South Asia Daily

Those silly hospital gowns

Hospital gowns. Those floppy, flappy sartorial silliness. Let’s talk about them.

What’s the point of them? It is true that we are all naked under our clothes, but these gowns have a sick way of reiterating that nakedness. Through the awkwardly placed split in the gown those walking behind you get a peep show that is frequently not desirable. Like most men, I have a simian body that is rudely functional and entirely devoid any elegance or beauty. I am very aware of it and the damn gown ensures that it is exposed all the time.

I make it a point to wear a trousers underneath to spare the world the torture of seeing me the way nature built me. There is nothing even remotely edifying there. Take my word for it. I would have liked to exist just as a brain with either wheels or two legs.

I do not know whose wisdom it is that we have hospital gowns the way they are. They close at the back or on the side at a spot where your hands struggle to reach, let alone tie the two strings at the end of the split into a knot. Someone decided that it is not bad enough that people come to a hospital in all manners of pain; so let us compound it by giving them a gown that is infuriatingly hard to tie and even more to keep in one place.

Sometimes I get the sense that the gown has its own sovereign existence within which I must navigate my body. The gown may suddenly decide to turn left when I want to go right. So I go right.

Why is it that the gown is not front closing with buttons? There is a great invention called a shirt. Why can’t hospitals order shirts made of the same fabric as the gowns? Require patients to bring their own pajamas or pants.

If you are a heart patient like me and have to wear a heart monitor all the time until the surgery, a bunch of wires stick out of gown’s V-neck. Given the weight of the wires it pulls the neck down exposing an unseemly amount of chest hair. With a small display screen sticking out of the gown’s front pocket I feel like a suicide bomber who did not make the cut and hence was asked to play suicide bomber rather than be one. (Comedic exaggeration.)

It has long been my theory that a significant part why many patients feel sicker than they are is because of the ill-designed gowns. Dressing well would help reduce some of the sickness.

On a separate matter, patients should try their best to look as well turned out as possible no matter how sick they might be. During my last surgery for diverticulitis two years ago I acquired a bit of reputation for “not looking sick at all.” I am trying to maintain that reputation this time around but the damn gown scuppers it.

'The Silent Sea' triggers the lunatic in me

Earthrise--Mayank Chhaya

Perhaps it is my name, which in Sanskrit means Moon, that I feel an inordinate pull towards Earth’s singular groupie. After binging on South Korean director Choi Hang-Yong’s remarkably compelling Netflix series ‘The Silent Sea’ I feel the pull even stronger.

I have painted the Moon quite a bit but after watching the jaggedly spectacular rendering of the moonscape in ‘The Silent Sea’ my interest in painting it has intensified. From the looks of it the Moon’s surface gives you the feel as if it is powdered glass. It looks so remarkably lifeless.

Th silvery grey of the Moon’s surface lighted up by the Sun’s white light gives it a glow which has inspired humanity for millennia. My personal fascination for the Moon is also from the standpoint of how despite being practically in the same habitable zone or Goldilocks zone as Earth, life has completely skipped the Moon. It is almost as far from the Sun as Earth is.

The most widely accepted theory about the Moon’s origin is that a Mars-sized planet named Theia and proto-Earth crashed into each other a little over 4.5 billion years ago, melted and merged into what is now Earth. But the debris from that crash eventually clumped up into the Moon. Earth and the Moon are very similar in terms of their minerology. There are parts of our planet that could pass of the moonscape. What differentiates the two though is the Moon is geologically dead unlike the very active Earth. That partly explains why life never formed on the Moon.

The Moon’s surface has essentially remained unchanged after its early days. The fact that its atmosphere is so thin as to be non-existent ensures that the Moon’s surface lights up by the Sun in very high resolution. I mention this because ‘The Silent Sea’s lighting of the moonscape is breathtakingly convincing. No other movie or series has been able to create the moonscape so brilliantly perhaps with the exception Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.  That is what is pushing me to paint it more. I will do it just as soon as I am able to afford paint supplies.

