South Asia Daily

On ‘Worldview’ with Jerome McDonnell

The trial of suspected Mumbai terror planner Tahawwur Rana begins in Chicago on Monday and is expected to last four weeks. I intend to be there everyday, if for nothing else, to get enough ingredients for a book I am writing about it.

I was on WBEZ’s (Chicago Public Radio’s) ‘Worldview’ with Jerome McDonnell yesterday to offer my perspective on the case. If you have 13 odd minutes to spare, you might consider listening to the clip. Tony Arnold, the WBEZ journalist assigned to cover the trial, appeared on the show with me.

Note to self: Your voice continues to have an urgency to it that is unsettling. Also, at one point you mess up the date saying 2000 July 8 instead of July, 2008. Pay attention, man.

I am staying back on earth to perish

This is how I am dressing up tomorrow for Judgment Day

I don’t know about you but there is no doubt in my mind that at the very least Stephen Hawking and I will be left behind to perish on the earth as believers leave tomorrow for heaven.

As you all know tomorrow is Judgment Day, the day when the earth begins to end. Or as some believe it will end in one fell swoop. Believers of a certain kind are expected to rise to heaven. Nonbelievers of all kinds are doomed to die a terrible death.

The only consolation for me is that I will have a sumptuous menu of death and destruction to choose from. From plagues, earthquakes, famines, and wars it is up to me to pick the way I want to be destroyed. I have five months from May 21, 2011 to October, 2011 to duck death. After October there is no way in hell that I will escape hell. How do I know this? Believers have told me so. Here is what I am thinking to do. Somehow contract plague and move to the most seismically active spot on the planet. Once an earthquake hits there, a famine is bound to follow. That will lead to war and eventual destruction. That’s a neat plan.

What I am most curious about is whether believers would be transported altogether as part of the rapture or they would have to wait their turns in long lines. How are the logistics of the mass transit organized? Another question that troubles me is for how long one has to be a believer to qualify for the transfer tomorrow. Can I become one tomorrow morning and manage a passage to heaven? And when the believers say May 21, which part of the planet do they mean because tomorrow happens much earlier in some parts of the world? Should I pay my health insurance premium which is due tomorrow? I ask because it does not cover plague. I can always call  my insurance company and find out tomorrow because I am certain they will be left behind because of all that they have done.

These are important questions that can be disregarded at our own peril. But then it seems a bit late to talk about such peril when everything is ending any way.

Believers have been saying their final goodbyes for a while now in anticipation of tomorrow. The rapture is expected to occur on Saturday night. Once again it is not clear Saturday night where? In the U.S. or elsewhere? As you know Saturday night will be Sunday in practically half of the world. What should Australians or Japanese or Chinese or Indians do? Oh,  I forgot that most of them are pagans. So they are not getting on the rapture bus any way.

It is obvious to me that only certain types of people in North America and may be some in Europe will manage to escape the doom that awaits the rest of us. So Hawking and I are not alone after all.

Tabla, sitar and Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’

At a time when Pakistan is desperate to showcase something other than its patronage of misanthropic jihadi groups, here comes an uplifting tribute to Dave Brubeck’s eternally uplifting ‘Take Five’. It comes from the Sachal Studios of Lahore and seamlessly interprets the jazz masterpiece with the tabla, sitar and violin. It is amazing how easily Take Five lends itself to South Asian orchestration and raags.

This side of Pakistan rarely gets seen in the West and it is not entirely because the skewed global media order. It is equally because the Pakistanis themselves do not take the trouble to project it.

Izzat Majeed, the founder of Sachal Studios, sounds like a man who would rather that his country fused its intrinsic talents with the rest of the world  than become a giant pain in its ass. So far it has been the latter as the trial of Tahawwur Hussain Rana unfolding in Chicago is likely to illustrate yet again.

Unfortunately, this aspect of Pakistani life has not been allowed to rise to a level of influence where it can overwhelm the more sinister impulses. Here is a recording of Take Five from 1961 for your comparison.

 

And here is the official video of the Pakistani tribute.

