South Asia Daily

'Nu' by Sanyu

Sanyu (1895-1966)

My pencil versions of 'Nu' by Sanyu

There are certain art impulses that happen at two different times only to later make one realize that their source is the same. In March last year, I did an acrylic on paper of a young girl blissfully asleep. I vaguely remembered that it was a version of a compelling work by a great artist but I had forgotten precisely whose.

This morning while going through some works of the iconic Chinese-French artist Sanyu (1895-1966), particularly his brilliantly evocative and minimalist masterpiece ‘Nu’ (1965), I realized it was his work of ‘Nu Endormi’ that had triggered by earlier piece.

‘Nu’ is up for auction at Sotheby’s on October 5 in Hong Kong. Both my versions were surprising easy for me to imitate but that is only because Sanyu had already done all the exceptionally hard and creative work of conceiving the original. That is the 99 percent of the genius. The rest is craftsmanship, of course. Mine are just hack pieces that help me sharpen my line control.

Of memory, identity and suchlike

Perhaps I am simplifying it excessively but we have our own individual identities because we have our own individual memories. Without memory, there would not be specific identity. For instance, I woke up this morning remembering very broad details of my life. That helped me fix who I am to myself.  This can be an unsettling thought in the context of losing one’s memory. In any case, our memory, such as it is, is always approximate. While eidetic memory does seem to exist in some form, it is no so prevalent as to challenge the broad assertion that as a rule memory is susceptible to subconscious or even conscious embellishment or alteration routinely. We just think we remember things absolutely accurately even though in reality it is often just a vaguely familiar recollection.

I have no idea why I woke up this morning thinking about this theme. That reminded me, and quite accurately so, that I have written about this. I might as well republish those bits.

March 24, 2016

When I wake up every morning, do I create the universe around me from my cache memory? Is the immediate observable universe around me just an approximation quickly constructed by my brain from cache memory?

I am tempted to believe that we perpetually create a new universe. While the broad structural contours of the observable, physical universe may remain as they are, we do fill in new details. There are, of course, larger features and experiences that are common to a group of people in a particular area such as weather but even there, if you observe minutely, they are felt or experienced differently by each individual.

My default temperament is to think along these themes on a daily basis until interrupted by the vagaries of mundane life. I am fascinated by the fact that we live such finely individualized lives even though we intuitively think that we are unified in the way we go through a common experience. I like the idea that I will never really know what another person is really thinking. I can only have an approximate idea which by its very nature not entirely accurate.

On April 19, 2014, I wrote a post about life being a shared approximation. That theme fits here rather neatly:

Breaking dawn and falling dusk* are such lovely ways of experiencing Earth’s rotation. Dawn and dusk and everything else in terms of the way sunlight changes its appearance is specific to a celestial body in this particular solar system; Earth, in our case. There are hundreds of billions of solar systems, which may or may not be anything like ours, with their own versions of day and night.  Of course, there is no sunrise or sunset in space the way we define them because they are both experiences unique to the shape, distance and rotation of anybody in the universe relative to the brightest object in its vicinity. Notwithstanding this knowledge, it is always a glorious experience what we earthlings with quaint inaccuracy call sunrise and sunset. I say inaccuracy because there is really nothing rising or setting other than from our vantage points in the solar system relative to the sun, the brightest object in our vicinity.

Being an early riser (again a misnomer because I don’t know what early riser really means in the grand cosmic scheme) I routinely experience our sky getting ever so subtly illuminated. It is like a cosmic brush of photons sweeping over our horizon from mauve to orange to yellow to finally just white glare. As the dusk falls, the order of the colors of sunlight seems to be reversed from white to yellow to orange to mauve. Once again, this experience is specific and unique to Earth simply because each celestial body will have its own combination of different hues depending on the constitution of its atmosphere, it axis, its position in relation to the sun and so on. For instance, the lunar sky looks mostly black because there is no atmosphere to give it the kind of breathtaking resplendence that we experience every day.

