South Asia Daily

What hides between moments is our illusion of our existence

It has been a long time since I wrote something random, something that has no immediate or any relevance. One writes because, well, one writes. That sort of thing.

On a walk this morning, for instance, a thought occurred to me, a short poem really, about myself. So here it is.

आप जो भी सोचते हैं मेरे बारे में

अछ्छा या बुरा

मैं उस से तो कम ही हूँ

Whatever you may think of me

Good or bad

I am invariably less than that

--Mayank Chhaya

***

I also thought about a wonderful conversation I had the other day with Dr. Tony Nader, a highly respected neuroscientist who also happens to be the successor to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and a passionate advocate of Transcendental Meditation (TM). In that I particularly enjoyed our exchange about a favorite theme of mine, the idea whether consciousness can be quantized. It is something I have ruminated and cogitated about for decades. I have always looked at human consciousness from the standpoint of quantum mechanics. It is in this context that I have been fascinated by the Buddhist idea of Kshanika or momentariness. I have written many posts about it. There was one that I wrote on February 25, 2017 that I particularly like. It bears repeating today.

The headline was : What hides between moments is our illusion of our existence

It is time to return to the “Kshanvaad” or the philosophy of momentariness. At its center is the astonishingly ingenious concept of Gautam Buddha that the universe is momentary and does not exist between moments. I have written about this frequently being quite conscious how quantum-like existence stood revealed to Buddha.

I describe this philosophy in Hindi as:

क्षणों के मध्य में जो छुपा है

वही तो हमारा भ्रम है

हमारे अस्तित्व का

(Kshanon ke madhy mein jo chhupa hai

Wahi to hamara bhram hai

Hamare astitv ka)

What hides between moments

Is our illusion

Of our existence

--Mayank Chhaya

I am as interested in the philosophy of momentariness as I am in quantum physics because both in their own way deal with an unresolved realm at the Kshan/quantum level. It is not my case that there is any intellectual affinity between the two. One was conceived of by the staggering mind of Buddha over 2500 years ago while the other a collective result of the work done by Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg in the early 20th century.

I find Kshanvaad calming in a strange way. Swinging from moment to moment like on vines in a surreal jungle of time is exhilarating. A vast majority of us negotiates swinging on vines for quite a long duration; some of us miss and fall in the void of illusion that we call death.

If the universe and the experience of the universe, including our own individual existence, is nothing but forever flowing discrete moments, then what is all this frenzy about anything? This has been my default response to everything in life so far. Of course, there have been times in recent years when familial responsibilities trigger a baser level response but as a single self, I have no particular response to anything.

‘Kshanvaad’ is part of the overarching Buddhist idea of Anitya or Impermanence. Those who believe in the traditional God-Us dynamic, as in most religions of the world, feel rather unsettled by the idea of Impermanence/Momentariness and hence perpetual fluidity of existence, its origin, its meaning and its resolution. As in quantum physics, we never really catch the essence of our existence. I have never felt unsettled by this. I ride discrete moments of existence like a highly skilled surfer or a vine leaper.

Some day I will write about the difficulty in the idea of Kshanika as to whether those moments are separable from the unfolding event, life and the universe if you will. I suppose this is enough esoterica for a Saturday morning. For me though it just moments that keep passing leaving an afterglow that too fades.

 

Majrooh Sultanpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi and giving life a lovely turn

Over the decades, Hindi cinema lyricists have used specific words or constructs frequently and in disparate situations to some extraordinary effect.

One such word is “mode” (pronounced quite similar to road) which means a turn or a crossroads or even a fork in road. It is safe to say that you would hundreds of songs, if not thousands, which have used ‘mode’.

In my estimation, no lyricist has used it as brilliantly as the two giants of Hindi cinema songwriting-- Majrooh Sultanpuri and Sahir Ludhianvi.

Interestingly, both songs were written in the 1960s—in 1963 by Sahir and in 1965 by Majrooh.

First let’s look at what Sahir wrote for the 1963 movie ‘Gumrah’. The song is a classic that begins with this lofty exhortation by the movie’s protagonist Sunil Dutt to his girlfriend Mala Sinha:

चलो एक बार फिर से अजनबी बन जाएँ हम दोनों 

Chalo ekbaar phir se ajnabi ban jayen hum dono”

Let us become strangers again

In that song composed by Ravi and sung by Mahendra Kapoor, there is a lovely second interlude where Sahir writes:

वो अफसाना जिसे अंजाम तक लाना न हो मुमकिन

उसे एक खूबसूरत मोड देकर छोड़ना अच्छा

Woh afsana jise anjam tak lana na ho mumkin

Use ek khoobsurat mode dekar chhodna achchha

That saga which cannot be brought to a denouement

It is better to give it a lovely turn and leave it

The construct ‘Let us become stranger again’ is brilliant and could have come only from Sahir, who was known to give poetry some extraordinary turns as it were.

