Mayank Chhaya Daily

Transience is life

Floating Bubbles by Chandu Mhatre (www.chandumhatre.com)

Having just wrapped up plans for the publication of the Gujarati edition of my Dalai Lama biography ‘Man Monk Mystic’, published in 23 languages so far, initiated plans for the reissue of an update English edition, laid the ground for a reality TV show, finished interviews for a new book, put in motion two more and attended a conference on global transformation, I head back to Chicago in time to be at President Barack Obama’s election night headquarters to report his defeat or victory.

Once I get past the ill-structured and long-winded sentence even I am impressed by the range of my preoccupations. All of the above is true but none of it even remotely means that I am engaged in anything of any significance. It just sounds that way. That’s the whole purpose of this post—to underscore how much I remain engaged in things that sound important but are anything but. In reality, it’s all about trying to survive without creditors breaking down the main door of my home.

Modern living is so much about leaving one set of people whom you love in order to be with another set of people whom you love as well. Either way you do so with a lump in your throat which subsides almost as soon as you step out to go to the airport. I just told my mother Snehlata that there is a chance that I would be back in a couple of months. To which she responded, “But that also means you will have to leave again. It is your leaving that I cannot handle.”

After that little personal digression, I am looking forward to spending the day/night at the Obama headquarters in Chicago because irrespective of the outcome it would be an interesting story to watch and report. I do everything, absolutely everything, mindful that in the cosmic scheme of things whatever I do or anyone else does is of zero consequence. It means nothing. It changes nothing. So to that extent the Obama defeat or victory would be just another one of the infinite number of transient and trivial events that keep unfolding.

That’s what I felt watching CNN anchor Ali Velshi’s live reporting about Sandy the hurricane out of a fiercely wet and windy street of Atlantic City, New Jersey. The display of nature’s power, although intense, was so situational and confined to a tiny corner of our planet. Velshi may have been swept away but its impact on the cosmic equilibrium would not have been felt even at the Nano level. Transience is the name of the game.

It is true of my own preoccupations as enlisted at the beginning of my post, quite like the momentary wrenching pain caused by my leaving my mother and others. Once back in Chicago the pain will be replaced several times over by the joy of meeting Hayaa, Jashn and Kesumi after a month or so. But that joy too would be transient. Life is transient. Transience is life.

Not to self: This is a strange post.

Politics of disaster management and relief

The illustration above is my approximate representation of what the Republican Party’s presidential contender Mitt Romney’s coffee cup might look like in the aftermath of the devastating storm Sandy. I would grant you that my recolored image of Sandy superimposed on a generic coffee cup has turned out to be too much like actual cream. Trust me, it is Sandy.

As the northeastern United States struggles to emerge from the effects of the giant hurricane, one inevitable talking point has been about the politics of disaster and emergency management. Romney has every reason to hem and haw, clear his throat, smile nervously and evade altogether as he is badgered with questions about whether he still maintains that drastic cuts to federal emergency management are wise and warranted.

During a Republican primary debate last year Romney was asked if he thought disaster management and relief should be handed over to the states. He replied, “Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” He thinks it is “immoral” for the federal government to deal with this and increase its debt. (I attribute this bit of information to The New York Times editorial on October 29).

One of the agencies that Romney and his Republican colleagues particularly dislike is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) whose mandate kicks in precisely at a time like the one the country is experiencing now. They are strongly for reducing the FEMA’s budget because they see the agency as an example of centralizing too much power in the federal government. At a time when the US states are battling massive budget deficits, a disaster of Sandy’s magnitude would have knocked their fiscal management out.

Sandy has come as a grim reminder to Romney and his supporters that some things are better handled federally because hurricanes are not state or ideology specific. As far as I can tell they are not known to skip states whose political philosophy is akin to Romney’s.

As if Team Romney needed any more reminders about it, New Jersey’s voluble Republican Governor Chris Christie, whose state has taken a major battering, was sanguine in his praise of President Barack Obama’s response to the disaster. Christie, who is widely seen to be among Romney’s most strident weapons against Obama, said the president has been “outstanding” during the crisis. In his TV interviews Christie used terms such as wonderful and excellent to describe how Obama has responded to it in terms of federal support.

