Mayank Chhaya Daily

Tennis player Sania Mirza and cricketer Shoaib Malik

Tennis player Sania Mirza (TV grab from www.ndtv.com)

The kind of public profile, credibility and adulation that India’s best known female tennis player Sania Mirza enjoys might mislead one to think she has won every single grand slam tournament. There could not be a greater disconnect between what her admirers think she has achieved and what she has actually achieved.

In recent years most headlines capturing the 23-year-old Sania’s performances can be distilled down to one: “Sania Mirza crashes out of second round.” This after the most frequently used headline: “Sania Mirza advances to second round.” It is almost as if she advances to the second round so that she can crash out of it.

She has had a few successes, of course. The most notable being the first Indian woman to win a grand slam title in 2009 when she won the mixed doubles with fellow Indian player Mahesh Bhupati at the Australian Open. The highest she has risen in the WTA rankings is 27 (that was in 2005) and she is currently at 92. As world class tennis performers go she is much closer to the lower end of the benchmark than the higher end.

Notwithstanding her largely mediocre career she has become a youth icon because of a combination of factors, none of which I feel like elaborating on right now. What has prompted this post is the kind of media frenzy her announcement to marry an equally high profile Pakistani cricketer called Shoaib Malik. That she was recently engaged to her one time boyfriend Sohrab Mirza and then decided to call it off because they found themselves to be “incompatible” also plays into this story apart from everything else that this highly self-assured young woman represents.

The story of their impending wedding has found resonance worldwide, simply because they come from two countries which have been congenital adversaries. The Guardian of London had this headline “India-Pakistan romance shows all's fair in love, war, tennis and cricket.” The New York Times chimed in with “Pakistan's Malik, India's Mirza In Cross - Border Wedding”. The young couple, in keeping with the exigencies of such a union, have decided to live mainly in the more neutral and glitzy Dubai.

As an aside, let me mention how this story, tailor-made for the broadcast media, prompted such brilliant questions to Sania as: “To kaisa lag raha hai (So how does it feel?) and “When is the wedding date?” One reporter asked how and where the two met, barely hiding his real intention to find out how she conducted the affair even while she was getting engaged to Sohrab Mirza. She quickly said it was personal and would like to keep it that way, a euphemism for “Shut the fuck up you insolent punk.” (Just kidding but you get the drift.)

‘Curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock’

Sarah Rose, the author of “For All the Tea in China” (Pic: www.sarahrose.com)

Lu Yu, the “Sage of Tea” as the Chinese call him, would have been furious to see me dangle two tea bags in hot water at 4 or 5 in the morning with the least amount of enthusiasm.

I prefer my brew strong and dark. That requires some careful work.The only element of skill, if I can all it that without offending the tea purists, that comes into play in this otherwise inelegant ritual is when I have to squeeze the two soggy bags.  I put them on a spoon and use the tiny thread to wrap the bag around it. And then wrap the thread one more time around the bag to squeeze the last drops of the brew. Those are the darkest. (Pardon me for making it sound crassly erotic.) That accomplished my interest in the fine art of tea making ends for the day.

I knew that there was much much more to tea than what I do every morning. Just how much more can be found out in the new book “For All The Tea in China” by Sarah Rose. The book is garnering some strong critical notices around the world. From the looks of it, it has the potential to become a major movie in the not so distant future.

Coming back to just how much Lu Yu (733 CE-804 CE) thought of tea can be found in this ode to the beverage and the plant. Here is what the best tea must have as ordained by the Sage of Tea.

The creases like the leather boots of Tartar horsemen,

Curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock,

Unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine,

Gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr,

And be wet and soft like

Earth newly swept by rain.

You have to be somewhat delusional (I mean it in the best possible way) to see all these fantastic images in a leaf. All that I see is two tea bags which have been mauled by an artless journalist.

Who questioned whom?

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi (Pic: http://www.narendramodi.in)

For the first time in the history of independent India, a serving chief minister was summoned to answer grave questions over his government’s alleged complicity in mass murders. The chief minister is Narendra Modi, the state is Gujarat and the massacre dates to 2002 when more than a 1000 people, predominantly Muslims, were killed in response to the murders of 50 Hindu train passengers. Both acts betrayed premeditation.

