Mayank Chhaya Daily

Random thoughts about a random calendar

Just a random illustration (Pink River by Mayank Chhaya)

Having invested all my hopes in the accuracy of the so-called Mayan prophecy foreshadowing the end of the world on December 21, 2012, my calendar for tonight is wide open. There was no Plan B post-December 21, 2012. 

My calendar, in fact, has been wide open every single December 31st night since the time one began to become aware of the utterly arbitrary nature of the calendar. That awareness came when I was eight arbitrary years old.

Like most nights tonight too I will likely go to sleep by my usual time of 10 p.m. No, I don’t watch the Times Square ball drop. Tell me when it does not fall and instead starts floating. I would be interested in that gravitational shift. Trust me if the ball floats, we will have much bigger things to be worried about than the annual changeover and hangover. The word hung over would have a whole new meaning in such an event. We will all be hung over.

Let me accept the onset of a new year tonight just for sake of argument for the duration of this post. To me the signature event of 2012 is unquestionably NASA’s ‘Curiosity’ mission to Mars. Beyond the mindboggling scientific and technological brilliance of the mission, including the utter insanity of the way the rover was landed on the planet by Dr. Adam Steltzner and his team, I am equally interested in the fact that the Martian year is 1.88 times longer than ours. It takes Earth about 365.242199 days to complete one orbit around the Sun. That’s what makes one Earth year. Mars, our nearest planetary neighbor, takes 686.971 Earth days to complete its orbit.

It may not take a great deal out of you to calculate that Earth ought to have gone around the Sun much much more than the 2012th orbit it is supposed to complete tonight. We might have to settle for the widely respected scientific figure of 4.54 billion years. I understand the practical need for the human race to have a global consensus over which year we all live in even though some of us may still be frozen in medieval times or even prehistoric ones. To that extent one has to reluctantly go along with the current calendar. That said, it would help a great deal if the exultant celebrants remember that it is an entirely arbitrary system. It does not work on our nearest planetary neighbor Mars. Forget Mars, it does not work even on our planetary groupie, Moon. A Lunar month is 29.53 days.  I am throwing all these figures at you before you become inebriated (At least some of you but in many other parts of the world inebriation is already at its peak) so that you know how entirely arbitrary it all is.

Of course, as I said earlier, I do recognize the need to be practical about it and not anal or even obstructionist like me. At the same time though it would help keep your feet grounded to be conscious of these relative facts. The purpose of any calendar essentially is to be able to predict changing seasons because human life has depended so much on it. In individual lifetimes there is a certain inevitability to the onset of seasons, although it may not be the case over earthly lifetime. To that extent it is helpful to have an annualized reference point.

It is amazing how every year at this time I do my best to pour cold water on the very idea of the change of year. Sometimes I think it might be easier to just go along with the global current and pretend that something seminal will happen on December 31 when the ball drops at Times Square. Can we at least aim for all debts being forgiven in honor of a new year? I say this because the system of money and currency is also completely arbitrary, quite like the number 2013. Collectively we can decide to retire every single penny in global debt. It is, after all, just some fancily printed paper.

As for Mars being our closet neighbor and having a different definition of a year, let me leave you with this fact. The distance between Earth and Mars swings between 55 million kilometers (a little over 34 million miles) and 400 million kilometers (250 million miles) depending on where in the context of their solar orbits they are at a particular time. Didn’t I tell you it is all relative?

A thing or two about motion sickness

This digital painting of mine was originally not meant to capture motion sickness. But I think it works if you see it after motion sickness. (Motion Sickness by Mayank Chhaya)

I have reached a stage in life where even walking causes motion sickness. I exaggerate but it makes the point about the intensity of my congenital condition. My motion sickness predates my migraine and that makes it really old.

I am convinced now, after having studied it for over 40 years, that motion sickness does not necessarily require actual motion. Even an illusion of motion can cause it. For instance, last evening while watching a striking documentary titled  ‘Japan Tsunami: Tales of Terror’ I began to feel particularly queasy.

