South Asia Daily

My interview on upcoming premiere of 'Gandhi's Song'

A very short response to whether alien spacecraft are hovering around us

NASA's hypothetical visualization of the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b (Image: Eyes on Exoplanets)

US intelligence officials have concluded there is no evidence that the unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP), a dressed-up euphemism for the more conspiratorial unidentified flying objects (UFOs), more 120 spotted over the last two decades, are alien spacecraft. According to The New York Times, simultaneously, they have also found no evidence that they are not. So file it under “Unexplained” for now.

Be that as it may, I have a different point to make. Why is it always suspected/feared/presumed that aliens ought to be unpleasant for us at best and destructive of us at worst? Let us say for the sake of argument that an alien but superior spacecraft travels at least 4.24 light years, which is nearly 39 trillion kilometers or nearly 26 trillion miles. I have used 4.24 light years because that is how far Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to us and which is often speculated to have an exoplanet called Proxima Centauri b that is like a super Earth. Its mass is 1.27 Earths, it takes 11.2 days to complete one orbit of its star, and is 0.0485 AU* (astronomical unit) from its star, according to NASA. Its discovery was announced in 2016.

An alien civilization that could send a spacecraft, which we might call a UAP or UFO, from that far to our precise location, and that too a spacecraft which could fly in our atmosphere at any altitude at will executing crazy maneuvers with apparently endless propulsion would be interested in a little more than destroying us altogether. A civilization that advanced would conceivably have technology to annihilate us from a safe orbit.

Scientific rationale demands that even if  UAP were here even from Proxima Centauri b, they would have been programmed with a mandate to do more than just collectively anal-probe the entire sentient life on Earth and then kill us. What would be the point of that? It is not like we pose a direct existential threat to a far superior civilization whose spacecraft are so advanced that they have no visible engine or that spew no infrared exhaust plumes.

It is a good thing that the intelligence report says that there is no evidence to suggest that the UAP are not alien. Former President Barack Obama told Ezra Klein of the Times in an unrelated interview this about the UAP, “My entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating in the middle of space.” Okay, Mr. Spock but there is nothing like “the middle of space” in space. And if that’s what your politics was premised on, why run to be the president of a tiny part of that tiny speck?

I do not have a particular point of view about UAP/UFO other than just saying that the universe as mind numbingly bizarre and disorienting, we should not be surprised by anything, including UAP.

*AU is the unit of distance of a planet from a star equivalent to how far Earth is from the Sun, which is 149.6 million kilometers.  

Some observations about Satyajit Ray's short film 'Sadgati'

Satyajit Ray’s short film ‘Sadgati’ based the short story by Munshi Premchand, popped up on my YouTube page yesterday which was just as well because this year happens to be the 40^th anniversary of the movie. Not that it matters but by some delightful coincidence it is also the movie I saw just as I was beginning my career as a journalist. We are both 40 in a sense.

Watching it, I was as outraged now as I was then at the quiet but harrowing cruelty of India’s pervasive caste system it depicts. I have read Premchand’s short story in Hindi and remained fascinated by how matter of fact the great writer is in conveying the brutality of that social order.

The story’s protagonist, deliberately named Dukhi (sorrowful), is a so-called “low caste” tanner in a village. His life with his wife Jhuria is one of relentless struggles as can be expected for those living on the terribly oppressive margins of a north Indian village’s social pecking order.

The plot is quite simple. The couple, played powerfully by the late Om Puri and the late Smita Patil, want to start the process of their daughter’s marriage and need the local brahmin, played with effective heartlessness by Dr. Mohan Agashe, to conduct the rituals around it.  That an untouchable family cannot get their daughter married without the priest makes them terribly vulnerable to all the cruel routine that follows.

Premchand quickly establishes the grotesque inequities through an early exchange of Dukhi wondering to Jhuria where they would make the priest sit. It is a loaded question because the priest is not expected to sit on the “khatiya” or a couch woven with jute rope or string that belong to them. Jhuria responds saying that perhaps they should borrow one from the local wealthy man known as Thakur.

“Sometimes you say things that singe my body. The Thakur would not even spare a piece of ember and you think he would lend us his couch?” snaps back Dukhi.

It is not my intention to narrate the whole story the way Premchand wrote it nor the entire movie the way Ray made it. Let me just make a couple of observations about how with such practiced ease and a sense of entitlement the priest subjects Dukhi to some backbreaking house and yard chores before he would condescend to visit his house to perform the rituals.

