South Asia Daily

Was the glass heavy or burden of sycophancy that enormous?

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

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

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

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

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

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

P.S.: I have written this post under a debilitating migraine attack. So if it makes any sense blame it on my headache.

Explaining Google Art Project

GOOGLE ART PROJECT from Michael Kurcfeld on Vimeo.

Having been an early admirer of the Google Art Project, I frequent world museums frequently (frequent… frequently is deliberate). It has so far been an uplifting experience to view great masterpieces in such mega mega pixel detail.

However, I did not know that one of the movers behind the project is someone called Amit Sood. In the accompanying video Amit explains the whys and hows of the Google Art Project.

For me visiting the museums virtually is such a constructive distraction that it sometimes takes away from the main task at hand, namely writing to earn.

The Google Art Project has such enormous utility in a country like India, littered as it is with history. I am not sure if Amit has any plans to catalogue India at any stage.

What long form journalism?

It is amusing to read the Newswallah section of The New York Times’ India Ink blog recommend some “long form” journalistic pieces in the Indian print media. I say amusing because the Indian print media has no tradition of what seriously qualifies as the long form journalism. To be sure, there are some very long pieces but they tend to be quite short on journalism, if that’s what they mean.

For instance, as part of its recommendations Newswallah mentions an interview with actor Salman Khan who has had four straight back-to-back box office hits in recent months. In this example of the long form journalism a correspondent of the Outlook magazine asks the actor all of six questions. The interview’s total length (at least its web version) is 382 words long, including the lead. The other two accompanying pieces together add up to a shade more than 2600 words.

The long form journalism, as it is practiced and understood in the United States, entails often months of working a story which can run up to 10,000 words. Such stories are generally handled by seasoned journalists who have built up a sizable network of sources that they can tap into to offer a truly comprehensive view of a chosen subject. I know for a fact that the Indian print media, with extremely few exceptions, has neither the means nor the talent to produce remarkable long form stories. I am not even going to include television networks because their idea of the long form journalism is beyond risible.

Apart from the thoroughness of the content, the long form journalism necessarily requires very high readability quotient, something desperately lacking in India. I would say for every thousand pieces of the Indian long form journalism,  you would probably find one that is meets some standards of thoroughness and high readability. Even in the few cases of something approaching the long form journalism, the thoroughness-readability quotient is askew—if it is thorough, it is not readable and if it is readable it is not thorough.

Some Indian journals such as Caravan, Open and Tehelka do have elements of the long form journalism but their readership is at best limited. Also, their long form pieces do have a whiff of subterranean activism rather than deeply informed, dispassionate reporting.

US report does not explicitly predict Rahul-Modi contest

I am reproducing below a story I wrote for the IANS wire on a report on India by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), an independent research arm of the US Congress.

I wrote this story because after reading the report, which is what you do to a report, I found that it had not implied anywhere what the Indian media said it had, namely that the 2014 parliamentary elections would be a battle between Rahul Gandhi versus Narendra Modi. That construct is the Indian media’s leap from two separate references to Gandhi and Modi.

The story was published widely.

By Mayank Chhaya

Chicago, Sep 16 (IANS) The coordinator of a major new US report on India says there is no "contention, speculation or projection" in it that directly suggests that the 2014 parliamentary election would be a battle between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi.

Dr. K. Alan Kronstadt, a South Asian affairs specialist and coordinator of the report of the Congressional Research Service (CRS), an independent research arm of the US Congress, said the report is a "scholarly compendium of information from various sources that does not in any way reflect the judgment of the US Congress or government of any kind".

Brief and separate references made to Gandhi and Modi in the CRS's 98-page report titled "India: Domestic Issues, Strategic Dynamics, and U.S. Relations" have been used by sections of the Indian media to suggest as if some elements of the US official establishment expect the 2014 elections in the country to be a direct battle between the two politicians.

"Nowhere in the report is there contention, speculation or projection that the 2014 parliamentary election will be between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi," Kronstadt told IANS.

