Mayank Chhaya Daily

Rhawn Joseph v. NASA

A jelly donut-like rock on Mars found by NASA’s rover Opportunity (Photo: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Cornell, JPL, NASA)

Dunkin’ Donuts has decided to shelve its plans to give out franchises on Mars after NASA’s rover Opportunity reportedly found a jelly donut-like rock.

If there is a jelly donut on Mars, there ought to be policemen (cheap stereotypical jibe) and if there are policemen, there must be criminals and if there are criminals there must be a form of Martian society that engenders crime. Ergo, there’s life on Mars.

If only it was that simple, there would not be a writ of mandamus against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) by Rhawn Joseph, a Santa Clara, California based astrobiologist. At the heart of the writ is the contention by Dr. Joseph that NASA’s rover team “inexplicably failed” to investigate what that jelly donut-like object is. In suing NASA, Joseph has claimed that in his analysis the object could well be “a mushroom-like fungus, a composite organism consisting of colonies of lichen and cyanobacteria, and which on Earth is known as Apothecium.” Or in simple terms, a biological organism possibly indicating the existence of some form of life.

The implication in Joseph’s writ seems to be that for whatever reasons NASA has either chosen not to fully investigate the object or, if it has, it is not letting the world know what it really is. If it is a biological organism, its implications are supposed to be enormous from scientific, philosophical, cultural and religious standpoints. I say “supposed to be” because I really do not know why life elsewhere should change anything. Earth alone has been home to some truly bizarre life forms for a very long time and they all live together to the best possible extent.

If life could evolve on a planet (Earth) whose distance from the sun varies between 91 million miles (146 million km) at its closest to 94.5 million miles (152 million km) at its farthest, there is nothing terribly breathtaking about life in some form evolving on Mars. At its closest, Mars is 128 million miles (206 million km) from the sun. On average, Mars is 141 million miles (228 million km) from the sun. Sunlight takes 8 minutes to reach Earth and a little over 12 minutes to reach Mars. At the speed of light (186,000 miles per second—about 300,000 kilometers per second) this is a considerable gap but I am guessing it should not make much difference in helping life evolve there if all other life-inducing conditions have existed on Mars at some point.

The Rhawn Joseph v. NASA is an interesting story in so much as it helps find out if NASA has been on to something and keeping from us. Purely as a realization that there may be some biology happening there, I don’t think we should go into paroxysms. We know our planet is bursting with life. It is almost as if there is not a corner on this planet where there is no life. People get excited about life elsewhere for understandable reasons because one of the outcomes of such a discovery would be a direct challenge, if not negation altogether, of humankind’s fixed ideas about things in the universe. We are a race that wants to be unique and yet, at the same time, desperate to be common.

It requires no scientific training to know that if there is life on Mars, it is unlikely to harbor any anthropic ideas. It would be tragic if life elsewhere turns out to be similar to us in that its members indulge in drag racing and drunk driving or sticking their tongues out and twerking.

Coming back to the jelly donut lawsuit, I have closely looked at the images that NASA has released of the spot where the object has been found. The first image below is before and after taken 12 sols apart at the same spot.

I have cropped the spot in question from the two days to see if there is any disturbance in Martian surface that might indicate a meteor falling. All rocks and pebbles look pretty much undisturbed to me. That makes one question whether the object is something the NASA rover’s wheels might have scooped up or even it is something that fell from the sky. On the face of it, it would not look that way, especially because the surface around it looks identical 12 sols apart. To lend my deduction some authenticity I have even circled and arrowed the spot.

As you can see, everything around the object looks undisturbed. That may, just may, suggest that the object might have actually grown there and eventually withered away. Or another plausible explanation could be that after ten years on Mars Opportunity might have overcome its constipation. (Pardon my mocking).

Whichever way one looks at it, this is a terrific story. All parties involved need to be commended for a serious approach to what is truly a remarkable accomplishment for a section of the human race.

Reading ‘Indian Home Rule’ on Gandhi’s death anniversary

 

MK by MC

On the 66th anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination today, I decided to randomly read his lean discourse called ‘Indian Home Rule.’ I could do so thanks to the Gandhi Heritage Portal, a solid resource of all things Gandhi here.