Inevitably, all such experiences bring me back to the lifelong realization that reality depends entirely on who you are and where you are. I can only approximately guess whether your reality is the same as or even largely similar to mine. It certainly feels so intuitively when it comes to larger realities such as sunrise or sunset within reasonably geographical proximity. We must all be conscious that there is no overarching reality that is common to us all. It is determined by so many other factors. The best we can do is to look for shared approximation. If all this sounds strange, you may blame it on the occasional dizziness that Earth’s rotation of about 1700 km per hour relative to its axis causes in me. We forget that that’s how fast we all move at any given moment. We do not feel it because it is a constant movement. We are forever getting flung but since that is built into us we do not seem to be discomforted by it.

While watching a 2002 movie ‘Copenhagen’ featuring Niels Bohr (played Stephen Rea) and Werner Heisenberg (Daniel Craig) I was struck by the idea of the universe being a series of approximations again. The movie is a speculative idea about what might have transpired between Bohr and Heisenberg when they met in 1941 in the midst of the Second World War and both Germany and America developing their atomic bomb program. How the until then abstract atomic physics became the source of the immense destructive power of the atomic bomb also plays into their purported conversation.

I am conscious that I am jumping themes here and creating a disjointed post. But that is how one’s mind works sometimes. That probably explains why each one of us creates and carries our own unique universe every waking hour even as we feel that the overarching reality remains the same for everyone. The movie ‘Copenhagen’ is very engaging if you are into how humanity’s morality was split apart by the advent of atomic physics. It was ironic that the idealist Bohr ended up being on the side that eventually created the atomic bomb and actually used it on humanity, while Heisenberg the pragmatist ended up deliberately or otherwise thwarting the Nazi atomic program.

* Why must dawn break and dusk fall? I don’t know.

The Tibetan plateau and the melting third pole

Polar--Mayank Chhaya

In recent months, there has been significant reporting on the melting glaciers on the Tibetan plateau—referred to as the world’s third pole—and how it adds even greater urgency to the climate change debate. Reading a piece about it by Gaia Vince in The Guardian headline “The world has a third pole—and it’s melting quickly” I was reminded of the following passage from chapter 2 of my book ‘The Dénouement: The 14th Dalai Lama's life of persistence’.

During my many conversations with the Dalai Lama in the late 1990s and many after that he did refer to the problem of climate change on the Tibetan plateau and has in recent years spoken forcefully of the third pole the danger posed to it. As the debate rages on, I think it is only fair that I reproduce an excerpt from the book. Quite like my excerpt, which was written in the 2000, The Guardian and other stories do speak of the plateau being the “water tower” of Asia.

As The Guardian piece points out, "Khawa Karpo lies at the world’s “third pole”. This is how glaciologists refer to the Tibetan plateau, home to the vast Hindu Kush-Himalaya ice sheet, because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic – about 15% of the global total. However, a quarter of its ice has been lost since 1970. This month, in a long-awaited special report on the cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists will warn that up to two-thirds of the region’s remaining glaciers are on track to disappear by the end of the century."

Chapter 2

Continental cataclysm

For tens of millions of years Nature has chiseled and sculpted Tibet out of the elements unlike any other place in the world. It is as austere as it is awesome. Cataclysmic geological forces over the last 75 million years have pushed millions of square miles of Earth’s crust northwards over the ocean. The continental drift has moved what is now known as the Indian plate over 6,000 miles in 50 million years. The final phase of this tectonic crunch began about 25 million years ago when the Indian plate started literally ramming into the Eurasian (Laurasian) plate and began dredging the Tethys Sea with a force of nature whose extent is still not fully understood. This powerful phenomenon carried with it a future history that defined many modern nation-states of Asia, their civilization, their religions, their cultures and their conflicts.  Tibet has been at the center of this bewildering tectonic spectacle.

From an ordinary human perspective, the time span may seem enormous and the pace of the drift impossibly slow, but in geological terms this is normal considering the gigantic blocks of Earth’s crust involved in this movement. A time-lapse cinematic perspective of the great crunch would reveal one of the most awe-inspiring occurrences in the planet’s history. According to geologists, Tibet had emerged as a hot and wet plane from under the sea between 14 and 18 million years ago, the era they call the late middle Miocene.  Some 15 million years before the present, the phase began whereby of this tectonic union would elevate the land and turn it into the highest mountain range on Earth. With the formation of the Himalayas, which continues to this day, began the rise of the Tibetan Plateau, arguably the world’s largest, stretching over 2,500 kilometers (1550 miles) from east to west with an average elevation of 13,000 feet. The Indian plate is still shifting northwards at an incredible rate of 5 centimeters per year, which geologists describe with some levity as twice the rate at which human fingernails grow. Although there is clear evidence to suggest that the Tibetan plateau began rising before the rise of the Himalayas, it was during the last four million years that it acquired its fabled elevation.

