one I am with Femen in so much as the group says that the embassy would end up perpetuating that unsavory reputation of Ukrainian women if it was indeed profiling those in the age group 15-40. Of course, visa issuance by any country has a built-in bias in the sense that it does eventually boil down to what a particular consular officer thinks at that particular time. Since visas are a privilege and not a right, it is never easy to prove why some get rejected. It could well be that the Indian embassy in Kiev does subject this age group of women to greater scrutiny.

Should Rushdie be in a lifelong battle-ready mode?

2012-01-18T05:36:00.001-08:00

Would it be fair to expect author Salman Rushdie to pick one more fight in defense of literary and creative freedom? Whether Rushdie should visit India to attend a literary festival in the face of some Islamic clerics’ demand to prevent him because he offended them a quarter century ago is at the heart of the debate.

There is no legal way to stop Rushdie from visiting other than someone challenging in a court of law his Person of Indian Origin (PIO) status that guarantees him unlimited multiple visits to the country of his birth whenever he wishes to. I seriously doubt whether any judge of reasonable merit would oblige any such petitioner. I am not even sure if the PIO status is vulnerable to individual litigation.

As some of you might know Rushdie is scheduled to visit the annual Jaipur Literature Festival (January 20-24). That visit has run into politically expedient resistance from a bunch of Islamic clerics who believe that the author should be prevented because he wrote a book, namely ‘The Satanic Verses’, in 1988 that they insist blasphemed Islam and the Prophet Mohammad. Rushdie has visited India in recent years, the latest being in 2007, without any serious opposition.

One reason for this objection may have something to with the fact that Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and politically the most influential state, is up for state legislature elections. It is a season of political expediency and posturing at its worst in a state where everything is political until proven otherwise. I do not mean to minimize the clerics’ ability to hold long grudges by saying that their objection is purely political but it helps that elections are imminent. There is no better time than elections to exhibit old wounds and demand that they be nursed.

One can make the case that without the obliging media, particularly the broadcast media, the marginal demand from the clerics may not have gained the traction and visibility that it now enjoys. It has risen to a point where it is seriously forcing the Indian government to dither over whether Rushdie should visit. Left to them the government would be mighty pleased if Rushdie cancels the visit of his own volition. Literary and creative freedom is not an issue any political dispensation would be too eager to stand up for. They would rather that such lofty ideals simply disappeared.

An element of uncertainty has been introduced by Ashok Gehlot, the chief minister of the state of Rajasthan in whose capital Jaipur the festival is being organized. Gehlot has implied that he is aware of the security concerns surrounding the Rushdie visit. What he really means to say is, “Salman Rushdie, can you please not mess up my happiness by actually visiting?”

That brings me back to my original question. Those, including I, who regard free speech as a fundamental human right, should be conscious that no one has paid a greater price to uphold it than Rushdie. It is entirely up to him whether he thinks it is worth his while to engage in one more battle. No one should think any less of him simply because he concludes that it is not worth it. Even Rushdie cannot be in a lifelong battle-ready mode. The idea that if he chooses not to visit would hand a victory to the extremist fringe is a powerful one, but why should it be Rushdie’s personal responsibility to take on them again and again?

So far in this ridiculous affair the only people who seem to winning are the clerics because they have forced the government on the defensive because of the media. Having been a journalist for 30 years, albeit on the less glamorous print side, I am willing to be sympathetic to those who raise the question whether they could have willfully disregarded the clerics’ demand. It is a question of treatment and perspective and not whether the media should disregard such stories which have a way of quickly degenerating into shrill television debates fueled by their ratings potential.

The clerics have also succeeded in grabbing political space disproportionate to their actual standing and influence as a voice of Muslims in the country. If there is a moderate, reasonable counter to their demand it is not getting the media representation it deserves. One heard Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah saying, "We underestimate the intelligence of Indian Muslims when we try to raise issues like this which have no bearing on day to day concerns of Muslims. I don't believe that there are many Muslims in India for whom visa to Salman Rushdie will be an election issue."

Despite those spirited words, there is a real possibility that Rushdie may not yet make it. The Jaipur Literature Festival organizers insist that there is no change in his visit but there is ambiguity about when he might come. From where I am sitting(a freezing basement) it is beginning to seem that even the festival organizers would be secretly relieved if Rushdie did not show up. I doubt very much if they would cancel the festival unless Rushdie attends. Even they are not so wedded to principles. Of course, it is possible that there is a lot going on discreetly, behind the scene to ensure that Rushdie attends and attends with the respect he deserves.

It is a sorry spectacle that a handful of outdated clerics can still sway the world’s largest democracy in the direction they want.

Mumbai’s celebrity world is convulsing in multiple Oprahsms

2012-01-17T05:58:00.001-08:00

Mumbai’s celebrity world is convulsing in multiple Oprahsms. It is hardly surprising that anyone who is anyone at all came in Oprah Winfrey’s honor. I meant to the biggest party of 2012 in India, in Mumbai, hosted in her honor yesterday.

Winfrey was visiting Mumbai as part of something so profound that it would change the course of human history. As usual I am not privy to exactly what. But as I was saying anyone who is anyone at all, even Sikander Kher, showed up wearing their most beatific smiles in case benediction came their way from her.

Oprah being Oprah did not disappoint as evident in the gushing stream of tweets that the attendees put out. Here is a sample from someone called Farah Khan Ali: “"Wth my inspiration @Oprah 2night.I just died. She is d eternal "Rock Star"&this is 1 day I will always remember.” I can go into a detailed analysis of the tweet in all its subtleties but what would be the point of that?

News reports say that Winfrey was chaperoned by personages no less than the Bachchans, Amitabh, wife Jaya, son Abhishek, daughter-in-law Aishwarya. She was visiting India’s first showbiz family, partly because Abhishek and Aishwarya were once guests on her show.

Winfrey was hosted-- in a manner of speaking because you don’t really host her-- by Mumbai’s pioneering socialite Parmeshwar Godrej of the famous Godrej family. Once that happens in the city, everything else happens. Superstars and superwealthies then reflexively show up in their Bentleys, Rollses and Mercs at the Godrej do.

These days when I see the photographs and videos of such high-powered celebrity events I look at the others such as security guards and hangers-on for any hint of resentment at having been left out. I must say I find it rather easily these days. It is not so much resentment as resigned bafflement at what it is they did not do to be among the guarded and gawked at rather than be among those doing the guarding and gawking.

It is easy to begrudge and slam the successful but the fact also remains that many of them came up the hard way. Winfrey herself is a powerful example of that. She has paid her dues and probably deserves every ounce of honor, deference, flattery, respect, admiration and sycophancy that she gets.

Once you are canonized by the Church of Pop Culture, the way Winfrey most certainly is, everything that you do is seen from that special canonical prism. You wear a sari and a gorgeously sequined blouse and you seem divine. There are no wrong moves for a saint, only intriguing ones.

Note to self: When you step out of your basement, remember to get a life.

A captive audience of people under their own spell

2012-01-16T05:36:00.001-08:00

Ricky Gervais

I got to the Golden Globes last night exactly at the halfway mark at 8.30 p.m. and did not miss anything. That should tell you how unnecessary they are.

The host, Ricky Gervais, said, "The Golden Globes are just like the Oscars without all that esteem. The Golden Globes are to the Oscars what Kim Kardashian is to Kate Middleton. Bit louder, bit trashier, bit drunker, and more easily bought. Allegedly. Nothing's been proved." For some inexplicable reason the high-powered Hollywood audience laughed, perhaps mistaking his observation to be a joke. I do not think Gervais meant it as one. Gervais seems to have understood that the best jokes are often a pure factual statement without bothering to inject any more humor.

I suspect Gervais had made no preparation for the show but had merely decided to show up and simply state the obvious. If some suckers are willing to pay him for not breaking a sweat, he would be foolish to turn it down. It is an easy gig for someone like him. It is a captive audience of people who can rarely be broken out of their own spell. And I am talking about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA). Movie stars did not even show up. They all sent their reputations dressed up in expensive clothes.

The formula of having a caustic Englishman hurling gratuitous insults at people is by now well established on American television. Simon Cowell pioneered it and Gervais is perpetuating it. Insult sells even more than sex and who better to sell it than the middle-aged Englishman who can’t do much sex? (See, that is an example of gratuitous insult).

I replayed Gervais’ opening monologue since I missed it live. I thought it had a couple of good cracks like this one: “Who needs the Oscars? Not me, and not Eddie Murphy. He walked out on em, and good for him. But when the man who said yes to Norbit, says no, you know you're in trouble.”

Even by the seemingly lackadaisical standards of the Globes, last night’s show came across as particularly lackadaisical. Don’t let anyone tell you, “But it had humor.” Well, that’s the least one would expect in a room full of Hollywood pantheon.

Waiting at the ocean’s edge

2012-01-15T05:04:00.001-08:00

Consider today’s post a sort of director’s cut. It is self-indulgent and not particularly well structured, but I suspect it is still fairly readable. If it is not, so be it because no one pays to read this blog. The tip jar on the left has not attracted a penny since it was shamelessly installed there by me some three years ago. So if you don’t pay, you get no say.

The following three literary constructs happened in quick succession within a span of about 20 minutes early this morning around 1.30 a.m. They just wrote themselves.The scrap of paper above is where I wrote it.

The first thought was about a fictional poet called Mazoori Sana of Africa. Incidentally, Mazoori Sana means ‘I am fine’ in Swahili in response to the question “Habari gani” (How are you or what's’ up?). I have used it as the name of a fictional poet standing at the edge of the Indian Ocean on the shores of Zanzibar. Here is what Mazoori Sana wrote via me:

From the shores of Zanzibar

I trade in cloves afar

Then I wait at the ocean’s edge

For fragrances to wash ashore

By the way, Zanzibar is one of my all time favorite words and always conjures up the fragrance of cloves, something this semiautonomous part of Tanzania in Africa was once known for.

That little limerick was followed by one in Hindustani. It says:

Woh le gaye gulaab merey,

Yeh kehke ke hisaab

Khushbuon mein chukayenge

Fir ek roz meri dehleez par

Itr ki do bottle koi chhod gaya

(She took my roses

Saying she will pay me in fragrances

Then one day

Someone left two perfume bottles at my doorstep)

The third construct is not necessarily poetic but tries to tell an ancient story my way. It is in Hindustani with translation below.

Brij pahuncha to pata chala

Ki woh to Dwarka mein baithen hein

Dwarka mein khabar mili

Woh Kurukshetra ko nikal gaye

Kurukshetra ki seema par ek yoddha ne mujhe roka aur kaha

‘Yehan se aagey jana pratibandh hai,

Aagey ghamasan yuddh chal raha hai

Woh aayenge, zuroor aayenge

Parantu is yuddh ke pashchyat

Sab vyarth hi hoga’

(I reached Brij only to find that

He was in Dwarka

In Dwarka, I heard the news that

He was on way to Kurukshetra

On the outskirts of Kurukshetra

A warrior stopped me and said,

‘Thus far and no further

There is a fierce war on

He will return, will surely return

But after the war

It will all be futile’)

After writing these three unconnected bits I went to sleep around 2 a.m.

The kite fliers of Ahmedabad redux

2012-01-14T05:25:00.001-08:00

The kite by Mayank Chhaya

(I wrote the following post on January 14, 2011. I am republishing it by popular demand…. Well, that’s a lie. For one, there is no popular demand for it. More importantly, nothing has to be republished on the Internet. It is always there for the world to see and read when it wants to. I am recycling it because I do not feel like writing this morning.To be fair to me, there are some rare new insights added to the redux version.)

I don’t do nostalgia that well. Coming from me, it sounds bogus. But I am going to indulge myself anyway considering that today happens to be Uttarayan, the D-Day for the kite fliers of Gujarat in general and Ahmedabad in particular.

While residents of many other cities wannbe kite fliers in the league of those in Ahmedabad, there is really no comparison. Kite flying in Ahmedabad is an experience of near nirvanic bliss. When I was growing up learning to fly kites was a defining rite of passage. I got defined when I was nine.

In my extended family, the ultimate test of one’s kite flying skills was to be able to fly a kite even while holding a firki (a string spool) and finally cutting a rival’s kite. I did all that without much fuss. So yes, I have been a bloody good kite flier. But then Ahmedabad is teeming with bloody good kite fliers.

Kite flying in Ahmedabad was and remains today an aerial war where victims are almost invariably anonymous. You never really know whose kite you are cutting because there are thousands in the sky.

There are two broad ways to wage this war. One is to attack your adversary from below and the other is to swoop down from top. Once your kite gains a certain altitude because of the Uttarayan wind, the taut string becomes a potentially lethal weapon. It is laced with what is called the manjo or manja. In fact, making the manja is quite a process and there are manja makers who have become legends because of the sheer abrasiveness of their product. When I was growing up some of them in the walled city guarded their formula as zealously as the makers of Coca Cola.

The manja is a mixture of flour, industrial adhesive, aluminum oxide, zirconia alumina, powdered glass and various types of colors. The raw string is laced with the manja and allowed to dry for several hours, sometimes overnight. My mamas, maternal uncles, who grew up in the walled city had “undisclosed” sources of specially made string spools which would be delivered in the dark of the nigh away from the prying eyes of neighboring spies. A dozen or so firkis would be brought wrapped in newspapers as if they were some rare contraband. And for that one day on January 14, the firkis were indeed rare contraband.

The lethality of the manja would be tested with the same meticulousness that a seasoned drug dealer would establish his contraband’s purity. Two firkis would be randomly picked from about a dozen or so surreptitiously peeping out of the newspaper packaging. One mama would unspool a firki as if he was initiating a virgin bride into the joys of sex without frightening her. Another mama would gently tap at the side of another spool to see if the string unraveled easily. They would then clip two short pieces of thread from the firkis. The two would rub the pieces in one swift action in opposite directions to see who cut first. That would complete the test of the manja’s purity.

Coming back to the two main ways to cut your rival’s kite, one of my uncles specialized in attacking from below. What it meant was that he would circle his kite around the rival’s, and at a precise point start pulling the string back with considerable hand coordination. That would rapidly raise his kite’s height again and the resultant contact of his string with the rival’s string would create a cutting edge. That’s where the quality of the manja would come into play. I do not remember a single occasion when this particular kite flier lost his. There were times when after cutting a dozen or so kites, he would cut his own string and let his kite go. Mahesh Mama, that was his name, was a kite flier whose prowess was discussed by us boys in whispered tones.

The other strategy is to swoop down and rapidly release the string as one makes contact with the rival. That rapid release causes friction and eventually cuts either your string or the rival’s. The second way of attacking was preferred by those not blessed with swift arms.

Kite flying began as early as 4 a.m. and went on till 1 p.m. when we would break for lunch. Even though we had protection on (that does not sound right), our fingers would have been slashed at several spots in the first ten minutes. That made eating an excruciatingly painful affair. It was literally rubbing salt and other spices in one’s wounds. At one point my throat was virtually slit because I came in the middle of Mahesh Mama’s ambush of a kite being flown by someone several streets away.

Mahesh Mama’s signature gig was to cut kites rising from nearby terraces even before they had gone up ten feet. That’s how good he was. Let’s just say he was a top gun among kite fliers. For some men in the neighborhood being cut down in early flight was nothing short of public emasculation. And we would rub it in by banging on steel platters in a tribal ritual proclaiming triumph.

It was only fitting that such triumphs were celebrated with deliciously rich food. It was a tradition in my maternal grandparents’ family to hide money, coins really, in food. So one had to watch out for a pawali (a quarter) in the daal or 50 paise in the pooris. There was no FDA to enforce rules about choking hazards. Since it was expected that money would be hidden as an Uttarayan gift, we would eat carefully. It never exceeded 50 paise.

At its core flying kite is as much about liberation, as signified by a soaring kite, as it is about being tethered, as signified by the string. It is a great thrill.

Pissed off

2012-01-13T06:01:00.001-08:00

Here is what the viral video showing four U.S. Marines urinating on three dead Taliban men tells me. It tells me that for these four men killing someone is not enough.

For them somehow their brutal death is incomplete without the kind of humiliation that these Marines believe they must be subjected to. And not just that, that humiliation must be recorded for posterity. Humiliation must not only be done but must also be seen (literally) to have been done. In that humiliation is like justice, I suppose.

I seriously wonder whether when these Marines were doing this, they would have told each other, “Hey, let’s urinate on them.” The term sounds too clinical and, under the circumstances, too dignified. They might have said something like, “Let’s piss on the bastards.” More seriously though one of the Marines reportedly says, “Have a great day, buddy.”

As I survey the broad global revulsion at the video, it is striking that death here has become secondary to urination. That has something to do with the rationale that in a war death is often inevitable but not being pissed on posthumously. That is a matter of choice, a despicable one but a choice nevertheless.

One can argue that in an ecosystem of brutality, misanthropy and vileness prevailing in Afghanistan, the Marines’ behavior, however revolting, is not that remarkably out of character. Those who are engaged in daily gun battles, from either side and irrespective of whose cause is more just, do develop a different set of standards of acceptable human conduct. No one should be surprised by that.

In a region where even a donkey is strapped with explosives and let loose in a crowded bazaar, one is hard-pressed to say with certitude what the standards of correct human conduct should be. (That happened in Kandahar in 2008).

To some my circumlocution might suggest that I am somehow trying to explain or rationalize an inherently vile act rather than unambiguously denouncing it. Far from it. In fact, I am trying to make a larger philosophical point about a situation where we have no major problem accepting wars as a way to resolve civilizational conflicts but feel such revulsion about acts which are consequences of that acceptance.

