South Asia Daily

Ambassador John Bolton will be on Bharat FM

 

Ambassador John Bolton (Photo courtesy:  www.johnboltonpac.com)

Rewards for a print journalist like me are often not pecuniary but professional in terms of a vast variety of people of consequence one gets to engage with substantive questions. As I in my capacity as the chief editor of Bharat FM, the Indian American news, entertainment and information radio station, work to make the enterprise commensurate with my nearly four decades as a journalist, it is gratifying to note that Ambassador John Bolton, former National Security Advisor to President Trump, will be my guest on November 30 for a 30-minute conversation about a range of issues.

Ambassador Bolton is a compelling if controversial figure within the Republican Party and the conservative movement who is known not to hold back his views of various issues. Only this morning, appearing on CNN’s The State of the Union with Jake Tapper he described the president as “the political equivalent of a street rioter” who is “throwing rocks through windows.” As someone who served as the president’s National Security Advisor for 453 days, Bolton has had a unique vantage point on the president.

During my upcoming interview I intend to engage Ambassador Bolton in a wide range of issues such as whether America has lost its moral ground on sermonizing to the rest of the world on the virtues of a smooth transition of power, India, China and the Indo-Pacific, India in the context of Afghanistan, the craven caving in of the vast majority of the Republican Party to President Trump’s onslaught and so on.

As they say in the world of broadcasting Bolton’s interview is a “big get” for Bharat FM. It will help us showcase to the mainstream America how we are trying to build, step by step, a serious radio station. If it seems to sum that we may be punching above our weight, I will have them know that with my long and diverse professional background I am very much punching in my category.

Weirdly disorienting yet reassuring experience in the mirror

This morning while washing my cereal bowl and spoon in my hotel bathroom sink I felt utterly disoriented looking at my reflection in the mirror. That experience did not have any physical, material dimension to it but something far more profound. "What is that thing?" was the precise question on my side of the mirror.

To the extent that I have a measure of narcissism—we all do—mine is not mirror-based, as in how I look. That is because I genuinely regard myself as just about ordinary looking. One is not much to look at. The better word to use would be conceit, which is entirely cerebral, in the way one thinks of the universe. My conceit is not about what I write or paint or speak. Those are trivial. My conceit is in the way I conceive and perceive the universe. There are as many moments when the universe stands thoroughly revealed to me in all its explicability as there are when it is indescribably abstruse. My current preference about the universe is that it is staggeringly pointless.

Coming back to what I saw in the mirror—beyond the obvious physical features on my face—it was the instant question “What is that thing?” that has lingered on. The reflection seemed so unfamiliar and yet so fleetingly familiar. An expression I had coined quite a while ago and which really does not mean anything came to mind—congealed entropy. I felt so removed from the reflection, it was as if we were two very distinctly different life forms.

In those brief moments, every worldly, for want of a better word, chutiyapa (the nearest equivalent I offer is absurdity) disappeared. For a couple of moments, which in the mirror seemed an eternity, I forgot all my mundane life’s challenges such as penury and debt; also, the fact that one has absolutely no money and no prospects.

That experience triggered this short post which while writing I went back to the bathroom mirror to see if that thing was still there. It has gone.

The best I can describe the experience would be to say it was as if I had met a version of myself from one of the many universes for a fleeting moment or two during which there was clear recognition that in essence we were the same congealed entropy.

Barack Obama calls Rahul Gandhi a "Pappu" in a manner of speaking

The legion of Rahul Gandhi’s detractors and baiters can be forgiven for thinking that in so many words former US President Barack Obama has called him a “Pappu.” I do not subscribe to that sobriquet but I understand what informs Obama’s assessment of Gandhi’s.

I must confess to a measure of surprise that a usually deliberate and sober Obama has been so candid in expressing his views about those outside America. According a review of the former president's much-anticipated memoir 'A Promised Land' in the New York Times, Obama describes Rahul Gandhi as “a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject.”

Or in other words a “Pappu.”

The description is bound to endear Obama to the vast constituency on the right of center in India’s politics that has with great derision and perverse joy derided Gandhi for a long time. Objectively, it is a withering indictment by Obama which is bound to rankle the Congress Party leadership.

