Mayank Chhaya Daily

Plugging upcoming release of Dalai Lama biography in Gujarati

Six years after it was first published by Doubleday in America and by over 20 others worldwide (not to mention generously plugged by me in this column), my biography of the Dalai Lama with a new chapter is set to be released in two days in my native Gujarati language. Chetan Sangani, a young publisher running his own WBG Publication in Ahmedabad, says he has seen the first sample copy of the book and it “looks wonderful.” Wonderful is good because I do need some wonder these days, especially the kind of wonder that comes sharply etched on paper out of the mint.

Translated by Sudha Mehta, the biography will be out without my presence. I would have liked to be in Ahmedabad but one cannot travel on one’s like. One needs an airline ticket for that, which in turn requires money that is printed on paper by the government mint. So there. It completes the circle.

Presuming some of my fellow Gujarati read this blog, here is my unabashed appeal: Go buy the heck out of this book and make it bona fide bestseller. When he first approached me for the Gujarati rights, Chetan was confident about selling at least 20,000 copies. So prove him right even if it means eating some less fafda-jalebi and buying fewer stocks. Whether you read or not is your choice but do buy. How is that for a plug?

Looking for the right phone charger

Have you noticed how when your phone charger goes missing and when you look for it you find a whole cluster of the old, useless ones and never the right one? I have even found the charger for the first prototype mobile phone that Martin Cooper used but not the one I am looking for. (Geek alert and literary exaggeration).

Well, if you do not face this particularly vexing problem of the 21st century, then you are a superior human species to what I am. I normally gather up my phone charger, nasal drops, a bottle of antacid and migraine pain killer before any movement. At least three of these are connected to each other. You figure out which ones.

In my latest move I remembered to carry the last three but misplaced the phone charger. As I rummaged through various boxes and bags I was ensnared by about a dozen useless chargers, which begs the question—What in the blue blazes am I doing with those chargers? It is not like some gold one stashes away for desperate times. These chargers do not fetch you a farthing. In fact, getting rid of them is some process.

While I am ranting at life’s trivialities, I might as well tell you about how hard it is to untangle wires. Keep any two wires together and in no time you would find them in an obscenely passionate embrace of the kind that even Vatsayana could not have imagined. I told a bunch wires engaged in a six-some to get a room. They turned around and said “We are in a box and that is our room.” The reason for this rather short and unnecessary post is that I have been without much access to the Internet. I found some unsecured random connection which I am using to quickly upload before I lose it.

Al Vegan Gore

As a natural born vegan, with occasional indulgences of ice cream, I claim no high moral, environmental or even culinary ground on account of my diet.

Veganism is just some food that you shove in your mouth, chew, swallow and then hope for the best. Not that different from non-veganism, I suppose. So I have no particular response to former U.S. Vice President and inventor of both global warming and the Internet Al Gore going vegan.

I am writing this post purely because the headline came to me first and it sounds quite weighty. When you say “My name is Al Vegan Gore” it carries conviction. Trying chanting that name. I guarantee you would be aroused into starting an environmental revolution.

According to The Guardian newspaper, Gore has apparently gone vegan and will likely switch this Thanksgiving, that is tomorrow, by consuming quinoa instead of the traditional turkey. Quinoa, about which I found out only on reading the story, is a plant of the amaranth that is mainly cultivated in Peru, Bolivia and is part of the local staple.

If the former vice president so desires I can send him a mindboggling variety of vegetarian recipes from my home state of Gujarat and India generally. There is enough to last him for generations.

It is commendable that people are thinking about ways to strike a balance between humans and other sentient life. However, we all need to recognize that to be born on this planet, or for that matter any other planet, is to be part of a naturally exploitative cycle. Unless we stop eating altogether there is just no escape from exploitation. The question is the kind and scale of exploitation of natural resources. With the earth’s human population at seven billion and rising consuming anything at all poses some serious risk to natural balance.

So while Gore going vegan is good for him, it is anybody’s guess whether it can really change the order of things. Just saying.

