Mayank Chhaya Daily

TigerFreak

TigerFreak by Mayank Chhaya

Perhaps the most exciting part of abstract painting is how far and how different it finishes from what any piece starts as. I engage in abstract painting purely as a ruse to mask my very limited abilities. The intention is always to create an image that would hopefully draw people, even if it is for a few seconds.

Take, for instance, the painting above which I finished on June 28 at 7.48 p.m. It took me about seven minutes. It began as a black backdrop with some light-blue green on the left. They were just random strokes. After a few strokes a strangely conjoined word popped up in my mind. It was TigerFreak with the T and F in uppercase. It was born as a fully formed word. From then on colors just got picked up without any particular thought and the result is in front of you.

I envisioned this as a close-up of a freakishly striped tiger’s torso. If only I could draw a full tiger, I think it would make a cool animal. Imagine in a jungle full of trees with blue trunks, yellow branches and light blue barks. Resting under them are tigers with the stripes like the one in my painting. If not imagined properly, the vision might give you a headache.

I have put up this painting for sale at my Saatchi Online page along with 31 other works. I have priced it at $2222 in the hope that the number alone might intrigue someone into buying it. I like to delude myself that what I paint has some quirky pop art value which might capture some collector’s imagination and get sold altogether. It has been a few months since I started displaying my works on Saatchi. So far not a single piece has sold. That is not a complaint but merely a statement of fact.

Every time I try to sell something I ask myself ‘Would I buy it?’ If the answer is no for whatever reason, it is most likely that that work will not sell. The funny thing is my answer in the case of most of my works is a resounding yes. And yet, nothing sells. That just shows I am clueless.

Voyager 1 approaching interstellar space

Voyager 1, Painting by Mayank Chhaya

NASA’s Voyager 1 finally seems to be in the last stages of leaving our solar system to enter interstellar space. It has taken the spacecraft 36 years to get that far, far enough now for it to enjoy a more than 17-hour lag to communicate with NASA.

Although in March this year there was some speculation that Voyager 1 had left our solar system, it is only now that NASA is saying this: “Data from Voyager 1, now more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun, suggest the spacecraft is closer to becoming the first human-made object to reach interstellar space.”

“Research using Voyager 1 data and published in the journal Science today provides new detail on the last region the spacecraft will cross before it leaves the heliosphere, or the bubble around our sun, and enters interstellar space,” it says.

One of the most definite indications that the spacecraft is about to leave the solar womb is that it is now reporting a much higher rate of charged particles from outside the heliosphere than from inside it.

“Scientists have seen two of the three signs of interstellar arrival they expected to see: charged particles disappearing as they zoom out along the solar magnetic field, and cosmic rays from far outside zooming in. Scientists have not yet seen the third sign, an abrupt change in the direction of the magnetic field, which would indicate the presence of the interstellar magnetic field,” NASA says.

"This strange, last region before interstellar space is coming into focus, thanks to Voyager 1, humankind's most distant scout," Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has been quoted as saying. "If you looked at the cosmic ray and energetic particle data in isolation, you might think Voyager had reached interstellar space, but the team feels Voyager 1 has not yet gotten there because we are still within the domain of the sun's magnetic field."

“Scientists do not know exactly how far Voyager 1 has to go to reach interstellar space. They estimate it could take several more months, or even years, to get there. The heliosphere extends at least 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers) beyond all the planets in our solar system. It is dominated by the sun's magnetic field and an ionized wind expanding outward from the sun. Outside the heliosphere, interstellar space is filled with matter from other stars and the magnetic field present in the nearby region of the Milky Way,” NASA says.

For the better part of their journey since 1977, the two NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have been the most distant human-made objects. Launched 16 days apart nearly 36 years ago, the two have seen and experienced space like nothing else that humans have created. Voyager 2 is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) from the sun and still inside the heliosphere.

"We saw a dramatic and rapid disappearance of the solar-originating particles. They decreased in intensity by more than 1,000 times, as if there was a huge vacuum pump at the entrance ramp onto the magnetic highway," says Stamatios Krimigis, the low-energy charged particle instrument's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "We have never witnessed such a decrease before, except when Voyager 1 exited the giant magnetosphere of Jupiter, some 34 years ago."