The documentary draws a great deal of its footage from scenes shot by the people of Japan using their camcorders and cell phone cameras in the midst of the unfolding disaster. Most of the visuals were jerky and even frenzied. Or, in other words, full of unanticipated movement for my brain and body.

It is not for the first time that visual stimulation of this kind has triggered motion sickness in me. That is one of the reasons why I do not particularly relish movies or documentaries shot with handheld or shoulder-mounted cameras.

Of course, I have experienced intense motion sickness in all the situations which are classically supposed to cause it such as a moving bus or a car. Mountain rides as a car or bus passenger are a total nightmare. Strangely though, nothing happens if I am driving or when I am flying or I am on a rollercoaster ride. That may have something to do with the fact as a driver my body anticipates the movement since I am in charge of it and deals with it differently from the way it would if I were a passenger.

Half an hour into the tsunami documentary and I was a total wreck, feeling quite like the debris of broken homes and overturned boats floating in swirly waters. I had to switch it off and take an antacid to calm my stomach.

Speaking of motion sickness let me conclude today’s unnecessarily personal post with a story out of Pakistan, circa 1993. I was a member of a foreign correspondents’ cricket team visiting Pakistan at the invitation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, an avid cricketer himself. The idea was that foreign correspondents from Delhi would take on the prime minister’s team. As it turned out, Sharif was in the midst of a political crisis (He eventually lost power in July 1993) and could not play with us. That is the background to the story. I give it because if I have to namedrop I might as well do so shamelessly.

Since we were state guests we were treated as state guests, which among other things meant that each one of us was given a brand new Mercedes as part of a big convoy. One of the items on the agenda was a visit to Murree, a charming hill station near the capital Islamabad. Knowing my condition I was pretty sure that it was not a good idea to be part of the trip but being a member of the team I could not get out of it. I had wrongly hoped that a smooth ride in a Mercedes on a smooth road might spare me the ordeal. On the contrary, it only made it worse.

Halfway through the drive I had to request my Pakistani chauffeur to pull over. I asked him if there was an older car, even a beat down one, in the convoy that I could shift to because I figured the one I was in was so smooth that my body felt like a part of the Merc. The chauffeur found the request so absurd that he burst out laughing. He told me that every Mercedes was barely a year old, part of a recently acquired fleet for state visits.

Luckily, there was one at the end of the convoy which was older than the rest. I shifted to that but felt no comfort at all as my nausea worsened. I lay down for the rest of the duration. When we finally reached Murree I looked washed up and pale. It took a bowlful of “aam ka murabba” (pickled mangoes in a sweet syrup) to pick me up. The return downhill was even worse. Back in the hotel room the inevitable happened.

India finally shaken out of its sloth over rape and sexual assaults

The death of the 23-year-old Delhi physiotherapy student gang-raped and brutalized by six men will hopefully act as a swift kick in Indian patriarchy’s pants and compel it to treat sexual assaults and rapes far more seriously than something so far offensively underplayed as “eve-teasing.”

Every one of the 24,000 rapes and sexual assaults reported last year is deserving of the same level of societal revulsion, outrage and collective action as the one that has finally shaken the country out of its stupor. There is complicity at all levels of Indian society and it would serve no purpose to apportion specific blame in the aftermath of the latest case.

While thinking about the revolting rise of 25 percent in the last six years, I am also grimly reminded of another societal crisis evident in the staggering number of female feticides which has pushed India towards a profoundly worrisome national sex ratio of 940 females to 1000 males. I do not have the research at my command to draw any serious inferences but in the capital city of New Delhi, where the latest crime took place, the sex ratio is an abysmal 866, which is among the worst in the country.

At the very least these figures tell us in cold statistical terms the extreme social prejudices and crimes that women have to suffer in India. I see a pattern in some six million girls “missing” between 2001 and 2011, according to the Indian census, and the indifference towards crimes against women both at the law enforcement level as well as the general public level. It might also help to remember that the same census also noted a serious decline in sex ratio in the age group up to six years with 914 girls for every 1,000 boys. Out of 35 Indian states 28 recorded a decline.