Particularly galling is the way the priest makes Dukhi chop a giant piece of log on a hot summer afternoon and that too when the latter has not had a morsel to eat. There is an exchange between the priest and his wife (Gita Siddharth) whether to serve Dukhi some food. Eventually, they don’t causing him to be so weakened by hunger and heat that the inevitable happens.

It is at once a moving and infuriating story which was all too real when Premchand wrote it perhaps a century ago, when Ray made it some four decades ago and very much remains so in 2021. I remember feeling utterly helpless and debilitated when I first saw it. Yesterday, I felt both those as well as a shrieking rage.

Performances are uniformly outstanding, particularly Om Puri who seemed to have a special handle on portraying the oppressed. Dr. Agashe, who is a respected psychiatrist in real life apart from being a much celebrated Marathi and Hindi actor, captures the psychology of the village priest perfectly. There is a scene where, after a particularly satisfying lunch, the priest walks to his couch in the verandah for a siesta. The way Dr. Agashe half-stifles an upcoming burp tells you about how excellent an actor he is.

We all know Satyajit Ray to be a visual master in most of his movies but unfortunately cinematically this film looked below his exacting standards. By that I don’t mean pretty frames at all but even the evocativeness of his shots. In my book Ray is the only Indian filmmaker who has an acute sense of cinema as a visual medium. He has no peers in India. It is from that standpoint that I felt a bit let down by ‘Sadgati’. Perhaps it is the cruel austerity of the theme that prompted Ray not to make a visual statement. But that’s small quibble compared to the powerful and moving theme it addresses in a short time.

I am happy to announce that Dr. Agashe will soon be my guest on ‘Mayank Chhaya Reports’ to talk about Ray on the 100^th anniversary of his birth this year generally as well as ‘Sadgati’ particularly.

Gravity, here I come

As I begin my preliminary reading and research for a distinctly possible book about Gravity for popular reading, I revisit a couple of posts I had written about in 2013. It is just as well that eight years later, I am on the cusp of a book about this most defining of the four forces of nature.

September 2, 2013

I think I have reached a stage in life where there is no difference between comprehension and incomprehension. Most concepts in physics, which I thought I comprehended in my younger years, are now safely beyond my comprehension. Gravitation is one such idea. I have always been fascinated by it but with advancing years it makes progressively less sense to me. I think I just don’t get it any more.

To be sure, my not getting it is not at the level of a fourth grader not getting it but not getting it in all its philosophical dimensions. Albert Einstein’s idea of curvature in spacetime caused by massive objects is exquisitely picturesque to me but I can no longer comprehend it. As I have often said the words strung together as part of sentences to explain his theory do make sense to me both individually and collectively but then at the end of it the final conclusive meaning eludes me.

My incomprehension about gravitation as a scientific concept does not prevent me from occasionally interpreting its philosophical and physical manifestations. For instance, I wrote the following as recently as May this year:

Gravitation as a natural phenomenon has been on my mind for as long as I can remember. In particular, I keep revisiting how gravity is at the heart of everything we are and the universe is.

Strangely, it is for the third time in as many years that I am thinking of gravity roughly around this time of year. It was in March, 2011, after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and again in April, 2012 that I wrote about gravity. This time it was triggered yesterday while watching my daughter Hayaa’s weekly soccer game; especially when I saw this assistant referee against the backdrop of the overcast sky above and the fresh green grass below. I was sitting in my partially broken deck chair on the sideline.

The entire activity of children running and kicking the ball, the ball moving, rising and falling, self in somewhat wobbly chair and the assistant referee with his feet firmly planted on the ground, everything was one of the millions of manifestations of gravitation.

Everything on Earth has evolved in response to the particular intensity of her gravity. On Mars, for instance, we would have to evolve in response to a gravitational force 62 percent lower than here. Presuming for the sake of illustrating the point that life could have still evolved and thrived on Mars, it would be so very different. Martians might still have played football (as in European football played with feet) but it would have been 62 percent slower than on Earth. Of course, the Martians would not have felt the slowness of their football because for them that would be the natural speed and their only reference point. Our understanding and experience of things are necessarily situational.