It is a sudden change in the direction of the magnetic field that would clearly tell us whether Voyager 1 is ‘outta here’, in so much as “out of” and “here” mean anything in the cosmic sense. If you see my painting of the spacecraft the light blue strokes are supposed to represent charged particles from inside our heliosphere and bluish yellow strokes from outside. It is a sudden change of direction of the magnetic field in this stage that we should wait for.

It is always sobering for the human race, quibbling over our trivial little preoccupations such as what constitutes marriage or privacy versus security or immigration or the falling gold prices or the rising dollar and other such assorted idiocies, to be reminded that even our relatively mediocre solar system extends at least 11 billion miles (18 million kilometers) in one direction. Our preoccupations cease to matter the moment there is a liftoff of spacecraft such as Voyager 1 and 2. So please, get your sense of scale and proportions before you launch into sanctimonious sermons. In short, these preoccupations are utterly, I mean really utterly, inconsequential. So much so that they do not even require stating.

Coffee looks good only when poured in slow motion in a white cup

Coffee looks good only as it is being poured in slow motion in a white cup on Jerry Seinfeld’s ‘Comedians in the Car Getting Coffee’ (CCGC). It does make me want to reach for my own cup of coffee, which, by the way, I do not particularly like. I don’t like coffee much, although I don’t seem to mind watching CCGC with unfailing regularity. Not that one is a prerequisite to the other. I mean I do not have to drink coffee to watch CCGC. For that matter, I do not even have to watch CCGC or drink coffee. I do it because that’s the sort of thing I do.

Look at the brew in these two pictures. It is like pouring molten ebony glass. I think the test of a great coffee brew is that it does not splash when you pour it. I just made that up because it sounds so knowledgeable, as if it could have come from the mouth of a legendary coffee connoisseur.

It is hard for me to rationalize why I watch CCGC. At one level, it merely indulges two people who hardly need any indulging. After all, what is comedy if not pouring your angst without splashing? The line sounds nice but is quite meaningless, quite like the show I occasionally write about.

In the latest episode Seinfeld invites French comedian Gad Elmaleh for coffee. If Bassem Youssef is the Egyptian Jon Stewart, then Gad Elmaleh is the French Jerry Seinfeld. I have never understood this need to describe someone as the something someone. Why can’t Bassem Youssef just be Bassem Youssef and Gad Elmaleh as Gad Elmaleh? Why do they need a qualifier in order to be lifted out of their obscurity in the United States? Why must they be dressed up in American pop references? But then why am I getting worked up when Youssef and Elmaleh do not seem to mind it?

Coming back to why I watch CCGC, it is partly because it has no particular structure to it. Basically, it is Seinfeld engaging another famous person in an almost incidental conversation about this, that and the other. It works mainly because that’s what Seinfeld and his guests have excelled at doing for a long time. Of course, a certain level of fame and celebrity are essential for a format like this. For instance, I could not pull it off simply because no one knows who I am. For most of the people who appear on this show it is mostly their long-nurtured reputation that makes it work. As they say, they could phone it in. As a journalist, I often send my reputation on assignments.

Having watched every episode, I have observed that more often than not it is not so much what they are saying but who is saying it. I call it humor by association. The audience is so used to expecting humor from these people that they are already primed to laugh no matter what they say. People often laugh as if they are giving them the benefit of the doubt. What are the odds that a professional comic is being funny? Even when they are not deliberately being funny, they become funny by being ironically unfunny. For successful comics, life is pretty much win-win.

Revisiting my first film after four and a half decades

After four and a half decades it is such a weird jumble of memories between my real life as a child and my first movie experience in the late 1960s. The movie was ‘Khandan’ (Family) made in 1965 and directed by A. Bhim Singh. Most likely I watched the film in 1967 or 1968 when I was between 6 and 7.

The most enduring visual from the film is a partially paralyzed Sunil Dutt singing “Badi der bhayi Nandlala” and dancing. His character reminded all of us in the family of my partially paralyzed father Manharray. I remember my mother Snehlata weeping during certain scenes that highlighted Dutt’s helplessness as a victim of paralysis. Perhaps it was too close to home for her. Of course, Manharray did not exude the kind of cheery optimism that Dutt’s character Govind Lal does in the film, although my father was blessed with a great talent as a raconteur and had a terrific sense of humor.

