South Asia Daily

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s strikingly effusive pronouncements in Pakistan

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has made some strikingly effusive pronouncements about his country’s enduring relationship with Pakistan. The official Chinese news agency Xinhua has quoted Li as saying, "China and Pakistan are all-weather strategic partners.”

"It is the consistent policy of the Chinese government to develop a friendly relationship with Pakistan. The Chinese side would firmly consolidate and develop China-Pakistan relations no matter how the international and regional situation changes," the premier has been quoted as saying.

He went to Pakistan after completing his first three-day state visit to India. Although the Indian visit was appropriately polite and carefully optimistic, Li seemed to feel much at home in Pakistan, a sort of place where he can loosen his tie, take off his shoes and rest his feet on the coffee table.

The assertion that the bilateral relations would be strengthened even further “no matter how the international and regional situation changes” sounds a bit excessive but sums up their old friendship. As the U.S. winds down its military presence in Afghanistan no one should be surprised if China and Pakistan make a joint play for influence over that country. Not that China needs Pakistan in order to make its presence felt in Afghanistan but it always helps if the latter is part of the equation.

The rich Afghan minerals resource is a major draw for China which is already involved in developing the world’s second largest copper mine in Aynak, some 20 miles from Kabul. China is also involved in exploring the oil and gas-rich Amu Darya basin.

One of the issues that Beijing is concerned about while expanding its base in Afghanistan is security for its various projects. It is from this angle that Beijing needs Pakistan to be firmly on its side. As if to assure Islamabad a good return on its strategic alliance, Li also added that China would always support Pakistan as it preserves its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Considering that any perceived threat to Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity could possibly emanate only from India, this was a less than subtle message to Delhi.

Perhaps the most amusing observation made by the Chinese premier came in a written statement where he said that Pakistan has made important contributions to peace, stability and development in the region and around the world. I am not sure even the Pakistanis themselves would fully believe that claim.

In keeping with the very special nature of the bilateral friendship, Li's plane was escorted by six Pakistani Air Force fighter jets when it entered the country's airspace.

Some observations about writing in multiple languages

I had wondered for a long time whether I can think in multiple languages simultaneously without one enjoying primacy over the other. The intuitive wisdom is that one thinks in a particular language, mostly in one mother’s tongue, and then does instant translation/transliteration into the language of the profession one is engaged in.

However, my role as the America columnist for ‘Gaon Connection’, India’s first rural newspaper of its kind, over the past 20 weeks or so has revealed that one can think in more than one language simultaneously. Not just simultaneously but very differently as well. Ever since I began my career as a journalist English became the default language. I think I even started farting in English in 1981. (Excuse the gratuitously malodorous comment.) Gujarati, my mother tongue and Hindi/Urdu, the two languages I am partial towards, seemed to have become the three pillars propping up the English edifice. Of course, my ghazals in Urdu and haikus in Gujarati invariably take birth in those two respective languages without English playing any role in it.

Writing a weekly column called ‘America Diary’ for Gaon Connection has effectively proved to me that it is possible to think and create in multiple languages at once. I am not sure if this was even some great unresolved question that linguists had grappled with the world over for decades. Perhaps this was known to everyone except me. I did genuinely think that there is the primary/default language and then there are additions; that one conceives in that default language and then translates. Evidently not, if my personal experience is any guide.

I have to thank Gaon Connection’s founder Neelesh Misra for presenting me the weekly column to be written in Hindi as a fait accompli. It has been easier than I suspected but I am often restricted by my limited vocabulary in Hindi. I am mostly able to cleverly conceal the fact that I know much less Hindi than what my column might suggest. I do write another column for fellow journalist and friend Pramod Pagedar-helmed Gujarati magazine ‘Monitor.’ So far I have written it in English but I soon plan to start writing it in Gujarati. I apprehend that writing in Gujarati may turn out to be particularly hard because my expression ought to have acquired a certain mustiness because of long disuse.