‘Indian Home Rule’ is written in a format that is like an imaginary dialogue between the reader (who is Gandhi) and the editor (who is also Gandhi). It was an unusually inventive way to write a book in 1910 that contains so much of Gandhi’s core ideas.

In particular, I was struck by the way he explains what the whole idea of the British rule is and how it is able to hold India. In the chapter titled ‘Why was India Lost?” he says, “The English have not taken India; we have given it. They are not in India because of their strength but because we keep them.”

He then describes the whole colonial rule essentially as a trade and commerce enterprise. He quotes Napoleon as describing the English as a “nation of shop keepers.” He calls it a “fitting description” and says the whole British enterprise was trade and commerce. If it had an army, it was employed to protect that enterprise. “It was unhampered by questions of morality. Its object was to in increase its commerce and make money,” Gandhi writes.

“Many problems can be solved by remembering that money is their God,” he says. He even says that the English want to “convert the whole world into a vast market for their goods.”

If I could marry what Gandhi said about the British and what the astute British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard says about colonization, it would be “The English were a bunch of traders with a flag.” See that bit in Izzard’s video here. (It is only here that you would find Izzard married to Gandhi in a manner of speaking.)

Gandhi would have been a great man merely on the basis of the enormous body of his writings.

The Household’s poor financial management

Her Majesty The Queen (Photo: Print screen image from the Official Website of the British Monarchy)

Members of the British royal family will have to do much more than harrumph and inaudibly clap in order to manage their finances better. They will also have to do a little more than every member of the Household saying everything that approximately sounds like “Poor chap, took a bit of a tumble theh…”

In a report Britain’s Committee of Public Accounts has made observations about the Household* which in lesser mortals might have led to foreclosing on their properties. Here is what it says:

There are three areas in particular where we feel the Household and the Treasury have fallen short.

First, the Household spent more than it took in. Net expenditure (£33.3m) was greater than the Grant (£31 million) in 2012-13. The Household had to draw down £2.3 million from its £3.3 million Reserve Fund, leaving a balance of only £1.0 million at 31 March 2013, a historically low level of contingency.

The Household needs to get better at planning and managing its budgets for the longer term – and the Treasury should be more actively involved in reviewing what the Household is doing.

Second, the Household is not looking after nationally important heritage properties adequately. Back in March 2012, 39% of the Royal estate was assessed as below what the Household deemed to be an acceptable condition. Now it is likely to be worse, with some properties in a dangerous or deteriorating condition.

The Household must get a much firmer grip on how it plans to address its maintenance backlog. It has not even costed the repair works needed to bring the estate back to an acceptable condition, and the Treasury did not require an estimate. Again, the Treasury has an oversight role here.

Finally, there is scope for the Household to generate more income and reduce its costs further. It’s certainly good news that the Royal Household has increased its income in 2012-2013 to £11.6 million. However, we think it could do more. Since 2007-08, the Household has cut its net costs by 16% in real terms, but 11% of that was achieved by increasing income, and just 5% by reducing expenditure. With better commercial expertise in place, we think there is room to do more with less, reducing costs further and supporting The Queen’s programme more effectively."

Reading the report about the Household’s financial troubles offers an amusing insight into the lives of the inordinately rich and the unforgivably privileged. That there was only 1 million pounds left for the contingency is indeed a matter of great concern. It’s the kind of money that Mukesh Ambani’s son can wire without feeling anything missing from his allowance. (Literary exaggeration. Not to be taken literally because Mukesh Ambani’s son is not actually going to wire that money and the Household is not going to actually accept it).

One way that the Household can generate some revenue is by sending their bowler hats out to the obscenely new rich in former British colonies. Of course, the royal hats will need a royal carrier.

* The Household is an umbrella term to describe various royal departments that manage the British royal affairs, including “royal animals” and their royal dung.

Rahul Gandhi came armed with Rahul Gandhi

Congress Party’s vice president Rahul Gandhi (A TV grab from Times Now)

Rahul Gandhi came to his career’s first news interview, with Arnab Goswami of Times Now, accompanied by Rahul Gandhi. It was like a doppelganger whom only Rahul could see and explain to Arnab.

