South Asia Daily

Fire in Babylon

For those hooked on the syrupy celebrity confection that passes off for cricket these days, I recommend a documentary called ‘Fire in Babylon’ by writer director Stevan Riley. This is a story about how the West Indies cricket team under captain Clive Lloyd, which suffered humiliating physical and verbal battering during its 1975-76 tour of Australia, channeled their rage and became the world’s most fierce cricketing force.

Australian fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson subjected the West Indians to the kind of battering that was reminiscent of the notorious Bodyline series of  1932-33 between England and Australia that featured Don Bradman. When you consider that Thomson, whose run-up was boosted by the chants of “Thommo Thommo” from the around the stadium, was bowling at speeds anywhere between 140 and 180 kilometers per hour you can imagine the pain when a batsman got hit with the ball.

That series stirred up something primal among the West Indians who decided to use their rage in a systematic fashion to get even. The team decided to let go of what was patronizingly called its calypso charms and turned into a ruthless cricketing machine under Lloyd and then under Vivian Richards.

As much as the documentary is about cricket, it is more about a nation, through its cricketing team, shaking off its colonial past. Richards, in particular, used his bat like a sword slicing and cutting through the legacy of a colonized country.And then there were the “fearsome four” Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Colin Croft and Joel Garner whose bowling struck terror among batsmen. Garner, I remember, was called the Big Bird because he was 6 feet 8 inches.

I have not yet fully seen the documentary but going by what I have seen, read and remember from the late 1970s this sounds highly promising.

After over a thousand posts, no Pulitzer yet

After over a thousand posts on this blog, I can say with complete certainty that a majority of my visitors end up here out of pure serendipity. It is somewhat like Columbus looking for India and instead landing in America. It is thrilling to know that essentially it is a bad sense of navigation that leads many here.

It is obvious to me that almost no one reads this blog as a matter of routine. Most of them are brought here by a series of algorithmic coincidences while searching for something entirely tangential. This morning, for instance, one of the visitors came from Quezon City in the Philippines looking for “2011Tell the White House open to Asia.” Some months ago there was one from India looking for “sex with hot Indian bhabhi.” I know I am journalist but a pimp? Really? Is it that close? And yet I soldier on.

In a burst of literary inspiration I had once described my 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 they cause a lot of bile afterwards. And they have no nutritional value whatsoever.

So it was no surprise to discover this morning that my name was missing from the list of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winners in any category. I couldn’t have because none of what I write is worthy of any prize, let alone a Pulitzer. Evidently, it is not even worthy of a committed readership as I have explained above.

Speaking of the Pulitzer winners, here is one who is eminently deserving of it. Cancer specialist Siddhartha Mukherjee has won in the general non-fiction category for his book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer". The book has been described as "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science".

I have no punch line for this one other than offering my congratulations to Dr. Mukherjee. Here is an interview with him as it appears on his official page on his publisher Simon and Schuster’s website.

 

Trump, Libya and supari

Donald Trump (Screen grab from CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley)

It is interesting that so far India has not figured on Donald Trump’s list of countries which he says are “ripping off” America and whose butts he would have no compunction kicking if and when he becomes president.

My guess is that the omission may purely be out of business expediency because he is reportedly on the verge of entering the booming real estate market in India. Trump has already announced a joint venture with Rohan Lifescape of Mumbai to build a “very luxury” (his son’s description) residential tower. It makes perfect sense for Trump to enter India where the number of buyers demanding “very luxury” has gone up dramatically in the past decade or so.

If not for anything else, I want Trump to become president so that the residents of his “very luxury” tower in Mumbai can boast that their apartments were built by the US president. Speaking of boasting, of all Trump’s braggadocian pronouncements the one that I find most amusing concerns how he might deal with a situation like Libya.

Here is what Trump has been saying about Libya, "The Arab League, composed of Saudi Arabia and the richest nations in the world, asked us to go in and rid them of Gaddafi [whom] they don't like. Why aren't they paying us? Why didn't we ask them for payment? They would have paid us whatever we wanted. If I would have said, `We want $5 billion.' You know what that is? That is nothing for these people. They should pay us." On CNN with Candy Crowley yesterday I think he even said the Arabs would write a check for $5 billion in “about two seconds.”

This for the first time that any public figure in the US of Trump’s high profile (no doubt mostly created by him with the help of a salivating broadcast media) has cast his country’s foreign policy in supari terms. If Trump indeed becomes president, America may officially become a supari nation.

