South Asia Daily

Time for reform in China

Chen Guangcheng (Illustration: MC)

A series of disparate events has exposed internal dissensions and fractures in China in recent months which could force the political leadership of the country to introduce significant reform.

The dramatic escape of the blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng and his reported custody with the US embassy in Beijing caps off other seemingly unconnected events that have the potential to force the issue of reform.

Chen’s escape, which is now seriously weighing down US-China bilateral relations as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton leaves for Beijing today, comes on the heels of the murder of a British businessman, Neil Haywood over a business dispute. That the wife of Bo Xilai, a once rapidly rising star of China’s tightly controlled political ascension, has been implicated in Haywood’s murder, is causing great embarrassment. There are also reports of China’s President Hu Jintao having been wiretapped by Bo and those close to him.The unraveling of Bo’s career only adds to the drama. Then there was the case of a police chief seeking asylum in the United States.

The Communist Party could consider these events as separate developments rather than treating them as a symptom of a much deeper malaise but it can also use them to carry out serious reform. It is tempting to see them as not representing a trend compounded only by widespread corruption. One way is to resolve them individually without so much as acknowledging that they are part of a growing pattern. But that would be self-serving and eventually counterproductive. The more mature approach would be to recognize them for what they are and put in place reform of the kind China’s Premier Wen Jiabao is said to favor.

All tightly controlled societies can appear deceptively solid but they invariably have deep cracks that only those living inside know about. Such societies have a way of coming apart by a single act of protest of the kind Chen was engaged in against forced abortions and sterilization. That is because societal pressures have built up for so long that even a minor rupture in the edifice could open the floodgates.

My personal interest in China is more by implication than by conscious choice because of my more specific interest in Tibet. Admittedly, I operate on very thin scholarship but even that tells me that the ferment of the kind in China one reads about these days does speak of subterranean tensions that could upend the decades of tight control.

The Chinese leadership can perhaps justifiably argue that their approach has produced near miraculous economic growth of the kind the world has never seen. Even if one takes the merit of that argument at its face value, it is time to build on that solid foundation and begin to offer ordinary Chinese citizens the kinds of freedom that would ensure that the country’s economic success is sustained and becomes more evenly spread.

3D printing and Singularity

Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil’s fascinating prediction about the imminent onset of technological singularity, the idea that nonbiological intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence, has been on my mind for some time.

It was primarily prompted by my son Jashn’s recent school assignment on the subject. I vaguely knew about it before that but I was more familiar with singularity in the context of physics, the kind that is supposed to be at the center of black holes. To put it unforgivably simplistically, at the center of a black hole all our conceptions of geometrical structures in space and time collapse. It is practically impossible to predict what reality could be in an environment where volume is zero and density infinite and nothing, even light, can escape.

Kurzweil’s singularity, however, is closer home and relatively mundane as it describes how nonbiological systems such as computers are growing so much in power and complexity that human intelligence will find it exponentially harder to keep up until a point is reached where it will be overwhelmed. I know the feeling because I reached that stage in the 1960s, soon after I was born.

On his website he describes singularity thus: “Nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle. We’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it. That will mark the Singularity.”

As you can see, the black hole singularity of the kind I first heard about a long time ago is of a mindnumbingly higher order. (On a much lower intellectual note, my ordinary desktop just told me that there is no word like “mindnumbingly” which is superfluous while talking about singularities—gravitational or technological.)

Ever since I came to know about 3D printers, which actually let you print physical objects in three dimensions, I have been thinking about their consequences. What if, for instance, they equip themselves with so much  intelligence that they are able to design and manufacture robots embedded with artificial intelligence way more advanced than ours? A gigantic 3D printing complex belching out robots in whatever design aesthetics it wants to is indeed a mindnumbing thought. If I were to predict how technological singularity might occur, I would say it would be 3D printers outprinting human reproduction.