Modi is easily India’s most polarizing politician who is largely loved at home and reviled outside his state. The Special Investigation Team (SIT), constituted under direction from the country’s apex Supreme Court, is going about establishing who did what and when as well who knew what and when. Modi having been at the helm of affairs in 2002, as he is now, was directly responsible for ensuring the safety and security of citizenry. Whether or not he was personally complicit is a matter yet to be legally established. What needs no confirmation, however, is that law and order was forsaken for weeks for a mob rule. Those are the bare facts.

Now a couple of observations. Eight years after the horrific violence, Modi was finally asked to explain what happened in the days and hours leading up to the 2002 killings and what it is that he did and did not do as the state’s leader to stand in the way of blood thirsty mobs. His questioning lasted nearly ten hours in two parts on March 27. After the first session, Modi came out to quickly brief the media.

Looking at his body language one could be forgiven for thinking that it was Modi who had just exhaustively interrogated the SIT and not the other way around.

Modi, who is his own best spinmeister even managed to slip in a bit of humor. “Beech mein aap ko thoda masala dene aa gaya (I came out to give you some juice),” Modi said to an ever eager media waiting outside the SIT office in Ahmedabad. Those who study body language would tell you a lot about Modi’s that day. What I can tell you watching him online on news channels is that the man’s self belief boggles the mind. And this is not a compliment.

Terror redux: Fear returns to the Kashmir Valley

 

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (left) and Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mohammed Qureshi

As the United States and Pakistan embark on the ambitious plan to deepen their strategic ties, this IANS story by Sarwar Kashani might be a sobering reminder of what really happens on the ground and away from the sanitized confines of diplomacy.

By Sarwar Kashani

Srinagar/New Delhi March 28 (IANS) As the sun sets in this scenic capital of Jammu and Kashmir, spreading a burning crimson on the horizon, Haajra Sofi, a 59-year-old mother, is worried and frantically waiting for her only son to return home after a day's work.

"He has not come. God knows if everything is okay outside," Sofi says about Shabir Ahmed, who works as a salesman at a shop in Srinagar's city centre of Lal Chowk, a bustling business centre that has been bearing the brunt of a 20-year-old separatist war.

The mother is worried as the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley is fearing the resurgence of Islamist militancy in the wake of renewed guerrilla attacks, more so in urban hubs.

As the authorities were gearing up to relocate more army troops from the valley after a lull in militancy in the past few years, Kashmir, once a holidayers' paradise, has woken up to a fresh bout of violence since the last year-end.
Officials attribute this to a rise in militant incursions from across the border with Pakistan. But many of them admit, though privately, that terrorists have used the lull period to regroup and accumulate arms and ammunition smuggled in from Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

According to data with the home ministry in New Delhi, 60 infiltration attempts have been foiled in Jammu and Kashmir since the beginning of this year during which one militant was killed and some 100 of them were forced to return to Pakistan.

Though the records show that militants have made no successful bid to cross over this year, officials are apprehensive that some guerrillas may have still sneaked in by breaching the multi-tiered vigil on the fenced Line of Control - the de facto border that divides Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

Indian Army chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor admitted the surge in militant incursions. "Infiltration has increased in Jammu and Kashmir this winter in comparison to last winter," Kapoor said after he met Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram over the issue Friday.

Security and intelligence agencies in the state are fearing that a new breed of militants - all teenagers - is being created and young minds are fast falling in the trap of guerrilla groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Hizbul Mujahideen.

"The militant groups are organising overground workers. They indoctrinate and brainwash young minds, mostly teens," said a police official in north Kashmir, which has emerged as the new hub of resurgent militancy and where guerrillas have been surprising police and paramilitary troopers with hit and run attacks.
There have been some 30 gunfights and around 40 other militancy-related incidents in Jammu and Kashmir since the beginning of this year, including a suicide attack in Lal Chowk in January, which left a local teenager and a foreigner -- both militants -- dead.

In the first two and a half months of this year, over 30 militants, 14 security men and seven civilians were killed in shootouts, grenade explosions and IED blasts.

Sopore town in north Kashmir has alone witnessed 12 attacks. Four army personnel, including an officer, were killed and 15 residential houses razed to the ground during a 72-hour-long gun battle late last month there.
Sources said that top militant commanders of the LeT and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen were hiding in the north Kashmir forest belt.