For now, have a look at a slice of a painting of Earthrise I had done three years ago from the iconic photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William A. Anders, the first humans to have left Earth orbit, on December 24, 1968.

NASA's Webb is on its way to the second Lagrange point a million miles from Earth

NASA's James Webb telescope en route to a million miles from Earth

A million miles from Earth, NASA’s most expensive $10 billion James Webb telescope, will soon begin looking within barely 100 million years of the universe forming. That would be barely 100 million years after the Big Bang dating back to nearly 14 billion years ago (13.77 billion to be precise).

In a cosmic sense, it would be like watching an egg called the universe cracking in front of our eyes showing us where everything might have come from. Before Webb, the earliest and most distant galaxy that we have detected was by the Hubble telescope within the first 400 million years of the Big Bang.

The James Webb telescope which was launched with textbook precision this morning is now on its way to what NASA calls L2, or the second Lagrange point. “What is special about this orbit is that it lets the telescope stay in line with the Earth as it moves around the Sun. This allows the satellite's large sunshield to protect the telescope from the light and heat of the Sun and Earth (and Moon),” NASA said.

As of writing this post Webb was reported safe in space, fully powered on and communicating with ground controllers.

It was oriented correctly with respect to the Sun. “The six reaction wheels of the spacecraft’s attitude control system have been powered on, and they are now responsible for keeping the spacecraft pointing in the right direction – so that its massive sunshield, which is the size of a tennis court and which will deploy over the course of the next week – will be able to keep the telescope protected from solar radiation and heat,” NASA said.

The telescope will take 30 days to reach L2 and some six months later begin its full science work which will involve it looking back billions of years over hundreds of thousands of trillions of miles. Looking back would mean capturing data from the oldest and most distant galaxy as close to the Big Bang as we can get in order to understand our origin. Webb is the most ambitious venture in so much as it seeks to look back nearly 14 billion years to unravel some of the mysteries of our origin.

“Webb will directly observe a part of space and time never seen before. Webb will gaze into the epoch when the very first stars and galaxies formed, over 13.5 billion years ago. Ultraviolet and visible light emitted by the very first luminous objects has been stretched or “redshifted” by the universe’s continual expansion and arrives today as infrared light. Webb is designed to “see” this infrared light with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity,” NASA explains in its backgrounder.

The telescope has many other tasks including studying exoplanets, meaning planets in other solar systems. “Webb will also observe exoplanets located in their stars’ habitable zones, the regions where a planet could harbor liquid water on its surface, and can determine if and where signatures of habitability may be present,” NASA says.

In terms of our immediate interstellar neighborhood, what might be most fascinating and relatable is that Alpha Centauri, a star that is just 4.5 light years away from Earth, which means light takes those many years to cover a distance over 26 trillion miles. That is unfathomably far but on the cosmic scale it is our immediate neighbor. Webb is expected to study whether Alpha Centauri has exoplanets—unlikely—and if it does, what kind.

However, the most interesting target for Webb from our immediate perspective will be the Trappist-1 system, some 40 light years away and known to be home to seven planets. It is a red dwarf star where three out of the seven orbiting planets are Earth-size, rocky and within the habitable zone where water can exist.

TRAPPIST-1, a system of seven Earth-size planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star is between 5.4 billion and 9.8 billion years in age, according to NASA. The term “ultra-cool” does not denote its cool dude quotient as we humans understand it but an astronomical term about a star which has an effective temperature of under 2700 K (2,430 C or 4,400 F).

The age of the TRAPPIST-1 as determined by scientists makes it much older than our solar system—at the higher end almost twice as old. We are 4.5 billion years. This is the most intriguing system with exoplanets that NASA has discovered so far. Seven Earth-size planets around a dwarf are seen as fraught with possibilities of life. Adam Burgasser, an astronomer at the University of California, San Diego, and the first author of a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal in August, 2017, was quoted by NASA as saying, “If there is life on these planets, I would speculate that it has to be hardy life, because it has to be able to survive some potentially dire scenarios for billions of years.”