While Sahir’s use of ‘mode’ is somewhat cynical and even laced with a sense of resignation, Sultanpuri makes it sound almost magical. He wrote the song for the 1965 movie ‘Teen Deviyan’. It was:

ख़्वाब हो तुम या कोई हक़ीक़त, कौन हो तुम बतलाओ 

Khwab ho tum ya koi haqeeqat, Kaun ho tum batlao

Are you a dream or real, do tell

In that lovely song, sung by Kishore Kumar and composed by Sachin Dev Burman, Sultapuri has these lines:

मिल ही जाती हो तुम

मुझ को हर मोड पे

चल देती हो कितने

अफ़साने छोड़ के

Mil hi jaati ho tum mujhko har mode pe

Chal deti ho kitne afsane chhod ke

You show up at every turn

Leaving so many stories in your wake

It is interesting that both Ludhianvi and Sultanpuri use another frequently used term—Afsana or saga or story. In Sahir’s song,  ‘Afsana’ seems to remain incomplete, while in Majrooh’s it is more upbeat and numerous.

Nature's spectacles for its own edification

These days on my morning walk as I observe, like I always have, Nature unfold spectacles for its own edification, I think of this brilliant poetic construct in Gujarati by the great poet-philosopher Narsinh Mehta (1414-1481). Download Brahm

Chitt chaitanya vilas tadrup chhe

Bhram latkan karey bhram pasey

ચિત્ત ચૈતન્ય વિલાસ તદ્દરૂપ છે
બ્રહ્મ લટકાં કરે બ્રહ્મ પાસે

My being is a play of consciousness

Brahman frolics with brahman for its own joy

One looks around the non-human realm of Nature, particularly that which does not seem so insistently sentient such the sun, sunlight, water, trees and so on, and one is arrested by how constantly spectacular everything is. The spectacular is the norm in the universe and what is stunning that it is so for its own amusement or edification or, perhaps, for no reason at all.

My communion with Nature is a lifelong affair. As I get in on years and approach the end of my life it is even more so. I feel as I if am tangibly aware of how breathtaking everything is in the non-human realm. I say non-human because humans bring the baggage of deliberateness that introduces a dimension I do not particularly like. Not standing in the way of life, and therefore Nature, has been my old habit. However, humans have the need to do precisely that.

That Narsinh Mehta could distil that overarching feeling in just two lines speaks to the man’s preternatural brilliance. The word latkan, pronounced lat (with a hard t) and kan where the n is silent but still adds a deeper nasal sound to signify a plural, is hard to describe in English. It approximates frolicking or teasing but in fact is a whole range of often coquettish gestures.

To recognize the universe as an entity in a state of permanent frolic and spectacle is an astonishing intellectual leap.

Unfortunately, most people do not engage with Nature’s unremitting spectacles enough or sometimes at all. I concede that I may be overdoing it but better that than constantly pouring venom and vitriol on your fellow humans.

Incidentally, while watching the sunlight scratch off the clouds in its way this morning, I thought of this superb 1973 song from the movie 'Abhiman' written by Majrooh Sultanpuri, sung by Lata Mangeshkar and composed by Sachin Dev Burman. Although in the movie the song is addressed to the protagonist, Amitabh Bachchan, by his screen and real life wife, in my case I was addressing Nature. Download Ab to 6

 

Are geese sizing me up? I think so

Everything about this post may be treated as comedic exaggeration.

The first thing that I don’t like about the goose is that its plural is geese. What lexical logic was employed to make a goose’s plural into geese? What was wrong with gooses?

I don’t like geese either; I mean as a bird. Not that they have harmed me in anyway. It is just that these days my morning walks coincide with their time of R & R. Dozens of them land around a rivulet that I walk past every morning around 5.30 a.m. Their vibe is one of menace and intimidation. With their craning long necks—excuse the ornithological pun (crane and goose)—I always feel they are sizing me up for a possible ambush. I am genuinely weary of geese. (There is some comedic exaggeration here as well.)

Soon after my quadruple bypass surgery, I used to wonder what might happen if one of those attacked me and I had to defend myself. With my sternum still weak then, a goose attacking me could do some serious damage to me. I have seen videos of geese and other birds attack humans and it does not look pretty.

