Mayank Chhaya Daily

Epicurious about Epicurus

I don’t quite know exactly what but it says something about me that I knew the word epicurean but not about the Greek philosopher Epicurus from whose name it is derived. It is one of those connections that you choose to live your life without bothering to make. I did make it yesterday.

With half an hour to spare between two meetings I decided to drop by at the Naperville Library. In the “Hot Non-fiction” section I saw a slim paperback titled “Epicurus:The Art of Happiness” by George K. Strodach and Daniel Klein(Penguin Classics). That made me epicurious. (Unnecessary coinage).

By some coincidence, earlier in the day I was again reading “Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism” by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on a whim. So Buddhism was fresh in my mind. As I began to leaf/browse/thumb through Epicurus I was pleasantly surprised to come upon this passage.

Some of you, who may read this blog frequently, would be aware that I have a weakness for these serendipitous fortuities.* Reading this passage brought on a smile on my face at the strange connectedness of things.

Epicurus’s era was 342 to 270 BC, which puts him some 150 years or so after Gautam Buddh. It is fascinating to note that in that age Democritus and Pyrrho had already traveled and returned with Buddh’s philosophy. I like the word gymnosophists for naked teachers, the Indian renunciates who had practically, and, in the case of Digambar Jain monks, fully, given up wearing clothes.

From whatever little I read, Strodach and Klein have written a compelling book about the Greek philosopher whom they think has not been studied to the extent he should have been. I will buy this book as soon as I start earning again.

* Although serendipity and fortuity are synonyms I fuse them because I like the cadence to the expression.

President Barack ‘Oh, I don’t know’ bama

President Barack Obama at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Oct. 18, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

I am not qualified to say with any confidence whether Barack Obama is a “bystander president” but recent developments tend to suggest that he is probably Barack “Oh, I don’t know” bama president. It is a measure of my shallowness that I am writing an entire post just get that little cheap shot out there.

Two particular developments point to the president’s apparent disengagement from the details of his job. As Peter Baker reports in The New York Times today, “Mr. Obama’s plea of ignorance may do less to deflect blame than to prompt new questions about just how much in charge he really is.”

His plea of ignorance relates to themes as diverse as the online execution of his defining political legacy of healthcare reform and spying on the leaders of allies. In both cases, the president and his aides’ response, shorn of all the calculated political equivocation, is that he was not aware of the details. And that’s where the problem lies.

Obama skeptics—and there is a legion of them with unvarnished glee on their faces—insist that the troublesome rollout of the web interface of his Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare is evidence enough that the president has lost control. In particular, they argue that since this was the signature issue on which he staked his political legacy he should have been practically sitting with techies to check the website’s navigation and every single link on it. That is, of course, ridiculous but it is always the ridiculous that concentrates minds in realpolitik.

While I am not so worked up over the screw-ups in the web interface, I am certainly intrigued by his denial that he was not aware that his own spymasters had bugged the personal mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. If the personal mobile phone of the leader of one of your most important allies on the friendliest continent was being tapped for years, I would think that the president would be made aware at some point. This is not just some random suspect being monitored but the chancellor of Germany on her personal mobile. It is an affront for which it is hard to find much extenuating circumstance even within the barely moral world of espionage.

What was the overriding rationale behind the decision to eavesdrop on her? Were they expecting to hear something terribly incriminating being plotted against the United States which they had suspected but could not confirm otherwise? And if they did hear something terribly incriminating why did it never reach the ears of the president? And if it did indeed reach the president, why are we being now told that he was not aware of the tapping? If after years of monitoring her the National Security Agency (NSA) seems to have produced nothing more than some useless insights into her personal life, then what was the purpose behind continuing it? This seems like a case of casting the net as wide as they could and then sit and wait for someone, somewhere to incriminate themselves.

It does not appear as if a simple cost-benefit analysis of bugging Merkel’s personal mobile phone was done beforehand. If reports are to be believed, it had been going on since 2002. Is there someone weighing the value of listening to her for over a decade? One is hoping that this was some sort of a rogue operation from which the president was excluded in the interest of plausible deniability. If I were Merkel, this is what I would have said to Obama in my protest phone call: “Mr. President, since you already know what I am about to say, I am not going to say anything. Thank you. It was nice knowing you.”