 

 

 

Thinking the same thoughts

For decades I have maintained this habit of putting down random comments and thoughts about a particular event or development that catches my attention. I do not always develop them into something bigger. I have hundreds of such lines written on scraps of paper. Many of them are not prompted by anything specific.

I am giving you this background for a reason. When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested on the charges of sexually assaulting a chambermaid, I wrote down this comment on the virtual sticky pad on my desktop “The IMF tells the world to tighten its belt while its boss cannot wait to get rid of his own.” I thought it was a funny line that pithily summed up the situation but never published it.

I had forgotten about this line until this morning when I was reading Maureen Dowd’s sharp witted and stinging column on the very subject. Dowd asks in her column, “Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to tighten their belts while he was dropping his trousers?”

Unless Dowd stealthily flew into Naperville, found my house, broke in, came down to the basement, accessed my computer despite its difficult password, opened the sticky pad, copied that particular line from a whole lot of useless information, went back and wrote her column, I think she came up with it strictly on her own creative merit. Of course, there is the more fiendish possibility that she broke into my mind telepathically, went through various memory folders and found this line.

In any event, if she managed to pull off either, then I suppose she fully deserves the authorship of that humorous construct. There is nothing unusual about two totally unconnected people independently coming up with similar constructs. As I wrote in this blog sometime ago, there is only a limited number of thoughts -- that number may be huge but it is still limited-- that human beings can choose from. So statistically, it is possible for the same thought to pop up in two unconnected minds.

Dowd is justifiably incensed at the manner in which some in France have spun the Strauss-Kahn drama. While it is entirely possible that he is innocent of any wrongdoing, the story’s more compelling point is that the US law enforcement system responded to the allegation of a relatively powerless person to arrest someone who is easily one of the world’s most influential figures.

While I am no the subject of Dowd’s column, I have one disagreement with it. (I like the way I am presuming parity between her column and this blog to create the impression that both enjoy the same level of readership and, more importantly, that anyone gives a wet booger about what I think.)

It is strange that Dowd chooses the label of “European” to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger in the same column for his own aggressive womanizing habits which led him to father a child with a member of his own household staff. “Another famous European with a disturbing pattern of sexual aggression got in trouble over the help this week: The ex-governor of California, who got elected after his wife, Maria Shriver, defended him so eloquently against groping charges.”

Why should Schwarzenegger still be called a European? He has been in the U.S. since 1968. I suspect he has earned his right to be called an American. And if it is fine to describe him as a European male because it somehow helps explain his egregious behavior, then every white American male should also be described in those terms. More strangely, this makes it appear as if European men have a special propensity to be boorish and sexually aggressive simply because they are European. The other European being Strauss-Kahn.

Other than that Dowd as usual makes some telling points.

Note to self: This is quite a confection considering you had nothing this morning. I did not want to write more about the Tahawwur Rana trial.

Geopolitics and Tahawwur Rana

My completely inaccurate sketch of Tahawwur Hussain Rana

Mumbai terror plot suspect Tahawwur Hussain Rana’s attorneys are expecting that the larger geopolitics surrounding their client’s upcoming trial will not influence its direction or outcome.

Whether that expectation is fulfilled depends entirely on the kind of jury that is chosen by Rana’s attorneys as well as federal prosecutors on Tuesday. Some 100 people of diverse ethnic backgrounds and gender and age groups were handed a questionnaire containing some 60 questions aimed at establishing whether any of them had any preconceived notions about the content of the trial.

Asked if a potential juror’s Indian or Pakistan connection would have a bearing on their selection, Rana’s attorney Charles D. Swift said while that may not be an “automatic disqualifier” it is was possible that such a juror may not make the cut.

The trial is being closely watched by three capitals, Washington, New Delhi and Islamabad because it has the potential to lay out in greater detail any possible links between Pakistan’s intelligence service and Islamic terror groups. In response to a question from me Swift said it was their expectation that the juror will decide on the basis of evidence as presented in the court and not swayed by the geopolitics that surrounds it.