It was rather instructive that in the first 15 minutes or so of his interview Gandhi answered three questions invoking Rahul Gandhi as if he was some apocryphal character trying to divine himself into reality.

It was also amusing to hear Arnab insert “Rahul” in his questions as if making sure that he was indeed talking to one and that he had not imagined this whole conversation.

The Times Now editor-in-chief asked Gandhi “Are you avoiding a direct face-off with Narendra Modi?”

Gandhi: To understand that question you have to understand a little bit about who Rahul Gandhi is and what Rahul Gandhi's circumstances have been and if you delve into that you will get an answer to the question of what Rahul Gandhi is scared of and what he is not scared of.

As Arnab persisted to draw Gandhi out over Modi’s daily needling of him, Gandhi said, “… I will answer the question and that will give you some insight into how Rahul Gandhi thinks. For that I will have to expand a little bit about my growing up, how I grew up and the circumstances in which I grew up.”

Arnab asked him again, “ a) What is your view of Narendra Modi? b) Are you afraid of losing to Narendra Modi, Rahul please answer my question as specifically as you can?

Gandhi: What Rahul Gandhi wants to do, is Rahul Gandhi and millions of youngsters in this country want to change the way the system in this country works. What Rahul Gandhi wants to do is empower the women in this country, wants to unleash the power of these women, I mean we talk about being a superpower…

From the first 20 minutes of the interview that I watched, I found a young man  trying to find some extenuating circumstance for a life of privilege he was born to through enlightened ambiguities. One felt that at any point Arnab could ask, “Rahul, Who is this Rahul Gandhi that you keep referring to? I thought I had come to interview Rahul Gandhi and not Rahul Gandhi.”

Granting an extensive interview to a news anchor who loves his voice to the exclusion of all others with the possible exception of his own echo was an interesting strategy. The idea of Gandhi’s media managers appeared to be to take head-on a media figure who enjoys considerable currency among the age group of Indians who tend to deride Rahul’s privileged existence in unvarnished ways. In doing so, Gandhi’s managers might have reasoned, let us get the elephant out of the room first.

Arnab lends himself to often vicious critique because he has confected a television persona that swings between that of a genuinely interested news anchor and a ratings-conscious hack entertainer. He is a tempting target for ridicule. However, he did ask Rahul many right questions in so much as they represent the popular angst among the very demographic of the Indian electorate that the politician is reaching out to. Arnab did a terrific job of first landing the big get much to the envy of other self-absorbed anchors and then managing to ask specific questions of a man who loves porous generalities.

In the final analysis, such interviews are of no consequence because both the parties come armed with their particular agenda—the journalist with the agenda to ask tough questions to burnish his or her own image and the politician to counter them with infuriating non-sequiturs and suspicious sequiturs. And a good television is had by all.

Revisiting ‘Empire of the Stars’

Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Pic: University of Chicago)

Since black holes are in the news thanks to Stephen Hawking’s new assertions, I am revisiting an excellent biography of Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar by Arthur Miller called ‘Empire of the Stars’.

As Miller says in the very title this is a book about “Obsessions, Friendship and Betrayal in the quest for Black Holes”. It was as a 19-year-old student onboard a ship from Madras to London in August, 1930, that this preternaturally brilliant and meticulous mind worked out what is regarded as the first mathematical description of black holes.

What Subrahmanyan developed was an extraordinary calculation for a scientist at any age but for a 19-year-old student it was stunning. In simple terms what he said was that certain stars in their death spiral would collapse into what can only be called nothingness. In specific terms what he said relates to the white dwarf state of a star. Chandrasekhar worked out the greatest mass limit exceeding which a white dwarf its final fate would be a spectacular and violent collapse, ending in a black hole. This limit, 1.44 times the mass of our Sun, was named the Chandrasekhar Limit.

This is how Professor Miller describes it: “Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s flash of inspiration came when he was an unknown nineteen-year-old in the hot summer of 1930. In ten minutes, sitting in a deck chair overlooking the Arabian sea, Chandra (as he is universally known) carried out some calculations that augured a disturbing fate for the small, dense stars known as white dwarfs. At the time scientists assumed that white dwarfs were dead stars in their final state. Those that had been found had more or less the mass of the Sub but were no bigger than Earth. Chandra’s calculations showed there was an upper limit to the mass of these white dwarfs. Any star more massive than that when it burned out would not end its life as an inert rock but would begin an endless process of collapse, crunched by its own gravity into a singularity—a miniscule point of infinite density and zero volume, many trillions of times smaller that the period at the end of this sentence and many trillions of times denser than Earth. Only one person understood the full importance of Chandra’s discovery; Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, the greatest astrophysicist in the world at that time.”