Unless the tactical gains of secretly listening to her conversations over the years were so high as to balance any potential damage to the long-term strategic relationship with Germany, I do not see the wisdom of it all. Of course, a lot of facile and blasé explanations are forthcoming about the need to spy on the rest of the world just as the rest of the world spies right back.

It is possible that Obama would like to avoid visiting Germany altogether until his presidency ends because what’s he going to say to Merkel personally that would be placate her? He couldn’t possibly tell her that he did not know without simultaneously admitting that he was not in charge.

Tailpiece: It appears that the NSA taps everything and everyone, so much so that they must be tapping each other tapping each other tapping each other ad infinitum.

Understanding the futility of now

The Clock by Mayank Chhaya

With the discovery of what is believed to be the most distant and therefore the youngest galaxy to be detected yet, it is time for me to again refresh you about the absurdity of our idea of “Now.” There is no now and not just because now constantly becomes then. It is also because of the sheer scale of the universe that “Now” is a futile idea. It may work terrestrially within earthly proximities but it begins to lose its meaning rather quickly even within our own planetary neighborhood.

Astronomers have just announced that they have found the galaxy that was formed a mere 700 million years after the Big Bang. Called z8_GND_5296, the galaxy brings us our closest to the birth of the universe. When you consider that the age of the universe is determined to be 13.8 billion years, we are talking about its infancy. It has taken light from this particular galaxy 13.1 billion years to reach. So what we are seeing now is 13.1 billion years old. That’s what I mean the futility of now.

Before I get into that, a bit about how these distances are measured. As the universe expands and objects, including this galaxy, for ever recede from one another, the wavelength of the light from them increases. The increase makes that light look redder in color. Scientists call it the redshift which is measured as z. The higher the value of z, the farther it is from us. As an excerpt from this discovery explains in Nature magazine, “Of several dozen galaxies observed spectroscopically that are candidates for having a redshift (z) in excess of seven.” Excess of 7 for the redshift is considered a very high number indeed. The z8_GND_5296 has a redshift of 7.51, the highest so far and which scientists call “an epoch 700 million years after the Big Bang.”

What is extraordinary about this galaxy is that despite its very early formation in the aftermath of the universe it had a high star-formation rate. This was an unexpected finding. The rate was a factor of 100 greater than what we see in our own Milky Way.I think this is enough geektalk. Now on to esoteric talk.

From time to time, I have written about the paradox of what we call now actually not being now in the real sense, the last one being on February 10, this year.I think it is worth repeating in view of the latest finding. Here:

Does it strike you that everything in the universe is always communicating through its past and never its present? All phenomena that we experience are dated.

There is no real real time contact among objects considering that the time lag between any two object is considerable. Take for example, an object so predominant in our daily experience as the Sun. Considering that light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach us here on the Earth, it means it is already dated information even if it so by just eight minutes.

As you begin to look beyond the interplanetary and into the intergalactic the distances become so vast that they no longer make sense on the human scale. If you don’t believe me check this out. At its closest the Venus is about 40 million kilometers from the Earth. Because of the elliptical orbits of the planets interplanetary distances vary extraordinarily. For instance, at its farthest the Venus is 261 million kilometers.Other than saying that it is extremely far, we cannot really sensibly comprehend how far.

Now consider Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to us. It is 40 trillion kilometers from us. To give you some measure of how far that is 40 trillion kilometers is 40 million million kilometers. Not that we can realistically grasp that either. So the nearest planet and the nearest star are separated from us by an incomprehensible magnitude.

It takes light, therefore information and data, 4.24 years to reach us from Proxima Centauri. That would be light traveling for over four years at the speed of 300,000 kilometers a second to arrive here. In other words, the information reaching us is nearly four and a quarter years old, even from the nearest star. Therefore, what we are looking at is Proxima Centauri as it was that long ago. If we want to know whether in the interregnum it got married, divorced, underwent a tummy tuck, won an Oscar, or simply turned into a red dwarf we have to wait nearly four and quarter years. What this means is that we are forever trapped in our universe’s past exchanging stale information.

One way to get around this problem of enormous datedness is to collectively agree that our past is in fact jointly our present and our present will be our joint future. I use our in a cosmic and not an earthly sense. All that we can do is together decide that the present is when we see it and not when it might have actually happened in relation to a particular event or an object.