Last night, I began watching ‘Khandan’ on my HTC phone and continued in bits this morning on my desktop. The gap of over 45 years has obviously left huge memory gaps but there are scenes that come back in their entirety without much effort.

Speaking of watching the movie on a smartphone I cannot help but be struck by how far technology has traveled. When I first saw the film it was on a makeshift screen made of a white creased up sheet projected out in the open on a dusty school playground. People sat on both sides of the screen. Those on the wrong side of the screen saw the movie from an opposite vantage point. Also, the creases in the screen meant that characters had waves on their faces. A gust of summer breeze would cause a flutter in the screen and distort the visuals. None of that seemed to matter to lower middle class families that came out in large numbers at such free public screenings. This partly explains my near fanatical insistence on watching everything in high-def.

The movie’s basic plot reflected a transition between the West influenced modernity and traditional Indian values that society was still very much in the grip of. I do not feel like recounting the whole story but there are moments when characters neatly sum up the challenges of their traditional Indian life. For instance, Lalita Pawar, playing the stereotypically devious role of Bhagwanti, tells Pran, playing Navrangi Lal with his unmistakably mock Hitler getup, how she rues the fact that she has to cook for the entire household. This she says in response to what Pran describes as a life without familial encumbrances outside India. Incidentally, Pran on his arrival from Singapore by sea declares that he has finally reached his “fatherland” in case the Hitler reference was lost on you despite his boxy moustache and flattened hairdo.

The movie left no particular impression on me as a child other than surprisingly complete memories of its lovely songs, “Badi der bhayi”, “Neel gagan par udte baadal’ and ‘Tumhi mere mandir’ (see the video above) composed by Ravi and written by Rajendra Krishna. What prompted me to revisit the film was that I impulsively started  singing another song yesterday. ‘Kal chaman tha aaj ek sahara hua’ by Mohammed Rafi just popped up in my mind. It was only later that I discovered that this too was from ‘Khandan.’

The song in the video above has remained strongly etched because that’s when I remember my mother crying, evidently thinking of her own life with my paralyzed father. It seemed rather strange to me as a child and it seems even more strange now that she was so moved by this piece of fiction when, in reality, she lived that real life everyday. It is possible that through the movie she was searching for some uplifting moments in her own life then. I suppose with four children, a paralyzed husband who could barely earn, a grandmother and all living in a single room was not an ideal place for anything uplifting. We did not need a Navrangi Lal. Life was Navrangi Lal.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo and International Criminal Court

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the first prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague (A grab from ‘The Court’)

Watching ‘The Court’, a compelling documentary about the workings of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague generally and its famed first prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo you realize how hard it is to achieve justice for those on the margins of the human civilization.

Jointly directed by Michele Gentile and Marcus Vetter, ‘The Court’ tells its story through Moreno-Ocampo’s steadfast commitment to the rule of law and justice in global affairs. I will have a detailed interview with Vetter later this week. However, as I watch the documentary in preparation for the interview, I am left practically paralyzed by some of the utterly banal cruelty on display in a place like Ituri, The Congo.

Although the documentary addresses several intractable global crises arising out the harrowingly criminal regimes in many parts of the world, its basic story is about the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubunga Dyilo who forced children to serve as his soldiers and subjected them to unspeakable cruelty as a matter of routine.

It was a great moment for Moreno-Ocampo when Lubanga was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2012. Although the effectiveness of the ICC has remained a matter of serious doubt this particular conviction was held up as what the court can achieve.

As the Argentine prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo describes his challenge, “The problem is that the biggest countries of the world are outside my jurisdiction because they never signed this treaty.” The treaty being the Rome Statute that created the court in the first place. Incidentally, India has chosen to stay outside because it disapproves its broad definition of crimes against humanity. So has the United States and many others. So far 122 countries have signed up as ICC members and respect its jurisdiction. One of the biggest problems that the ICC faces is that it has no enforcement mechanism in these countries and must depend on individual nations to execute arrest warrants against those accused of crimes against humanity.

Early on in the documentary, there is a scene of what are presumably the soldiers of the Lubanga brutalizing a boy. When you see that you seriously wonder whether we have really traveled that far from our violent primitive impulses. Unarmed, utterly helpless young men are casually shot point blank even before they could complete their pleas for mercy.