Such robots may not even need external nourishment such as food the way we do. They would be like perpetual machines that create and consume energy within themselves to remain in perpetual motion. These robots may choose to fraternize with humans and create a peculiar variety of cyborgs in order to help humans upgrade their own limited biological system.

One can go on speculating endlessly about what might happen but Kurzweil sets a specific date for technological singularity to happen. “I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”

I will be 84 in in 2045 if I manage to successfully run the gauntlet of life between now and then. If I do survive, I will be able to see whether Kurzweil’s prediction comes true. As for Kurzweil, who will be 97, given his cerebral trajectory he would have long created his own hybrid version retrofitted with enough artificial intelligence to deal with singularity.

A nearly superannuated terrorist and his aphrodisiac

Who can fault a nearly superannuated terrorist with three wives, bent on destroying the infidel world, for needing a little aphrodisiac? It must have been hard to keep up for Osama Bin Laden with all the banging at home and blowing up outside.

According to an upcoming book by CNN’s Peter Bergen, a widely respected authority on Al Qaeda generally and Bin Laden particularly, the man’s preferred aphrodisiac was Avena syrup. We are told that Avena syrup is like natural Viagra made from wild oats, a large quantity of which was found in bin Laden’s compound at Abbottabad nearly Islamabad.

The book, “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden -- from 9/11 to Abbottabad” is set for release on May 1 to coincide with the first anniversary of Bin Laden’s killing. According to the Washington Examiner, which has reported about the book, Bin Laden also dyed his hair using ‘Just For Men.’

I have it on authority that he never mixed up the two, meaning he did not consume ‘Just For Men’ and apply Avena to his beard. That would not have been pleasant to say the least, although being a natural sweetener the wives might have liked it on his beard.

What the disclosure means is that despite all the destructive grandiloquence of a blood-soaked religious war, these are ordinary horny men in search of a longer lasting hard-on. In Bin Laden’s defense (horrifying that one would ever use that expression), he had to also think about his afterlife where much greater pleasures awaited him going by his beliefs.

Bergen quotes a source as saying that Bin Laden was “vain”. I wonder whether one needed a source to conclude that unless his vanity was being discussed in the context of him dying his beard.

“Sam, believe me, I haven’t taken a penny”

The late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, left in white, with Sam Pitroda, middle (Pic: ‘Sam Pitroda: A Biography' - Konark Publishers)

With India’s signature arms purchase payoff scandal, the Bofors gun deal, being politically resurrected after over a quarter century, I thought it might be useful to revisit the pages of my first book that very briefly touched upon it.

It was in the 1992 biography of technology guru Sam Pitroda that I detailed a conversation between him and then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi about the very subject of the Bofors deal. It was important for me that Pitroda spoke about whether the two ever discussed it because their professional association and personal friendship grew even as Gandhi battled the scandal which eventually dislodged him. He never quite recovered from that despite protestations of his innocence and was assassinated on May 21, 1991, by a Tamil Tigers suicide bomber.

Rather than paraphrasing the particular passage from the book I have attached it here in full. I thought it was interesting that Gandhi pretty much said what Sten Lindstrom, a former police chief of Sweden investigating the allegations of kickbacks in the deal, has just said in his interview. The conversation between Gandhi and Pitroda took place in October, 1989, at the height of the controversy.

 

Bofors saga: a new twist and a story retold

The late Indian American publisher Gopal Raju

The disclosure by Sten Lindstrom, a former police chief of Sweden, that names of the Bachchans, actor Amitabh and businessman brother Ajitabh, were “planted” by Indian investigators in India’s biggest arms purchase kickback scandal a quarter century ago brings back several memories for me personally.

As the chief South Asia correspondent and one of the two decision makers along with editor-in-chief Tarun Basu of the wire service India Abroad News Service (now Indo-Asian News Service) or IANS I was right in the middle of reporting this politically incendiary story.

The following comment that I wrote for IANS and distributed worldwide today retells some of the details of those rather vicious days in New Delhi. The Bachchans justifiably feel vindicated by Lindstrom’s disclosure, although they have had to endure the slander for a long time.

