Mayank Chhaya Daily

The Times and Chinese hackers

There are hackers and then there are hackers.

The first kind are like street-level pickpockets and petty thieves who just break in and steal whatever they can. They rummage through your life and property in a particularly crude fashion. The second kind are like the more sophisticated burglars with refined tastes, the kind dressed in a tuxedo who, while meticulously removing high valuables, might savor a sip or two of expensive wine. They are the kind who may be telling you that under better circumstances they could have been your friends.

I am not entirely sure how to categorize the Chinese hackers, who hacked into The New York Times for the past four months. Going by what the newspaper reports  “Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.”

The newspaper was “persistently” hacked for the past four months, apparently in response to its correspondent David Barboza’s investigation that exposed that relatives of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had amassed billions of dollars through business deals. The story was published online on October 25. The hacking began around that time.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” Jill Abramson, executive editor of the paper has been quoted as saying.

The fact that no customer data was stolen shows that the Chinese hackers in this particular case seem to fall in the second category, the kind that thinks theirs is an art form and not thievery. More seriously though, it has been known for a long time, at least since 2008, that China has an army of highly skilled hackers whose job it is to scour the web of antagonistic material. They have both defensive and offensive hacking. Over the years they have become extremely good at what they do because cyber war is now an integral part of statecraft.

It is a measure of how detailed web scouring by China gets that in 2008, the year when reports say Chinese hackers began hacking systematically under official patronage, my personal website was blocked in that country. I was told that by someone from Beijing. What was particularly surprising was that even the website of a high profile friend’s company was blocked simply because of his association with me. The logic then seemed to be Mayank Chhaya who has written an authorized biography of the Dalai Lama is obviously part of the “splittist clique” and hence, by implication, his friends too are part of the “splittist clique” which wants to split Tibet away from China. Hence block Mayank Chhaya and all those he knows.

I do not know if my website remains blocked now. In 2010, when it was still blocked, a friend in Delhi, who knows how the Chinese apparatus operates, told me that my being blocked was not personal but part of a vast algorithm that filters out everything and everyone who may have had anything to do with Tibet and the Dalai Lama. So if I had any illusions about my importance, I should quickly banish them. I was just swept up along with the other muck that clogs the worldwide web.

Coming back to the Times hacking, perhaps more than looking for specific information the strategy may have been to just let the newspaper know that hackers could get in at will. Of course, the paper has completely overhauled its security but there is no guarantee that the Chinese would not continue to try and break in. More than the theft of data, sometimes it is the sheer presence of an intruder that is effective.

Nandy, Rushdie, Haasan, Khan

Nandy, Rushdie, Haasan, Khan has the cadence of a charming limerick.

However, the cadence and the charm vanish quickly when you discover that the four men carrying these respective last names are confronting intolerance in India these days.

With the possible exception of the actor and filmmaker Kamal Haasan, sociologist Ashis Nandy, writer Salman Rushdie and actor Shah Rukh Khan have all experienced societal wrath in varying degrees in the past.

The themes of intolerance that these four men are up against may be very different. What unites them is that they are up against ferment of some kind for saying something. In Rushdie’s case, of course, it is an open-ended protest without any expiry. If he is there, someone will find a reason to protest. He has long become a classic template for protest where the immediate provocation can be plugged in at the last moment.

It strikes me that what also unites these four men for now is the utter silliness of the protest surrounding them. Khan wrote a piece for Outlook Turning Points magazine, published in association with The New York Times, where he said, "I sometimes become the inadvertent object of political leaders who choose to make me a symbol of all that they think is wrong and unpatriotic about Muslims in India."

"There have been occasions when I have been accused of bearing allegiance to our neighboring nation rather than my own country - this even though I am an Indian, whose father fought for the freedom of India. Rallies have been held where leaders have exhorted me to leave and return to what they refer to my original homeland," added the 47-year-old Khan.

The piece prompted one of those ridiculous spats between India and Pakistan. Sensing an opportunity to muddy India’s domestic political waters, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik and wanted terrorist leader Hafiz Saeed, who is the chief of the Jamaat-ud Dawa and carries a $10 million U.S. reward, both jumped right in. Both said if Khan did not feel safe as a Muslim in India he should consider locating to Pakistan. They both knew that inviting Khan to Pakistan would only fuel the antipathy that the actor says he occasionally encounters, although the general tone of the piece was rather upbeat.

