Mayank Chhaya Daily

A few observations about the spelling bee

Arvind Mahankali,13, of New York who won the Scripps National Spelling Bee (Pic: http://www.spellingbee.com/)

I often think about tens of thousands of words, perhaps even a few hundred thousand, which are destined to languish in the musty pages of dictionaries. Many of them are neglected into obsolescence. I often hear feeble, whiny sounds emanating from my dictionary from words making entreaties to me to use them.

After watching last night’s National Spelling Bee devoured by an inordinately large number of boys and girls of Indian American background (I was told 41% of them were Indian American), I became more curious about the number of dictionary words in existence. To the question how many word there are in the English language, the OED says the following:

“There is no single sensible answer to this question. It's impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it's so hard to decide what actually counts as a word. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (e.g.dogs = plural noun, dogs = present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since it might also be written as hot-dog or even hotdog?”

The Second Edition of the 20-volume  Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures don't take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.”

The thing to remember about words is that all words are made up. Those which have been enshrined in respectable dictionaries such as the OED and the Webster may appear to have the weight of etymological sanctity. But essentially, all words begin as random sounds put together by either an individual or a community of individuals. Once those sounds are understood by a sufficiently large number of people, they are sanctified by the etymological establishment as words.It is likely that the purists would be offended by my perspective because many of them accord language and words a certain sacredness, even divinity.

It is from this perspective that I watch the National Spelling Bee with mild amusement tinged with irritation. What compounds my irritation are those unseemly nametags/billboards/signs/placards that the contestants are made to wear. I am surprised that the contestants are able to get up and walk at all with those billboards hanging around their necks. They ought to screw up their center of gravity. Can someone at the Scripps National Spelling Bee commission a professional designer to redo those labels please? I am sure the contestants’ sponsor can afford to give each one of them T-shirts printed with their name and other information. But I suppose by now those signs have become a charmingly quirky eccentricity (Deliberate use of quirky and eccentricity together) of the championship.

Last night, the Bee came down to two boys, both of Indian American heritage. Arvind Mahankali, 13, and Pranav Sivakumar, also 13. The winning word for Arvind was knaidel (K is not silent)  which is a German-derived Yiddish word for a small mass of leavened dough. It is a like a dumpling, you know (Know is pronounced no and not ka no, just in case). I know for a fact that many parents and other close relatives of the spelling bee aspirants cut them no slack at all and badger them with words for months on end. It is commendable that many of these children manage to retain their sense of humor in the face of such parental onslaught.

This year what was different about the Bee was that the contestants knowledge of vocabulary was also tested. I presume what it means is that the participants had to break the words down in order to zero in on their meaning. I could be wrong but that’s what I understood.

Reading the dictionary was a favorite pastime for me as a child. So at some level I understand these children’s interests in words for the sake of words. But as they grow older, they would discover that a vast majority of the words they know could die of sheer disuse. Of course, some of these children can always pursue a writing career. However, I will have them know that writing is a tad more than just knowing the words. Even the dictionary knows the words. That does not make it a writer. 

Arvind says he wants to pursue quantum physics as his career. It might do him well to know that in quantum physics he will have to mostly deal with probabilities and not sharply defined words. Congratulations, Arvind Mahankali.

P.S. Here is a new word for those obsessed in spelling words—Spellbeesession. Use in a sentence—I am spellbeesessed with words.

Bowling in Oak Brook, ‘Downton Abbey’ and Shireesh Kanekar

It is an old habit of mine to break into cricket bowling action at random places and totally on impulse. It is a habit I share with my dear friend, writer, journalist and great standup comic Shireesh Kanekar.

You have to understand this rather complex choreography. There is no ball, there is no batsman, there are no fielders and there is no cricket ground. All that is imaginary. Now imagine that you and I are walking in the lobby of a five star hotel or a foyer of an office building and suddenly I break away from you, pretending to grip a cricket ball in my right hand and start my run-up to the imaginary stumps. And then, I bowl. Well, that’s what I did yesterday in the 18th floor lobby of an office building in Oak Brook Terrace. To complete the action I even turned towards a non-existent umpire to appeal for Leg Before Wicket (LBW) as if the non-existent batsman had padded the ball.

I was, of course, unmindful of the surroundings while doing this; unaware that there was an elderly American gentleman watching as he waited for the elevator. “That’s cricket action, right?,” he said smiling. Pleasantly surprised, I asked him, “How did you know?” As the elevator doors opened, he said while getting in, “Downton Abbey.” I am a sucker for these little stories that unfold in life unexpectedly drawing such diverse connections.