 

By Mayank Chhaya

A callow prime minister, a global superstar, shadowy international arms dealers, crafty middlemen and nosy journalists were the dramatis personae of a real life political thriller that played out in New Delhi, Stockholm, London and New York over a quarter century ago.

Of all the names crowding India's biggest and most notorious arms purchase scandal at that time, the most incongruous ones were those of actor Amitabh Bachchan and his younger brother Ajitabh.

Through a series of complicated innuendoes and stage whispers it was let known to obliging journalists that the Bachchans, particularly Ajitabh, were among the recipients of the Rs.640 million (about $53 million at the mid-1980s exchange rate of Rs. 12 to a dollar) Bofors gun bribery payoff. The actor himself, stung stiff by the sheer absurdity of the campaign against him and his brother, reacted with ferocious contempt and went to remarkable lengths to clear his and his family's name.

On Jan 31, 1990, the Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish daily newspaper, reported that Swiss authorities had frozen an account belonging to Ajitabh Bachchan into which Bofors commissions were transferred from a coded account. That story was vigorously denied and challenged by the Bachchans, eventually compelling the paper to retract, apologize and settle saying they had been misled by Indian government sources.

With former police chief of Sweden, Sten Lindstrom, asserting in an interview with the media watchdog website The Hoot that the Bachchans' names were "planted" by Indian investigators, a can of worms has been reopened on how the actor and his family were victimized in a vicious political game. Despite Lindstrom's revelations, India is none the wiser about the real motivations behind dragging the actor's name into it. At the time the most educated guess, which endures until today, was that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was being attacked politically via the soft target of the Bachchans.

The Bachchans' efforts to clear their name included a libel lawsuit against the former avatar of this wire service, India Abroad News Service, and its New York-based parent India Abroad Publications.

The suit by the Bachchans was filed and won in a British high court, enforcing its award on the New York-based India Abroad Publications and its owner, the late Gopal Raju. It became one of America's most cited cases of the freedom of speech and the press under the First Amendment of the US constitution, widely written about and supported in the Supreme Court of New York by mainstream American media as amici curiae that included the New York Times, Associated Press, Time Warner, CBS, Association of American Publishers, Reader's Digest, etc.

The cause of the libel suit against the publication and the wire service was the fact that the latter picked up and distributed the story originally appearing in the Dagens Nyheter, claiming that the Bachchans were the custodians of some of the bribe money. Although the Swedish newspaper settled the claim, India Abroad chose not to settle. It did report the Dagens Nyheter apology and settlement.

However, Raju, a gutsy Indian American publisher, decided to fight the case on the basic contention that publications and wire services do routinely pick up and transmit news stories in good faith and cannot, by the virtue of just that action, be held liable on the ground of malice.

While the British court granted the Bachchans a victory in the libel suit and awarded them 40,000 pounds in damages, Raju cited the newspaper company's New York location to invoke the First Amendment protection against the enforcement of a British judgment on an America publication. A New York court ruled in favor of Raju and in the process set up a frequently cited legal precedent in America.

At the heart of the Bachchans versus India Abroad Publications case was the difference in the way libel is legally viewed and enforced in Britain, where the burden of proof is on those seen to be causing it, and America, where the burden of proof is on the party claiming to be aggrieved.

India Abroad's victory in New York was not so much about the Bachchans' inability to collect the damages as about the principle of the freedom of speech guaranteed under the First Amendment in America and how its interpretation varies fundamentally from Britain. It is regarded as a landmark judgment.
There was a perception in America's legal community at the time of the lawsuit being an instance of "libel tourism" where those with means file libel lawsuits in countries where the libel laws are weighed against the media. Equally, there were those who thought that the Bachchans were justified in making an example of India Abroad and the wire service, IANS.