Buzz and rumor as credible sources of news

India’s two leading newspapers have reported mother-in-law-daughter-in-law tensions inside the country’s preeminent film family, the Bachchans. The Indian Express and The Times of India claim that all is not well between Jaya Bachchan and her daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.

The Express report, attributed to its own wire, says:

“Bollywood beauty Aishwarya Rai has been living in the Bachchan mansion ever since her marriage to husband and co-star Abhishek Bachchan in April 2007. But now buzz is that the Bachchan 'bahu' is not too happy with the arrangements.

According to reports doing the rounds, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is keen to move out and live separately with her daughter Aaradhya and husband Abhishek.

Apparently, there seems to be a bit of friction between Aishwarya Rai and mother-in-law Jaya Bachchan, who is said to be keeping a tab on her activities. Reports further suggest that Jaya Bachchan is believed to be constantly interfering with her private life.”

The Times report, attributed to its own wire as well but quotes the Express report, says:

“Bollywood diva Aishwarya Rai has been living as a dutiful daughter-in-law since she got married to Abhishek Bachchan in 2007.

She is known to share a strong bond with both her father-in-law Amitabh Bachchan and his wife Jaya Bachchan. However, if rumours are to be believed then Aishwarya is keen to move out of the family home and live separately with her husband and daughter.

A report in Indian Express says that things are not smooth between Aishwarya and Jaya. The report further adds that Jaya allegedly keeps a tab on all activities of her bahu and keeps on interfering in her professional as well as personal matters. It is said that Aishwarya is expected to update Jaya about all her professional activities, something that Aishwarya does not appreciate.”

Of course, there is no sourcing other than something completely reliable as “buzz” and “rumors.” The Express report depends on “buzz” and the Times report depends on the Express report as well as rumors. So at least the Times has the high professional standards to verify from at least two completely unrelated and unverified sources.

Hilariously enough, both reports, as if to cover their asses, add: “We hope they sort their differences and these reports are just a mere rumour.” (Express) and “Well we sure hope that they resolve their differences and can put these rumours about a rift between the saas-bahu to rest.”

To the Express, I would make this minor point. When you say you hope they sort their differences, you implicitly say that there are differences. Then you cannot say in the same breath that you also hope that these reports are just rumors, particularly when you attribute their existence to “buzz.” Ditto the Times’ gratuitous comment.

The news, if at all true, is not that the two women in question have grown apart. The news is that they took six full years to attain the default state of the mother-in-law-daughter-in-law relationship.

In any case, it is beyond me how a 36-year-old man and his 40-year-old wife with their two-year-old daughter moving out of their parents’ home is news, even if it is prompted by family feuds or tensions or disagreements or spats or whatever.

Putting the Iran deal in perspective

One does not have to be an expert on, which I am not, or even a dabbler in, which I am, the Middle East to be able to read the obvious. The obvious being that the short-term deal reached between Iran and six world powers over the Shia hub’s nuclear program has the potential to dramatically rearrange the strategic jigsaw.

Even the vague possibility that Shia Islam’s nerve center may strike up a less than adversarial relationship with the United States is fraught with enormous consequences in the region. For decades now, 34 years to be precise since Iran and America violently bounced off each other in 1979, the default strategic alignment in the Middle East has been Sunni in nature. Of course, Israel has been the pivot around which the overarching US interests have revolved.

I must control premature articulation over whether the stopgap deal to curb  Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for some easing of economic sanctions for six months will work or not.. That said if the development is taken to its logical end, meaning if Iran becomes what the West understands to be a reasonable, sensible power, then it can eventually upend a strategic imperative carefully laid out by the plutocratic, oil-fueled Sunni majority with the help and connivance on the United States.

It is not for me to say whether one is necessarily better than the other because no one really knows the mood of the shifting sands. But one at least knows better than to herald any seemingly significant realignment in the Middle East as being for the final and larger good of the Middle East.

One advantage of a possible warming of relations between America and Iran is that the latter’s client states, in particular Syria, might become easier to deal with. It is entirely possible that through private, behind the scenes channels, Washington might have told Tehran to rein in its despotically errant client states if it wants the world to eventually lift the sanctions.