That brings me to the silly controversy number 2 involving legendary Tamil actor Kamal Haasan whose latest film ‘Vishwaroopam’ has run into major obstacles amid protests from some Muslim groups. His own state of Tamil Nadu, where he enjoys a near godlike status, wants the film banned because it is supposed to be offensive to Muslims. The high court of his state gave him the go ahead but the movie has again run into problems with major editing being demanded. Some Muslim groups want it banned altogether.

So dismayed does Haasan feel that at a news conference he practically announced his decision to forsake his home state and shift to any other “secular” state in India or even another country. “After this (controversy) I will have to seek a secular state for me to stay in. I have lost what I have got. I have nothing to lose. And I  might as well choose. That choice will be a place where it will be a secular state….If I can’t find it within India I will find hopefully another country that might take me in,” he said. The actor says he has put his house as a collateral to finance his movie which reputedly cost him one billion rupees (About $20 million) and may have to turn it over to his lender.

It is unclear what precisely is considered objectionable about the film but going by the preponderance of media reports it is the way radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan have been shown. Haasan himself is baffled by the reaction.

Now on to the third silly controversy. At the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival well-known Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy spoke about corruption in India. One of the points he seemed to make was that most cases of corruption involved India’s traditionally oppressed classes known as backward classes, scheduled castes and tribes. There was a much deeper point to what Nandy was saying as a lifelong academic but what got transmitted by India’s ever hyper broadcast media was the simplified sound bite that Nandy says the oppressed classes are more corrupt.

As he explained in subsequent interviews he was merely pointing out how the corruption among the people at the lower end of India’s society gets highlighted much more because they are unable to finesse it the way the rich and the powerful do. He also said that unlike the corruption of the rich which is out of greed, the corruption of the oppressed classes is out of desperation. In an interview with Niharika Mandhana for The New York Times’s India Blog, Nandy said, “The point I was trying to make was this: if you remove all corruption from society, that’s good. But that will take decades. In the interim period, those who are on the brink of desperation, those who have been deprived of access to power for centuries, deserve to get a share of the loot. Their corruption is a sign of their empowerment and the growth of the Indian republic. In fact, it should be encouraged.”

Nandy’s comments caused a minor firestorm with some groups demanding his arrest, which he has welcomed.

The fourth and final controversy is really not anything specific because it involves Rushdie. The author is in India these days to promote the movie version of his much celebrated book ‘Midnight’s Children.’ He had had to cancel a visit to Kolkata because of what the media reports described as “security concerns.” As I said Rushdie is now a template for protest. It seems it is no longer even necessary to look for a reason when he is involved. With Rushdie, people protest first and think of a reason, if at all, later.

My personal takeaway from these four disparate cases of silliness is that silliness is a monster that feeds on itself. What is not silly is that it involves real human beings who have to pay a real price for it. That the four protests unfolded so close to each other may be just a coincidence but now that they have occurred almost simultaneously it is fair to wonder whether they are part of a larger pattern of silly intolerance that grips India so often these days.

One can always fairly argue that the freedom of expression applies equally to those who have chosen to challenge that of these four men. Protest is enshrined in democracy. Silliness is not.

India and its Google data requests

India ranks only behind the United States among the countries which obtain user data from Google.

According to the figures published by Google as part of its Transparency Report, in 2012 India made a total of 4750 data requests and asked specifically for a total of 7573 users and accounts. More than 60 percent of the time some data was produced by Google in response to the Indian requests.

The figures for the United States are much higher. For the same period the U.S. made a total of 16,407 data requests and asked specifically for a total of 31,072 users and accounts. More than 85 percent of the time some data was produced by Google in response to the American requests.

The top six countries in a list of 31 countries that made such requests are the United States, India, Brazil, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Each of these made more than 1000 such requests last year. The total number of global data requests last year was 21,389 and the number of specific users and accounts was 33,634. In 66 percent of cases some data was produced and furnished by Google.