This writer, who interviewed Bachchan in the aftermath of the controversy, was witness to his profound chagrin at having been dragged into the sordid affair simply because he and Rajiv Gandhi were childhood friends and their families had longstanding ties. While the Bachchans have emerged unscathed, albeit after such a long time, for Gandhi's family Lindstrom's comments are equivocal. "There was no evidence that he (Gandhi) had received any bribe. But he watched the massive cover-up in India and Sweden and did nothing," he has been quoted as saying.

Of course, Lindstrom's disclosures are not seen as particularly remarkable because a lot of what he says has been claimed in some form or the other over the years, including that Gandhi himself did not benefit. For the Bachchans, its importance comes from the fact that for the first time there is an authoritative face other than their own behind the assertion of their innocence. It may have been too long in coming but it does offer them a much-deserved closure.

--Indo-Asian News Service

Yaar, Apna Missile India Ke Missile Se Chhota Kyun Hai?

Not an actual missile but my interpretation of the Shaheen 1A

Once you get past the mass lethality of their follies, there is something bizarrely comedic about Pakistan and India test-firing their nuclear capable missiles in rapid succession.

As you know India test-fired its first long-range nuclear capable missile Agni V on April 19 much to China’s chagrin. It was only a matter of time that Pakistan answered India’s tit with its own tat, or to be phonetically more accurate, India’s tat with Pakistan’s tit.

The Pakistani test was conducted early Wednesday morning local time and involved an improved version of its intermediate-range nuclear missile. The missile, Hatf IV’s (Shahen 1A) range is said to be between 466 and 620 miles. In other words, fired from its garrison town of Rawalpindi it can very easily reach Delhi. The distance of about 420 miles between the two cities is shorter than even the lowest range of the missile.

If global missile programs are caused by the dick envy among the male leaders of nation-states, as I have always maintained, then Pakistanis can ask only one question in the aftermath of the test: “Yaar, apna missile India ke missile se chhota kyun hai? (Pal, how come our missile is smaller than India’s?”) The question is not particularly relevant because Pakistan’s entire national animus is concentrated on its immediate eastern neighbor, namely India. Their missile range is more than sufficient to very significantly destroy India’s industrial and economic backbone in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Delhi-Haryana and Punjab.

It is unlikely that Pakistan will ever need to threaten the United States or China any time soon. They ought to be content with their size for now.

It is obvious from the very short passage of time between the two tests that Islamabad keeps its powder dry and its fingers even drier. Since their missile is supposed to be an improved version, I doubt if even Pakistani missile scientists could have carried out that improvement in six days flat. They must have kept them ready precisely to counter the kind of test that India has just conducted.

Some elements of the Chinese official media were quick to ridicule that the Agni V is not long enough to be qualified as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) because its range falls 500 kilometers or about 300 miles short of what is widely considered to be the minimum range of an ICBM. I wonder what they might say, if anything at all, about the Shaheen 1A.

I have this image of missile spotters on either side of the India-Pakistan border unblinkingly staring at the sky 24/7, waiting for either to fire. They would then rush to their own silos, polish their own missiles after blowing breath vapor on them and then rush to the control room to press the launch codes.

While one understands that in the real world deterrence is better than destruction, but should we not, as a reasonably intelligent life form, now give up forever threatening one another with annihilation? I think so.

Mining asteroids is about to happen

An asteroid (Illustration: MC)

A bunch of tech entrepreneurs and billionaires are getting together to mine asteroids orbiting the earth for precious metals. Planetary Resources, Inc., a new space venture company bankrolled by these billionaires, is scheduled to make the asteroid mining announcement out of California later today.

The company has been co-founded by Eric Anderson of Space Adventures and Peter Diamandis of X Prize Foundation. It has investment from Google’s CEO Larry Page and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, former Microsoft chief architect Charles Simonyi, and Ross Perot Jr., son of Texan billionaire of the same name, according to early media reports.