All this is unlikely to make Romney and his aides happy, particularly when voting for the presidential election is scheduled to take place next Tuesday. None of this, of course, means that Obama is guaranteed to win but, at the very least, it offers an unwelcome contrast in his favor so close to the vote.

Note to the readers: I wrote this post purely to use this illustration that got immaculately conceived in my mind this morning.

On being kind of famous for a nanosecond

Visual fame, as being recognized on sight, is something that has long fascinated me; not so much to be that person but to understand the chemistry and mechanics of it.

I am not talking only about the Amitabh Bachchan kind of raging fame that never seems to dim and carries a massive force field around it all the time. I am also talking about semi-moderate to moderate kind of fame that many others among us have experienced. I mean the TV anchor or TV pundit kind of fame which is incidental to the profession and not integral to it. Also, it is not really earned but grudgingly granted.

Speaking of incidental fame, this morning as I waited for my luggage at the Mumbai airport after arriving from Ahmedabad, something mildly amusing happened. A ground staff member of Go Air, by which I traveled, looked at me with a passing degree of familiarity first. Out of sheer politeness I smiled at him, thinking it was in the nature of his job to greet passengers fidgeting near the conveyor belt.

After about a minute he approached me with a peculiar combination of diffidence and obsequiousness that famous people are known to cause among those who are not famous. “Sir, I have seen you on TV many times and…” he said and trailed off expecting me to complete his sentence. I had to swiftly formulate my response and weigh it so as not to ruin his sense of accomplishment at having spotted a famous person. That is much harder than what you might think.

Here is a total stranger who has invested in my fame and celebrity in such a way that not to be the person he thinks I am could scar him for life. (Literary exaggeration). At the same time though he does not quite know who I really am but suspects I am someone he has seen on TV “many times.”

Before I tell you what I told him, here is a simple fact. I have never been on TV, certainly not in the way the young man thought of me. I have never been on Indian TV. I am not even remotely famous. (Zero modesty here). I have zero visual fame. (Bare fact). It is possible that I look like someone he sees on TV regularly although I am not sure why someone who looks like me would be on TV. (Labored self-deprecation). So please weigh my response against this backdrop.

After about five seconds all that I could tell him was, “Well, I don’t live here but it is nice meeting you.” Both those parts are 100 percent accurate and put together they saved me the unpleasantness of disappointing a perfectly nice young stranger. As I shook hands with him, I am not sure whether he thought my response had vindicated his vague feeling that he had seen me many times on TV or that he was grateful at having been saved the awkwardness of discovering that I was not who he thought I was.

The question that has remained in my mind is whether I should have ended his misconception right there or I should have played along in order that he had a reward, a very inconsequential one but a reward nevertheless, on his otherwise boring job. I do not know the answer to it. What I do know is that fame, even as mild and uncertain as the kind I experienced for about a nanosecond, has that natural adhesive that sticks to you long after life has come unstuck.

Indian media’s almost lascivious interest in cabinet reshuffles

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (fifth from left) with his new cabinet in the Rashtrapati Bhavan (Presidential palace) in New Delhi on October 28. (Pic: http://pmindia.nic.in/)

I have never understood why cabinet reshuffles, quite like the annual government budget, make such big news in India. There is almost lascivious media interest in the days before a scheduled or likely cabinet reshuffle over who would be dropped and who would be inducted.

Political hacks go into overdrive trying to scoop each other as to which ministers is getting the boot, which one is getting promoted to the cabinet rank and which new faces are likely to come in. It is always the process and the accompanying political jockeying that they are interested in. No one gives a ministerial chair’s rusted screw about the ministers and their performance  after the reshuffle has been carried out. In fact, many of the departments are heard of only at the time of such cabinet reshuffles as the one just carried out by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh yesterday.