Rather than my explaining what these figures mean, let me quote what Google’s FAQs say about these requests.

“Government agencies make requests to Google companies seeking information about Google users accounts or products. In this report, we are generally revealing statistics about demands in criminal investigations. In some cases we may not be able to tell if the demand is for a criminal investigation as opposed to some other purpose. In those situations, we try to include the request in these statistics,” it explains what a user data request means.

Google is careful to say that while the statistics cover requests in criminal matters, the company “can't always be sure that a request necessarily relates to a criminal investigation, however, so there are likely a small number of requests that fall outside of this category.”

It is the part where Google says it cannot always be sure that a request necessarily relates to criminal matters that raises serious questions about internet privacy. It is here that the debate enters a controversial realm. In theory and, significantly, in practice it is possible that some of those requests for data and users/accounts have a political dimension. There is no real way of knowing the motivation behind those requests because governments can always layer it with a veneer of criminality.

There are cases when a user whose data is being requested will be notified by Google via email. However, I am sure there is a significantly larger number of cases where governments would expressly forbid Google from alerting the concerned users so as not to compromise whatever investigation that is underway.

You can see India related statistics here. Do note how the numbers have gone up considerably since 2009.

So far I am agnostic to the larger meaning of these requests except saying that it is always tempting for any government to monitor what its citizens are doing. I am not entirely sure whether 7573 users and accounts for which information was requested by New Delhi should be considered high enough to alarm advocates of privacy.

It is hard to second guess government when it comes investigation into criminal activity which may prompt such requests. However, it always helps to be vigilant about the existence of such requests.

There is no way for me to know whether Google has ever received any request about me. I have never received an email alerting me to such a request. But then they are not always allowed to send an alert email. One can safely assume that my laughable inconsequentiality is in itself my immunity against being sought out.

Mr. Khan, please do not demolish Taj

The Taj Mahal

As idiotic righting of historical wrongs go, the one started by an Indian state government minister must rank among the best.

Mohammad Azam Khan, the Parliamentary Affairs and Urban Development Minister of Uttar Pradesh, has said that perhaps the Taj Mahal should be demolished. Incidentally, although Uttar Pradesh is just one of the Indian states, with a population of close to 200 million people it could be the world’s fifth most populous country.

"Shah Jahan had no right to spend crores (millions) from the public coffers on his sweetheart," Khan has been quoted as saying by the IANS wire. He went to the extent saying that he would have led it if there was any popular movement to bring down the Taj.

Once you get past the immediate insanity and shock value of what he is saying, you would discover that at the very least it has the merit of sound academic argument. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan is unlikely to have paid for its construction from a personal checking account or his personal credit card. One good thing about being a post-medieval emperor is that not only could one draw limitlessly from the state exchequer but you were in fact the exchequer and the currency and the image on the currency.

It has been estimated that the Taj, built between 1632 and 1653, cost an equivalent of 32 million rupees. To put it in today’s perspective, that would not be very much more than what Shah Rukh Khan might spend on a car. Or look at it this way. At that price, Mukesh Ambani could buy it cash down on his way from his billion dollar high-rise home in Mumbai to his office.

It is logical to conclude that Shah Jahan used the state exchequer to finance his dream project to memorialize his love Mumtaz Mahal, who died because of child birth complications during her 14th child in 1631. I am not even going to ask why he thought it wise to subject her to 14 pregnancies.

Since he used the public coffers for an entirely personal whim it is fair to at least question the monument’s legitimacy. To the extent Khan is saying that Shah Jahan misused public money, he is on solid ground. The problem arises when he advocates its demolition. There is nothing to be gained by bringing it down.

Even if one disregards that the public debt of a post-medieval empire is non-transferrable to a modern day nation-state, it is reasonable to assume that India has more than recovered 32 million rupees in tourism fees over the past few decades from those visiting it. Let us not even quantify in financial and cultural terms the enormous global brand equity that the Taj has given India and continues to do so. One should not be surprised if millions of tourists come to India every year are primarily drawn by the allure of the Taj.  So as serious economists might say it’s all good.