The documentary does a powerful job of capturing Moreno-Ocampo’s relentless pursuit of justice. He is a natural protagonist for a documentary such as this with his innate flair for the medium.

Building a TV career on someone else’s shoulders

With the possible exception of Seth McFarlane, no one could have imagined a scenario where a television reporter mounts on the shoulders of a flood victim to report how bad that flood is. Of course, McFarlane’s would have been a fictional scenario in ‘Family Guy’. The one above is real.

An Indian television news reporter, Narayan Pargaein is getting buffeted by criticism for using the shoulders of a flood victim to present his report to the camera about the the devastating flood in the Indian state of Uttarakhand which has killed close to a 1000 people so far.

The cruel hilarity of the moment is undeniable but that wears off rather quickly as its cruel absurdity takes over. In an interview with the website www.newslaundry.com, Pargaein (pronounced pur as in a cat purring, ga as in Lady Gaga and in, well, as in in) seeks to blame the cameraman. They both work for a news channel called News Express based in Dehradun.

“This was entirely the cameraman’s fault, who, it seems, almost tried to sabotage my career by shooting from that distance and angle and releasing the video mocking this whole incident, and making me the villain,” he has been quoted as saying by Birbal on this site.

It seems Pargaein expected the cameraman to take a much tighter shot that would not have exposed how he had managed to to elevate himself. I have demonstrated below what Pargaein would have thought the shot would have looked like. But then, as you can see, keeping the shot that tight would not have shown the flood water and defeated the whole purpose of the story about how apathetic the local government has been about the hardships caused by the very flood. So there is some defense to be made in favor of the cameraman.

The easiest thing would have been for Pargaein to stand in the water himself and report. Going by the Newslaundry report there is a back story to why he did not stand in the water himself. The man on whose shoulders he is sitting was so overcome with gratitude after Pargaein helped him with some money and food that he insisted that he carry the reporter to return the favor.

“We helped him with some food and some money and he was grateful to us and wanted to show me some respect, as it was the first time someone of my level had visited his house. So while crossing the river he offered to help by carrying me on his shoulder, between which, I thought of reporting the flood. We offered Rs 50 as well for the help he gave me,” Pargaein has been quoted as saying.

The idea that someone of the reporter’s “level” had visited the poor man’s house is so bizarrely telling of India’s often rigidly stratified societal structure. What Pargaein means by “level” is rather nebulous. It could mean any number of things. It could mean that someone who is possibly a minor local celebrity because of his appearances on television had the humility to ride a poor man’s shoulders. It could mean that someone who possibly hails from a higher caste than the man on whose shoulders he is riding chose to do so to establish social equity. It could mean that he is wealthier than the man below him. It could also mean all three and more. The point is that Pargaein feels he is of a “level” which is elevated enough as it is for him not to feel strange riding roughshod on another man’s shoulders. Pargaein’s ground is where the poor man’s shoulders are.

I am willing to give Pargaein the benefit of the doubt when he says the man in the vest was so grateful that he insisted on carrying the reporter. A gesture of gratitude like that is far more common in India than you might think. However, it does not obligate one to yield to that show of gratitude. Pargaein could have politely declined the offer. I cannot second-guess Pargaein’s motivations but they may have been far less sinister than what they seem in the video. That is precisely the problem—that he thought nothing of taking a ride on someone else’s shoulders.

The irony of the whole situation is that the spot where the man in the vest is standing seems barely ankle deep, a depth that even a celebrity television reporter could have fathomed without diluting his prestige. Hasn’t this guy been watching CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s ‘The Situation Room’?

Time again for Beijing to directly engage Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama, Illustration: Mayank Chhaya

As a biographer of the Dalai Lama I have frequently advocated that China make a grand gesture and directly engage him to discuss the future of Tibet. Intrinsic to that gesture should be an official invitation to the 77-year-old Tibetan leader to visit Beijing for comprehensive talks with the specific objective of resolving the over six-decades-old Tibetan issue. Here is some of what I wrote for the IANS wire on April 18, 2010 when a major earthquake struck the Qinghai Province:

The deadly earthquake in the Qinghai Province in northwestern China, which killed 1400, mostly Tibetan people, on April 14, offers an extraordinary opportunity to Beijing to allow the Dalai Lama to make his first visit home in over 50 years.