Going by the nationwide demonstration of outrage and resolve, one would like to believe that this time around the Indian nation has well and truly been shaken out of its sloth. This may well lead to the problem of rapes, sexual assaults and molestation being addressed very seriously by all stakeholders.

While legislating stronger laws and enforcing them ruthlessly is one very important part of it, it is equally important that as a society India and as a people Indians decide that they will not at all tolerate sex-related crimes at individual level. There has been any number of rape cases which takes place because of a combination of indifference and connivance at individual levels.

Once society as a whole demonstrates zero tolerance for such crimes, I am confident you would begin to see the results rather quickly. Once word gets around among those men with propensity for such crimes that they will invite instant wrath and retribution, one would begin to see a difference.

A garden variety male chauvinist

Abhijit Mukherjee seems to be a garden variety male chauvinist. Men like him abound in India and across the world. They harbor views about women that switch between chauvinism, sexism and misogyny quite effortlessly. In their defense, they genuinely believe in their own bile.

This Indian Member of Parliament belonging to the Congress Party, whose father happens to be India’s President Pranab Mukherjee, is getting justifiably lacerated and whipped publicly. In a television news interview this is how he described the women who came out in big numbers on the streets of New Delhi to protest a brutal gang-rape and beating of a 23-year-old woman now battling for life:

"Those who are coming in the name of students in the rallies, sundori, sundori mahila (beautiful women), highly dented and painted," Mukherjee said.

"Giving interviews in TV and showing off their children. I wonder whether they are students at all," he said. “What's basically happening in Delhi is something like (the) pink revolution, which has very little connection with ground realities."

On the sexism scale, these are standard issue observations of an anachronistic male chauvinist. Contrary to popular notions, this species continues to flourish throughout the world. It is just that many of them are in camouflage.

It is strange that Mukherjee used a derivative of a term which is normally found in signs at auto body repair shops in India. “Denting and painting” is a commonly used expression used by auto body repairers. I am not quite sure what “dented and painted” really means. “Painted”, of course, means women wearing heavy makeup but “dented” sounds Freudian to me. Is he implying that these are damaged women who hide under liters of paint or is he saying that these are morally dented women who need a masquerade of respectability?

The uproar over Mukherjee’s comments, which he has since withdrawn and apologized for, makes them seem as if they are extraordinarily rare and their being made at all calls for national censure. Every once in a while a person emerges to exemplify the worst in us and in this particular case it is Abhijit Mukherjee.

However, as profoundly unpleasant as this is one has to acknowledge that what he said does encapsulate the views of a large number of men, and some women as well, in India. To the extent that he taps into widespread antipathies against women Mukherjee is not exceptional. As I said he is a garden variety male chauvinist. Not that being one extenuates his transgression in any way at all but one has to bear that in mind while roasting him.

I find the TV studio-based rage against Mukherjee amusing simply because it misses the larger point about how widely shared his view is across India. When he is harangued and hectored by outraged anchors it may make for compelling television but it does not in any way address the real problem of sexism, chauvinism and misogyny. This is not a problem that can be solved one anachronistic male chauvinist at a time.

Mukherjee qualified his apology by saying his “intention was not to hurt anyone.” That what he said is intrinsically wrong is not something that appears to have dawned on him. It is not about whether he hurt someone, which is an outcome of his medieval obscurantism. It is about why he continues to remain a medieval obscurantist.

He has been quoted as saying, “As a father, he (the President) also asked me what prompted you to say that. You are in public life and definitely it will create controversy. You must apologize. I said I have already done (so). My intention was not to hurt anyone. Not to undermine the agitation.”

