South Asia Daily

India’s “unhappiest” city

All surveys are bogus because people tailor their response depending on the situation they are in. The same question can prompt two diametrically opposite answers a few hours apart. Hence, I am not sure if one could take the results of any survey seriously.

That said, I am amused by the findings of the Outlook-Club Mahindra Happiness Survey 2011 which among other things say that Ahmedabad is India’s unhappiest city. Only 8.8 percent responded favorably to the question “Are you very happy?”, while 42.1 percent said they are happy and 48.3 percent said they were neither happy nor unhappy, 0.8 percent said they were unhappy and no one said they were very unhappy.

Let me tell you a little secret about the people of the city where I was born and raised. One important reason why only 8.8 percent of those surveyed said they are “very happy” was because the rest would have reasoned that saying so might mean someone would send them a bill later.

Outlook misses out on perhaps the most striking part of the findings. Over 42 percent say they are happy and over 48 percent say they are neither happy nor unhappy. I do not know about other cities but in Ahmedabad the response neither happy nor unhappy is particularly illustrative of the way its citizens think. It is indicative of the city’s often painful pragmatism.

The most frequently heard exchange in the city (as elsewhere in Gujarat) is “Kem chho? "(How are you?) and the answer “Majama.” Now, Majama literally means happy. However, it can also mean ‘I am fine’, ‘I am okay’, ‘I am not fine but I am okay’, ‘I am okay but wish I was happier’, ‘I am not okay but will be okay’, ‘I am fine but don’t know why’ or even ‘I am neither fine nor okay but so what?’ 

Another commonly heard exchange is “Kem chhe badhun?’ (How’s everything?) and the response, “Bas, baraabar.” (It’s alright). Like many such responses it is not supposed to accurately reflect the state of affairs. When someone says ‘Bas, baraaabar’ it does not necessarily mean that everything is alright. The guy may have lost a couple of million bucks that morning in a stock market crash but he might still say ‘Bas, baraabar.’ These responses are more aspirational than actual.

My point is if only 0.8 percent said they were unhappy and no one among the surveyed said they were very unhappy, how does that make Ahmedabad the unhappiest city in India? All that the survey tells, if it tells me anything at all, is that Amdavadis are cautious and understated. If you know Ahmedabad, that is certainly not breaking news even in a country where everything is breaking news.

The same survey also found that over 75 percent of the Ahmedabad sample said not having money makes them very unhappy, which is way higher than any other major city surveyed. My counter to that would be to ask the question ‘What makes you very unhappy?’ even as you give them Rs. 100,000 cash. The chances are that it would produce the same result.

Let me come back to my original contention that all surveys in India are bogus and add that analyzing them, like the way I have done it here, is equally bogus. Treat them the way Amdavadis treat jalebi and fafda—as a meaningless indulgence.

I am switching to neutrinos; light is so 21st century

Illustration: Mayank Chhaya

You don’t get pulled over and ticketed on the cosmic highway if you travel faster than the speed of light. You get raised on a pedestal and stared at in absolute awe because you have just violated perhaps physics’ most important law.

For the second time in less than two months scientists at the world’s leading particle physics facility, CERN in Switzerland along with those at the Gran Sasso Lab of Italy have yet again found that neutrinos, the electrically neutral particles that roam the universe without interacting with anything, do indeed travel faster than the speed of light.

The finding seems to clearly defy perhaps physics’ most inviolable law that nothing with any mass can travel faster than the speed of light according to Albert Einstein. Despite the two findings reached by using two batches of neutrinos fired in two varying bursts from point A to point B over a distance of 730 kilometers underground suggesting that the particles travel faster than light, scientists are in no hurry to mothball Einsteinian physics. They want more experiments in order to produce more widespread matching results before they declare that light has been breached.