LeT Kashmir chief Abdullah Ooni, who is said to be masterminding the new attacks in the valley and is the brain behind the changing militant strategy in Kashmir, has been evading security forces for long. The sources say he easily escapes any security cordon and has managed to give forces the slip at least seven times in January.

Officials admit that militants are outsmarting the technological intelligence grid by frequently changing their locations after making cellphone calls and that is why security agencies have now started relying on conventional intelligence gathering.

Security agencies in the state are fearing more militant attacks in summer though they say they are capable of countering them.

But a sense of fear has returned to the state with heightening of tensions. Mothers, like Sofi, have again started worrying about their children outside home, and shops close early in the evenings - the way it used to be in early 1990s when the militancy erupted.

Unfortunately I recovered from my stupor

I would die a happy man right now if I could sing like this just once. I must caution some of you who may not be South Asian that this is an acquired taste. For maximum enjoyment I recommend you put the headphones on.

The singer is Mehdi Hassan. For some people their name is their introduction. Hassan is one such name in the world of semi-classical singing genre of ghazals. He is the benchmark against which other supreme talents are measured.

 

The Boolean negative of India

During his opening remarks at the start of the so-called US-Pakistan strategic dialogue earlier this week, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mohammad Qureshi said this: “We are meeting today in the special backdrop of the 70^th anniversary of adoption of the Pakistan Resolution, a landmark event in the history of South Asia and a defining moment in our struggle for freedom.”

March 23, which is celebrated in Pakistan as Pakistan Day, was the day the resolution to create a separate country was adopted. I am sure a lot has been said and written about it to mark the anniversary. What caught my attention was a piece by Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn on that day.

“It's March 23, Pakistan Day, and time for the usual flag-waving. But let's face it: things have not gone well for Pakistan. It has been a state since 1947 but is still not a nation. Missing is a strong common identity, mental makeup, shared sense of history, and common goals. The failure to effectively integrate flows from inequalities of wealth and opportunity, absence of effective democracy, and a dysfunctional legal system,” he wrote.

He makes a telling point when he comments about the country’s glaring disunity, “Pakistan's genesis explains the disunity. Created as the Boolean negative of India - NOT India - there was little thought to how the new country might accommodate diversity.”

Read more here.

Stating the obvious, twice

It is surprising that a newspaper of The New York Times’ resources took this long to get its arms around Mumbai terror plotter David Headley and that too with pieces that merely state the obvious.

Yesterday the Times’ website featured two separate pieces by Jane Perlez from Islamabad and Akash Kapur from Mumbai about Headley and his larger connections. It is particularly odd to see Perlez’ story datelined Islamabad but drawing almost entirely from the plea agreement that Headley’s lawyers reached with the US prosecutors on March 18 in Chicago. And Kapur’s “Letter from India” is merely compilation of the same facts with some personal impressions thrown to give it some flavor.

In the 1980s during my daily newspaper days we reporters used to have an expression for such pieces. They were called “table top” stories, which essentially meant stories or articles which were by and large generated straight off the typewriter. This blog, for instance, is more often than not “table top.” That is never the case when I do actual reporting for the wire service IANS as I have done all these years. Of course, once in a while it is perfectly fine for seasoned journalists to go table top, purely drawing on their long experience in covering specific subjects.

This post is pretty lame but I did not feel like writing much this morning. The  links to the Times pieces are here and here.

A project for Rushdie and Tarsem

 

I have just begun reading Salman Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence” two years after it was published. In keeping with my resolve, I am not going to review it. Writers write, readers read. And that’s that. There is no point in reviewing books, or for that matter, there is no point. Period.

The only observation I have to make about the book is how strikingly cinematic it is. I suspect Rushide could have been a filmmaker had he not been a fulltime writer. He seems to see his plots before he writes them down.

There is only one filmmaker that comes to my mind who can do justice to “The Enchantress of Florence.” It is Tarsem Singh. In fact, in Tarsem’s hands this story could become an absolute visual treat. I don’t know how many of my 36 or so readers have seen his 2006 movie “The Fall” but check that one out and then read “The Enchantress of Florence” and you would know what I mean.