A vast majority of us, who would never get to enjoy interplanetary travel, cannot possibly know how it would feel to be on a planet which has 38 percent of our gravity. Even the expression “The gravity of the situation…” would have meant something different. An earthling visiting Mars would perhaps say, “The 38 percent gravity of the situation…..” As always, I digress but then an earthling would digress on Mars because of its lower gravity.

Am I glad that gravitation exists? Mostly yes, but I am equally curious about what if there were a sudden, albeit a slight variation in our terrestrial gravity. What if gravity could leak like a liquid?

The  National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), established by NASA, makes some fascinating points about the effects on human body of varying gravity. It talks about the effects of changing gravity on bones, muscles, spine, cardiovascular systems, inner ear and balance and sleep.

One was taught a long time ago that it is our inner ear that is particularly sensitive to gravity and helps us keep our orientation. Here is how the NSBRI explains: “On Earth, a complex, integrated set of neural circuits allows humans to maintain balance, stabilize vision and understand body orientation in terms of location and direction. The brain receives and interprets information from numerous sense organs, particularly in the eyes, inner ear vestibular organs and the deep senses from muscles and joints. In space, this pattern of information is changed. The inner ear, which is sensitive to gravity, no longer functions as designed. Early in the mission, astronauts can experience disorientation, space motion sickness and a loss of sense of direction. Upon return to Earth, they must readjust to Earth’s gravity and can experience problems standing up, stabilizing their gaze, walking and turning. These disturbances are more profound as the length of microgravity exposure increases. The changes can impact operational activities including approach and landing, docking, remote manipulation, extravehicular activity and post-landing normal and emergency egress.”

So as I sat on the sideline yesterday, somewhat disinterestedly watching the game but thinking more about gravity, it was entirely unique to my being on this particular planet. My predilections, predispositions, perspectives and perceptions would have been radically different even on our nearest celestial body, the dusty desolation we call Moon. That’s because my brain would have formed differently in keeping with the gravity there. By the way, the lunar gravity is a mere 16.7 percent of Earth’s. My point again is our certitudes become invalid even on our nearest neighbor. So next time you clear your throat and adjust your collar to hand down what you believe to be a grand universal pronouncement, take a pause and preferably give up the idea.

I now struggle with even the difference between the Newtonian idea  and Einsteinian idea about the direction of forces that act on us as we feel grounded to the Earth like the referee is in the picture above. The Newtonian idea was that just as we are being pulled toward the Earth, the Earth is also being pulled by us. The Einsteinian idea says we are being pushed up even as we are pushing back on the Earth.

While I am at it I might as well mention the fallacy of straight lines. Since we all lived in curved space there are no real straight lines except that given the massive scale of the spacetime curve we may treat relative short lines between any two points as straight for all practical purposes. (Just about now I can see you scratching your head and saying “What is this man talking about?”) That incomprehension is precisely my point.

In my case comprehension and incomprehension about everything constantly cancel each other out in the final result, although at specific points in time one may be greater than the other.

April 6, 2012

The universe is forever balancing competing gravities.

It could be competing gravities between celestial bodies such as stars and planets or between sentient beings like you and I. When that balance goes out of control, things crash into each other.

Fortunes fall as do reputations in a way that is not so different from objects falling to the ground. In cultural terms, falling is regarded as a bad thing as in falling from grace. In physics, falling is merely a fact of the universe resulting from gravity that is shorn of any emotion or moral judgment. Come to think of it, the thud of a fall from grace is inaudible unlike that of a rock hitting the ground. In the physical world when you fall, you know instantly you have fallen. In the moral world, when you fall it takes a lifetime to experience that.

Being a universal force, gravity is really at the heart of everything. It holds everything together with the possible exceptions of fire and human mind. Fire can go in any direction as can human mind. The worship of fire in many cultures has also something to do with the fact that it seems to defy gravity. In reality, only a transient form of that appears to be rising. The soot eventually does fall.

I have been meaning to ramble on about gravity for a long time because it is a force I do not quite comprehend and yet can never escape. Everything we are on this planet of ours can be attributed to the earthly gravity and the kind of force it exerts. It is conceivable that even a slight change in the value of ‘g’ (as in terrestrial gravity) would radically alter everything and everyone. We forget that all of us are so completely a product of a vast variety of random happenstances. So next time when you feel like strutting and bragging, remember there is nothing special about anyone of us.

In the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami last March I wrote the following. It bears repeating because while ground is a decisive part of who we are, gravity is infinitely more consequential in a universal sense.