What has heightened the interest in the Rana trial is that in the aftermath of the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden there are serious questions about the extent of involvement, even complicity, of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in sheltering terrorist leaders. While the US federal prosecutors are already privy to all the information that key Mumbai terror plotter David Coleman Headley has provided so far, there are expectations that he would repeat some of those assertions in court to strengthen the government’s case against Rana.

Rana has been charged with having provided material support that facilitated Headley to scout targets in Mumbai and has been under detention since October, 2009. His attorneys said no one was keener than Rana to get on with the trial. It is not clear how aware Rana is about the interest with which his trial is being followed but it is more than likely that his attorneys have briefed him as part of preparing him for the next four weeks that it is expected to last.

On Monday, the 50-year-old former Pakistani military physician sat inside court number 2525 at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in downtown Chicago dressed in a dark grey business suit and white shirt but with no tie, occasionally smiling at those present. It was evident that he had recently had a haircut and beard trim in preparation for jury selection and a trial that could decide whether he is set free or has to spend his life for the foreseeable future in prison. His lead attorney Patrick Blegen later said Rana was doing as well as he could under the circumstances.

Ashok Kumar and Edward G. Robinson

Edward G. Robinson and Ashok Kumar

In recent days my posts have been too newsy and earnest. So let me break that with my favorite space filler—lookalikes and feelalikes.

Edward G. Robinson and Ashok Kumar have been on my mind for this segment for a very long time. Although separated by 18 years (Ashok Kumar would have been 100 this year), Robinson and Kumar’s careers ran parallel for a fair length of time. Of course, by the time Ashok Kumar started his career in 1936, Robinson was already a veteran of some 25 movies and respected name.

I must ask my friend and fellow journalist Ashok Easwaran, who is in the midst of finishing Ashok Kumar’s biography, whether the Indian icon followed Robinson’s career.

Kumar and Robinson do not quite lookalike but they do unquestionably feealike. Robinson frequently played a gangster or a tough guy, an image that came to define his career. In contrast, Kumar played a wide diversity of roles.

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Here is yet another inspired casting suggestion. My earlier ones have found considerable acceptance, not to mention amusement that I have time for this. If ever a movie is made on Al Qaeda’s likely new leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, I suggest Johnny Depp be cast for the role. Here is why:

Johnny Depp, Ayman al-Zawahiri

A fanciful outlier or ISI’s nemesis?

David Coleman Headley has unexpectedly emerged as a crucial piece of the puzzle as the Obama administration goes about establishing the extent of Pakistani intelligence agency’s involvement with Islamic terror groups in the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden killing.

By itself the trial of the physician turned businessman, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Canadian citizen of Pakistani origin who is a permanent resident of Chicago, may not have been much more than a blip on the administration’s radar. However, bin Laden’s presence in the military heart of Pakistan and the suspicion that he may have been facilitated by some elements in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has sharpened focus on the Rana trial staring tomorrow.

That is because there are possibilities that Headley, who made a plea deal with the federal prosecutors to avoid the death penalty and extradition to India, would speak about his own experience with the ISI in plotting the 2008 Mumbai terror strikes.

While Headley’s testimony would be news for the public, the federal prosecutors already know all that he has to tell them in highlighting the links between Pakistan’s intelligence and militant Islamic groups. It is on the basis of what Headley has told them that a superseding indictment recently named a certain Major Iqbal, supposedly an ISI officer as someone with whom he interacted during the plotting of the Mumbai attacks.

The indictment says that Major Iqbal gave Headley $25,000 “to, among other purposes, establish and operate the Mumbai office of First World and pay for living expenses while Headley carried out his assignments for Lashkar (e Tayyiba).” First World Immigration Services was, as the name suggests, an immigration services business owned by Rana. The basic premise of the indictment is that behind the cover of opening the Mumbai office of First World Headley carried out surveillance of various targets in Mumbai. That is supposed to establish for the federal prosecutors a direct link between the ISI (as represented by Major Iqbal) and Headley-Rana combine.