I am sure the US government will hand down whatever punishment that is due to these Marines but that will neither solve the larger question of how wars grotesquely mangle what we consider decent human behavior nor bring the kind of peace the US says it wants to in that part of the world.

Popping out of pages of poorly produced pulp

2012-01-12T05:37:00.001-08:00

If for nothing else, one must hand it to Pakistan and its ruling elites for turning their country into an absurdistan where daggers are returned to their scabbards only so that they can be drawn again immediately. It now closely resembles a country that popped out of the pages of poorly produced pulp fiction. (Excuse the wholly unnecessary alliteration).

The latest chapter in this pulp fiction is about the sacking of the country’s most influential defense bureaucrat, Defense Secretary Lieutenant-General Naeem Khalid Lodhi (Retired) by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. In the country’s peculiarly military-centric power structure Lodhi was seen as more powerful than his civilian boss, the defense minister. When you consider that the defense secretary had direct blessings of the Pakistani military and its chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, you can begin to gauge the sheer audacity of Gilani’s action. It was tantamount to a civilian prime minister saying up yours to the military. (Oh, the joys of coarsening a serious debate!)

There is wide agreement that under most circumstances an affront much less severe would have prompted the army chief to let his men come out of the barracks and take over the country. This time around though Kayani’s calculus seems to be shaped by other factors, including a vigilant Supreme Court and alert media, not to mention a wary United States.

Although speculations that President Asif Ali Zardari may go into exile remain high, and not only because he is supposed to have gone to Dubai for a day to attend a wedding, if there is one politician who can brazen this out it is him. In a strange way Zardari’s guile may be the most effective antidote to Kayani’s gumption for now.

There is flux at the highest levels in Pakistan that began with the allegations that the Zardari government sent out an unsigned memo to the US calling for Washington’s intervention to prevent a military coup. The memo was allegedly created at the behest of the government’s top leadership. The country’s former Ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani reportedly played a key role. Haqqani has since returned to Pakistan and is now holed up inside the prime minister’s official residence in the midst of fears of reprisals from both the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Think about this one fact alone. The country’s former ambassador to Washington is having to hide inside the prime minister’s residence. If that is not absurdistan, what is?

I have been saying for quite sometime (That is so pompous but anyway) that Pakistan’s civil society ought to reclaim its supremacy over the national discourse and direction in which the country should go. It is in no one’s interests, the least of all India’s, for Pakistan to fail as a nation state. I began saying that it already resembles a fictional place where all nightmare scenarios may come true at once.

One immediate fallout of the current ferment could be snap parliamentary elections otherwise due in 2013. That may temporarily fix the problem but over the past three decades or so Pakistan has worked itself into such an unmanageable frenzy that it will need much more than just hurriedly called, contested and won parliamentary elections. Perhaps it is time for all the stakeholders to sit down without any conditions and create a national consensus on what it is that they really want out of a nation state that was conceived in the minds of a few ambitious individuals in the 1930s.

UnMittigated corporate lootera

2012-01-11T06:18:00.001-08:00

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (Photo: mittromney.com)

A super political action committee (Super PAC) attack ad describes Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney as a greedy corporate “looter.” If Romney was an Indian politician contesting an Indian general election, the description could be altered slightly to make it more theatrical and effective. It could be “Corporate lootera.”

Incidentally, loot is a Hindi word that entered the English lexicon courtesy two centuries of the British colonial rule. Somehow it seems appropriate that the word should have caught the fancy of the colonizers since institutionalized looting of India’s wealth was the cornerstone of the empire. But that is a separate story.

For those of you who do not live in America and are not familiar with the political process here, a quick explanation is called for. Currently, the country is in the midst of what are known as primaries in which people of particular political persuasion, in this case Republican and even independent, decide who they would like to be their nominee to contest the November, 2012 presidential election. Romney, once a ruthlessly successful leveraged corporate buyer and former Governor of Massachusetts, is trying one more time to win his Republican Party’s nomination. He tried in 2008 but lost to John McCain, who lost the election to Barack Obama.

Super PACs are a legal way to circumvent the limit on the amount of money an individual or an institution can donate to a presidential candidate. I think that limit is $5000. An unlimited amount can be donated almost anonymously to the Super PAC of any candidate. In the story that I am referring to a casino billionaire has donated $5 million to a Super PAC that supports former House Speaker New Gingrich. This particular Super PAC has released a half hour documentary cutting and slashing and burning Romney’s reputation by calling him, among other things, a “corporate raider” and a greedy “looter.”

What is ironic about the attack ad is that it uses all the catchphrases that would normally be expected of the left-of-center politicians and activists in Obama’s Democratic Party. Republicans as a rule are a rabidly pro-business party who celebrate capitalism in all its glory and infamy. To think that one of their own, namely Gingrich, could benefit from such an attack ad is bizarre to say the least. Gingrich’s Super PAC ad is like a free ammunition depot that the Obama campaign would raid with relish once Romney indeed emerges as the Republican nominee. As of now he still has some heavy odds to surmount, although his two victories in Iowa and New Hampshire do make him a favorite.

At a time when the US economy is going through its worst crisis since the great depression Romney is projecting his corporate experience as his major asset, but he does not forget to mention American military might since he knows that’s what gets the base fired up. In his victory speech yesterday he said, “He (President Obama) doesn’t see the need for overwhelming American military superiority. I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it.”

I was struck by Romney insisting on a military “so powerful no one would think of challenging it.” What does that really mean? It is already a military that no one thinks of challenging.

The season of ludicrousness does not end

2012-01-10T05:58:00.001-08:00

Salman Rushdie (Picture Beowulf Sheehan—www.randomhouse.com)

If there is no statute of limitations on religious hurt, there should be. Even by the standards of feeling religiously hurt and offended, 24 years is a long time to nurse hurt and offence.

I refer in particular to the ludicrous demand by some Islamic clerics in India that author Salman Rushdie’s upcoming visit to the country should be canceled because he hurt the sentiments of the Muslim community in 1988 with his book “The Satanic Verses.”

Let me go off on a tangent here. The Urdu language, which clerics speak, is so full of cadence and so naturally poetic that even when they are expressing ludicrous dissent, it sounds uplifting and agreeable. A case in point would be the way Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani, the vice chancellor of the powerful Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband, described the proposed visit. “Inki aamad se Musalmano ke jazbaat majrooh hongey,” said . (His visit (arrival) would wound the sentiments of Muslims."). It sounds so much more lyrical in Urdu, although what he is saying is nowhere near that singsong.

As controversies go in India, this one is subpar. It is hardly surprising then that some 24/7 news channels have picked it up. Nomani and others are demanding that Rushdie be denied a visa to attend the annual Jaipur Literature Festival later this month. It is a different story that, as the author pointed it out, he does not need a visa to travel to India. I am not sure if that means he remains an Indian citizen or that he has a multiple entry visitor’s visa. If it is the former, he cannot be prevented. If it is the latter, it can always be cancelled.

In any event, no one other than a handful of Islamic clerics wants to make an issue out of this routine visit. However, it is possible that with some help from the 24/7 news channels it might acquire enough traction to compel the Indian government to reconsider the visit. One must never underestimate the ineptitude of a government.

Speaking of 24/7 news channels and their slobbering over non-issues, I was amused by this tweet from India’s most high profile news anchor Barkha Dutt. “Ridiculous controversy being raised over @SalmanRushdie's visit to India. In my view shouldn't get media space either. Grow up India." One has to be remarkably unselfconscious to say what Dutt has said. It is also quite ironic because the whole 24/7 news universe which she presides over in some way draws its sustenance from the ridiculous and not growing up.

When I last checked the job of a university vice chancellor was to run a university and not issue or deny visas. That is the function of India’s foreign and home ministries which are located in New Delhi and not in Deoband.

Exiles and returns in Pakistan

2012-01-09T05:41:00.001-08:00

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf (Photo: Antônio Cruz/ABr, 2.5 Brazil)

Exiles and returns amid threats of arrest have become a peculiarly Pakistani political rite of passage.

If he does indeed return from exile later this month, Pakistan’s former president and army chief Pervez Musharraf will do so amid threats of his arrest. He will become the third leader of the country to have returned with arrest hanging over his head.

First it was former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who returned on October 18, 2007, after negotiating amnesty from corruption charges with Musharraf. A little over two months later she was assassinated in Rawalpindi. She had been in exile for nine years.

Another former prime minister Nawaz Sharif followed suit and soon returned on November 25, 2007 after being in exile for eight years. He had attempted to return once earlier on September 10 that year but was promptly deported from the airport to Jeddah by Musharraf.

Now it is the same Musharraf’s turn to return even as prosecutors want to charge him with involvement in Bhutto’s assassination. Musharraf’s exile will be the shortest at a little over three years. He has announced that he would return between January 27 and 30.

In a country where military generals have become a unique political species with strong survival and evolutionary skills, no one should be surprised if Musharraf has struck a backroom deal with the military that his return would not lead to his arrest.

The timing of his return is obviously aimed at the 2013 general elections which Musharraf seems intent on contesting. There are also speculations that President Asif Ali Zardari, locked in a standoff with the military over allegations that he secretly sought US intervention to preempt a coup, might call early elections sometime this year.

It makes sense for the Pakistani military to let Musharraf reemerge in a purely political political avatar by contesting and hopefully winning the general elections. Although many reports suggest that cricketer turned politician Imran Khan and his Pakistan Teherik-e-Insaaf (PTI) could win the next elections, the military might like Musharraf thrown into the mix. Musharraf as president could give the military the cover of political legitimacy they want without having to sully their hands. Khan, on the other hand, being a new force may try to assert his political independence to retain the confidence of the country’s younger constituents that he seems to be winning.

On a separate note, I am curious to find out what average Pakistanis think of this rather bizarre phenomenon of their leaders running into exile and returning. If it is Pakistan’s endeavor to be taken seriously as a nation state, these frequent flights of its leaders may not be the best way to do it. Even as Musharraf prepares to return some are already discussing whether it is Zardari who will go into exile now.

Since Pakistanis have tried everyone else and largely failed, they may as well try Khan this time and see if that works. If nothing else, the country will have the satisfaction of having a handsome leader.

Time for Katy Perry to go with the flow

2012-01-08T04:56:00.001-08:00

Never was the time more opportune than now for Katy Perry to go with the flow as the Sanskrit tattoo on her arm suggests. On September 9, 2010, I wrote a short post about the tattoo that said the following.

“Once you get past Perry’s stunning bosom (actually you never really get past it but one tries in a manner of speaking) one notices that little Sanskrit line that goes “Anugachchantu Prawah”. My scholar friends on Facebook have confirmed they mean what I suspected the words meant. They mean “to flow with the current”or “go with the flow.” When I read the words my first reaction was not to wonder what they meant but who the lucky bastard was who got to tattoo her there. Going by the clarity of the tattoo I am sure the artist took particular care to be gentle and prolonged.

My friend Rajesh Ranjan was astonishingly quick on the draw on Facebook when he recognized whose arm and the rest of the body it was by merely looking at the cropped version that I uploaded. There was a time once, not so long ago, that even a slight glimpse of any part of Madhuri Dixit’s midriff was enough for me to tell you at any given time of the day or night whose midriff it was. Now I would rather not. Katy Perry has not quite reached that status but if things continue at this pace, who knows she might.”

Now that Perry is passing through a delicate phase in the aftermath of her divorce from British comedian Russell Brand, the best advice she can get is right at hand. (Couldn’t help the pun). I am presuming that the tattoo is still there unless that too was swept away by the current.

The singer-performer has tweeted this: “"I am so grateful for all the love and support I've had from people around the world. You guys have made my heart happy again…Concerning the gossip, I want to be clear that NO ONE speaks for me. Not a blog, magazine, "close sources" or my family.”

I certainly do not speak for her merely because I am from India and have some understanding of Sanskrit. What I can say is that when you go with the flow no two moments are ever alike.

On a separate note, it would be interesting to find out how many Western celebrities who get married in India, drawn by her striking colors,enveloping rituals and unbounded joie de vivre, manage to survive the union. Perry and Brand got married in India in October, 2010. I just hope they do not ask India for a refund. The country cannot afford it.

A few thoughts about Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol

2012-01-07T05:39:00.001-08:00

Tom Cruise in the movie’s most talked about stunt on the glass and steel walls of the fabulous Burj al Khalifa building in Dubai

There is good news and there is very good news. The good news is that I finally saw Mission:Impossible -- Ghost Protocol. That is also the very good news.

I do not intend to write a review of a movie which has already been out for weeks, made in excess of $200 million and rescued Tom Cruise’s career as a global superstar. That and also my belief that reviews do not matter other than in the mind of the critic. I would just stick to making some observations without any narrative theme. That too does not matter other than in my own mind.

First, the obvious Indian pop culture reference prompted by the miniscule presence of Anil Kapoor as Brij Nath, a multimedia billionaire who considers being pummeled by a sexy woman (In this case, Paula Patton as Agent Jane Carter) as some kind of a fantasy foreplay. Arguably, it is the shortest cameo Kapoor has played in his three-decade-long career.

He plays the kind of role that Dinesh Hingoo would play in a Hindi movie where Anil Kapoor was Tom Cruise. For those of you who are not Indian, it would be too much for me to explain Dinesh Hingoo in detail. Suffice it to say that he is a talented actor who has spent his entire career of close to 300 movies playing bit roles of some minor comedic value. If you add up the durations of all his roles, they would probably make one two and half hour collage.

Kapoor as Brij Nath is supposed to know satellite upload codes, which Ethan Hunt (Cruise) must know in order to abort a nuclear missile fired at the behest of Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), the misanthrope who believes that human race has to be destroyed from time to time in order to facilitate its renewal as its own stronger version.

As part of his five to eight minute presence Kapoor is required to look sartorially sharp (He does) as well as exude a lasciviousness for Jane (Not hard to work up given the way she looks). He is also required to get pushed around and slapped by her, all of which in his mind constitutes the fantasy foreplay worthy of Vatsayana’s ‘Kama Sutra.’ That he ends up dead at the end of the foreplay may or may not have pleased Vatsayana.

Coming after his significant turns in the global hit movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and global hit television series ‘24’, Kapoor’s choice of MI:GP may have surprised his avid followers but it was obviously aimed at maintaining his international visibility in a movie system where the length of one’s role has not been regarded as sacrosanct.

I could not help but notice that Kapoor’s character seemed to cause genuine mirth among the very Midwestern US audience in the town of Warrenville (Population: 13,140). Some audience members did seem to connect him with Slumdog as well as 24.

Paula Patton (left) Anil Kapoor (right below)

Cruise, who had been struggling lately to keep his superstardom alive, finds the right platform to reclaim the lost ground. No one does the tightly wound kinetic energy better than Cruise. Much has been said about his stunt that involves scaling seven or so more storeys above the 130th floor that they are already on. Director Brad Bird makes the stunt at once harrowing and fun. It is credit to Cruise that one finds it hard to imagine any other actor pulling that off with such credibility.

There is an authenticity to Cruise’s body language while doing this scene that can come only from someone who genuinely enjoys courting and tempting danger. That said, I am not privy to how Bird, Cruise and the unit hands responsible for the stunt managed it so well. It is hard to imagine an insurance company underwriting Cruise for the particular stunt if it really meant him actually climbing the building.I suppose the fact that Cruise is also a producer may have helped in securing a financial cushion around these stunts.

MI:GP is a thriller unapologetically designed to usher Cruise back to his global superstardom as well as breathe a whole new life and vigor into the franchise. The choice of Bird, whose specialty so far had been slick animated movies (The Incredibles and Ratatouille), seems to have worked wonders because he brings that improbable flexibility of form that animation directors are so used to. In a sense Bird treats MI:GP as an animated venture. Hence Cruise often escapes unscathed despite the brutal falls, bumps and hits. His body is treated as prime international real estate where wounds have to make high bids to find spots.

The producers make no effort to hide that there will be an MI 5 in a couple of years, which is just as well because I am ready every two years to watch something like this.

Living in an age of cognitive decline

2012-01-06T05:53:00.001-08:00

A new study reported in the British Medical Journal says our cognitive function declines by age 45, much earlier than 60 as traditionally believed. The finding was based on a study of 5198 men and 2192 women over a 10-year period.

Among the the findings there is one about reasoning which the study says declines 3.6 percent among men and women between 45 and 49. Since I crossed that age group a while ago I feel liberated that anything that I say or do can no longer be blamed on me. It has to be my age. I am setting up a new email account called iampast45@something.com (totally fictional) where you can send all your objections and criticisms and denunciations which I will never get to see. You will feel good at having vented things out and I will feel good not knowing about them.

The traditional belief has been that cognitive decline begins at 60. In fact, India has specific expressions to describe the condition after 60. In Hindi, the expression is “sathiya jana” (Sathiya comes from saath which is number 60 in Hindi. Sathiya jana roughly means someone is off the rocker past 60) or in my own mother tongue Gujarati it is “Saathey buddhi naathey” (which means reasoning vanishes at 60). With the new findings we will have to recast these maxims.

The study does not augur well for the future of the world because most countries are ruled by men and women well past 45, with some being well past 70. To think that we are governed by men and women of rapidly declining cognitive abilities is rather reassuring.

I was struck by this particular passage in the findings: “This study of a large cohort of individuals aged 45-70 at baseline, using three cognitive assessments over 10 years, presents two key findings. Firstly, average performance in all cognitive domains, except vocabulary, declined over follow-up in all age groups, even in those aged 45-49. The results for vocabulary were expected as it is known to be little influenced by age.”