Of course, we can also resign to the fact that there is no real present but perpetual past and there is no real future but nascent present. Moments are taking birth and perishing all the time. Our immediate anthropic present will never reconcile or converge with that of even our nearest planetary neighbor, the moon because of the time lag, albeit miniscule in this particular case.

For all practical purposes it does not really matter that we are never up-to-date about the universe because we have to live with what appears before us. If Proxima Centauri was atomized at this present Earth moment, what material difference would it make to us in the way we process that information four and a quarter years into the future? For you and I Proxima Centauri will appear to have disintegrated only in June of 2017. It will be real present for us when we experience it then even though for the star it would be its past.

There are two kinds of present, one that is real present as experienced by the object in question and the other as experienced by those away from it. This time lag exists even on our own planet but it is so small that as human we cannot perceive it.

One way to respond to the post today is to ask me if I forgot to take my medicine. The more mature way would be to ponder yourself. It is not my intention to freak you out but to merely remind you that the concept of past, present and future is so strange at the scale of the universe. Perhaps the idea of a multiverse is supposed to mean that every object in the universe is a multiverse in and of itself in so much as their timelines never really converge.

So next time you have an argument with someone simply say this: “Let’s just say that we are on different timelines. Our present do not seem to converge.” Or try saying, “Your light has not yet reached me. It is the time lag and not us.”

When it comes to anyone other than oneself, we can all only hope for the bare minimum timeline convergence.Friendships and romances develop during that timeline convergence.

Is it any wonder then that only you genuinely know and converge with yourself? This is what Oscar Wilde called a lifelong romance.

A short rumination about ‘Cloud Atlas’, the movie

Do you ever get the sense that you see everything clearly and yet comprehend nothing even remotely? Well, I have lived that all my life. It is from that vantage point that I watched ‘Cloud Atlas’ yesterday, a full year after it was released.Since one of the movie’s identifiable themes is about a weird continuity between the past, present and future, it should not make a difference that I am writing about it only now.

Based on David Mitchell’s much celebrated novel of the same name and written and directed Tom Tykwer and the siblings Lana and Andy Wachowski the film had a strange grip on me throughout the day.

I watched the 172-minute long film stretched over several hours, allowing my own life and its hardships to unfold simultaneously. Among the irritating hardships were half a dozen calls in a span of 15 minutes from a credit card company about a pending payment several weeks past its due date. One of callers even threatened to report my account to the credit bureaus. When I said “Go right ahead and if you don’t have the numbers for them I can give them to you” she was irretrievably confused. To push her deeper into her confusion I also told her that I was merely a transmigrating soul ensnared for a brief while in the oppressive banalities of her planet, namely Earth. She put the phone down.

I digress. I was telling you about ‘Cloud Atlas.’  Six stories set in six different eras, from 1850 to 2321, play out in ‘Cloud Atlas’. In those five centuries, while on the face of it many characters live many disparate and complex lives, a closer scrutiny would reveal an underlying connectedness across space and time. They are pieces self-contained unto themselves and when they come together they form a self-contained if somewhat amorphous whole as well. I have not read the book but am aware of its reputation for its thematic abstruseness and its inherently unfilmable nature. So it is to the credit of Tykwer and the Wachowskis that it is such a brilliantly compelling visual feast with strikingly told stories.

I don’t know about you but when I am confronted with material that is hard to grasp in the first, second, third or whateverth viewing/reading what I do is just distill sense from moment to moment and move on. It is not like life generally makes much sense anyway. That’s why I started with the question  whether you ever get the sense that you see everything clearly and yet comprehend nothing. Seeing is comprehending.

Tom Hanks as an Irish thug author in ‘Cloud Atlas’

There are many memorable scenes but the one I found laugh out loud memorable concerns Tom Hanks, playing an Irish thug whose autobiography was panned by a snobbish prick of a critic. The critic had said of the book this: “Mr. Haggins should apologize to the trees felled for the making of his bloated autobio novel, 400 vainglorious pages expire in an ending that is flat and an end that is beyond belief.”  At a party when Hanks meets the critic he just flings him off the high balcony, looks down on the critic’s badly mauled, flattened body and says “Now that’s an ending that is flat beyond belief.” Not that I recommend that writers deal with dismissive critics thusly but it works well cinematically. (I have used “thusly” for its humorous undertone).

