South Asia Daily

The Red Remix

Mao Zedong (Illustration: Mayank Chhaya)

From all indications China is remixing Mao Zedong as the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the 90th anniversary of its founding on July 1. Mao is being revived using a less threatening strategy of propaganda music as immortalized by the “red songs.” Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have run specific stories about this form of valorous music which was widely used during Mao’s time to fire up the Chinese people.

If the media reports are any indications the post-post-Mao generation seems to have no problem with him and the founding of the Communist Party that he came to embody so overwhelmingly. They all seem to want to discover a bit of Mao in them. If you were unaware of the horrors of that era and came to know of the time only through the current, more cuddly remix of it, you could not be faulted for feeling warm and fuzzy about it. After all, what’s not to like in cute children singing songs in unison or pretty girls locking hands, wearing their best smiles,dressed in designer retro Mao outfits and singing?

There is probably nothing intrinsically wrong with the red songs, many of which were born out of folk wisdom and inspired ordinary people to a higher ideal than just their individual selves. What may be worrisome though is that they are being selectively chosen to soften the much harder and damaging aspects of the time they came to symbolize.

I have no scholarship of any significance to hold forth on China and its political culture but signs seem to point at attempts to slide in Maoist ideology while ordinary people are too busy thanking the party for all it has done for the country. The more discriminating and discerning among the Chinese people are justifiably worried that the current generation may not be able to appreciate the full measure of what that ideology represents and may get taken in by its more visual, celebratory, song and dance version which hides its sinister underpinnings.

At this stage it is futile to argue against the Communist Party’s manifest success in turning China into an economic powerhouse that the world looks at with a mixture of awe and befuddlement. What people seem to be responding to is some fantasy interpretation of the Mao-Party combine that exists mainly in their minds. I would not be surprised if from the vantage point of July 1, 2011, July 1, 1921 looks rather charming.

Chavvani—1950-2011

It is with considerable anguish that I record the death of Chavvani. It was not just a quarter rupee for a little over 50 years but, more significantly, helped India define a cheapskate. I know for a fact that in both Hindi and Gujarati there are expressions drawn from this denomination to put down someone rather effectively.

In Hindi, the expression Chavania has been long used to deride someone with no grace, class, taste and elegance. Its Gujarati equivalent is Pavli (literally a quarter) which has also been used as a mild pejorative. It has perhaps something to do with the fact that both Chavvani and Pavli represent only a quarter of one whole unit.

Thursday, June 30, in India will be the last day for Chavvani. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country’s central bank, announced that as of tomorrow it will no longer be considered legal tender. The RBI is way behind on the curve on this compared to the beggars of India who have refused to accept Chavvani for more than a decade at least. In fact, in metros such as Mumbai and Delhi they would give you a withering look even if you give them a five rupee bill.

For me personally, Pavli or Char Ana once represented serious wealth because in my childhood and early teens all other coins used to be generally minted from aluminum. They were light enough to be blown away by gentle wind. In contrast, Pavli carried weight because of the alloy that was used in it.

It sounds silly in retrospect but there was no greater joy than holding a freshly minted Pavli in those days. Those who worked at banks would show off their roll of new Pavlis as if they were some highly valued contraband. The knurl of the new Pavli was particularly sharp and could leave a cut if you did not watch out.

So long, Pavli.

A little self-promotion never killed anyone

Here is an unabashed plug for my upcoming book on the city of Ahmedabad, where I was born and grew up and which, in 2011, completes 600 years of its founding.

This will be one of my three books that will come out in the next few months. The other two are about nanotechnology and the Chicago end of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Those should make the total number of books written by me to be five, which is still only half way through the mark when I think a professional acquires the heft to introduce himself or herself as a writer. Unless one has written ten books, one is only an aspiring writer. That’s what I am for now.

The following is the blurb from Harper Collins India’s catalogue announcing the Ahmedabad book.

For a city that is India’s seventh largest, Ahmedabad exerts surprisingly light urban gravity. It is a city that gives one the impression that it is either
unaware of or unconcerned about its impact on India’s national life, both throughout history and in modern times. Few metros of Ahmedabad’s size and historical significance are as unselfconscious and untouched by their relevance.