‘Downton Abbey’ is a hit television series from Britain that has captivated American audiences for a while. I have just watched a few minutes of the series which has already completed three seasons on PBS. The fourth one will debut in January, 2014. There are indeed cricket matches in this series and that’s how the American gentleman, an apparent follower of it, knew about my bowling action. See the clip above and you would have a fair approximation of what one version of that bowling action can be. I can assure you mine is way better, way way better because I played cricket for 20 years.

While I am on the subject, this charming little quirk is something Shireesh used to engage in as well. I remember once in 1986, while we were working together in Bombay’s Dalal Street area, I saw Shireesh walking down the crowded street. I could see him from the first floor window of our office. I whistled at him and, as if on cue, he suddenly started running like a professional bowler with an imaginary ball in his hand. I should tell you that this is in the middle of one of Bombay’s busiest business districts in the afternoon. A short man with a slight paunch suddenly begins to run in the middle of the street as if he is about to bowl. He had perfected the act enough so that people knew what he was up to, that he was not just running but running up to the crease like a bowler.

Shireesh’s version was quirkier than mine in that he did not actually bowl but created the impression that he was about to do so. Those watching this odd little spectacle, after having overcome their initial surprise, do invest enough in it for him to complete the bowling action. He did not and that was the twist. After running some distance he returned to his normal walking pace and pretended as if nothing had happened; as if what the people on the street saw was something that they had only imagined. Shireesh took care to see that his expression gave nothing away. “Wait, did we just see this man pretend to bowl or did we just hallucinate?” was the kind of unasked question Shireesh’s street performance would prompt at its very best.

So, so like that.

Gandhi in China, Mao in India

Mao Zedong, left, Mohandas Gandhi

It is a stretch to call Mohandas Gandhi and Mao Zedong contemporaries because they were born 24 years apart and died 28 years apart. Mao, in fact, was Jawaharlal Nehru’s contemporary.* This bit of information is necessary to introduce the news that Gandhi’s ideas are for the first time making their appearance in China in the form of a book.

The Press Trust of India (PTI) reports from Beijing that the first Chinese version of a book about Gandhi’s thought was released on May 27. “'Gandhi's Outstanding Leadership', written by former Indian diplomat-turned-Gandhian Pascal Alan Nazareth, was released at the Peking University's Centre for India Studies in the presence of Indian Ambassador to China S Jaishankar,” the PTI report said.

Prof Shang Quanyu, a history professor with the South China Normal University, translated the book into Madarin. He described the book as a "trail blazer".

Indian officials said in many ways the book was an "official debut" of Gandhian thoughts in Mao's China as the revolutionary leader, a contemporary of Gandhi dominated the Chinese thought like a colossus for over six decades until the country began loosening its the grip over his ideology in recent years.”

A couple of centuries from now it might not seem so incongruous to call Gandhi and Mao contemporaries, although I like to think that a difference of 24 years in their age is a considerable time by any measure. By the time Mao was born, Gandhi had already gone through his formative years. For one he had been married to Kasturba for about 11 years by the time Mao was born and had fathered two children Harilal (1888) and Manilal (1892). Gandhi and Kasturba, in fact, had their first child when they were about 15 but the child died.If marriage and fatherhood are not clarifying and formative, what is?

Nevertheless, this book translated in Mandarin offers a significant opportunity to those in China who may have heard of Gandhi but not known much about him. I am not sure that those Chinese interested in Gandhi would have had to wait for a book like this to come out since the Internet abounds in Gandhian literature.

Perhaps for the Chinese generation familiar with their country’s near civilizational antipathies against Japan may find some resonance in the fact that Gandhi strongly disapproved of Japan’s attack on China during the Second World War. The PTI story quotes Nazareth as saying that Gandhi “intensely disliked” the Japanese aggression and said in an open letter to the people of Japan "you (Japan) have descended to imperial ambition".

Those who keep track of such developments say that in recent years China has begun to promote Gandhian ideas. They also see in the development a subtle shift away from Mao’s philosophy which was for long at the heart of the Chinese experience. Of course, one can always read too much into the release a book on Gandhi here and a discussion on him there. In so much as both China and India have moved considerably far from the respective perspectives of Mao and Gandhi, it may not matter much that such shifts are happening.