Perhaps the biggest problem while writing in any language is the likelihood that one may not sound authentic. I mostly feel that my writing never quite rises above the quality of Ramen noodles or Maggi noodles. It may be instantly accessible but falls woefully short on literary excellence. In what I thought was a fairly compelling description I had once described this blog thus: “Think of what you get here as an assortment of bhajias or pakodas of the kind Indian restaurants in the US describe on their menus as fritters made with gram flour. They may be tasty while you eat them but cause a lot of bile afterwards. And they have no nutritional value whatsoever.” I now serve bile in multiple languages.

On what Yahoo!’s likely acquisition of tumblr means to me personally

Reading about Yahoo’s acquisition of tumblr at least creates some notional hope in my mind that I may have contributed to the blogging site’s $1.1 billion cash price tag. After all, I have so far written 958 posts on the tumblr edition my blog. If I could quantify my share from $1.1 billion, I would write to David Karp to send me at least a quarter, as in 25 cents.

As someone who has created content for over three decades, I find it extraordinary that I too am a sucker for blogging sites and social networking sites such as Facebook by offering them content absolutely free. I can understand that those who do not write for a living indulge themselves by expressing half-baked opinions about everything under the sun. (Never mind the paradox of opinions not getting fully baked under the sun.)

There is no excuse for a professional like me to get lured into the same trap. And yet, here I am, morning after morning for close to five years* without missing a day, writing this blog for zero remuneration. The only thing that explains this idiocy is that I treat my blog as an appetizer that sets me up for my other writing that does actually pay. There is, of course, an element of exhibitionism that propels such steadfast commitment to daily blogging.

Coming back to the acquisition, it is obvious what motivated Yahoo! to reportedly put down $1.1 billion in front of Karp and his investors. Yahoo! wants to reclaim some of its online primacy and sees in tumblr a reservoir of the demographics that might help the company. According to Quantcast, which measures websites in terms of their user base, Tumblr had 216.9 million global users. It is that user base that Yahoo! covets.

News reports suggest that tumblr’s ad revenues in 2012 were $13 million and the company had hope to generate $100 million in ad revenues this year. That target may have been very hard to achieve. Mercifully for tumblr, the Yahoo deal is on the verge of being announced. By acquiring tumblr’s 217 million global users, Yahoo! hopes to buy what it reasons is a commercially exploitable demographic resource.

I like to think I have the craftiness to use the platform provided by the various blogging sites to my advantage. Of course, I have no empirical evidence to support that claim. The only advantage, if one can call it that, is that blogging keeps you alive/current/relevant on the net. Perhaps as a professional journalist that visibility has an eventual commercial consequence. The idea is that those who might like to commission me as a ghost writer or simply to offer me an occasional assignment may choose to go through my writings on these blogs and feel sufficiently aroused to try and consummate the relationship. Excuse the sexual undertones but it is just an online trick to draw more traffic.

Speaking of online traffic, I have just signed up with Quantcast to quantify traffic to my various sites. One of the cool tools that Quantcast offers is my very own, “private” real-time tracker that lets me view who is coming to my site. I have monitored it for about 30 minutes at the time of writing this post. The result? Not a soul has shown up. It is a desolate place so far where an unsuspecting occasional surfer might crash.

*Including today, I have written 1806 posts on my Typepad blog. That makes it about five years.

This and that about the speed of light

A random artwork of mine

The latest finding that the speed of light may not be constant has to be accurate because the news of the finding has reached me 20 days after first reported. Whatever impedance that existed between the news first getting reported on April 28 and it reaching me this morning can be compared to what light traveling incomprehensible distances through space must encounter.

Normally, I am very up to femtosecond on such matters. (A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second.) In this particular case, if I were to employ femtosecond as the basic unit of measurement, I am so outdated that it is pointless even calculating by how much. So instead, I am going to pretend that the finding, from my vantage point, is very fresh because they just reached me.

For some inexplicable reason I woke up this morning thinking about the speed of light and what it might mean to travel faster than that. One of the mindfuck consequences of traveling faster than light is that effect happens before cause has had a chance to come into being. While you wrap your mind around that, I must move on because I am going faster than light this morning.