Let me translate Trump’s comment in the Mumbai underworld Hindi idiom. “Yeh Arbastan wale ko bolo tum ki kisi ko kabrastan mein sulane ka hai to itna khkoha lagega ki sala mein bhi bol nahi sakta. Bole to bees se pachchis hajar karod lage ga. Kitna khokha yeh tum sab Arab log baith te gino. Bolo tum Arabastan ko.”

For those of you who may not be familiar with what supari is, it is a term used by Mumbai’s underworld to describe a contract killing. When an underworld don accepts supari, it is a commitment to bump off someone for a price. That price is often quantified using the term khokha, literally meaning a cardboard box, each of which can contain ten million rupees in cash.

The best way to treat Donald Trump’s blistering hot pre-campaign campaign is to take every thing he says about the world at its face value and literally and actually elect him president. In less than ten minutes after taking over he would discover the world as it is and not the way he had described it.

The Apprentice White House edition

Date: January 21, 2013

Time: 8.30 a.m.

Place: The Oval Office at the White House

President Donald Trump is swiveling in his chair with a sense of smug satisfaction as his chief of staff Gary Busey enters. Both men laugh out loud as if they have pulled off a heist.

Busey: President Trump, that has a nice ring to it. What do you think  President Trump?

Trump: The beauty of me is that I was always very rich and very presidential and very smart. It is just that the smart people of America have gotten around to electing me only now.

Busey: So what do we now? Do we have to work?

Trump: That’s precisely what I was thinking. What do we do now?  Let’s do The Apprentice White House edition. Get some bureaucrats and I will fire them on national television.

Busey: That’s a great idea.

Before the two could pursue the idea any further an aide walks in and says: Mr. President, it is the Chinese president calling.

Trump: I did not order any takeout.

Busey laughs at his boss’s crack and repeats ‘I did not order any take out…I love that.”

The aide (trying hard to keep his composure): It is a customary call to greet you, sir.

Trump (looks at Busey and smiles again): It has already started. The guy must be shaking in his boots. (Trump turns to the obsequious aide and says) Tell him not now. I am busy. Try next year.

Busey and Trump laugh again with Trump thumping his desk.

Busey repeats ‘Try next year… I love that’ and laughs again.

The aide looks very uncomfortable and confused: Sir, we have to take this call.

Trump: I will decide whose calls I take and when. This is a new White House with new rules. They don’t call us. We call them. And only if we want to berate them. So go and tell the Chinese president to do some Tai chi and cool it in the mean time.

The aide, looking even more confused: Are you serious Mr. President. I could not possibly do that.

Trump: It is a direct order from your commander-in-chief.

The aide: If you insist, Mr. President.

The aide leaves.

Busey: Way to go Mr. President. Now should I call some bureaucrats?

Trump: You do that.

Before Busey could do that the aide walks in again.

Trump (looking irritated): What is it now?

The aide: Sir, I requested the Chinese president to try next year. Before he disconnected he said I should tell you these exact words ‘Tell Mr. Trump, China wants its money back. All two trillion. Now. By this evening.”

Trump,looking befuddled, turns to Busey: Gary, what do we do now?

Busey: You are the boss who is very rich and very presidential and very smart. You should know what to do.

Trump: Get some bureaucrats and the Apprentice camera crew. We need to fire some people right now. And yes, include the aide who kept interrupting me.

Charles Spencer Chaplin

This scene from Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Gold Rush’ (1925), which was  his favorite film, cannot be improved upon. Period. Don’t say a word. Just watch it in utter gratitude that Chaplin once lived.

Incidentally, today is Chaplin’s 122 birth anniversary.

A boring post about Freida Pinto

Freida Pinto in ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’

With a culturally flexible face and gradually sharpening acting talent Freida Pinto seems to be doing a good job of building up her international movie career. Not that Bill Maher, perhaps America’s best known contrarian and political comic, is particularly qualified to judge such things but recently he predicted that Pinto “is going to be the first giant superstar of Indian heritage.”

That he said while introducing Julian Schnabel, the director of ‘Miral’, which features Pinto as Miral, “an orphaned Palestinian girl growing up in the wake of Arab-Israeli war who finds herself drawn into the conflict.” Schnabel was a guest on a recent edition of Maher’s HBO hit ‘Real Time with Bill Maher.’