Since vocabulary is not influenced much by age it only makes sense that men and women of a certain age say a lot of things with a lot words without really worrying about their implication. To put it succinctly it is a case of possessing more words than sense. This is my flippant extrapolation which the study does not support.

I am beginning to believe that cognitive decline begins the day we are born.

A scoop in the age of Asoka

2012-01-05T05:58:00.001-08:00

A silver coin from the Maurya dynasty (3rd-2nd century BCE. Pic: The British Museum, London)

Here is a bit of a teaser from a short story I am writing about a fictional crisis that grips Samrat Asoka’s rein in 231 BCE, just one year before the great king’s death. The story is still being written and should be out pretty soon.

By Mayank Chhaya

“As the chief metallurgical assayer at the Royal Pataliputra Mint, Salisuka’s may not have been a glamorous job but it was decisive as a determinant of the health and stability of the kingdom. So when he received a secret messenger from the royal court that cold morning in 231 BCE, Salisuka knew it had to be something rather significant.

The messenger had just one line message “The Samrat has summoned you.” Its brevity added extra urgency to the summons. The messenger told Salisuka he was there to escort him to the court.

In his 23-year-long career as a royal metallurgist Salisuka had met the Samrat only twice, first when he was appointed and the second in 248 BCE when a new silver rich coin was minted and released to commemorate the silver jubilee of the great king, Asoka’s ascension to the throne. It was obvious that Asoka had something pressing and much less celebratory on his mind.

Salisuka was ushered into Asoka’s private chamber where the king was waiting. The nape of Salisuka’s neck bent forward reflexively in a courtesy that was expected of all subjects. Asoka was not looking at Salisuka directly but gazing into a distant horizon as if scouring for signs of an impending economic crisis.

“Cut down the silver in the coins by more than half,” Asoka said.

It was a simple instruction fraught with historic implications.

It was not expected of Mauryan bureaucrats to say anything but merely nod in deference when the Samrat spoke in somber tones. But Salisuka being a scientist first and a government servant later often defied that convention.

“Samrat, with such little silver we might as well carve out little rocks as coins,” Salisuka said and instantly realized that he had gone too far.

To his surprise Asoka did not react and said, “The kingdom is facing some grave challenges. Debasement is our only option. Use more copper.”

The emperor’s tone suggested that he was not going to entertain any discussion on this. His mind was made up.

“When would you like me to start?” he asked.

“From today,” said Asoka and left the private chamber.

Salisuka was escorted out.

On the way back to the mint, this time traveling alone, he decided to drop by at the home of Yashovardhan, a scholar and scribe who “published” Pataliputra’s most widely read stone tablet called “Maurya Bhoomi.” Salisuka had a scoop for him.”

Trying to make sense of India’s Headley-Rana charges

2012-01-04T05:11:00.001-08:00

The decision by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) to file charges against David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana along with seven others in connection with the Mumbai terror strikes is looking more and more symbolic.

The NIA filed the charges against Headley and Rana on December 24 last year after being granted sanction to prosecute them by the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs. The other seven also charged are Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Sajid Majid, Abdur Rehman Hashim, Major Iqbal, Major Sameer Ali and Ilyas Kashmiri. Many of these names also figure in the indictment brought about federal prosecutors here in Chicago which has already led to the conviction of Headley and Rana.

Since I have been following the story from its very inception and am in the middle of writing a book about it, I look at every new development with great interest. If there is a clearly defined rationale behind the Indian charges, particularly in connection with Headley and Rana, it is lost on me.

Headley pleaded guilty to 12 counts of involvement in the Mumbai strikes in return for a deal which precludes his extradition to India as well as the death penalty.The deal was made conditional upon the extent and quality of his cooperation with the federal prosecutors and the word so far is that he has lived up to it. If that is indeed the case, then his extradition to India is out of the question. That in turn makes the Indian charges immaterial to him.

Then there is the case of Rana. He was found guilty of facilitating a plot by Headley and others to attack a Danish newspaper which published cartoons about the Prophet Mohammad offensive to Muslims. Rana is currently awaiting formal sentencing at a facility in Chicago. However, he was acquitted of any involvement in the Mumbai terror case.

His attorney Patrick Blegen has maintained that Rana cannot be extradited to India because he was acquitted in the Mumbai case.

As for the other seven, particularly Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Harkat ul Jihad al-Islami (HUJI) operatives such as Saeed and Lakhvi, it is anybody’s guess whether Pakistan would ever extradite them to stand trial in India. The two shadowy figures, Major Iqbal and Major Sameer Ali, both with reported links to the Inters-Services Intelligence (ISI), too have been unavailable. Ilyas Kashmiri, an influential Al Qaeda and HUJI operative, has been killed at least twice so far, in two drone strikes, first in September, 2009, and again in June, 2011. Although one cannot be certain but someone killed twice is very likely dead. We do not know if India would get to Sajid Majid and Abdur Rehman Hashim either.

So on balance the NIA indictment, while an expression of New Delhi’s resolve, may turn out to be superfluous.

AC and Daisy

2012-01-03T05:28:00.001-08:00

Anderson Cooper (left), and a daisy (right) (Anderson picture www.anderson.com)

Even after discounting the effects of my bunker mentality (I work out of my basement), I am increasingly convinced that Anderson Cooper is extraterrestrial. There is no other way to explain his ubiquity and omniscience. Either that or there are many more ACs than we know.

He is on AC 360, 60 Minutes, Anderson, underwater, on the ground, above ground, in the air, and in between realms. And yet he manages to look like a freshly plucked daisy every single time. I am telling you there is no explanation for his omnipresence other than his extraterrestrial gifts.

The man has no bad hair day, no bad clothes day, no bad teeth day, no bad stubble day and no bad bags under the eyes day. He has no bad days. Period. It is as if he is in a permanent state of being immaculately groomed by forces we cannot see or understand. Even when he does CNN’s annual new year’s eve special with Kathy Griffin he gives you the sense that there is an invisible but impenetrable casing around him against which the elements crash and disintegrate.

These are, of course, my superficial impressions because I have no incentive in going beyond the obvious. I am sure AC has his own share of frailties and follies. It is what the world gets to see that I am talking about here.

Notwithstanding his mounting celebrity and the frivolities it inevitably gathers Cooper remains a serious and substantial journalist on his news shows.

A question to self: What exactly is your point here? None, really. I am merely verbalizing what has been on my mind for a few days now.

Amitabh Bachchan and his waiting throngs

2012-01-02T05:48:00.001-08:00

Amitabh Bachchan and son Abhishek (Pic: bigb.bigadda.com)

It is tempting, especially if you are the one receiving it, to believe that it is selfless love which regularly brings hundreds of people outside the gates of Amitabh Bachchan’s two bungalows in Mumbai. Surely, it is some of that. But there is lot more complexity to the throngs’ emotions than just selfless love.

The actor occasionally uploads pictures of the crowds on his blog at bigb.bigadda.com. He uploaded some yesterday and those have triggered my post today.

Bachchan devotees have gathered near his Juhu residence for close to three decades and,remarkably, their number seems to have only grown over the years. During my decade-long posting in Bombay as a journalist from 1981, on way to work I frequently traveled past Bachchan’s ‘Pratiksha’ bungalow. There were always people just hanging around. They were there because they had nowhere else to be. If some of them did indeed have elsewhere to be, they would rather be here than elsewhere because here was fraught with possibilities unlike elsewhere which was probably just full of drudgeries.

Once out of journalistic curiosity I decided to drop by across the gate and chat up some of the fans. I got off an auto rickshaw, an act that allowed the hangers-on to determine my position in the social pecking order. I could not be that important because I had used the plebian transport, notwithstanding that rickshaws were a grade higher than going by bus and certainly much higher than just showing up at a movie star’s bungalow at 8 in the morning for no reason other than the very unlikely possibility that they might spot him and corner some measure of reflected glory.

If memory serves me right, there used to be a tea and cigarette vendor right opposite the bungalow. Many of his fans would buy tea or cigarette or both and just wait. On that particular day in 1984 I found out that the actor was not even in town. And yet some two dozen young men hung around. It was as if the sheer act of waiting and intensely gazing at the bungalow and what they thought was his bedroom window would somehow magically materialize Bachchan. It was like in quantum physics where the observer creates reality by the act of their observation. He was there if they believed he was there and if they looked hard enough they would find him.

From that particular visit and some more that followed--twice to interview him-- my sense of what draws the crowds is that it is a mixture of a whole lot of emotions. As I said at the beginning of the post unconditional love only marginally explains the numbers. Many of those show up only to discover what it might mean to be in the proximity of the one they have accorded the status of a demigod. Some of them are simply sampling the air to see if it is discernibly rarefied. Deliverance seems to be on their mind.

I found some young men who thought they stood a good chance of being noticed by a movie icon in order to gain an entry into movie stardom themselves. I remember one particular young man in 1984 who would comb his hair every few minutes lest he was caught unkempt at the precise moment Bachchan saw him. There was something heartbreaking about his faith.

There was another who just stood at the concrete edge of the footpath with his hands folded in front of his chest and kept looking in the general direction of the bungalow. It was as if the meaning and purpose of life he was searching for had to be found inside or near the bungalow. My overactive analyzing would suggest that he was not even waiting to meet Bachchan but was there as an act of penance for the wrongs he might have done. Being there appeared to be an act of redemption. It turned out he used to come there almost everyday. I asked him what brought him to ‘Pratiksha’, which ironically means wait or to wait in Hindi, he seemed genuinely unable to understand the question. From the contortions on his face all that I could make out was an unexpressed counter question, “What do you mean what am I doing here?”

Large crowds of admirers are a regular feature at Amitabh Bachchan’s bungalow. (Pic: bigb.bigadda.com)

Most admirers come there simply to be a part, albeit ever so fleetingly, of what they consider to be something much larger than them. Many of them display the kind of nebulously defined hope that one encounters inside a place of worship—a temple or a church or a mosque. I am quite sure some of them look at Bachchan or at least the gate of his mansion and think of possibilities that life may hold for them as well. Like the man who frequently combed his hair just in case Bachchan saw him and offered him a role.

However, if there is one underlying reason that draws people to the Bachchan bungalow it is just the simple and charming act of extracting joy out of someone else’s success with the full realization that most of them may never come anywhere close to what they regard as near divine attainment.

So it is 2012. What now?

2012-01-01T06:32:00.001-08:00

So it is 2012. What now?

Well, we now wait for the creditors to call. Unfortunately, they do not accept leftovers.

More seriously though, we now wait and see whether any or all of the Mayan prophecies about 2012 come true. Fortunately, the Mayans have left an elaborate visual record of what could happen as shown in the video above. I suspended my 2012 celebrations and stayed up all night to dig out this rarest of rare footage. I later discovered that Sony Pictures had already dug it out before me.

The Mayans believed that December 21, 2012, which marks the end of a 5,125 year cycle (Reference from Wikipedia), the world as we know it will end in planetary cataclysms. As the clip above shows, a solitary Buddhist monk may not be able to save his monastery from being swallowed up by the raging ocean despite its high Himalayan elevation. And this may just be a sideshow of what is going to happen. John Cusak ably assisted by Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton might be our only hope.

One way to forestall this doom is to somehow slow down the earth’s rotational velocity of 1,674.4 kilometers or about 1040 miles per hour at the equator. A slower moving earth would mean slower passage of days and nights and weeks and months and years. That even a marginal slowing down could have disastrous consequences is something I am going to conveniently disregard.

It so happens that National Geographic Channel already has that rare video here. Between these two we get a fairly good idea of what lies ahead for us. I am personally prepared for all of this not that my being personally prepared is material when forces of this scale are unleashed. But if you must know, the plan is to escape to the far side of the moon which we cannot see from the earth. The latest theory is that the reason the far side of the moon is so radically different from the near side is because two moons, one of which far more mountainous and cratered, fused into each other.

As if on cue for my plan, one of NASA’s two spacecraft, part of the Gravity Recovery and Intereior Laboratory (GRAIL) project, is already in orbit 56 miles above the moon to make detailed reading of the far side. The link can be seen here.

P.S.: I could blame today’s ramblings on the nightlong drunken revelry but for the fact that I am a lifelong alcohol virgin. So it just all really me.

A short reminder about life before the current era

2011-12-31T06:55:00.001-08:00

A ring stone from the Mauryan period (Pic: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2000.284.10)

Ancient Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya has been on my mind for no fathomable reason, which is just as well because it reminds us that there was so much more history before the current era.

Chandragupta’s empire stretched from Patliputra (modern day Patna, the capital Indian state of Bihar) to the border of Persia, some 2000 miles to the west by the time he starved himself to death at 42 as a renunciate in 298 or 297 BCE as part of the Jain end-of-life ritual. The Maurya empire was eventually extended by his grandson Asoka to cover the southern parts of India. At its height the Murya kingdom was probably 2000 miles east to west and over 1000 miles north to south. At a time when the population of the region was about 50 million Chandragupta had an infantry of 600,000, a cavalry of 30,000 and some 9,000 elephants. That would be like if India had an army of over 12 million today.

A contemporary of Alexander, whom according to many historians he met as a young man, Chandragupta died a Jain. I mention this only because his grandson Asoka died a Buddhist. Both, who led a life of often gratuitous violence that always attends empire building, were, in the end, shaken by it and embraced avowedly pacifist philosophies.

Bindusara, Chandragupta’s son and Asoka’s father, was a relatively laidback royal who had a weakness for figs and raisin wine. The Maurya period is regarded as India’s most defining and not in the least because of the overarching presence and influence of the philosopher/economist/strategist Kautilya, also known as Chanakya, who mentored Chandragupta.

The creator of economics of the day known as the Arthashastra as well as statecraft, Kautilya/Chanakya left a profound mark on the period and well beyond. So detailed was the statecraft developed then that even the quantity of liquor that could be sold and to whom was clearly laid down. It had to be be such that it would not cause pramada (intoxication) maryadatikrama (boorishness) utsaha (recklessness) bhaya (fear). Even the designs of taverns and the fixtures inside it were incorporated into the building code to ensure both safety and comfort. Scents and garlands were required to enhance the pleasure of those who came to drink.

Something tells me though that a lot of these regulations, other than luxurious trimmings, did not apply to the one who loved figs and raisin wine.

I write this post on the last day of 2012 if only to underscore that so much more happened before the current era whose annual landmark we celebrate as if nothing else preceded it.

The biggest regret of 2011

2011-12-30T04:30:00.001-08:00

Of all the enduring regrets of 2011, now in its fading last hours, the most galling for me would be not having cleared the Level 11 of Angry Birds’ ‘Season’s Greedings.’

There has to be some hidden message in three birds, two yellow and one white, not being able to pulverize seven pigs hiding in various corners of a wooden scaffold. I have tried dozens of assault techniques, trajectories and angles but failed to kill all the pigs. The best I managed was smashing six of them. The one on the extreme right of the frame invariably managed to survive unscathed.

I think I am asking the wrong question. Rather than asking “Why am I failing at this?” the question should be “Why is a man hurtling towards the twilight of his life catapulting flightless birds into an assortment of wood, concrete and glass blocks?”

I suspect there is a commercial conspiracy behind my failure because after every third or fourth attempt the game’s creators offer me ways to beat the level for just 99 cents. So far I have resisted the temptation because I figure I can pay down some of my debts using the 99 cents saved on the game.

In many ways Angry Birds is emblematic of what we have become as a civilization. We have been reduced to hurling virtual birds at virtual pigs, causing virtual death of either or both because virtual eggs were stolen. For those of you who may not be familiar with the basic plot of Angry Birds, the birds are angry because the pigs have stolen their eggs.

More than anything else, it is the easy and hassle-free cruelty and violence of this game that are deeply worrisome. Because it is fictional, animated and virtual, players do not think about the serious underlying problem with such games. I am a classic example of that because I have played this game too.

So my resolution for 2012 is not to play Angry Birds.

P.S.: For those not as resolute as I am when you chuck the white bird, I would recommend that you let it crash on the structure. It is more destructive than the massive egg drop that it does midflight by clicking your mouse once. The egg drop is more dramatic but less effective.

P.P.S.: The biggest draw for me is the sound that the pigs make when attacked. It sounds like “Hulll.”

Swinging from vine to vine in the forest of hyperbole

2011-12-29T05:14:00.001-08:00

I have several questions for television blowhards in India.

Do they exist outside of the electronically transmitted world?

If they do, do they actually go home or go to work? Or do they just rush from studio to studio?

If they do indeed rush from studio to studio in a 24/7 blather cycle, do they carry fresh pairs of clothes and underwear?

Also, do they freshly manufacture outrage for every panel they appear on or recycle some of the same they felt on the previous show?

There are many more but let us begin by getting these answered.

Now to the broader point of today’s sermon… I mean post.

Anna Hazare, the 75-year-old village reformer turned anti-corruption emblem in India, has spent the better part of the past six months or so on a pedestal obligingly erected for him by the broadcast media. The pedestal is high enough to give Hazare the kind of national prominence I suspect he never thought he would gain. In recent weeks, he had begun to resemble demigods of the kind that abound across India.

The broadcast media loved and nurtured India’s John Doe into either a messiah or monster, depending on your point of view. Somewhere along the line Hazare might have taken his near mythical status as a slayer of all corruption in public life rather seriously.

