South Asia Daily

A few observations about Hardik Patel’s agitation

I was requested by a major media outlet to do a piece on the political ferment in Gujarat caused by the 22-year-old Hardik Patel and the agitation of the Patel community he has whipped up. I chose not to do it for several reasons, one of which is that I do not know what to make of it. Of course, having been a hack seasoned and marinated for over three decades by journalistic juices I could have written a cogent enough piece that would have been read by a few people.

I need to clarify what I mean when I say I do not know what to make of it. I fully understand the forces that create a sudden outburst of socio-political disquiet that one is witnessing in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat unleashed by a youthful braggart. The reason I hesitate is because I am not on the ground experiencing the phenomenon of a communal uprising led by a young man of uncertain ideas.

I recently spent three months in Gujarat. often in the very areas from where Hardik Patel hails. Among people of the Saurashtra region I did encounter a considerable feeling of having been let down by the powers that be. The anger did not seem to be yet directed at Modi specifically but there was an allusion to him. It was still a stage where those disillusioned were wondering whether it was a result of their own personal failure or something broader and larger.

My first reaction on reading and watching the news reports about the massive rally that Patel organized in my hometown of Ahmedabad was that after a long time the state was witnessing the rise of a voice other than Narendra Modi’s. Over the past 15 years or so Gujarat has pretty much lapped up Modi as he thundered, lambasted, lampooned, mocked, satirized and insulted to the exclusion of any other voice. In a sense—and this is whether or not Hardik Patel remains a long-term political force—we are looking at significant erosion of Modi as an unassailable political presence in Gujarat. This is quite apart from the fact that Modi had outgrown Gujarat by the time he set out for Delhi.

In the emergence of Hardik Patel the much feared Narendra Modi-Amit Shah combine (the latter being Modi’s confidant and powerful president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party) is discovering the limits of their raw street clout. It is still entirely possible for the two men to remote-manage the affairs of the state but the ground has clearly shifted since the two shifted to the capital. Gujarat has a history of agitators such as Hardik Patel suddenly rising and then getting co-opted into the unique complacency that comes with being part of the very establishment they were agitating against. The kind of instant revolution that Patel appears to be embarked on, in no small measure fueled by an impulse for violence, is by its very nature short-lived.

One can see that the young man is out of his depth just as soon as he begins to speak. Bombast is useful only up to a point. It may work at rallies but after a while revolution of any kind, even a fake one, demands detail and thinking. At this point his entire strategy seems to be to let the prime minister know that he should either humor them for his own political good or earn their wrath because the Patel community was the one that built him up when he was in Gujarat. It is like small investors in a megacorporation now demanding a high dividend. That calculation is flawed simply because Modi is no longer just ruling a captive state that was Gujarat but a deeply diverse and politically fragmented country. In his mind he knows that only about 31 percent of the Indian electorate voted for him and his party in 2014.

More than anything else what the Patel agitation does is seriously threaten to undermine the success of the much touted “Gujarat model” of economic growth, which has been about industry-intensive policies. If nearly 18 million Patels out of Gujarat’s 63 million population can be made to think they have got a raw deal under this model, it could be seriously problematic both for the model and those who propagate it. It would be extravagant for Hardik Patel to claim that he speaks for the entire Patel community of Gujarat but he can certainly create that perception with some generous help from the broadcast media. We live in the time of optics and the optics as presented by the current agitation do not look good at all for anyone, the least of all the prime minister.

Much consternation has been expressed about the “mysterious” rise of a 22-year-old underachiever who now appears to set the political discourse. I couldn’t possibly tell you what explains that but that is not as important as the fact that he now exists on the periphery of realpolitik and could disrupt a few calculations.

At the same time, there is every possibility that the agitation would loose its edge like many such agitations before it and merge indistinguishably into the larger national disquiet. For now it is enjoying a news cycle, something that all agitators do for a while. Show me a revolutionary and I will show you a jaded, disillusioned old person some years later. Revolution wears off like everything else.

Of “Asian” and “anchor babies”

As ridiculous as it is, the term Asian in America generally describes Chinese. It is one of those lazy American constructs that has struck roots in defiance of geographical and ethnic realities. I have come across Americans many times who look at me flabbergasted when I describe myself as Asian.

With the embarrassing debate on “anchor babies” and whether they are mainly Asian (meaning Chinese) rages on among the Republican Party’s aspirants for president, let me point out a few elementary facts. Asia is the largest and most populous continent on the planet. It consists of 48 countries as recognized by the United Nations and six other states where a total of 4.4 billion people live. It is home to at least three of the oldest civilizations in the world, thousands of years old, where hundreds of languages and dialects are spoken. Incidentally, it is also the birthplace of all religions, including Christianity in whose name and under whose cover many of the Republican candidates routinely take shots at others. I can go on with many staggering facts about Asia but these should be enough to illustrate my point.