He said he has been doing reports on India and Pakistan for nine years and has often seen the media in the two countries "disingenuously" take out a line or two and make it seem as if it is a major focus. Kronstadt pointed out that Gandhi and Modi have been mentioned in two different places and in two different contexts, contrary to the impression they have been clubbed together as some of the Indian media reports create.

The reference to Modi's prime ministerial prospects on page 41 says, "At present, the BJP president is Nitin Gadkari, a former Maharashtran official known for his avid support of privatization. Although still in some disorder in 2011, there are signs that the BJP has made changes necessary to be a formidable challenger in scheduled 2014 polls. These include a more effective branding of the party as one focused on development and good governance rather than emotive, Hindutva-related issues, and Gadkari's success at quelling intra-party dissidence and, by some accounts, showing superior strategizing and organizing skills as compared to his predecessors.

"Yet among the party's likely candidates for the prime ministership in future elections is Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who has overseen impressive development successes in his state, but who is also dogged by controversy over his alleged complicity in lethal anti-Muslim rioting there in 2002 (Modi has in the past been denied a U.S. visa under an American law barring entry for foreign government officials found to be complicit in severe violations of religious freedom)."

The reference to Rahul Gandhi comes on page 46 where the report says, "The 2009 polls may have represented a coming out party of sorts for the younger Gandhi, who many expect to be put forward as Congress's prime ministerial candidate in scheduled 2014 elections. Yet this heir-apparent remains dogged by questions about his abilities to lead the party, given a mixed record as an election strategist, uneasy style in public appearances, and reputation for gaffes."

Most of what Dr. Kronstadt and his co-authors say in terms of comments of political nature is drawn from various sources, a lot of which are media stories. What the report does is distil varied amounts of information down to a perspective which US Congress members and other government agency personnel interested in the subject can easily wrap their minds around.
As a rule CRS reports are meant for consumption by US lawmakers and Congressional committees but they do occasionally get into the public domain because of analysts and think tanks. This particular report has been turned by Modi's supporters into a victory lap of sorts without paying attention to the real nature of its content. Even the praise of Modi's shepherding of Gujarat's economy is not necessarily the authors' professional endorsement nor is it the view of any US government agency but merely a reflection what the authors have gathered from many different sources.

"Perhaps India's best example of effective governance and impressive development is found in Gujarat (pop. 60 million), where controversial Chief Minister Narendra Modi has streamlined economic processes, removing red tape and curtailing corruption in ways that have made the state a key driver of national economic growth. Seeking to overcome the taint of his alleged complicity in deadly 2002 anti-Muslim riots, Modi has overseen heavy investment in modern roads and power infrastructure, and annual growth of more than 11% in recent years. The state has attracted major international investors such as General Motors and Mitsubishi and, with only 5% of the country's population, Gujarat now accounts for more than one-fifth of India's exports," the report says even as it clearly implies that the inference is drawn from a news story headlined "A Glimpse at India, Minus the Red Tape" in the Wall Street Journal of Jan 14, 2011.

The report examines India from many different regional and US-India vantage points. "With the lifting of Cold War geopolitical constraints and the near-simultaneous opening of India's economy in early 1990s, the world's largest democracy has emerged as an increasingly important player on the global stage. India dominates the geography of the now strategically vital South Asia region, and its vibrant economy, pluralist society, cultural influence, and growing military power have made the country a key focus of U.S. foreign policy attention in the 21st century", is how it begins.

--Indo-Asian News Service

Two well-fed Gujarati politicians begin their limited edition rival fasts

Two well-fed rival Gujarati politicians begin their limited edition rival fasts on Saturday in Ahmedabad. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his main antagonist Shankarsinh Vaghela, also a former chief minister, will shun food for three days. Both men have enough in their girth to shun food much longer but that is another story.

Modi’s fast is a gratuitous political stunt and Vaghela’s fast is a gratuitous political stunt against Modi’s gratuitous political stunt. Modi says he is doing it for public harmony and Vaghela says he is just doing it because Modi is doing it, sort of. Neither action means anything at all other than creating near orgasmic frenzy in the newsrooms of India’s many 24/7 television channels. For some reason I can picture the feet of news anchors rattling in the throes of near erotic pleasure under their desks at the very thought of covering the rival fasts. But that’s me, crass in the face of crisis.