Perhaps unlike any other region in the world, Tibet draws its fundamental character from its geography and geology; some say even more so than its history. Tibet without its enormous mountains and vast plateau loses almost all its mystique, which has endured several centuries through medieval and modern times. If Tibet were a hot African nation with no mountains and monks as the predominant features of its landscape, chances are that it would not have inspired a million tales and attracted the West’s attention. Not only is Tibet’s geography at the center of its people’s existence but it determines the climate of the whole region involving over two billion people. The Himalaya-Tibet region has been called the “water tower” of Asia. It supplies water to more than a third of the world’s population and is the source of most great rivers in China and the Indian sub-continent. The Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra, all rivers at the heart of the great Indian civilization originate at the Kang Rimpoche in the northwestern corner of upper Tibet, more popularly known as Mount Kailash. This is also the putative home of Shiva, one of the great trinity of gods that Hindus worship along with Vishnu and Brahma.  The east is formed by splendid gorges of the Salween, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers.  These eight major rivers have shaped the two great civilizations of China and India.

As recently as a million years ago, or till the end of the Pliocene era, Tibet’s climate was tropic or subtropic. But with the Himalayan range rising to 20,000-plus feet towards the tail end of the Pliocene (about five to six million years before present) its climate started changing dramatically. The mountains blocked the movement of the monsoon rising over the Indian Ocean. Consequently, the Tibetan climate became a frigid alpine zone rather than sub-tropic which would have been more in line with its latitude.

Tibet’s reputation as an impregnable and aloof land, the roof of the world, owes everything to its geology and geography.  Towering on its southwest are the greatest mountains on the planet—the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Pamir.  Its northwest is the desert of Takla Makan, and the east has parallel gorges formed by the four rivers. The northeast is the only accessible area of Kokonor. Permafrost covers 2.15 million square kilometers (975,000 square miles) of the Tibetan plateau throughout the year.  Its 2.5 million square kilometers -- 2,500 (1550 miles) kilometers from the east to the west and 1,200 (744 miles) kilometers from the north to the south – form one-fourth of China, adding an enormous geopolitical weight to the country.

The overriding appeal of Tibet to the outside world has been visual first and anything else later. The overwhelming yet majestic manifestations of nature have over the millennia created in the inhabitants of Tibet reverence for the elements. Mountains have traditionally enjoyed the exalted status of deities. Nature spirits have been invoked as a matter of routine. A whole set of prehistoric Tibetan belief systems that preceded the arrival of Buddhism was dominated by what to a novice and outsider seem completely outlandish. Then prevailing belief system included nature and animistic worship which would seem rather bizarre to an outsider. For the Tibetans themselves it was just a way of surviving with humility in the midst of overarching Nature. These extremities of the Tibetan climate and geography are perceived as something of great value.

Let life be a blur

Let life be a blur

Where everything is emergent

And nothing quite fully astir

--Mayank Chhaya

The Dagger

It is an old habit of mine to write and store what I think are pithy one-liners which may fit in a larger piece of writing some day. The very short story today was prompted by one such one-liner. That is the opening of the short story. 

I call it "short story" merely as a convenience. It is nothing more a scene numbering less than 700 words. I hope you like it. If you do not, well, it is not as if you pay me to read this blog.

By Mayank Chhaya

He held the knife as if he could let it go for the right price or could kill someone if the price was not right.

I was the one not only making that observation in my mind but even confronting that choice. As I guessed what price would get the ivory-handled knife with a gold alloy blade from his hand to my pocket rather than across my throat, I also noticed that his grip on it was rather tentative.

For someone who had slashed at least a dozen victims’ throats with it, he seemed strangely unpossessive about it. That I would be his 13^th was a near certainty unless I did something unthinkable. I did and decided to ask him.

“How much would you sell the knife for?” I asked.

At first, my question appeared to crash somewhere between my lips and his ears. He had absolutely no expression.

