Mayank Chhaya Daily

Prepare for Musharraf’s return to Pakistan

Exile has become a requisite for any Pakistani ruler looking for rehabilitation. First the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was pushed into exile to be followed by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and finally former President Pervez Musharraf. Bhutto returned from exile and paid the ultimate price. Sharif is struggling to regain his grip on the country’s fractious polity. In the midst of what is probably the most traumatic period of Pakistan’s history, Musharraf is seeking to return as well.

What gives him hope is his rising following on Facebook which is now more than 200,000. His Facebook “Fan demographics” suggest that over 75 percent of his fans are in the age group 18-34, something I am sure the former general finds greatly reassuring. The largest fan following comes from Pakistan, where Facebook is ironically banned. So the one definite policy move you can expect if and when Musharraf becomes Pakistan’s prime minister is that he would revoke the ban of Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of other sites.

While on Musharraf here is something he said in The Guardian. “Referring to Pakistan's relations with India, he recalled being told in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, of a proverb which said that when two elephants fight the grass gets trampled. "I shudder to think if two elephants start making love the grass gets more trampled," he said.”

Even factoring in a grandiose former dictator’s penchant for hyperbole, it is hard to consider India and Pakistan being in the same league of pachyderms.

Beyond tight-assed protocol

President Barack Obama (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama will attend a reception hosted by his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in honor of the visiting External Affairs (Foreign) Minister S. M. Krishna of India on June 3. This simple gesture is fraught with deep diplomatic meaning in the bilateral ties between India and the United States. Or so we are told by those who watch such choreographed spontaneity.

The now familiar theme that Obama is too clinical and professorial who is unable to show genuine empathy or anger or friendship seems to have affected even Washington’s relations with New Delhi. The perception that US-India relations have lost the momentum they acquired under President George W. Bush has only intensified in recent months. While most of that perception stems from Obama’s preoccupation with Afghanistan and Pakistan, there are those in India who believe that Obama singularly lacks the effusiveness of his predecessor. And hence the importance of Obama attending the reception in honor of Krishna, who under a tight-assed diplomatic protocol would not qualify for an august presidential presence.

All of this is ridiculous of course, but that is how the rarefied world of global diplomacy functions. It is a world where everybody stands on ceremony even as they look for that elusive personal touch. As a democracy of a billion plus people, not to mention one of the greatest civilizations unbroken for over 5,000 years, it is unbecoming for India to look for vindication and reassurance from any country, including the United States. Admittedly, perceptions such as this one that holds that Obama is cold towards India unlike Bush, are largely a media creation which acquire a life and legitimacy of their own. Hence even a simple gesture like the one Obama is making to Krishna, evidently to scotch the very perception, the very media reads deeper meanings into it.

Great civilizations ought to be greater than the sum of the people whom make them and free from their frailties and needs.

There, Tibet again

India’s President Pratibha Patil (center) with China’s President Hu Jintao On May 27 (Pic:http://presidentofindia.nic.in)

It would have been amusing were it not gratuitous for Beijing to raise the Tibet issue with India’s visiting President Pratibha Patil. China has ingrained Tibet so much into its global diplomatic discourse that there is almost no escape for anyone of consequence from taking a position on the dispute, preferably to Beijing’s liking.

One way to rationalize senior Chinese leader Jia Quinglin seeking President Patil’s reassurance over Tibet is to say that the Chinese just cannot help it. But that rationalization lacks the finesses of global diplomacy. It is not as if a tactless host made some uncalled for references to an honored guest. It is a deliberate, almost anal, element of Chinese foreign policy to raise Tibet irrespective of with whom it is being done.

Beijing is astute enough to know that in the Indian system of governance the president is largely a figurehead who has no executive or policy role whatsoever. It is an office that becomes relevant only during the times of intractable political or constitutional crises. Otherwise it is mostly about pomp and pageantry. And yet the Chinese government chose to bring Tibet up with Patil. Why? One explanation is because it can and it must if only to remind its interlocutor that Beijing will not tolerate any view other than concurrence with its own worldview.

Having watched Chinese posturing on the subject for over a decade now I believe it is more reflexive than anything else. It is a virtually involuntary reflex of the Chinese policy machine. However, somewhere along the line it also betrays some deep-seated defensiveness about having annexed Tibet, even though it was done 60 years ago.

India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama rao, who is the country’s top diplomat in terms of the foreign policy bureaucracy, had this to say about Jia raising Tibet. 

"All issues were raised and spoken about. And they have sought greater understanding. Jia sought, in the course of conversation, India's position on the Tibet issue. He wanted India's reassurance that on India's soil no anti-Chinese activities are allowed to take place. They wanted our reiteration and assurance on this point," Rao said.

If it is Beijing’s unshakable conviction that Tibet was historically part of China, why is it that six decades after it incorporated the territory into the country it still feels compelled to seek India’s reassurance?  And why seek it from someone who has next to no role to play in the matter? A plausible answer is that at best it still remains uncertain about Tibet’s cultural and emotional integration into China even though it has managed to complete its territorial integration.