An interesting twist to the trial came when Rana through his attorney Patrick Blegen claimed what is known as a “public authority defense” which essentially means that in his mind Rana was acting at the behest of the ISI and therefore entitled to claim immunity from 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 defense was rejected by Judge Harry Leinenweber in Chicago as “objectively unreasonable.”

It is in Judge Leinenweber’s court that the Rana trial begins tomorrow. I intend to report on the trial on a regular basis since I have been following the case from its inception.

Considering Headley’s value to the prosecution, he is a highly guarded figure now and the details of where he has been detained are kept secret. It was initially believed that he had been lodged at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the heart of downtown Chicago. I am not too sure if he is there, although it is possible that for the duration of the trial he might be housed there.

Pakistan will inevitably reject any claim that Headley might make to implicate the ISI or any other government agency. They could turn around and say that he is a fanciful outlier, although I seriously doubt if any one in Islamabad would construct their description in those words.

Whatever be the base the next few days or weeks would be fascinating to watch.

A state that finds it easier to live by its wits

Lawrence Wright, a respected journalist and the author of the critically acclaimed ‘Looming Tower” Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11’, underscores something that should have been obvious to the United States for at least a quarter century.

In a compelling piece in The New Yorker, Wright writes, “India has become the state that we tried to create in Pakistan. It is a rising economic star, militarily powerful and democratic, and it shares American interests. Pakistan, however, is one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a covert sponsor of terrorism.”

All the contours of India’s transformation were becoming visible as long ago as 1985, soon after Rajiv Gandhi took over as the country’s sixth prime minister after his mother Indira Gandhi’s cold-blooded murder. Although Gandhi’s term as prime minister did not quite ignite the country’s latent economic and entrepreneurial energies to the extent it should have, a fairly robust foundation was laid during that period, particularly in the area of information and communications technology. In fact, India chose to be a serious power with a strong emphasis on democracy, education and knowledge from its very inception as a nation-state under Jawaharlal Nehru.

Any reasonably discerning American scholar with a long-term view and elementary understanding of South Asia should have known then that India would eventually become the state that the US was trying to create in Pakistan. (Just contextualizing Wright’s own perspective somewhat differently.) The Americans did not have either the vision or the stomach to join hands with what they for long considered to be a chaotic and barely governable country ruled by Soviet lackeys. Pakistan, in contrast, with its militarist and self-serving feudal elite seemed a much easier country to influence and control in a region whose geostrategic importance for America could not be overstated.

It is only in the last one decade or so that Washington has begun understand India’s exceptionally sound self-corrective instincts as well as its natural preference for democracy. Add to that its population’s cultural predisposition towards education and knowledge and you have the makings of precisely the kind of society that India is becoming. Of course, there is no shortage of problems in India. A vast majority of Indians still languish on the margins. It enjoys no special immunities against mutinies and revolutions. And yet, over the millennia it has built up societal shock absorbers and checks and balances which in their own peculiar fashion help maintain overall equilibrium.

In contrast, Pakistan which came into being as a reactive state, has become even more reactive over the decades. It is a state that has not fully coalesced. It has failed to define its own cultural and economic goals. The military feudal elite has no vested interest in creating a cohesive society which can think beyond its eastern neighbor. It is not as if Pakistan is bereft of cultural, artistic and entrepreneurial strengths. It is just that the elite has discovered that it is much easier to keep its populace in thrall using a combination of religious radicalism and reactive militarism.

A quarter century is a long enough time for course correction but the U.S. failed to do so because of its own peculiar propensity to patronize states that suit its own expediencies and can be shaped and molded in its own image. The only problem is that in Pakistan also has enough craftiness to exploit those very factors. Pakistan has become a state that finds it much easier to live by its wits and America has been a great enabler by pumping billions into to its dangerously skewed economic order.