While the Dalai Lama has been quick to request that he be allowed to visit the province, China has not so much as even taken note of that suggestion. 'This time the location of the earthquake, Kyigudo (Chinese: Yushu), lies in Qinghai Province, which happens to be where both the late Panchen Lama and I were born. To fulfill the wishes of many of the people there, I am eager to go there myself to offer them comfort,' the Dalai Lama said in a statement. He had expressed a similar wish in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan which killed over 80,000 people.

Although some 800 km separate Takster in Amdo, where the Dalai Lama was born in 1935, and Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture where the earthquake hit, the tragedy has the potential to considerably narrow the distance between the two sides and begin dialogue at the highest level of the leaderships for the first time.

It is a measure how eager the Chinese leadership is to demonstrate that they care deeply about Tibet's well-being that both President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have become personally involved in the relief efforts. While Hu cut short his visit to Brazil, where he had gone to attend a summit meeting of the Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) grouping along with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Wen postponed his visit to Indonesia. That demonstration of Beijing's commitment to Tibet could acquire a historic dimension were it to invite the Dalai Lama to be among his people at the time of their desperate need.

The reflexively adversarial Chinese leadership can score some political and diplomatic points in allowing the Dalai Lama to visit the affected area, even if it is highly controlled. For his part, the Dalai Lama could use the visit to send a strong message of hope to the Tibetan people, generations of whom have grown up thinking of him only as a fabled figure since he was forced into exile in 1959.

It is almost a foregone conclusion that Beijing will not entertain the Dalai Lama's proposed visit because in its assessment his presence is bound to be a serious distraction. In their strategic thinking, China is better off waiting out the Dalai Lama's death rather than giving him a chance to complicate the issue at this time. Even though at 75 the Dalai Lama remains in reasonably sound health, the Communist leadership is conscious that time is on the side of the Chinese state and not the person of the Tibetan leader. The leadership is bound to see the Dalai Lama's presence in Tibet for the first time in 51 years, and that too in the midst of a catastrophe, of this scale as fraught with possibilities of igniting a revolt among the Tibetan people.

Also, at the operational level of bilateral diplomacy it would be unrealistic for Beijing to let him visit and not choose to engage him a substantive dialogue over the future of Tibet. Not talking directly with the Dalai Lama has been a far more effective approach so far for China. Why should an earthquake change that?

For one, it could send a powerful symbolic message about China's sincerity in resolving the Tibetan question around the world. More importantly, it can have profound impact in the eventual peaceful integration of Tibet into the Chinese mainstream with the kind of autonomy demanded by the Dalai Lama.

Now, as The Economist reports, Chinese scholar, Jin Wei, who is director of ethnic and religious studies at the Central Party School in Beijing, has suggested that China should consider inviting the Dalai Lama to visit one of its semi-autonomous cities, Hong Kong or Macau, and eventually even back to Tibet.  “For her (Jin) to do so publicly, in an interview this month with a Hong Kong magazine, Asia Weekly, suggests that she has high-level backing,” The Economist says.

The magazine also says there may be some rethinking underway in the Communist leadership on the hardline approach to Tibet. The departure of Hu Jintao and the rise of Xi Jinping as president has been seen by some as possibly signaling a change in Tibet policy. As someone in charge of Tibet between 1988 and 1992 Hu was known to be particularly uncompromising on the hardline policy, an approach he maintained throughout his tenure. There are expectations that Xi might be different, although as The Economist notes, there are no signs to make that determination. In his defense, Xi took over only in November last year and has had to deal with more immediate crises such as a wayward North Korea and strains in relations with the United States.

I personally think it is in China’s long-term interests to invite  the Dalai Lama to Beijing for direct talks, notwithstanding that he has retired from his political role. There is nothing to stop Beijing from including the democratically elected Tibetan prime minister-in-exile Lobsang Sangay but that may be too bold for a system that calibrates every step when it comes Tibet. In fact, precisely because the Dalai Lama has given up a political role, it might make more sense to talk to him directly.

Although formal political power resides in the office of Tibetan prime minister-in-exile in a real sense, the Dalai Lama unquestionably remains an overarching influence over any negotiated future of Tibet. Beijing knows that very well.

Talks between Beijing and the Dalai Lama’s representatives have been suspended since 2010 and there are no signs yet that they would be revived. Rather than talking to his representatives within a framework that is designed not to resolve anything, I think it is time for Beijing to host the Dalai Lama and have threadbare discussions.