Of all the government ministries whose continuing existence baffles me, the Information and Broadcasting (I and B) Ministry remains my favorite. It so vestigial that even the ministry would not be able to enlighten us about the rationale behind its existence. It now has a new minister in Manish Tewari, the ruling Congress Party’s hyperubiquitous and hyperloquent (just coined these words) 24/7 television news presence until now. He replaced Ambika Soni whose performance as the I and B minister was as unclear as the rain of black and white dots on television sets without the digital box.

It is easy to mock the I and B ministry but in reality it does control, at least by implication, a very powerful area of government—information and how it is broadcast and policies that govern the dissemination. There are at 16 “attached and subordinate” organizations, including (I could not make this up) ‘Song and Drama Division’, that the ministry oversees.  Here is that list directly taken from the I and B ministry’s website:

All India Radio  
Doordarshan (State-run TV)  
Press Information Bureau 
Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity
Publications Division
Office of the Registrar of Newspapers for India  
Central Board of Film Certification 
Films Division  
Directorate of Film Festivals 
National Film Archives of India                                                         Directorate of Field Publicity  
Song and Drama Division 
Research, Reference and Training Division 
Photo Division  
Principal Accounts Office
Central Monitoring Service

In short, the I and B is a media giant in and of itself whose boss, now Manish Tewari, is not that different from, say, Rupert Murdoch in so far it means the amount of broadcast and dissemination power he enjoys. After all, he even has the entire ‘Song and Drama Division’ at the his beck and call, not to mention that ominous sounding ‘Central Monitoring Service.’

Coming back to my original point about the lascivious media interest in cabinet reshuffles, it is a transient story that is peculiarly Indian because it reveals for a short duration the raw complexities of coalition politics. That’s because cabinet reshuffles are often less about competence in governance and more about political rewards.

Much has been made about how Rahul Gandhi, the heir apparent to one of the world’s most illustrious political lineages of Gandhi-Nehru, leaned on Prime Minister Singh to either induct fresher, younger faces or make those already in more prominent. Contrary to media speculations the 42-year-old politician himself stayed away from joining. He is in a unique position of choosing not to be chosen by the prime minister. Either that or cabinet reshuffles are so humdrum that even he is not interested in them.

Broken relationships are HD, good relationships are SD

My conception of broken relationships/failure (Illustration Mayank Chhaya)

I am an advocate of broken relationships that mend occasionally rather than good relationships that go sour frequently.

Broken relationships are unambiguous and easy to grasp. They are in high definition (HD). In contrast, good relationships have unexpected layers of ambiguities and one can never tell when they might come apart. They are in standard definition (SD). I suspect broken relationships have a much higher pixel density than good relationships.

Since I conceive life, including relationships, visually it makes sense that I naturally prefer the visual clarity of relationships broken in HD to relationships intact in SD.

My conception of good relationships/success (Illustration Mayank Chhaya)

These may sound like ridiculous ruminations of an idle mind on a Sunday morning but they do genuinely sum up how approach life. Let me conflate and extrapolate to even claim that failure has much greater clarity than success. Failure leaves no doubt while success has room for skepticism.

Failure is liberating while success is shackling. Success raises benchmarks for future performances and heightens expectations. Failure, on the other hand, erases benchmarks and removes expectations. Failure has the potential to pleasantly surprise you. Success carries the risk of disappointment.

I can assure you I have neither drunk nor inhaled anything mood altering in the last 24 hours or anytime ever before that. This post has practically written itself. I can feel that after reaching this point it has begun to groan, the surest sign that it has run its course. So, so like that.

A few thoughts about Rajat Gupta’s sentencing

Raj Rajaratnam (left), former US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (center) and Rajat Gupta. (Pic by the ubiquitous Jay Mandal/ On Assignment)

The sentencing of Rajat Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs partner and once a luminous corporate star in whose reflected glory many Indians basked and bathed, for insider trading is deserving of re-re-visiting what I wrote on October 15 and May 13 last year. Gupta has been sentenced to two years and asked to pay a fine of $5 million for tipping off his friend and now jailed billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.