Rather than investing in its people, the U.S. invested in its highly corrupt elite which as I have said repeatedly is perpetually cutting deals within itself. The state of affairs can still be turned around but it will take quite some time and quite a lot of commitment. After all a country that created Faiz Ahmed Faiz or Ahmed Faraz or Mehdi Hassan or Ghulam Ali or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Abida Parveen has more than enough intellectual depth and diversity to defeat a bunch of misanthropic men who dream of imposing a brutal and regressive religious order even while watching porn in the privacy of their homes. Not that there is anything wrong with watching porn or trying out what porn stars do.

Smell the greed

I have mixed feelings about the whole business of stock trading. It has never appeared to me to be a particularly constructive line of work. While it does require a degree of smarts to monitor complex market trends and pick out winners from them, it primarily remains a hollow vocation. It is also peculiarly self-serving.

The conviction of hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam for insider trading has taken me back to the Bombay of the mid 1980s and early 1990s. Having been born and grown up in Ahmedabad I was already primed to understand the stock market culture. “Ketla banshey (How much would I make?)” was the only benchmark that stock traders kept in mind while buying or selling any stock.

For close to five years I worked out of newspaper offices situated, by some quirk of fate, on Dalal Street. The offices of the Free Press Journal, the first newspaper I worked for, was some 1000 feet away from the Bombay Stock Exchange.  It was close enough to smell the greed. To think that you could smell it above the lead-rich printing ink tells you how powerful the greed ought to have been.

It is my sense that stock brokers of any size are generally open to insider tips notwithstanding their illegality. It is also my sense that they genuinely believe that there is nothing particularly immoral or illegal about information even if it comes from inside. They treat it as part of their tradecraft. When you point out that insider trading is illegal under the law of the land, their reaction could be summed as “So?” Many stock brokers consider insider trading as a legitimate device and do not regard it as violative of anything.

When I read about the so-called “mosaic theory defense” by Rajaratnam’s attorneys I was reminded of what a broker once told me. Mosaic theory means that brokers depend on a of mosaic of intelligence and analyses gathered from a variety of sources to effect their trades. The basic argument being that insider tips are merely one minor part of that mosaic. At the height of the 1992 stock market scandal presided over by the late broker Harshad Mehta, a broker (not Mehta) told me, “I would even find out what the chaprasis (peons) of the company that is going public are saying. I need to know everything.”

The difference in the Rajaratnam case is that instead of chaprasis he cultivated their bosses. It is a question of levels.

Why I hate wooden homes

It is official. I hate wooden homes.There, I said it.

It has taken me 12 years to make this admission publicly. That’s how long I have now lived in America and that’s also how long I have lived in wooden homes.

Unless you are dead and made to lie on the floor, there is almost no activity that a living person can engage in in any part of a wooden home without the rest finding out instantly. It is not for nothing that I work out of my basement whose floor is concrete. Somehow I cannot square the American penchant for personal privacy  with the overwhelming preference for wooden homes. They carry tales across walls. Tales are like wind, they can seep through the tiniest of openings.

The combination of dry walls and wooden floors makes a mockery of what passes for a home. There is something transient about these structures. As it is life is transient. We do not have to make it more by living it in wooden homes.

Most wooden homes creak and squeak. Once in a while rusty nails pop. When you walk, the floor lets you know its displeasure of being trampled upon. It is as if some dead tree is settling scores for having been heartlessly chopped down. The worst is when the slats in one’s bed squeak in unison with those in the floor. There are times when even one’s breathing can make the whole house whistle.

In the interest of decorum (Yeah, right. Decorum and me.) I am not even going to talk about the other more exciting/embarrassing sounds and noises that wooden homes transmit across walls. I leave it to your imagination.

You could be taking shower in any bathroom anywhere, the opening of the faucet will be reverberate throughout the house. Homes of my home’s vintage (that is about 20 odd years) have a peculiar problem. They are not old enough to be old and therefore pitiable and young enough to be young and therefore likeable. In such homes the floor has just begun to give way. If it is a carpeted floor and a slat has become loose, it sticks out like a morning hard-on. (My sense of decorum did not last even a paragraph). You have to beat it down.

I have not been able to fully resolve this but for some reason wooden homes have a near permanent hum to them. It is as if all those trees that were felled to build them are still in anguish.