That was until Tuesday when the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, passed a potentially significant Lokpal or public ombudsman bill, some of whose provisions came from Hazare and his team. The passage coinciding with a rather thin response in Mumbai to Hazare’s hunger fast number 3 made the media sit up and launch part 2 of the Hazarenama under the charitably worded “Is the Anna Hazare movement finished?”

The Hazare movement members are probably discovering that the media is an unreliable mistress that can both pleasure and torment alternatively in such rapid succession that it is hard to tell one from the other. The pedestal has been pulled from under Hazare’s feet and the resultant fall is bound to cause some image fractures. (Excuse the trite imagery).

The transition from a demigod to just another poor sod can be painful but this is the time when Hazare’s resolve will be tested. He has announced his intention to be a partisan hack in the aftermath of what he calls a “betrayal” of his cause by the ruling Congress Party. In the upcoming state assembly elections Hazare and his movement’s supporters will campaign against the Congress Party.

No matter how strenuously he denies it his is a partisan political movement motivated by its antipathies towards a particular political party. That is a perfectly legitimate activity in a democracy. But the problem is Hazare and his supporters have so far cast themselves as a lofty movement driven entirely by the moral imperative of eliminating corruption in public life. In so many words they have tried to convince India that they are not a partisan political uprising but that they represent a much deeper churning among the ordinary people of the country beyond party lines. Now it turns out they are just another political pressure group with an ambiguously defined political ideology.

The problem with dismounting a moral pedestal is that one gets exposed to all the dust and grime of ground level existence. Or in other words, the realm inhabited and mastered by crafty politicians of the kind asserting the supremacy of parliament and legislature.

In this flux what seems to remain constant for now are the television blowhards and analysts who would be required to break down every twist and turn into easily digestible sound bites. Right now the question is “Is the Anna Hazare movement finished?” Very soon it would be “Can the Anna Hazare movement be revived?” followed by “Should the Anna Hazare movement be revived?”

P.S.: The latest television ubiquity is a young Hazare acolyte called Abhinandan Sekhri whom the channels use as a sort of earnest and fresh, albeit somewhat out of depth, counterweight to the more jaded but well-oiled talking head such as Congress Party lawmaker Mani Shankar Aiyar. As someone just introduced to the forest of hyperbole Abhinandan, which literally means congratulation, is still discovering his rhythm. Since he has to appear on many panels, my sense is that he cannot decide whether to mint fresh outrage at the skullduggery called the politics-broadcast media nexus on every show or carry over the remnants from the last and refashion them. I am sure he will learn to harmonize what he really feels with the way he says he feels it on television. Congratulations are nevertheless in order.

In the mean time Aiyar, whom I consider by and large a sincere, serious man, continues to swing from a giant vine to a giant vine in the forest of hyperbole with the practiced ease of a Tarzan.

“Baith jaiye, Baith jaiye”

2011-12-28T06:54:00.001-08:00

Speaker Meira Kumar

Watching Indian lawmakers yesterday debate the pros and cons of a bill to create a Lokpal or a public ombudsman against corruption, the one predominant thought on my mind was Broadway.

I could picture three starring roles to play the speaker of the house, Meira Kumar, the leader of the opposition, Sushma Swaraj and the most assertive proponent of parliamentary supremacy, Lalu Prasad Yadav.

All three characters have immense histrionic as well as musical possibilities. Meira Kumar’s singsong manner of speaking gives her character a natural flair that is so suitable for a Broadway production. A command/instruction/plea that she most frequently uses bilingually is “Baith jaiye, baith jaiye” “Please sit down, please sit down.” Coming from her ‘Baith jaiye, baith jaiye” sounds so melodious that even those wanting to sit down to maintain the dignity of the house stand and sway.

Swaraj, with her chaste Hindi delivered in impeccably rehearsed tones, brings a touch of the magisterial. Yadav, in sharp contrast, brings uninhibited rusticity and easy humor that can reduce or elevate any debate depending on your perspective. Apart from these three main characters there are at least a dozen others who together make for a powerful Broadway play. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with his sullen monotone has his own unique character.

The play opens with the speaker standing and Members of Parliament thumping the benches in unison—“thak, thak, thak.” The speaker then starts singing the theme song of the play that goes something like this:

“Baith jaiye…” thak thak thak

“Baith jaiye..” thak thak thak

“Kripya karke” thak thak thak

“Baith jaiye.” thak thak thak

The more I think about this the more I am convinced I should write this as a Broadway play.

A few thousand versus 675 million

2011-12-27T06:51:00.001-08:00

Let me do what television news channels do everywhere—use a small survey sample to make a large political, cultural or social point. It may not make for accuracy but it sure does make for good television.

To coincide with the three-day parliamentary debate over what, if any, kind of Lokpal or ombudsman should be created to counter raging public corruption in India, NDTV, reputedly a leading television news channel, is asking its viewers to rate lawmakers as they make their own argument for or against.

I have reproduced here two visuals from NDTV’s website that are striking for what they reveal in terms of political trends. It is amazing to see how political interests of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) align so closely with a vociferous urban middle-class movement led by Anna Hazare that is demanding a virtually parallel law enforcement, arrest and prosecution system.

If you study the voting pattern you would notice a couple of striking results. Every political grouping except the BJP and the Hazare group has been rated less than five on a scale of ten with India’s once much heralded Prime Minister of unimpeachable personal integrity, Manmohan Singh, at 4. In sharp contrast, both the BJP members who spoke during the debate, Sushma Swaraj and Yashwant Singh scored a solid 8. Now both scoring 8 may be taken as a coincidence but if you look at Hazare and his two closest supporters, Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi, they too have scored a solid 8. If that is a coincidence, it is a bloody good one.

If there is more incontrovertible evidence of how the Hazare-led movement is not just political but political with a distinct hue, I cannot find. This is me talking the way television channels make snap political judgments merely because they reflect a trend based on a few thousand votes in a country whose total number of registered voters is 675 million.

I fear that it is this ability to hijack and control the public discourse merely because a section of Indian society is urban, tech savvy and with 24/7 access to the broadcast instruments that inordinately influence the legislative process and public policy making, a few thousand clickers in a few major cities might be able to overwhelm 675 million others. One can argue that but that’s how democracy works. Well, then that’s how it should not work.

Tintin on sugar candy rush

2011-12-26T05:33:00.001-08:00

Captain Haddock, left, and Tintin (All images from http://www.us.movie.tintin.com/)

I have found my dream job. It is the one that Tintin has. He is a reporter with an unlimited expense account, gets to travel the world in search of stories which he never files for a newspaper that does not exist and whose editor he never gets in touch with. Naturally, he has no deadlines.

I have also found a place where I want to be posted. It is called Bagghar, somewhere in Morocco. It is a North African sultanate by what looks like the sparkling blue Mediterranean Sea. There are other fringe benefits to being Tintin. Although he is 83, he does not look a day over 18. He has a perfect quiff that never collapses. Also, he does not seem to have a bank account or a credit card. He receives no threatening letters from the income tax or internal revenue authorities. And finally, he does not ever have to shave.

Watching Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin” yesterday was one thrilling ride but largely in an unmanageably frenetic manner. It would be somewhat akin to taking every single crazy ride at both Disney and Universal Studios theme parks in a span of about 24 minutes. Having been freed from the laws of physics, and particularly gravity, that govern the traditional filmmaking, Spielberg does go a bit crazy with the swinging action.

Don’t get me wrong, the film is a breathtaking example of motion capture brilliantly married with animation that is so real you want to inhabit every corner of every frame. But for some reason that I do not fully comprehend Spielberg makes the pace so hurried and hyper that one finds no time to savor the visual feast that the movie is. It is almost as if both Spielberg and his producer Peter Jackson are two boys on a sugar candy rush who want to showcase every little trick and toy that they possess in a limited time that they have you as their captive audience.

Early on though as the plot develops there is a moment, the kind of which one wishes one had more of. Tintin (Jamie Bell) is getting a portrait of his done by a sidewalk sketch artist. After the portrait is done the motion capture, animated 21st century Tintin turns towards his fox terrier Snowy holding his own early 20th century drawing as conceived by his creator, Belgian cartoonist Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi-1907-1983) and asks “What do you think Snowy?” That’s a charming and cheeky little moment.

Then there is the sequence (see the image below) in the Sahara, where Captain Haddock (played by the motion capture legend Andy Serkis of the Gollum fame) is so disoriented by the heat that not only does he see a mirage, he imagines a whole sea break out of the horizon with a medieval ship that one of his Haddock ancestors commanded. That scene is magical.

One major reason why the movie seems to move at such a frenzied speed could be because the director uses many long continuous shots to recreate the feel of Hergé’s panels in the comic book. This continuous movement can be taxing at times.

These are just minor quibbles in what is otherwise a very high benchmark entertainment in animation. Being a technology aficionado I would be very interested to find out in some detail how the final effects of the movie are achieved. It seems so real that one could see the pores on Tintin’s cheeks or Haddock’s nasal hair. And yet, Spielberg and his special effects and animation designer team of Joe Latteri, Jamie Beard and Paul Story make sure that it still retains all of its comic book charms. (See a typical frame below)

Since I do not like 3D I watched the regular version of the film but I can imagine how effective it would be for those who enjoy 3D.

The way the movie ends it is obvious that this is going to be a franchise. For future Tintin movies Spielberg might want to slow down the pace a bit. The first installment has showcased all that he and Jackson can accomplish in terms of action. Hopefully, the next one will be a little more deliberate.

Mohammed Rafi, Manohari Singh, O P Nayyar and Dr. Charles Langs

2011-12-25T06:56:00.001-08:00

Dr. Charles E Langs (Pic: http://www.med.nyu.edu/biosketch/langsc01)

My mind routinely flies off on a million tangents. It is a good thing nature does not require me to file my flight plan.

As in life, one of the things I like to do on this blog is connect seemingly unconnected dots or create reasons to connect them. Today’s post is one example of that reflex.

Let me start with Dr. Charles E Langs, a New York nephrologist with whom I had a chance meeting on a flight from Chicago in September. I had a debilitating migraine attack on a full Southwest flight and assigned the middle seat (5B). One may be able to manage either a migraine attack or a middle airline seat but doing both must qualify as a nightmare of epic proportions peculiar to modern life.

As I kept clutching my head in my hands and at one point even detached it from my torso and held it like a helmet, Dr. Langs’s doctorly instincts sharpened. At that point he did not really need his medical degree to tell that I had a severe migraine attack. So he began chatting me up with the easy empathy of an accomplished family doctor. That conversation continued throughout the nearly two-hour flight during which we discussed literature and classical music and everything in between. It struck me instantly that Dr. Langs was an enormously well-read man. As it turned out his friend Christopher Hitchens thought so as well.

In fact, Hitchens asked Charles if there was anything that he had not read. Apparently there was not much. Not much of consequence anyway. Charles gently mentioned his passion for Western classical music and how he was learning to play the piano. It was obvious to me that he was not learning to strike a few notes at a party where everyone was drunk. He was learning it seriously.

To cut the short story shorter, by the time the captain announced that we were landing my migraine had subsided significantly. I mean significantly enough for me to face New York. It turned out that Dr. Langs had deliberately engaged me to distract me from my intense pain. The other consequence of the conversation was that we became friends.

That story ends tangent one. Tangent two is about the great Indian saxophonist Manohari Singh who died recently. No single piece of instrumental music has endured in my mind for close to four decades and revitalized itself every time I have heard it as much as one played by Singh for the 1964 Hindi movie ‘Kashmir ki Kali’ composed by the ever melodious O P Nayyar.

I found this remarkable clip of Singh playing to a handful of his admirers the song ‘Yeh duniya usiki zamana usika”. There is a lot I can say on the enchanting little performance but instead I chose to send it to Dr. Langs, someone totally unconnected with Hindi cinema music. I sought his comments to see what he thought of it as someone learning Western classical music.

“Although I am woefully ignorant when it comes to the music of the sax, I truly was moved by his playing,” Charles says. He then adds something that I could have said but did not. “Mournful, melancholic, achingly beautiful. Goes right to the soul. He had that exceptional gift of eliminating the barrier between instrument and player. He, in effect, became the instrument.” Singh does indeed become the saxophone.

This brings me to my third and final tangent. Mohammed Rafi, by most reckoning India’s greatest playback singer, would have turned 87 yesterday. Although he died in 1980, the passage of three decades has done nothing to diminish his dulcet genius. While he sang a few thousand songs and most with uncompromising brilliance, I am choosing this one merely because it fits my post. Pay attention to the opening of the song and how effortless he is. This has to be one of Nayyar’s best compositions.

P.S.: Just before the onset of another migraine headache, I played Singh’s impromptu riff. The migraine disappeared.

P.P.S.: I am very likely wrong on this one but the saxophonist in the movie clip may have been Singh himself. If so, that would be neat.

Republic of Ferment

2011-12-24T04:44:00.001-08:00

Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 1st Class William John Kipp Jr.taken from Wikipedia)

Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s denial of rumors of a coup are perfectly credible. That’s because in order to seize power the military has to give it up first. Here is a country where the civilians have to stage a coup from time to time just so that they remember what it feels like to be in control.

Explanations of why Pakistan is in a permanent state of ferment and why its military and political ruling elites are at daggers drawn no longer add up. They all make sense individually and yet together they fail to explain why it is so inexorably drawn to its own destruction.

Contrary to the strenuous denials by the civilian government there appears to be something to the allegations that a secret unsigned memo written at the instance of President Asif Ali Zardari and others asking the United States to rein in the military. Even if the memo does not exist or was not allegedly written by former Pakistani Ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani at the behest of the elected government, the broader issue of intensifying tensions at the top remain. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani too has spoken of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. Calling that military a “state within state” is the farthest a civilian leader in Pakistan can go as Gilani did.

It is possible that the drumbeat of an impending coup is a calculated political strategy by the elected government to preempt it from actually happening. After all what could be worse for a rumor than be confirmed? Raising a ruckus seems to have helped because Kayani told troops in the tribal areas of Pakistan’s northwest, “The army will continue to support democratic process in the country.” Gilani was quick to jump at the clarification saying, “The clarification from the army chief yesterday is extremely well taken in the democratic circles. There will definitely be an improvement because of it.”

If the whole purpose of the memo by the elected government, whether real or imaginary, was to thwart the military from contemplating any drastic action it may be succeeding for now. General Kayani is astute enough not to deny the rumors of a coup and then stage it anyway. Or at least I hope he is. It has been my longstanding view that in Pakistan one must expect the expected. If that is really the case, a coup should happen sooner or later, in some form or the other. On the other hand if the military is already a state within a state, then it makes no material difference whether it makes it formal.

From the looks of it the talk of the memo followed by Gilani’s public remonstrations are a form of civilian coup. Let’s see how long this hold because someone somewhere in the military must be pissed.

For now I am choosing to go by the official profile of General Kayani on the Pakistani army’s website which describes him thus: “Imbued with the qualities of head and heart, General is perceived to be a purposeful and pragmatic Commander and embodiment of professionalism. Excellence and perfection remain the hallmark of his personality.”

Since he is imbued with the qualities of head and heart and is purposeful and pragmatic, he may not yet dislodge the elected government. But then excellence and perfection are also the hallmark of his personality, neither of which the elected government is loaded with. So there.

In India, a rustic defender of parliament’s supremacy

2011-12-23T05:14:00.001-08:00

My very approximate approximation of Lalu Prasad Yadav

It is his carefully untrimmed ear hair, defiantly spiking out on both sides, that gives Lalu Prasad Yadav that satirically menacing look. As the most vocal and colorful defender of the supremacy of India’s parliament in the face of an increasingly assertive section of civil society seeking to legislate, Yadav is characteristically effective.

Lalu Prasad Yadav, TV grab from www.ndtv.com

There is a veritable turf war going on in India these days between parliamentarians and an unquantifiable but significantly loud section of civil society over whose right it is to draft bills and enact them into laws. At issue is the Lokpal (Ombudsman) Bill and the extent of powers that should be enshrined in the proposed new institution to fight and redress massive corruption in public life at all levels.

If India were a forest, politicians would have marked the whole country as their territory. Seasoned old predators have been on the prowl for decades but now new, much younger, wildlife is intruding. The confrontation is expectedly brutal. What is ironic is that leading the pack of new intruders is a 74-year-old former army truck driver consumed by the utter moral righteousness of anything and everything he does. The man, Anna Hazare has now been tormenting the political establishment for the past six months or so by going on hunger fasts until his way prevails.

Television shows are full of representatives from both sides with their own loads of braggadocios about who gets to draft a bill as far reaching as the Lokpal Bill. Yadav has very vociferously cast his lot behind his own crowd of federal legislators saying that parliament is both competent and supreme.

What makes this 64-year-old former chief minister of the state of Bihar as well as former Railway Minister compelling is his unrestrained rusticity and unselfconscious sense of humor. It is also his ability to go off on a tangent that entertains in parliament. For instance, yesterday during a nearly 25-minute speech, studded with colloquialisms straight out of the hinterland of Bihar, he said it was his misfortune that he was born in 1948 because the British “fled” before he was born.(The British left India in 1947). It had nothing to do with the debate but then he is like an improv comic who often just wings it.

Despite his manners and language shorn of urban finesse, his purpose is deadly serious. He is telling this agitated section of India’s civil society that laws cannot be enacted from the sidewalks and streets. For a man who has built a whole career out of removing political filters from his rhetoric, for once that gift is coming in particularly handy. At one point during the speech he even spoke how much politicians have to grovel in order to get elected to parliament. His implication being that there was no way that he was going to let the street protestors led by Hazare hijack lawmaking.