Pinto, who until she was seen in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was a complete unknown, will now be seen with James Franco in ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes.’ Apart from that she has three other movies in post-production, including ‘Black Gold’, ‘Immortals’ and ‘Trishna.’

Pinto with James Franco in ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’

Her trajectory as an international actress is in sharp contrast to her Slumdog costar and supposed boyfriend Dev Patel, who had an indifferent showing in an indifferent movie called “The Last Airbender’ by an indifferent filmmaker called M. Night Shyamalan.

I don’t quite know what the point of this post is other than acknowledging that Pinto has done well to build up a career for herself. And why should that tickle me? It shouldn’t. This is a boring a post.

Sex ratio is not about sexual needs or men becoming gay

It is hard to determine whether India’s Minister for New and Renewable Energy Farooq Abdullah is worried about the declining sex ratio because it means less girls to have fun with and marry or because it is exposes a cruel and criminal societal bias.

Even if one gets past the oddity of Dr. Abdullah choosing the inauguration of the India Water Forum to speak about the subject, one cannot get past the way he framed the debate.

“Unfortunately the male sex is growing faster and women are being eliminated. I don’t know whether a time will come when we will all become gays. That might happen when we will not find girls to marry,” Dr. Abdullah said even as one could hear muted and awkward chuckles in the audience.

Abdullah, a physician by training and qualification, makes it sound as if homosexuality is Plan B (as in a secondary plan and not a contraceptive, I mean.) While the scientific debate over whether homosexuality is genetic or may also be shaped by environmental influences is not fully settled, there appears to be reasonable consensus that it could be a combination of factors, including genetic, hormonal and environmental.

The issue here is not what might happen to Indian men’s sexual needs if the sex ratio declines even less than the latest 914 girls to every 1000 boys for children under six years. It is much more fundamental in what it reveals about the profoundly disturbing gender bias so deeply embedded in Indian society. It is possible that Abdullah the politician, known for his propensities to be thoughtless and glib, may have been trying to be deliberately provocative to get people to pay attention to this very serious problem. However, it merely ended up sounding churlish in a sophomoric sense.

The point is not “Oh my god! We will all turn gay” as if it was a contagion, but what is being systematically done to the female gender with the express sanction of society.

A brief story of my hunger strike

Thirty seven years after it shook up India’s polity and forced the country’s then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to impose an emergency rule, I am contemplating to claim some credit for the Navnirman Movement of 1974. That is because as a 13-year-old I went on a hunger strike for a day in Ahmedabad as part of what began as a students’ protest in the city and escalated into a national movement led by Jayprakash Narayan.

Those of us who have been 13 once--and I suppose that would be most of us--would know what a harrowing ordeal staying hungry during any single hour of the day can be at that age. So my sacrifice is no less than what Gandhi did before me and others have done since.In fact, it is easier to go hungry once you are past 70 than once you are past 10. (If this bogus theory turns out to be accurate, don’t forget that you read about it here first).

The day-long fast was organized in front of the Sharda Nagar post office because to a teenage mind nothing symbolized government oppression and corruption more than a post office. And why, you might ask. Well, don’t because there is no answer other than saying that because postmen unfailingly delivered mail every day. Those in my neighborhood, who were politically more mature and astute than I was (meaning they were 15 or 16 and had more fur on their faces), had determined that Mrs. Gandhi monitored anarchists such as yours truly using the post master because not only did he have access to a telephone but, if that filed, he could send telegrams too.

The fast began at 8 in the morning when the early summer sun had already begun to bake the ground beneath the linen my brother Manoj, two other childhood friends and I were sitting on. We sat under a neem tree (Azadirachta indica) whose shade is considered not just the coolest for India’s mind-numbingly hot summers but even therapeutic. Who can dispute that we needed therapy if we believed that not eating for seven hours would coerce perhaps the wiliest chief cinister of India in those days, Chiman Patel of Gujarat, to pack up and leave his office? Astonishingly, Patel did indeed pack up and leave that February.

We broke our fast that day ourselves by sipping some fresh lime water with a generous quantity of sugar. In those days, there were no breathless and clueless television reporters asking us “Kaisa lag raha hai?”

What was ironic about this whole affair was that Patel was our very next door neighbor whom we saw every morning dressed in his impeccably white churidar and kurta get into his white Ambassador car as a retinue of his servants waited on his exalted personage. One held the car door, one held his tiffin box and one held the tail of his kurta lest it folded up as he slipped into the car.