NASA pointed out that it is not clear what the much older age of the TRAPPIST-1 system means in terms of life having developed on any of the seven planets. “It is unclear what this older age means for the planets' habitability. On the one hand, older stars flare less than younger stars, and Burgasser and (Eric) Mamajek confirmed that TRAPPIST-1 is relatively quiet compared to other ultra-cool dwarf stars. On the other hand, since the planets are so close to the star, they have soaked up billions of years of high-energy radiation, which could have boiled off atmospheres and large amounts of water. In fact, the equivalent of an Earth ocean may have evaporated from each TRAPPIST-1 planet except for the two most distant from the host star: planets g and h. In our own solar system, Mars is an example of a planet that likely had liquid water on its surface in the past, but lost most of its water and atmosphere to the Sun's high-energy radiation over billions of years,” it said.

It leaves this tantalizing possibility open: “However, old age does not necessarily mean that a planet's atmosphere has been eroded. Given that the TRAPPIST-1 planets have lower densities than Earth, it is possible that large reservoirs of volatile molecules such as water could produce thick atmospheres that would shield the planetary surfaces from harmful radiation. A thick atmosphere could also help redistribute heat to the dark sides of these tidally locked planets, increasing habitable real estate. But this could also backfire in a "runaway greenhouse" process, in which the atmosphere becomes so thick the planet surface overheats - as on Venus.”

The relative proximity of this extraordinary system to us—40 light years or 240 trillion miles (400 trillion kilometers) is like your next-door neighbor in cosmological terms. The light and therefore the data it carries that we are capturing now is just 40 years old and hence quite fresh. It left TRAPPIST-1 sometime in 1977 our time.

TRAPPIST-1 has the fortune of having a slow-burning dwarf whose brightness  and temperatures can last trillions of years. "Stars much more massive than the Sun consume their fuel quickly, brightening over millions of years and exploding as supernovae," Mamajek had then said.  "But TRAPPIST-1 is like a slow-burning candle that will shine for about 900 times longer than the current age of the universe."

On Charan Singh's 119th birth anniversary a reminiscence again

From left, Jagdish Rattanani, Mayank Chhaya and India's fifth Prime Minister Charan Singh in Bombay,sometime in 1984. (Photo: Gopal Shetty)

I do not recall a whole lot about my only personal interview with India’s fifth Prime Minister Charan Singh, whose 119^th birth anniversary falls today. By all reckoning, fellow journalist Jagdish Rattanani and I, both working for the Free Press Journal then, met Singh in Bombay in late 1984.

Singh’s tenure was among the shortest lasting between July 28, 1979 and January 14, 1980. It ended abruptly in after the Congress Party withdrew its support to him just one day before a parliamentary meeting was scheduled to discuss that very issue. By the time we met him he was already 82. He died three years later. However, among my clearest memories was how taut his face looked at that age. I also remember how devoid he was of the frills of power even though by that time he had been the country’s prime minister, deputy prime minister and twice chief minister the country’s largest and most politically consequential state of Uttar Pradesh. I might as well mention that he was also the most high-profile face of the country’s farmers, always a powerful political constituency.

Here was a man who was among the earliest movers of land reform which attacked the very heart of the oppressively exploitative system of zamindari or landlordism. Some of this very self-serving landlordism and feudal impulses that lent themselves the the predatory and colonially motivated East India Company to make deep inroads into India.

Charan Singh had the bearing of someone who did not need much to get by. I remember him asserting how deeply influenced he was by Gandhi, particularly his ideas of rural economy and its importance for an independent India.

Singh indeed came of age during the tumultuous decades of the British Raj. He was already 45 years old when India gained independence. Perhaps it was that reason he seemed like someone unburdened by having been in powerful political positions for a long time. The fact that he spent more than half his life before India became independent had deeply informed his politics. 