Three scientists, Marcel Urban of the Université du Paris-Sud and Gerd Leuchs and Luis Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light in Erlangen, Germany, have separately published findings that suggest that light seems to change its speed depending on how and what it interacts with as it goes around. The basic contention, as I understand, is that there are virtual particles that constantly swing between existence and non-existence, interact with radiation. Light is made of photons which interact with these charged virtual particles causing impedance. That impedance changes the speed of light or that’s what I understand. I am pretty sure that it is not as neat as I make it appear here. But then we are talking virtual particles going in and out of existence at will. At that level of physics or reality, it makes zero sense to apply our imperfect logic based on very ordinary, everyday experiences.

The speed of light as popularly understood always refers to its speed in a vacuum where there is no impedance whatsoever. Since space is supposed to have virtual particles it cannot be regarded as a vacuum and hence the speed of light can conceivably vary. The finding is important because all our physics is based on the assumption that the speed of light is constant. When you couple this finding with the one in September, 2011, that said that neutrinos, the electrically neutral subatomic particles, do indeed travel faster than light at 299,798,454 meters a second, and you understand why we have a problem.

I had written this soon after that finding was announced:

“Scientists at the Gran Sasso, one of the world’s largest physics laboratories, have announced that neutrinos travel 5996 meters a second faster. That is 19,671.916 feet or 3.72574166 miles. That figure may not seem like a lot in and of itself but when you consider the absurdly long distances in the universe this would make an absurdly big difference.

The scientists conducted the experiment to measure the speed of neutrinos by sending them from the European particle physics lab called CERN to the Gran Sasso on a 730 milometer underground journey repeatedly for three years. Some 15,000 neutrinos were used in the experiment but it is not known how many were harmed. (I had to slip that silly little crack in).

This finding is so enormously big that scientists around the world are probably looking askance at its implications, which are that everything that we know to be reality as determined by the Einsteinian physics could stand fundamentally disrupted.”

It is beginning to seem that seen from the standpoints of these two unrelated findings, coming two years apart, light appears to lose some of its aura. That light is the ultimate cool fact of the universe which cannot be trifled with at all may be losing some shine. If neutrinos can travel faster than light and virtual particles can impede light so as to change its speed, then what are we left with really?

If I were to apply the principle that effect may preempt cause to me personally, what it might mean is that I came into being without being conceived by my parents. If this does not make me divine, then what does? Just asking.

An opportunity for Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to renew his India acquaintance

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang  with members of an Indian youth delegation and Chinese youth representatives in Beijing on May 15, 2013.  (Pic: Xinhua/Zhang Duo)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has chosen India to be his first trip abroad after taking over the reins in Beijing in March. The state visit will offer Li an opportunity to renew his acquaintance with a country he first visited 27 years ago.

He told an Indian youth delegation on visit to Beijing that he chose India to be the first country to visit as prime minister “not just because India is an important neighbor and one of the populous countries of the world but also because of the seeds of friendship sown during my own youth.” The visit, he said, left him with fond memories and a “lasting impact.”

He also said, "The linkage of the Chinese and Indian civilizations and their markets, the harmonious coexistence of the two countries, their mutual respect for each other's concerns and the proper management of their differences will bring tangible benefits to people in both countries and provide strong impetus for development and prosperity in Asia and the world."

Although 30, the age when he first came to India, is stretching the definition of youth a bit, the important thing is that Li was in the country just as it had begun to unencumber its economy from its socialistic shackles under Rajiv Gandhi. Admittedly, state visits are carefully choreographed and the visitor of Li’s consequence is basically rolled through the country in a sanitized bubble. So he may not be able to personally contrast what he saw in 1986 with how things are now. In any case, he comes from a place where the benchmarks of the sheer physical transformation of an country engendered by breakneck economic liberalization are legendarily high. India, in comparison, may still look like a poor cousin to him.

The visit, starting tomorrow, comes in the shadow of the recent incursions by Chinese troops inside what India claims to be its territory in Ladakh. Although both sides have since retreated to their original positions to scale down tensions, it is instructive to remember that when it comes to border disputes between India and China things are always on low ferment between the two giant neighbors. It is as much up to Li as it is up to India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to not let the visit be consumed by the question of incursions.

It is in this context that Li’s India experience in his “youth” could be useful. His view of at the bilateral relations is likely to be shaped by that. It would be futile for New Delhi to try and impress its eminent guest with the economic transformation since 1986 because in that period his country has created dramatic new standards of such transformation.