Close to 9000 asteroids that orbit near the earth are said to be metal and mineral rich. These space investors intend mining some of them for platinum, palladium, osmium, and iridium which are scarce on our own planet and are prohibitively expensive. According to a story by Adam Mann of Wired, “Platinum alone is worth around $23,000 a pound — nearly the same as gold. Mining the top few feet of a single modestly sized, half-mile-diameter asteroid could yield around 130 tons of platinum, worth roughly $6 billion.”

Various estimates suggest that eventually Planetary Resources, Inc. will pump in trillions of dollars into the global GDP by mining asteroids. Prospecting asteroids has been long speculated but it is only now that a confluence of various technologies could make it financially viable over a long term. It is a very capital intensive and technology heavy enterprise but those involved believe that the time is right to do that in order that in the next decade or so we will actually begin bringing back these metals back to the earth. However, it is not clear yet whether the enterprise will mine and refine or simply bring ore back to the earth for refining here.

If not for anything else, for the sheer coming together of some of human history’s most complex technologies it would be exciting to watch this enterprise take shape. The mining , refining and shipping will be an unmanned affair to begin with but it is not altogether inconceivable that at some point in the future you might have space miners land on these asteroid to do the job themselves.

There is the inevitable question of whether space mining should be used for the limited purposes of satisfying our own ever growing earthy demand or we should, in fact, consider it as integral to creating satellite civilizations around our own planet. Expanding to near space objects is inevitable; the only question is how far into the future.

P.S. Excuse if my asteroid illustration looks like SpongeBob.

P.P.S.: Apart from the enormous challenges inherent to such an enterprise, I also apprehend that the Klingons might not take lightly to it.

Many laughs and considerable promise in ‘Veep’

Julia Louis Dreyfuss, center in red, as Vice President Selina Meyer, in HBO series ‘Veep’

(Spoiler alert: Don’t read this post if you have not watched the episode and intend to.)

The inaugural episode last night of celebrated British film and television director Armando Iannucci’s new HBO series ‘Veep’ felt like a disinherited son of the fantastically biting ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ and gravitas laden ‘The West Wing.’ In case you do not get my drift, ‘Veep’ is not for you. Or, you will have to watch some episodes of both first to know that I am actually praising it.

Featuring Julia Louis Dreyfuss as Vice President Selina Meyer, the first episode showed great promise but, equally, propensity to lose it. I suspect that Iannucci (pronounced Aya nucchi) wants the audience to feel as if things could go desperately wrong with Meyer and her staff anytime and they do. But in the process a couple of times I felt things could go wrong for the new show itself.

Being HBO, and not television, language is not required to be watched by its makers at all, which in my book, is a largely good thing, although it can get gratuitously profane occasionally.

Early on Meyer, who is standing in for an unnamed US president, at an event, is utterly dismayed to discover that her speech has been “pencilfucked” by a White House liaison. Pencilfucked, incidentally, means a document so heavily edited that it appears to be in tatters because of all the deletions penciled and corrections. I like the phrase. Someone needs to pencilfuck this blog but who has got the balls to do it?

I watched Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The West Wing’ from its very first episode with such proprietorial zeal that I would take umbrage at anyone else watching it. It was almost as if I wanted it to be broadcast exclusively for me and only on my TV. What I am trying to say is that I am a sucker for effectively done political dramas. Therefore, I will watch every episode of ‘Veep’.

The position of the US vice president is a truly odd one in that its occupant is just a step away from being the world’s most powerful person without almost ever becoming one. US presidents do not die in office that frequently and with the miracle of modern medicine they outlive their presidency by decades. Think of vice presidency as an extended foreplay that almost never climaxes into consummation. For that reason alone it is a rich subject for humor of all sorts--sarcasm, satire, irony, wit, buffoonery and so on. ‘Veep’s first episode sure had quite a bit of it but it gave me the feeling of having chanced upon something that was already underway before I got there.