The earthquake-tsunami-radiation triumvirate in Japan demonstrates just how profoundly we as a civilization are shaped by a stable terra firma. Everything that has happened on this planet, particularly in the past 250,000 years since the rise of homo sapiens-- speech, language, culture, religion, conflicts, triumphs, revolutions, genocides , politics, economy, cinema, technology, bigotry, altruism, compassion, orgasm, Internet, blogs, Muammar Qaddafi and iPad2—has happened because the terra firma has generally remained stable.

We forget that we exist the way we do precisely because the ground beneath us has not slipped too much and too often. For over three decades I have thought about this theme. Some day I would like to write in detail about how the fact that we live on solid ground has so overwhelmingly created and defined the human race. What if we were a strictly water-based civilization? I am quite sure our brains would have been wired very differently  and we then would have created a radically different civilization. Can you imagine territorially defined nation-states if the whole planet was just water? And how do you define boundaries in a medium that is never steady?

For some strange reason we treat our incidental geological reality as our natural right and build a whole lot of mythologies around it. It is true that as a species humans are extraordinarily adaptable and flexible. One can say with a fair degree of certainty that we would have created a civilization in response to our geological conditions, however different they might have been.

The problem is that we have come so far as a solid ground-based species that we would find it practically impossible to survive if the earth were to fundamentally reshape its contours suddenly. Of course, in terms of its overall planetary impact the Japanese quake-tsunami cannot be considered even significant, but it is big enough to make us all wonder what if the earth’s crustal plates were to suddenly go into a global subduction mode.

It would help us all to remember that the ground beneath us is also a consequence of gravity and the way things have coalesced across the universe because of it. In my younger days, I used to feel utterly frenzied by the thought of the sheer randomness of it all. With age one becomes resigned to it, more grounded as it were. Incidentally, feeling grounded too has everything to do with gravity.

P.S.: This is what I mean by how fire and human mind defy gravity. My mind does indeed go in any direction it wants to.

 

Buddha and the absence of beinghood

A couple of immediate thoughts come to my mind on  Gautam Buddha’s birthday today. He was born in 563 BCE around this time of year. The fact that he was born more than 500 years before the onset of the current era and its calendar, it is an approximate date. However, according to the Indian calendar, which is much older, it was on this full moon’s day that Siddharth or Gautam was born.

One is the very essence of what Buddha taught; the profoundly original idea that we are forever in the process of becoming and never become. This is the heart of Anitya or Anicca* or Impermanence. Attached to that is yet another profound idea that existence is a series of moments or Kshanika as it is called in Buddhism.

There is nothing like beinghood because we are in a constant state of flux from moment to moment, Kshanika to Kshanika.

I have frequently written about these themes.

The idea of Anitya or Anicca* or Impermanence has captured my imagination for as long as I remember. That it is at the core of Buddha’s philosophy is something I discovered only when I was 18 or 19. I have since reflected on it many times.

It is a spectacularly brilliant explanation of everything there is as long as you understand that everything there is, is there in that passing moment and hence it is really not there. The idea of Anitya can be deeply disturbing; especially because it removes what we like to call the essence. It can be deeply affecting for those stuck in the morass of corporeal certitudes about reality.

As part of my overall reading for the Dalai Lama biography ‘Man Monk Mystic’ I read many books. However, the one that has managed to make most impact is the 1916 edition of “Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism” by the extraordinary scholar of Indian culture and arts Ananda Coomaraswamy (22 August 1877 − 9 September 1947).

There is a lot to reflect over in this book first published in London by George G. Harrap & Company. For the purposes of this post, I would like to reproduce a brief passage about Anitya or Anicca. I must caution that it may sound rather abstruse at first but invest some thought in it and the idea will stand utterly illuminated. Of course, your comprehension will disappear as soon as you have attained it.

How essential in Buddhism is the doctrine of the eternal succession of causes appears from the fact it is often spoken as the gospel:

“I will teach you the Dhamma,” says Gautama, “That being present, this becomes; from the arising of that, this arises. That being absent, this does not become; from the cessation of that, this ceases.”

We read again that “Dhamma-analysis is knowledge concerning conditions.”