‘Cloud Atlas’ packs in so much in terms of ideas, constructs and philosophies as well as performances, images, special effects, prosthetics, and characters that it is best to experience them from moment to moment. Life is never presented to us as a whole but a series of moments that can be as seamless as they are disjointed. Given my own inability to make sense of much of anything I have long lived from moment to moment. That way, both your comprehension and incomprehension are momentary. So are your triumphs and failures.

It strikes me that in the many interludes between watching the film I also did an hour-long interview with a local Indian music radio show on WLUV 88.7 FM called ‘Global Desi World and Women’. It is hosted by the effusive associate professor of sociology at Loyola University, Shweta Singh. Her show was mainly about the great singer Manna Dey who passed away the other day. I was reminded of one of Dey’s very popular songs from the 1969 movie ‘Chanda aur Bijli.’ Written by Neeraj and composed by Shankar Jaikishen, the song began with the lines:

Kal ka pahiya ghume bhaiya
Lakh tarah insan chale
Le ke chale barat kabhi to
Kabhi bina saman chale

I do not feel like rendering its translation but the poet is talking about how the wheel of time keeps revolving irrespective of what we do. A possible theme song for ‘Cloud Atlas’, I think.

Outlook magazine’s idea of turning 18

India’s Outlook magazine has turned 18 which, in their editors’ judgment, is a milestone of some significance. They have tired to link magazine years with human years in a risible attempt at metaphor for something, anything.

Of course, it is good that the respected magazine has turned 18 but asking “18 top authors” to write about being 18 to commemorate its 18th anniversary is an obvious stretch. They just made it up.

When you look at the list of the 18 top names you suspect that some of them were never 18 while some others never ceased being so. So you take your pick. To be sure, 18 has zero significance. It heralds nothing, nor does it end anything. Reading some of the short pieces by the 18 distinguished names—and they have to be distinguished because I am not on the list—I got the sense that some of them had an unspoken WTF balloon go off when they were approached. Many of them are of age where the age 18 seems so far as to be non-existent.

Having entirely skipped teenage I have no particular handle on what it meant to have turned 18 but I suppose it is safe to say that it meant just about as much as it meant to be 36 and might mean to be 72 if I last that long. In short, nothing at all. I wish at least one of these top 18 authors had just written one simple line saying “Why are you asking me to write this?” Most of them being fertile minds with varied experiences were able to muster up something about the number 18.

Here is what I mean when I say that some of them had an unspoken WTF balloon go off when the magazine approached them to write. Fatima Bhutto, writer and political commentator of considerable erudition, said this: “I think of Damascus. The connection between 18 and Damascus, like all connections, is tenuous at best. I left Damascus for Karachi when I was 11. Age has nothing to do with it. I spent the summer of my eighteenth year in the city, as I spent every earlier and later summer. But if you ask me today what I think of when I hear the number 18, I think of the jasmines that creep down the side of Mezzeh’s buildings, brushing your shoulder as you walk by them.” Read the rest here.

Amish Tripathi, currently among the hottest popular writers in India, had this gem: “… if you ask me what 18 fundamentally signifies, I’d say that I think it represents wisdom. Wis­dom that allows us to give meaning to our lives.” Quite apart from the redundancy of “If you ask me” because Outlook already did, what does this sentence mean?

At least, Manu Joseph, editor of Open magazine and a respected writer, tried to be humorous even while avoiding to say anything substantial for free, perhaps saving it for his more lucrative (The) New York Times pieces.

In a devastatingly brilliant insight, Chetan Bhagat, the prima donna among popular Indian authors, said this: “However, little do we realise the gravity of achieving this stage—or adulthood. In some ways, becoming 18 sucks too.” Yes, yes, gravity does suck too.

And now I conclude this unnecessary post.

Headley “bragged” about Mumbai attacks: Danish book

Kaare Sorensen, a journalist with Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper

Kaare Sorensen and I met in Chicago during the 2011 trial of David Coleman Headley, a convicted plotter behind the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror strikes. I could see Kaare meticulously taking down notes at the trial which he was reporting for his Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. I reported it for the IANS wire.

Kaare had a direct stake in the trial because along with Headley, also on trial was his childhood friend Tahawwur Hussain Rana, both charged with hatching a particularly macabre terrorist attacks against the Jyllands-Posten offices in Copenhagen. At the conclusion of the trial Kaare mentioned that he might consider writing a book about the abortive plot. I said I was most certainly going to write a book about it. Two years hence, he has published that book in Danish, while I am still in the process of adding more details.