Miller’s book concerns itself with the ugly conflict that the young Chandra ran into with Eddington for reasons as petty as prejudice bred by a sense of superiority that propelled the English to colonize the world. The Chandra-Eddington conflict is one of science’s great dramas drawing on many human frailties, envy and prejudice being the two most important ones.

Of course, Chandra, as he was popularly known, went on to work on a large number of complex questions throughout his long career and produced a body of work that would be enviable for some of the greatest minds of science.

Shireesh Kanekar: 50 years as a writer

Writer, standup comic and journalist Shireesh Kanekar

When Shireesh Kanekar describes his unusually witty grandson Anish (daughter Shweta’s son) he sounds as if he is taking about himself. The other day during one of our usual long phone conversations Shireesh was telling me about the four-year-old’s quick retorts.

The way Shireesh described Anish—and he is well known for absolutely accurate recounting of things—prompted me to say this to him:

“It is as if in Anish you have reincarnated in your own lifetime.”

I thought that was a rather clever way to put it; the idea of someone having reincarnated while still alive.

To which Shireesh had an even more compelling response. He said, “Either that or I am already dead and still unaware of it.”

Both of us agreed that it could be a potentially powerful plot for at least a short story if not a full-fledged novel. Both of us also agreed that it is good enough that we recognize its potential but really do nothing about it. The plot could have been about a dead writer’s reincarnation in his own grandson and how the writer does not know that he is dead. He continues to engage with life as if he is still alive.

Speaking of writing and writers, Shireesh casually mentioned that 2014 marks the 50th year of his writing career. With close to 40 books and thousands of newspaper columns and articles, apart from more than 3000 standup shows around the world, Shireesh’s has been a life in the written and spoken word. Apart from our natural attraction for the irreverent, what connects him and I is the idea that everything in life is about telling a story. Telling a good story redeems everything.

Shireesh’s autobiography ‘Mee Majha Mala’

It is fitting that his autobiography in Marathi ‘Mee Majha Mala’ has been published recently and is doing very well. Directly or indirectly, Shireesh has been the protagonist of a lot of his writing but the autobiography gives him a great opportunity to put his life in the center of his literary journey. I have not yet read it but from what I gather by talking to him and having known him as well as I do I am sure it is a brutally accurate and extremely readable account of his life.

One of my minor complaints with Shireesh has been that he has not employed his obvious talents as a writer to write novels. That may have something to do with his career as a journalist, as someone used to dealing with real life the way it is. But I don’t think it is a convincing enough reason. At 71, Shireesh retains enough literary fertility to spawn at least a couple of novels.

Fifty years of anything is a long time and if it involves writing as a fulltime career it is even more so. But he has managed to produce consistently high quality work whose only test should be whether or not it is readable. And Shireesh is nothing if not eminently readable.

As a tribute to him I republish an interview I did with him a couple of years ago as well this black and white of picture of us together standing on our desk in our office in Bombay sometime in 1985-86. This was four years before John Keating (a superb Robin Williams) stood on top of his desk in ‘Dead Poets Society’ (1989) to tell his students not to conform and develop a different vantage point on life.

Shireesh and I in 1985-86 standing on our own desk in Bombay (Picture: Palashranjan Bhaumick)

Shireesh’s interview:

Given a choice Shireesh Kanekar would describe himself as a writer first, a standup comic next and a journalist last. He has been all three for the better part of the last nearly four decades.

Writing is something that he revels in, comedy is something that he makes others revel in and journalism is something that he hopes no one revels in. With 38 books in Marathi, more than 3000 standup shows of his four distinctly different routines and a few thousand daily and weekly columns, Kanekar has been astonishingly prolific.

It is a measure of the 69-year-old writer’s success that he has become a genre of writing in Marathi known as the “Kanekar style” which many younger writers and columnists imitate and emulate, mostly without knowing it and always without acknowledging it. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but I also want to be paid for it,” is how he once described it to me.