Yadav’s style may be rough-hewn but there is no mistaking his passion for the political establishment. During the speech he also spoke about how under the proposed Lokpal Bill it would easy to file frivolous cases against the country’s prime minister and how it would lower the prestige of the office when the prime minister travels abroad. Yadav has obviously thought through the major consequences of the bill as and for a politician.

In a sense he said everything that other Members of Parliament would have loved to say but were inhibited by their natural filters of political circumspection. For someone who wears his ear hair with the conviction of a wolverine, circumspection does not come naturally to Yadav.

India's charges against Headley may make no material difference

2011-12-22T04:53:00.001-08:00

Lest you think that I am all about caprice and conceit and everything in between, here is a piece I wrote for the IANS wire last night and out all over the world today.

By Mayank Chhaya,Indo-Asian News Service

Unless the NIA is working out of some undisclosed arrangement with US authorities about Headley, the formal charges could turn out to be more symbolic than consequential.

--Indo-Asian News Service

In case greatness is thrust upon me

2011-12-21T07:56:00.001-08:00

Mayank Chhaya--Waiting for greatness (Pic: Mayank Chhaya)

It is almost certain now that I was not born great. If it was not evident by the time I turned 25, it does not really matter any more because 25 more years have passed since. I believe life ends at 25. If you have not cracked the mysteries of the universe by then, you should regard your life as a failure. Everything that follows is a bogus reassertion of delusion.

It is equally certain that I did not become great in the mean time. And the prospect of greatness being thrust upon me seems remote at this stage of life.

However, being an optimist I am fully prepared, having kept all the trimmings in place, in case greatness does come upon me. All the backstories have been neatly arranged, although not altered one tiny bit. They unfold at opportune intervals of my life in a compelling fashion. There are friends who would have quirky and charming anecdotes ready to illustrate and accentuate certain aspects of my personality. There are as many critics as there are admirers, six of each. It is just that oftentimes it is hard to distinguish one from the other. But the point is they are there, eager to hold forth on me in case someone asked.

For instance, if a hagiographer (I insist on a hagiographer) wants stories that highlight my directness irrespective of who is at the rough end of it, I have friends who would supply numerous instances.

I have prepared a list of people who have unique insights into my life and works. Admittedly, I am long on life and short on works. If I am to be judged as a journalist, there is a sizable enough body of writings which has accumulated over the past three decades. I am not yet a writer by the benchmark of a minimum of ten books that I believe one must have before being called one. I have four so far. So we will wait for that to happen. As for being judged as a human being, there is a slight hitch in the sense that I am now more convinced than ever before that I am human only in form. My processes are entirely alien. Let’s just say that I fake human effectively.

Realistically, there is next to no chance of greatness being thrust upon me. My friend Ashok Easwaran and I have this standard exchange where he would ask me, “So what is happening about greatness, fame and money?” and I would respond saying, “I would prefer to reverse the order of your question—money, fame, greatness.” With money the other two are not that hard to buy or generate.

It is paradoxical that I live in a country where everyone and everything is great and yet greatness has eluded me. I would like to believe that in a country where shoes are “great” just as sex is “great” or burger is “great”, I have a fairly good shot at greatness. Evidently, I have been wrong so far.

It is relevant here to mention what I think defines greatness. Unless I have created this universe and I relish black holes as my afternoon snack, everything else is stamp collecting. (Apologies to Earnest Rutherford who said “All science is either physics or stamp collecting”).

P.S.: This is one of those posts I keep in store for a rainy day. It is raining where I live.

P.P.S.: The discerning among you would have read the pic caption and felt embarrassed by its self-absorption.

India, Russia and the Gita

2011-12-20T05:47:00.001-08:00

Krishna

Some of the most vocal proponents of banning books in India are ironically discovering what it feels like to be at the receiving end. A news story first reported by the IANS wire about an ongoing court case in Tomsk, Siberia, over banning the Gita on grounds that it is extremist literature has set off a political and diplomatic firestorm.

At the vanguard of the protest are some of the very people who have in the past proudly demanded the banning of the books that challenge or run counter to their own ideas. Both the ruling Congress Party and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and some of its extreme fringe allies are no stranger to the practice of demanding and enforcing bans on books they do not like. Now that someone in Russia is paying back in the same coin and that too against a book they regard as the distillation of Indian philosophy, they are irate.

In a laughable, albeit predictable, response the BJP’s senior leader Sushma Swaraj is even demanding the Gita, which is the philosophical backbone of the much larger epic poem Mahabharat, be declared a “national book.” The controversy has unlocked the floodgates of grandiosity as evident in the remarks by Tarun Vijay, a member of the Rajya Sabha or the Upper House of Indian parliament. He has been quoted as saying, “Can (the) sun be banned, Himalayas be banned...?” implying that the Gita is piece of cosmic or geologic eternity.

Political leaders cutting across party lines have expressed their outrage at the possibility that the Gita may be banned in Russia. To pacify the anger India’s Foreign Minister S M Krishna has said the court complaint "appears to be the work of some ignorant and misdirected or motivated individuals".

"While this complaint is patently absurd, we have treated this matter seriously and the embassy of India (in Russia) is closely monitoring this legal case," he told Indian parliament.

Krishna said the government was "confident that our Russian friends, who understand our civilizational values and cultural sensitivities, will resolve this matter appropriately".

He also counseled that not much attention should be paid to the issue as "we do not want to dignify some misdirected individuals who have filed an absurd complaint".

Sensing that the issue could have an impact on India-Russia relations, the Russian ambassador to India Alexander Kadakin condemned the "madmen" seeking the ban. "Russia is a secular and democratic country where all religions enjoy equal respect… Even more applicable it is to the holy scriptures of various faiths -- whether it is the Bible, the Holy Quran, Torah, Avesta and, of course, Bhagvad Gita -- the great source of wisdom for the people of India and the world.

"I consider it categorically inadmissible when any holy scripture is taken to the courts. For all believers these texts are sacred," he said.

The timing of the Gita case is particularly inopportune as it has been taking place against the backdrop of a series of visits by Indian government ministers in recent weeks, culminating with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s summit visit on December 15-17.

The fundamental lesson here for all concerned, especially those who reflexively make such demands, that no books should be banned. Period.

Asif Ali Zardari returns home

2011-12-19T05:27:00.001-08:00

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari

Defying skeptics and belying speculations Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari has returned home amid fast deteriorating relations between the military and civilian leaderships. At the core of the tensions are the allegations that the civilian government sent an unsigned memo urging the Obama administration to lean over the military and prevent a possible coup.

The allegations are now before Pakistan’s Supreme Court which is investigating the veracity of the memo which the Zardari government has denied having anything to do with. Pakistan’s power equilibrium has been rudely upended ever since the American raid killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden earlier this year.

When Zardari rushed to Dubai on December 6 after suffering from what now has been described as a mild stroke, there were speculations that he had in fact gone into exile over the memo controversy under pressure from the military. As it turns out the reality is a little more complicated than that.

Zardari’s return means any number of things, including that he has become resolute in meeting the memo challenge head-on and assert civilian authority over the country or that he has struck a backroom deal where the military might gain even greater say in the affairs of the state than it already enjoys. Given Pakistan’s record so far either of these is eminently possible.

What might be at work here is Zardari’s much reviled wheeling and dealing talents to carve out a corner for himself in what seems like an increasingly narrowing civilian space at the top of the country’s control structure. I have frequently written about how Pakistan is a country where the elite seems to be permanently striking deals within itself to exclusion of the rest of the country. It is possible that that is what is going on. Either that or Zardari has behind him some powerful support that is encouraging him to return. One can never say with any degree of certainty.

People must not forget that here is a man who married up, earned lucrative notoriety, spent 11 years in prison, and emerged triumphant politically in the aftermath of his wife and former prime minister and would-be prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The point is if there is one thing that Zardari does well is reinvent himself. He is not a transcendental figure. He is a transactional figure.

The next few days would be interesting to watch as the Supreme Court hears the memo case.

Stop perpetuating this non-sense of caste

2011-12-18T06:51:00.001-08:00

Sam Pitroda (Pic: www.sampitroda.com)

Indian politicians have mastered the art of perpetuating and mining the politics of sordid caste consciousness even while simultaneously pretending to be rejecting it. The latest case in point is none other than India’s prime minister-in-waiting and Congress Party general secretary Rahul Gandhi.

At an election rally in Akbarpur area of Ramabai Nagar in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state that is getting ready for assembly elections, Gandhi was quoted as saying, “Twenty years back Rajiv Gandhi thought of bringing mobile phones to India. Do you know who brought them? Sam Pitroda, who is a Vishkarma, “Barahi” (carpenter). He brought mobile phones to your houses.”

Gandhi's use of Pitroda's caste is not only gratuitously insulting of someone has never let it enter any aspect of his life and work, it is also embarrassingly expedient. The worst part is Rahul's presumption in using it so unselfconsciously.The whole picture of a seemingly modern, presumptive prime minister choosing to yield to the temptation of crass caste politics is indeed sordid. The sheer condescension of that construct ought to be rejected.

What worries me is that in his mind Rahul must have thought of its use as an inspirational device. I am not privy to how the young politician’s mind works but his logic in saying what he did may have worked something like this. Winning the state elections in Uttar Pradesh would be the signature accomplishment of my political career so far. One of the most effective ways to do it is to beat Chief Minister Mayawati at her own game of tapping into the caste-based electorate. Now let’s see whom do I have as an ace in my pack of caste cards? Boom! Why not Sam Pitroda?

It is entirely possible that Rahul was trying to offer the electorate of the particular constituency a role model in Pitroda, someone whose story they feel inspired by to rise above narrow social divides. His intentions may have been entirely honorable but the outcome is anything but.

What I find particularly galling about this is that Gandhi is invoking the name of a public figure not in the least burdened with the baggage of his birth and lineage. Having known Pitroda for over 20 years, I can tell you from deep personal experience that rarely have I met a public figure so utterly detached from India’s oppressive social stratification. And that’s what makes Gandhi’s assertion so ironic.

It would be in character for Pitroda not to pay particular attention to his political projection because the attribute that detaches him from the non-sense of caste is the same attribute that would make him dismissive of how he is being cashed.

As for Rahul, precisely because he commands a powerful political platform not just because of who he is but who he could be, it behooves him to consciously eschew the use of caste as a political tool.

Madam, zara zyada oomph lao?

2011-12-17T06:11:00.001-08:00

Pic: Narendra Bisht, Outlook magazine

Sex sells. So let me sell some this Saturday morning.

The Outlook magazine of India has done along with Durex, the makers of a popular range of condoms (both ribbed and flavored, I think), a survey on sex among middle-aged urban Indians.

I do not know the sample size (The size does not matter or does it?) but it seems over 90% says sex is just as good, if not better than when they were younger. A little over a third of those surveyed say they have sex between 11 and 20 times a month. Nearly 94% says they are between satisfied and very satisfied with sex.

Surveys about sex do not mean much other than giving those surveyed a chance to often live out their fantasies. I am sure there is a kernel of truth in there somewhere but largely they help sell the magazine that is carrying out the survey. It also offers the publication a chance to publish some racy photos, not that anyone needs an excuse to do that anymore. What’s not to like in soft porn images of a fully lit young couple sort of dry humping?

I saw the picture above and quickly went into my overdrive deconstruction (ODD—I just made that up) mode. The first question is—Is she in the throes of an orgasm or in anticipation of it? Why is her luxurious hair so meticulously fanned out? And why does he look as if he is asking are we done yet? And why does she look that his presence underneath is entirely incidental? What was the brief from the cameraman? Did he say, “Madam, zara zyada oomph lao? (Madam, turn on more oomph).” The brief for the man had to be simple—just lie down and don’t get really aroused. Such profound questions came flooding without any answers on seeing the picture.

On a side note, the men surveyed were asked to name the person they find most attractive. A full 3.2 % named Hillary Rodham Clinton. So there are urban men in India fantasizing about Hillary Clinton. In contrast, none of the women named Bill Clinton. Pakistan’s young Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar polled marginally above Hillary Clinton at 3.5%. Interestingly, Pakistani actress Veena Malik who allegedly posed for the Indian edition of the men’s magazine FHM with nothing on other than an ‘ISI’ tattoo figured nowhere.

There is a reason why the survey was confined to the middle-aged urban Indian demographic because that’s who reads the magazine. Also, there is next to no prospect of a middle-aged rural couple doing in front of the camera what the couple above is doing. That does not mean rural folks do not dry-hump or toss their heads in uncontrolled ecstasy. It only means they do not read Outlook.

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

2011-12-16T05:00:00.001-08:00

Christopher Hitchens (Pic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Christopher_Hitchens_crop.jpg)

Christopher Hitchens lived life as if he was doing it a favor. In the end, he did “do” death the way he said he would.

“I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive,” he wrote, “and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.”

These were the words of someone of immense self-belief and someone with a gigantic appetite for and talent to produce an astonishingly wide variety of writings and philosophical constructs. As I suspected, many of his obits mention his flaming atheism as a central attribute of his life as if the belief in the non-existence of god is somehow a belief system.

Hitchens wrote with such feverish profligacy that it is hard to keep up with his vast output of essays, columns and reportage. However, from whatever little one has read it was obvious that writing was the ultimate act of regeneration for him. Somewhere in his mind he was perhaps thinking that if he wrote enough he might overcome his esophageal cancer.

“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in an interview in 2010.

As if wanting to prove that even in the final year of his life he produced “Arguably: Essays”, a best-seller hailed as one of the ten most important books of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review.

In what is likely his final piece of writing, Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair’s January, 2012 issue, about the philosophy around the popular maxim “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Of course, in keeping with his acerbic contrarianism he ridiculed it.

I was particularly struck by this passage.

“During my next hospital stay, in Washington D.C., the institution gifted me with a vicious staph pneumonia (and sent me home twice with it) that almost snuffed me out. The annihilating fatigue that came over me in consequence also contained the deadly threat of surrender to the inescapable: I would often find fatalism and resignation washing drearily over me as I failed to battle my general inanition. Only two things rescued me from betraying myself and letting go: a wife who would not hear of me talking in this boring and useless way, and various friends who also spoke freely. Oh, and the regular painkiller. How happily I measured off my day as I saw the injection being readied. It counted as a real event. With some analgesics, if you are lucky, you can actually “feel” the hit as it goes in: a sort of warming tingle with an idiotic bliss to it. To have come to this—like the sad goons who raid pharmacies for OxyContin. But it was an alleviation of boredom, and a guilty pleasure (not many of those in Tumortown), and not least a relief from pain.”

For a bon vivant of Hitchens’s particular disposition having to consider an injection being prepared as a “real event” must have been quite an experience. In the end, it seems, the pneumonia took his life.

Hitchens took it upon himself to invigorate the global human discourse and succeeded frequently.

What the fukhoormajalmaamada..

2011-12-15T04:43:00.001-08:00

What Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’ was to Adolf Hitler, Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘The Dictator’ promises to be to Mohammad Qaddafi. It is funny how raw cruelty, terror and despotism lend themselves so perfectly to humor and satire.
No one else could have played an over-the-top, flamboyant and cruel narcissist, inspired by Qaddafi, with as much conviction as Cohen. Unfortunately, and I use unfortunately in an ironic way, Qaddafi is not alive to watch the movie. In all likelihood he might have secretly enjoyed the characterization unlike Hitler, who was apoplectic with rage at Chaplin’s take on him.
Cohen is an enormous talent, not yet quite in the league of Chaplin but for the times he exists in he fills that slot rather effectively.
I have watched everything that Cohen has done, including most episodes of The Ali G Show and Borat as well as the movie versions, not to mention his other films. Cohen just cannot contain himself and that’s his talent and calling.
In this particular trailer, there is almost nothing that does not make one laugh. I suppose that is the intention of any trailer. However, it is safe to say that the whole movie too is unlikely to disappoint.
Jay Z’s “Mundiya tu bachke rahi’ was a pleasant, if appropriate, surprise.
Cohen’s take on WTF as “what the fukhoormajalmaamada..” is as hilarious as his sprint where he shoots the fellow sprinters and brings the ribbon closer. The bit about Megan Fox, hairiness and the Kardashians is easy pickings too.
I apologize for taking the lazy way out for the second consecutive day by writing about a movie trailer.
I always thought Cohen would be perfect casting as Qaddafi in a wild spoof on an utterly cruel and whimsical dictator.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

2011-12-14T04:41:00.001-08:00

Some movies should be made only as as a trailer. I do not know yet but going by its trailer “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’, directed by John Madden (‘Shakespeare in Love’), does not feel like one such movie.

On the face of it, it is a compelling plot to have a bunch of “self-deluding” English “fossils traipsing around” in India in their golden years lured by a false promise. Some words are in quotation marks because they are taken from the lines in the trailer.

I generally keep the benchmark for any creative work extremely low. That way the creator becomes redeemed rather easily. As a rule I root for the creator not fail abjectly. In a book, for instance, I look for one or two effective lines. In a movie, I look for one or two compelling frames and a moment or two of competent performance. Anything more is bonus.

This particular movie seems to have quite a few effective lines and some charming frames, not to mention well-oiled performances. The one that has stayed with me is spoken by Dev Patel who tells one of the English guests demanding a refund because the hotel is a disaster, “Everything will be alright in the end. So if it is not alright, it is not yet the end.”