It struck me that sitting with was an 82-year-old politician here was a powerful politician who had spent an almost equal amount of time on either side of India’s independence, seriously engaging with two journalists in their early 20s. Jagdish was 22 and I 23. There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest that he did not take us seriously. He answered all our questions in detail. I am sure the printed version of that interview can be found but I do not have a clipping.

On a separate but related note, the movement for land reform is a grossly understudied aspect of India's independence struggle. Six years ago I had written a short piece in these columns about Vinoba Bhave, the pioneer of an extraordinary land equity movement. I might as well republish it. 

March 18, 2015

Vinoba Bhave (September 11, 1895-November 15, 1982) is a very prominent presence at the Gandhi Ashram here in Ahmedabad. With the current political ferment in New Delhi over the Narendra Modi government’s land acquisition policy, where farmers’ consent to their lands being acquired is the main bone of contention, Bhave’s life seems fictional.

While waiting for the shoot to be set up at the Ashram yesterday for my interview with Dr. Tridip Suhrud, a well-known Gandhi and Narsinh Mehta scholar, who also happens to be the director of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, I began thinking about Bhave.

Arguably one of Gandhi’s most consequential followers, Vinoba was an extraordinary figure whose was, in many ways, a uniquely Indian story. He set out for a life as a Himalayan hermit. As part of that quest his first stop was Varanasi in early 1916. Newspapers then there were full of reports about a man called Mohandas Gandhi and his defining speech at the newly founded Benaras Hindu University. He sought a meeting with Gandhi and subsequently met him in June of that year. That changed his life and put him firmly on a lifelong mission to perfect non-violence as a tool for social transformation.

His chosen tool of transformation through non-violence was ‘Bhoodan’ (Bhoo meaning land and dan meaning donate) or gift of land. The idea was exquisitely simple yet enormously difficult. Using the power of his personal morality, mass public contact and the essential goodness of people’s hearts he would make the landed voluntarily gift tracts of land for the landless millions of Indians. Vinoba believed that along with air and water land too was a natural human right. But he also knew that it was far more difficult to part with than the other two.

During a meeting with the disenfranchised and landless people of the village of Pochampalli in Andhra Pradesh he found out that barely 80 acres of land could change their lives. He did not know how to get them the 80 acres. It was then that a local landowner, Ram Chandra Reddy said he could gift 100 acres. That set the stage for what turned out to be a remarkable movement. Starting September 12, 1951 he walked thousands of miles throughout India for 13 years exhorting large landowners to donate pieces of land for the landless across the country.

According to Bhave’s official website over 4.1 million acres of land were gifted as part of his Bhoodan movement. The actual land distributed was about 1.2 million acres with over 1.8 million acres being found unfit. The remainder was perhaps never donated. Even if it was just 1.2 million acres of land, it is quite an accomplishment for a frail, barely clad, man to walk the lengths and breadths of the country and getting people to donate something for which massive wars have been fought.

At a time when the country is discussing fair ways to acquire land from farmers for infrastructural development, Bhave’s is an exceptional story. To me it is also strikingly cinematic and not in the least because of his unusual presence. It is a great movie waiting to be made.

A black hole in my memory of India's 1983 cricket World Cup triumph

India’s iconic victory in the 1983 cricket World Cup is a strange black hole in my memory. I remember almost nothing of that spectacle. It is particularly weird for a lifelong cricket aficionado and a player. I had already been a journalist for two years in 1983 when India won but I have next to no memory of the historic triumph. It is almost as if that might as well have not happened.

If all this was not strange enough, I remember filmmaker Kundan Shah’s 1983 black comedy ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro’, now a cult classic, more vividly than India’s captain Kapil Dev raising the World Cup trophy at the Lord’s cricket ground. I do remember though what Kapil Dev told me in an interview in the early 1990s about that moment. I had met him at his stylishly decorated New Delhi home then. He welled up a bit and said, “Jaadoo tha woh.” (It was magic.)