As if the news channels do not have enough political circus to slobber over, the rival fasts will give them yet another opportunity to grab some precious ratings. There will be a split screen broadcast of the fasts with Modi and Vaghela inhabiting the two sides. Left to me I would have got them to fast together and engage in three days of exhaustive debating their politics. That would have created so much more gladiatorial drama.

Despite his protestations to the contrary Vaghela has become a marginal figure in Gujarat’s utterly Modi-centric politics. There may have been a time once when Vaghela the politician commanded much greater following than Modi the backroom ideologue.  But that was ten years ago. Now Modi has no serious political rival in the state. Vaghela’s fast will get any attention at all because it involves Modi somewhere.

Perhaps the only thing going for Vaghela is that he will fast on a sidewalk opposite Ahmedabad’s shrine-like Gandhi Ashram, while Modi, who faces mortal danger, will have to do it in the air-conditioned confines of a university hall which apparently charges half a million rupees a day to hire. Saturday happens to be Modi’s 61st birthday and it always helps to celebrate with a dose of bile. Vaghela turned 61 in July this year.

Bringing alive Pieter Bruegel the Elder

When I first chanced upon the works of the 16th century Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder entirely because of the Google Arts Project, it was obvious to me that a filmmaker of great visual talent would make a movie about his art someday. Someone indeed has.

Well-known Polish filmmaker Lech Majewski has chosen Bruegel’s 1564 painting ‘The Way to Cavalry’ to make ‘The Mill and The Cross.’ I thought a filmmaker might consider the painter’s another masterpiece ‘The Harvesters’ (read here) but I suppose ‘The Way to Cavalry’ offers more cinematic drama than a bunch of harvesters taking a break from that back-breaking work amid the pastoral serenity of Europe, possibly in August and September.

When it comes to cinema and literature I am occasionally susceptible to style over substance. It is no surprise that I am immediately drawn to the stunning aesthetics of this movie on the basis of its trailer. The movie is both about the painting as well as how Bruegel the Elder, played by Rutger Hauer, created it.

“From the more than five hundred figures that fill Bruegel’s canvas, The Mill & The Cross focuses on a dozen characters whose life stories unfold and intertwine in a panoramic landscape populated by villagers and red-caped horsemen. We are invited to live inside the aesthetic universe of the painting as we watch Bruegel himself at work on his canvas, weaving the web of his painting and piecing together his sketches,” explains the movie’s blurb.

Polish filmmaker Lech Majewski

Rahul Gandhi versus Narendra Modi

Rahul Gandhi, left, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi (Rahul pic:  http://www.congress.org.in/new/, Modi pic: http://www.narendramodi.in/)

It is not as if the Congressional Research Service (CRS), an independent research arm of the US Congress, is saying anything startlingly revelatory by suggesting that the 2014 Indian election may see Rahul Gandhi versus Narendra Modi.

For Rahul it has been a fait accompli for over a decade now that he would be positioned as India’s prime minister at some point unless Nature intervenes or he demurs. For Modi it has been a little more complicated, but there have been enough signs that his political trajectory might take him there as well unless, of course, Nature intervenes or he demurs.

That said, let me also say that India is not Gujarat and while Modi may have many admirers nationwide, they certainly do not constitute a critical mass to guarantee him popular acceptance throughout the country. In a sense, Modi is the quintessential provincial politician whose political success is a direct result of his shared cultural predilections and prejudices with a particular region. The rest of India is a whole different ballgame.

Although he can successfully scale his image as a no non-sense and highly efficient facilitator of economic growth from the state to the nation, he has to factor in formidable antipathies, resentments and rivalries that are bound to gather not just outside his own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) but within it as well. Even if he manages to bury the ghosts of his own questionable conduct during the 2002 violent social breakdown,he can never fully excise it from his resume.

In comparison with Modi, Rahul’s appeal is clearly more national and less fractious, but it is also more wishy-washy. As of now Rahul can probably sway many more Indians in his favor than Modi could ever hope to. However, we still have nearly three years before the 2014 election. In a profession where one hour can disrupt best laid plans, three years are inordinately long. At the same time though, if any of these men is serious about his national aspirations three years are not so long.