The sheer artistic weight of the cast of this movie should make it a worthwhile experience. Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson and Bill Nighy add up to something eminently watchable, although I suspect the plot may have some lazy Indian stereotypes. There is no excuse for stereotyping a people but there is even less for doing it lazily. I hope that fear is belied.

This morning I wanted to write more about “tantalizing” possibility the Higgs boson does indeed exist and dwell in the subatomic world. But then I saw this trailer and was happily distracted because, unlike the Higgs boson, I could actually see the trailer.

On a separate note, I am beginning to resent the fact that Western film units so predictably go to Rajasthan to look for a signature Indian experience. No one can deny Rajasthan’s irresistible cinematic appeal and how it so effortlessly lives up to a Western filmmaker’s conception of the exotic India. But still, there is a little more to India than just Rajasthan.

Waiting for the Higgs boson

2011-12-13T06:14:00.001-08:00

Illustration: Mayank Chhaya

I did not expect the CERN particle physicists to come with a jarful of the Higgs boson like fireflies, but even with a low benchmark it appears that the so-called “God particle” remains elusive.

I watched the first 40 minutes or so of the live webcast of what was billed to be an important announcement by the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider. The expectation was that they would probably say they saw the ever elusive Higgs boson. From what Fabiola Gianotti of the ATLAS team has said so far, it is not conclusive that the Higgs boson has been seen.

Those who know the subject well (and that automatically excludes me and a vast majority of humanity) believe that the presentation indicates good progress towards finding it but we are not there yet. There are signs that the scientists have seen some signs of the particle’s existence but they are not yet jarful of fireflies.

It could be said with some literary liberty that if the Higgs field, which is somewhat like an energy field that pervades the entire universe, did not exist life as we know it would not. Without this invisible field inhibiting them all particles would zip around the universe at the speed of light which in turn would mean that atoms as we know it would not have formed and hence eventually everything else, including you and I, would have remained unrealized. The invisible energy field imparts these particles weight as they pass through the field. It also slows them down. That is the simplest way I can put this search in.

The CERN presentation this afternoon in Europe was more like a peer review which was webcast for anyone interested in the subject. Gianotti had no choice but to densely pack it with pure facts that most of us would not understand. Of course, her words were all English but together they made sense only to particle physicists and science writers. I understand physics in the broadest possible sense but that means nothing.

The conclusion seems to be that we are approaching the Higgs boson. "We are homing in on the Higgs. We have had hints today of what its mass might be and the excitement of scientists is palpable. Whether this is ultimately confirmed or we finally rule out a low mass Higgs boson, we are on the verge of a major change in our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter,” Dr. Claire Shepherd-Themistocleus, head of the CMS group at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, has been quoted as saying by The Guardian.

Part 2 of “We don’t know WTF happened?”

2011-12-12T06:10:00.001-08:00

Flood control units are on standby in New Delhi as fears mount over the rising levels of anchor drool in the newsrooms of the capital’s television news channels.
The return of anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare to the political center stage has sent anchors into unprecedented slobbering frenzy. I have this wild vision of anchors drowning in their own particularly viscous drool before eventually being rescued.
Dozens of dinghies and rafts have been requisitioned in the likely event that newsrooms get submerged in knee-deep drool. Some of the channels have elevated the anchor chair by several feet to give the anchor a bird’s eye view of Part 2 of Part 1 of the “We don’t know what the fuck happened?” show.
Television news is already full of shots of Hazare angrily pointing the accusatory finger at the rest of the world even as his lips curl in defiant disdain. “I am here. Can a moral revolution be far behind?” is what he seems to be saying.
There is a general feeling that the whole kerfuffle over India’s Telecom and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal demanding the screening of incendiary content on social networking sites is aimed at preempting the supporters of Hazare going viral all over again.
For television news they would love the reality to be something like this -- Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi and her son and prime minister-in-waiting Rahul Gandhi called Sibal and said, “Hey Kapil, do you know what they are saying about us on Facebook? Turn Facebook into Effacebook. And while you are it install a camera in Hazare’s topi so we know what he is up to.”
Speaking of Sibal and screening content, The New York Times’ India Ink blog has its own little version of slobbering going on. The Times’ New Delhi correspondent Heather Timmons broke the original story about Sibal meeting with executives of internet service providers such as Facebook and Google over screening inflammatory content. Sibal went on CNN-IBN’s “The Devil’s Advocate” show hosted by Karan Thapar to essentially say that the Times pulled it out of its ass. (Not quite in those precise terms but that was the implication).
“I’m a little surprised, we never talked to them (the Times), they never talked to us, they never sought my response, and they attributed all this to personalities in the Congress Party which is far from the truth.,” Sibal said.
The Times' clarified saying, “Mr. Sibal’s office confirmed that he would meet with Internet service providers Monday but did not provide more information about the content of the meeting.’’ India Ink called three people in his office before posting the article: Mamta Verma and S. Prakash, spokespersons who said they had little information about the issue, and Ranjan Khanna, a secretary who was unavailable. The article attributes no information to Congress Party personalities.”
Then there is this exchange:
Thapar: Have you drawn the attention to The New York Times to the fact that they have published a story which you believe is inaccurate?
Sibal: Well, someone from The New York Times said we want to keep you on your toes.
The paper concedes that Timmons did say to the minister “just trying to keep you on your toes” but qualified it by saying, “It was intended as a friendly nod to the fact that he may not have liked the story, but that nothing personal was meant by it.”

Joe Wong wants to “work on TV announcing losing lottery numbers”

2011-12-11T04:53:00.001-08:00

Comedian Joe Wong (Pic: www.joewongcomedy.com)

Joe Wong tells jokes that would very likely make him laugh too if he was in the audience and someone else was telling them.

He also takes care to see that in a public context people see him as a comedian and do not go beyond what he has to offer publicly. His website lays out some of his quirks.

“Joe goes to the post office and grocery stores a lot. These activities make him feel very competent.

Joe likes his rooms white. This way when he takes pictures there, he saves money on printer ink cartridges.”

I think the best quirk is his dream job, which is to “work on TV announcing losing lottery numbers.”

The concluding part of my interview with someone “who hold liquor well” but “throws up everything else.”

Q: From what I have seen on your site and YouTube, your humor has subtlety that requires the audience to pay attention. Has that been a challenge in establishing yourself?

A: Yes. A lot of comedy clubs are at bars or restaurants where you have to be kind of loud to get attention. Fortunately, the American comedy scene is mature enough to have clubs that place more emphasis on alternative or intellectual humor.

I also got some advice from fellow comedians. A veteran comedian Tony V once said to me, “Joe you gotta slow down when you tell jokes. Your jokes are smart and you have to give the audience some time to think.” When you pause on stage, people actually pay more attention to you and think more.

Q: Do you ever feel that half the time your just being on the stage primes the audience for laughter? Not that comics have a particular look but the fact that you don’t even have that seems to accentuate your impact. Do you agree?

A: It’s kind of the other way around. When people see someone who looks like a comedian, they will laugh right away. But that laugh can’t last long, you have to have jokes to keep the audience going.

In the beginning my presence did give the audience, and sometimes even the comedians and bookers, a sense of suspense. I remember one comedian told me after a show, “When I brought you up to the stage, I thought, ‘This is gonna be a train wreck’ But I was really surprised.”

But now I am booked as a headliner at most comedy shows and the audience know they have the most established comedian that night on stage so they tend to laugh from the beginning more.

Q: What is your sense about the comedy scene in China? Is it possible, for instance, to say the kind of things you said at the RTCA dinner in the presence of Wen Jiabao in Beijing?

A: Zhou Libo’s routines sometimes mention political figures such as Wen Jiabao, but not in a critical way. I don’t think (Chinese) comedians can make the type of jokes I made at the RTCA dinner. There is more reverence toward the government than the US. It’s just the culture there.

Q: It appears from your material that you do not take the easy way out by focusing too much on ethnic humor. Was it a conscious decision? For instance, when you speak about having read so much American history that you have developed white guilt is a sharp departure for a recent immigrant.

A: It is a conscious decision. There are already many Asian comedians doing ethnic humor. I want to do something more challenging to me.

Q: Do you perform in China at all? If you do what kind of care would you have to take not to end up in prison?

I went to a comedy club in China once back in 2008 but I can’t say I perform standup comedy in China. Standup comedy is a language art and it takes a lot of practice in front of audiences to get better. There is no Chinese language comedy club in the US.

Q: How much role do you think America’s receptivity to humor and the fact that there are no sacred cows here play in helping create your material?

A: In every country there are people who are into different types of humor, vulgar, intelligent, slapstick, etc.

Americans see humor as part of a person’s intelligence and personality. When I came to the US I struggled with my identity in a new world. In a sense that struggle pushed me more toward comedy and self expression.

Q: Do you still encounter those annoying people who cannot recover from the fact that you speak English at all, not to mention words such as demagoguery?

Before I came to the US, I memorized an Oxford dictionary. I used to use big words such as demagoguery in my conversation because I assumed every American knows every word in that dictionary. And that did get some people amazed. I remember once I said to a white guy at the campus bar after learning that he doesn’t drink, “So you are a teetotaler?” He said to me, “See that’s the reason you can hang with us.”

Later on I learned that people think you are pretentious using that kind of vocabulary all the time. And that white guy was not well liked by people. So I started to stay away from those words when I speak. I am not pretentious and I don’t want to be perceived as such.

I used that type of words at the RTCA dinner because the audience are made up of reporters and politicians who play with words for a living. I enjoyed writing for that show.

Q: Do you see yourself branching out beyond stand-up comedy? If so, where?

I am working with David Letterman’s production company World Wide Pants to develop a sitcom. And I am having a book published in Chinese soon.

Q: And finally, an unrelated question about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. How do you look at the issue?

I will take a pass at this one. I hope everyone lives a happy life but politics is not my forte. That’s partly why I’m a comedian I guess.

Joe Wong, the best Chinese export to America

2011-12-10T06:20:00.001-08:00

There has to be something inherently ironic, if not altogether funny, about a biographer of the Dalai Lama writing about China’s most agreeable export to America—Joe Wong, the “All American Immigrant” comedian. If I look hard enough, I will find it.

I do not quite remember how I discovered Joe but ever since I did, I cannot forget him. Immediately after watching his 2010 performance at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner (RTCD) on YouTube, I sent him an email in September this year to set up an interview.

Joe Wong is unquestionably the most wickedly funny Chinese American comedian ever. This, I assert with such finality because if there was a fellow comic of comparable talent, America’s humor industry would have found him or her by now. No, Margaret Cho is not of Chinese origin. She is an American of Korean descent.

Not that comics have instantly identifiable markers that reveal their talent but Joe Wong has one that helps a great deal. He has a half smile that heralds a joke. The smile would suggest that he has quality tested the joke and it is guaranteed to be funny. The funny thing is that the jokes which he deadpans are even funnier.

Sample this one, for instance, from the RTCD where Washington’s movers and shakers come down every year to share a laugh or two or three depending on the comedian. In Joe’s case there were too many to count. Vice President Joe Biden was in attendance and, inevitably, Joe had a joke for that.

“I am honored to meet Vice President Joe Biden here tonight,” he said with as much genuineness as it is possible to muster with the knowledge that a joke is following right behind that sentiment.

“I actually read your autobiography and today I see you,” he said, priming and sautéing the audience like a gourmet chef utterly self-assured that what he is about to dish out will bring the house down. And then boom… the punch line.

“I think the book is much better..”

As humor goes Joe keeps it biting and mainstream without generally resorting to ethnic foibles and stereotypes. But when he does, he does it more to coopt mainstream America than to mock ethnic minorities. Take this one about taking the citizenship test where he offers his own unique perspective about the questions that are asked to test the applicant’s knowledge of American history. I reproduce this bit verbatim to give you the flavor.

“Who is Benjamin Franklin?

Aah…The reason our convenient store gets robbed.

What is the second amendment?

Aah..The reason why our convenient store gets robbed.”

These are bitingly funny in themselves, but then Joe kills (as the expression for a brilliant comic routine goes) with the following two.

“What is Roe V Wade?

Aah..Two ways of coming to the United States.”

Later I read so much about American history that I started to harbor white guilt.”

Here are the excerpts from my interview. I am breaking them down in two parts. The rest will follow tomorrow.

Joe Wong (Pic: www.joewongcomedy.com)

Part 1

Q: Humor is not something Westerners suspect the Chinese of having. Why do you think that is? (I am from India and they think we have even less.)

A: I remember after I published an assay on a Rice campus newspaper, my friend and English teacher said to me, “Who knew a Chinese can be funny?” Whereas most Chinese learn American culture through movies and books, most Americans learn Chinese culture from their observation of Chinese immigrants and media portrait of Chinese immigrants in America. Most immigrants face enormous amount of pressure to make a living, they don’t have the luxury of participating in pop culture and politics.

More importantly, new Asian immigrants are not that comfortable and relaxed in America to begin with, and one of the most uncomfortable things in the world is not getting the joke, right below telling a joke that nobody laughs at. So why risk it? But as Asian groups are getting more comfortable and relaxed in America, more and more of us are telling jokes.

Q: You came to the US when you were 24. Having spent your formative years in China, how did that shape your worldview and,particularly, humor?

A: When I was in China, I wrote and performed some sketches in college. I did several with various degrees of success but I never planned to one day perform comedy. Growing up, I always thought people around me were funnier than me. My college roommate would sleep in the school library and say to people, “Success is 1% inspiration and 99% drool.”

In college, I wanted to find the meaning of life and of the universe on my own. I read a lot of Western philosophers such as Cant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Bacon, Dewey, and so forth. I believed that there is a common humanity everywhere in the world regardless of the language and the cultural background. I still believe in this commonality even in humor.

China is actually more open to Western humor than Western countries are to Chinese humor. We have Mark Twain’s writings in our text book, even though it’s translated into Chinese and needs footnotes to understand, but you can get the humor. Later more American magazines and books became available, a friend of mine read the jokes on Readers’ Digest, understood every word in the joke but couldn’t get it. I had to explain to him why the joke was funny. I guess I may have a keener understanding of humor than some people.

Because I grew up in China and came to the US at such a late stage in life, I was obsessed with making people hear and understand me. As a student I often feel that non-white immigrant students were easily ignored in conversations because our cultural background and languages were so different from American students that most of them didn’t bother to listen what you have to say.

I remember when I first told some jokes, my friends would go, “Oh that’s interesting. I never thought about that.” Because they would not expect a guy like me is telling jokes. Later on when people laugh at my jokes, I feel this connection with Americans that a lot of immigrants want or proclaim not to care.

Americans are famous for being humorous in China, so making Americans laugh gives this extra sense of “beating them in their own game” After I published an assay at the campus newspaper, I sent the clipping to home and wrote in the letter, “Foreign students here are voiceless. I am proud to make people notice us.”

Q: It takes particular gumption to come that late to the United States and pursue humor as your profession. How did you go about it?

A: Work work work. There is no secret to it. Everyone is a nervous wreck when they first step on the stage. The number one fear among Americans is public speaking. Some comedians would throw up before they went on stage. But through hard work you learn to work with the nerves.

Q: Describe to me a little bit about the humor scene in China.

Traditional Chinese standup comedy is called crosstalk, done by two performers. One is the straight guy doing the set up and the other doing the punch lines. It has existed since the Qing dynasty. Besides crosstalk, there are a lot of regional singing comedies and vaudeville troupes speaking various dialects. Because crosstalk is done in mandarin, the official language in China, it gets more air time on national TV and radio stations.

Crosstalk was hugely popular in the 80’s, then it died down in the 90’s. There was a revival of crosstalk in 2006 after Guo Degang became popular. In the meantime, Zhou Libo in Shanghai became popular in 2008 for his more western style standup comedy shows.

An even more popular form of comedy is sketch. Every year, Zhao Benshan’s sketch is the headlining act in the Chinese New Year Gala, which is the biggest television variety show in China watched by over a billion people.

Besides standup and sketch performers, there are a slue or TV hosts who are famous for their humor, notably Cui Yongyuan and Wang Han, as well as great comedy movies from directors like Feng Xiaogang.

In summary, China has a very vibrant comedy scene covering the slapstick as well as deadpan humor. (End of Part 1—Part 2 tomorrow)

The Lollipop Sun and the Pink River

2011-12-09T06:03:00.001-08:00

The Lollipop Sun—Mayank Chhaya (Virtual on virtual)

As the lollipop sun angled through the distorted window, the neon green and pink chair sat unsurely. The rug underneath looked as if the painter had tried to pull it before before deciding to keep it because it bore his initial at its frayed left corner.

The painter happens to be me and the tool is to be found at www.pixlr.com.

I am not quite sure yet if I am in the grip of the Van Gogh syndrome but these days I see the world in deeply saturated colors. (Three ‘I’s in one sentence? Even I am embarrassed). It must be the ringing in my ears that is disturbing my vision.

Whatever be the cause, something strange has happened in the past one month or so that is prompting me to draw and paint with unprecedented frenzy. Some of the proliferation can be attributed to the ease of use of the tools on offer here, but I must also credit a sudden burst of creativity.

I have created a dozen or so works on an impulse. It does not feel accurate to say I have painted them because there is no actual paint or brush involved here. It is such a compelling coming together of technologies. The first is the the tool itself. Pixlr is primarily a photo editing tool but it also offers painting. Then there is the Internet which is such a complex confluence of so many other technologies. Then there is the mouse. After all that comes my uncertain talent to put a few shapes and colors together.

Pixlr is a free online tool that has become widely popular because it allows a great deal of freedom and ease of use. These three works are done on three consecutive days in about 15 to 20 minutes each.