I was thinking about my personal black hole in time for the December 23 release near my home of director Kabir Khan’s much anticipated movie ‘83’ about that very cup. I could have easily falsified my personal history and filled up that black hole with misty nostalgia accompanied by soaring background score to fall in line with the excitement being built up around the movie’s release. I could have built a compelling narrative based on watching excerpts from the final game between India and the West Indies. I could have knowingly written about how Krishnamachari Srikkanth scored 38 from 57 balls and Mohinder Amarnath 26 from 80 balls. I could have frothed at my mouth in faux rage at how the great Sunil Gavaskar truckled for just two runs because of an outside edge to a beauty by Joel Garner to be caught behind.  I could have faked any number of very detailed and specific memories.  Being painfully honest, I won’t.

This morning I watched some of the highlights of the final against the West Indians to get a measure of how it might have felt watching the game live in 1983. It was thrilling. When Srikkanth was out LBW to the right arm fast bowler Malcolm Marshall, I did curse even while watching the highlights this morning, 38 years after the fact. Watching Sunil Gavaskar getting caught behind to a delivery from Andy Roberts, I shouted “damn!” Again, 38 years after the fact.

I am going to try hard to dredge my memories to see what I was so preoccupied with at the time that I do not remember India’s incredible victory in any significant detail. Once again let me cite what Kapil Dev told me about a decade after it. “Pataa nahin mujhe kyun aisa yaqeen tha ki hum jeet sakte hain. (I don’t know why I was confident that we could win.)”

I also remember asking Sunil Gavaskar barely a couple of years after the win about how he felt getting out at just 2 in that decider. I met him with dear friend and great cricket fanatic and writer, Shireesh Kanekar at his then office at office 'Nirlon' near Worli in Bombay. Gavaskar thought a bit and said, “It was one of those days, I suppose.” In a separate context, I had also asked him about his much reported differences and even tensions with Kapil Dev, saying “There is no smoke without fire.” To which he had replied, “There is no smoke.”

The 1983 World Cup final was played on June 25 at a time when the violent separatist Khalistan movement was at its peak. It was in a sense in the run-up to the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi eventually ordering the military to storm the Golden Temple complex between June 1 and 8, 1984, in Amritsar where Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the supremo of the Khalistan movement was holed up heavily armed with his cohorts.

I am not sure if I would go to a theater nearby where ‘83’ is being shown. My being unsure stems from two reasons in that order: 1) It costs and 2) With the Omicron variant raging again, is it worth being inside a theater with an exultant crowd? I have never been an enthusiastic theater goer. In fact, I mostly cannot stand it. I have never considered watching movies a communal, collective joy. I like to watch movies and shows alone with no one making those horrid popcorn smacking sounds or slurping every last drop of sodas from cups which are almost completely empty.

Coming back to the 1983 win, let me end with what Kapil Dev said to me in the mid 1990s when I asked him if he ever felt that high again. He thought about it a bit and said, “No.”

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has "touched" the Sun

The first thing that struck me about NASA’s Parker Solar Probe “touching” the Sun is how far the Sun’s upper atmosphere stretches—about 8.6 million miles or over 13.8 million kilometers. That upper atmosphere is called the corona. In other words, the Sun’s atmosphere stretches nearly a tenth of Earth’s average distance from it—about 91 million miles or 150 million kilometers. That scale is mindboggling even within the scale of the universe that is beyond comprehension.

The first ever human probe touching the Sun at 8.1 million miles or about 13 million kilometers is an astonishing scientific and technological accomplishment for NASA. I am not sure if the probe has cameras on it but what a sight it would be to look at the Sun from such close quarters. Parker is expected to flyby even closer, its closest in fact, by 2025 at 3.83 million miles or 6.1 million kilometers. Beyond the complex science coming out of Parker’s flybys what I am drawn particularly to is the sheer visual spectacle that it presents at such a close distance. Of course, to the naked eye it would be an unmanageably blinding gigantic white orb.