Before I conveniently quote myself, it is strange that while the user of the lucrative corporate intelligence (Rajaratnam) received 11 years, its originator (Gupta) has received only two. Explain that to me, someone who is not too far from thinking that insider trading is an outdated and victimless crime.

October 15, 2011

The sentencing of Raj Rajaratnam (the billionaire co-founder of the hedge fund Galleon Group) to 11 years begs the question whether insider trading is an outdated, victimless crime. The question is particularly relevant in the information age where the lines between insider trading and legal trading have been indistinguishably blurred.

When you consider that the whole business of stock trading is based on a sordid mixture of verifiable and unverifiable tips and intelligence, I am not entirely sure how egregious insider trading is. Let me qualify my view by saying I have never traded in life because I have never had the money to trade and, more importantly, I regard the business of trading to be a generally useless pursuit.

Whether insider trading is a victimless crime is a question that has occupied a lot of serious academic minds for quite sometime. Whether it is an outdated crime is something that I have added. There is so much information floating around in cyberspace that one can make a reasonable case that a fairly smart trader can distil it into highly lucrative intelligence even while unconsciously violating the provisions of the law against insider trading. This glut of information is a direct consequence of the information technology revolution which is now in its very advanced stages.

Of course, in Rajaratnam’s case the prosecutors have argued that he squeezed every ounce of insider intelligence out of his rolodex in order to make huge profits. They have also argued that since he had inside information he had a clearly established unfair advantage over ordinary investors with no such access. One result of this was that ordinary investors would have most likely paid much more on the stocks than Rajaratnam, who had the ability to buy low and sell high because he got in early on the strength of his inside information.

That’s a fair point but at the same time it is debatable how many ordinary investors who had a similar opportunity of cashing in on inside information the way Rajaratnam did would have actually shunned it on moral and legal grounds. I understand that in the end the Rajaratnam case is about enforcing the law as it exists on the statute books. Prosecutors have a constitutional obligation, not to mention a moral one, to prosecute to the fullest extent of that law. However, my contention is whether such a law makes sense any longer when the ways in which it can be wittingly and unwittingly violated or circumvented have grown manifold because of the IT revolution.

In the strictest legal and moral sense stock markets and stock traders the world over do occasionally operate outside those tight definitions. If it is only a question of not being found out ever or for the longest period possible, then I am afraid the whole edifice of the rule of law collapses.

Mine may be a cynical view of the world of finance in general and stock trading in particular but those who inhabit that world have not done a stellar job disabusing doubters of their doubts about the fundamental integrity of the profession.

I have mixed feelings about the whole business of stock trading. It has never appeared to me to be a particularly constructive line of work. While it does require a degree of smarts to monitor complex market trends and pick out winners from them, it primarily remains a hollow vocation. It is also peculiarly self-serving.

May 13, 2011

The conviction of hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam for insider trading has taken me back to the Bombay of the mid 1980s and early 1990s. Having been born and grown up in Ahmedabad I was already primed to understand the stock market culture. “Ketla banshey (How much would I make?)” was the only benchmark that stock traders kept in mind while buying or selling any stock.

For close to five years I worked out of newspaper offices situated, by some quirk of fate, on and around Dalal Street (India’s Wall Street). The offices of the Free Press Journal, the first newspaper I worked for, was some 1000 feet away from the Bombay Stock Exchange.  It was close enough to smell the greed. To think that you could smell it above the lead-rich printing ink tells you how powerful the greed ought to have been.

It is my sense that stock brokers of any size are generally open to insider tips notwithstanding their illegality. It is also my sense that they genuinely believe that there is nothing particularly immoral or illegal about information even if it comes from inside. They treat it as part of their tradecraft. When you point out that insider trading is illegal under the law of the land, their reaction could be summed as “So?” Many stock brokers consider insider trading as a legitimate device and do not regard it as violative of anything.