As an introduction to the theme Iannucci and his writers puts Meyer in a couple of obviously humiliating situations, not to mention many minor mess-ups by her own staff. For instance, being a champion of biodegradable cutlery, she encounters an embarrassingly sparsely attended fundraiser because the plastics lobby does not take kindly to her campaign. Her aide tells the veep to “mingle” which befuddles her because there are barely seven people in the room. Mingling takes much more. As Meyer asks, “Did Simon mingle with Garfunkel?”

Then there is a belittling meeting with a powerful senator in order to maker her gaffe about the plastics lobby right. The senator is studiedly distracted by sending out emails while the vice president of the United States is blabbering away two feet away from her.

I liked many of the one liners. There was one about Veep’s aide not particularly liking the ceaselessly tall and annoying White House liaison Jonah. A little more than halfway through the episode after some “colossal fuckup” by the vice president, he shows up at her office.  “I don’t have time to ignore you, Jonah”, says her chief of staff Amy and then she turns around in the general direction of the other staffers and says, “Garry, could you please ignore Jonah for me?”

At another time a seriously ill and eventually dead senator is described as “mostly intravenous” as the chief of staff adds, “He has so many tubes, he looks like a set of bagpipes.” There is also this one, “Every minute that we delay, retard goes up in font size.” The R word, whose casual use is socially and culturally frowned upon in America, is also used once earlier in a much more unvarnished but hilarious fashion describing a staff member’s Twitter gaffe as “hoist by our own retard.”

The entire cast fits the mood perfectly, particularly Dreyfuss of Seinfeld fame, who carries off the easy profanity of her character with such abandon. It is interesting that of the four iconic Seinfeld characters, only Dreyfuss seems to have a highly successful post Seinfeld career. Her casting is pitch perfect.

Confectionary nationalism of three songs

Indians of certain generations, which ended with mine in the 1960s, have grown up with what I so brilliantly describe as calls to confectionary nationalism.

They are mostly contained in Hindi movie songs from the 1950s and 60s which usually feature gawky and innocent children being introduced to the joys of dreaming lofty on behalf of a nascent nation-state.

I have no hesitation in saying that despite their cheesy sentimentalism some of these songs still open up my lachrymal glands. Or, in short, they make me cry for a reason I have never comprehended. The response for me is instant and begins with a rapidly rising lump in my throat which I have to gulp down before tears flow. Bereft of any sense of nationalism, I am reacting entirely to the melody of these songs. The music gets me every single time as do some of the words.

There are dozens of such songs but the three which have stayed with me all these years are “Insaaf ki dagar pe” from the 1961 iconic movie ‘Ganga Jumna’ composed by the redoubtable Naushad, written by Shaqeel Badayuni and sung by Hemant Kumar, ‘Nanha munna rahi hun’ from the 1962 Mehboob Khan movie ‘Son of India’, sung by Shanti Mathur to the words by Shaqeel (watch the video above) and finally, ‘Sarey jahan se aaccha’ from the 1959 movie ‘Bhai Behen’ written by the great Mohammed Iqbal and composed by N. Dutta.

‘Insaaf ki dagar pe"’

‘Sarey jahan se acchha’

I have a tendency to randomly play some of these songs for my nine-year-old daughter Hayaa who does not understand Hindi at all. Lately, she has often heard me play or sing ‘Nanha munna rahi hun’, a habit which has so utterly familiarized her with it that yesterday as I was pacing up and down in my basement, she tracked it down on our Nook and started playing it to my surprise.

On an unrelated note, I was also thinking about how a confluence of technologies and algorithms has bridged eras separated by over five decades. It was magical that Hayaa got on a tablet (Nook), went to YouTube, and punched in words as she remembered in their sounds in the search box and voilà, the song popped up.

She seems to be drawn as much by the unquestionable appeal of the song as by the child star, Sajid Khan in his surprisingly hip outfit, including a cool beret as well as his German shepherd.

This song, along with the other two, captured the spirit of the era for boys and girls of my generation. I vaguely remember being explained why the line “Manzil se pehle na lunga kahin dum’ (I will not rest before reaching the destination) was so important. Mehboob Khan did a very effective job of taking slices of the Indian life of the day and putting Sajid Khan in various contexts of a nation in the making.