While I am on the subject, I might as well point out the deeply troublesome rise of what the Indian establishment describes together as “Maoists guerillas” across India. Although at the heart of these loosely connected insurgencies is decades of disenchantment with the Indian State among the marginalized classes, they have acquired a spectacularly violent edge in recent years. It was  barely four days ago that “Maoist rebels” killed 25 people in the central Indian state of Chhatisgarh. Some might feel tempted to point the irony of the so-called “Maoist” rebels gaining strength in India at a time when China is promoting Gandhi’s ideas.

* Gandhi—October 2, 1869 January 30, 1948

Mao—December 26, 1893, September 9, 1976

Nehru—November 14, 1889, May 27, 1964

Expelling a nearly 90-year-old politician, II

Ram Jethmalani by Mayank Chhaya (All my caricatures look alike)

Ram Jethmalani can be fairly described as the closest version of India’s most high profile public curmudgeon. Quite apart from being one of the country’s most successful lawyers, with a penchant for taking up cases and causes others might run away from, the 89-year-old Jethmalani has made a name for himself as someone with no filters or guards. (My earlier post about him here.)

Jethmalani has just been expelled for six years by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for “breach of discipline.” At his age that is pretty much the end of his association with a political party with which he has had a mostly turbulent relationship. I was struck by the fact that a party that never tires of professing its steadfast adherence to the core Indian values such as respect for elders felt no compunction while expelling an 89-year-old man. There is something not right about the aesthetics of punishing someone of that age for “breach of discipline.” All 80-plus people ought to be released from the archaic ideas of discipline. They can say what they want because they do not have too many years left to say it.

One of the first questions that occurred to me while reading the news of Jethmalani’s expulsion was—what do you tell him while expelling him for six years? Do you tell him, ‘Mr. Jethmalani, you can always return when you are 95’? That sounds rather cruel. And why would a 95-year-old anyone want to return to a party that threw him out in the first place?

It is interesting that the BJP’s Parliamentary Board, of which he too was a member and which is responsible for such matters, took a unanimous decision to expel him. What it means that no one on that board liked him.

One can raise the loftier issues of freedom of expression and inter-party democracy in contesting Jethmalani’s expulsion. Jethmalani has been highly critical of his party’s positions on various issues. I find it more objectionable that a nearly 90-year-old man was unceremoniously shown the door. The party knew very well that this former law and justice minister of India comes with all his angularities and quirks. Of course, there is no real political consequence for the BJP for its decision because Jethmalani does not have much grassroots standing. I suspect that even more than his so-called anti-party activities many in the parliamentary board found him to be a pure annoyance.

Now that he is out of it, presumably for good, perhaps he should make it his mission to be the BJP’s outside ombudsman. Not that he ever felt hamstrung by party discipline even when he was its primary member but now he has even less reason to feel inhibited. He will likely lose his membership of the Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of Indian parliament where members are nominated without having to contest regular elections. With Jethmalani out, the BJP’s oldest member now is the 85-year-old Lal Krishna Advani. There are no prospects of Advani ever being expelled because he is the BJP.

Dredging my mind for sedimentary memories

Sedimentary Memories by Mayank Chhaya

I have zero obligation to write this blog. None whatsoever. And yet on rare days when nothing is written until 9 in the morning, like today for instance, I begin to feel a strange restlessness. I start dredging my mind for sedimentary memories of some anecdote. When that fails one just engages in some random rumination.

Since 5 a.m. I have been staring at the candle flame rising out of a tiny reservoir of molten wax.I dunked a used matchstick in the molten wax in the hope that it might create a tiny piece of experimental art. It did not. That’s when I thought I might as well paint. The result is the painting you see above. That’s all for today.

Epic anthropocentric hubris

Mindfuck by Mayank Chhaya

I am staking my over three decades as a physics aficionado to say what I am about to say. Forgive me for I know not what I am saying but say I nevertheless will.

The universe is one infinite mindfuck. Any final explanation by way of a Theory of Everything about all its “mysteries” can be right in a certain moment and then it changes beyond recognition. Hence the term infinite mindfuck. I am beginning to think that to think that there is one final Theory of Everything is nothing but epic anthropocentric hubris. The notion that we can create one elegant explanation about everything that the universe encompasses is a uniquely human obsession.