The funny thing is it has nothing to do with him being in public life and therefore should not say such things because they would create controversy. It has to be about the simple fact that what he said was just plain wrong and indefensible. That is where it should have ended. He is free to maintain such views in the private recesses of his mind but if he chooses to take them out for a walk publicly he should be ready to be pilloried.

I find it strange that some TV anchors try to make it appear as if Mukherjee is a virus they have detected in early stages of mutation and it has to be stamped out before it explodes into a veritable pestilence. And having subjected him to TV studio lashing and bashing that virus has now effectively been eliminated.

Enjoying coincidences

 

Few things make me as happy as coincidences. I have had my share of them on such a regular basis that I do wonder if they are a little more than that. The latest one happened yesterday.

It began with Mars. For my weekly Hindi column in the rural newspaper ‘Gaon Connection’ I decided to write about NASA’s Mars mission as being the signature achievement of 2012. Until yesterday I used to write Hindi in the English script which the newspaper’s copy editors would convert into the Hindi Devnagri script in India.

Having just discovered the Google Transliterate app I chose to use it to write in Devnagri. It is an amazing app because it lets you key in Hindi words in English and almost simultaneously offers you their Hindi version. This is a remarkable technological accomplishment in itself. It was just as well that I used one to write about something even more marvel-worthy, namely NASA’s Curiosity mission to Mars.

Now to the coincidence. Mars is called Mangal in Hindi. After writing the first three paragraphs of the column I happened to notice the font tab. The app had automatically chosen a font called ‘Mangal’. That made me almost as jubilant as the Curiosity mission scientists had felt when the rover landed on the planet on August 6 this year.

In the absence of any other explanation, I must put this under the ‘Coincidences’ column of my life. I am sure some would rationalize saying since there was a mention of the word ‘Mangal’ in my text, Word might have automatically chosen that as the font. That’s a fair a point but my default font for all Word documents in English is Calibri. I did not change anything before typing my column.

Another coincidentally routine occurrence in my life takes place at anytime during the day or night. This has happened for at least a decade and several times in a week. I have this old habit of looking at the clock every time I am awakened by some need such drinking water or voiding my bladder (That sounds hilarious). More often than not the time on the digital alarm radio clock would be 11:11, 12:12, 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, not necessarily in that order but randomly. This is has zero significance in any realm but as coincidences go it is pretty neat. For instance, on December 12, 2012, I was awakened by thirst and the the time was 12:12.

Before I begin to sound like those people who get routinely kidnapped by aliens and anal-probed I should end this column. Incidentally, the column finished precisely at 8.08 CST.

Reading five diverse books at once and not getting any

The five books I am reading simultaneously…and failing to grasp any

I am reading five books simultaneously, four of them generously gifted by Dr. Charles Langs, a New York nephrologist with whom I struck up what now seems like an inevitable and charming friendship during a flight from Chicago to New York.

I do not know of anyone other than Charles who reads with such ferocious commitment over an astonishingly wide range with such impressive comprehension. The only other name that comes to mind is the late Christopher Hitchens, who also happened to be Charles’ friend and who too used to applaud the nephrologist’s extraordinary range of reading and ability to offer instant references.

The books are the much celebrated ‘The Yellow Birds’ by Kevin Powers, ‘The Emigrants’ and ‘The Rings of Saturn’ by W G Sebald, ‘Speak, Memory’ by Vladimir Nabokov’ and ‘From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia*” by Pankaj Mishra.

This is indeed a very heavy literary burden to carry. It is not surprising that I ended up with three days of a severe backache recently. It caused me to walk at a weird angle from the right side of my torso. I looked as if I had been refracted mid-body. I doubt if physics had accounted for such an angle for a body in motion because I kept falling down.

It was not my plan to go genre/author/theme/period hopping. It just turned out that way and now it has become a personal experiment about how much cerebral bandwidth I really have to absorb such diversity of writing. I don’t think it is going well.

The biggest problem is that I mostly do not understand what I am reading. At the superficial level I understand the words that I am reading, but for some reason I have just not been able to get into the spirit of any of the books. That prompts me to say it again how little I grasp the human experience. It turns out that I understand it even less than I had suspected. Also, that I am intellectually even shallower than what I had originally assessed, which was not very much to begin with.