Quite apart from the fact that it is a UNESCO World Heritage monument, demolishing it would damage so much more than just destroying a dream monument. It would irreparably damage India’s reputation as a civilized society. It would be somewhat akin to the Taliban destroying the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan, Afghanistan except that here the motivation would not be religious but economic and social wrong.

As the IANS story points out with some irony Khan was advocating the demolition on the same day as his boss, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav was praising it to foreign delegates at the Jaypee Palace hotel in Agra.

So on balance, I would request Mr. Khan to spare the monument. If not for anything else, to save the world from thinking post its demolition that the Taj was, in fact, built by Emperor Donald Trump in Atlantic City.

A tongue-in-cheek short on porn industry

Here is a tongue-in-cheek short on porn industry, although the expression tongue-in-cheek in their profession has a completely different meaning. Their tongue is always in someone else’s cheek. (I had to slip it in).

I empathize with porn stars. They all lead such a hand to mouth existence. More often than not they have to be on their knees and all fours begging for more.

They get slapped and pushed around on a daily basis. The more they scream the more intense the slapping and shoving becomes, rather than less. Many of them even get chained and shackled and whipped and scraped. And yet they go on because they have to survive.

They don’t get proper clothing and whatever they get is often so short and tight that it climbs up their orifices. But for a helpful hand from a fellow porn star they may never be able to remove ropes that pass off for underwear painfully wedged deep inside.

They are handcuffed without ever having been mirandized. The only right they have is the right to be gagged. They are often thrown into narrow cages and left at the mercy of prison guards wielding leather whips and generously using them.

The contortions they are subjected to earn a decent buck would be classified as torture in any other profession. There is a whole class of them who have to endure piercings in places where the sun never reaches.

Contrary to all norms of civility, their ordeal is also filmed with proper lighting and several cameras. It is then viewed around the world, often free and always in violation of international conventions prohibiting the parading and filming of captives.

And through this unspeakable ordeal, they have to look inexplicably pleased and pleasured, moan and shriek in joy and invoke god every step of the way. What is worse is that at the end no one helps them put their clothes back on. They just stay there naked, smiling for the camera until the picture fades. Who knows what happens when lights are off?

Het Meisje met de Parel

It serves no purpose second-guessing what the 17th century Dutch master painter Johannes Vermeer had in mind when he created Het Meisje met de Parel (Girl with a Pearl Earring). He has already done what he wanted to.

As this marvel goes on display at the de Young/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco today it is appropriate that I write a thing or two about his works. I think it says something about me, and obviously nothing flattering, that I came to know of this masterpiece because of the 2003 movie of the same name. The movie was directed by Peter Webber and featured Scarlett Johansson as the 17-year-old girl in the painting, Griet. Colin Firth played Vermeer.

The movie’s art direction by Christina Schaffer and cinematography Eduardo Serra together create a superb fusion in bringing alive what is known as the Dutch Golden Period. Both got nominated for the Oscars in their categories. Webber also did a terrific job bringing the best-selling selling novel by Tracey Chevalier.

A lot of Vermeer’s works, or at any rate over a dozen that I have seen courtesy the Google Art Project, stand out for the way they use light filtering in through windows. I have cited three examples below. Most of his works captured middle class interior life in the 1660s in his city of Delft.

“Girl with a Pearl Earring” remains his most celebrated work because it has the same enigmatic quality of ‘Mona Lisa’ by Leonardo da Vinci who preceded Vermeer by nearly two centuries.

Apart from the very obvious artistic merit of Vermeer’s works what I find particularly fascinating is the knowledge of the science of pigments. Look at ‘The Glass of Wine’ for instance. There are so many different colors and shades in it. From the chessboard tiles of the floor to the stained glass window, from the chair’s upholstery to the tablecloth and from the woman’s gown to the wall, it must have required an extraordinary knowledge of colors and their mixing. The movie captures those details rather well.

Vermeer was regarded as a modestly successful provincial figure at the time of the Dutch Golden Period which makes me wonder how much more gifted one had to be to be installed among the pantheon.

 

Officer and a Laughing Girl

The Glass of Wine

The Milkmaid

Here is my pathetic little tribute to Vermeer’s enduring masterpiece. It has no face simply because I do not have the talent to draw it. It does have the earring.