 

Kaare’s book “Hals Hug” which in Danish means behead or decapitate

I did a story on the publication of the book for the IANS wire. It has been carried worldwide. Here is the story:

Chicago, Oct 26 (IANS) A Danish journalist says barely a week after the Nov 26, 2008 terrorist strikes on Mumbai, David Coleman Headley, their most high-profile Chicago plotter, was "bragging" about them in an email forum. What seems remarkable about Kaare Sorensen's finding is the extent of Headley's involvement in the planning of the Mumbai attacks and who also justifies the Mumbai killings, calling them "retaliation" for the wrongs done in Kashmir and even Afghanistan.

Kaare Sorensen, a journalist with the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, has just published a book about a particularly brutal but abortive plot by Headley against his own newspaper. Although the 350-page book in the Danish language titled "Halshug", which means behead or decapitate in Danish, focuses mainly on the conspiracy to attack the newspaper offices in Copenhagen, it also contains 80 pages about the Mumbai attacks.

"I've gained access to all 9,000 emails on the email-forum for old students of the military academy that Headley went to in Pakistan. More than 300 of them are written by David Headley; most of them between the years 2008 and 2009. These emails show us a great amount of details about Headley and his state of mind. The emails tell of specific stories or events in Headley's life. And they also show us his brutal words about Denmark and India," Sorensen told Hi India newsweekly, published from here, in an email interview to coincide with the publication of the book.

The 300 odd emails by Headley that the journalist went through suggested how well-informed the Pakistani American was. "It (the exchange) also shows that Headley wrote personal information about the attackers of the Mumbai attack not long after the attack, information that he probably got from his contacts within the LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba)."

He just couldn't resist bragging about it. So Dec 3 2008 he wrote: "Yes, they were only 10 kids, guaranteed. I hear 3 of the kids were Hafiz and 2 were married with a daughter each under 3 years old."

Hi India has a copy of the particular email, which is part of 'Halshug' published by Denmark's People's Press. The content of the email is a broad indictment of India for its conduct in Kashmir as well as what followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.

In a particularly harsh passage, Headley says, "Our opinion here is that the casualties in Mumbai are should (sic) really be taken as Collateral Damage from the Daisy cutters (bombs) that have been falling in Afghanistan as well as the over 70000 dead in Kashmir over the last 20 years at the hands of the Terrorist Indian Army. As you can see that more than 500 commandos had a hard time containing 10 kids. These pieces of shit have no stomach for a fight. All their valor is reserved for the girls in Kashmir."

Sorensen, who covered the Chicago trial and conviction of Headley and his childhood friend Tahawwur Hussain Rana in 2011, said he had been "most interested" in Headley's focus on Denmark. "This is probably the most serious threat Denmark has seen in terms of modern day terrorism, so there has been a look of focus on how far the plan had progressed, and what actually had happened."

The threat in question was constituted by the plot hatched by Headley with apparent blessings of the LeT against Sorensen's newspaper offices in Copenhagen and Aarhus. The attacks were in retaliation for the newspaper's 2005 publication of cartoons, which Muslims considered insulting to the Prophet Mohammed. One of the elements of the abortive attacks, which was deliberately meant to stun the world, was to behead captives at the newspaper and throw their heads on to the street in Copenhagen. The idea behind this macabre plan was to provoke the Danish authorities into a strong, possibly military, response.

Sorensen said the Headley plot has resulted in "very tight security" at all their facilities but did not dwell on the details because of its sensitive nature. However, he said the book does not talk about how the plot might have influenced Denmark's national security policies.

Asked how he assessed the role played by Rana in the Denmark plot, Headley's closest childhood friend and a Pakistani army doctor who became Canadian and later a permanent resident of the US, Sorensen said, "I think it's clear that Rana knew that something was going to happen in Denmark. But there are still many questions about Rana that I would like to have answered. Hopefully, we will know more about him if he at one point decides to talk to the press."

Headley, born Daood Sayed Gilani but who later changed his name, was sentenced to 35 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to his involvement both in the Mumbai and Denmark plots, while Rana was sentenced to 15 years for his role in the Danish newspaper plot.

Here is the brief Q and A from which the story above was drawn:

Q: As someone whose newspaper was the specific target of potentially horrific attacks, what has been your broad perspective of the David Headley case?