What he thought was designed to avoid the two extreme doctrines of realism and nihilism, the belief in phenomenal being and the belief that there is no phenomenal process at all. “Everything is: this, O Kaccana**, is one extreme view. Everything is not: this is the second extreme view. Avoiding both these extremes the Tathagata*** teaches the Norm by the Mean.” This doctrine of the Mean asserts that everything is a becoming, a flux without beginning (first cause) or end; there exists no static moment when this becoming attains to beinghood—no sooner can we conceive it by the attributes of name and form, it has transmigrated or changed to something else. In place of an individual, there exists a succession of instants of consciousness.

“Strictly speaking the life of a living being is exceedingly brief, lasting only while a thought lasts. Just a chariot wheel in rolling rolls only at one point of the tire, and in resting rests only at one point; in exactly the same way, the life of a living being lasts for the period of one thought. As soon as that thought has ceased, the living being is said to have ceased.

“As it has been said:

“The being of a past moment of thought has lived, but does not live, nor will it live.

“The being of a future moment of thought will live, but has not lived nor does it live.

“The being of the present moment of thought does live, but has not lived, nor will it live.”

As Coomaraswamy  points out, “We are deceived if we allow ourselves to believe that there is ever a pause in the flow of becoming, a resting place where positive existence is attained for even the briefest duration of time.”

Life as a series of moments always transmigrating is an astounding concept. Think about this assertion: “In place of an individual, there exists a succession of instants of consciousness.” It is poetic, profound and purely cerebral. Look at his explanation of moments which have passed, which are, and which are yet to be. It is so finely sliced. This is the mind of someone to whom everything stood fully explained.

I am willing to assert that as a purely cerebral living goes, there has been nothing that has surpassed Buddha since Buddha with the possible exception of Albert Einstein. In the timeline that we understand, that would be some 2500 years. It is ironic that for someone who emphasized the idea of Anitya or Anicca or Impermanence above all else seems to have lasted quite a while.

I would strongly recommend Coomaraswamy’s outstanding book to anyone who is interested in, for want of a better word, the gospel of Buddhism. I have always found it odd that a philosophy of impermanence should be given a traditional structure. But that is a separate discussion.

* Words such as Anicca or Dhamma are the Pali language versions of Anitya and Dharma

** Kaccana is Pali for Katyayana who was a disciple of Buddha.

*** Tahtagata is how Buddha referred to himself. It is interpreted to mean many things but mostly it is “The one who has thus gone” or “The one who has thus come.”

Brilliant works of Dr. Sudhir Patwardhan

I was mildly aware of the works of radiologist and painter Sudhir Patwardhan. It is only in the last few days that I have begun to discover how extraordinary his works are. His brilliant and astute observation of the life in Mumbai lights up his works. My reflexive reaction on seeing many of his works, particularly the four I have cited here, was Hopper, as in the American master Edward Hopper. However, Dr. Patwardhan in many ways surpasses Hopper. Both are very cinematic and much has been said about Hopper’s influence on Hollywood films, particularly when it comes to capturing the light and the mood of isolation. Dr. Patwardhan's works are more specific in their detailing. 

Dr. Patwardhan’s works superbly capture Mumbai’s middle class home scenes, particularly involving elderly people as so evident in these four works. It is not necessarily melancholic but a rather matter of fact depiction of the life in Mumbai apartments and homes. Two particular aspects strike me about these works apart from his sharp control of spaces. One is the way he captures the light of Mumbai’s apartments and homes and other how clutter-free those spaces are.

One gets the sense looking at Dr. Patwardhan’s paintings that he knows precisely what he wants to portray before he begins. I am guessing here but the feeling I get is that he does not seem to struggle with his brushwork at all. His angles and lines are very assured. There does not appear to be any frenzy in his works. Also, although he is the painter of these various scenes, one gets feeling that those inhabiting are not aware of his presence. He is an unobtrusive painter even though he is so completely immersed in the milieu of his paintings.

At some point soon I do plan to interview him for my online videos as part of ‘Mayank Chhaya Reports’.

 

Namaste, Alabama

There are those in Alabama who think merely saying Namaste turns you into a Hindu. I say this with only some mild exaggeration and levity, quoting from a bill just signed into law by the state’s Governor Kay Ivy that ended a nearly 30-year-long ban on yoga in K-12 schools.

Apart from expressly disallowing Namaste, the law now also says yoga is allowed in schools as long as it does not require meditation.

"Chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, and namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited," the bill says.