So this morning when I saw the geese (See the photo above), I became particularly cautious even though they were on the other side of the road. They have wings, you know. They can fly across the road in less than two seconds and land on me as if I were their landing strip. (Comedic exaggeration.)

One of them, presumably a female goose or a dame as they are called (male is called gander) had four chicks walking behind it. They become particularly protective around their chicks. Their sense of danger is heightened. If they see a human too close, they might act. Or so I think.

There were two geese on my side of the road that flapped their wings as I walked past them. I am not sure if they were preparing to fly away or ambush me. Let’s say they were preparing to ambush me. After six months, my sternum is fully healed, and I could have fought them valiantly if it came to them. It did not. It turned out they were communicating with each other. Perhaps they were saying, “Look at this loser. He always walks around our territory.”

At the risk of being an ornithological racist let me say that more often than not all geese appear the same to me even though they are different on a closer scrutiny. Nature hates repeating itself.

A couple of times I walked a little later than my normal time and found that there were no geese at all, not one. Perhaps I should change my time rather than allowing the possibility of being mauled to death by gooses, I mean geese.

And now, a completely unfitting use of a popular saying here in America-- what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It broadly means what is good enough for a man is also good enough for a woman. They should be treated equally.

 

There is a composition and then there is its arrangement

With the release my debut single ‘Tu bataa de’ drawing ever so close, I want to share a few observations about how the way any song is arranged makes such a huge difference. I have for decades known that arrangers play an often-defining role in the way a song eventually sounds. Thousands of Hindi movie and other songs have achieved great heights of popularity on the backs of their arrangement.

While I composed the entire song nine years ago and had some broad idea about what kind of instrumentation I wanted—the santoor and the cello were a must—it was the involvement of the gifted Mumbai-based composer Anupam Mallik Mithun, who has several Bengali and Hindi songs to his credit, that has given ‘Tu bataa de’ a professional sheen. Anupam agreed quite generously to arrange and additionally compose the song. That made all the difference.

While the song sounds very much like what I had composed, the fact that it sounds so much better and sharply rendered it is hugely because of Anupam and, of course, the gifted singer, Suparna Chakravarty. Suparna gets into the essence of what I had in mind so effortlessly.

Some of you may know what an arranger does. They bring in overall instrumentation, tempo, harmony, beat and so on. Sometimes little hooks in a song, a mandolin here or an accordion there or tablas here and bongos there, that can give songs the edge they may have lacked otherwise.

Most great composers have a broad sense of how they want songs arranged but, equally, arrangers help them attain greater heights.

Think of an arranger as someone who drapes the bare body of a song with fineries, making them even more attractive. It is true that unless the essential composition is good, arrangers cannot always on their own make it work. However, I am sure there are many examples where even a sucky composition became tolerable because of the way it was arranged.

I have said this before but bears repeating. Just as one swallow does a summer make, one song does not a composer make. I am not a musician by any definition. So far ‘Tu bataa de’ seems like a fluke. Lately though, in the past few days, I have composed two more songs which are very different in their moods. Hopefully, I will be able to persuade Anupam again to join forces. Of the two one is a very male song while the other can be sung by both male and female. If the second song comes to be, I would request Suparna to sing again.

A short take on Nupur Sharma's suspension from BJP

As someone who does not believe in religion or god, my views on the controversy over the now suspended Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Nupur Sharma’s comments about Prophet Mohammed are not guided by any partisanship. Also, as someone who was denounced as “pseudo secular and communist” to his face over three decades ago by a leading BJP ideologue, I have zero stake in what the assortment of the BJP members believes in. I suppose that lends credibility to what I am about to say.

Sharma’s suspension from the party’s primary membership is gratuitous because she merely articulated a distilled version of the widely held views within the party and the extended Hindu right family. If she is suspended, then I suppose a vast majority of the BJP membership too should be suspended. The honorable thing for the party leadership to do would have been to stand by her and say it is her freedom of expression, an idea which the party as an institution supports without concurring the specifics of her views.

The government of India, as an entity distinct in theory from the BJP, has had to scramble to contain some terrible diplomatic fallout in Islamic countries from Sharma’s comments. To minimize the transgression some Indian diplomats have described her as “fringe elements” which is rather weird because if she was “fringe elements”, how was she a party spokesperson and if she was a party spokesperson, how can she be “fringe elements”? There cannot be any credible explanation for this dichotomy for the simple reason that, like I said, she articulated a distilled version of the widely held views within the party and the extended Hindu right family.