Some kid this!

If I had a loyal readership, which I do not, they would plead with me, which they would not, to write something, anything, about the two-year-old Indonesian boy who is addicted to smoking. So here it is. What I have to say is as edifying as the sight of the two-year-old smoking as if there was no tomorrow.

I know I am supposed to be horrified by this story. Unfortunately I am more entertained than horrified. And I blame the kid for that. He makes smoking at any age look so much fun, cheerful, pleasurable and cool that he makes you forget its consequences. When I first saw the video, I wished someone had stuck a fag in my mouth when I was two. I upbraided my mother for sparing me this child abuse in my childhood.

The boy has natural charisma which his smoking only enhances. It seems he smokes 40 cigarettes a day, prompting his father to testify to his good health. That his son has become a global freak show does not seem to bother his parents. They are even less bothered about the potentially fatal effects of his smoking. From the tone of the snatches of comments one hears in the video, it is almost as if the boy is seen as a celebrity. I caught pantas, which in Bhasha means something good, attractive or healthy. The kid sure looks healthy and in complete control of his surroundings, but the question is for how long.

There are millions of people who have lived a long life despite heavy smoking all their lives. But that does not negate the science that smoking is extremely injurious to health. What is wrong with this particular story is that the boy is being introduced to things which he has no understanding of or the faculties to critically process. In that sense being given a cigarette at his age is quite like being given religion. He has been ambushed even before he has the ability to comprehend either. By the time he comes of age he will be hooked to both—smoking and religion. It is hard to tell which one is more injurious.

Death of a planet

The toss-up for this morning’s post was between what Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama has written about religion in The New York Times, and a video of a two-year-old Indonesian boy addicted to smoking. So I have chosen to write about a planet, some 600 light years away from us, being torn asunder by its sun. Somehow this fantastic cosmic violence overrides all our arbitrary notions of moral-immoral, right-wrong, good-evil, religion-irreligion.

NASA’s Hubble telescope has captured this planet called Wasp-12b being in the midst of getting slowly torn apart. The planet’s name is derived from Wide-Area Search for Planets, a British team which spotted the planet in 2008. The planet has got so close to its sun that it completes its orbit in 1.1 days, as opposed to 365 days that Earth takes. So severe is the sun’s pull on this planet that it is getting elongated at its equator. Its temperature has reached 1,500 degrees C. or 2,800 degrees F. The rate at which it is getting eaten up the planet will be destroyed in 10 million years.

The information we are getting today is actually 600 light years old or in other words the time it took for that information to travel 6000 trillion kilometers from Wasp-12b to the Hubble. What we are seeing today is the information that left Wasp-12b roughly when “Saint” Joan of Arc was hearing voices in eastern France or, to make it more relevant, just about the time the first Dalai Lama, Gedun Drupa was born in central Tibet.

When you consider such magnitudes you must wonder whether our self-absorbed anthropocentrism is of any relevance or consequence at all. And this is just one little planet around one little star at a relatively modest distance of 6000 trillion kilometers.

Republic of Denial

A picture cropped from the original by Rehan Khan/European PressPhoto Agency in The New York Times

The New York Times has an excellent story today along with a highly instructive video about how conspiracy theories have become the mainstream fodder in Pakistan.

It was only a matter of time that a country buffeted by growing violent religious radicalization in the midst of a poorly defined nationhood would fall prey to reflexive denial about everything. What is surprising for me personally is that Pakistan’s 103 million people below the age of 25, or 63 % of its total population, do not seem to seem to act as a strong counter against the forces that overwhelm the country’s psyche.

It is in nobody’s interest that tens of millions of young people in any country anywhere grow up so fundamentally disillusioned and disenchanted.

Non-news news conference

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (Pic: http://pmindia.nic.in/)

Prime ministerial or presidential news conferences are notoriously non-newsworthy. More often than not they are an exercise in journalists asking the obvious and leaders stating the obvious.

So it was not surprising that the news conference by India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday, only his second such in the six years that he has been at the helm, turned out to be singularly uneventful. That in Dr. Singh India has a prime minister famously reticent and shorn of verbal flourish did not help the matters at all.

Although Dr. Singh’s news conference did have some important substance in terms of India’s relations with Pakistan as well as something that he has described the the single biggest internal security threat, namely the spread of anti-state and violent Maoists guerilla groups, it generally remained bereft of any peaks.

The lowest point of the news conference, a sort of WTF moment, was a question from an unidentified foreign journalist. It had to do with media credentials for foreign journalists who are stationed in New Delhi. All journalists, who report on the government, require credentials issued by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) which are issued after some level of background check. I had one until the time I left India. I am sure the foreign journalist’s grievance was legitimate but for him or her to feel compelled to ask the prime minister of the nation of a billion plus people, not to mention the world’s largest democracy, a purely logistical question is embarrassing. I have quoted below the exchange.

 

For the entire transcript of the news conference go here.