Over the last six centuries, since its founding in 1411, Ahmedabad has frequently found itself at the centre of India’s defining moments. And yet it has kept a surprisingly low profile. Despite its dramatic growth in the last decade and a half, Ahmedabad’s heart remains essentially provincial. The overriding attitude of its people has been that the world will adapt itself to the city rather than the city to the world.

In this intimate story of one of India’s most happening cities, the author captures Ahmedabad as he saw it first hand in the first two decades of his life, and then as a frequent visitor in the last thirty years.

Mayank Chhaya, a native of Ahmedabad, has been a journalist for the past thirty years. He has reported extensively out of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the United States. He is a widely published commentator on South Asian and US–India affairs. He has written a critically acclaimed biography of the Dalai Lama, Man Monk Mystic, which has been published in twenty languages worldwide.

Killing without knowing why and who

On June 11, Mumbai’s best known crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey was shot dead. Five bullets were fired at close range. The shooting had all the signs of a mob hit.

It turns out that although it was indeed a mob hit, according to the Mumbai police, the killers had no idea about the man they were tasked to kill. They did what they were told, only to realize later, to their panic, that the man they murdered was a journalist.

IANS reports that Mumbai Police Joint Commissioner Himanshu Roy has identified the man who allegedly pulled the trigger as Satish Kalia, a professional hitman allegedly assigned by Chhota Rajan, one of the city’s most high profile mob bosses. Kalia was among the seven men arrested by the Mumbai police in a nationwide operation.

The most striking aspect of the killing is how devoid it was of any emotional investment. Although the killers did track Dey’s for several days before the assassination, for them he was no more than some person they were paid to kill. In all likelihood, they did not know or question whom they were being asked to eliminate and why. They could not care less about what it would do to Dey’s family and how permanently and brutally it would disrupt their lives.

“Zyada sochne ka nahi. Sochne se aadmi dheela padta hai” (Don’t’ think too much. Thinking makes one weak.) used to be the most important guiding principle of the underworld when I reported on it in the 1980s. I am not sure that has changed much.

It was only after they discovered that they had killed a journalist, did the seven go into a panic mode and split up. It is remarkable how quickly the Mumbai police tracked them down. They could not have done it without someone in the know spilling the beans.

Hilarius the Herculanian

A general view of Herculaneum site (Pic:Herculaneum Conservation Project)

If I were born some 2000 years ago in Herculaneum, my name would probably be Hilarius. I would have been eating sea urchins sprinkled with fennel seeds partly to justify my name. In 2011, excavators would have found my excrement lodged in tons of human waste in a cesspit under what is now called Ercolano in modern day Italy.

I would have been a contemporary of Pliny the Elder, the great Roman naturalist, author and philosopher. I may even have helped him research his seminal work Naturalis Historia. I would have been partying on the night of August 23, 79 AD, blissfully unaware that a few kilometers away Mount Vesuvius was getting terribly restless.

A few hours into the night, Herculanians would have been buried under ash and pumice spewed by Vesuvius. Also among the dead would be Pliny the Elder at Stabiae near Pompeii, the city with much greater historical allure.

As historians and experts study the fecal and other garbage left behind by the residents of Herculaneum, they are compelled to conclude that ordinary citizens like me were generally happy. They can tell from the kind of food we consumed. It included chicken, mutton, fish, fig, fennel, olive, sea urchins and mollusk. If we were not generally well-to-do, we would not have had access to such food. Hence our excrement would have told a different story.

When I read this National Geographic report about the excavation of the largest collection of Roman garbage ever found, I could not but wonder about what generations of humans would think of us in 4011 based on our excrement. One conclusion could be, “These people sure ate a lot of crap.” That is presuming that 2000 years from now they would still be speaking English and using expressions such as “a lot crap.”

As an aside, it is obvious to me that history as something you come upon serendipitously is now well and truly over. There are so many of us, so widely spread and so widely documented and so extensively  chronicled that there will not be any need for history in 4011.

Sir, one more thing…

Peter Falk

No one did Peter Falk doing the impression of Lieutenant Columbo better than Peter Falk. And if that was done at the celebrity roast of no less a celebrity than Frank Sintra, it would be a rare treat to watch. With Sinatra on his left and Dean Martin  on his right, Falk brings the house down in this 1977 clip even as he stays in character throughout its duration of over nine minutes.