As has been pointed out widely, regaining Iran through diplomacy has been one President Barack Obama’s favorite foreign policy visions since 2007.To that extent the election that brought an apparently moderate Hassan Rohani as Iran’s president has proved to be a remarkably fortuitous turn of events for the U.S. president along with his own re-election. These are heavy variables that cannot be controlled. They just have to fall in place for the rest to happen.

The Iran deal is bound to unsettle Sunni regimes in the Middle East, particularly America’s most enduring partner Saudi Arabia. But that is something Washington will have to manage. As for Israel, it could be even harder to convince Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than the Sunni Islamic states not to lose faith in America. Netanyahu has already called the short-term deal a “historic mistake.” The prefix “historic” is redundant because all mistakes in the Middle East are ultimately historic. There are no small mistakes given the terribly intractable cultural equations there.

I probably, vaguely, might have told you so

Iran’s new President Hassan Rohani (Photo: Mojtaba Salimi/Wikimedia Commons)

Journalists live for “I told you so” moments even if the vindication of one’s writing is ever so tangential. What other rewards do we really get anyway?

I have had many ‘I told you so’ moments over the past 32 years in the profession but it is only with the advent of blogging that one is able to flaunt those to a global audience. The latest such moment came on June 18, 2013 when I wrote a post under the headline ‘Hassan Rohani has ‘ruh’ in his name.’

With the interim deal being reached between Iran and six world powers to strictly curb the former’s nuclear program, I think I can at least say “I probably, vaguely, might have told you so.” That post bears repeating. Here it is:

Iran’s electorate has done America’s TV anchors a big favor by voting out a leader whose name they could not pronounce and replacing him with someone whose name they can.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been replaced by Hassan Rohani. I like to think that Hassan Rohani might be easier for them to get their lips around. I do not want to trivialize the deeply adversarial relationship between Iran and America by reducing it to how easy or hard it is to pronounce Iranian names. But it sure helps that Americans can say his name without having to do a doctorate in linguistics.

For those of you who care for such things Rohani is essentially ruhani which in Farsi means spiritual. It flows from the word Ruh meaning spirit. If there is spiritualism in his name, it may not be too ambitious to presume that there is some in him too. There is some disagreement in the international media about the way his name is spelt. Some spell his last name as Rouhani while others Rowhani. For me personally Ruhani is the closest to its original meaning. However, I am going with the spelling used by the official website of the Iranian president.

So if the anchors can say his name, I suppose Washington can do business with him. The new leader, with a reputation for moderation despite being a cleric, has already signaled a change of mood by saying that he would “follow the path of moderation.” He has also spoken in terms of more openness about Iran’s nuclear program even while asserting its right to continue its uranium enrichment program.

Rohani has wasted no time in letting all concerned know that he is going to be fundamentally different from Ahmadinejad. He may be opening a door for the West in general and the United States in particular to explore a negotiated agreement over Iran’s nuclear program and possibly end sanctions which have hit the country rather hard.

He will have to balance the uncompromising nationalist/religious forces represented by the Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the all powerful Revolutionary Guard on the one hand and the reformist/pragmatist constituency that turned out in large numbers to vote for him on the other. There is no reason to think that he would fail just as there is no reason to think that he would succeed.

India, which has been a civilizational friend of Iran’s, has a great opportunity to engage Rohani early on and ensure that its stake in the region remains unshaken. The only major power in Asia and pretty much around the world with which Iran enjoys strong cultural ties is India. Farsi words are routinely used in many Indian languages. In this particular context, I can think one instantly. It is ruh-ba-ruh meaning personally or, more literally, heart to heart. That there is ruh in Rohani’s name should count for something.

It is unlikely that you would find an analysis of the Iranian leader’s last name elsewhere and put in the larger diplomatic context. But that’s what I do. I do different.

There is nothing to prevent Rohani from transforming his nation from a global pariah to a truly refined and creative civilization that it has been for a long time. All that he needs to do is to be more self-aware of his own last name.

An “artist” wonders why he does not sell and blames picture

A sampling of my portfolio on Saatchi Online

Among the first half a dozen websites that I reflexively check every morning soon after waking up is Saatchi Online, in particular my portfolio to see if there has been a bidding war on my digital paintings.