The scramble comes only a couple of days after India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar went chest-thumping over how independent India’s foreign policy is. Qatar, a country about 284 times smaller in its size and with a population of less than three million, which is about 0.21 percent of India’s, manages to push the latter on the defensive over Sharma’s comments. It is pathetic.

As someone who does not believe in religion and god, I do not feel even remotely offended by the perceived insults against any religion and their deities such as they are. To that extent, Sharma should be immediately reinstated. In the same breath though, the BJP should also stop getting offended by any perceived slight against Hinduism and its pantheon. If you are the kind who believes in the non-sense that religions are words of god, then you should hardly feel threatened or offended by what mere mortals say.

Gandhi, flu pandemic of 1918 and COVID19

Excerpted from my chapter in ‘Standoff: Virus and US’, edited by Bharat Thakkar, Ph.D. and published by Xlibris.

By Mayank Chhaya

The COVID pandemic became America’s deadliest pandemic in history, surpassing the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 that killed some 675,000 people. The fact that over a century of revolutionary advances in not just vaccine development but vaccine manufacturing capacity, delivery, and communications tools for public messaging about the pandemic did not help America save those lost. A great deal of that had to do with the politics of the pandemic rather than the science of it. Media reporting and scholarly discourse about the COVID pandemic frequently invoked the flu pandemic of 1918–19 because it was for the first time in a century that the world was hit by a pandemic matching in scale and potential lethality.

The flu pandemic infected about a third of the world population then of some 1.8 billion people or about 500 million people. It killed some 50 million people globally with the US number totaling about 675,000. It is important to remember that the 1918 flu deaths came in the midst of a complete absence of any vaccine. As pointed out by U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), “With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.”

The flu pandemic grotesquely highlighted the health and economic inequities that ruled the world, a significant portion of which was still under the control of British imperial rule. India, often called the Jewel in the British Crown because of its many riches, was the worst hit by the flu that killed between 17 and 18 million people, which was about six percent of its total population. More women and children, whose immunities were devastated by malnourishment and starvation, died due to the flu than men.

So indiscriminate and unsparing was the flu’s spread in India that even Mohandas Gandhi did not escape it. He along with his fellow inmates at his ashram in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat remained sick for several days. For Gandhi, it was his first protracted illness.

In his much-regarded memoir A Life Misspent, Suryakant Tripathi, one of Hindi literature’s most heralded poets who wrote under the name Nirala, recalled the flu’s devastating effects in some detail.

“I travelled to the riverbank in Dalmau and waited,” he wrote, “the Ganga was swollen with dead bodies. At my in-laws’ house, I learned that my wife had passed away.” Nirala lost many others in his family and mentioned that there was not enough wood to cremate them.

“This was the strangest time in my life,” he recalled. “My family disappeared in the blink of an eye. All our sharecroppers and laborers died, the four who worked for my cousin, as well as the two who worked for me. My cousin’s eldest son was fifteen years old, my young daughter a year old. In whichever direction I turned, I saw darkness.” These deaths were not just a coincidence of personal tragedies visited upon the poet, they were connected. “The newspapers had informed us about the ravages of the epidemic,” Nirala wrote.

The flu pandemic occurred in the pre-antibiotic and for a large swath of the world, pre-independence era. The period around 1918 was considered the high noon of the British Empire which really could not care less about what the flu pandemic did to the native populations. The deaths of some 18 million Indians due to the flu pandemic did not appear to have dented Britain’s grip over the colonized world much since it took another three decades for its colonies to become free.

In sheer statistical terms, the 1918 flu pandemic and the COVID-19 pandemic are not comparable. Take for instance, the death to infections ratio in 1918-1919. Of the 500 million people who were infected by the flu virus in 1918-1919, 50 million or 10 percent died. In contrast as of June 4, 2022, of the over 531 million cases of the COVID 19 infection globally over 6.2 million people died or a little less than 1.4 percent. That relatively low number could be attributed to several factors, including considerably to the rapid vaccine development and distribution as well as the overall improvement in public health infrastructure compared to a century ago. The flu pandemic ravaged populations under oppressive colonization where the colonizing power, namely Britain was criminally apathetic to the people it subjugated. Add to that the fact that it followed in the immediate aftermath of World War I which had devastated Europe, the home to all the traditional colonizers such as France, Britain, Portugal, and the Dutch. Not that there is any reason to believe that in the absence of the war Britain would have found it within its collective conscience to handle it more humanely.

[To order copies of ‘Virus and US’: Xlibris 844-714-8691 www.Xlibris.com Orders@Xlibris.com.]