Then after a couple of moments he leaned forward a bit said, “What’s that?”

I weighed the consequence of repeating the question and quickly concluded what I already had done when he cornered me in the fusty alley.  That I would soon be jerking on the urine-soaked road in a pool of my own blood was clear to me. So why not delay that fait accompli by asking him again.

“I wonder how much you would sell your remarkable dagger for?”

“Oh, so it’s a dagger now? When did it stop being a knife?” he asked me, confirming my suspicion that he had heard my question the first time.

“Yes, I noticed that it is double-edged,” I said.

“You seem to know your daggers and knives well,” he said.

“Well, I get around. I own an antiquities store around the corner,” I said.

“What makes you think I want to sell it?” he asked.

“It is the way you are holding it,” I said trying to prolong the conversation to coil down his pre-murder tension.

“What do you mean the way I am holding it,” he said twirling it.

“You were holding it as if you had just found it on the road. The handle was between your thumb and index finger,” I said.

“And you think that’s not how a skilled serial killer holds his weapon?” he said.

I could sense that this was a crucial moment that would decide where his dagger ends up—in my jugular or in my store?

“No, I think you know how precious the dagger is. You stole it from an auction at Arty's last year. It was an auction of South Asian and Chinese daggers. The one you stole is from the 12^th century. The auction estimate was 30,000. It cost you nothing but subsequently it cost 12 people their lives,” I said, surprised by my own bold play.

Finally, some emotion on his face. He smiled.

“You know your shit well. Fifteen thousand cash right now and you stay alive to enjoy the dagger in your collection,” he said.

The fact that it was the most important piece of evidence in a serial killing spree that shook up the city at the rate of a murder a month in the last 12 months did not even cross my mind. Perhaps I too was a criminal at heart.

“I have about 12,000 cash in my store and can draw the remainder from the ATM next door,” I said.

He twirled the dagger one more time and then returned to his thumb-index finger grip. “Let’s go,” he said.

We went to my antiquities store at the top of the alley. I took out 11,650. We stepped out to go to the ATM where I withdrew 3350.

I handed him the cash. He handed me the dagger and said, “I will throw in the scabbard for free.”

I checked both quickly for authenticity.

He turned and started to walk away. In one swift movement from left to right, I slit his throat. He collapsed on the sidewalk.

I could have taken back the cash but did not.

A deal is a deal. I had promised to pay but not promised to spare his life.

 

 

Water vapor on K2-18b

An artist's impression of K2-18b, an exoplanet 110 light years away with water vapor in its atmosphere. Credits: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

NASA’s Hubble telescope has found water vapor on an exoplanet 110 light years away or 950 trillion kilometers away. Let’s just say it is very far; far enough for light to have taken 110 years to reach us.

This is for the first time that we have found signatures of water vapor in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. Called K2-18b orbits around a red dwarf in the constellation Leo.  The exoplanet is in the habitable zone which means there is potentially water on its rocky surface. Its orbit in the habitable zone gives it potentially life-friendly temperatures. Given the presence of water the prospect becomes that much more tantalizing. But there is a big but here.

“Given the high level of activity of its red dwarf star, K2-18b may be more hostile to life as we know it than Earth, as it is likely to be exposed to more high-energy radiation. The planet, discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope in 2015, also has a mass eight times greater than Earth's. That means the surface gravity on this planet would be significantly higher than on our planet,” NASA said.

The team that found the exoplanet “used archive data from 2016 and 2017 captured by Hubble and developed open-source algorithms to analyze the host star’s light filtered through K2-18b’s atmosphere.” 

“The results revealed the molecular signature of water vapor, and also suggest the presence of hydrogen and helium in the planet’s atmosphere,” NASA said.

The distance of 110 light years is next door in cosmic terms but if there is life on K2-18b that is radio-intelligent and is aware of our existence, the communication between us would be only multigenerational given the current technology. We are both stuck in Earth year of 1909 for now. I don’t know what year or time it is on K2-18b. Their version of NASA may also have announced the presence of a small exoplanet with distinct signatures of life. The only individual presence K2-18b’s scientists have detected is that of Donald Trump’s, I am told. The rest of us are just an amorphous blur.

Let’s concede that everything is without a cause, If now is not now, it’s when

(The image has no connection with the post but it is mine.)