I look at the message box to find out if world famous art dealers, gallery owners, agents of reclusive billionaire art collectors and chic merchandizers have flooded it with massive offers to buy my artworks. So far the response has been in the realm of Zen-like minimalism in that no one has bought anything, nor has anyone so much as sent a message even deriding the portfolio, let alone applauding it.

It must feel like a pretty humorous routine if there were people secretly watching me gingerly move the cursor to the website’s saved link, hold down the left-click of the mouse in quivering anticipation before releasing it even while simultaneously shutting my eyes as if to delay the impending gratification of a huge windfall. I am reminded of Gujarati stockbrokers aboard Mumbai’s local trains playing “paplu”, a form of poker, who pick up their cards with near erotic anxiousness with their eyes closed.

Once the link is open and I have checked the message box to find much to my chagrin that absolutely nothing has sold, I play this little game of what possible reasons behind the complete lack of sale could be. Everyday, I invent a new reason. Today’s reason is that it is my picture with my characteristic smirking smugness that is the biggest turnoff. I envision potential buyers feverishly punching their credit card numbers to buy an artwork and then suddenly discovering my photograph and wondering, “Does this smug patrician posing before fake ivory chess pieces deserve my money?” The answer is obviously no and thereby hangs a tale.

 

Mayank Chhaya (Picture: Raghunandan)

Of course, I know that it is not any extraneous factor that inhibits the sale of my digital paintings but the clear lack of artistic merit. However, what is an “artist” if not an endless reservoir of delusional optimism? From time to time, I chuck rocks in that reservoir to break my own spell on myself.

The lofty and the louche, Part II

In my first comments on the apparent accusation that Tarun Tejpal, one of India’s most high profile editors, sexually assaulted a female colleague and his subsequent statement I said the following yesterday:

“Tejpal also speaks of “an awful misreading of the situation.” That is a baffling explanation.It means there was a situation, involving the young woman, to be misread. Is it his case that the young woman might have conducted herself in a manner that she had opened herself to be misread? What situation is he talking about?”

The situation that he was implicitly talking about and the one that I suspected as much that he was talking about may have to do with whether the young journalist had opened herself to be misread. In his first official statement Tejpal said the following:

“There have been serious allegations cast on me in this last week, and unfortunately as sometimes happens in life, the complete truth and the need to do the honorable thing can come into conflict. In this case this anguish was accentuated by the fact that very many intimate people, professional and personal, were involved.

For four days, as demanded by Shoma Chaudhury, the managing editor, and the recipient of the complaint, I have tried to do what was honorably demanded of me. On Tuesday I issued an apology for the alleged misconduct, as desired by the journalist through Shoma Chaudhury. On Wednesday I stepped down from the editorship of Tehelka and removed myself from the office premises. On Thursday I learnt of the formation of the complaints committee.

I offer my fullest cooperation to the police and all other authorities, and look to presenting all the facts of this incident to it. I also urge the committee and the police to obtain, examine and release the CCTV footage so that the accurate version of events stands clearly revealed.”

It is the last contention that the police should examine and release the CCTV footage “so that the accurate version of events stands clearly revealed” that is loaded with the suggestion that there is another side to the story that might cast a very different light on the incident. The purpose of this contention, and I am consciously second-guessing Tejpal here, seems to be that there was something in the young woman’s conduct in the elevator that the man twice her age felt it acceptable to act fresh with her.

The Hoot, a respected Indian media watchdog, has published this brief on its site under the headline “Tejpal’s version”:

“After the sustained TV onslaught, Tarun Tejpal's version sent to friends,  is now circulating. It says that the truth is that out of an attempt to preserve the girl's dignity and on "Shoma's adamantine feminist-principle insistence" that he keep correct form by apologising, he did so. But, he says,  the girl's version is a total lie,  as the CCTV footage will establish. According to him it was a less than a minute long  fleeting, totally consensual encounter in the lift of a two-storey building.”