The Pink River—Mayank Chhaya (Virtual on virtual)

The Ominous Picnic—Mayank Chhaya (Virtual on virtual)

P.S.: To be fair to myself, I think it is a little more than just the tools which have created these.

Cucumber, bananas and bad sex that did not happen

2011-12-08T05:21:00.001-08:00

Three well-hung cucumbers and one banana

If there was a “Bad Sex That Did Not Happen” literary prize, I think the following passage from my blog would have at least qualified for the consideration.

Writing about Pakistan proposing a ban on 1695 words or expressions it regards as profane and provocative, I said the following. Do remember that it contains some of the words sought to be banned in texting. They are in bold.

“It was 4.20 a.m. and the wee hour had blessed me with a boner. She lay next to me, deeper in sleep than ever before. Her lingerie had rolled up her right thigh teasingly revealing her yellow thong. Jesus Christ, I told myself, how can I resist her? With every passing second it was becoming harder (Get it? The pun? Harder) I woke her up and said, ‘Let’s have a quickie. I am told early morning sex is like a fairy tale.’ She was horrified by the suggestion and said, ‘You looser, you damn idiot, no sex now. You will get my athlete’s foot up your monkey crotch. Go to hell.’”

Now if only I could find a way to write a whole novel around this scene, then I could be on to something. I shall write to Literary Review of London which gives out the yearly bad sex prize to consider this new category.

Speaking of bad sex that did not happen, news comes out of Europe that an unnamed Islamic cleric has demanded that Muslim women stay far away from cucumbers and bananas lest their phallic shape turn them on. I am not sure whether this is a prank or not because why would a Muslim cleric choose to remain anonymous saying something that he is enjoined by his beliefs to say? Let’s accept for the sake argument that it is not a prank.

I had two knee jerk reactions to this news. One was that the cleric very likely finds the produce irresistible himself and the other that with men like him Muslim women are better off wooing bananas and cucumbers. In fact, women generally are better off wooing bananas and cucumbers because they come without men attached at the other end. On reflection, my reactions remain the same. There is so much more I can say about the benefits of cucumbers and bananas and all the other phallic shaped farm produce but that would be gratuitous. For one, they require no foreplay or Viagra.

The anonymous cleric says Muslim women desirous of eating these vegetables can do so by having a male member of the family first chop and slice them. It is a good thing that the cleric has no problem with women putting the chopped vegetables in their mouth.

Of course, the cleric does not quite know how to get around the ticklish problem of Muslim women being exposed to these vegetables in grocery stores and farmers’ markets. That, he says, is between the women and god.

Location, location, location

2011-12-07T05:09:00.001-08:00

An artist’s rendering of the Kepler 22b (Illustration: NASA)

The cardinal rule of the real estate business is “Location, location, location.” That is also the cardinal rule of scientists looking for more habitable planets. For a planet to be habitable, its location from its host star is considered rather important.

There is a habitable zone in any star system where a planet can maintain surface water. Of course, there is nothing to rule out life that may not depend on water, but as of now as astrobiologists look for earth-like planets in the habitable zone around a host star.

NASA’s Kepler mission has just announced the discovery of a planet 600 light years away that is resembles our own earth the closest we have found so far. Although it is 2.4 times the earth’s radius, the Kepler 22b orbits around its host star at a distance that could conceivably give it a life-friendly atmosphere. The planet completes its orbit in 290 days around a star that is similar to our own sun, only slightly smaller and cooler.

On hearing the news, I called my real estate agent to look for some property on the Kepler 22b. I am presuming that the planet is not yet overrun by a massive mortgage crisis of the kind we face here on the earth. In all likelihood the problems on the 22b are far more primal in nature because we do not know if it has been settled yet. We do not even know whether its composition is rocky, gaseous or liquid. That’s a good thing because I will require no paper work, no social security number, no credit report and no bank statements.

“You can all stand and watch, why not?”

2011-12-06T06:44:00.001-08:00

Self-absorption is the core fuel of movie stars. Unless you believe that the world is watching you at all times, you have no business being a movie star. I think Dev Anand had mastered that truth.

Although this little post may seem as if I am being sarcastic or that I am smirking at him, nothing could be further from the truth. (Or is it farther from the truth?) Those who inhabit the make-believe world of cinema have to create agreeable realities around them and then make them believable.

Anand was shooting his movie called “Love At Times Square” in the U.S. in 2002 and some of the plot unfolded in San Francisco. He called to say that he would like me to accompany him for the shoot. “We will talk about this, that and the other,” he said on the phone from New York.

This particular clip relates to the shoot around the Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. I decided to carry my camcorder and record the event for my own entertainment. Although the clip is short, there is something revealing about the way the mind of a movie star works, particularly someone like Dev Anand who seemed to genuinely believe that people just stand and watch whenever and wherever he showed up. While very frequently that was indeed true, in this particular case he was merely coopting a parallel reality into his own world.

If you cue to 10 seconds, you would hear Anand say, “You can all stand and watch, why not?” For some reason this little remark has become one of my favorite expressions because it is so deeply illustrative of one man’s self-belief.

Those of you who might be familiar with the Fisherman’s Wharf would know that it is one of San Francisco’s most popular tourist spots. On any given day, there are hundreds of visitors enjoying its easy picturesqueness. I can tell you as a firsthand witness that other than about a dozen members of Anand’s unit, no one was paying much attention to the shoot. People were just walking past unaware of the presence of an Indian movie icon in their midst. In any case, how would they know who he was?

However, for Anand, who was already 78 then and had lived the life of a giant movie star for over 50 years, it took no time to reflexively rearrange the reality and conclude that they were all there to watch him and the shoot. Hence the almost involuntary remark, “You can all stand and watch, why not?”

Here is a suggestion. Next time you go to a party try saying this line aloud. I guarantee you will feel good and might even make some people stand and watch. Why not?

Sidharth Bhatia tells the Navketan story

2011-12-05T05:04:00.001-08:00

Sidharth Bhatia

Sidharth Bhatia often wears an expression that suggests an impending witticism that he is struggling to stifle. More often than not he does. He is the sort who lets out about ten percent of what he is actually thinking. Once in a while he gives away what is coming by grinning to himself before whatever it is that is coming.

My professional destiny is somewhat intertwined with that of Sidharth’s for two reasons. One, as someone senior to me in the profession by several years, he assigned me my first ever feature story in 1983 when we were both working for the Free Press Journal. The story was actually an interview with a very talented, not mention very good looking, ghazal singer called Vatsala Mehra. The other reason was more consequential because he actually led me to fill the slot as the Associated Press (AP) correspondent in Bombay that he was giving up after a long time sometime in 1985.

Sidharth has been a dear friend ever since and among the hundreds of subjects he and I and another very dear journalist friend Shireesh Kanekar held forth on actor Dev Anand was a compelling one. Notwithstanding some of the sarcasm of those conversations, it was clear that all three of us had a very genuine fondness and respect for the colossus who died in London two days ago.

It is more than fitting that Sidharth has written a definitive book on Anand’s pioneering movie production house Navketan which is about to be launched.

From right, Dev Anand, poet and song writer Neeraj and Sidharth (Pic courtesy: The author)

“Dev Anand was really looking forward to launching the book. Although one is saddened that that is not to be, I think in a sense his passing gives the book even greater relevance because it is a way of celebrating the achievements of a remarkable man.",” Sidharth, a seasoned journalist and the author of ‘Cinema Modern-The Navketan Story’ (Collins, 180 pages, Rs. 1999), told me.

The book traces the history of what has perhaps been India’s most progressive movie production house, telling the fascinating story of three brothers at the dawn of the country’s independence successfully putting their spin on the birth of a new nation.

Founded in 1949 by Dev Anand and elder brother Chetan, Navketan notched up impressive successes in movies such as Baazi, Taxi Driver, Funtoosh, Kala Pani, Hum Dono, Jewel Thief, Tere Ghar ke Saamne, Hare Rama Hare Krishna, and the overarching Guide, apart from many others. Most of the Navketan themes were decidedly urban that were not preachy and ideologically weighed down by rural idealism that characterized some of their contemporaries.

The trio landed with their feet on the ground rather early in the Navketan story. Bhatia attributes that to the fact that "the Anands were smart, educated people. They had their share of struggle, but they had a wider, fresher worldview.

"Chetan Anand had studied for the ICS (the elite Indian Civil Service), the brothers had both gone to the prestigious Government College in Lahore. They mixed with a very smart, intellectual lot. So they saw how things in the industry were changing and moved quickly."

Bhatia explains the predominance of urban themes in Navketan movies saying: "It was their background and their sensibility...Their father was a great believer in British educational experiences. They mixed in Lahore with the smart young set. The Anands and their friends were heavily influenced by Hollywood. They thought urban, not rural."

Navketan seemed to create a genre that was free from a colonised mindset.
What separated Navketan movies from the other comparable production houses was that it stayed away from what Bhatia calls the "national project", which involved the village in some form or the other.

"India was rural dominated and Gandhiji had spoken about India being a land of villages. So this preoccupation was natural. The Anands looked at the world differently," he says. That difference manifests itself in the way their movies tackled urban themes; but Bhatia disagrees that they conveyed a sense of settled urbanity.

"In fact, their sense was of unsettled life in the city - poor migrants, people eking out a living at the margins, the underbelly. Hollywood was experimenting with film noir. I call the Anands' early films Bombay Noir," he says.
One particularly remarkable feature of the Navketan films has to be its progressive treatment of female characters.

"The women in Navketan films were characters all their own. Even, and especially the 'vamps', were interesting and beguiling characters. Geeta Bali in 'Baazi', Sheila Ramani in 'Taxi Driver', Tanuja in 'Jewel Thief' -- all these were independent women confident of their sexuality.

"Rosy in 'Guide' is in a class of her own; she leaves her husband because he stifles her desire to dance and then leaves her lover because he cheats her. An unusual character never repeated in Hindi cinema. And this was a film made in 1965 India, remember. Even today a filmmaker would be worried about showing adultery."

Somewhere in the late 1970s and early 80s, Navketan began to lose its touch.
Bhatia explains the reason behind the decline thus: "I have explored that in some detail in the book. Fashions changed, audiences changed, Amitabh Bachchan happened and Dev Anand the star of Navketan got older. He wanted to direct, Vijay Anand wanted to act -they should have stuck to their strengths. And unfortunately, new blood wasn't brought in. It was inevitable that a decline would happen."

On his personal motivations behind writing the book, he says, "I felt Navketan was not taken seriously, at least not as much as some of those filmmakers who produced 'heavy' and 'serious' cinema.

"Dev Anand was seen as an entertainer and as a handsome young man, but his contribution, along with that of his brothers and their friends and colleagues, is enormous. This needed to be recorded, appreciated. Frankly, given the response I have got and the book is getting, I am pleasantly surprised that others are agreeing with that view."

The book is quietly efficient and solid in its pursuit of capturing the ins and outs of a movie production house at the center of the world’s quirkiest cinema industry. I unreservedly recommend it because it is eminently deserved. That he is a friend plays no part in my recommendation. And if it does, does it look like I care?

“Everybody is a buddy but then nobody is”—Dev Anand

2011-12-04T04:26:00.001-08:00

Dev Anand in ‘Jewel Thief’

I first met Dev Anand in 1984, when he was 61, which in Dev Anand years would be early 20s.

He wore a blue gabardine shirt and black corduroy trousers. A flaming orange scarf was wrapped around his neck. He stood in the doorway to his Navketan office in Khira Estate, Santa Cruz, with hands akimbo, mouth breaking into his signature toothless smile, and said, “You are young, Mayank.” For the record I was 23. It sounded as if he was relieved that I was young.

Before that first meeting I had spoken to him a couple of times on the phone, one of which was had such a refreshing Dev Anand whimsy attached to it. Sikh separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale had just been killed in Operation Blue Star and I was seeking reactions from prominent figures of Bombay. Dev Anand was one of them.

I called his residence Iris Park in Juhu. The first call was answered by an aide of his who said something which could mean any number of things in the context of a Hindi movie star except what it really means. The aide said, “Sahab, abhi bathroom mein hein aur ready ho rahen hein.” (He is in the bathroom and getting ready).

Since I was on a deadline, I called again five minutes later. This time another man answered with a distinctively stretched hello that sounded like “haloooo.” Perhaps half of India would have recognized that voice instantly. It was Dev Anand and my first ever conversation with him. I could hear some water flowing in the background. I told him who I was and explained the purpose of my call.

“Mayank, can I call you back in 15 minutes? I am in my shower,” he said and actually held the receiver close to the showerhead to prove that he was telling the truth. He told me to leave my number with his aide. That is another thing with movie stars. They generally do not return your calls. That’s just their way of saying that they would never call you back.

Some 20 minutes later I received a call from Dev Anand. He gave me a brief reaction and ended the call saying, “Let’s meet sometime.”

We met several times over the next quarter century or so, the last being on my last visit to Mumbai last year. There are so many stories to tell which I would do over the course of the next few days. For today, one particular bit from my first interview with him is instructive because it speaks so eloquently to his character.

We spent nearly two hours together in his rather charmingly unkempt office, but he did not sit down even for a moment. Barely third year into my career as a journalist, I considered it very becoming of me to ask insolent questions, one of which was, “Mr. Anand, what do you have more—talent or enthusiasm?”

The impudence of the question was not lost on someone who had already been an iconic movie star for close to four decades by the time I posed it. The only sign that this otherwise remarkably classy gentleman was discomfited by my effrontery was evident in the way he took two brisk rounds of his desk and said, “I am as talented as anybody else.”

It is entirely a measure of Mr. Anand’s character that he did not let my first encounter with him stand in the way of what turned out to be a long friendship.

The first interview also tried to dwell on themes that I thought other journalists, mostly specializing in Hindi movies (I was a general hard news reporter), were not at all curious about. Flamboyance was Dev Anand’s default temperament and I saw an opening there. Since by that time it was more a conversation than an interview I said something to this effect. “It would seem that you use your flamboyance as a shield to keep most of the world out. They are so taken in by your flamboyance and charisma that they do not bother to look beyond it.”

He had a fountain pen in his mouth as he looked at me and then through me. He then drummed his desk with the pen as if harmonizing what he was about to say and then said, “That is an unusual question and unusual theory. But I am not going to discuss that.”

Another question I remember distinctly was about his views on friendship. His reply, “Everybody is a buddy but then nobody is.”

P.S.: In 2001, as the founder-owner of a now defunct California based publishing house I almost commissioned Dev Anand to write his autobiography. We had even drawn up the basic contract but it did not work out because, in his words, “It is too early look back.” He was 78 then.

See, no clothes

2011-12-03T06:02:00.001-08:00

On a rainy Saturday morning, what could be better than gratuitously using this controversial cover of a men’s magazine to steam things up? This nude cover of Pakistani actress Veena Malik on the Indian edition of FHM is predictably causing an uproar in her country and glee in India.

Now that I have used up all the currently trending keywords in the first four lines, I can get on with the business of saying a thing or two about it. The magazine calls her “Pakistani W.M.D.” and presumably carries an interview with the outspoken actress. With the cover having ignited a firestorm (not really but I just wanted to use this expression here), the 33-year-old Malik is denying that she ever posed nude. She says the picture has been “morphed.”

FHM India’s editor Kabeer Sharma insists otherwise, saying that he has the video of the photo shoot as well as email correspondence with her to prove the picture’s authenticity.

Apart from everything else, many in Pakistan are incensed that Malik’s left arm bears a tattoo that says “ISI” as in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s intelligence agency reputed for being responsible for everything in Pakistan unless proven otherwise. Sharma told the BBC's Nosheen Abbas that the idea to have the tattoo was his but have it in bold letters was Malik’s.

Everything that can go right or wrong (depending on your vantage point) has in this cover. If you are in India, here is an outspoken (“Munhfut” is commonly used to describe her) glamorous Pakistani actress, who frequently sends mullahs into paroxysms of rage, posing nude for a men’s fashion magazine’s Indian edition with “ISI” emblazoned on her arm. It all comes together.

However, if you are a conservative Pakistani raised with oppressive moral certitudes of religion, then this an affront from any angle. A Pakistani woman dropping it all for an Indian magazine and mocking both the ISI and Islam.

For me this is a bogus controversy for now. I say for now because these things have a way of quickly getting out of hand and endangering someone’s life. As for the tattoo, I don’t think the ISI has ever looked so inviting. Rather than contesting it (which I don’t think it has done so far), the ISI should be happy that its letters have crept up the arm of a beautiful young actress. It is a great recruitment poster.

Malik says she is considering legal action against the magazine. I am not sure if that is such a good idea if the magazine has documentary evidence of the photo shoot. She is better off letting this slide by because soon enough, perhaps in the next hours, another controversy will preoccupy the forever restive minds of the fanatics.

It is somewhat ironic that the controversy comes at a time when Indians are lapping up the curvaceous charms of another actress, Vidya Balan in a movie called “The Dirty Picture”, supposed to have been inspired by the life of the South Indian sex symbol Silk Smitha.

P.S.: The last paragraph was solely aimed at adding some more keywords trending now.

Secular diplomacy powers Tibetans' global outreach

2011-12-02T03:36:00.001-08:00

Tibetan Prime Minister-in-exile Lobsang Sangay (Pic: www.kalontripafortibet.org/)

The following analysis is on the IANS wire worldwide today.

By Mayank Chhaya

The Dalai Lama's political successor and Tibetan prime minister-in-exile Lobsang Sangay has significantly stepped up his outreach as the Tibetan issue slides further into global amnesia.