2013 is not 1950 when China annexed Tibet, nor for that matter 1959 when it forced the Dalai Lama into exile in India. China is far more secure in its own skin now having pulled off what is widely regarded as human history’s biggest economic transformation.  The least it can do is to talk to a Buddhist monk who has officially given up his political and temporal responsibilities.

There are only upsides to this strategy, particularly when for years now the Dalai Lama has spoken specifically in terms of seeking genuine autonomy within China and not independence. The only thing standing in the way of Beijing is Beijing.

Bragging about its reflected glory

My painting of Supermoon

Although it is expected to be at its peak tonight, last night I spent sometime looking at supermoon. Known as a perigee full moon in astronomical terms, supermoon is at its closest to the Earth during this period. It looks about 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter.

Tonight the Moon expected to be 356,991 kilometers or 221,824 miles away from us, its closest this year. Barely two weeks later, that is on July 7, it will achieve its apogee at a distance of 406,490 kilometers or 252,581 miles. That is close to a difference of 50,000 kilometers (49,499 to be precise) or 30,757.3 miles. That’s a considerable variation and has a recognizable gravitational swing on the Earth.

The sky over Naperville was squeaky clean, giving supermoon an even sharper than normal periphery. It was so high resolution that it began to look fake after a while. It looked like Hollywood moon. You could have printed it straight off the sky at millions of DPI or dots per inches.

It was almost as if the Moon was bragging about its own resplendence which is rather ironic because as we all know well it is reflected glory. I suppose those who lead a life of reflected glory tend to flaunt it more.

It must be sobering for the Moon not to have its own intrinsic light. Not that the Earth is any different but at least its inhabitants have created some measurable luminosity. The Moon has none of its own. In that sense, the Moon that we see on a night like this or for that matter any other night is indeed Hollywood moon in that it is created by the way it is positioned in relation to the Sun and us.

Without the Sun the Moon is nothing more than a dusty, dark sphere. This is how NASA explains moondust: “Almost half is silicon dioxide glass created by meteoroids hitting the moon. These impacts, which have been going on for billions of years, fuse topsoil into glass and shatter the same into tiny pieces. Moondust is also rich in iron, calcium and magnesium bound up in minerals such as olivine and pyroxene. It's nothing like gunpowder.”

The reference to gunpowder comes from the fact that astronauts who have smelled it say it smells like gunpowder. Why? NASA says, “No one knows.”

“To be clear, moondust and gunpowder are not the same thing. Modern smokeless gunpowder is a mixture of nitrocellulose (C6H8(NO2)2O5) and nitroglycerin (C3H5N3O9). These are flammable organic molecules "not found in lunar soil," says Gary Lofgren of the Lunar Sample Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Hold a match to moondust--nothing happens, at least, nothing explosive.”

My point, if there must be one to what I write, is that the glorious beauty of the Moon mostly comes out of the way the Sun lights it up. Like I said, it is Hollywood moon.

Foreplay more exciting than coitus in US-India diplomatic intercourse

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (Portrait courtesy: www.state.gov)

As Secretary of State John Kerry reaches New Delhi tomorrow on his first visit in that position, the strategic partnership between India and the United States appears much less grand than what was promised in 2009.

You may not hear public candor from the two country’s diplomats in precisely those terms but there is a sense of drift and ennui in bilateral discourse. Merely calling the US-India relations one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century, as President Barack Obama had done, does not necessarily make it so.

Kerry is going at a time when India’s polity is shifting into the preliminary stages of the 2014 parliamentary elections. Electoral calculations have a unique way of clarifying priorities in all democracies but nowhere more so than in India. So while Kerry’s Indian vis-à-vis Salman Khurshid will pay complete attention to his honored guest, one can be reasonably sure that the overriding theme for all members of the Manmohan Singh government from now on is the national elections.

Of course, it is not as if government ministers drop whatever it is that they are doing and run to attend to their own electoral plans. However, there is a natural slowing of envisioning grand ideas. At best, this would be a nuts and bolts visit for Kerry, particularly because the United States is preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan and India is naturally concerned about the new emerging contours there.