Mathematical physicist turned hedge fund economist Dr. Eric Weinstein’s much talked about presentation in the main physics lecture theatre here at the University of Oxford has amused/irritated/pissed off many in the physics community. Of course, there is the how-dare-a-mere-dabbler-presume-to-solve-the-final-puzzle aspect of feeling pissed off. A hedge fund consultant doubling up as the ultimate physicist? Really? That seems to be the underlying sentiment among some people.

There is also a very legitimate grievance about how particle and other physicists were left out of the presentation.

Dr. Weinstein’s lecture was organized courtesy well-known mathematician Marcus du Sautoy who also happens to be the University of Oxford's professor of the public understanding of science. What has riled many in the physics establishment is that Dr. Weinstein has not published any paper or submitted one for peer review. It is obvious that the physics establishment feels bypassed and that could be one reason why derision about Dr. Weinstein’s idea is trickling in.

Speaking of his work, this is how the Clarendon Laboratory’s website described the concept: “A program for Geometric Unity is presented to argue that the seemingly baroque features of the standard model of particle physics are in fact inexorable and geometrically natural when generalizations of the Yang-Mills and Dirac theories are unified with one of general relativity.”

While I will let the conservative physics establishment sort out how they deal with someone they probably regard as an interloper, my concern is mainly with the universe. It is just about time for the physics community to consider the possibility that everything that they say about the universe may be right in a particular moment and then is rendered inadequate the next. Perhaps there is no universal theory for the universe. Perhaps snapshots and slices are all that we can comprehend. Perhaps there is nothing to comprehend. Perhaps the universe is what individuals make of it.

It is a laudable objective to want to drape the universe in an utterly exquisite and elegant mathematical robe. It is commendable that the human mind wants to ferret out one universal truth that underlies everything. But it might be equally wise to consider the possibility that there is nothing to unravel because it all stands already unraveled. Could it be that the universe is in a constant state of somehow retaining a bare minimum equilibrium? And in the process of retaining that bare minimum equilibrium it improvises all laws that are supposed to govern it? Hence my hypothesis that everything that we say about the universe may be right in a particular moment and then it is rendered inadequate the next because it is in a constant flux to retain a bare minimum equilibrium. I began by saying the universe is an infinite mindfuck. This is what I mean.

As for Dr. Weinstein and his idea of Geometric Unity, its all transient anyway.

Akbar, Tansen and Swami Haridas

Swami Haridas, right, with Tansen, center, and Akbar, left, at Vrindavana  (1700 AD - 1760 CE) Artist unknown

On my ritual pilgrimage to the Google Art Project this morning I visited the National Museum, Delhi. Browsing through the gallery one covered a period of 4200 years in a couple of clicks. I had intended to write about a statue of an Indus Valley unhumped bull dating back to 2700 BCE and its superb proportions. Instead, my eyes settled on an early 18th century painting of a visit the Mughal emperor Akbar supposedly paid to Swami Haridas, the reclusive guru of Tansen, the most famous court musician of his day.

Unhumped Bull, Mohenjodaro (National Museum, Delhi) 2700 BCE

The painting by an unknown artist was done over a century after Akbar’s time (14 February 1556 – 27 October 1605) and it is being written about by me over three centuries later.

I was utterly captivated by the flora and fauna of Vrindavan, the charming putative hub of Krishna some 110 miles from Delhi, as captured by the painter. Unfortunately, I could not tell you any of the names of the trees, plants and flowers. I have always been poor at remembering floral and faunal nomenclature. I can identify banana and mango trees in the serenely pastoral grove. There are lovely creepers and vines. One can see peacocks, parrots, monkeys and many other birds in the painting.

I have visited Vrindavan many times and can tell you from firsthand experience that that the unknown artist has done a great job of capturing the landscape and its various hues.

At first glance the three men may appear similar. However, once you examine them closely you can see distinct differences in their facial structures, complexions and body types. All three are unshod, although I am presuming in the case of Tansen because his feet cannot be seen. The painter has labeled the names of the three to ensure that the viewers know who’s who.

Emperor Akbar

Tansen

Swami Haridas

The story behind the painting is that Akbar wanted Haridas to come to his court and perform. Tansen said his guru would never do that. So the emperor visited Haridas along with Tansen. The reclusive musician was said to have sung for Akbar in this particular grove.