It is a measure of the paranoia that the bill even lays down that only English nomenclature be used to describe various poses and exercises lest using India/Hindu nomenclature instantly pushes you over into weird Hindudom.

The bill was piloted by State Representative Jeremy Gray, a Democrat, whose passionate advocacy of the usefulness of yoga for school students eventually won its reinstatement. However, the amount of caveating is both absurd and risible.

I am willing to say that had the roles been reversed and there was a form of exercise and meditative techniques that rose in a predominantly Christian country that came to today’s India, I would not be surprised if they too would find similar knee-jerk rejection. The world right now is so tribally entrenched.

I had interviewed Representative Gray a few weeks ago as part of ‘Mayank Chhaya Reports’ and he was confident that the ban would be reversed. I will speak to him again next week because I am sure he will have a few things to say about the language of the bill going to such lengths to strip yoga of its origins.

NPR reports "Yoga is a practice of Hindu religion," the Eagle Forum of Alabama told the National Public Radio’s (NPR) affiliate WBHM in an email. "Religious practice in the school's constitutes a violation of the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment as public schools cannot promote the practice or ideology of religion,” the Forum said even as it demanded that the ban be continued.

In the Forum’s imagination each yoga pose was designed not as an exercise but to "be an offering of worship" to Hindu gods.

I can at least understand part of that paranoia since over the millennia in India culture, religion and spirituality have become so fused and intertwined that it is hard to tell them apart for an outsider, especially someone sitting so far from it like Christian conservative groups in Alabama. They neither have inclination nor open-mindedness to dissect in a way that understand and accept that merely saying namaste or using Indian names of yoga poses does not instantly turn you Hindu. Nothing instantly turns you Hindu because it is not that kind of philosophical construct.

In the interest of clarity, I have never been a practicing anything. I have no religion, nor any spiritual consciousness. I do not pray. I do not find anything special about any religion. And yet, I would have no hesitation in saying Namaste. So, Namaste, Alabama.

Here is to Sundarlal Bahuguna, a man of natural benignity

My attraction towards the mountains, particularly the Himalayas, is primal. I have done a fair bit of traveling through them. One such journalistic trip took place in October, 1991 to Chamoli/Uttarkashi/Tehri Garhwal region. The circumstance of the visit was terrible. A major earthquake, measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale, had sliced through the mountains, destroying some 300,000 homes and claiming over 2,000 lives. It was among the world’s deadliest earthquakes in one of the most seismically active zones.

During the course of my interviews with the inhabitants in Chamoli, I chanced upon a soft-spoken, almost apologetic gentleman called Bachu Singh Rawat. He was already in his 70s then. It is less than likely that he is still alive. He gave me a flavor of what it means to be in the midst of an earthquake sitting atop a mountain. “Pahad naach rahe they, sahab (The mountains were dancing.)” he told me.

During the course of that conversation, he said quite casually, “Sundarlalji to kab se hum sab ko samjha rahen hain ki prakruti ke saath hame vinamra hona chahiye. (Sundarlal has been persuading us to be humble in front of Nature for a long time.”)

The Sundarlalji in question was Sundarlal Bahuguna, one of India’s most passionate, inventive and relentless environmental campaigners, who died yesterday at age 94. “Woh aaj kal yahin pe hain. (He is here these days.)” Rawat told me. My ears perked up because I was planning to meet him but was not sure he was around.

As the iconic pioneer of the “Chipko”, which literally means hug or cling, environmental movement in 1974 where activists hugged trees as part of their action to save forests and hence the environment, he was already a high-profile name. Over the decades Bahuguna had expanded his movement to include indiscriminate dam construction and that was the reason why he was there. He was opposing the upcoming Tehri Dam over the Bhagirathi river. In fact, he piloted that movement which eventually did not stop the dam construction. The Tehri dam is the tallest dam in India.

The deadly earthquake that year had served to reinforce Bahuguna’s argument against the dam. He was in the process of moving about as part of his campaign. The day I met him for a short conversation he was not too far from the dam site. If memory serves, he was sitting on a jute charpoy.

“Is bhukamp ke pehle bhi yeh dam banana nahi chahiye tha. Is ke baad to ab bilkul bhi nahi banana chahiye,” Bahuguna told me. He had his trademark bandana on. His clothes were spare khadi kurta pajama. His visage had a certain benignity about it which suggested a man who was reflexively kind. There was also a certain mountain-like dignity to his bearing. After all he was born amid the Himalayan mountains in Maroda in the Pauri Garhwal district which too I visited.