KS: I’ve been most interested in Headley’s focus on Denmark, of course. This is probably the most serious threat Denmark has seen in terms of modern day terrorism, so there has been a look of focus on how far the plan had progressed, and what actually had happened.

Q: How does that perspective reflect in your book?

KS: Well, the book is called “Halshug” – behead or decapitate – that was Headley’s plan in Denmark. So it is a big part of the book. But the first 80 pages of the book deal with the attack in Mumbai. It’s a 350-page book.

KS: How has the Headley-Rana plot impacted the way your newspaper functions?

We have a very tight security now at all our facilities due to several plans for an attack on our newspaper. I don’t wish to talk that much about it as this is or course a sensitive area for all us working at the newspaper.

Q: Yours is the first book of its kind on this case. What new insights have you been able to offer?

KS: I’ve gained access to all 9000 emails on the email-forum for old students of the military academy that Headley went to in Pakistan. More than 300 of them are written by David Headley – and most of them between the years 2008 and 2009. These emails show us a great amount of details about Headley and his state of mind. The emails tells of specific stories or events in Headley’s life. And they also show us his brutal words about Denmark and India. It also shows that Headley wrote personal information about the attackers of the Mumbai-attack not long after the attack. Information that he probably got from his contacts within the LeT. He just couldn’t resist bragging about it. So on Dec 3 2008 he wrote: “Yes, they were only 10 kids, guaranteed. I hear 3 of the kids were Hafiz and 2 were married with a daughter each under 3 years old”.

Q: Do you focus in your book on how the case may have influenced Denmark’s national security policies?

KS: No, not really.

Q: What has been your assessment of the extent of Tahawwur Rana’s role in the Denmark plot?

KS: I think it’s clear that Rana knew that something was going to happen in Denmark. But there are still many questions about Rana that I would like to have answered. Hopefully, we will know more about him if he at one point decides to talk to the press.

Q: Any plans for the English version of the book?

KS: We are still considering this. I will let you know, if I get any information about this, but right now the focus is on Denmark.

Tapping into Manmohan Singh’s mobile phone

The Guardian report about America’s National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping on mobile phone conversations of 35 world leaders prompted me to put on my investigative hat. I wanted to find out if the NSA listened in on the phone conversations of India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

I met a deeply embedded source inside the national security establishment under a leaky and fusty smelling bridge somewhere outside Washington last evening. I could only see her hands under the eerie sodium light. It was reassuring that she was not married because she had no wedding ring. Her hands were slender in a way that suggested someone who was adventurous and yet discreet. I had to quickly remind myself that this was not to be an amorous encounter but a professional one.

She agreed to have a brief conversation with me. Given that she was violating half a dozen statutes of her the national security convention she decided to keep it tightly to the point with occasional humor. Here are the excerpts:

Q: Is India’s prime minister among the 35 world leaders you tapped?

A:: Yes and no.

Q: What do you mean yes and no? Either he is or he is not.

A: Precisely. He is but he is not.

Q: I am not following.

A: That is my job. I follow but jokes aside we did tap into his mobile phone but always heard a very strange static sound broken by an occasional clearing of the throat.

Q: That’s him alright, I say, that’s him alright.

A: Is that some weird Eastern yogic mind trick, I mean static—harrumph-static-harrumph?

Q: You tell me. You are the one expert at listening and deciphering.

A: We had a two-day voice analysis and code analysis by some of the brightest brains in the agency. We have filed this under “Inconclusive.” We think he was saying something terribly cryptic that only a couple of people understood. Before joining the agency I worked in a top secret SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) program. Only once did I hear a static that sounded so similar to your prime minister’s phone calls.

Q: So what do you propose to do?

A: Nothing. We don’t do anything but keep these with us in case of a future need…Alright, I got to go. I have talked enough.

She started to leave but turned right back and took something out of her pocket. It was a piece of paper that had a voice sample graph.(See below)

My secret source then said, “The last two spikes are him clearing his throat but the first one does say something. We had a Punjabi interpreter analyze the sample. We were told it said something like “Gursharan, Main thak giya si.”

 

Ensure steady supply of daal and keema to President Obama

As always, it is left to me to look for meanings where none exists. Anyone can find meanings where they exist. The real talent is to find them where they don’t. (Some people might call it delusion but that’s that).