I wish I was in San Francisco.

David Headley: a picture of casual self-assuredness

The IANS wire has run a story drawn from a piece by me in the upcoming issue of a local Chicago weekly ‘Hi India.’

By Mayank Chhaya

Chicago, Jan 25 (IANS): In his light grey prison issue tracksuit and sneakers, David Coleman Headley looked like an elderly man back from his morning jog. An air of casual self-assuredness that had characterized his nearly week-long testimony in May, 2011, against his childhood friend Tahawwur Hussain Rana, was on display yet again as a 35-year-long sentence was handed down to him.

With no shackles in his ankles the 52-year-old six feet plus key Mumbai terror plotter stood with his hands behind his back and legs apart. He betrayed no particular emotion at the fact that his unfettered existence was effectively over. By the time he comes out of prison he will be nearly 80 years old since he is not entitled to federal parole and is required to serve 85 percent of his sentence.

Asked why unlike Rana, who was sentenced to 14 years on Jan 17, Headley had no shackles in his ankles in the courtroom, an official explained, "That is the determination made by the US marshals."

From India's perspective the sentence may seem relatively light. However, the next nearly 30 years that he will have to be in prison coupled with a plea bargain deal that mandates him to basically do whatever the government directs him to do in perpetuity is way tougher than it might seem on paper. What New Delhi will have to bear in mind is that at any time the US government can rescind his plea bargain if it determines that Headley is deliberately holding back information because he no longer has any incentive of a reduced sentence after the pronouncement. He waved his right to appeal soon after his arrest on Oct 3, 2009.

Gary Shapiro, acting US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, told the local Hi India newspaper that plea bargain deals are essentially for life. It means that Headley will have to cooperate in the best possible way throughout his incarceration. Of course, the value of any information or intelligence he provides will naturally diminish over time and a stage will be reached when he will no longer be useful as a source of actionable intelligence.

The most striking aspect of the points made before Headley's sentencing was the great and repeated emphasis that both the prosecution and the defense put on the extent and quality of his cooperation. His attorney John Theis, in requesting for a lighter sentence, said the information that Headley provided was "so profound that it calls for extraordinary downward departure."
He also said because of the information provided by Headley barely 30 minutes after his arrest, lives were saved not just in India and the United States but elsewhere in the world.
For its part even the defense described Headley's case as "uniquely aggravating" and "uniquely mitigating" and frequently pointed out his unprecedented cooperation. It is perhaps for the first time in a major case of global terrorism that one of the key players chose to cooperate without any coercion and so immediately after his arrest.

According to Hi India, Headley was arrested only in connection with the plot for planning to carry out a spectacular attack on the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten for its 2005 publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed which many Muslims found offensive. The information about his involvement in the Mumbai attacks came solely from him. It was only after his arrest that the investigators became aware of his involvement in the Mumbai terror attacks as disclosed by him.

The cynical explanation of his extraordinary cooperation is that he was merely trying to save his skin by volunteering so much, so easily. Some of the interrogation videos, which were played during his testimony, showed a man almost desperate to cooperate. So much so that at one point he sounded upset that the federal investigators were not fully utilizing his information to make major arrests. To many Headley's eagerness to cooperate and help effect major arrests looked to be part of a strategy to mitigate his own complicity.

Nothing highlighted his extraordinary push to cooperate more than when it came to the whereabouts of Ilyas Kashmiri, the Al Qaeda/Harkat ul Jihad al Islami leader Ilyas Kashmiri who was killed June 3, 2011, during a drone strike on an orchard in South Waziristan. Regarded as one of the fiercest commanders, Kashmiri was one of the seven people to have been charged them with involvement in both the Mumbai case as well as the abortive attack on the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten which published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed offensive to Muslims in September, 2005.

Headley had even proposed to the investigators that they should send him back to Pakistan with an ornate sword embedded with a locator chip which he could gift Kashmiri. The US then could use the signal from the chip to locate and target him.