A silly post about Queen Elizabeth's platinum jubilee and bald royals

From left, Charles, Edward, William and Harry

The question I am asking of myself this morning is whether I would trade my thick head of hair by going bald if it got me a membership of the House of Windsor. My answer is a resounding no. I want to be a hair apparent. (A bad joke.)

As you might know, the House of Windsor is the reigning Royal House of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. That is so damn pompous but I digressed.

Watching highlights of Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee celebrations, I could not help but notice how the main Windsor men are in various stages of balding, be it Charles, William, Harry and Edward. Edward and William are almost fully bald while Charles and Harry are getting there. Andrew, one of the three siblings, has a lot of hair but he stands disgraced because of his alleged dalliances courtesy of the late Jeffrey Epstein. Incidentally, Andrew did not attend the celebrations because he has the COVID. In any case, his would have been an awkward presence.

Baldness runs in the family. Prince Philip, the queen’s husband, was also mostly bald. I wonder whether these men ever rue the fact that all their titles and privileges could not help them retain their hair. I suppose it is a great tradeoff if you are into it.

It is so absurd that all these people hold on to their titles and the vulgar privileges that come with them. On such occasions, they turn out in their full regalia with so many medals on their chests that you might think trophy shops across England would have run out of them.

At 96, the queen is still regnant. I suddenly remembered a joke about how someone once said the queen was regnant, but others heard that she was pregnant. Laughter was had.

Prince of Wales, Charles is still waiting for his turn at 73 to be the king. He is, of course, the heir apparent but not the hair apparent. (A bad joke again.)

Other than making this brief comment on the baldness among Windsor men, I do not have much to say about the celebrations.

In defense of fake, transient love

I am all for pretend, transient love. It is the kind that is expressed in the moment, that does not endure and is not necessarily genuine. Every time I think of it, two songs come to my mind instantly. One of them is a ghazal.

Better fake, transient love than genuine, enduring hatred.

The first song that comes to mind is ‘Palbhar ke liye koi hamey pyar kar le, jhootha hi sahi’ from the 1970 film ‘Johnny Mera Naam’. The song was written by Rajendra Krishna, composed by Kalyanji Anandji and sung by Kishore Kumar. The other one is a ghazal by Mehdi Hassan written by Farhat Shehzad. It is ‘Tanha tanha mat socha kar’. In that there is an antara that goes “Pyar ghadibhar ka hi bahot hai, Jhootha sachcha mat socha kar.”

Both constructs are similar in their poetic underpinnings in that they both advocate pretend, even fake, love that is transient. Perhaps the idea is that the one receiving that love should feel that it is real.

Love by its very nature is a massive chemical turbulence in one’s brain that does not last more than ten minutes. Or so I believe. What lasts is the illusion of it. Fake love is fine because more often than not the recipient cannot tell the difference, especially if it is a man.

I have next to no understanding of love. It is possible that I have experienced it, but I am not entirely certain. It has always been hard for me to process received human emotions. I remember when I was 21, a young woman in the similar age group once asked me, “Are you flirting with me?” To which I countered, “What’s that?” She thought I was being facetious and laughed. For me it was a genuine question because I do not know how to flirt.

Perhaps I am giving too much information here but I have never felt the need to be romantically loved. That is mainly because I just don’t get it. I can never tell someone “I love you” without sounding transparently insincere. I just can’t carry off love or, any rate, expressions of it.

This post was triggered by the fact that I woke up singing the Johnny Mera Naam song. I had written about this theme in my blog some time ago. It had no particular point to it other than making a couple of observations about what you humans call love.

Life unfolds better if you do not stand in its way

Life unfolds better if you do not stand in its way. Last evening while cooking I noticed from my kitchen window a boy chaperoned by a young woman coming into my verandah. Even as I was making a tandoori naan I had a sense that the boy was coming to my door. He was indeed.

I opened the main door and he seemed to be knocking the storm door gently as if asking me to let him in which I did. He was followed by what turned out to be his aunt. The two-year-old boy was very cheerful and confident. He went around my apartment as if he was very familiar with it. His aunt tried to stop him to which I said ‘Oh, let him have some fun.’ He looked around, smiled at me and left.

The young lady kept telling him that it was not his house but he was quite oblivious to it as children are wont to. It was such a refreshingly innocent little encounter for me. The boy had no particular plan. I had none either. A great but transient human contact was had by all.

For as long as I remember I have tried not to stand in the way of my life. As I get in on years and see the end of my life, I challenge it even less. Try it sometime. It will offer you some memorable experiences.