When I read about the so-called “mosaic theory defense” by Rajaratnam’s attorneys I was reminded of what a broker once told me. Mosaic theory means that brokers depend on a mosaic of intelligence and analyses gathered from a variety of sources to effect their trades. The basic argument being that insider tips are merely one minor part of that mosaic. At the height of the 1992 stock market scandal presided over by the late broker Harshad Mehta, a broker (not Mehta) told me, “I would even find out what the chaprasis (peons) of the company that is going public are saying. I need to know everything.”

The difference in the Rajaratnam case is that instead of chaprasis he cultivated their bosses. It is a question of levels.

***

Today

Many of Gupta’s friends, most of whom are who’s who of corporate world and global philanthropy, strenuously pointed out that the loss of his reputation is punishment enough for him. Their basic contention was that an actual prison term be offset against the loss of reputation. That’s as neat a defense it gets but the prosecutors led by Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, had tasted blood and were not about to let go off the prey without causing as much damage as possible. Gupta’s reputation was merely an appetizer for them.

It may not be a bad idea to introduce a new currency called ‘Reputation’ (Repu for short) that white collar criminals can pay their bail amount and fine in.

Where no man has gone before

Catarina Migliorini (Pic: http://virginswanted.com.au/index.html)

My dear friend and a fellow journalist Ashok Easwaran says I should write about the sentencing of Rajat Gopta, former Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble Co. board member, for insider trading. I will do so tomorrow because for today I would like to focus on a young sexy student trading her inside for a huge price.

I suppose the allure of virginal sex comes from going, and I might add boldly so, where no man has gone before. And then coming.

Catarina Migliorini, a 20-year-old Brazilian student, has just sold her virginity for $780,000 to the highest bidding Japanese man Natsu as part of an online auction organized an Australian documentary film production company. A total of 15 bidders offered large sums of money to deflower Catarina. Among those who came close to winning the bid was also a man from India named Rudra Banerjee who offered $730,000, according to the website that conducted the auction.

I have no moral position on Catarina’s decision to sell her virginity or that of the Thomas William Productions to indirectly profit from that although there are specific terms for their actions in the dictionary which escape me right now. I think they both start with a P. The auction was part of a documentary being made by Justin Sisely and seemed to have been designed with clear rules of, what shall I say?, engagement.

The terms and conditions and various agreements around the auction make for interesting reading. For instance, under ‘Virgin Agreement’ section it explicitly says, “The virgin must engage in sexual intercourse with the highest bidder. The penis entering the vagina defines consummated sex in this instance.” No ambiguity there.

Under ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ here is one and the answer to it.

Q: If my bid is successful, is having sex with the virgin illegal?

A:No. Having sex with a virgin is not illegal. The sexual act will also take place where it is not illegal. The winning bidder and the virgin will rendezvous where they will spend the night.

Media reports suggest that the sexual act, defined as the penis entering the vagina, will take place aboard a plane flying between Australia and the United States.

The terms and conditions also stipulate that the virgin has to be medically certified to be a virgin. “The female virgin will undergo a medical examination by an accredited gynecologist and provide the winning bidder with medical evidence of her virginity. The virgin must provide a document from the gynecologist that certifies her claim to virginity. The accompanying medical certificate will be a statutory declaration that supports her claim to virginity,” it says.

Did I tell you that along with Catarina’s virginity also auctioned was the virginity of a young man called Alexander Stepanov? His “virginity”, such as it is for a man, was bought for a niggardly $3000.

Catarina says she would give away 90 percent of her earnings to charity, an act which is supposed to ennoble any appearance that she has engaged in prostitution. Many doubt if she would, in fact, make that donation.

On the question of whether she thinks she is going to engage in prostitution she has been quoted by the Daily Mail of London as saying, "If you only do it once in your life then you are not a prostitute, just like if you take one amazing photograph it does not automatically make you a photographer.”

Just a couple of points. Can someone please gently break it to her that she can lose virginity only once? Also, while at it, I would not use the photographer analogy because it also requires a dark room with a red light.

Of dogs and paans

Street dogs stray into my consciousness just as soon as I arrive in Ahmedabad. It has been a little over two weeks and I have had to fight quite hard the urge to write about them. However, as my visit winds down here I have to get this one out.