Perhaps the right approach would be to familiarize him with India’s unquestionable success in maintaining the general robustness of its democracy in the face of truly formidable odds. Granted that this is a tricky approach. How do you broach the broad subject of democracy during the limited time that the two leaders will spend together? Their agenda will be dominated by much more specific issues such as border tensions or trade imbalance of over $28 billion in China’s favor.Bilateral trade was $66 billion last year as China became India's second-largest trading partner.

India is expected to to press China for greater market access in pharmaceuticals and information technology sectors. It is perhaps from this standpoint that Li will visit the Mumbai headquarters of the Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS), which is India’s largest exporter of software services in terms of sale.

Like his counterpart Singh, Li is also a PhD in economics and would find himself at home discussing issues surrounding economic cooperation. However, unlike Singh, a career bureaucrat and administrator, Li also has a strong grounding in political life.

Such state visits are generally bereft of spontaneous moves and pronouncements because so much of ground has already been laid in weeks and months before. There is not much opportunity to deviate from the mutually agreed script. Notwithstanding that, when Li and Singh meet they can still choose to stray a bit from their chalk line and do something spontaneous. As much as no single visit can define bilateral relations between these two countries, Li’s has some significance because it his first as the premier. It always helps that the visitor has some lasting impressions of India from the time he was not yet in the swirl of things.

3D glasses are stupid, so are subtitles

As movie viewing experience goes, there is nothing more annoying than subtitles and 3D glasses. Either one of them is a major turnoff for me. I don’t know if there are subtitled 3D movies. Those would be an unmitigated disaster.

I am sure there is a way to perfect the art of speed-reading subtitles without missing out much on the visuals. I am yet to master that art. Subtitles make me feel as if someone is interpreting the film for me, very slowly and inarticulately. Not that it is much of an improvement but I would rather see a dubbed movie than a subtitled one. One can learn to disregard that more often than not the dubbed language may not phonetically match with the original language of the film; but that is still way less visually jarring than subtitles.

As for 3D glasses, I think they are just plain stupid. For those of us who already wear glasses they are even more so. I reject 3D on the grounds of aesthetics as well as convenience. Until the day 3D makers create special designer counters outside the cinema hall and offer a wide variety designs and sizes to choose from, I am not using 3D glasses. They still look like the kind of free sunglasses which are given to cataract patients in poor countries. It is amazing how 3D glasses have a way making almost every wearer look ridiculous. I guarantee that even Bradley Cooper, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and George Clooney can’t rock 3D glasses. I am aware that there are designer 3D glasses already in the market. But like all things designer, they are quite expensively priced. They range from $30 to $100. Unless 3D movies become the norm, which I doubt very much, why would anyone spend so much on watching an occasional 3D movie? 

That brings me to one of my favorite pastimes—speculating about the emergence of a new human species. I have written about the need for a new human species that is not necessarily endowed with superhuman qualities but one which has some significant evolutionary improvements. For one, shouldn’t the human brain by now be able to comprehend and speak every single language on the planet? For another, why can’t we have the ability to not sweat at all? Or for that matter, why can’t we altogether eliminate the need to discharge any waste from our bodies? While we are at it, why not have a total control on how much your body hair grows and when, if at all? Also, could we have a human species that can change its body fragrance on demand? And how about not making those horrid crunchy, smacking sound while eating? On a minor note, why can’t our eyes automatically switch to 3D without having to put on those silly glasses?

This should be enough for now.

An unplanned experiment on my brain’s visual retention

Gold Mountains, Mayank Chhaya

White Mountains, Mayank Chhaya

The paintings above have turned out to be an unplanned experiment about how the brain retains visuals, visual references, scale, perspective and so on.

I painted these two two weeks apart. It is quite striking how the basic mountain range remains fairly similar even though the mood of the colors is so very different. Some might argue that the red one is representative of a darker, more pessimistic mind than the blue and white one, which seems to have a more hopeful, optimistic mood.

I am not sure if either one represents any particular mood because they were not prompted by anything. The mountains just emerged while trying to perfect my strokes. Since one is still not clear what talent, if any, one has when it comes to drawing or painting, I keep painting.