Shireesh’s books are predominantly drawn from newspaper writings known for their incisive and humorous perspective on popular culture, including Hindi cinema, Hindi cinema music and cricket. His admirers believe that given his brilliant storytelling skills and captivating literary style he could have transitioned into a great novelist. He has, however, chosen to remain a satirist because that gives him the license to hold forth on anything and everything.

A list of Shireesh’s works can be found here but it has not been updated with his last five books.

A resident of Mumbai’s Shivaji Park neighborhood, Shireesh says although he has many friends, he has always preferred his own personal shell where he can do back and forth with himself. “I like to believe that I cover all sides of an argument myself and hence do not need a second opinion,” he says.

I have known Shireesh for over a quarter century and regard him as one of my closest friends who expects no explanation and to whom none is offered.

Here is a short interview with him, if only to introduce him to those who do not speak or read his language.  He gave up English journalism quite sometime ago because, “It is like pursuing a woman who plays so hard to get. Marathi, on the other hand, courts me.” Some day I will write a bigger piece about him.

Q: First explain what it takes to be so prolific. I think those who do not write for a living do not recognize how hard it is to produce so consistently.

A: I am grateful to you for showing keen interest in my writing world. There seems to be someone other than me to be impressed with my penmanship. We are in a micro-minority. I have entered into a secret pact with myself that I'll continue to write till I drop dead or am physically incapacitated because I realized some years back that I truly live my life only when I write. I am delirious. Nothing else matters. I do not show my writing to anybody before or after it is published. Arrogant as it may sound, nobody's opinion really matters to me. Everybody is welcome to react the way he or she wants but that does not mean that I should take a serious note of it. When Oscar Wilde was asked by his publisher to make certain changes in his manuscript, Wilde said, "How can I improve upon a masterpiece?"

Q: Does it frustrate you that since you write in a language that is not English it makes it economically unviable to survive on it?

A: Surviving on writing in a language other than English in India is nearly impossible. But I am proud to say that I did it for good number of years. I am to the best of my knowledge the highest paid Marathi columnist. It has taken years of sweat and toil to reach this position. The credit for my writing style, which majority of readers find young and fresh despite having written for 38 years without a break, goes to the Almighty.

Q: Your writing is almost entirely based on your rather unusual perspective, point of view, and assessment of life. At what point did you consciously know that that would be your genre of writing?

A: I don't think I have made any conscious efforts to write the way I do. That's me. My admirers fondly refer to my writings as 'Kanekar style.' I don't exactly know what it means. I write what comes naturally to me. No posing, no literary acrobatics. If the readers like my writings, I like to believe that they like me. It is a soothing feeling especially for someone who has lived a loveless life.

Q: How do you think critics treat your writing?

A: I don't think that critics have taken note of my writing and its impact on the readers. That, I believe, happens to most of the humorous writers all over the globe. P.G. Wodehouse is not mentioned in the same breath as Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Earnest Hemingway and many more.

Q: Do you feel that people tend to consider satirical or witty writing not literary enough?

A: Humor takes a back seat when it comes to literary classics. Humor is always regarded as an escape from the tragedies of life. Sad but true. But still I believe that I don't have the recognition that I deserve which is not to be confused with my following and popularity. I have authored 38 books so far. By itself, I concede, the number does not place me on a high pedestal.

Q: A lot of your books are compilations of your newspaper writings. Do you expand those writings for the book format or they are mostly as were?

A: While compiling articles to make a book I do not make any changes. One, I am too lazy for that. Two, I do not see scope for improvement.

Q: There is a general belief among your readers that there are several novels sitting in you. How come you have not chosen to write them?

A: I don't think that I am cut out for novels. The canvass is too big for my comfort. Once (the preeminent Marathi writer and satirist) Pu. La. Deshpande was asked why he did not try his hand at writing novels. He said: "How would I remember the name of a character which I wrote two hundred pages back?" There is more humor than fact in his reply. Each writer has his own field. A novelist is not a poet and a short story writer is not an essayist, unless he is supremely endowed.

Q: Would you find yourself more comfortable as a short story writer or as a regular novelist?