I have woken up in a weird state of mind. There is a certain hubbub within that quickly led to these three verses in rapid succession. Like all poetry, these too were born unplanned. Of indiscretion. 

चलो सब मान लें सब बेसबब है

अब अगर अब नहीं तो फिर कब है

(Chalo sab maan len, sb besabab hai

Ab agar ab nahin to phir kab hai)

Let’s concede that everything is without a cause

If now is not now, it’s when

***

खुशबू जो थी हवा में

कोई आदि पैराहन की थी

(Khushboo jo thi hawa mein

Koi aadi peraahan ki thi)

The fragrance that pervaded the air

Was that of a primal attire

***

तुम्हे जो दर्शन हो वोह तुम मान लो

मुझे जो अनुभूत वोह मैं मान लूँ

अब बस तुम अपनी थान लो

और मैं अपनी थान लूँ 

(Tumhe jo darshan who tum man lo

Mujhe jo anubhoot main maan loon

Ab bas tum apni thaan lo

Aur main apni thaan loon)

You believe what is revealed to you

I accept what I experience

You remain committed to your own

I remain committed to my own

***

I told you I had woken up in a weird state of mind.

Richard Dawkins, god, Jupiter and I

Human belief in god or its absence is of no consequence to the universe. Religious faith and atheism and everything in between are essentially an anthropic vanity project. If the universe were a person, it would probably say to generations of us, “I don’t give a quantum fuck about what you think or believe.”

I have long been amused by fierce assertions of the existence of god as well as its thumping rejections. I do not consider myself nearly so important as to think that my faith or its absence (For the record, it has always been absent) makes the slightest difference to the cosmos; even in the inordinately minuscule part of it that I occupy.

In recent years, especially in the past couple of decades, as atheism has grown to be—and quite ironically so—a sort of a belief system, I have occasionally written about it. It is with some dismay that I say this but I am running late in wrapping up my book precisely on some of these very themes. Titled “What does Jupiter really do?” the book is “A lifelong and futile quest to get a handle on this damn universe.” In the cosmic scheme of things, where ever own Milky Way is just an average galaxy, not to mention our mediocre star—the Sun—and its solar system, Jupiter is so beyond inconsequential. However, from my standpoint here is why it is the reference point in my quest for larger, more profound answers.

Jupiter is a wannabe star. Had it grown bigger it may have ignited enough and then who knows? It is said that if there were 1000 Jupiters fused together there could have been a rival star to the sun in our solar system. For now though we have to be content with one monstrous gas giant among us.

Purely as a comparison, Jupiter is massive enough to envelop 1000 Earths. Its core, if it has any, would be the size of Earth. It is more massive than the rest of the planets in our solar system combined and then some more.

The scientific community is convinced that had it not been for Jupiter, there would not have been any us with all our ridiculous certitudes and stupid little squabbles. Jupiter has been described as a preserver and nurturer because of where it is in our solar system and the way it so magnificently acts as Earth’s protector.

At 778 million km (484 million miles) from the sun and its 67 moons Jupiter takes 12 earth years to complete one orbit around the sun. With no known surface, the gas giant’s clouds are an eternally swirling toxic mix of ammonia and other unknown chemicals. Storms just rage on with no landfall to make. Despite its monstrous size, it rotates very fast—spinning once every ten hours. That fast spin churns up the toxic brew in its atmosphere to create what is easily the most strikingly beautiful mélange of shapes and colors in our solar system. It is paradoxical that the more toxic something is, the more bewitchingly beautiful it is.

It is said that once our sun has become a white dwarf some five billion years from now, Jupiter will still go on because of its internal furnace. It is just as well because Jupiter grabbed most of the material left over by the sun after its formation.

I have been thinking of some of these themes in the context of ‘Outgrowing God, a beginner’s guide’, a new book by the much-celebrated science writer and very publicly assertive atheist Richard Dawkins. An accompanying publicity description says this about the book:

“Should we believe in God? In this brisk introduction to modern atheism, one of the world’s greatest science writers tells us why we shouldn’t.

Richard Dawkins was fifteen when he stopped believing in God.

Deeply impressed by the beauty and complexity of living things, he’d felt certain they must have had a designer. Learning about evolution changed his mind. Now one of the world’s best and bestselling science communicators, Dawkins has given readers, young and old, the same opportunity to rethink the big questions.