Those of you who follow this blog from time to time would agree that this is in no way an exercise in humility or modesty. I genuinely do not comprehend most things that one comes across during the course of living one’s life. One way to explain this is to argue that somewhere along the line I suffered from a stunted intellectual growth. I like to believe that I reached the natural limits of my growth in my early teens and everything I have done since I have done so by stretching that miniscule ability. After three and a half decades of living past its expiry I think my brain is no longer able to fool my mind.

I can only go by the popular critical opinion that these are all terrific books written by authors of great depth. Charles had asked me to tell him what I thought of ‘The Yellow Birds’ in particular. While I will send him a more detailed feedback in a personal email, for the purposes of this blog I would simply cite my natural lack of comprehension to offer a cogent critique. Of the five books, I have so far found Mishra’s the most accessible simply because I am somewhat familiar with the milieu and the context within which he writes. That’s the best I can say about my ability to understand anything these days.

It is possible that some of my friends find this post rather strange and perhaps even mildly disturbing if they discern in it some sort of confession of my intellectual decline. To them I can only say this: There is no intellectual decline here because it never rose to any discernibly higher level ever.  Perhaps the only worthwhile result from reading these five books at once is that I have rediscovered how shallow and insubstantial I am.

* The subhead of Mishra’s book in non-US edition is ‘The Revolt Against the West and Remaking of Asia’ which has been amusingly changed to the less insurrectionist “The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia”

Deporting Piers Morgan

CNN host Piers Morgan (Pic: A TV grab from cnn.com)

There are many reasons to deport CNN host Piers Morgan from America, including for being Piers Morgan, but his passionate advocacy of gun control is certainly not one of them.

Besides, I am not even sure if the Brits would want him back so soon after he came to live in America. It has only been seven years since they deported him*. Let this once great colonial power, now in decline, catch a break.

 

A petition on the White House We the People website has already garnered almost 60,000 signatures as of this morning. It requires a minimum of 25,000 signatures to compel an official response from the White House. As far as I know the White House has not responded but the petition’s proponents seriously want Morgan deported for the following reason:

“British Citizen and CNN television host Piers Morgan is engaged in a hostile attack against the US Constitution by targeting the Second Amendment. We demand that Mr Morgan be deported immediately for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens.”

The petition was created by a certain Kurt N. of Austin, Texas on December 21in the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut shootings that killed 20 children and six adults. On his show ‘Piers Morgan Tonight’, he said, "The argument I keep hearing is 'well if everybody else was armed, it wouldn't happen. It's a load of total hogwash,” he had said.

Morgan being Morgan is thoroughly enjoying all the attention that he and his show is getting because of the petition. There is next to no chance that he will be deported because of the petition. All that the petition is accomplishing so far is getting him a lot of attention. There is nothing at all original in what Morgan has been saying about gun control and a ban on those deadly assault weapons. What makes him effective is mainly his CNN platform and, partly, that he is a Briton with the kind of British accent that always has that subterranean mocking tone.

I much rather prefer Robin Lustig, the freshly retired BBC radio broadcaster and the host of the ‘Newshour’. His style was authoritative and yet indulgent, sincere and yet skeptical. In contrast, Morgan simply sounds as if he has headphones permanently implanted in his ears so that he can hear only himself. Now that is certainly one reason to deport him.

For some reason every time I see Morgan I think of Robin ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ Leach. That Leach is also an Englishman is just one part of it. Morgan comes across as the kind who always wanted to be among Leach’s “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” (It strikes me that my mind is stewing in such useless trivia).

*That’s a joke. Being a Brit himself Britain cannot deport him.

Sab theek nahi hai, Dr. Singh

There are reports in the Indian media about “online fury” over a question by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh caught in a hot microphone after he concluded an address to the nation about the current ferment over a brutal rape and assault in Delhi.