A: Yes, I secretly believe that I would make a successful short story writer. I have that stuff in me. But mentally I am not in a frame of mind where I can jump into a new field. Your health, physical and mental surroundings and many other factors take decisions on your behalf. At 69 one develops that laidback attitude.

Q: You also have a very successful career as a standup comic, more like an observational humorist. Is there an overlap between the writer and the comic?

A: My writing and my standup comedy are two separate things. Wit, which is a part of me whether I am writing, performing or talking in general, is bound to be a common factor. What is humor? It is a way of life, your perspective on things.

Q: How would you describe the state of Marathi popular literature? And how would you describe your position in that?

A: The popular literature today is not as popular as it used to be in yesteryears. The convent educated Marathi boys and girls don't read Marathi literature at all. Mostly those above fifty read. They constitute the major chunk of our readership .I am very well known. In fact, those who run Marathi Mandals in America have read me and hence know me. So I get shows. My standing in literature has helped me get shows. I am a writer first and everything else comes second.

What?! No black holes? What do we do know?

Black Hole by MC

The problem with black holes is that they are black and they are holes. For an averagely intelligent human this can mean nothing more than, well, nothing; as in since it is black and it’s a hole it does not exist. So what’s the point of exulting over proving that something that is non-existent does not exist?

The average human mind, which constitutes a vast majority on this planet, cannot look at “nothing” and infer through celestial perturbations that there is indeed something.

Stephen Hawking, the superstar physicist who is among the creators of black-hole theory, now says there are no black holes. To which the average mind is unlikely to say, “What?! No black holes? What do we do know? Where do we banish our worst enemies?”

The key feature of the profound debate about black holes has centered around the idea of a sharply defined rim called event horizon which is supposed to be so unimaginably powerful that nothing, including light, can escape it. That has been the popular understanding of the idea of an event horizon so far.

One of the major challenges of a black hole’s rim has been the violation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity,according to which as pointed out by Zeeya Merali in Nature,  the event horizon is an unremarkable space. At the heart of the debate is what is called the black-hole firewall paradox. Einstein’s theory says that anyone passing through the event horizon may not feel much initially but eventually they would be stretched into shreds and finally be crushed. In short, not a very pleasant feeling.

However, a thought experiment done by theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute and his colleagues seems to produce a wholly disruptive result. They approached it from the standpoint of the laws of quantum mechanics which rule the world of subatomic particles and concluded that the event horizon is actually a region full of energy, sort a of a firewall. So unlike Einstein’s imaginary astronaut, who would get stretched into shreds, Polchinski’s imaginary astronaut would be burnt. For the averagely intelligent there is not much of a choice between being shredded and toasted but for physicists it changes everything.

This is what Merali quotes Hawking as saying::

“There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,” Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, “enables energy and information to escape from a black hole”. A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century. “The correct treatment,” Hawking says, “remains a mystery.” 

What Hawking is proposing now to ensure that neither the general theory of relativity nor quantum mechanics gets violated seems remarkably simple. He argues that the event horizon is not what we perceive it to be. “A different resolution of the paradox is proposed, namely that gravitational collapse produces apparent horizons but no event horizons behind which information is lost,” Hawking says in his paper on the arXiv preprint server. In other words, the information that we thought it is lost is not lost but merely regurgitated by the black hole. As it happens with things regurgitated, we would not able to tell what the original matter looked like before it was scrambled. In this scenario, the light once sucked in by the black hole does try to escape but is trapped at the apparent horizon before eventually being released in some unrecognizable form.

If none of this makes any sense to you, there is nothing I can do to help. Get in touch with Professor Hawking. I understand it enough to think that I understand it. Now crack that paradox if you can.

Anjan Sundaram’s ‘Stringer’

I suppose there is some grace in being rendered into so niggardly an existence that buying books seems like a reckless luxury. So one has to be content with reading free excerpts that publishers give out to tease buyers into buying books. Or, alternatively, one has to reserve a copy at the neighborhood library in the hope that you will get to it before senior citizens do.

Such thoughts come to mind this morning as I read free excerpts from Anjan Sundaram’s much celebrated book ‘Stringer’. Sundaram was on The Daily Show last night telling Jon Stewart about his decision on a whim to visit Congo* and report from an enormously resource rich African country ravaged by violence for decades.