It is still possible that the results reflect some inaccuracies arising out of equipment wear and tear. When one is talking measurements in the billionth of a second, who could say for sure what is causing the infinitesimal variation? It is absolutely essential that scientists get this right because the speed of light as the ultimate speed has been the bedrock of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

The finding is unlikely to affect those who lead a humdrum existence, which is pretty much the whole sentient world. However, for those who want to understand the fundamentals of the universe this could be as big a change as there is every likely to be until, of course, some more comes along.

While particle physicists go about confirming their results, I have decided to switch to neutrinos. Light is so 21st century. The only problem is neutrinos do not illuminate anything. They just pass right through everything and everyone. Come to think of it, that may not be such a bad idea. Imagine walking right through life without reacting to anything.

US, China and Myanmar

On his current Asia visit President Barack Obama seems motivated by the wish to needle and discomfit China. Earlier in the week Obama announced that up to 2500 US marines will be permanently stationed in Australia. The base will be near Darwin at the northern tip of Australia, giving the Americans a crucial strategic oversight in the Asia-Pacific region.

Obama was candid in saying, “This region is of great strategic importance to us” said Obama. “We will make sure we are able to fulfill our leadership role in the Asia Pacific region.”

Specifically referring to China he said, “We will send a clear message to them that we think they may need to be on track, in terms of accepting the rules and responsibilities of being a world power.”

Just two days after that announcement, the Obama administration is now exploring possibilities of entering China’s backyard in Myanmar. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will travel to Myanmar on December 1 in the midst of what the US believes to be clear signs of positive changes in the resources rich country.  This will be the first visit by a major US official to Myanmar, also known as Burma, in 50 years.

China has been possibly the strongest supporter of the military junta in Myanmar for a long time. It is a measure of how deep the Sino-Myanmarese engagement has been that bilateral trade jumped over 50 percent in 2010 to $4.4 billion, while Chinese investment there is said to be over $12 billion as of 2010. Myanmar has been long known to be oil and natural gas rich and for China there could not be an easier energy resource to tap.

The US decision to engage Myanmar is clearly aimed at Beijing, and fact that it comes within days of Washington’s decision to create a permanent Marine base in Australia shows that the US wants to keep the Asian giant in check on its own turf.

Once again India, which had also kept up its relationships both with the Myanmarese military as well as the democratic movement, has been found falling short of underscoring its own longstanding ties. Although the people of Myanmar are not known to be that favorably disposed towards the Chinese, the military leadership has forged strong ties with Beijing which may not be that easily reduced.

In short, great powers continue to be in each others’ way at the cost of smaller and compliant countries.

Revisiting ‘Shatranj ke Khlidai’ for the nth time

When I first watched Satyajit Ray’s largely underrated but charmingly addictive 1977 film ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ (The Chess Players), the first thing I did was to go out and have a paan. I was 17 (I saw it a year after it was released) and could be forgiven for choosing the most obvious symbolism in the movie.

The two central characters in the film, Mirza Sajjad Ali (Sanjeev Kumar) and Mir Roshan Ali (Saeed Jaffery), both heirs to diminishing aristocracies, spend their entire days playing chess. As they plot their next move they would delicately pluck paans dangling from tiny silver chains and slip them into their mouths. Jaffery’s character would conclude the ritual by sprinkling some powder (presumably a mix of cardamom powder and clove) from a tiny metal box. The whole effect was so irresistible for me that thirty years down the line I still get the fragrance in my nose.

The movie contrasted the easy decadence of Awadh’s nawabi culture as symbolized by Wajid Ali Shah (brilliantly played by Amjad Khan) with the very businesslike imperialism of the colonial British officers such as General James Outram (a meanly effective Richard Attenborough). My sense is that when people speak of Ray’s oeuvre they studiedly push aside this movie. I have never quite understood the reluctance. It remains one of my most watched Ray films because it captures the fading and sharpening rulers of the time rather compellingly.