I do not know this for a fact but it is safe to say that the emperor and his chief musician would have set out on their horses from the Mughal capital in Fatehpur Sikri. The distance of close to 40 miles to Vrindavan would have been covered in a few hours. It is possible that a royal messenger or an advance team would have been sent beforehand to alert Swami Haridas to the impending royal visit. 

A Theory of Everything, again

A Smiling Buddha by Mayank Chhaya (The illustration has no relevance to the post. It is linked to my Saatchi portfolio so that one of you may feel generous enough to buy it)

The Theory of Everything (ToE)  has eluded physicists for as long as there has been physics. Every so often a physicist comes along with the grand claim of having cracked the grand unified theory and then fades like some of the ever vanishing particles of particle physics.

The Guardian’s science correspondent Alok Jha had a fascinating piece yesterday about Eric Weinstein, a mathematical physicist turned a hedge fund consultant, who it seems might have come close to this elusive theory. He was scheduled to have presented his broad ideas in a paper at the Clarendon Laboratory yesterday. I presume that did indeed happen.

I have not yet seen any report of the actual presentation. However, the Clarendon web link described the event thus: “A program for Geometric Unity is presented to argue that the seemingly baroque features of the standard model of particle physics are in fact inexorable and geometrically natural when generalizations of the Yang-Mills and Dirac theories are unified with one of general relativity.”

This is one of those descriptions of physics that I understand broken down but fail to comprehend as a whole. It is obviously meant for the truly brilliant and not physics aficionados like me who write about everything. As some of you might be aware all our knowledge of the universe accounts for about 5 percent of what there is to know. The rest is constituted by dark matter and dark energy. It is called dark because we have not been able to observe it, even though its presence is felt by its implication. One such implication is the expansion of the universe.

I like the idea that something is manifest only in its implication and not directly. There is something mystifyingly profound about it. In contrast, I am obvious, direct and far from profound. For me, it has now been close to 40 years on a quest to get some marginal handle on what in the blue blazes the universe is. I have read a great deal of physics over the decades but still remain inexplicably uninformed. I mean I do understand at a very broad intuitive level what is being said but never reach a stage where I can go ‘Aha! So that’s what it is.’ To be sure, there have been many moments like that but they have turned out to be false positives. Just as one thinks one is getting somewhere, one discovers that one is actually lost.

Not blessed with a mathematical mind, one then takes the easy way of glib philosophizing. I will, of course, keenly read whenever Dr. Weinstein’s lecture is published. The way Jha explains it sounds rather intriguing.

“In Weinstein's theory, called Geometric Unity, he proposes a 14-dimensional "observerse" that has our familiar four-dimensional space-time continuum embedded within it. The interaction between the two is something like the relationship between the people in the stands and those on the pitch at a football stadium - the spectators (limited to their four-dimensional space) can see and are affected by the action on the pitch (representing all 14 dimensions) but are somewhat removed from it and cannot detect every detail.

In the mathematics of the observerse there is no missing dark matter. Weinstein explains that the mass only seems to be missing because of the "handedness" of our current understanding of the universe, the Standard Model of particle physics. This is the most complete mathematical description physicists have of the universe at the quantum level and describes 12 particles of matter (called fermions) and 12 force-carrying particles (called bosons), in addition to their antimatter partners.

"The Standard Model relies on a fundamental asymmetry between left-handedness and right-handedness in order to keep the observed particles very light in the mass scale of the universe," says Weinstein.

That we are removed from the central action in all its details is something that many people find frustrating and eventually take recourse to religion. It has not happened to me because I have treated the universe as subjective—what I make of it rather than wanting to be part of what we make of it collectively. Having read a vast amount of explanations about various aspects of the universe and failed to get a grip on everything, I think I am better off going with the flow.

The scientific community will expect Dr. Weinstein to offer some testable attributes of his theory because without that it will remain a grandly ambitious pronouncement. That’s where the mathematics of physics will come in and that’s where I will have to exit.

Former Congressman Anthony Weiner seeks to make a comeback

Former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner (Picture: A frame from his official video)

Now that former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner has announced his run for New York Mayor, it is a good time for shallow people like me to revisit what made him into a former Congressman in the first place. Let me reproduce below a short post I wrote about him on June 13, 2011.

“There is a simple rule of playwriting. If there is a gun hanging on the wall in a scene, it better have some rationale. It cannot just hang there for no reason. It has to have a purpose. I think the dick-flashing US Congressman Anthony Weiner violated that simple rule in the political theater that has just played out in America. Evidently, the gun was merely hanging there without a purpose.