It is weird that every time someone mentions the Congo, the devastatingly telling title of a famous book by Edward Behr pops up in my mind: “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?” I read Behr’s brilliant account of the conflict in Congo in the late 1970s. The brutally practical but unforgivably insensitive question was asked of the European survivors of a siege in Stanleyville in eastern Congo in November, 1964.

This was one of the books that subconsciously made me want to be a journalist. As I look back over my 32 years in the profession I do have to seriously wonder if Behr and I are members of the same profession. Sure, Behr was a great journalist. As for me, well, I read free excerpts of books which I cannot afford to buy and write about them in a blog that practically no one reads other than my brilliantly well-read and scholarly nephrologist friend, Dr. Charles Langs.

Coming back to Sundaram—because this post is about him—whatever little one has read of his writing in his account out of the same Congo, tells me that he can write in that spare yet evocative Naipaulian style. The description of his book on his website reads: “In the powerful travel-writing tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and V.S. Naipaul, a haunting memoir of a dangerous and disorienting year of self-discovery in one of the world's unhappiest countries.” It must be brilliant to be Naipaul.

The title of the book is a very familiar term in my profession to describe those reporters who are not in the formal employment of any media outlet but they are tied to them by an invisible string. A stringer is basically a journalist without any benefits other than starvation wages. That string can be snapped any time.

Congo is a terribly tragic story where some five million people have been killed for reasons which no longer make sense, if they did indeed make sense at all even when Behr wrote his masterpiece. Blessed with rich natural resources this country in the heart of Africa has inspired many writers, the most famous, of course, being Joseph Conrad and Naipaul. In a piece for the New York review of Books in June, 1975, Naipaul wrote: “The Congo, which used to be a Belgian colony, is now an African kingdom and is called Zaire. It appears to be a nonsense name, a sixteenth-century Portuguese corruption, some Zairois will tell you, of a local word for “river.” So it is as if Taiwan, reasserting its Chinese identity, were again to give itself the Portuguese name of Formosa. The Congo River is now called the Zaire, as is the local currency, which is almost worthless.”

Here is an excerpt from Sundaram’s book:

My posts are known to lack cohesion as well as literary or philosophical center. This post is an example of that. I have just put some lines together in the hope that I successfully go through my daily motion of writing something, anything.

* It used to be called the Congo but I find that most people no longer use ‘the’ any more.

Shudder to embark on an experiment

As an experiment I have decided to watch every single news video during a given 24-hour news cycle on the leading Indian channel NDTV. The actual experiment will take place sometime in the near future but in the interim I am carrying out several dry runs. One such dry run is going on as I write this blog.

The overriding feeling that one gets watching everything is that life in India is an unending frenzy of contentiousness. I am watching videos in no particular order. The first one I picked this morning was a brief interview by NDTV’s lead and omnipresent anchor Barkha Dutt with a popular poet-cum-standup comic turned politician called Dr. Kumar Vishwas. The primary reason why Dr. Vihswas is under severe media glare is because he has decided to contest the upcoming parliamentary election from the constituency of Amethi, a bastion of India’s most admired and derided political family of the Gandhis. Rahul Gandhi, who could become India’s Prime Minister should his Congress Party win big (unlikely), is being challenged by Dr. Vishwas on every claim on behalf of the newly formed Aam Admi Party ( AAP-Ordinary People’s Party). That is the background to this story.

Over the years in his avatar as a comic, Dr. Vishwas has said things which pander to coarse, sexist and racist impulses that often dominate such audiences. Some of those utterances are now coming back to bite his behind. One in particular is about nurses from the southern Indian state of Kerala. The bit that he is shown doing on a video is unambiguously sexist and racist. It is deep fried in bigotry that runs the length and breadth of India when it comes to skin color. People from Kerala tend to have a darker complexion than those from Northern India. The skin color is nothing more than a fact of nature and has no bearing on anything whatsoever. And yet it is at the heart of the kind of bigotry that infects both public and private discourses in India.