In twelve fiercely funny, mind-expanding chapters, Dawkins explains how the natural world arose without a designer—the improbability and beauty of the “bottom-up programming” that engineers an embryo or a flock of starlings—and challenges head-on some of the most basic assumptions made by the world’s religions: Do you believe in God? Which one? Is the Bible a “Good Book”? Is adhering to a religion necessary, or even likely, to make people good to one another? Dissecting everything from Abraham’s abuse of Isaac to the construction of a snowflake, Outgrowing God is a concise, provocative guide to thinking for yourself.”

This sounds almost like reverse evangelization—"In god we don’t believe" sort of thing. With B.Sc. in physics and chemistry, I share many of Prof. Dawkins’s views of the universe but I have never understood why modern atheists get so worked up over something they are sure does not exist. In a strange way, it is almost as amusing as believers getting worked up over something they are sure exists. Meanwhile, the universe, already larger, more complex, beguiling, seemingly pointless than we can conceive, chugs along, expanding at rates beyond our comprehension. I am content being settled in a zone of utter irrelevance and inconsequentiality.  There is never going to be a response from the universe that says, “Finally, you get me.”

I choose only Jupiter as my reference to get some measure of it even as I am conscious what the universe is telling me, “I don’t give a quantum fuck about what you think or believe.”

Backtosquareoneistan

We know this only because President Donald Trump chose to share it on Twitter—his now abortive plan to host Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban leadership at Camp David just three days before the 18^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The idea was to announce a peace deal in Afghanistan between its government and the Taliban and project himself as the ultimate dealmaker. The Camp David peace summit was to be held yesterday but Trump, in an action that startled many, canceled it via Twitter just one day before.

I have several observations/questions about this strange turn of events. The first is the obvious one. There has to be at least one official in the administration’s top leadership, who knew of the Camp David show who also knew about the terrible optics of a deal with the Taliban barely two days before the September 11 anniversary. I am fairly certain someone knew that it was the Taliban that had provided a conducive ecology to Al-Qaeda and its sinister grandee Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks. The whole Afghan war was triggered to dislodge the Taliban. How was it even conceived that just three days before that anniversary the US president would dim it fit to host the same Taliban, albeit not necessarily the same leaders, for a peace deal?

Then there is a logistical question. It is safe to assume that although Trump announced the cancellation on Saturday, the Afghan president and the Taliban leaders were informed a little earlier than that. Otherwise they would have been midflight from Afghanistan to Washington on Saturday to make it in time for the Sunday meeting. In normal course, the parties would have arrived at least two days earlier for a summit of this consequence for a country that has only seen relentless bloodletting pretty much since December 1979 when the erstwhile Soviet Union invaded it. They were driven out by February 1989, by some of the same forces under US patronage that later mutated into the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

I am curious to know when the decision to cancel was made and conveyed because going by the US president’s tweets, the timeline is very short. He cited a suicide bombing attack in Kabul on September 5 by the Taliban that killed 12 people, including an American soldier. “They were coming to the United States tonight. Unfortunately, in order to build false leverage, they admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great great soldiers, and 11 other people. I immediately cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations. What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?” he tweeted.

There is so much that does not add up with the tweet that I do not know where to start. But before I start to add up, let me concede without any qualification the US president’s right to call off any meeting over the killing of a single US soldier, no matter what circumstances. However, that is not the point here. This year along 16 US soldiers have died in Afghanistan and so far since the start of the war 18 years ago the number is 2400. If the sanctity of US soldiers’ lives overrides all diplomacy—and it should in most cases—then why did the 16 previous killings not upend the negotiations with the Taliban which were by all accounts being conducted by US negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad for at least year prior?

As a New York Times report by Peter Baker, Mujib Mashal and Michael Crowley notes this morning, “In recent weeks, it had been increasingly clear that the United States and the Taliban, after nine rounds of painstaking negotiations in Doha, Qatar, had ironed out most of the issues between them. Mr. Khalilzad declared that the agreement document had been finalized “in principle.”

The deal called for a gradual withdrawal of the remaining 14,000 American troops over 16 months, with about 5,000 of them leaving within 135 days. In return, the Taliban would provide counterterrorism assurances to ease American fears of a repeat of Sept. 11 from Afghan soil.”