Early on in the film, there is an exchange between General Outram and his aide de camp Captain Weston (Tom Alter). What I found particularly striking was the way General Outram is building up a case for Wajid Ali Shah’s ouster by discussing his daily routine and showing how ineffectual he is. The urgency of an imperialist and the leisureliness of a nawab come out very well in this scene. Amitabh Bachchan’s narration setting up the scene too works exactly the way it should.

 

 

It is not so much the movie’s cinematic merit that gets me as the the general air of slow-acting decadence in the face of a colonial onslaught. General Outram’s bafflement with the way Wajid Ali Shah rules Awadh by not really ruling it is at the heart of the conflict between the two.

I like everything about the film, including this little scene (see at the top of the post) where Munshi Nandlal (David Abraham) says of chess, “Baadshahon ka khel hai huzoor, Khelon ka baadshah (It is the game of kings and the king of games).”

India, Australia and uranium

Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard (Pic:http://www.pm.gov.au/)

Australia’s decision to overturn its policy of not selling uranium to India is being seen by some as coming under US influence. President Barack Obama, however, rejects that notion out of hand.

"We have not had any influence, I suspect, on Australia's decision to explore what its relationship in terms of the peaceful use of nuclear energy in India might be," Obama said at a news conference on his arrival in Melbourne yesterday.

The decision to overturn the policy was in a sense announced by Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard in a newspaper article. She wrote that "it is time for (ruling) Labor to modernise our platform and enable us to strengthen our connection with dynamic, democratic India".

"We will not sell India uranium for peaceful purposes - though Canada is preparing to - while policy allows us to export it to countries such as China, Japan and the United States," Gillard wrote.

"I don't think Julia or anybody else needs my advice in figuring that out," Obama was quoted as saying.

"I will watch with interest what's determined.”

"But this is not something between the US and Australia... this is something between India and Australia,” he said.

Despite President Obama’s assertion it is possible that at the very least his administration may have very gently encouraged it to revisit the policy.

In recent years Australia has been assiduously courting India as the latter has risen in its economic influence and commensurately in its geopolitical influence. It makes perfect sense for Australia to warm up to one of the two most decisive economies of the world right now.

Privilege is incestuous

Brian Williams (Pic: screen grab from: msnbc.com)

There is every possibility that this post would come across as unnecessarily harsh. That has never been an obstacle in my path before. So here goes.

Superstar news anchor Brian Williams says Chelsea Clinton "possesses an uncommon understanding of humanity." As opposed to us commoners who possess a common understanding of humanity, I suppose. Privilege always engages in incest with privilege. Privilege is incestuous.

I would be interested to find out how Williams has reached such a grandiose conclusion. We get it that the only daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton has just been hired as a special correspondent by NBC News, and Williams, as the most high profile face of the network, has to package her as a brilliant humanist who brings insights to human discourse which have sorely lacked so far. I am sure Chelsea’s privileged upbringing has given her a perspective that most of us have not had the privilege to have. But still, “an uncommon understanding of humanity”? Really?

It is obvious that Brian Williams is an outstanding television journalist who anchors news with rare facility. He also possesses an uncommon comedic talent as he displays time to time on various late night shows. He has the Cary Grant good looks and bearing that compel attention. All this is good stuff. And more power to him.

But to think that merely because a few million people watch his television news elevates him to a perch high in the sky is to forget that there are more than 300 million people in America and seven billion in the world, not to mention 100 billion stars in our mediocre galaxy and over 100 billion galaxies in a universe that is about 14 billion years old. And it may turn out that ours is only a slice in a multiverse where they may be as many massive universes with as many galaxies and stars and planets and sentient beings who might also possess an uncommon understanding of their sentient life. Phew! Calm down, Mr. Chhaya. But I am just saying.

P.S.: In a promotional video for his new news show ‘Rock Center’ Williams says of his team, “There is not a team on earth that can match the team we have assembled.” So there. To that team he has added someone with an uncommon understanding of humanity.