In this particular material Dr. Vishwas talks about how earlier when men who were hospitalized used to feel assured because of the nurses from Kerala, whom he describes as “kali-pili” meaning “black and yellow”. I don’t quite get the relevance of “pili” other than being used as a term of derision. The ostensibly humorous point he is making by implication is that since these nurses were of a darker complexion, they were not attractive which in turn would inspire “sisterly” feelings in male patients. In case there was any doubt about what he really meant he compounds it by saying that these days even nurses are from North India and therefore, by implication, lighter complexioned and hence more attractive. He jokes that when they take a male patient’s pulse, it races. The audience, consisting of mainly Hindi-speaking North Indians, loves this.

One can perhaps argue that this is just a throwaway bit as part of a standup routine in which one must not read profound sociocultural prejudice. May be so but when you consider the fact that versions of this prejudice run deep in Indian society you are forced to think of the larger malaise. Now that as a politician Dr. Vishwas presumes to unseat Gandhi, whom he calls a “Yuvraj” or a prince, he is open to all sorts of scrutiny. He has apologized but simultaneously contextualized his remarks as part of a passing comic routine. For the next few months India will see such sideshows in large numbers because of the election season and especially because the AAP members seek to upend status quos everywhere.

Thinking about how much verbiage I had to expend in order to explain a short news video I shudder to think the lengths I will have to go to to explain everything I watch in a 24-hour cycle. There are videos of a suspected suicide death by a prominent politician’s wife, India’s Home Minister calling Delhi’s Chief Minister “mad”, a 20-year-old gang-raped tied to a tree, a huge movie star explaining his political troubles, bald men complaining about a joke by Gandhi that involves selling combs to them and a well-known renunciate slapping a television journalist for asking a political question. The list goes on.

I am not sure when I might do this experiment because I need to find enough time to do so. Hopefully, it will be soon.

The meek shall be disinherited

If a new Oxfam report is any indication, the meek have already been disinherited in this world.About 700,00,000 people own half of the world’s wealth, according to Oxfam. That means 1 percent of the world’s population controls $110 trillion in wealth which is 65 times the total wealth of 3.5 billion people.

The key findings in the Oxfam report titled ‘Working for the few: Political capture and economic inequality’ come to coincide with the annual World Economic Forum in Davos where some of those very rich people get together and wonder about such issues.

The Oxfam findings are:

• Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.

• The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.

• The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.

• Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.

• The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.

• In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

The report also has a brief mention of India that says:

“India has seen its number of billionaires increase from less than 6 to 61 in the past decade, concentrating approximately $250bn among a few dozen people in a country of 1.2 billion. What is striking is the share of the country’s wealth held by this elite minority, which has skyrocketed from 1.8 percent in 2003 to 26 percent in 2008, though it declined in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

By some estimates, half of India’s billionaires acquired their wealth in ‘rent thick’ sectors.31 This means sectors where profits are dependent on access to scarce resources, made available exclusively through government permissions and therefore susceptible to corruption by powerful actors – as opposed to creation of wealth. Such sectors include real estate, construction, mining, and telecommunications. In fact, it is common knowledge that property development is India’s most opaque business, where enormous sums of illegal money exchange hands and little tax is collected.32 Wealth accrued from rents is made possible by the coaction of government and powerful groups, whereby the economic rules of the game are rigged in favor of elites.

Despite incredible economic gains by a few dozen people in India, poverty and inequality remain rampant. While the number of billionaires has multiplied by ten, government spending on the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable groups in society remains remarkably low. For example, India’s public spending on healthcare is just one percent of GDP.33 The Asian Development Bank’s recently released (assessing country expenditure on poor and economically vulnerable groups) ranked India 23 out of 35 countries in the region. Even among the 19 low- to middle-income countries, India ranked in the bottom half, in twelfth place.

Corruption and loopholes mean that tax revenues necessary to address inequality are either too low or misappropriated. The fortunes amassed by India’s new billionaires are often hidden through shell companies established in foreign countries, making it easy to evade taxes. A recent working paper by Oxfam India demonstrates that ending the inheritance tax (in 1985) and limiting the wealth tax (in 1993) to non-productive assets (thereby excluding financial assets) has driven a low tax-to-GDP ratio and is permitting the much greater concentration of wealth. The tax structure in India is also highly regressive, with only 37.7 percent of total taxes coming from direct taxation such as income, profits, and capital gains.”