It is obvious that freed from the niceties and decorum of being president, Obama writes of figures such as Gandhi with the reassurance that it does not matter any more how his assessment might be construed diplomatically. It is perhaps safe to say that Rahul Gandhi may not have harbored a similar opinion about Barack Obama but in light of this, it might change. However, given that Gandhi felt it fine to hug his most trenchant critic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi—much to the latter’s discomfiture and awkwardness—in parliament, he may treat Obama’s undisguisedly uncharitable view with a measure of forgiveness if the two ever meet again.

Unlike his father, Rajiv Gandhi whom I met during the course of my posting in New Delhi, I have never met Rahul. From what I have heard and seen of him there is a measure of strange unevenness to his public conduct when it comes to expressing opinions. He does go off the rails in his earnestness. I would not be able to make a more specific assessment beyond that not having ever met him.

For its part the Congress Party was quoted as saying that it does not comment on “an individual’s view in a book.” I suppose that is one way to look at it.

When life fails you....

Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Hoeido Edition “Shono (Rainstorm)” Hiroshige 1833

When life turns predator

And you its prey

I say

Ukiyo-e

--Mayank Chhaya

Discrete unfolding of Nature's beauty

Sharonville, Ohio, November 10, 2020

Nature unfolds in discrete bits. You should know when to catch them. And when you do that, you are rewarded. For example, this photograph from this morning in Sharonville, Ohio where I have been since August.

This might be a silly thing to say but I think Nature recognizes those with a particularly keen interest and eye like I think I have and then holds spectacles a little longer. As spectacles of Nature go, this one is rather gentle and not particularly showy. However, even when I was taking this photograph I had a sense that people would generally like it. I am happy to report that I was right. It had the serenity of morning which is often evanescent.

It has been my experience that people do not commune enough with the relentless beauty of the planet we are on and instead waste much of their time in petty viciousness on a daily basis. I find myself looking at Nature so much that I have to consciously try and snap out of that communion. 

 

James Cagney as a vagrant reporter and I

The idea of a vagrant journalist drifting through life fits me to like an old shoe. So it is just as well that I chanced about a 77-year-old movie about a vagrant reporter played James Cagney in the 1943 movie ‘Johnny Come Lately’ on YouTube.

I too am a vagrant journalist these days unsure of where my life will take me. Although in his review of the film on September 23, 1943 the New York Times film critic skewered the film calling it “a curiously second-rate film”, I don’t seem to mind it as much. Like I said it has some distinct shades of my life in it; near vagrancy being one of them. Cagney was a brilliant actor and movie star active between 1919 and 1984. He was born July 17, 1899 and died on March 30, 1986.

Cagney plays Tom Richards, a newspaperman who comes to a small town called Plattsville and avoids being imprisoned for vagrancy after the publisher of a local newspaper Vinnie MacLeod, played by Grace George, intervenes and employs him to take on a local crook W M Dougherty played by Edward McNamara. I can see why the movie got unflattering reviews but mainly because it partly reflects my own career predicament I was drawn in by the movie.

Cagney is eminently watchable with his deadpan performance. Cagney reminds me of Joe Pesci.

Richard’s first task is to overhaul the newspaper Plattsville Shield Banner as he along with the publisher decides to take a three-day break in publication to change the design. This is before they take on Dougherty’s corrupt demand to print his editorials full of lies under the publisher’s name. Richard works out a plan where the paper would publish the editorials but in italics and an accompanying note that they were being published under coercion.

The quick scenes where the paper’s small staff start feverishly typing and setting the linotype machines to make printing blocks took me back to 1981 when I first joined the Free Press Journal in Bombay in the dying days of the linotype machine. The smell of molten lead to make the printing blocks is still in my nostrils. I think I have beaten the coronavirus so far because the lead fumes are still in my nostrils and the virus cannot survive lead (This is an egregiously false claim made here for the effect in league with the suggestion by our outgoing president to inject bleach.)

An interesting aside. Cagney could draw very well as he creates impromptu chalk caricatures on a blackboard of some of his colleagues. I draw and paint as well.

The Plattsville Shield Banner publishes a series of exposes of Dougherty’s many corrupt actions.

I am not going to report the whole story of the movie and spoil it for those who might choose to read my blog first and then watch it. (Literary exaggeration.) Watching it had an uplifting effect on me in that that I decided to write this post.