When you consider that we are everything the Sun lets us be, you realize how thrilling Parker’s flybys are.

A NASA story said this about the science Parker is producing: “As it circles closer to the solar surface, Parker is making new discoveries that other spacecraft were too far away to see, including from within the solar wind – the flow of particles from the Sun that can influence us at Earth. In 2019, Parker discovered that magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind, called switchbacks, are plentiful close to the Sun. But how and where they form remained a mystery. Halving the distance to the Sun since then, Parker Solar Probe has now passed close enough to identify one place where they originate: the solar surface.”

“Flying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere – the corona – that we never could before,” said Nour Raouafi, the Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “We see evidence of being in the corona in magnetic field data, solar wind data, and visually in images. We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.”

Unfortunately, back on Earth we are currently troubled by a different kind of corona which is too small for the human eye unlike the Sun’s which is too big for it.

In case you wonder what earthly benefits Parker might produce through its measurements of the switchbacks and other phenomena, consider this: “Such measurements from the corona will be critical for understanding and forecasting extreme space weather events that can disrupt telecommunications and damage satellites around Earth.”

So next time your Internet gets knocked out and you are not able to watch YouTube videos of a cat playing the piano or a porn star climaxing but coitus interrupted, you know that solar winds have been particularly intense.

Kashi Vishwanath corridor and Gandhi

Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Varanasi's Kashi Vishwanath temple. (Photo: @narendramodi)

Irrespective of to whom the credit for cleaning up and significantly upgrading the approach to Varanasi’s famous Kashi Vishwanatah temple as well as the whole complex should go to, I am yet again reminded of a remarkable speech by Mohandas Gandhi in 1916.

Gandhi was one of the invitees at the opening of the Banaras Hindu University in February, 1916. Fresh from his triumphs in South Africa, he was a much sought-after man. In his speech, the following is what he said among other things.

“No paper contribution will ever give us self-government. No amount of speeches will ever make us fit for self-government. It is only our conduct that will fit for us it. And how are we trying to govern ourselves?

I want to think audibly this evening. I do not want to make a speech and if you find me this evening speaking without reserve, pray, consider that you are only sharing the thoughts of a man who allows himself to think audibly, and if you think that I seem to transgress the limits that courtesy imposes upon me, pardon me for the liberty I may be taking. I visited the Vishwanath temple last evening, and as I was walking through those lanes, these were the thoughts that touched me.

If a stranger dropped from above on to this great temple, and he had to consider what we as Hindus were, would he not be justified in condemning us? Is not this great temple a reflection of our own character? I speak feelingly, as a Hindu. Is it right that the lanes of our sacred temple should be as dirty as they are? The houses round about are built anyhow. The lanes are tortuous and narrow. If even our temples are not models of roominess and cleanliness, what can our self-government be? Shall our temples be abodes of holiness, cleanliness and peace as soon as the English have retired from India, either of their own pleasure or by compulsion, bag and baggage?”

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurating the transformed Kashi Vishwanath corridor it is damning that it took India 105 years to follow up on Gandhi’s indictment. In the same speech this is what he said about Bombay: “In every city there are two divisions, the cantonment and the city proper. The city mostly is a stinking den. But we are a people unused to city life. But if we want city life, we cannot reproduce the easy-going hamlet life. It is not comforting to think that people walk about the streets of Indian Bombay under the perpetual fear of dwellers in the storeyed building spitting upon them.”

One important reason why the prime minister’s die-hard supporters remain die-hard is because of his penchant to make spectacles and pageantry out of public works projects. And if such projects have a religious dimension, these spectacles make his die-hard supporters’ belief in him even more, well, for want of a better word, die-hard. Add to it the temptation of making a splash in the run-up to the upcoming state legislature elections in Uttar Pradesh early next year and you have the perfect political storm as it were. That the temple complex happens to be in his parliamentary constituency makes it all even more tempting for him and his supporters.