New Delhi is closely watching the progress, or a lack of thereof, in the proposed talks between Washington and the Taliban. In the aftermath of the drawdown by the Western forces, what happens in Afghanistan is of direct and vital consequence for India. If the Taliban is emerging as a decisive stakeholder as evidenced by the US willingness to engage it seriously, then India has to bear in mind what that means for its own long-term influence in the region. After all, India has invested in excess of a billion dollars in help the government of President Hamid Karzai rebuild his country. New Delhi does not see the latest overtures to the Taliban as anything to applaud.

It is not my case that Kerry’s visit will pivot around the issue of Afghanistan but it has the most immediate relevance in both bilateral and multilateral contexts.

Shaun Tandon of the AFP asked a State Department official during a press briefing on June 20 about what the message to India would be about Afghanistan. Here is what the official said: “With respect to Afghanistan, we have long appreciated the role that India has played, particularly on the economic front, to support this regional integration vision. India has a very substantial economic assistance program. It’s one of the largest investors through its – the Hajigak iron ore project, and of course, it’s been a very strong supporter of the Istanbul process to encourage regional support for regional integration that will help the economic transition in Afghanistan. So I think that will be a focus. Certainly, I expect the Secretary and External Affairs Minister Khurshid to talk about the reconciliation process. We’ve always sought to be very transparent with India about that.”

The reply seems substantive at first but on reflection you would discover that it is mostly anodyne.

There are other issues such as the recent Indian court judgments on life saving drugs and the nuclear liability law, both of which have generally upset the Americans. A group of U.S. senators on Thursday wrote Kerry urging him to push New Delhi to protect US business interests in light of those two developments. India is expected to explain its position without really changing it in anyway.

The visit must be seen from the standpoint that both the Obama administration and the Singh government have their own reasons to focus elsewhere. For President Obama the time is to firm up his domestic legacy. His sanguine view of US-India relationship notwithstanding that relationship is not of any enduring value for his presidential legacy. Of course, unlike Obama, for whom this is the last term, Dr. Singh at least stands a theoretical chance of returning to power since there are no term limits in India. So he will necessarily do what is good in his and his Congress Party’s long-term interests.

Kerry will notice that there is discernible jadedness in the bilateral intercourse. To put it in purely sexual terms, he will likely discover that the foreplay, that happened before his time, was more exciting than the coitus. But then that is not such a bad thing as relations between countries go.

MoMA’s Corbusier exhibition

My tribute to Le Corbusier’s iconic chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France.

As the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MoMA) holds its first major exhibition of Le Corbusier’s career “encompassing his work as an architect, interior designer, artist, city planner, writer, and photographer” I thought I would pay my small tribute to the master architect. The painting above is inspired by one of Corbusier’s most enduring buildings, the iconic chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France.

Like many things in life, I have a tangential connection to Corbusier’s career in the sense that I come from a city, Ahmedabad, which has the distinction of having the most number of individual homes and buildings designed by him. Corbusier designed four buildings in Ahmedabad. They include two private residences called Villa Sarabhai and Villa Shodhan, a now decrepit museum called Sanskar Kendra and the Ahmedabad Textile Mill Association (ATMA) House. These were all designed in 1951.

Sanskar Kendra was a great getaway for me as a child since my school Diwan Ballubhai Madhyamik Shala was right opposite the museum. I know there are many who detest Corbusier’s emphasis on concrete but his buildings in Ahmedabad never failed to lift my spirits. I know Sanskar Kendra intimately. I have also visited Villa Sarabhai and the ATMA House several times.

Sanskar Kendra now seems to be in a state of disrepair. I have seen pieces of concrete missing from some parts of the structure with rusted iron bars being exposed. In contrast to the stuffy environs of my school,Sanskar Kendra’s open plan was such a refreshing distraction for me. I used to imagine one day owning a building like that. It is poetic justice that I ended up in an unfinished basement with unpainted concrete walls.

Corbusier had a particularly productive relationship with India as the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned him to design an entire city called Chandigarh. The two men struck up a great friendship. It is tragic that many Chandigarh buildings, particularly government offices, suffer from neglect and apathy. I have seen smears of the red gunk spit out by tobacco and paan chewing bureaucrats and visitors alike on the walls of Chandigarh’s secretariat. It is not that different at Sanskar Kendra either.

To those living in New York, I strong recommend a visit to the MoMA’s Corbusier exhibition.