As always, first things first. Fury is the default temperament online.  Online begins with fury and ends with apocalypse in a mater of minutes and as a matter of routine. So no surprise there.

Before I say what Dr. Singh said, let me give you a quick background to the story. India’s capital New Delhi has been long known as the “rape capital” of the country. That sordid and criminal sobriquet was brutally reinforced on December 16 when a 23-year-old student was gang-raped inside a bus by six men, stripped, severely beaten and then thrown out. The young woman has since been battling for her life at a local hospital. The men responsible have been arrested with one of them reportedly confessing and saying he should be hanged for the crime.

Although sexual harassment, molestation, assaults and rape are a common feature in the capital which ignite strong passions from time to time, the latest case has blown the lid off its inhabitants’ easy complacency. Delhi has been in the grip of violent protests for several days now with the issue acquiring profound political, legal and socio-cultural dimensions. Everything from public castration of rapists to their public hanging has been suggested during this unprecedented reaction.

The aftermath has reached a level which compelled Dr. Singh to address the nation today on how his government proposes to deal with the climate of harrowing insecurity for women in the city.

Now to what Dr. Singh, a maestro of monotone, was caught saying. After his address, as he waited for a few seconds, with the camera and microphone on he asks almost plaintively, “Theek hai?” in Hindi, meaning “Okay?” These two words have set off a combination of anger and ridicule against a prime minister who is temperamentally unable to capture the emotional highs and lows of any given situation.

One cannot slam him beyond a point because that is his natural way of speaking. However, an outraged nation, at any rate a slice of it as shown by 24/7 news channels, naturally wants much greater emotional quotient in its prime minister. Hearing the speech, it is hard to tell whether Dr. Singh was talking about the beastly brutality that a young woman was subjected to or the latest GDP and inflation figures. And then the cruelly ironic question: “Theek hai?” It is true that the fury and ridicule are being vented online with some reasonably macabre jokes popping up here and there.

I have been asked why I have not said anything yet on the gang rape. It is mostly because one is acutely conscious of how gratuitous and insincere it can sound, no matter what one says. It also becomes a sort of cottage industry of raging reactions. Women have been so regularly demeaned and defiled in Delhi, where I worked for a decade, that it no longer seems right just to engage in transitory rage and then settle down to a level of helpless inaction. Rape is by no means a Delhi phenomenon but the capital has disregarded its frequent occurrence with such cavalier indifference that it is not surprising that protests have broken out.

Watching some of the TV footage of policemen baton-charging women protestors I had the sinking feeling that at least some of them were acting out a version of the very misogyny that propels sexual assaulters and rapists. Of course, that is just one part of it. We have been told that rape is power that men think they can use against women. I agree but it seems to me so much more primal than just that. In Delhi at least violence against women happens simply because men think they can. I read one of the six accused saying that that December 16th evening they were on a sort of a “joy ride.”

The capital’s law enforcers have never really demonstrated zero tolerance against this horrific crime. One would like to believe that the latest incident will change all that but one remains deeply skeptical because apart from not taking it seriously, sexual assault and rape are viewed by some men in authority strictly as individual acts rather than a manifestation of a collective breakdown of civility.

Without quite realizing it the city has over the decades created a climate of easy indifference about violence against women. In the early 1990s soon after shifting from Bombay I used to be deeply troubled by comments by young women, one of which would be, “Aaj bus mein kisi ne haath nahi mara. (No one pawed me on the bus today).” While it was meant to represent a young woman’s sense of relief at having been spared being pawed by some uncouth fellow male passenger on a particular day, it said so much more about a society that treated such an occurence as the norm.

Coming back to Dr. Singh’s “Theek hai?” I do not want to indulge in hysterical second-guessing whether he meant the speech was okay or generally things were okay. It was obvious to me that he was asking in his own polite way whether the address went off okay. I am still not as cynical as to think that India’s prime minister, and that too someone as civil and polite as Dr. Singh, would have meant anything else. However, it is a measure of how much credibility has been lost by his government among certain sections of society that even a minor indiscretion is interpreted with such frenzy.