After a short passage of time Patel was made aware by my brother and I that we had fasted against him. He broke into a chuckle and quickly ordered one of his many minders to get us some milk-based sweets. I am not sure if we ate any, but I would guess that we did because that’s what freshly triumphant teenagers who had overthrown a government do. We were hungrier than ever before.

Headley-Rana case heats up again

The curious case of David Coleman Headley--Tahawwur Hussain Rana is becoming even more curious with the latter reportedly claiming an extraordinary defense known as the public authority defense. As lawyerly moves go, this one was pretty astute but was dismissed by Judge Harry Leinenweber in Chicago as “objectively unreasonable.”

The public defense may not have worked as Rana prepares for his trial on May 16 but it has thrown some disturbing light on what might have transpired behind the scene during the planning of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

Rana, a Pakistani physician and a Canadian citizen permanently residing in Chicago accused of involvement in the Mumbai terror plot, reportedly claimed that he acted at the behest of the Pakistani government and its spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

“(The) Defendant’s proposed defense is that his alleged illegal acts of
providing material support to terrorists — at least those related to
the  Mumbai  attacks  —  were  done  at  the  behest  of  the  Pakistani
government and the ISI, not the Lashkar (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba)  terrorist organization.  He argues that he is entitled to a public authority defense because he acted  under  the  authority — whether  actual  or  apparent  —  of  the Pakistani government and the ISI,” said a document published by Canada’s leading newspaper The Globe and Mail.

Rana’s public defense argument is based on Headley’s testimony before a grand jury where he said, “During  my  trip  to  Chicago,  I  told  [Defendant]  about  my meetings with Sajid and others in Lashkar.  I also told him about my meetings with Major Iqbal, and told him how I had been asked to perform espionage work for ISI. I even told him some of the espionage stories that Major Iqbal had told me. I  told  [Defendant]  about  my  assignment  to  conduct surveillance in Mumbai.  I asked [Defendant] if it was okay with him that I set up a First World immigration office in Mumbai.  I  explained  to  him  that  the  immigration  office would provide a cover story for why I was in Mumbai.  I told him that Major Iqbal would be providing money to pay for the expenses associated with setting up and operating the office. [Defendant] agreed.”

In short, what Rana claimed is that since in his mind he was acting under what he believed had the sanctity of the Pakistan government’s national interests he is immune to prosecution. The basic thrust of this defense would be that Rana believed he was directed to engage in certain activities by the ISI, an official agency of a sovereign state, namely Pakistan which enjoys immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), he is also immune. That was the contention which was rejected on April 1.  Rana is accused of “providing material support to terrorists and foreign terrorist  organizations” and has been under detention since October, 2009.

Rana’s public authority defense has the potential to seriously embarrass the Pakistani government and offer India more evidence that the Mumbai attacks were much more than just a Lashkar action. Of course, there is nothing to stop Islamabad from summarily rejecting Rana’s contention but it at least sharpens New Delhi’s suspicions.

‘The Harvesters’ by Pieter Bruegel

The Harvesters, 1565 By Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1551 – 1569,

Oil on wood, Height : 119.10 cm, Width : 161.90 cm, At the Metropolitan Museum of Art

What just might save Google from becoming evil, I think, is its Art Project. And thanks to the Art Project I have been introduced to the 16th century Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder whose work ‘The Harvesters’ I have not been able to get over this morning.

It is astonishing how every corner of this masterpiece is a great piece of art by itself as the following slices illustrate. I have been able to do this entirely because Google Art Project lets me go zoom right into the gut of this painting, or for that matter any work of art that it shows in high resolution as part of Google’s partnership the world’s leading museums. This is an extraordinary learning tool waiting to be exploited by schools around the world.

Coming to this particular painting, whose existence as well as that of its creator I discovered only this morning, captures the pastoral serenity of Europe possibly in August and September in such remarkable detail. The zooming tool lets me blow up any corner of the painting and discover how rural life might have unfolded in the 16th century Europe.

I am particularly struck by two images from the painting. One is this woman, sitting in a perfect posture and eating bread. Although one does not know who she is, the way Bruegel has set her up creates a strange allure about her. I am dying to find out what she looks like but never will.

 

The other is this harvester who is sleeping as if the rest of the world has ceased to exist. And that he is doing so just a few feet away from the alluring woman tells me that he must really be sleepy.

For your edification I have taken various bits from the painting to show you how much work would have gone in creating this breathtaking work.