The national Indian electorate is by temperament moderate and it does not like to put someone as divisive and gloves-off as Modi in charge. So even when they gave the BJP the mandate to rule first in 1996 and then 1998, they made sure they were getting Atal Behari Vajpayee as prime minister.

If Modi has any prime ministerial ambitions and presuming that he was not directly involved in orchestrating and sustaining anti-Muslim firestorm in 2002 in the aftermath of the equally gruesome killings of 58 Hindus, then he has to do some profound image repair in the next three years. He should have publicly apologized to the Muslim community in February, 2002. With that apology his subsequent nine years as chief minister, which have been without any communal conflagration and with identifiable economic prosperity, could have made him a credible choice. While the claims of Gujarat’s economic growth have many skeptics, Modi’s refusal to even consider a public apology is a bigger problem. It suggests a small-minded satrap.

Even as I write this, I have a lurking feeling that despite his obvious image problem Modi may still be able to make a race of it, should he choose to go for prime minister in 2014. The India of 2014 will not be the India of 2002. Tens of millions of new voters would have been added to the rolls who would have no real memory, not to mention a sense of outrage, about Modi’s conduct during the systematically organized violence. They might see Modi as an attractive option after ten years of the Congress Party-led ruling coalition under Manmohan Singh.

Rahul betrays the laidback ease of someone who is comfortable in the knowledge that with the bare minimum effort he can become the country’s prime minister simply because everything else, mainly political lineage, is in place. In contrast, Modi comes across as a scrappy street fighter who takes nothing for granted.

Revisiting the Ilyas Kashmiri story a bit

Ilyas Kashmiri as cited as a government exhibit in a Chicago federal court

When Al Qaeda/Harkat ul Jihad al Islami leader Ilyas Kashmiri was killed for the second time on June 3 this year during a drone strike on an orchard in South Waziristan, I had wondered whether Mumbai terror plotter David Coleman Headley’s may have helped the US with his coordinates.

My inference was drawn from the fact that Headley, now in prison awaiting sentencing for his role in the November, 2008 Mumbai terrorist strikes, was in regular contact with Kashmiri and may have provided significant actionable intelligence about his location to the US authorities. But it could well turn out that the source of Kashmir’s whereabouts may not have been Headley.

The more likely lead about Kashmiri, regarded as one of the most intelligent guerilla warfare minds within Islamist terror central, may have come from the murdered Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad. In an excellent long form story in New Yorker about Shahzad’s murder sometime between May 29 and May 30, Dexter Filkins suggests that possibility.

“Given the brief time that passed between Shahzad’s death and Kashmiri’s, a question inevitably arose: Did the Americans find Kashmiri on their own? Or did they benefit from information obtained by the I.S.I. during its detention of Shahzad? If so, Shahzad’s death would be not just a terrible example of Pakistani state brutality; it would be a terrible example of the collateral damage sustained in America’s war on terror.

If the C.I.A. killed Kashmiri using information extracted from Shahzad, it would not be the first time that the agency had made use of a brutal interrogation.”

Kashmiri is one of the seven names in the second superseding indictment that charges them with involvement both the Mumbai case as well as the abortive attack on the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten which published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed offensive to Muslims in September, 2005. It was that indictment that led the partial conviction of Chicago physician of Pakistani origin Tahawwur Hussain Rana in June. Headley’s was the key prosecution testimony during the Rana trial.

My surmise then was that as eager, and perhaps even desperate, as Headley was to offer the US authorities a truly big catch he might have said things that led to Kashmiri. While that possibility still exists, in light of what Filkin reports it appears more compelling that Shahzad may have given that information.

Although Filkin takes note of the fact that Headley had identified Kashmiri as a “key terrorist planner” during his testimony in Chicago, he also reports that Pakistani investigators found on Shahzad’s cell phone more than 250 phone calls to and from a single number during a one-month period. Guess whom that number belonged to? Apparently, Ilyas Kashmiri.