The government's position paper on his sentencing, while referring to his extraordinary cooperation, said, "Headley similarly provided extensive detail about Ilyas Kashmiri and his network." When asked to elaborate on the kind of information that Headley provided about Kashmiri, Shapiro said it was classified and he could not share it. This correspondent had speculated in September, 2011 that it was possible that Headley's information, in fact, led to tracking down Kashmiri and killing him the drone strike. There was no confirmation of this forthcoming from any quarter.

It has baffled many why a man once so deeply immersed in an extreme version of Islam known as Salafism can change so radically as to seriously undermine its other adherents by exposing them. Salafi adherents treat the companions of the Prophet Mohammed and the two immediate generations of Muslims that followed as their role model. Headley said the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) believes being a Salafi "is a prerequisite to jihad".

One plausible explanation could be what even Judge Harry Leinenweber zeroed in on. He pointed out how Headley had a history of being arrested and then finding his way out of it by cooperating with the authorities. He was referring to Headley's two arrests in the past in connection with narcotics smuggling and how he managed to come out of prison on fairly positive terms in exchange for cooperation.

This time around too, despite the enormity of his crimes, Headley did manage to compel the prosecution to take the death sentence as well as extradition to India off the table. So to that extent he did get his way but the judge steadfastly refused to bite the bait and offer him any serious downward departure in his sentence.

"Mr. Headley is a terrorist," the judge said, adding, "There is little question that life imprisonment would be an appropriate punishment for Headley's incredibly serious crimes but for the significant value provided by his immediate and extensive cooperation." In fact, Judge Leinenweber, in his prelude to the sentencing, seemed to imply that without the mitigating circumstances arising out of Hedaley's cooperation with the US government the death sentence would have been the easiest option.

In choosing to give him the top end of the reduced sentence requested by the government the judge showed that the he did not believe Headley was capable of a change of heart. "I don't have any faith in Mr. Headley when he says he is a changed person and believes in the American way of life. The sentence I impose, I'm hopeful it will keep Mr Headley under lock and key for the rest of his natural life," he said.

The judge was referring to a letter Headley wrote about three weeks ago where, while pleading for clemency, he had said he had had the time to reflect and had come to believe in the American way of life. He had also said he read the scriptures again and found that their content was misrepresented by those who recruited him.

The sentence provided a powerful denouement to one of the more unusual careers in global terrorism, of a man of obvious intelligence choosing relatively late in life to pursue jihadi objectives through unabashedly violent means. What began as childhood anger at his school being bombed during the 1971 India-Pakistan war eventually led Headley, once known as Daood Gilani, to be trained by the virulently anti-India terrorist group LeT. Between February, 2002 and December, 2003 Headley underwent a total of over eight months of LeT training on the merits of waging jihad, use of weapons and grenades, close combat tactics, survival skills and counter-surveillance.

He was instructed in by the LeT in late 2005 to conduct surveillance in India. As part of the mission he changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley in February, 2006 for the purposes of suspicion free travels to India. Between September, 2006 and July 2008, he visited India five times, each time to consolidate a detailed surveillance map of targets in Mumbai which were attacked by ten heavily armed terrorists on November 26, 2008.

A (hopefully) charming story about a pair of glasses

I would grant you that there is certain vanity to this picture. An older me holding up a picture of a younger me and taking a picture of that on my webcam and then publishing it here are all signs of flagrant self-absorption.

However, that is just a small part of it and, in any case, I do not see this as vanity at all. I see it as a mere illustration accompanying a little story about the glasses in the photograph. I could have simply scanned the picture of my younger days rather than holding it up and injecting myself in the frame. I think the contrast between the two makes it a more compelling visual. Don’t look at it as my picture but just any other picture and you would be able to tolerate its vanity.

Since I will be away to downtown Chicago this morning for the sentencing of key Mumbai terror plotter David Coleman Headley, I thought it might be more convenient to write this post last night.

I had been thinking about this frame of my glasses for the past few days. In the nearly four decades of having worn glasses this frame remains my all time favorite. I chanced upon it one afternoon in 1988 while walking to a news conference from my office in Fountain to the Taj Mahal Hotel in Colaba, Bombay. There used be a Parsi optician in Kala Ghoda across the Jehangir Art Gallery. The decrepitude of the store and the building that housed it suggested that both were once charming places.