Falk, regarded as one of America’s finest actors who is, and I say it with some discomfort, popularly remembered for his iconic portrayal of the fictional television detective Columbo, died at the age 83 yesterday. Rather than writing a thing or two about him, I thought this celebrity roast clip would be a charming little remembrance.

Columbo’s carefully staged dishevelment was carried off with such precision by Falk that it became hard to picture him in any other getup, although he was twice nominated for the Oscar for his cinematic roles. Even in this clip, there is not a single misstep in the company some of the giants of the movie and showbiz worlds.

So long, Mr. Falk.

Swaying between Zanzibar and Teerashabi

I have long admired certain words not just for what they mean but, equally and even more, for how they sound. Two completely unrelated words took over this morning. Hence this quick post about them.

One longtime favorite of mine is Zanzibar. I have liked the word since I first heard it in my childhood. For some reason the word always woke up my olfactories to the fragrance of cloves. This was even before I learned in middle school that cloves were indeed a major produce of Zanzibar. The clove was introduced to Zanzibar in the early 19th century from Indonesia by the sultans of Oman.

The word Zanzibar creates in me a strange sense of upliftment that I cannot fully explain. Although the primary association with the word is olfactory, it also stirs up some primal sounds in my mind, especially a slow rhythmic drum beat. The combined picture of the word Zanzibar is one of people swaying in a trancelike state to the distant drum beat even while gently inhaling a clove-based perfume. If anyone ever uses this scene, send me a royalty check.

The other word that came out of nowhere this morning is Teerashabi. I first heard it in a ghazal sung by Mehdi Hassan. It goes: “Jab bhi aati hai teri yaad kabhi’ by Krishan Adeeb.  The word Teerashabi, which I am pretty sure means a dark night from ‘Teera’ (dark) and Shab (night), comes as part of “Warna das jayegi yeh teerashabi sham ke baad.” From what I understand, Teerashabi is used as a metaphor for a poisonous snake and hence the expression “das jayegi” meaning will bite.

There are two more words from the same ghazal that I like as much. They are afsurdadili which means melancholy or sorrowful and tashnaalabi or thirst/ quest.

While Zanzibar conjures up a strange kind of fantasy in me, teerashabi grounds me to something more real and immediate and yet enigmatic.

You can turn around and say that like I occasionally do, I am overthinking these words. May be so, may be so.

What to report and what not to

Photo: Chandu Mhatre

This post has been prompted by writer and contrarian Arundhati Roy’s assertion that many Western journalists based in India operate instructions of “No negative news” from their editors. The rationale behind the instructions seems to be India’s dramatic emergence as a giant investment destination for Western corporations. It is a controversial claim which may not be entirely without foundation.

Roy’s comments came in an interview with The Guardian’s Stephen Moss on June 5 and exercised Andrew Buncombe of The Independent enough to write a rejoinder yesterday.

Roy told Moss, “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.”

Against this backdrop, let me describe in simplistic and therefore inaccurate  terms how the foreign media coverage of India has evolved over the last four decades. It has evolved from poverty porn of the 1970s and early 80s to exotica/conflict porn of the 1980-90 decade to prosperity porn of 2000 and beyond. In short, correspondents have practiced journalism that they can easily understand for themselves and interpret for the largely uninformed readerships of their respective countries.

If foreign correspondents in New Delhi, a species to which I once belonged, are expressly told by their editors to write only what we used to call “sunshine stories”, I suspect that is because it is an easy sell. For instance, sometime ago multibillionaire Mukesh Ambani’s reputedly billion dollar multistoried home in the heart of Mumbai was a preferred subject of this prosperity porn journalism.

Even as I write this I also read a story The New York Times’ website today about a Moroccan style home of Kawal Singh Ahluwalia, a former chairman for South Asia of the marketing research firm A. C.  Nielsen. The story casually mentions that a bed in his house made from the wood fallen from trees was once used by the singer Sting. That Sting slept in that bed is mentioned as if by that one act of the singer’s behind touching it the bed acquired rare sanctity. I see no relevance of that piece of information otherwise.

But then the same Times also had a story yesterday about the iconic Indian IT giant Infosys coming under a federal investigation over accusations of misuse of business visas.