One can only hope that the young woman survives and emerges as someone whose cruel ordeal shook up a nation enough to significantly and effectively address a social crisis. Doctors have said her condition has worsened because of internal bleeding. However, her vital organs are functioning well and she is able to communicate.

P.S.: For those of you who do not know Hindi, the headline translates as “All is not okay, Dr. Singh.”

Oscar Niemeyer, 1907-2012

My tribute to Oscar Niemeyer (Illustration: Mayank Chhaya)

My brother Trilochan, a greatly talented architect and a studiedly underexplored artist himself, once defined great architecture thus: “Your gait changes when you enter a great architectural space.”

Oscar Niemeyer (Pic: Taken from Wikipedia, no photo credit available)

As we mark the passing of the great Oscar Niemeyer I was reminded of Trilochan’s observation. He had made it in the context of the fabulous Mughal buildings of Fatehpur Sikri near Agra but it was meant for great architecture generally.

The only Niemeyer building I have set foot in is the United Nations headquarters in New York, which was, in fact, in collaboration with others, including Le Corbusier. Your gait does change when you enter the main hall of the building that conveys a sense of being inside an inclusive space in keeping with the spirit of the United Nations.

Although Niemeyer did say he was influenced by Corbusier, he also said he took a different direction. Having grown up in Ahmedabad, I am very familiar with Corbusier’s work because the city has some striking work by him.Reinforced concrete was the preferred medium of these two men who were essentially sculptors who happened to be trained as architects. Or at least that’s how  my untrained eye sees them.

Regarded as one of the pioneers of modernism, Niemeyer’s fascination with curved lines that flowed to their own logic was obvious in all his buildings. In fact, his memoirs is called ‘The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer’ where he writes, “I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire Universe, the curved Universe of Einstein.”

I have no qualification to write about Niemeyer other than some ability to whip up a passable enough post about a subject I have no training in. I do not understand the mechanics of architecture but like most others I can feel the spirit of a great building. From that standpoint, I suspect if I ever entered a Niemeyer creation I would feel unbounded despite being in an enclosed space.

Oscar Niemeyer Museum (NovoMuseu), Curitiba, Brazil (Pic: Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz)

Museu de Arte Contemporânea (MAC)

As you can see my tribute drawing at the top of the post, notwithstanding its less than professional quality, has been inspired by Niemeyer’s works. If nothing else, I hope it comes across as a sincere effort.

About me, by me and mostly for me

Not having made the grade as a journalist or a writer who might get featured in The New York Times Sunday magazine section I do not have much option but to write about myself in hagiographic terms.

Today’s post is inspired by a piece about the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in the Times by Jonah Weiner. The piece is accompanied with a video about how Seinfeld writes and nurtures his jokes.

Since my writing is not preceded,accompanied and followed by any glamor it does not make sense for anyone else to shoot a video like that. So I have chosen to do it on my own. I shot, edited and uploaded it as I always do.

Writing anything, including comic material like Seinfeld does, is a singular process which is not in and of itself attractive or glamorous. Fame, celebrity and glamor are a consequence of that writing if it succeeds the way it has for Seinfeld and drudgery results if they don’t work as well as has been in my case.

Some of my friends have wondered how it is that I say I have finished four books and am in the middle of three more and yet they don’t get to see any in the market. To that I say “Well, that’s that.” Come to think of it, one could write an interesting novel about an aspiring writer starting many projects and finishing none except the novel about a writer starting many projects and finishing none. I think I am on to something.

Lest you think I just say things without having anything to show for myself here is my latest Hindi column in the rural Indian newspaper ‘Gaon Connection’. It is an interview with Sam Pitroda, something I have steadfastly avoided doing because he is a friend. In this particular case though, it is rather narrow-focused and my friendship plays no role whatsoever.