Dr. Har Gobind Khorana, 1922-2011

Dr. Har Gobind Khorana (Pic: MIT News)

When I was a student of science in the late 1970s Dr. Har Gobind Khorana was often held up by my professors in Ahmedabad as the gold standard one must aspire to reach.

However, every time I asked them what it was that he did to win his 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, the professors would fumble and stumble. Some of them would grumble at having been asked to give more details and then offer a jumble of words. The most common explanation was that he discovered genes which he did not.

His Nobel Prize was given for his “interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis". He shared it with Robert W. Holley and Marshall W. Nirenberg. With considerable scientific liberty it may be said that Dr. Khorana and the other two scientists independently helped crack some of the code of life.

The announcement of his death on MIT News says this: “Khorana devoted much of his scientific career to unraveling the genetic code and the mechanisms by which nucleic acids give rise to proteins.”

I tried reading Dr. Khorana’s Nobel Prize lecture but largely failed to understand its content enough to break it down into something I can share in this post. It was hardly surprising that my professors thought it would be easier to just tell me that he discovered genes. In precise terms he has been described as a “creator of new methods to produce synthetic nucleic acids.”

His death in Concord, Massachusetts on November 10, concludes a fascinating life that began in 1922 in Raipur, a village in Punjab which is now part of Pakistan. His father was a patwari, “an agricultural taxation clerk”,  who although poor, “was dedicated to educating his children and we were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people,” as Dr. Khorana wrote after wining the Nobel Prize.

Since it is always easier to blame others, let me say that part of the reason why I did not became a scientist (physicist to be precise) was because my professors could not explain with any degree of accuracy what Dr. Khorana won the Nobel Prize for. Instead I became a journalist who would one day write a 373 word post about him.

The king of not so good times

Dr. Vijay Mallya (Pic: www.theubgroup.com)

Indian business tycoon Vijay Mallya is discovering that it is never a good idea to fly under the influence, in a manner of speaking. His business mainstay after all is liquor because his UB Group controls half of India’s beer market and three-fourths of the liquor market.

Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines, which the hedonist businessman has run with his characteristic flamboyance reminiscent of Richard ‘Virgin’ Branson, is, to use a tired cliché, caught in a massive air pocket. Aviation industry experts say it desperately needs $400 million right away to pay for fuel, staff and maintenance. The fate of the airline has become a political debate in the past few days with talk of banks being asked to throw Mallya a lifeline.

The basic question is whether Kingfisher should be allowed to meet whatever fate the free market economy will hand to a failing business or the government should step in to bail it out. Nothing would make Dr. Mallya happier than to get some state-run banks to cough up more money. Depending on whom you believe the fault for the airline’s failure is either on the government or Dr. Mallya’s profligate management style.

The airline management would argue it is a combination of factors, including the rising aviation fuel cost and the Indian government’s requirement that airlines also mandatorily service routes that do not make profit, that is responsible for the industry wide crisis. The government and other independent experts say the problem is deeper than that and goes to the way some of these airlines are run.

It is no secret that Dr. Mallya likes the good life as much as the next guy (It is the second consecutive day on which I have used this expression), but sometimes he likes it way much more. However, that is neither here nor there. He can do what he wants in his personal life. That should have no bearing on how his businesses are run. Speaking of his personal lifestyle (he is known as the “King of good Times”) I used to see him ten years ago in San Francisco, particularly at the Indian consulate-general’s independence day celebrations. He would invariably arrive in his Rolls Royce chauffeured by a white liveried driver. He had the bearing of someone who genuinely believed he owned whichever space he passed through. I don’t say this as a judgment or criticism but merely as a personal observation.

I always got the sense looking at him that if you argued too much with him he might whip out a check book and buy you cash down. Not that he has ever done that as far as I know but that is the bearing he has. Does it have anything to do with his current crisis? May be so. It is not all that unusual for the boss’s personal approach to life rubbing off on to the business. The basic premise of Dr. Mallya’s main business is that people would get drunk on his brands of beer and hard liquor and would want to drink some more. In that mix he throws in his much celebrated and ogled at Kingfisher calendar of uniformly sexy girls. (Mind you, the calendar is not a serious business). And then there is the airline.