Watching the official 12 minutes and 48 seconds long video of U.S. President Barack Obama and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif joint statement to the media yesterday, I was struck by a couple of things. The only time there was some levity was when President Obama reminisced about his visit to Pakistan in 1980. Obama said in college he had  two Pakistani roommates whose mothers taught him how to cook daal and keema. The reference to daal and keema animated Sharif instantly as he laughed.(See the picture below).

Then after Sharif concluded his part of the statement he said that when Obama visits Pakistan again keema and dal will be waiting for him. That brought about a wide grin on the president’s face. (See the second picture) It is amazing how food and conversation about it can lighten up any discourse. Of course, I could not help but notice that Sharif subtly changed the order to keema and dal, thereby signaling a difference of opinion between the two. (I told you I was looking for meanings where none existed).

All diplomatic engagements should be built around basic human needs such as food and sex with larger, more intractable issues thrown in between. No one has experimented with it but I am fairly certain such an approach would produce more positive results.

I suspect it might be easier for Sharif to convince Obama to stop the drone attacks on Pakistan by ensuring a steady supply of daal and keema to the White House. Someone in Pakistan’s diplomatic establishment should have recognized that all the fury that Obama feels towards their country is caused by not having had proper daal and keema since 1980. It has been 33 years and someone should have been more sympathetic towards the president’s appetite. Let’s call it daal and keema therapy.

India, Pakistan, Kashmir and U.S.

Let us for a moment set aside India’s consistent and near visceral rejection of any global mediation in general and U.S. mediation in particular in its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. Even if we consider it, as being reportedly sought by Pakistan’s visiting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, for the sake of argument, there is a fundamental problem with that approach. America’s record in conflict resolution around the world has not been particularly inspiring.

It is true that every time the U.S. gets involved in a conflict either as a mediator or a direct intervener there is a certain amount of heightened expectation that builds around a potentially positive outcome but , more often than not, it gets belied soon enough. That failure, of course, may have as much to do with the inherently intractable nature of the conflict as with the limits of U.S. power and strategic interest in it.

It is from this standpoint that I find it amusing that Sharif should feel compelled to call on Washington to mediate over Kashmir. "With its growing influence in India, the US now has the capacity to do more to help the two sides resolve their core disputes, including Kashmir, and in promoting a culture of cooperation," Sharif has been quoted by the Press Trust of India (PTI) as telling a think tank in Washington.

It is also ironic for Sharif to think of Washington as a mediator over Kashmir even as he severely complains about the Obama administration’s relentless drone strikes on targets in the northwest of the country which often kill innocent civilians.

In any case, it takes no particular intelligence to know that when it comes to Kashmir, there is no influence strong enough to persuade India beyond what it regards as its territorial, strategic, cultural, political and even emotional interests. The U.S. can certainly try and lean on India but it is quite aware of the instant pushback from New Delhi.

Washington has its own highly complicated relationship with Islamabad to attend to in the aftermath of the May 2, 2011 Navy SEAL operation that killed Osama bin Laden. A large number of people in Pakistan saw this as clear violation of its sovereignty and those reverberations still continue to be felt refreshed by the drone strikes.

I am not entirely certain if there exists any political goodwill that the Obama administration can draw upon to both repair its relationship with Pakistan even while stretching itself over into the Kashmir issue. India’s foreign ministry, still quaintly called the external affairs ministry, knows all too well about the challenges the State Department faces in making itself heard around the world.

In the absence of such goodwill, the best the U.S. can do is use financial aid in the form of security and economic assistance as the lubricant to calm the squeaky diplomatic discourse. In the run-up to Sharif’s meeting with President Barack Obama today, the State Department has announced that it will release $1.6 billion in such assistance that was frozen because of the strained relations.

As a congenital pacifist, I am always for peace over conflict. I am willing to be optimistic about India-Pakistan relations despite the overwhelming and historic evidence to the contrary. That said, I doubt if U.S. mediation can really be part of any mix to resolve it.

And now, as I often do, I must take a cheap shot. Although Sharif’s handlers had steadfastly denied ever having used the term, there were media reports that during his recent visit to New York to attend the U.N. General assembly he had sarcastically called India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a “dehati aurat” (a peasant woman). The reference was supposed to have been used to describe how an unlettered, helpless peasant woman might run to someone she perceives to be powerful with any and all her woes. Dr. Singh had reportedly told Obama to help rein in Pakistan over the question of supporting terrorism in India. So even though the expression “dehati aurat” was apparently never used by Sharif, the definition of a cheap shot prompts me ask this question: “Who is a dehati aurat now?”