I was quite struck by what the song speaks of at the cue 2.11- 2.30. Shaqeel writes, “Naya hai zamana meri nayi hai dagar, Desh ko banaunga mein machinon ka nagar. Bharat kisi se rahega nahi kum.” (The times are new, so are the paths, I will make the country a hub of machines. Bharat (India) will be second to none). That machines, and hence industrialization, symbolized progress was the pervasive wisdom then as, I suppose, it is now still.

There is no specific point to today’s post other than random reminiscence of an era long past. And nothing contextualizes and situates an era long past in India than Hindi movie songs.

Himanshu Vyas: the making of a young politician,Part II

Himanshu Vyas (Pic: Jay Mandal/On Assignment)

Two years ago I promised to track the career of my childhood friend and politician Himanshu Vyas for two years. And like a seasoned politician I have failed to deliver on that promise. So here is an attempt to make that right.

On July 12, 2010, here is what I wrote about him.

It takes no talent to scorn a politician anywhere in the world,especially in India where they wear all the revolting stereotypes right on their sharply starched sleeve.

However for the next two years I have chosen to track a politician of a different breed. His name is Himanshu Vyas and we have been friends since childhood. His chosen constituency is Surendranagar in Gujarat where life can swing in slo-mo between salt pans and cotton fields.

I spent last weekend with Himanshu, who also happens to be a spokesman of the Congress Party in the state, taking part in a whirl of part social, part religious, part cultural and fully political activities. You do not have to believe it when I say it but the fact that Himanshu and I go back nearly 40 years plays no role whatsoever in the way I observe his fascinating navigation of the often treacherous estuaries that eventually flow into the the ocean of India’s national polity.

In my long career of reporting politics and politicians, I have not seen too many young politicians who switch so effortlessly between the vast cast of suppliant characters who constantly importune you with their conflicting demands with as much ease as Himanshu. In fact, Himanshu makes it appear as if it is sheer joy to solve the varied mundane problems that people face every day.

Since I have just begun charting the next two years of Himanshu’s political career, I do not have a whole lot to report. But to give you some idea about the range of things a politician has to do, in a span of six hours he spoke at the renovation of an old Hindu temple surrounded by local religious leaders, dedicated a portrait of a recently dead politician at a college and wrapped it up with the release of 50 books by a single author. Throughout these six hours Himanshu gladhanded hundreds of people and managed to address almost all of them by their first names and asking about an ailing mother here or a jobless brother there. What is important is that he made his concern sound genuine.

Although there is nothing certain about it, it seems that when the state of Gujarat goes for assembly elections later this year, Himanshu will likely get nominated from Surendranagar. If he does indeed get nominated, there is every chance that he will win to become a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) which is really not a big deal because Himanshu has displayed the demeanor of being a MLA from his childhood.

There is certain body type that exudes authority and power without having either. Himanshu has that body type, particularly in the context of Indian politics. I have frequently joked that Himanshu’s demeanor is such that he always seems to be on the verge of issuing an extraordinary proclamation. It is necessary for anyone in public life to be able to exude that sense of owning the space one is in.

India does not have the tradition of endorsing political candidates the way America has. As a journalist I have never endorsed anyone. I make an exception in Himanshu’s case purely as a friend. If there is anyone in Gujarat who should have risen to chief minister by now, it is him. There are many reasons why he should be but for me personally it simply because it is high time his political career caught up with his body type.

I do not know of any politician in Gujarat other than Himanshu who has the vision, gumption, network, self-belief, commitment and, of course, body type to helm the state. For as long as I remember, Himanshu has used the expression “Raju karo” meaning “present it before me”. There is something authoritative about that expression because it presumes that the world will present things before him. For that alone, he deserves to win.

My next Himanshu installment, whenever it happens, will seriously assess his potential contribution to not just his constituency but Gujarat as a whole.