The point is newspapers these days are like the Gujarati thali (Those who do not know what it is look it up here) which serves a mix of vegetarian food that is sweet, spicy, sour and pungent but never bland. People no longer read newspapers for just substantive information and credible perspectives but also for entertainment and out of aspirational voyeurism.

Journalism is no longer a profession that can be practiced in a hermetically sealed moral echo chamber whose inmates are forever protected from the vagaries of the world outside.

It is entirely possible that foreign correspondents in Delhi are told by their foreign desk to look the other way poverty buttonholes them on the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad and instead focus on what goes on behind the glistening glass and steel exteriors of corporate offices. One good thing about the mirrored frontage of corporate offices is that they cannot pick and choose whose reflections they capture. It does not discriminate between an Armani clad CEO of walking in and a deformed beggar hobbling behind. I am not saying that someone might not invent a mirrored glass that can make that distinction and erase unwanted images but until that day...

Bubbles Fedora Send

I knew I was easily pleased but did not quite realize how easily pleased. I found out this morning with Google’s latest magic trick of Voice Search. It is, as the name suggests, a way of searching by speaking to Google rather than writing.

Unlike how the apes respond to the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, I responded to Google Voice Search without any hesitation or circumspection or philosophical doubt whatsoever. To test how how good the new search tool is I sang a Hindi song into my computer’s microphone. The song was “Mein to tum sang nain mila ke” (Lata Mangeshkar, ‘Man Mauji’, 1962). Google Voice Search interpreted that as “magpul ms symptoms manmohan singh.”

I then tried my own name which it got perfectly. To conclude my morning aping around I said “Uncertainty Principle” and the tool picked it up instantly. Three out of two with my accent, which I consider globally neutral, is not bad at all. I cannot possibly fault the tool for mucking up the song.

Unable to resist, I tried Maqbool Fida Husain and it heard it as “bubbles fedora send.” To think that Google knows Mayank Chhaya more than Maqbool Fida Husain, while uplifting, is simultaneously disturbing. What’s happening here is that many variables kick in in terms of my intonation, the complexity of the search and perhaps even the ambient noise. I tried the same search again and I got this: “bubble sabella listen.”

I am sure Google will fine-tune these challenges but as a tool it is quite an accomplishment. I can already see Iris recognition in the not too distant a future. You could look into your webcam and Google or someone like it would tell you what is going on in your mind. Reading a man’s mind would be easy for that tool for obvious reasons. It is a woman’s mind that would severely test all its algorithmic strength.

It is strange that I should have mentioned ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ in the beginning of my post because one of the themes of the movie is the attempted takeover of the spaceship by its computer HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer and hence HAL). Of course, Google would not do something like that. Would it now? It is not evil after all.

“Optimized for one-hand use”...It’s a phone

It is glistening, smooth, slightly curved and four inches long. What is more is that it has been “optimized for one-hand use.” And yet, it is not what you might be thinking right up until this point. I am talking about Nokia’s new smartphone N9.

Nokia’s N9

The N9 is supposed to represent a rejuvenated Nokia, once a byword in mobile phone design aesthetics that became a disheveled, pajama-clad recluse for a while. The Finnish company’s head of design Marko Ahtisaari, whose team is responsible for the N9, told The New York Times’ Kevin J. O’Brien, “It’s optimized for one-hand use.” That’s the line that caught my attention and prompted me to write a suggestive opening to this post.

With that impulse out of the way, I can say that strictly going by the Times report and Nokia’s own promotional videos on their website the N9 looks promising enough to free the company from mediocrity. I am not much of a mobile phone user other than answering a few phone calls but I am a sucker for gadget  and app design aesthetics. I am also sometimes susceptible to visually powerful stimuli to the exclusion of accurate judgment. The N9 promotional material has all the elements for someone like me.

Although Nokia still enjoys about 28 % share of the world smartphone market behind Android’s 36 % but ahead of Apple iPhone’s nearly 17 %, it has conveyed a sense of defeatism lately. I do not know whether the N9 will help Nokia regain some of its edge but it seems to create a new source of excitement which is distinctly different from the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone, which demands unquestioning faith and commitment, the N9 has the promise of promiscuity. (The last line is gratuitous but had to be purged from my brain.)