My decades of having observed them has convinced me that barking street dogs are really looking for an honorable way out their barking fit. Once one starts and the others join it becomes a canine cacophony that feeds on itself. That cycle has a natural life which can be pretty long and unless broken by human intervention it tends to go on longer than what is good for human sanity.

What happened this morning around 4 a.m. was somewhat unusual. A street dog began barking all of a sudden and as it grew more insistent in the hope that others of his ilk might join no one else seemed to respond. It tried various combinations, including many solicitous yelps and ferocious growls, but to no avail. It had succeeded in brutalizing my sleep.

After about 30 minutes of increasingly stressful barking the dog stopped. A few seconds later though he finished the routine with what I can only describe as a dirge for the unheralded dead. I am pretty sure which dog it was because it always hovers around in my brother’s apartment compound, often sleeping during the day on the roofs of parked dusty cars.Incidentally, it is a female but I am never sure about the etiquette of calling a female dog a bitch.

She has all the pugnacity and servility of a street creature which she employs alternatively depending on whom she is up against. She is particularly deferential towards me because I suspect she knows that I may have some dollars in my pocket. Either that or she knows that my life has gone to the dogs.

If I encounter her anytime today I don’t know how I might react but none of the options seems that humane.

***

In my younger days I used to eat paan, a betel leaf packed with a mélange of Indian fragrances such as cloves, cardamoms and fennel seeds with some known digestive qualities. I seldom do now and that too only when I am in India.  On this visit I have had about four in over a month.

The other day after a particularly filling meal with my childhood friends we decided to top it off with paans. The paanwallah was a young man, probably still in his teens, with his palms fully red because of having to make paans all day long. Paans mixed with lime and katha (acacia catechu powder) produce a deep hue of red.

After the young man finished my paan I stretched out my hand to take it from him. Instead, to my utter surprise, he slipped it into my mouth. The move was so sudden that I had no time to resist it. All that I could muster was “Ohhh!” I was later told that this gesture is quite commonplace at many paan shops in Ahmedabad. I was also advised not to read any meanings into it and see it for what it is—a practical way to help you save having to dirty your hand because paan generally have red streaks.  To which I can only say ‘Okay.’

A narrow, template driven foreign policy debate

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney (left), CBS News moderator Bob Schieffer (center) and President Barack Obama during the final presidential debate on October 23 (Pic courtesy: http://www.debates.org/)

Although President Barack Obama handily dominated the third and the last presidential debate on the strength of both his record and his opponent Mitt Romney’s surprising subservience, one saw no grand, fresh vision about US foreign policy emerge from either man.

The whole feel of the debate as conducted by CBS News veteran Bob Schieffer was so immediate and had such a narrow horizon that it did not seem like the debate was taking place between one who is already “the leader of the free world” and the other who wants to become one.

For instance, one would have expected some articulation of what Obama and Romney think in terms of a world that is in the midst of an unprecedented connectedness thanks to information and communications technology revolution and how they intend leveraging modern technological advances to counter some utterly outdated constructs. Or about global health, global education and global climate and how the US can reach out to China and India and other large economies to create whole new strategies.

One understands that even a foreign policy debate has to be tailored to suit the specific demands of domestic US electoral politics. Nonetheless, both men could have said a few sentences about other overarching global crises simply because they have a direct impact on all of us.

While Obama had a fairly effective wisecrack about Romney being stuck in the 1980s Cold War mindset, there was nothing in his own formulation that would do justice to the vision of a country that never tires of describing itself as the “greatest country on the face of the planet.” (For those interested, here is what the president said: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War's been over for 20 years.”)

Of course, what Obama said and Romney generally concurred with was important and relevant such as about the situation in Syria, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. These are all existential conflicts with global ramifications and demand urgent resolution. But then foreign policy ought to be about much more than just ongoing conflicts. It has to be about the future of the human race as a whole for the next 50 years or 100 years. It is not my case that America should forever take a leadership role in battling issues around the world but it has the means and the depth to set an agenda much beyond conflict-specific strategies which are mainly about militarism and oil.