Even the Taliban is not foolish enough to think that the killing of one US soldier in a suicide bombing would, as Trump said, “strengthen their bargaining position.” The US, Afghanistan and the Taliban are where they are today after 18 years of a largely counterproductive war.

The Times story says that Khalilzad and the Taliban leaders had concluded the last round of their talks in Doha, Qatar on September 1 and initialed the copies of the finalized text. Their copies were left with the Qatari hosts. But it was the Taliban’s insistence, according to the Times, that the deal be announced before they came to Camp David that led to the collapse of the talks. There was no way Trump would have let the showmanship of the deal being announced at Camp David undermined by a prior announcement in Doha.

In the entire affair, it is instructive how almost incidental the Ghani government and Kabul are to the deal. They were largely kept out, an illustration perhaps of the fact that their writ barely runs beyond Kabul and vicinity. With Afghan presidential elections scheduled for September 28—their likelihood now in serious question—and the talks having collapsed for now it seems to be back to square one. Afghanistan might as well be called Backtosquareoneistan. (Admittedly, clumsy.)

Some observations about Vikram lander and Chandrayaan 2

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief Dr. K. Sivan (center) soon after it became clear that the Vikram lander's soft-landing had failed.  

While watching the live broadcast of the soft-landing of India’s Chandrayaan 2 mission yesterday, my eyes were mostly focused on the graph of the descent trajectory whenever it was shown. For about 90 percent of the time the descent was precisely going as expected.

An anxious ISRO scientist in the midst of mounting evidence of Vikram failure. 

Then around 2.00 a.m. India time (3.32 pm CST here in Chicago) there was a slight but distinct deviation in the trajectory, causing me to sit up. However, the descent returned to match the projected path for a short while. That wobble though was quite significant and kept nagging me. Soon afterwards, the descent deviation became dramatic and then froze sending data. At that point, which must be around 3.36 pm CST or 2.04 a.m. IST, that I posted on my Facebook timeline. “Clearly, there is a glitch with Vikram landing,” the update said. Eight seconds later, I posted this: “Vikram landing is not looking promising. I hope I am wrong.”

Unfortunately, I was not wrong. You could sense on the faces of the mission control staff that the absence of any more movement on the graph was problematic. It was around that time that Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief K. Sivan, looking crestfallen, went up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The horizontal and vertical velocities seemed to be frozen at 48 meters and 59 meters per second. It was around 53.06 minutes into the descent broadcast that one of the scientists was seen holding his head in his hands. Taken together, it was becoming clear that the mission had run into a problem.

There is a difference in a silence of hopeful anticipation and a silence of intimations of failure. This silence was the latter.

I attempted to calculate in my own terribly untrained manner what it might take at those horizontal and vertical velocities for the lander to cover 2.1 kilometers. Wisely, I gave up because I have no clue.

The partial failure of the lander—the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has been successful in its operation—has understandably caused nationwide dejection. In fact, the prime minister had to console a sobbing ISRO chief for several seconds. One can always rationalize and mitigate such failure with the counter that space missions are inherently failure-prone. They are but when they do actually fail, those who have invested so much of their life in them do feel shaken up.

I am absolutely not qualified to assess the factors behind the partial mission failure. Merely because I am a journalist with some very vague grasp of the sciences does not give me the qualification to hand down value judgement on those who have spent decades on such missions.

It is in this context that I would like to point how woefully ill-educated or uneducated a vast majority of Indian journalists is. There is next to no specialization in Indian journalism unlike here in America and the West generally where journalists spend their entire careers on specific aspects of science reporting. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the TV and newspaper reporters would not know if a rocket asked them out on a date. (Literary exaggeration.)

The failure of the Vikram landing is a sobering one for ISRO and no one knows it better than them. There is no point holding forth on the causes unless you have a working grasp on the sciences involved. If you cannot tell the difference between the horizontal velocity and vertical velocity—the former is constant while the latter changes every second beginning at 9.8 meter per second—you have no business reporting such stories.

I have kept my piece short and bereft of lofty pronouncements for that reason. It is a setback but setbacks are baked into all great space enterprises and ISRO is certainly a great space enterprise.