The very first sentence in the book is a great opening shot for a possible movie based on it. “In the day’s last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold,” it begins. Even as I quote it I can see the shot conjuring up before me. “The traveler” in the book could form a stunning silhouette against the setting sun’s light reflecting off the lake’s water. This is a semicircular tracking shot where the camera first frames the silhouette and then ever so gently completes a semicircle around the traveler to gradually reveal his face lighted up by the dying mauve-golden light of the day. If Tarsem gets to read this post, here is his next project.

Should he choose not to, I could be the next choice. That is precisely what Rushdie needs—a lifelong hack with no background in cinema other than having made dozens of movies in his mind.

Headley questioning: US ground rules to apply

 

Attorney John Theis, right. The man under the arrow is yours truly looking unnecessarily earnest.

As always the following was on the IANS wire worldwide.

By Mayank Chhaya

Chicago, March 24 (IANS) Predetermined ground rules will govern any questioning of Mumbai terror plotter David Coleman Headley by Indian investigators, his lawyer has said.

"The way an actual interrogation or interview will take place the government will have to determine. But we will insist on being present during it," Headley's attorney John Theis told IANS.

While pointing to the specifics as laid down in his plea agreement Theis reiterated that it will either be deposition, videoconferencing or letter rogatory. However, he said that the US government will be the eventual decision maker on the kind of interaction Indian investigators will be afforded.
Asked specifically whether Indian investigators will be able to sit across a table and interrogate him, Theis said that is the kind of determination that the government will have to make. "The reason there is confusion or ambiguity about this is because Headley is in US custody and there are logistical issues involved," Theis said.

Ground rules governing any interrogation will be decided on the basis of "relevance" but once they are set Indian investigators will be able to ask what they choose within those parameters, he said.

On the much speculated question of Headley's alleged life as a "double agent" for either the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) or unspecified American intelligence units, Theis said, "There is no evidence of that. No one has shown me any evidence. Bloggers have been writing on the basis of speculation." He said he had even come across some bloggers calling Headley a "quadruple agent" let alone a double agent gone rogue.

Theis said he had not heard of anything specific about if and whether Indian investigators would arrive soon to question his client.

However, considering that Headley's sentencing is postponed in accordance with the plea bargain to ensure his cooperation in foreign judicial proceedings the questioning will take place sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, Dean Boyd, spokesman, National Security Division at the Department of Justice, had no comment on the subject other than pointing to the statement by US Ambassador to India Timothy J. Roemer who said, "As the Assistant Secretary (for South Asia Robert Blake) indicated, the US is committed to full information sharing in our counter terror partnership and in fact in this case we have provided substantial information to the Government of India and we will continue to do so. However, no decision on direct access for India to David Headley has been made. The US Department of Justice will work with the Government of India regarding the modalities of such cooperation."

This continues to strike a contradictory tone compared to what top Indian home ministry officials, including Secretary G K Pillai, has been saying about having been assured access to Headley.

US flip-flop over Headley

US Ambassador to India Timothy J. Roemer (Pic: US Embassy, New Delhi)

The US seems to be painting itself into a corner over the extent of access it will provide India while questioning Mumbai terror plotter David Coleman Headley.

Barely four days after Attorney-General Eric Holder reportedly assured India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram that New Delhi will be able to question Headley, US Ambassador to India Timothy J. Roemer now says that "no decision on direct access for India to David Headley has been made".

Even Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Robert Blake had assured India access to Headley. It turns out that assurance may have been somewhat premature. "As the assistant secretary indicated, the US is committed to full information sharing in our counter terror partnership," Roemer said in a statement.

"In fact in this case we have provided substantial information to the government of India and we will continue to do so. However, no decision on direct access for India to David Headley has been made,” the ambassador said.

This flip-flop is only helping to serve mounting suspicions in India that the US has something to hide about Headley. Allegations that he was an agent working under cover for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in the 1990s before he went rogue and got radicalized have resurfaced. Many in India believe that Headley probably had much deeper links with US intelligence and that entanglement could be influencing the decision about how much access India should be given.

At the very least, one can safely argue that for reasons not fully comprehensible the US is dithering over its decision to expose Headley to some direct questions from Indian investigators. What is behind that reluctance is a fertile ground for all sorts of conspiracy theories.