There was something remarkably template driven about the debate where the two participants as well as the moderator did not feel compelled to at least sketch out a long-term plan. This, I say, fully mindful that foreign policy is often about very hands-on micromanagement of the world as it is and not the way one would like it to be. That said, since the world was watching it would have helped a great deal if both Romney and Obama were specifically asked by Schieffer to envision the world as they would like it to be.

Let me get off this lofty perch and conclude today with what was an ideal lesson in how to be condescending towards your opponent with a devastating effect. After Romney insisted that Obama was not making enough allocations to the US defense budget (he spoke of the Navy not having enough ships), here is what the president said:"You mention the Navy, for example, and the fact that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets," Obama said, "We have these things called aircraft carriers and planes land on them. We have ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines."

A moment of gentle gloating for Narendra Modi

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi (left) and Britain’s High Commissioner in India James Bevan in Gandhinagar yesterday (Pic:www.narendramodi.in)

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi could permit himself a moment of gentle gloating in the privacy of his bathroom this morning. Outwardly, of course, it is in his best interest to maintain studied dignity at the way things are turning out for him on the international front.

The visit yesterday of Britain’s High Commissioner James Bevan to the state’s capital Gandhinagar to specifically meet Modi is an unambiguous triumph for the chief minister. Even though in keeping with the nonpartisan traditions of his profession Bevan did meet Gujarat Congress Party chief Arjun Modhwadia too, there was no question in anybody’s mind that the primary purpose of his visit was to reengage Modi both individually and as the elected leader of the state. It is like dropping by on your ex after a steamy date with your current.

Bevan and his bosses in London recognize that it is no longer tenable or productive to shun Modi personally even while claiming to be engaged with the rest of the state. It is a deliberate decision taken out of diplomatic and economic expediency as Britain understands the benefits of cooperating with what is widely regarded as India’s most business savvy state.

One may quibble over the details of the extent to which Modi can personally claim credit for Gujarat’s strong economic growth and renewed entrepreneurial vigor but it is undeniable on the strength of facts that he has, at the very least, been a very effective cheerleader. Even his most strident critics, and I regard myself as one, would grant Modi quantifiable success in engendering a mood of can-do in the last ten years by not standing in the way of entrepreneurs. Now that could be as much a strength as a weakness depending on how it all works out eventually.

Bevan took care to say at a news conference after the meeting that his visit and meeting with Modi should not be seen as an endorsement of the chief minister. That would be funny if it was not disingenuous because that is precisely how it seemed and, more crucially, that is precisely how it would be pitched by Modi’s supporters in the run-up to the state assembly election. The timing of Britain ending its diplomatic isolation barely two months before the state election may have been unplanned but there is no escaping that it has taken place so close to an election fraught with national significance for Modi.

The regular readers of this blog, as few as they are, would know that I am not the one to shy away from venturing a potentially hazardous speculation. So here it is. Watching Modi talking to Bevan my sense was that he was so self-assured at the turn of events that he almost looked pleased. There are three stages in a moment of vindication. One is unrestrained gloating, another is contrived detachment and third is self-aware amusement at the other party having yielded. (I can really talk some serious balderdash). Modi was in that third stage.

It is not as if Modi’s supporters and devotees, and there is a legion of those in the state, needed the presence of a British envoy to remain committed to him. Conversely, it is also not as if his detractors, and there are some of those too, were waiting for just such a meeting to convert themselves. However, on balance Bevan’s meeting ought to work in Modi’s favor in as much as an ordinary constituent in a remote village in Gujarat struggling to make ends meet can tell the difference between a high commissioner and an ambassador. (For the record ambassadors of Britain to the former colonies and those from the former colonies to Britain are called high commissioners). They don’t vote on the basis of whether Britain had diplomatically isolated Modi or has now thought it fit to reach out to him. Their parameters for voting someone are distant from what compels hacks like me to comment.