This particular frame was casually consigned to one corner of a dusty showcase in the storefront. I wasted no time at all in deciding to buy it right away. I vividly remember how the entire interior of the store had a natural sepia tone to it and seemed to have been part of a yellowing photo album. It looked as if it had been staged for a nostalgic picture.

The store owner, an elderly Parsi gentleman, greeted me saying, “Sahebji” and asked if there was anything in particular I was looking for. I pointed out the frame in the showcase. “That!” he exclaimed. “But why that? It is just a piece of junk. I did not even remember it until now.”

I said I had been looking for a frame like that for a very long time and could not pass up on it. He did a quick eye examination and finalized the prescription. The spectacles were ready in two days. As I began wearing them I did cause some unexpected mirth among family and friends. For a 27-year-old to sport an early 20th century design was an oddity that became a topic of conversation.

I remember when a young waiter named Janardan, working for a restaurant where I was a regular customer, saw me in this frame he laughed out loud and said, “You look like you are 50 years old.” I am 52 now and look like the man on the right in the picture above.

In a way the glasses became my signature for about five years or so until one day, on a visit to Bombay in 1993 (I had shifted to New Delhi in 1989) I left the pair in a taxi right outside the optician’s store.

So, so like that.

Tangential vindication of journalistic speculation based on a hunch

Let me tell you what tangential vindication of journalistic speculation based on a hunch tastes like. It does not at all taste good but I am going to tell you about it anyway. It tastes like boiled broccoli without salt.

On September 13, 2011, I wrote this in my blog:

“When Al Qaeda/Harkat ul Jihad al Islami leader Ilyas Kashmiri was killed for the second time* on June 3 this year during a drone strike on an orchard in South Waziristan, I had wondered whether Mumbai terror plotter David Coleman Headley’s may have helped the US with his coordinates.

My inference was drawn from the fact that Headley, now in prison awaiting sentencing for his role in the November, 2008 Mumbai terrorist strikes, was in regular contact with Kashmiri and may have provided significant actionable intelligence about his location to the US authorities.”

As educated surmising goes this was not bad at all. Here was my line of thinking: Since Headley was in contact with Kashmiri prior to his arrest and because after his arrest Headley wanted to prove to U.S. federal investigators how serious he was about his cooperation with them, he might have said things that helped track Kashmiri down.

Just how desperate Headley was to spill the beans became evident during his testimony. He proposed to the investigators that they should send him back to Pakistan with an ornate sword embedded with a locator chip which he could gift Kashmiri. The US then could use the signal from the chip to locate and target him. We will never know for sure whether he was sent back with such a sword. (I am being tongue-in-cheek.)

While a lot of what I had surmised and inferred may be disregarded, what probably carried some weight was my basic contention that Headley did indeed give enough intelligence on Kashmiri to track him down.

So yesterday when I received the U.S. government’s position paper on Headley’s sentencing, scheduled for January 24, I read it thoroughly. The paper, while describing the kind of extensive cooperation Headley offered, says, "Headley similarly provided extensive detail about Ilyas Kashmiri and his network."

I don’t know about you but I have chosen to treat that as tangential vindication of journalistic speculation based on a hunch.

On the broader question of the quantum of sentencing the prosecutors have asked the court to consider giving Headley between 30 and 35 years. For the 52-year-old Headley this duration would be effectively like serving life in prison, although technically it is below the life imprisonment.

India, which has a direct stake and interest in Headley, is likely to be displeased about the sentence but there is nothing much it can do about it. As the position paper notes, “Determining the appropriate sentence for David Headley requires consideration of uniquely aggravating and uniquely mitigating factors.”

The “uniquely aggravating” factors are obvious but not so well-known are the “uniquely mitigating” factors, which mainly relate to the extent of his cooperation. The prosecutors said he offered information about the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba including its organizational structure, leadership and other personnel, recruiting methods, fundraising methods, training methods, planning of attacks and potential targets.