Booting up new life form

Illustration by Mayank Chhaya

It is fair to argue against creating artificial life in a lab when we already have enough natural life flowing out of every hole on this planet. So to that extent American biologists Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison’s success in artificially creating a bacterium with no ancestor falls in the category of neither here nor there.

In terms of their technical prowess this is a stupendous achievement which might even get them the Nobel Prize. That they could write what they call “software of life” and load it onto a host is breathtaking by any measure. However, in terms of the human versus nature debate, its value is at best questionable. On a bad day nature can create something infinitely more complex seemingly out of nothing than we humans ever can. For instance, initially the biologists and their team turned to something called Mycoplasma genitalium, a creature found in the genital tracts because it is supposed to be the tiniest “free-living” bacterium.

Did you know about the kind of stuff you carry around in your pants? I did not. To think that nature has a bacterium living inside the genital tracts whose shell was thought by the three biologists as a possible place to insert their laptop generated genome!

Now that I have got my unsolicited and largely half-baked opinion out of the way, what the biologists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have done is, within the realm of human accomplishment, is truly historic.

Remembering an assassination

Rajiv Gandhi

“The dessert cooler outside my bedroom made a squeaky noise that night. I had postponed lubricating it for far too long. Behind the door a cricket chirped incessantly. God had omitted lubricating it altogether. The two noises combined to produce an eerie effect. I was gradually slipping into sleep when the phone rang. There is nothing more exasperating than being interrupted in the first stages of sleep. I have this habit of looking at the clock by my bedside every time I  am woken up by a phone call. It was 11 p.m. on May 21.

Shreyans Shah was calling from Ahmedabad. Shah, the owner of the Gujarat Samachar, the largest Gujarati daily in the world, asked me a matter-of-fact question. “Is it true that Rajiv Gandhi has been assassinated?” Without realising the shattering import of his question I said I didn’t know. Shah sounded pretty certain about the news, but since I live in New Delhi he probably thought that I would be better informed about such matters. I promised to get back to him as soon as I found out the truth.

I called Sam Pitroda to ask him if he had heard anything about Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. There was silence on the other end, a silence jagged by anguish. Pitroda had just recovered from a quadruple bypass surgery a few months before, and despite his protestations to the contrary he was still not fit enough to take such news with equanimity. If hurt could be seen on telephone, I saw it that night.”

I quote these opening paragraphs from my own 1992 book not because I love quoting myself but because May 21 was just two days ago and it marked the 19th anniversary of the macabre assassination of India’s former prime minister. And also because they accurately situate me in the context within 40 minutes of a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber setting off her explosive vest barely five feet away from Gandhi at 10.10 p.m. in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, where he had gone to address an election rally.

It was inevitable that as a journalist I did not sleep that night. Among the callers was the host of a news show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking me to report on the assassination. I remember he asked me if there was any immediate suspicion as to the identity of Gandhi’s killers. I told him that given that it was a suicide bomber in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu it was more than likely that it would turn out to be a plot by the Tamil Tigers separatists of Sri Lanka. It did.

I had met Gandhi a few days before his assassination at a “high tea” in the forecourt of his residence. During a brief exchange I had reminded him that I was waiting for him to give me a couple of hours to finish my interview with him in order to complete Pitroda’s biography. “I promise you as soon as the campaigning is over,” he said.

The next time I was anywhere close to him was at the Delhi airport when his badly dismembered body was flown in by a special aircraft in a casket. Since those were pre-24/7 news channel days, there was no media frenzy at the airport. There were only two journalists—my friend and colleague Tarun Basu and I. Gandhi’s close friend and journalist Suman Dubey was among the men shouldering the casket as the former prime minister’s wife Sonia Gandhi came down from the aircraft looking poised but inscrutable. However, her eyes gave a glimpse of the profound sense of loss she must be feeling.

The passage of two decades has done nothing to erase the vividness of those 24 hours.

Of Christopher Hitchens and his sexuality

Admittedly, this post has a limited appeal even within the fact my posts have a limited appeal. Some of you may have heard of Christopher Hitchens, the celebrated British journalist, writer, atheist and in-your-face public intellectual. The Guardian of London has an interview-cum-profile on Hitchens to coincide with his memoirs “Hitch-22.”. It is a compelling read. I was particularly struck by these passages, which talk about his sexuality.

I am particularly captured by this line: “Hitchens was exuberantly bisexual in his younger days – until his looks "declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me." 

“We must also make what we will of his claim to have slept with two unnamed young men at Oxford who later joined Thatcher's government. Hitchens was exuberantly bisexual in his younger days – until his looks "declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me" – and is quite candid on the matter, so his refusal to name the future ministers looks at best coy and at worst like teasing up a bit of publicity for the book. "Oh no," he says. "To the contrary, I'd rather not discuss it." So why mention them at all? "You may look in vain for logic or consistency," he concedes.

Poetry, he does volunteer, always played an important part in his impressive sexual success. "You're disarming yourself in an important struggle if you can't produce a fucking sonnet. What if I had to try on my own merits? You've got to have some sort of reserve arsenal."”