One can never predict whether a spectacle like this would help Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party retain Uttar Pradesh but it certainly helps fuel mythology about him as a visualizer of a grand India. Of course, like everything else in life, spectacles and pageantries too have their expiry and a point beyond which they no longer produce benefits. We will see if that expiry has been reached yet.

However, in so much as the sprucing up of the Vishwanath temple complex unintentionally constructively addresses Gandhi’s legitimate grievance, it is commendable.

Here is to Mr. Kutty, who could sing while being a journalist

Journalist and editor K P K Kutty

Of all the journalists who could sing and whom I knew very well, K P K Kutty was by far the finest. Mr. Kutty, who passed away today at age 89 in New Delhi, was an outstanding classically trained singer. He also happened to be an accomplished journalist and editor.

I worked with KPK for several years in the 1990s at the India Abroad News Service (IANS), which he joined after his retirement from the United News of India (UNI). I was its South Asia chief correspondent for about a decade. The age difference of 29 years between him and I was effortlessly bridged by music. Just as he hummed and sang in the office all the time, so did I. He was as open to my often unvarnished banter, laughing in his deep, baritone, which apart from being a natural gift was a consequence of a great deal of smoking.

As a rule, I used to be the first one to arrive at IANS’s office in Delhi’s Jor Bagh area. It used to be usually by 7 a.m. to sort through stories coming from all over the world. One winter morning I got a bit late in reaching the office by 8 a.m. KPK was already there outside the gate puffing away with relish and singing “Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khayal aata hai” giving the song from the movie ‘Kabhi Kabhi’ a distinctive Carnatic classical touch.

Even though normally by then I would have cleared half a dozen stories, that morning I told KPK, “Fuck it. Let’s just sing.” And we did for about ten minutes. When I told him the Kabhi Kabhi song somehow annoyed me he looked me in mock anger, flipped his cigarette in style and said almost sounding like Amitabh Bachchan, “Let’s go in.” Incidentally, the song was filmed with Bachchan in the movie.

KPK was an old school editor, sharply focused on the simplicity of language and utter clarity of the news in the lead, meaning in the very first lines of the story. At the IANS, his role was largely ceremonial having earned his perch after decades of hands-on work at the UNI. Occasionally though, he would edit stories. It was an amusing scene to see him humming a perfectly pitched song or a classical composition even as he ruthlessly hacked superfluity in them by crossing out with vigor entire paragraphs. He and I shared that trait of editing along with Tarun Basu, the editor-in-chief of the IANS.

For Tarun, KPK was “Kutty sahab” and for me, “Mr. Kutty.”

He was inordinately warm towards both Tarun and I, often gazing us both as if we were his cubs. By the time I met Mr. Kutty in the early 1990s, his head was already fully silver grey. He liked his hair long and mustache bushy. He had a somewhat gaunt face and given his height he seemed to stoop a bit as if to make him more accessible to those shorter than him.

The IANS’s newsroom was the old school kind where editorial meetings were sharp and substantive and never dragged on for more than 20 minutes or so. Mr. Kutty would happily venture his ideas and challenge story treatment. Being the most seasoned of the lot he could marshal facts from recent Indian history rather quickly.

In my reasonably long association with him I never once saw Mr. Kutty peeved or upset or annoyed, let alone angry. He always gave the impression that his personal music was constantly playing in his head which came out from time to time in his humming and singing.

He was a calming presence at the IANS who always exuded a sense of detachment. In his post-IANS life Mr. Kutty did what he loved the most--singing and teaching music back home in Kerala where he came from. I would occasionally amuse him with my smattering of Malayalam by saying things like, “He is such a pattida monay” as in he is such a son of a dog. Mr. Kutty would laugh in his baritone mixed with the rasp of a veteran smoker.

Here is to Mr. Kutty.

With Vicky Kaushal's mehndi outfit delivered I can breathe easy now

I could not sleep last night worried and agonized as I was over Vicky Kaushal’s mehndi outfit. Will it be ready in time? Will the styling and tailoring be what was promised to him? What if one button was bigger than the next? Will the garment bag have his name embossed on it? These were the questions that made me convulse practically all night.