I would be interested to find out whether Headley ever came in Shahzad’s orbit.

P.S.: The reports of Kashmiri’s first killing in a drone strike in September, 2009, turned out to be inaccurate as accurately exposed by Shahzad.

P.P.S.: A plug for my book on the Chicago trial. It is coming along well.

India, pompadour and the New York Times

It is a no-brainer that The New York Times has introduced its first-ever country specific site about India. In a country where people still eat samosas wrapped in a three-day-old newspaper and then read that very oil streaked page as if it was fresh off the presses, it makes perfect business sense to have a dedicated news and views site.

The Times knows it can build up a sizable web readership fairly quickly and then leverage it for ad revenues sometime in the future. “India Ink will provide more in-depth, on-the-ground coverage of the world’s biggest democracy — and of a people who know that no matter how far they roam, their hearts will always be Indian,” the paper says in a short explanation about what the site will do.

As is my wont, I quickly focused on something trivial but telling. Even after accounting for extra artistic creativity, one cannot help but notice that the site’s India map illustration not only shows Kashmir as part of the Indian territory but even gives it a distinct pompadour. If you translate that pompadour into actual territory, it would give India an extra few hundred square miles of Pakistan and China. Also, notice that two small islands have popped out of the Arabian Sea off the coast of Gujarat, closer to the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay).

All that should make the Indian government quite happy given how anal its faceless bureaucrats get about how the country’s geographical boundaries are represented in the Western media. The general tradition among the Western media is to hive off the Indian map in the Kashmir region somewhere along the Line of Control. India has for decades seized and tried to individually correct journals that she thinks distort its territorial spread.

I am sure it is my hyper expository mind that makes me see something more than just an artistic illustration here. When I see the Indian map I get the feeling as if India’s body language has that new found swagger which says, “I am here and I am freer.” The pompadour over Kashmir only accentuates that effect. And finally, one also gets the sense that the map may breakout into a Bollywood dance any moment.

9/11/01 to 9/11/11

I was up at my normal 5 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST), reading the San Jose Mercury News sitting on the carpeted floor of my apartment in Fremont, California.

It was 8 a.m. in New York and America was still in love with herself, having ridden a spectacular ride to prosperity fueled by the technology boom in Silicon Valley. Until that morning the worst that could happen was that a young upstart founder of a tech startup might make $100 million in cash and not $150 million after selling his company in a half hour over drinks with a venture capitalist at a bar in Santa Clara.

It was a measure of how surreal the times were until that morning that barely a year earlier I had managed to raise a multimillion dollar VC investment in a span of about three and a half minutes to start a publishing and media company. In short, any fool with a reasonably good idea could raise foolish amounts of money. America believed in herself with uncritical frenzy.

Then around quarter to six (I think it was 5.46 a.m. PST and 8.46 EST to be precise) CNN started reporting a possible plane crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The early word was unclear as to how big the plane was and how it found its way to this very prominent cluster of buildings in New York. Within the next couple of hours or so despite the toxic mix of soot and dust that rumbled through streets near the World Trade Center, it was clear that America had been torn from her hinges.

Being a Tuesday one would have been at work by 8 a.m. but it made no sense for a journalist to do anything else in light of what was unfolding in New York and Washington. I remember clearly being struck by how the events in New York and Washington were at once both extremely local and yet so global. The natural instinct was to see if one could catch the next flight to New York but as it turned out the air traffic had been frozen in the immediate aftermath of the crashes because of the apprehensions that more planes may have been hijacked. The only option was to do some side stories. I did not do any because who cared about anything else that day?

An entrepreneur friend had scheduled a news conference to announce a second round of funding for his startup. When he called to ask me what he should do, I said, “Need I even tell you?”

Notwithstanding the enormity of what had happened in New York and Washington, life in Fremont felt eerily humdrum for the rest of 9/11. And by that I mean the newly arrived families of H1B techie visa holders were still seen commandeering carts from the neighborhood stores and bringing them home loaded with groceries.

There is a lot one can say about the immediate aftermath on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 but it would be best to introduce you to this fascinating PBS program on how secretive America became.

 

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.