After finishing ‘White Mountains’ this morning, it struck me that the work looked quite similar to ‘Gold Mountains’ I had done earlier. In both cases, I did not set out wanting to draw mountains at all. However, once the strokes begin to create some identifiable shapes and contours, it struck me that I was essentially painting the same mountains but in a different color combination.

To confirm my suspicion I superimposed ‘White Mountains’ on ‘Gold Mountains’ and voilà, they fit so well! There ought to be a pretty staid explanation for this, although I would like to see in it some grand mystery. There was a considerable gap that separated the two paintings during which many other annoyances and joys of life unfolded. There were also half a dozen other paintings that I finished, apart from thousands of words of generally useless writings such as this post, newspaper columns and book chapters. And yet the brain somehow retained that image and recreated it in a manner that the two could fused almost seamlessly.

So, so like that.

Madhuri Dixit turns 46; she can turn what she wants

Madhuri Dixit has turned 46 today. She can turn whatever she pleases. She is Madhuri Dixit. 

After finishing my post this morning about the current outrage in America over the disclosures that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) selectively targeted rightwing political groups, I realized that it is happens to be her birthday. Hence I have chosen to forsake that post for this one. As you can see from the video above there is no contest between Madhuri Dixit’s midriff and the IRS’s gargantuan girth. I will publish the IRS post tomorrow.

For those of you who may not know about Madhuri Dixit, she was, until 15 or so years ago, India’s biggest female movie star. Blessed with a smile that could electrify a small country, she had that effortless charisma riding her fetching good looks. She retains much of her allure, although age is not a subtle experience for anyone. In many ways she embodied the unapologetic spirit of Hindi cinema as the street quality song above represents.

Being a Hindi cinema song, everything was carefully orchestrated here, including the men throwing their limbs around under her spell. However, it was not inconceivable that Dixit could have had a similar effect in real life as well. By no definition, does this song from a 1995 movie called ‘Raja’ encapsulate Dixit’s career. However, it does a pretty good job of contextualizing her appeal on the streets of India then.

My partiality towards Dixit is fairly well known among my friends even though I have liked many other women in cinema equally. With that being the case, I see myself as that seemingly inebriated man in a blue T-shirt and khaki shorts flailing about as one of the chorus dancers (See the shaky picture below). You can see him at cue 1.06-1.12. There is rhythm to that man once you get past insultingly ill-fitting attire he had been given to wear for the song.

I have always been fascinated by such marginal men and women of Hindi cinema, performing in extreme corners of the frame with utter conviction to their stupid little jobs. That is an admirable quality. They say there are no small roles, only small actors. I beg to disagree. There are small inconsequential roles of the kind this guy had but I like it.

I digress. Coming back to Madhuri Dixit, apart from being so obviously talented she had that indefinable something that sets stars apart from people like me or the guy in the blue T-shirt and khaki shorts. After Waheeda Rehman, the iconic beauty of Indian cinema of the 1950s-1970s, Dixit was regarded as the most graceful dancer of Hindi cinema. Notwithstanding the studiedly street-level gyrations of this particular song, Dixit manages to rescue it from vulgarity.

I have never interviewed her but my claim to petty fame was that I once walked out of an appointment with her because she got delayed by a couple of hours in the late 1980s. I remember subjecting her befuddled mother to a bombastic harangue on the etiquette of appointments and also, for good measure, pointing out that I was not a “mere film journalist” but a hard news reporter. Her mother’s response was an expression of gentle incomprehension.

Dixit continues to get odd assignments but it is clear that the primacy that she enjoyed is long over. She still commands the kind attention that many of her younger peers would find enviable.

I am not given to heralding people’s birthdays but this one has offered an excuse to write about a woman who knows that men still go weak in their knees thinking about her. My weak knees these days are, of course, more on account of an early onset of arthritis inherited from my mother than Madhuri.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s 11th Hour auction fetches $33 M

Bharti Kher’s ‘The Skin Speaks A Language Not Its Own’, Bindis on fibreglass 55 7/8 x 180 x 76¾ in. (142 x 456.2 x 195 cm.)