I have always been drawn to movies about the press and journalists, especially print journalists. That was even before I became one myself some 40 years ago and notwithstanding the fact that it has brought me to near vagrancy like Cagney’s character in ‘Johnny Come Lately’.

Paleocene, tectonic crunch, Ladakh and sovereignty

It is an old habit of mine to read scientific research papers in various serious journals such as Nature and on websites such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

I came across this fascinating paper titled ‘Paleocene latitude of the Kohistan–Ladakh arc indicates multistage India–Eurasia collision’. I know, I know, I probably lost you at Paleocene. It is a geologic epoch that lasted from about 66 to 56 million years ago.

That period is directly relevant to what we call India today and all the hyper-emotionalism of what we are and what our sovereign boundaries are and/or should be in places such Ladakh. I mention Ladakh particularly since it is in the news these days because of the continuing and most serious border tensions in over five decades with China.

When we take a short-term view, as in now, the past 100 years and the next 100 years—and we ought to—we feel a whole assortment of emotions. I tend not to do that because my view has naturally been in billions of years when it comes to the universe, a few billion years when it comes to our solar system and hundreds of millions of years to tens of millions of years when it comes to Earth.

That is where Paleocene—between 66 million and 56 million years ago—comes in. It was around that time when what we now call India began as a direct consequence of tectonic collision. In my biography of the Dalai Lama, ‘The Dénouement: The 14th Dalai Lama's life of persistence’ I have written about this very subject to talk about the geological birth of the Tibetan plateau.

A paper published on the PNAS website by Craig Martin of Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and seven others, says the following. I am quoting from it even though many of you may not understand much of it. I understand a reasonable amount of it.

“We present paleomagnetic constraints on the latitude of an intraoceanic subduction system that is now sutured between India and Eurasia in the western Himalaya. Our results demonstrate that the India–Eurasia collision was a multistage process involving at least two subduction systems rather than a single-stage event. This resolves the discrepancy between the amount of convergence and the observed crustal shortening in the India–Eurasia collision system, as well as the 10–15 Ma time lag between collision onset in India and the initiation of collision-related deformation and metamorphism in Eurasia. The presence of an additional subduction system in the Neotethys ocean explains the rapid India–Eurasia convergence rates in the Cretaceous and global climate variations in the Cenozoic,” it says explaining the importance of their research.

In the abstract the authors say, “We report paleomagnetic data showing that an intraoceanic Trans-Tethyan subduction zone existed south of the Eurasian continent and north of the Indian subcontinent until at least Paleocene time. This system was active between 66 and 62 Ma at a paleolatitude of 8.1 ± 5.6 °N, placing it 600–2,300 km south of the contemporaneous Eurasian margin. The first ophiolite obductions onto the northern Indian margin also occurred at this time, demonstrating that collision was a multistage process involving at least two subduction systems. Collisional events began with collision of India and the Trans-Tethyan subduction zone in Late Cretaceous to Early Paleocene time, followed by the collision of India (plus Trans-Tethyan ophiolites) with Eurasia in mid-Eocene time. These data constrain the total postcollisional convergence across the India–Eurasia convergent zone to 1,350–2,150 km and limit the north–south extent of northwestern Greater India to <900 km. These results have broad implications for how collisional processes may affect plate reconfigurations, global climate, and biodiversity.”

Essentially, what they are saying that when the Paleocene epoch tectonic collision began there was a chain of volcanic islands. The drifting India landmass swept up rocks from these volcanic islands as it began crashing into the Eurasian plate which created the Himalaya and the whole geology and terrain that we now call the India-China border, including Ladakh.

I have traveled extensively in parts of Ladakh as well as the early Himalayas in Kashmir, Garhwal and Himachal Pradesh. A casual look at the materials that make up those splendid mountains reveal a strange oceanic feel in their rocks.

My larger point is that what we now call a region of great sovereign consequence and importance to what we now call India was some 40-50 million years ago just drifting tectonic plates. We get so focused on and obsessed with the minutiae of national boundaries and sovereign sensitivities forgetting the primordial nature of the processes that create landmasses we call sovereign nation-states and those who occupy them as citizens and so on. What flows from all that is the idea of distinct cultures and everything that results from it including languages and religions and all the fixed ideas that begin to form.

On every visit of mine to these regions in the 1990s the overwhelming sense for me was one of awe about the primordial forces that shaped Earth. Once you recognize that, you forget absurd ideas about nationalities and sovereignty and borders and disputes and wars and death and destruction. Ironically though, it was precisely a form of massive geological destruction and crunching and subducting that created what we now call countries. And within those country borders, rise the ideas about cultural, religious and linguistic identities that too move like tectonic plates and ram into each other creating conflict and violence.

Democracy, Donald Trump, freedom of expression and Arnab Goswami

The 2020 presidential election has turned out to be an edge of the seat thriller with President Donald Trump falsely claiming victory even while simultaneously threatening to appeal to America’s Supreme Court to stop the counting of tens of millions of valid votes.

In contrast his challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, who as of this broadcast was leading the decisive electoral votes 237 to Trump’s 213, called for patience saying ‘we know it was going to be long.”

With Trump and Biden making diametrically opposite statements as the backdrop let me give you my personal take.

The American public has been historically primed by the broadcast media to expect decisive election results on the very night of their being concluded. This is despite the fact that counting of votes is an arduous process that often takes days and sometimes even weeks.

For instance, in 2008, it took two weeks for Missouri to be called for then then presidential candidate,  Senator John McCain. In 2012, it took four days for Florida to be called for President Barack Obama.

More to the point President Trump’s own much celebrated victory in Michigan in 2016 was confirmed only after two weeks.

Counting mail-in ballots is a physical process that requires opening of tens of millions of envelops and verifying them for authenticity, including signatures. They are then sorted according to whom the senders have voted and then counted.

Merely because we have a president who wants to win and win the very night of the election and announce it instantly on Twitter does not change anything. If anything, that unseemly and politically expedient rush undermines the country’s democratic process and in fact disenfranchises a large number of citizens.

It is entirely possible that once every legitimate vote is counted irrespective of how long that takes, President Trump would be re-elected. The opposite is equally possible. That is the nature of electoral democracy and particularly one as unnecessarily complicated as what we have here in America because of the long-outdated practice of the electoral college.

Perhaps we will soon do a segment on the electoral college but for today let me just say this. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President. Each State has the same number of electors as it does Members in its Congressional delegation: one for each Member in the House of Representatives plus two Senators. That was according to the national archives.

It is true that with the advent of social media and all the 24/7 hyperventilation citizens have become accustomed to a degree of instantaneousness that is often so unhealthy. However, even for social media and the freedom of speech and expression to survive it is important for a healthy democracy to survive and for a healthy democracy to survive it is absolutely imperative that every single legitimate vote is counted irrespective of how it might impact the outcome of any election, particularly this one.

Speaking of the freedom of expression and speech and 24/7 hyperventilation , India’s most vehement and often bizarrely hyperventilating news anchor  Arnab Goswami has been arrested by the Mumbai police on the charges of abetting a suicide.

Goswami, a fire-breathing news anchor and founder editor of Republic TV, was practically physically dragged from his Mumbai apartment, a mobile video of which is being widely circulated in keeping with his style of broadcast journalism.

While it is plausible that the arrest is an act of political vendetta for Goswami’s weeks-long fulminations of fantastical conspiracy theories over the suicide death of the popular Hindi cinema actor Sushant Singh Rajput on June 14, in a sense it also underlined how the kind of activist broadcasting he has pursued is a double-edged sword.

The abetment of suicide charge relates to the death of an interior designer named Anvay Naik in 2018. In his suicide note Naik was believed to have named Goswami accusing him of not paying him his fees.

Akshata Naik, the widow of Anvay Naik, said her husband had worked hard on a design project for Republic TV. Not being paid for it for over a year had left him penniless and forced him to commit suicide.

“We also want justice. My husband died because of Arnab Goswami, Mrs. Naik was quoted as saying.

The arrest was seen by many journalists as an act of political vendetta by the Mumbai police which has been at th receiving end of Goswami’s almost theatrical wrath on Republic TV since mid-June over the handling of the Sushant Singh Rajput death which he had darkly hinted to be part of a larger gangland conspiracy. Recently the death was concluded as a suicide by both the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences as well as the Central Bureau of Investigation.

During the course of his crusade in the Rajput case Goswami had been trenchantly critical of the Mumbai police openly daring its chief Param Bir Singh.

The Editors’ Guild of India has called Goswami’s arrest extremely distressing and condemned it. It called on Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray to ensure that the journalist is treated fairly.

Some observations about the still raging pandemic

Even as the COVID pandemic continues rage across America, India and the world, taking thousands of lives, the World Health Organization is alerting countries about its long-term symptoms, including damage to major organs.

“Although we’re still learning about the virus, what’s clear is that this is not just a virus that kills people.  To a significant number of people, this virus poses a range of serious long-term effects,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, speaking in Geneva on Friday during the UN agency’s latest virtual press conference.

The WHO Director-General described the vast spectrum of COVID-19 symptoms that fluctuate over time as “really concerning.”

They range from fatigue, a cough and shortness of breath, to inflammation and injury of major organs – including the lungs and heart, and also neurological and psychologic effects.

Symptoms often overlap and can affect any system in the body.

The WHO has also warned of very tough months ahead with too many nations witnessing exponential increase in cases. As of this morning the world has over 46.5 million cases and over 1.2 million deaths with America accounting for 9.2 million cases and over 231,000 deaths. India has the world’s second highest 8.2 million cases and the third ighest deaths at over 122,000.

With that as the backdrop it is deeply troubling that nine months on China has still not allowed a transparent and independent investigation of the source of the virus.

The WHO, which has faced the accusations of being coopted by Beijing, has not been able to conduct an independent investigation despite the fact that it is the best equipped international body to do that. Also, tarnishing its reputation are its early failures in acknowledging the risk of spread from asymptomatic carriers and that the virus could be airborne.

With no independent access to investigate the source of the virus and the world having to take China’s word for it, the world is flying blind.

The resurgence in Europe coupled with the virus’s raging progress across America and India will leave a lasting impact on the global economy. And if the long-term impact on the those infected is as severe and diverse as the WHO chief is saying, we have a debilitating post-pandemic crisis unfolding.

#SeanGone

With Sean gone

It is all woebegone

Ian Fleming creates a fictional character, namely James Bond which a real man, namely Sean Connery, becomes, and then the lines get so blurred that it is hard to tell who’s who. If that is not magic, what is?

In the death today at age 90 of Sean Connery not just the world of cinema but the world generally have lost their swag forever. It was hard to tell whether in Connery as Bond we were watching a projection or something real. At some level it is a pity that his obit would have inevitably mentioned James Bond in the very first few words. I say that because I am sure as an Oscar winning actor Sean Connery would have liked to be detached from that cool albeit tired appendage.

On the other hand though if you have to remembered posthumously, it does not get much better than James Bond. He portrayed Fleming’s child in seven movies between the first in 1962 until his last 1983. I do not feel like listing them here. You do that.

My point is what’s not to like in playing a man who kills at will and wills what he will. He travels at locations which the hoi polloi wouldn’t even know exists and canoodles with anyone in skirt or without it. Along the way he saves the world even while introducing himself with his last name first and first name last. This is even while his boss and colleagues refer to him as double oh seven.

We all have our Sean Connery moments. Mine came mainly in Brian De Palma’s ‘The Untouchables’ where in an Oscar winning turn he played the Irish beat cop Jim Malone. The movie was released in 1987 and I saw it four times on two consecutive days in Bombay for Connery and Robert de Niro.

I am not giving away any spoilers because you know the movie is over 30 years old when I say that Connery’s character gets killed in his apartment on a Chicago street named Racine. In 1995 on a visit to the city, I made it a point to go and stand on Racine. I have lived in Chicago area now for some 15 years and every time I pass Racine, I just smile.

Sean Connery in any role was a magnetic presence, somewhat superseded by his persona as James Bond but he did produce many memorable performances, including in the 1975 John Houston film ‘The Man who would be King’. That James Bond was bald or balding did not make a difference. He just had to stand and look at you and you would go “Alright then.”

All of us can admit to a slight and momentary shift in our walk and demeanor coming out after watching Connery as Bond. It created, albeit shortlived, a sense of self-assurance. It did not last, of course. But in Sir Thomas Sean Connery it lasted 90 years.