I then got out of bed at 3.45 a.m. to check the NDTV website and felt a wave of relief wash over me. In its “Latest Updates” about the upcoming nuptial of Vicky Kaushal and Katrina Kaif, which no one is calling Kvick but could, NDTV reported that the actor’s outfit “Covered in Blue with His Name” had reached the venue in Rajasthan’s Swai Madhopur district.

I cannot begin to tell you how much weight it lifted from my body. Since I cannot begin to tell you, I won’t.

In another update NDTV also reported this, “Katrina Kaif, all dressed up in an ochre sharara, waved to the paparazzi that had waited outside her home all day to photograph her.”

That Katrina Kaif actually waved to the paparazzi made me weep. First Vicky’s mehndi outfit reached the venue and now this! Too much, I say, just too much. I am too emotional right now.

I am told the nuptial has become a big media event because you know no one has gotten married in India’s 5000-year-old civilization before this. Celebwatchers within the India media, those would be almost all of them it seems, are offering excruciating minutiae of the event, including about horses that would be deployed for the groom. I says horses because it seems seven white steeds will be part of the groom’s entry.

Now that the wedding preparations are well under control, including Vicky’s mehndi and sangeet outfits, I can breathe easy and go to sleep during the day.

It means nothing

Me by me.

After a long time I am choosing to write something ruminative. Death is a good subject to be ruminant about.

Death as a theme and death as the final reality figures frequently in my life. If death were a person, it would be among the top three interlocutors of my life.

What death really is is a formless eraser of life. Notwithstanding the popular belief in reincarnation or many births in India I am forever fascinated by how clearly final death is. There is no turning back; at least not in the form one existed as far as we know. The eventual erasure is precise even though more often than not the paths leading to it are diverse and full of agony and pain.

There is no right time to die except that dying early has its rewards. One of those rewards is not imposing on your family and friends the burden of taking care of you in the decrepitude of old age. My personal favorite is between 60 and 65. I am now in that period of life where death would be eminently suitable.

As someone with no illusions whatsoever of bringing anything of let alone lasting value but any value at all to the human discourse, my death, whenever it happens, will be regarded as a minor passing. For about ten minutes my immediate family might feel some pain but that will be the extent of it.

The visual, bodily absence that death causes is something I am quite fascinated by. We all get accustomed to the visual and bodily presence of our fellow beings. Within the ephemera that is our corporeal existence resides the visual and embodied presence that might seem permanent.

We all know the feeling of waking up morning after morning and finding our immediate family members all around us for years and years. Then suddenly one of us is gone, felled by death and there is no possibility at all of that visual and embodied presence returning. Memories are a poor substitute for the visual and the embodied.

Since we are on the subject of death, the kind I would prefer is like a fading movie frame. In the movie editing parlance, it should be like a crossfade between life and whatever lies beyond it—a vast, dark void. So far I think that there is nothing beyond death. It is just a complete cessation of all physical and emotional experience. Not being the soul type, I think death just irretrievably ends it what we used to call I.

Speaking of I, I have frequently contemplated whether my individual existence is contextual or has its own intrinsic reality to it. It certainly feels that there is some intrinsic self which remains unchanged at its core but keeps changing in its trimmings. When death occurs the trimmings and the core both cease simultaneously.

Eventually, we all lead lives of limited imaginations because there will always be incalculably more to the universe than what you and I are capable imagining. The universe perpetually outimagines us, its incidental products. There are times when I feel that the universe has given us birth as a limited opportunity to figure the universe out. We are the universe’s plaything.

With age, periods when my mind is completely empty have increased. Living mostly alone often engenders a version of shunyata or emptiness, not just in my mind but within my existence altogether. In the end one finds absolutely nothing. If Buddh had not pioneered it 2500 years ago, I am certain I would have founded the idea of shunyata. “It means nothing,” is my go-to expression for everything in life.