People are baffled that he sent out explicit sexual images and messages to half a dozen women using Twitter, Facebook and email without ever trying to have sex with them. I suspect that part of the clamor by his fellow lawmakers to force him to resign is because he did not go the distance. How dare he just tease is the question.

If I have chosen not to comment on the feisty Democratic Congressman’s tawdry predicaments so far, it is because I see that as a non-issue as long as it is clearly established that he did not send those images to girls below the legal age of consent. His detractors have argued that if he can lie about such indulgences, one can never be sure what else he has been lying about. That’s a fair point and I do not have an effective counterpoint other than saying that one does not necessarily flow from the other.

I am sure Weiner would eventually sort out what seems to be an addiction for him, but my general response to this fake controversy is characteristically broader than just him. We live in times when the bulge in a man’s underwear could be a stick of RDX and not his barely concealed arousal. Aren’t we better off with men in whose underwear the bulge is what it should be and not something wired and triggered by an insane ideology? Just a thought. You might disagree.”

As you can see, I took a characteristically non-judgmental view of his indiscretion. Going by early indications Weiner’s candidacy is not all that absurd and he stands a fair chance. Until he was undone by his crotch cam, Weiner was perhaps the most assertive articulator of liberal-left views in Congress. In many ways Weiner is a cinematic character in that he has many of the attributes that writers of political movies have to contrive. The man has natural charisma that politics so requires.

Two years is a long time for a boner to last even if he had consumed the entire Viagra supply. Now that it has subsided politically, perhaps Weiner is ready to make a comeback. “I made some big mistakes and I know I let a lot of people down. But I've also learned some tough lessons,” he says in his campaign video.

"I'm running for mayor because I've been fighting for the middle class and those struggling to make it my entire life," he says. “I hope I get a second chance to work for you."

If there is one city that would give fallen politicians like Weiner a second chance, it has to be New York. His wife Huma Abedin, once a high profile aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has already given him a second chance. If it is resolved between them, the world should have zero problem with his salacious past.

That said, I must live up to my reputation for reflexive shallowness. In the campaign video Weiner speaks of his father Morton J. Weiner and how went to law school on the G.I. Bill and then “hung a shingle outside our house.” At that very instant, I told myself, “May be Anthony Weiner can say I went into politics and hung my dick outside my house.” In a manner of speaking, of course.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s strikingly effusive pronouncements in Pakistan

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has made some strikingly effusive pronouncements about his country’s enduring relationship with Pakistan. The official Chinese news agency Xinhua has quoted Li as saying, "China and Pakistan are all-weather strategic partners.”

"It is the consistent policy of the Chinese government to develop a friendly relationship with Pakistan. The Chinese side would firmly consolidate and develop China-Pakistan relations no matter how the international and regional situation changes," the premier has been quoted as saying.

He went to Pakistan after completing his first three-day state visit to India. Although the Indian visit was appropriately polite and carefully optimistic, Li seemed to feel much at home in Pakistan, a sort of place where he can loosen his tie, take off his shoes and rest his feet on the coffee table.

The assertion that the bilateral relations would be strengthened even further “no matter how the international and regional situation changes” sounds a bit excessive but sums up their old friendship. As the U.S. winds down its military presence in Afghanistan no one should be surprised if China and Pakistan make a joint play for influence over that country. Not that China needs Pakistan in order to make its presence felt in Afghanistan but it always helps if the latter is part of the equation.

The rich Afghan minerals resource is a major draw for China which is already involved in developing the world’s second largest copper mine in Aynak, some 20 miles from Kabul. China is also involved in exploring the oil and gas-rich Amu Darya basin.

One of the issues that Beijing is concerned about while expanding its base in Afghanistan is security for its various projects. It is from this angle that Beijing needs Pakistan to be firmly on its side. As if to assure Islamabad a good return on its strategic alliance, Li also added that China would always support Pakistan as it preserves its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Considering that any perceived threat to Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity could possibly emanate only from India, this was a less than subtle message to Delhi.

Perhaps the most amusing observation made by the Chinese premier came in a written statement where he said that Pakistan has made important contributions to peace, stability and development in the region and around the world. I am not sure even the Pakistanis themselves would fully believe that claim.

In keeping with the very special nature of the bilateral friendship, Li's plane was escorted by six Pakistani Air Force fighter jets when it entered the country's airspace.