Leonard DiCaprio’s ‘11th Hour’ auction at Christie’s in New York yesterday netted $33,327,000 (Over $33.3 million). The auction, jointly hosted by Christie’s and the Leonard DiCaprio Foundation, featured two artists of Indian origin. Both Bharti Kher and Anish Kapoor sold their works.

Kher’s fiberglass elephant with bindis all over its body was sold for an impressive $1,785,000, while Kapoor’s fiberglass bowl was sold for $735,000.

 

Anish Kapoor’s Untitled fibreglass and paint 35¼ x 35¼ x 19½ in. (90 x 90 x 50 cm.)

The DiCaprio’s foundation has been focused on wildlife and environment and many of these pieces under the auctioneer’s hammer captured that theme. After going through the photographs of each of the 33 pieces, it is my considered opinion that Kher’s elephant was easily the best work, although it did not fetch the best price. The highest price went to Mark Grotjahn’s oil on cardboard mounted on canvas.(See below). It sold for $6,510,000.

For whatever my opinion is worth, I was left underwhelmed by most of the works. Speaking of being underwhelmed, DiCaprio’s portrait by Elizabeth Peyton fetched $1,050,000. The portrait is evocative but I am not entirely sure if it is worth a million bucks. The bid may have had something to with the fact that DiCaprio, riding on raves about his performance as Jay Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann’s 3D epic ‘The Great Gatsby’, was sitting in the front row. Stars have a way of warping space. But then a work of art is worth as much as anyone is willing to pay. There is no point rationally analyzing its merits.

What trumps any discussion on the artistic quality of the works is the cause for which they were sold. DiCaprio has been quoted by Christie’s press release as saying, “My Foundation has worked on environmental issues since 1998, and despite the great efforts by organizations all over the world, our planet is in trouble. The modern world is placing enormous pressure on the very natural systems that sustain us; we are destroying our forests, polluting the air and water, overfishing our oceans and facing overwhelming extinction rates of plants and animals. Consequently less than 2% of our Oceans and 12% of our forests and wildlands are protected. Nature is abundant and it is resilient, but we have to take action now to protect our planet before it’s too late. Given that less than 2% of philanthropic giving goes to environmental conservation projects, we are grateful that Christie’s and the participating artists are providing this incredible opportunity.”

If a million dollars for a DiCaprio portrait could help regenerate a stretch of forest, that is money very well spent indeed.

Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Parts Unknown’

I am no foodie from any angle. Food for me is strictly utilitarian. One eats because one has no choice in the matter. There is no food that I would look at and exult, ‘Aah! Food.’ 

That said, I am also conscious that food is perhaps the most important definer of cultures. It is from that perspective that I think Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Parts Unknown’ is the best show on CNN.

The show offers much greater throwaway insights into cultures than many of CNN’s so-called serious news shows simply because Bourdain seeks to connect with peoples at an elemental level. People are generous, open and tolerant when they are eating. His three segments out of Myanmar, Colombia and Morocco may have been very diverse in terms of what the people of these countries eat but they were unified in their passion and joy about whatever it is they eat. There is something to be said about a stomach that is full making its owner particularly joyous and tolerant. That is because the presence and sight of food is reassuring for humans.

There is a perfectly good chemical reason why empty stomachs can lead to bloody revolutions. That’s because the digestive fluid gastric acid is predominantly hydrochloric acid (HCl). If you have handled HCl in a college lab you would know that that stuff can be wicked. With no food to digest HCl has the potential to digest the stomach but before it does that it can make people particularly irrational.

Bourdain’s epicurean propensities are on full display on the show as he walks in and out of cultures and countries. You can see that he just loves food and uses it as a gateway to fellow humans. Bourdain also has that ease of bearing in new places that separates a seasoned traveler from a gawky tourist. Of course, one must recognize the whole paraphernalia that must attend Bourdain’s travels.

‘Parts Unknown’ is also a very well shot show. The production values are fairly impressive. One always finds at least one or two striking frames and shots in each segment. Check out the first two frames, for instance, from the segment on Myanmar and the third from the segment on Colombia. Don’t miss the dragonfly just in front of the farmer.: