South Asia Daily

That melting yellow sky...

वोह पीला सा पिघलता आसमान 

वोह पारदर्शी नीला पानी 

वोह ज़रा सी डोलती नाव 

वोह पेड़ों की हलकी सी छाँव 

वोह मेरा इस दृश्य में खो जाना 

वोह तुम्हारा आगमन 

--मयंक छाया 

That should be all for today. यार, मुफ्त का चन्दन कितना घिसोगे?

 

Hey Universe, increase your data transmission speed

I have been wanting to say this for a long time. Today is as good a time as any to do that.

I do not know about you but I think the universe needs to significantly increase its data transmission speed or photon speed (PhoSpee) as I call it. The universal ceiling of the speed of light in a vacuum of 186,282 miles per second , 299,792 kilometers per second, first theorized by Albert Einstein, is no longer acceptable to me. It is too 20^th century. It is like your internet service provider (ISP) still operating the analog modem with that horrendous screechy noise.

Come on, Universe, you can do much better. At one level, it is still impressive that although Voyagers 1 and 2 are as of this morning over 13.778 billion and 11.405 billion miles away respectively after 42 years of traveling, in radio signal time they are only 20 hours and 17 hours away in one-way light time. That means to communicate with them, which will soon become impossible because of the diminishing radio signal strength, we need 40 hours and 34 hours each. Since they are pulling away from us at over 38,026 miles per hour (61,196 kmh) and 34,390 miles per hour (55,345 kmh) the length of that one communication loop is constantly increasing.

This is an example of my complaint about the universe’s data transmission being restricted by the speed of light ceiling, courtesy of Einstein. It is not as if Einstein imposed that limit. He brilliantly theorized it and has been proven right time and again. It is not his fault that he is right about the whole universe so far.

The point is the universe needs to measure up and give us a much faster data transmission speed. Ideally, I would ask for instantaneous transmission, meaning something occurring and being detected by us happening at once with zero, yes pure zero, time lag. I understand that this is the spooky action at a distance realm but I am not talking quantum scale but the normal macro scale that our dense brain operates on.

Can you imagine how that would completely transform our experience of the universe? It is not a rhetorical question. I am working on what that might mean in our daily human experience to have absolutely no time lag at all.

If the universe were my ISP, I would have long disconnected it with the pathetically slow light speed it is offering.

Jawaharlal, Raj Kaul, Farrukhsiar, nahar and Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru by MC

Today happens to be the 130^th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru. I can write an informed tribute to an extraordinary life but, as is my wont, I won’t and instead focus on something tangential and even trivial.

It strikes me yet again how human life and therefore human history is either improbably random or so finely designed. By the time Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, Mohandas Gandhi was already 20 years old. He had left for England in 1888 and the year 1889 for him was eventful for him as he immersed himself in learning elocution, French, dancing, and Western music. The month Nehru was born was the month Gandhi met Madame Blavatsky, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, and Annie Besant, a well-known theosophist and women’s rights activist.

The reason why I mention this is because in 1889 when Nehru was literally in conception, turning into a fetus and eventually a fully-formed baby in November, 1889, Gandhi was already an adult firming up his personality through various influences. At that point who would have thought that the baby born to Motilal Nehru and Swarup Rani Nehru in Allahabad (now Prayagraj) would go on to become Jawaharlal Nehru? Or for that matter, Gandhi’s most cherished young disciple?

What are the odds that two men separated by 20 years and thousands of kilometers at that stage would go on to preside over India’s destiny? Apparently quite high because it did indeed happen. I do not want to be graphic here but when Motilal Nehru and Swarup Rani were in the process of conceiving someone who became Jawaharlal, there was next to no prospect or knowledge of what future held not just for the baby being conceived but, by implication, for India and the world.

Another defining figure of India’s destiny, Vallabhai Patel, whose life too would be intertwined with Nehru’s so deeply, was already 14 years old by then. In a sense Patel was Gandhi’s contemporary rather than Nehru’s peer, something that is often forgotten by those who constantly harp on the non-existent rivalry between the two great men.

I am fascinated by these connections. Consider the fact that Motilal Nehru’s first wife died during child birth. Had she lived, it is conceivable that India’s history would have taken a different turn. That’s what I mean by how human life and human history are either so improbably random or finely designed. I think it is the former.

By the time Nehru met Gandhi for the first time in December, 1916, the 47-year-old Gandhi was already an internationally prominent figure because of his work in South Africa. Nehru was just 27. History seems to be a series of happenstances and fortuitous events somehow coming together. In that it is quite like the way the universe appears to have evolved. It could have taken any number of directions, including the one it eventually took and the one we are part of.

Interestingly, as an aside, even the last name Nehru, which is these days perhaps the most reviled in India’s politics, comes from the word nahar or a canal. Jawaharlal writes in his autobiography, “We were Kashmiris. Over two hundred years ago, early in the eighteenth century, our ancestor came down from that mountain valley to seek fame and fortune in the rich plains below. Those were the days of the decline of the Moghal Empire after the death of Aurangzeb, and Farrukhsiar was the Emperor. Raj Kaul was the name of that ancestor of ours and he had gained eminence as a Sanskrit and Persian scholar in Kashmir. He attracted the notice of Farrukhsiar during the latter’s visit to Kashmir and, probably at the Emperor’s instance, the family migrated to Delhi, the imperial capital, about the year 1716. A jagir with a house situated on the bank of a canal had been granted to Raj Kaul, and, from the fact of this residence, ‘Nehru’ (from nahar , a canal) came to be attached to his name; and, in later years, Kaul dropped and we became simply Nehrus.”

Once again, that is a charming example of the randomness of human life. Had Raj Kaul not been noticed by Farrukhsiar and had he not migrated to Delhi and not lived by a nahar, history may have been very different. At the very least Kaul would have been the most reviled last name today. Perhaps.

You can argue that it is all written, if you have that sort of mindset, or argue that nothing is written. Either way, here we are 130 years after the fact.

Wolf Blitzer: Bringing a toothbrush to a gumfight

So far the best image of the impeachment day has been this photo of CNN grandee Wolf Blitzer and his desk. 

What strikes me the most about Blitzer's desk is the toothbrush. Any weapon in service of journalism, including gleaming teeth, is welcome. It is called bringing a toothbrush to a gumfight. (I couldn't resist that one.)

That's all for today. 

With all due respect, it is delightfully unprincipled

From what little one has read and heard about her book ‘With All Due Respect’, it is clear that former US Ambassador the United Nations Nikki Haley expects Donald Trump’s sway over not just the Republican Party but his own fiercely loyal base to last well beyond his presidency. And she wants every part of it as she might consider 2024 as her time to run for president.

As political positioning goes, Haley, a former Governor of South Carolina, uses her book with remarkable sagacity, albeit with cynical efficiency, to keep the Trump constituency on her side just in case she does indeed go for presidency. The most telling part of the bits of excerpts from the book that support her apparent game plan is the way she describes how former White House chief of staff John Kelly and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tried to recruit her against President Trump and some of his policies to “save the country.”

According an excerpt published by The Washington Post, Haley writes, ““Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country. … It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said. The president didn’t know what he was doing.”

That’s a stunning claim, which Tillerson has sort of denied while Kelly has so far kept silent to, that Haley uses to illustrate how she did not go along with it. Her point being that not only would it have been dangerous to America’s constituency but implicitly that she is keeping her powder dry for 2024. The calculation appears to be that the Trump era may not end with the end of his presidency in so far as the pathological loyalty of his base to him is concerned. It is a constituency that Trump has created and could well remain decisive within the Republican world for a significant period.

It is extraordinary how all the way in she is with Trump was illustrated during an interview this morning with Savannah Guthrie on Today Show on NBC, when she was asked, "Did you think he (Trump) was a truthful person?"

"Yes," Haley said. "In every instance that I dealt with him, he was truthful, he listened, and he was great to work with."

That flies in the face of what the rest of the world has experienced relentlessly for at least three years now.

Notwithstanding that, Haley appears to have begun at least some exploration of her prospects for 2024. It is not my case at all that she would run but if she does want to run this is probably the most astute way to signal it. Ever since she was appointed the US Ambassador to the UN and even after she left she has carefully choreographed her working relationship the president given all his terrible flaws but on balance making her peace with them.

Self-serving? Unprincipled? You might ask. Sure, and flagrantly so. But we live in flagrantly unprincipled times.

A short reminiscence about T N Seshan

India’s former Chief Election Commissioner  (CEC) T.N. Seshan, who died yesterday at age 86, had what would in today’s parlance be described as swag. His brief rise as an icon of the middle class in the mid-1990s coincided with my nearly one decade in New Delhi as the South Asia chief correspondent of the then India Abroad News Service and India Abroad newsweekly.

About a year after I arrived in Delhi in 1989, Seshan was appointed the CEC. He quickly recognized the enormous importance of the body in the world’s largest democracy and got on with the task of enforcing unprecedented discipline on political parties and politicians who were until then used to cavalierly flouting election laws and norms. A strict adherence to the model code of conduct was Seshan’s mantra.

Although the body language and bearing of a CEC, for that matter any government functionary should hardly matter, in Seshan’s case he had a certain lumbering presence, made somewhat Hitchcockian because of his baldhead, that seemed to accentuate his reputation as a whip-cracking election boss.

I had my share of interactions with him. What struck me the most was that his body language suggested a man of fiery ambitions. It was no surprise that he once said he “ate politicians for breakfast” and saw himself as fit to be India’s president. Something tells me that had Seshan been a CEC in this era of social media he would have built up an enormous following with his often unfiltered pronouncements.

One of the recurring complaints about Seshan from politician at the receiving end of his wrath was that he was arrogant. Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha, herself no stranger to being called imperious, described him as “embodiment of arrogance.” I asked him if he was that, he struck a mock arrogant posture and said, “What do you think?”

Even as Cabinet Secretary under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the country’s top bureaucrat, or before that as Defence Secretary as well as Secretary (Security) Seshan left his mark with his crusty no non-sense style.

His lasting legacy would be the significant reform he brought in as the CEC and giving the body much-needed teeth and snarl, although some might argue that much of it has since eroded, particularly since 2014.

My one tangential connection with Seshan, apart from some direct interactions, came in by 1992 biography of Sam Pitroda. It was I who had called Pitroda on the night of May 21, 1991 with the news that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated. Pitroda in turn called Seshan who confirmed that in the early minutes of the macabre killing that Gandhi was apparently killed in an explosion.

I think India needs top government functionaries such as Seshan who often step out of the bounds of bureaucratic correctness and act in the larger interest of the country. If in the process they come across as excessively ambitious, so be it.

That one which is burning, One Astronomical Unit away

वोह जो जल रहा है

एक एस्ट्रोनोमिकल यूनिट की दूरी पर

वही तो है हमारे

वजूद की वजह

जलता रहता है बावजूद उस के

की उस की रौशनी में

हम कितना अँधेरा बिखेरते हैं

--मयंक छाया

That one which is burning 

One Astronomical Unit away

Is the reason

For our existence

Keeps burning away despite that

In its light

We spread so much darkness.

--Mayank Chhaya 

Ayodhya verdict: A remarkable act of sociocultural funambulism

As a journalist who was deeply immersed in reporting firsthand, not to mention observing from very close quarters the grandees of the Ayodhya dispute in 1992 and prior, I find the Indian Supreme Court’s verdict a remarkable act of sociocultural funambulism.

Although by its very nature the nearly 1000-page unanimous verdict is couched in legalese, its underpinnings appear to factor in faith as a decisive element; faith among hundreds of millions of Hindus that Ram was born at the site where a temple once stood according to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Interestingly, one unnamed Supreme Court justice, who was among the five on the Constitution Bench, wrote a 116-page addendum where the judge said “faith and belief of Hindus” that the Lord Ram’s birth place “is the place where Babri Mosque has been constructed” is “proved by documentary and oral evidence discussed above”, according to The Hindustan Times.

Faith and belief as credible factors in a seven-decades-old direct dispute and over four-centuries-old  jostling between Hindus and Muslims is quite a remarkable occurrence. The mosque in Ayodhya was demolished on December 6 1992 by Hindu groups in what was independent India’s most stunning act of cultural, political and legal defiance. Reporting the story from New Delhi along Tarun Basu, chief editor of the then India Abroad News Service and I, as its South Asia chief correspondent, were granted an extraordinary interview by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who of course went on to become India’s prime minister, barely three days after the Babri Masjid demolition. Vajpayee was a picture of deep anguish and repeated contrition amid a resurgent BJP led by his lifelong friend and fellow leader Lal Krishna Advani, who essentially took the path of least resistance as the disputed structure was hammered down. Nearly 2000 people were killed in the sectarian conflagration that followed.  Even then, I used to point out to fellow journalists and political leaders, including Vajpayee, the irony of so much violence being unleashed in the name of someone Hindus call “Marayda Purushottam Shri Ram” or the finest of humans with enlightened restraint as his guiding principle.

I call the court verdict a remarkable act of sociocultural funambulism because it does a rather precarious tightrope walk over the heads of 1.2 billion people. In operational terms, it grants 2.7 acres of land in Ayodhya at the heart of the dispute to Hindu groups who will eventually build what they have been calling the grandest temple of its kind to commemorate Ram. It is an unquestionably robust win for the Hindu groups. The Muslim parties at dispute, on the other hand, have been given 5 acres in a prominent spot in Aydohya to build a mosque. The rationale for that balance is that, according to the reporting of the verdict, the Muslim groups were wronged twice, first in 1949 when Hindu idols were placed inside what was then called the Babri mosque, and then for the second time in 1992 when it was demolished.

Given the incendiary history of the dispute and the bloodletting it has led to, not to mention a tectonic shift in India’s polity since 1992 which has culminated into a back-to-back electoral triumph for the BJP in 2014 and 2019, the Supreme Court has done its best under the circumstances. All court verdicts have a way of leaving some feeling deeply wronged, which in this case are some Muslim groups, but by and large it has the potential to offer a workable closure to a vicious conflict. It has not gone unnoticed that the Supreme Court said the demolition of the Babri mosque was against the rule of law, a sentiment both Vajpayee had expressed to Tarun and I somewhat implicitly. Advani too had then has since expressed regret over the turn of events on December 6, 1992.

What I find fascinating is that the verdict grants legal sanctity to the existence of Ram, not just as a matter of faith and belief, but as a legal entity in the form of the infant or child Ram, referred to as Ram Lalla Virajman, which loosely translates as baby Ram present or seated. As someone not emotionally invested in any faith at all from childhood, I take a detached but fascinated view of the interplay between faith and law, what is notional and what is legal, in this verdict.

Dissatisfaction among a significant constituency notwithstanding, the verdict offers India a chance to heal decades of wounds and end the often downright brutal fights and vicious and vulgar name-calling. That does not necessarily mean that it will happen but this is as good an opportunity as there will ever be to move on to a new era altogether.

An excerpt from "Vikram Lunar Lander:Dead or Alive?"

 

As 'Vikram Lunar Lander: Dead or Alive?", a slim, 110-page examination by Dr. Bharat Thakkar and I is on a quest to make an impact via Amazon , I present a brief excerpt from a chapter titled 'Here Comes the Moon'. Here is hoping that some of you would consider buying it for just $9.99 to get a quick but credible grasp in the lunar mission. 

Here Comes the Moon

Space mission control rooms everywhere have a certain air about them—an air of anxious optimism. ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 mission control was also no different. Irrespective of whether a mission being tracked succeeds or fails, there is always great excitement about watching scientists peering at their computer monitors unwaveringly for any and all hints of where the mission is headed.

The control room scientists’ body language is a cornucopia of human emotions if one knows how to read them. While the seasoned ones manage to remain inscrutable like professional poker players, most of them betray signs that can be interpreted to know how the mission is going.

Apart from the historic significance of India’s Chandrayaan 2 mission, only the fourth country to attempt soft-landing a probe on the Moon and that too on the near side of the Moon’s south polar region, the authors also watched it live to see how mission control staff responded emotionally to every moment.

The Chandrayaan 2 lander, Vikram, was set to attempt a soft landing on the night of September 7 in India and afternoon of September 6 in the United States. The location was, as NASA noted, “a small patch of lunar highland smooth plains between Simpelius N and Manzinus C craters.”

The culmination of any mission on any surface—be it on the Moon, Mars or an asteroid—comes after years of intense scientific, engineering, materials, management and even political work. Given the nature of space missions in terms of their cost to any country’s exchequer, they may all have begun from a scientific standpoint but invariably get cleared politically.

Almost exactly 11 years after the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cleared the project on September 18, 2008, it was coming down to the last 15 minutes of its long journey above the Moon as the Vikram lander and its rover colleague Pragyan began its descent.

Unlike other mission control rooms such as those of NASA’s or China National Space Administration’s (CNSA), where there is sartorial uniformity, ISRO’s was in keeping with the exuberant diversity of the country it so proudly represents. It was a mosaic of colors, especially among the women scientists. While uniformity in terms of everyone wearing the same kind of T-shirts shirts does give a mission control room a certain earnestness of purpose, the eclectic nature ISRO’s mission control seemed to work in the Indian context. While NASA, CSNA or European Space Agency’s (ESA) control rooms may look straight out of a Hollywood movie, ISRO’s tends to be more informal. Not that one is necessarily better than the other. It is just symptomatic of a country’s cultural predilections.

©2019 Dr. Bharat Thakkar & Mayank Chhaya

Everything is merely experiential

Physics, in particular abstruse ideas such as locality versus nonlocality, has been my longstanding escape when confronted with harrowing survival challenges such as mounting bills. They make me forget, even if it for a very short time, that life sucks loads. 

This morning for no particular reason I started thinking about locality, not as in neighborhood but as in physics. It is the idea that an object is influenced directly only its immediate surroundings. Or in other words you are a result of what is here, in the immediate vicinity. That begs the question--perhaps a foolish one--whether the universe is nothing but a cluster of infinite localities. 

Opposed to the idea of locality is nonlocality where there is instantaneous propagation of correlations between or what Albert Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance" and essentially rejected the idea. The notion that there is instantaneous behavioral symmetry between two objects--particles really--violates the laws of physics. And yet it is seriously believed that spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement. Such thoughts this morning prompted this quick rumination in Hindi. I concede all this is just to esoteric but that's my natural realm.

अब यहाँ की क्या व्याख्या करूँ मैं?

जहाँ हूँ मैं वही यहाँ है मेरे लिए

और जहाँ नहीं वोह कहाँ है मेरे लिए?

यहाँ का होना एक अनुभूति मात्र है

वैसे कहीं भी होना एक अनुभूति मात्र ही है

फिर क्यों हम इस व्यर्थ भ्रम में जीते हैं की

जहाँ हम है वोह वास्तविक है  

ऐसे मूलभूत प्रश्नों में क्यूँ नाहक उलझना

हमारा अस्तित्व कितना क्षणिक है

उसमें यहाँ क्या और वहाँ क्या

जो है सब एक अनुभूति मात्र है

***

Now how do I define here?

Here is wherever I am

And where I am not is not for me

Here is merely experiential

In fact, being anywhere is merely experiential

Then why do we labor under this illusion?

That wherever we are is real

Why raise such fundamental questions?

Our existence is so momentary

Within that what is here or there

Everything is merely experiential

--Mayank Chhaya