If one reads Tejpal’s official statement and the version he has reportedly sent to friends as quoted by The Hoot together, the pushback from his side would be propelled by the claim that she was as much a willing party to what transpired in the elevator as he was.

At the risk of taking an uncharacteristically absolutist stand I would say irrespective of the optics of the situation it was unbecoming of a 50-year-old man to play along with whatever he presumed was going on. It is not my case even for a second that the young woman was a willing party to it. Her response ex post facto, as reported in the media, is compelling enough to suggest that she was traumatized by whatever it is that Tejpal did. That she shared her trauma with friends and family almost immediately is a testament to that. To me that alone should make Tejpal’s conduct wholly unacceptable simply because he should have exercised better judgment.

Now that Tejpal has been officially charged with rape by the police from the state of Goa where the incident happened, the matter is squarely in the legal domain. All opining, second-guessing and pontificating should cease until the matter has been settled. Tejpal has been charged suo moto under Sections 354 and 376 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which deal, respectively, with criminal use of force on a woman and rape.

The lofty and the louche

There is always the danger of being sanctimonious when it comes to writing about other people’s abhorrent conduct. Hence, I would like to be careful while offering  completely unsolicited comments on the charges of grievous sexual misconduct against Tarun Tejpal, one of India’s most high profile journalists and founder-editor of the Tehelka magazine.

I would restrict myself to Tejpal’s email that he sent to Shoma Chaudhury, his second-in-command and the managing editor of the magazine, as widely quoted in the Indian media.

Since I have no firsthand knowledge of the incident and because my sources of information are secondary I would hesitate to hand down a snap denunciation of Tejpal’s moral character. That said, his own statement is more than enough to at least make one wonder about it.

Tejpal wrote: "The last few days have been most testing, and I squarely take the blame for this... A bad lapse of judgment, an awful misreading of the situation, have led to an unfortunate incident that rails against all we believe in and fight for. I have already unconditionally apologized for my misconduct to the concerned journalist, but I feel impelled to atone further."

"I feel atonement cannot be just words. I must do the penance that lacerates me. I am therefore offering to recuse myself from the editorship of Tehelka, and from the Tehelka office, for the next six months."

I am struck by the term “unfortunate.”  Sexual harassment/assault is not a matter of fortune going awry. It is, in most cases, a conscious and deliberate act performed precisely because the one perpetrating it believes he or she has the power to do it and can get away with it. There is a degree of assurance that may stem from a sense of invincibility.

Tejpal also speaks of “an awful misreading of the situation.” That is a baffling explanation.It means there was a situation, involving the young woman, to be misread. Is it his case that the young woman might have conducted herself in a manner that she had opened herself to be misread? What situation is he talking about?

There is grandiosity to Tejpal’s mea culpa.There is also an element of grandstanding on the sordid spectacle where he himself is the main player.

The grandiosity and grandstanding come in the second part of his email where he speaks of the need to “do the penance that lacerates me.” It is almost as if Tejpal is disengaging from himself and looking at Tejpal the perpetrator as a third person. The use of the terms penance, lacerate and atonement sounds biblical. He seems to view himself in fairly grandiose terms rather than someone who allegedly indulged in a common crime. It appears to me that he is subconsciously elevating the commonness of his action to a level where nothing short of penance, atonement and lacerations, and not necessarily a punitive judicial action, would suffice.

His recusal as the Tehelka editor for six months is neither here nor there and is equally in keeping with a somewhat inflated view of the self.

Presuming the “misconduct” happened the way it is being suggested by many media reports then there is nothing that even remotely casts Tejpal’s action in the realm of “unfortunate” or “misreading”. It looks like a straightforward case of sexual assault/harassment which Tejpal might associate with men lesser than him.

What is particularly galling is that the “misconduct” was going on on the sidelines of an annual highfalutin cerebral event that Tejpal hosts and where he asks people of world renown important global questions and raises moral conundrums. I am also struck by the contrast between the lofty and the louche here.