What I find particularly interesting is the fact for two weeks before his arrest became public he volunteered to communicate with his associates at the instance of the investigators. Unaware of his arrest it is possible that Headley was able to lead the authorities to operatives of some value. “Through these communications, law enforcement was able to identify additional members of Kashmiri’s network and gain other valuable information,” the position paper said. All of these together constitute what the prosecutors call “uniquely mitigating factors.”

As an aside, I am curious to know how Headley communicated with his former associates in Pakistan and elsewhere and how he was monitored. For instance, did he speak to them in English or Punjabi/Urdu? Also, who monitored him to ensure that he was not, in fact, alerting the operatives using some coded language?

* I say second time because he was also reported to have been killed once earlier but it turned out to be inaccurate.

Let me try some caveat free optimism

The newly minted Congress Party vice president Rahul Gandhi’s speech is being widely applauded in India for the authenticity of its content. Many commentators are saying that with this once speech he has proved that he is not some disengaged scion of the country’s most celebrated and reviled political royalty.

When it comes to making speeches, the bar has been set so low in Gandhi’s case that he makes one at all is cause enough for jubilation among some people. By that standard not only did he cross that bar but virtually breached all barriers of oratory. I have a somewhat different perspective on political speeches generally and this one particularly.

The broad theme of Gandhi’s speech was a sense of alienation and frustration among Indians that those in government and positions of power simply do not respond to ordinary people’s concerns. It was a sensible theme which is also timeless in India because at any given time in the last six decades that characterization would have been accurate. To that extent Gandhi was not saying anything that no one would dare say. His father, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi,  pretty much said the same thing in 1985 when he was finding his political moorings.

“The voices of a billion Indians are today telling us that they want a greater say in government, in politics and in administration. They are telling us that the course of their lives cannot be decided by a handful of people behind closed doors who are not fully accountable to them. They are telling us that India’s governmental system is stuck in the past. It has become a system that robs people of their voice, a system that disempowers instead of empowering,” Rahul said.

“No matter what state you look at, no matter which political party you look at why do a handful of people control the entire political space? Power is grossly centralized in our country. We only empower people at the top of a system. We don’t believe in empowering people all the way to bottom,” Gandhi added.

All perfectly valid and thoughtful points except that there is a problem. He embodies the very system he so damns. In his defense though he has said so as much, perhaps not as clearly as I am saying it. To his point that things are decided by “a handful of people behind closed doors”, I would point out without any irony at all that his own rise as his party’s vice president is an example of what he is saying. I am sure there was an appearance of consensus building among senior Congress Party leaders that preceded his anointment as number 2 behind his mother, party president Sonia Gandhi. However, it is hard to dispel the impression that the original decision to make him number 2 was essentially hers with his consent.

Perhaps the more credible way to counter the menace of centralization in the particular party context of the party would have been to appoint number 2 someone who was not from the same family as its president. After all, there are other young leaders in the similar age group in the party as well. However, that is a minor point in the scheme of things. It is undeniable that the Gandhi family name does enjoy a unique political brand recognition and political parties are nothing if they are not about making the most of what works.

That said, my broader objection to the tone of the speech has to do with the approach where the one making it makes it appear as if he is talking about a system from which he is as cut off and alienated as ordinary Indians whom he seeks to empower. That is simply not true. I like the way politicians around the world talk about the ills of their own profession as is they are talking about something totally unconnected.

As he embarks on a trajectory which will likely take him to becoming India’s prime minister as early as in 2014 I think the nation should hold him to his words. He also said this: “Every single day, I meet people who have tremendous understanding, deep insight and no voice. And all of us meet them. They are everywhere. But almost always they are kept outside our systems. No one can hear their voice. No matter how much they try to speak no one listens. And then I meet people holding high positions with tremendous voice but with no understanding for the issues at hand.

Why does this happen? It happens because we don’t respect knowledge. We respect position. And it does not matter how much wisdom you have, if you do not have a position, you mean nothing.

This is the tragedy of India.”

I am perfectly willing to put aside my reflexive cynicism and say that perhaps India can give Rahul and young politicians like him across the political spectrum an opportunity to chart a new course. I am equally willing to be optimistic that he would put in action what he has put in words. This is my caveat free optimism.