On a more serious note, I have not been able to square the woes of India’s aviation industry with the fact that the country has for at least a decade posted an annual economic growth in excess of 8.5 percent. It is safe to presume that an economy growing at that pace would see a very large number of people flying around which in turn should translate into a solid business for the airlines. Since Kingfisher has been frequently projected as India’s leading premier carrier, it is baffling where the problem is.

Here is the summary from the airline’s latest annual report.

I will let you know when I have figured out what is causing all the turbulence.

Painting on a whim

I understand painting as much as the next guy, if the next guy also happens to be me. Yesterday, quite on a whim, I began painting using a combination of tools, none of which is physical, and ended up creating what you see above.

It is hard to believe that the painting started with the random squiggle below.

 

The final painting took about half an hour to emerge. Not that I was working towards a defined visual goal but in the end it has turned out to be what my friend Rupa Chatterjee so perceptively calls, “organic. As though it'll come to life in seconds.” She is right. It has that embryonic feel.

I had originally intended to produce six or so works as a series and wanted to project them as those by an anonymous painter whom I happened to stumble upon. The idea was to create a bit of fiction about this promising new talent whose identity I cannot establish. But now that the cat is out of the bag I will occasionally use these columns to plug myself. Here is one more work which is actually manipulation of a photograph I took.

Here is to Sadhana

Sadhana

I don’t think Ramlal Nagar in the Mani Nagar area of Ahmedabad, where I spent some formative time of my early childhood, still exists. Prosperity has most likely effaced it.

The only reason Ramlal Nagar escaped being called a slum was because it was in the midst of many that resembled it. When every one is poor there is nothing to contrast one’s poverty against. So you do not really know that you are poor. Poverty then was not so sharply defined as it is now.

We, a family of five, lived in a single room which was nothing more than a space enclosed by four walls and aired out by a couple of windows. The bathroom and toilet were shared with others in this strip housing. I remember our next door neighbor was Chinubhai the barber. In the social milieu of the 1960s it was bad enough to be a hajaam or barber. What was worse for the puritanical was living next to one. Sharing the toilet with one represented such a low that it was not even mentioned in passing. Mercifully, my family did not believe in this non-sense.

There is a point to all this in so much as it sets up the scene. Although life was not as dreary as it sounds, there were things that gave it an element of fantasy and escapism. The actress Sadhana was a huge part of things that represented possibilities in life; in particular, a song from her hit 1964 movie ‘Rajkumar’ with Shammi Kapoor, which kept playing in what seemed like a weekly loop. It was “Aaja aai bahar dil hai” composed by Shankar-Jaikishan, sung by Lata Mangeshkar and written by Shailendra.

If I give it a lag time of one year in keeping with the slowness of the era, the movie and the song had reached my city in 1965. Forty six years later, you can wake me up at 2.38 a.m. in Naperville and and ask me to sing and I would do so without any compunction. The funny thing is I remember this only as a song and a poster because until today I have not seen the movie directed by K Shankar.

 

Strangely, the other morning I was awakened by the very song at 2.38 a.m.. As I began my work that day I began it with a visit to YouTube to watch it. Sadhana, who looked sensational to a boy not even five yet, remains a ravishing figure at 50. (I am 50, I mean. She is not.)

 

In retrospect, with some unconscious altering of personal history I get the feeling that it was Sadhana who made living in Ramlal Nagar bearable. It was not so much her as the poster and a disembodied voice of Lata Mangeshkar that wafted through the air as it emanated from a gramophone record. It was only much later into my boyhood that I connected Sadhana and the movie with the song.

The only way I can end this post is by telling you that I saw the actual video of the song for the first time in my life just two days ago.