I genuinely wish the young woman in question is able to deal with the criminal violation without damaging herself in the long-term. As for Tejpal, I am sure he knows that for lacerations to be effective, they have to come from someone else. It is for the young woman to either forgive or press for prosecution. Recusal from editorship, atonement, penance and lacerations must be secondary to what she decides to do. Also, the state has an obligation to act if there is enough evidence to make a case of sexual assault.

Observed modern social anthropology of movie stars and celebrities

My interpretation of modern celebrity saturated culture

I wrote this post  on July 1, 2012. I am republishing it because it works and, more importantly, I do not feel like offering anything fresh:

One of my rarely admitted guilty pleasures is to see the photographs and videos of Indian celebrity events, particularly those that involve movie stars.

Don’t mock me saying, “That’s original” because it is not the movie stars that I am looking at. It is the minders, security guards, ushers, nannies and other paraphernalia that gather around them that I am interested in. This is my minor contribution to modern social anthropology, which sounds so much better than just straight celebrity voyeurism. It also lends a scholarly aura to this useless pursuit.

All Indian celebrity pictures have the feel of a self-contained living organism. Generally a group four to six people move together in unison to a subtly orchestrated choreography or like a school of fish.

There is the movie star in the center of the frame, barely being able to suppress a sense of entitlement on his or her face. In the immediate orbit you have those who are closest to the movie stars, which could be either their personal bodyguards, secretaries, nannies or event hosts or a combination of all four. The personal bodyguards look almost as self-important as the celebrity they are surrounding. They have an expression that suggests ‘We are as important as the person we are surrounding.’ They make sure that they do not come across as the star-struck, drool-dripping groupies.

You can spot the movie star secretary from several light years away. They have the look of bored familiarity of those who have gone through the routine for years and have long shattered the mystique of the person whose lackeys they are. Some of them have an expression that could be well read: “You think this guy/girl is a star? Wait until you know what I know and endure what I endure everyday and see what I see.” And yet they have to look suitably deferential, obsequious, unctuous, subservient and servile. I have seen male secretaries--and most of them are men--to female movie stars wear a strikingly uxorious expression. Are you suitably impressed by a minor show of my vocabulary?

Then there are the nannies to the starlets who have recently become mothers. The starlets ensure that their nannies turn out in the cheapest possible outfits which are not obviously torn. There is no makeup on the nannies. The only feminine attribute they are allowed to display is neatly combed hair. They have to balance the weight of overfed star babies with that of the baby bags carrying baby feeds, milk bottles and diapers. Sometime I suspect the starlets make the nannies wear diapers so that they do not have to leave their star babies’ side even for a second.

The most amusing aspect of celebrity pictures and videos for me is that it all seems like a miniature planetary system moving with their star in the middle who carries an invisible force field that both repels and attracts simultaneously.

That brings me to the main point of my doctoral thesis on “Observed modern social anthropology in the narrow context of movie stars and celebrities in the midst of the 21st century real time media.”

At the outermost edge of this star system are bystanders, sideliners and hangers-on who more often than not are ill-clad, sweaty men with unkempt hair, wearing shirts and trousers a size too large or too small and cheap sneakers or flip-flops or chappals or slippers as they are called in India. They know they can never be part of the circus unfolding before them and yet evince an inexplicable interest in the goings-on. Some of them seem to have an unarticulated question on their lips, “What wrong did I do that I am a hanger-on and not a star?” Some others look just utterly mystified at what they have chanced upon.

It is funny how you can see the quality and value of the clothing and accessories progressively decline with every orbit that is further away from the movie star. Those at the outermost edge of the system look dim and dull and lifeless quite like the real star system, as in the Sun and the planets. I would not be surprised if some of them are wondering in the privacy of their own minds, “How I wish I could puke on his shirt/her tank top?” or alternatively, “Can I get ever a piece of that?”

These celebrity pictures appear to create a sense of inadequacy among those watching from the sidelines, a feeling that they have been cruelly left out of the good things in life, a realization that life has dealt them a losing hand. Being there possibly lifts their spirit for a short while and creates a sense of optimism about possibilities in their own lives but that vanishes rather quickly as the glamor moves on, leaving them to grapple with the oppressive mundaneness of their own real existence.

Note to self: Wow! I do write crap.