When I found out I was from Ahmedabad, he said, "Gandhiji pranam (My respect to Gandhi.)" he was a lifelong Gandhian himself.

We spoke quite a bit but what has stayed with me all these decades is what he said about his iconic Chipko movement. “Jab aap ped ko chipakte or un se lipatte hain to ped bhi aap ko gale lagata hai. (When you hug a tree, it hugs you back.”)

I frequently hug trees and think of this remarkably sensitive man. Here is to Sundarlal Bahuguna, an enlightened soul who communed with Nature before it was fashionable to do so.  

Revisiting Rajiv Gandhi's macabre assassination on its 30th anniversary

It was 30 years ago today that once again the lure of journalism was proved to me in all its macabre glory. At 10.10 p.m. on the night of May 21, 1991 a suicide bomber named Dhanu, a female member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), blew herself up right in front of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, killing him and others instantly.

It was less than 50 minutes later that I was thrown into the thick of things in New Delhi where I was stationed as the South Asia chief correspondent of the New York-based India Abroad and India Abroad News Service. May is a horrible month in Delhi with its summer at its peak. It is obscenely hot.

Living in what Delhites call a “barsati” or a top floor apartment of, in my case, a three-story home the heat can get particularly unbearable. Although I was very well paid then, I did not think of installing an air conditioner. What I had instead was a contraption called a desert cooler that operated on the simple principle of water evaporation cooling the ambient air down. The evaporative cooler made of an aluminum box whose three sides were fitted with sort of excelsior (wood sliver) pads and one side with a fan. When air passes through water-soaked pads, its temperature drops significantly. My evaporative cooler was on that night.

I offer some details about the cooler because it has a bearing on the story that I am about to tell. I was then in the middle of writing a biography of Sam Pitroda, who revolutionized India’s telecom and information technology sector in his capacity as Gandhi’s all-powerful advisor. I was supposed to have met Gandhi for an interview for the book but given his preoccupations with the electioneering he could not find any time for me. In fact, I did meet him at a high tea in the forecourt of his residence in Delhi just a few days before May 21 . I told him how he was delaying my biography of Pitroda’s. He was very apologetic to me, saying, “Either Mani (Shankar Aiyar) or Suman (Dubey) will fix up a meeting with me once I return from this campaign tour.”

He did not return from that campaign tour.

Here is how my biography opened:

“The dessert cooler outside my bedroom made a squeaky noise that night. I had postponed lubricating it for far too long. Behind the door a cricket chirped incessantly. God had omitted lubricating it altogether. The two noises combined to produce an eerie effect. I was gradually slipping into sleep when the phone rang. There is nothing more exasperating than being interrupted in the first stages of sleep. I have this habit of looking at the clock by my bedside every time I am woken up by a phone call. It was 11 p.m. on May 21.

Shreyans Shah was calling from Ahmedabad. Shah, the owner of the Gujarat Samachar, the largest Gujarati daily in the world, asked me a matter-of-fact question. “Is it true that Rajiv Gandhi has been assassinated?” Without realizing the shattering import of his question I said I didn’t know. Shah sounded pretty certain about the news, but since I live in New Delhi he probably thought that I would be better informed about such matters. I promised to get back to him as soon as I found out the truth.

I called Sam Pitroda to ask him if he had heard anything about Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. There was silence on the other end, a silence jagged by anguish. Pitroda had just recovered from a quadruple bypass surgery a few months before, and despite his protestations to the contrary he was still not fit enough to take such news with equanimity. If hurt could be seen on telephone, I saw it that night.”

Pitroda called T N Seshan, who was then the cabinet secretary, the country’s top bureaucrat who went on to become India’s Chief Election Commissioner later. Seshan, a no non-sense man, told Pitroda that there had been an explosion in Sriperumbudur which had killed Gandhi. Pitroda in turn called me back to confirm the news. By 11.10 I knew the operative details of what had occurred.

I quote these opening paragraphs from my own 1992 book not because I love quoting myself but because today is the 30^th anniversary of that gruesome assassination.