Print/online journalism and its new saviors

Even if I do not stand to gain a farthing now or,most likely, ever, I welcome that the print/online journalism has pulled in half a billion dollars in investment in two months. At the very least, there is a theoretical chance that I might get a job that pays every month and not when someone feels compassionate.

First Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid $250 million of his own personal cash to buy The Washington Post. Now it is Pierre M. Omidyar, the founder of eBay, who has decided to invest $250 million of his own to back a new venture by Glenn Greenwald of the Edward NSA Snowden fame and a couple of others. The second venture is expected to be a kind of global investigative journalism website.

That both these billionaires come from the world of high technology is indicative of a clear shift in the way original journalistic content will be delivered and monetized. Serious journalism is in serious need of being funded and managed in a way that not only does it make it endure but endure profitably. If content is king, that king at least needs to be able to pay the bills.

Apart from Bezos and Omidyar, there was also the relatively less heralded news in July of Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, investing in Ozy Media, a news start-up that is supposed to be “smarter, fresher, different.” One of the stories on Ozy Media currently is about how young Indian Americans have become a political force. As an aside, I must mention the late Gopal Raju, a pioneering Indian American publisher of India Abroad and India Abroad News Service (IANS), who played a significant role in introducing young Indian Americans to the world of political power through his Washington Leadership Program (WLP). That program is now being overseen by the young and ever enthusiastic Harin Contractor and four others.

Having been among the earliest proponents of tech entrepreneurs investing in the media, I think I have an insight of some value to offer. It was in the year 2000 that I founded an online publishing and media company called Literate World in Silicon Valley with near fable-like generosity of an angle investor. I wrote about that venture a couple of years ago when Amazon began its push to become an original publisher. This is what I wrote about my own experience:

With some luck and a lot of business savvy I could have trumped Amazon by a decade. Here is how. In 2000, after raising capital with uncomfortable ease from a very well known Silicon Valley venture capitalist called Raj Singh, I set up a publishing and media company christened Literate World. The web front of that operation was literateworld.com, which was designed to emerge as the world’s first multilingual literary portal.

The overarching objective of the multilingual literary portal was to use the worldwide web to create interest in global literature and leverage that interest by publishing books. The portal began with news, features, interviews and trends in literature in the three most widely spoken languages—Hindi, Spanish and English. In less than six months the portal was receiving close to two million hits a month without any publicity whatsoever. I had plans to add 12 more languages to the portal.  I am sure we could have built up a huge global readership which we could have leveraged for our own titles.

I directly commissioned 15 books in different languages with a minimum advance of $5000 paid to the first three authors. The first three of those were published in English, Hindi and Marathi to very strong critical acclaim. Unfortunately, we folded up for reasons unrelated to the publishing venture. I remember having reached out to business executives in all major publishing houses in New York with a proposal to collaborate on digital publishing. Not one of them even had the courtesy to return my phone calls or respond to email messages.

Raj Singh had the vision to recognize the importance of original and high quality content a decade before Bezos or Omidyar. We also had plans to emerge as a serious news producer with Literate World having invested in a major wire service operation. It is a pity that my venture did not survive despite the fact that the literary portal had notched up an impressive two million unique visitors soon after it was launched. The insight that I would offer to Bezos and Omidyar is that the media business necessarily requires a long-term commitment. It is not the kind of business that can be cashed out of in a couple of years. In fact, it is by its very nature a profession of passion and not a business of numbers. That said, it is absolutely imperative that any such venture is profitable. Original content has to be paid for by billions of freeloaders who roam the cyber world.

Five hundred million dollars may seem like a lot of money but journalistic content of high quality is an expensive affair. It is not something that you can stage-manage. There are so many variables and unpredictable factors. The most important factor that Bezos and Omidyar will do well to remember is that their ventures will invariably bring them in direct confrontation with governments that they cannot antagonize in their own main businesses. There will be a fork ahead in the road, one of whose arms will compel them to be adversarial and not cozy up to the powers that be. I hope they are ready for that.

I also hope that they have the stomach for a profession which in its purest form regards money with natural disdain.