A dozen self-immolations by desperate Tibetans since February, 2009, including 11 since March this year alone, has not done much to focus the world's attention divided as it is between a slew of global economic and geopolitical crises.

In recent days Sangay, who is the first exiled Tibetan elected leader to inherit formal political powers historically invested in the person of the Dalai Lama, has acquired a stronger public profile than any of his predecessors.

Since his election in April, Sangay is embarked on what appears to be a conscious strategy to reignite interest in the Tibetan cause in important capitals where the preoccupation has increasingly been the global economy. After a strong showing during his visit to Washington, Sangay went around European capitals with the overriding message that without a strong moral foundation China would find it impossible to be taken seriously as an emerging superpower. And a lot of that moral foundation will have to be built out of Tibet where it is facing serious challenges.

Sangay is aware that he has a tough job trying to get the West to pay more attention to what is going on inside Tibet at a time when the Chinese role in ensuring global economic stability has begun to rival that of the US. A potential Tibetan uprising is not something either America or Europe considers a major priority when they are facing internal unrest resulting from their own economic decline.

As Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy journal noted, "Earlier this year, the self-immolation of one Tunisian fruit vendor sparked a region-wide series of revolutions that upended autocrats around the Middle East. Meanwhile, no less than 10 Tibetan monks have set themselves on fire this year to protest Chinese repression in their homeland, but the international community has yet to take notice."

The Kalon Tripa, as the prime minister is referred to as in Tibetan, has been a low-key figure until recently because the office was mostly administrative and without any real political powers. In May this year that situation changed dramatically when for the first time in 369 years the Dalai Lama's political and administrative powers were formally transferred to the office of an elected Tibetan leader. In approving the amendments to the 1991 Charter of the Tibetans in Exile, the Dalai Lama made his "semi-retirement" more formal.

The transfer fulfilled a commitment the 76-year-old Tibetan leader made to himself and public decades ago to step back from exercising complete control over Tibetan affairs, such as it is with Tibet having been incorporated into China for more than 50 years. The approval of the amendments may not have any immediate consequence but is potentially important in the event of the 14th Dalai Lama's death. Now that those powers have been detached from his person and enshrined in an elected government, the transfer empowers the Tibetan administration to take a formal position on the future of Tibet.

Sangay, a 43-year-old Harvard educated legal scholar, seems to recognize the importance of reminding the world of what is going on inside Tibet. In an interview with the BBC, he said he would be "more active and forthright about the situation inside Tibet". To that end his visits to the US and Europe saw a defined presentation to the Western powers. During his address to the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee Nov 29, he was introduced as "Prime Minister of the Central Tibetan Administration" despite protests from the China's European Union (EU) mission.

Sangay's message to the EU was that it should not uncritically accept that China has emerged as an economic superpower. Citing India's economic model he told the EU Observer in an interview in Brussels, "As long as a process is democratic and based on rule of law, rather than top-down, there is more chance of its being fair and sustainable. Because of censorship, we do not see the damage (the Chinese government) is doing. We don't understand the ramifications of the economic and political decisions made by the leadership."

Separately, like the Dalai Lama, the prime minister-in-exile has also emphasized the moral deficit in China's quest to become a superpower. "China wants to be a superpower. It has money power, military power but no moral power. China ought to earn respect from respect from the international community. As long as the Chinese government continues its repressive policies and treats Tibet as the way they are doing they will never get the respect they should have," he has said.

For Europe, significantly weakened by its widespread economic crisis, China is the most promising potential source of investment and aid. In return Beijing wants Europe to recognize it as a full market economy. "Recognizing China as a full market economy is a way a friend recognizes a friend," Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said at the World Economic Forum summit recently.

With that as the backdrop and its debilitating debt crisis, it is anybody's guess whether Europe takes the moral route on the question of Tibet as suggested by Sangay or the more expedient economic route as dictated by the circumstances.

What is strikingly different about Sangay's emergence is that for the first time since the Dalai Lama came to India in exile in 1959, secular diplomacy is powering Tibet's international interactions. There is a perceptible difference in the optics of a young, western attired prime minister talking about Tibet and an ochre-robed monk doing the same. The irony is that Sangay's rise is a direct consequence of the same monk's decades-long effort to democratise political decision-making among the exiled Tibetans.

--Indo-Asian News Service

A very short rant about Arundhati Roy

2011-12-01T06:20:00.001-08:00

Arundhati Roy by Mayank Chhaya

Let me get this rider out of the way at the outset. (“At the outset” is such a pompous expression). I believe that Indian rights activist, essayist and writer Arundhati Roy is motivated by a genuine concern for the human condition. Her heart is in its right place, and by that I do not mean on the left anatomically.

That said, here is a question that has bugged me for a while. Why is it that everything that is written by and written about Roy is never less than a few thousand words? I am not even going to ask why publications, particularly Western publications, feel so compelled to interview her so regularly? The latest interview with Roy appears in The Guardian here. This particular piece is 2,452 words. (Yes, I counted them). The word length would qualify as brevity in Roy’s case.

I am aware that we live in an oppressive and cruel world which takes a bit more to change than the distilled wisecracks of the kind you see on this post. I am also very acutely conscious that unlike Roy I do absolutely nothing to help ameliorate the miserable condition that humanity finds itself in. (Ameliorate is a word that carries no conviction). I would be the first one tell you that my life has become one relentless selfish survival gig. Notwithstanding all these admissions, I still think we can do with shorter pieces by and about Roy.

Either by design or default or both, Roy has emerged as the voice of the globally oppressed. Wherever there is a seemingly righteous uprising, she is there to articulate its meaning. Let’s call her an interpreter of malcontents. Unlike a lot of people who dislike her viscerally, I think she is onto something worthwhile; but there is something in the way she approaches life that makes it so unlivable. The emotional density of what she has to say is too much for me personally, even though a lot of what she says is not all that wrong.

It would be ironic if I stretched this post into a few thousands words. So let me end it by saying that Roy is alright in dribbles. If you do not watch out, she will inundate you verbally.

Thinking of “My Fair Lady”

2011-11-30T05:16:00.001-08:00

The 1964 classic “My Fair Lady” has been playing in my mind since yesterday. In particular, I was reminiscing about its lovingly couched sexism and chauvinism.
When I first saw it in the late 1970s, my immediate reaction was to want to see it again immediately. In that, it was quite similar to “The King and I” which too I watched again instantly. Both great films, notwithstanding some of their attitudes.
For me, it was akin to eating a particularly delicious vada pav because I always go for a second immediately after that. It is as if I am trying confirm that my first response was correct and genuine.
For someone who does not particularly like musicals, this was a very unusual reaction. I have since understood why I liked “My Fair Lady” and “The King and I” so much. It is the delightful self-absorption of the protagonists—Professor Henry Higgins (a superb Rex Harrison) and King Mongkut of Siam (a superb Yul Brynner). For the purposes of today’s post I shall focus only on “My Fair Lady” and one particular bit from the movie.
I doubt if there is a more compelling example of male chauvinism and sexism having been made so charming and attractive and, dare I say, something to aspire to than this song written by the legendary Alan Jay Lerner. It was obvious that Lerner wanted to know more about women and understand what women want because he married eight times. So some of what he says through the medium of Professor Higgins has to have carried personal insights.
In my extended family there were many men who were unapologetically male chauvinists who practiced sexism as a matter of their birth right. Perhaps that explains why Higgins felt so familiar.
“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” wonders/asks/ponders Higgins as if it is the most obvious thing women should be. The way Harrison’s intones that question it sounds like merely posing it is sufficient to settle the age-old gender conflict. In the scene Harrison keeps going in and coming out of his room. He goes in only so that he can come out with progressively harsh indictment of the female gender. For a moment I thought that neatly stacked inside the bedroom were his borderline misogynies, a new batch of which he brings out every time he emerges from it.
“Men are so honest, So thoroughly square, Eternally noble, Historically fair” is what Higgins thinks of men.
And women? Well, “Women are irrational, that’s all there is to that. Their heads are full of cotton, hay and rags. They are nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating hags.”
Further down the song he says:
“Why is thinking something women never do?
And why is logic never even tried?
Straightening up their hair is all they ever do.
Why don't they straighten up the mess that's inside?
The song goes on in that vein, including at one point Higgins asking of his housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce (Mona Washbourne), as he comes down the staircase. “Mrs. Pearce, you are a woman,” Harrison says; and the expression on his face is ever so subtle in its realization that there is indeed a woman in the house and he could always ask her the question that has been bothering him, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
The most troubling aspect of this song is that despite its content it remains so eminently watchable. I would attribute that almost entirely to Harrison’s performance and to a somewhat lesser extent to Colonel Hugh Pickering (the very Brrritish Wilfrid Hyde-White). For instance, the scene where Pickering calls a friend at the Home Office and says,"Whitehall, seven two double four please”. There is such grandness and expansiveness in that otherwise mundane request that he could well be calling on the Viceroy of India to resign. No one does grandiosity better than the English.
On an unrelated note, I have always found the dynamic between Higgins and Pickering very similar to that between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. There is something about quirky English gentlemen and their perfect foils that is so cinematic. Someday I might write a but more about this equation.
P.S.: This post is so random but then what’s new?

Wolf Blitzer trying to prematurely tease information out of Herman Cain

2011-11-29T07:08:00.001-08:00

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, left, and Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain (TV grab from cnn.com)

In keeping with the glorious tradition of overanalyzing everything on this blog, let me make a few comments on the interview that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer had yesterday with Herman Cain even as an Atlanta businesswoman was preparing to claim a 13-year-long relationship with the Republican president candidate.

I was struck by the rather Freudian usage of the words such as “teasing” and “premature” not to mention that the woman was claiming a 13-year-long relationship whose definitions Cain disagreed with.

Wolf, “Was this an affair?”

“No,” said Cain.

“There was no sex,” persisted Wolf.

“No,” said Cain.

That opened the door for Blitzer, whom Cain had mistakenly called Blitz only a few days earlier during a CNN TV debate.

So Blitz persisted, “None?”. I almost envisioned Wolf nudge-nudging, wink-winking, with a thought balloon carrying the words, “ No sex at all? Really?! Why oh why?”.

What is “None” supposed to mean in this context? I can guess but what would be the point of that?

Then it was pointed out by Blitzer how the Atlanta TV station that broke the story had been “teasing for the past hour or so.” So an hour-long tease was already underway even as Cain was talking to Blitzer.

Then came the suggestion from Blitzer, “Without giving us her name tell us what was she like? The nature of the friendship.” What was she like?? As in what, Wolf?

Cain, “No, not gonna to do it, Wolf. That would be premature.”

Wolf, “Did you work with her?”

Cain, “No, that would be premature.”

Can you figure out the meaning of premature in these two contexts? Is Cain saying it would be premature to say what she was like? Or is he saying that it is premature for him to say what she was like before she said what their relationship was like?

And what about the second premature? Is Cain saying that it would be premature to say that she worked with him? Perhaps he is saying everything that happens with him these days is premature articulation.

More to this blog than Savita Bhabhi’s boobs

2011-11-28T05:49:00.001-08:00

While an inordinately large number of web searchers still end up on my blog looking for “Savita Bhabhi’s boobs”, once in a while I do get rather intriguing visits. Yesterday, I was struck by someone from Many Farms, Arizona in the US looking for “Ilyas kashmiri whereabouts.” (See reader number 2)

For those of you who may not keep track of such things, Ilyas Kashmiri was an Al Qaeda/Harkat ul Jihad al Islami leader who was reportedly killed for the second time on June 3 this year during a drone strike on an orchard in South Waziristan. The same Kashmiri was also reportedly killed in September, 2009 in a drone strike. It seems he was indeed killed the second time around.

Kashmiri has figured in this blog several times because he was also one of the seven names in the second superseding indictment in Chicago that charged them with involvement both the 2008 Mumbai case as well as the abortive attack on the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten which published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed offensive to Muslims in September, 2005.

There is nothing particularly odd about someone from Many Farms being interested in finding out the whereabouts of Kashmiri. I am writing about it because this morning I did not feel like writing much else and thought this would be a good space filler. So there.

In a sense it is gratifying to know that people may be checking out my blog for something more than just the physical endowments of a fictional Indian porn character.

Still promoting ‘Man Monk Mystic’

2011-11-27T04:59:00.001-08:00

Andaaz host Sarika Batra (left) and Mayank Chhaya

http://andaaztv.com/season-two-online/

Sony Entertainment Television’s popular show ‘Andaaz’ featured my interview the other day. The subject was my book “Dalai Lama: Man Monk Mystic”. You may cue it to the 8th minute to watch it if you go to the original link above. Watching it is entirely voluntary.

Far be it for me to review my own interview in my own blog but I suppose it is not far enough. The interview does nothing to challenge my longstanding observation that I sound far too earnest. The timber of my voice has that unnecessary urgency that irritates me.

Also, I must crane my neck a bit more because it looks as if there is nothing between my shoulders and one and a half chins.

I have smoker’s teeth without ever having smoked. Evidently, the Dalai Lama book has not earned me enough to pay a visit or two or three to get my teeth bleached.

What I like the best about this video are my clothes. They have the style of a journalist who was on the verge of making some good money but was pulled back by circumstances at the last moment.

All that said, what I am saying is quite passable.

(I have had to optimize the size of the video in order to upload it here. Hence the resolution has suffered.)

A few thoughts about third anniversary of Mumbai attacks

2011-11-26T05:18:00.001-08:00

As a journalist who cut his professional teeth in Bombay in 1981 I felt terrible being peripheral to the terrorist siege and attacks of November 26, 2008, on the city. Watching the mayhem from the suburban comforts of Naperville in Midwestern America felt strangely irresponsible.

Things changed dramatically less than a year later when David Coleman Headley, one of the main plotters behind the attacks, was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare international airport here and plead guilty by federal investigators in return for a deal that took the death penalty as well as his extradition to India off the table. He was a resident of Chicago in as much as someone like him can be a resident of any place. It is an odd thing to say but when the arrest happened followed by the disclosures of how deeply Headley was involved in the planning of the attacks, I felt a sense of having been reinstated to the story.

A journalist has a reflexive need to be part of any major story and if the story happens to be so close to one’s area of interest as the Mumbai attacks were, then that need becomes almost unmanageable. Come to think of it, I have been on the Chicago end of the Mumbai story ever since October 9, 2009, arrest of Headley.

One got to see Headley firsthand during his testimony against his childhood friend and co-accused Tahawwur Hussain Rana in May, this year. I wrote about my impressions of the man on May 25 and they bear repeating here today.

“Key Mumbai terror plotter David Coleman Headley talks about death and destruction with the aloof air of a laboratory technician mixing various chemicals to see which combination would be most combustible.

If there was ever a plan to showcase his remorse about Mumbai, his two days of testimony in the federal court of Judge Harry D. Leinenweber in Chicago, it is going in the opposite direction. Here is a man who says the Mumbai attack evened scores for the bombing of his school in December, 1971 during the India-Pakistan war, that led to the creation of Bangladesh. The man sure holds long grudges.

One had heard about Headley’s cool and measured composure and one is getting to witness it now. As Assistant US Attorney Daniel Collins carefully walks him through all major and minor details of the Mumbai plot, Headley responds as if he has dropped by for a casual chat. His replies are precise, almost well-rehearsed. He remembers details of who said what years ago, making me wonder whether he is improvising it. He is under oath and improvisation is not an option. He cannot possibly wing it. And yet I find it hard to conceive of someone who can remember minute details about his dozens of meetings with the masterminds of the Mumbai attacks.

The man is clearly good at his chosen profession. That chosen profession may not be all that respectable but he gave his absolute best. Yesterday, for instance, while talking about his reconnaissance of various potential sites to strike, he spoke of Mumbai’s Siddhi Vinayak Temple. He visited the temple to shoot some surveillance video. While he was there it struck him that it would be a great idea to get some red and yellow threads that the faithful tie around their wrists. He carried those threads, described in the court with some liberty as bracelets, back to Pakistan and gave it to Sajid Mir, the Lashkar-e-Taiba operative who oversaw the training of the ten Mumbai attackers. They indeed wore those threads in order to blend in.”

In a separate news dispatch for the IANS wire on May 24, I found this to be particularly compelling:

“Headley's attorney John Theis sat in the front row as his client answered questions in somewhat muffled tones even while disclosing remarkable details.

At one point as he discussed the kind of conversations he had had with his Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) handler Sajid Mir, Headley said he was even told how to pray in order to avoid "mihrab", the dark spot that devout Muslim men have on their foreheads because of the regular friction with the floor while praying.
The significance of this particular detail being that since Headley was to travel to Mumbai as a white American on a US passport, a mark like that on his forehead may arouse suspicion. As a result, he was advised to pray without touching his forehead to the ground.

Another seemingly minor but crucial detail that came to light during his four-hour-long testimony concerned the train arrival and departure announcements at Mumbai's Victoria Terminus or Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

Headley told the court that he pointed out to both Sajid Mir and Major Iqbal, a shadowy figure reportedly belonging to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), that the announcements were made in English and Marathi. If the attackers did not know English, they could run into difficulty trying to find out when trains were arriving.”

Having left Mumbai a long time ago I am not qualified to comment on whether the city’s authorities have learnt any lessons from the attacks. From what I read in the Indian media, it does not appear to be the case. When you consider the level of planning that terrorists do, I am not sure if the law enforcement agencies are able to anticipate all the scenarios with equal meticulousness.