It was inevitable that as a journalist I did not sleep that night. Among the callers was the host of a news show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking me to report on the assassination. I remember he asked me if there was any immediate suspicion as to the identity of Gandhi’s killers. I told him that given that it was a suicide bomber in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu it was more than likely that it would turn out to be a plot by the Tamil Tigers separatists of Sri Lanka. It did.

The next time I was anywhere close to him was at the Delhi airport when his badly dismembered body was flown in by a special aircraft in a casket. Since those were pre-24/7 news channel days, there was no media frenzy at the airport. There were only two journalists—my friend and colleague Tarun Basu and I. Gandhi’s close friend and journalist Suman Dubey was among the men shouldering the casket as the former prime minister’s wife Sonia Gandhi came down from the aircraft looking poised but inscrutable. However, her eyes gave a glimpse of the profound sense of loss she must be feeling.

The passage of three decades has done nothing to erase the vividness of those 24 hours.

Iniquitous vaccination, Israel and the Palestinian Authority

I have been trying to look at the current Israel-Palestine conflagration from the standpoint of the COVID 19 pandemic. Expectedly, the picture is deeply troubling in so much as it highlights the inequitableness and inequity in vaccination.

Before I dwell on that, here are some bare numbers. So far over 200 people have died in Israel and the occupied territories as of yesterday because of the rocket attacks by Hamas and the retaliatory strikes by Israel. A majority of deaths has occurred in the Palestine. In contrast, the pandemic has claimed close to 3500 lives in the occupied territories, according to reasonably reliable sources online.

Purely numerically, the pandemic has been more lethal than the current violence but that argument does not mitigate the frustratingly intractable territorial dispute that has stretched over seven decades now. I am also struck by the irony that while the Israel-Palestine standoff is about territory and geographical boundaries, something that respects neither, namely SARS CoV2, has swept through here as well like the rest of the world. The virus made no distinction on the basis of which parts of that region it infects and kills.

That brings me to the remarkably iniquitous vaccination drive. I chanced upon a piece by Matthias Kennes, who is a registered nurse, and medical adviser for the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) COVID-19 response in Hebron, West Bank, Palestine. This is dated February 22, 2021, under the headline “In Israel, you’re 60 times more likely to have a COVID vaccine than in Palestine.” Mind you this was written nearly three months before the current conflict.

Kennes writes, “As a medic, I am shocked. The internationally-acclaimed COVID-19 vaccination success of Israel has a dark side, the consequences of which are being felt cruelly in the West Bank territory of Palestine where I work, and in the blockaded Gaza Strip where my Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) colleagues work.

Israel has managed to vaccinate nearly 4.2 million people with a first dose – that’s around 50 per cent of the population – and 2.8 million people with the full two doses – that’s more than 30 per cent of the population.

Meanwhile, only several thousand doses are available in the Palestinian West Bank, and a delivery of 20,000 reported to have arrived last weekend in Gaza scarcely scratches at the surface of the needs. At a generous maximum, assuming that the 35,000 reported Sputnik and Moderna vaccines are all available, that would be around 0.8 percent of the Palestinian population.”

Those figures are from February. The iniquitous vaccination has not since improved for the Palestinians. As the New York Times reported today, “Covid-19 vaccinations have stopped, and on Tuesday an Israeli strike knocked out the only lab in the territory that processes coronavirus tests.”

How horrible is this existence! On April 9, writing in The Guardian Yara M Asi, said, “Instead of vaccinating Palestinians, Benjamin Netanyahu tried to send thousands of doses around the world as rewards to countries that moved their embassies to Jerusalem.” Asi is a Non-resident Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC, a Policy Member of Al-Shabaka, and a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the University of Central Florida specializing in health in fragile and conflict-affected states.

On May 5, writing in The Times of Israel, Lazar Berman, said, “With Israeli officials floating even the possibility that it might be forced to dump millions of COVID-19 doses, the question must be asked: Why not make them available to the PA?”, PA being the Palestinian Authority which is the governing body of the Palestinian autonomous regions of the West Bank the Gaza Strip established in 1994 as part of the Oslo Accords peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

According to the Johns Hopkins COVID 19 overview , Israel has so far administered 10,537,076 doses to 5,102,510 people, which 53.36 percent of the population fully vaccinated.

My general point is that so much can wrong in life at so many levels at the same time for ordinary people. Imagine what it does to a people to have their lives turned upside down and downside up in a relentless cycle of violence. This is not about who is right and who is wrong but about how life throws completely unexpected problems in the mix.