So when American politicians such as Jeb Bush claim that “anchor babies” are mainly Asian, meaning Chinese, he needs to take a crash course in elementary geography or he can read this blog. As for the debate on “anchor babies”, meaning babies that are born to parents who reside in the United States without proper documents, I think the candidates need to go back in history only little a bit when Europeans began coming here. One can be fairly certain that just as the officers of the British East India Company landed unmolested on what are now Indian shores, they did not come to America with passports or multiple entry business visas or visitors’ visas stamped by the native population. They just got off their boats and began living wherever they landed, either in America or India. As the great British comic Eddie Izzard points out what the Brits had going for them was that they had a flag.

The sacredness that is attached to passports and visas and how they lend humans the dignity of a nationality is a relatively modern idea. I grant that in the absence of those we will have anarchy but let us not become so completely dickish about them either that we lose our essential humanity.

That said the issue of babies being born for the specific purpose of gaining US citizenship does exist in America and it is said to be more prevalent among the Chinese visitors. However, figures are not so staggering as to alter America’s demographic balance in a manner that would necessarily defeat the white jingoistic male politician. That may happen because of those “legal” immigrants, who came through a proper process that is so loved by many politicians,  and their natural born children. There is a simple rule about electoral politics. You cannot kick someone in the groin and then ask for their votes. It just does not happen.

In a piece in The New York Times this morning, Josh Barro points out this:

“Although birth tourism is real, it’s not clear that it’s a significant social problem. News media accounts citing “industry publications” have put the number of annual births to birth tourists at 50,000 or 60,000, but the more reliable Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 9,075 births in the United States in 2013 to people who do not reside here. By definition, birth tourists return to their home countries, taking their American citizen children with them. They do not stay and place a continuing burden on public services.

It’s possible their children will return later, and after they turn 21, these young adults can start sponsoring their relatives for American citizenship. But while immigration skeptics typically worry about the fiscal burden from low-skill, low-income immigrants, birth tourism is available only to foreigners who have a fair amount of money already. A Rolling Stone article in February profiling a Chinese couple that traveled to Los Angeles to have a child estimated their expenses at $35,000.”

I am not sure about the etymology of ‘anchor babies’ but it may have to do with the belief that once they have babies here in America those unauthorized visiting parents have dropped an anchor to stay here. I could be wrong in my interpretation but I feel that to be the case. Xenophobia is always in the mix when it comes to electoral politics because it fires up the committed base and gives a candidate mouthing it early traction. Xenophobia can come couched in economics as in the H1B visas or in security as in undocumented people committing crimes. Some of that fear is well-founded but it is not well-founded because they lack the stamp of immigration legality but because they just happen to have criminal propensity. This is not an easy debate and it occurs in many democracies.

My only submission would be to stop insulting those who did not have the fortune of being born in America or other countries where living a decent life is relatively easy. You look around any of these countries and realize that other than randomness of nature most of those who were born in affluent countries had no qualification. So let’s cool it down.

This happened while watching ‘Mr. Turner’

The three paintings here happened while watching director Mike Leigh’s ‘Mr. Turner’. They have no relation to the great British master J M W Turner’s works. I merely painted these three in the interludes while watching the movies since last evening. I suppose it is enough for today.

It is not for everyone to illuminate the world

The Sunwalker by Mayank Chhaya

Not all verses can or should become full poetry. Some deserve to just stand alone. Lately, I have written quite a few. I prefer them these days because they have the virtue of brevity and therefore distilled thinking.

I have chosen the following few. The translation, I am afraid, is never as good as the original. It is not my case that the original are good but I like them.

 

कौन से ख़ौफ़ की गिरफ्त में हो तुम

जो दुआ में उठे हाथ से भी सर बचाते हो

What fright has gripped you

That you duck even at hands raised in prayer?

***

किस मसाइल-ए-हिन्द पे मैं जंग छेड़ दूँ

हर एक गली में लश्कर-ए-पायमाल मौजूद है

Which crisis in India should I wage war on

There are forces of destruction in every street

***

यह तो ज़रूरी नहीं के सब रोशन ज़माना करे

किसी को तो ज़ुल्मत से वाबस्तगी रखनी है

It is not for everyone to illuminate the world

We also need those who court darkness

***

अंतरिक्ष की ना ही कोई व्याख्या और ना ही कोई अर्थ

उसका वर्णन है असंभव और अस्तित्व भी व्यर्थ

Space has no definition, nor any meaning

Its description impossible, its existence futile

***

किनारे किनारे निकलते हैं वोह

इशारे इशारे समझते हैं वोह

मोम सा है वजूद उनका

शरारे शरारे पिघलते हैं वोह

She moves furtively

She communicates in hints

Her existence fragile like wax

She melts with every spark

Concluding my Trump-watching

I am not columnist Charles M. Blow and this blog is not The New York Times. What it means is that what I write here is hardly read and I am of zero consequence. That said, since I had already completed my piece below about Donald Trump before I read Blow’s ‘Enough is Enough’ column today, I might as well publish it.

My interest in Trump, as in life generally, has been of clinical nature in so much as I look at his campaign with surgical detachment. I have viewed his increasingly unfunny farce with rapidly depleting attention. Trump is the embodiment of a certain kind of quintessential American. He couldn’t have existed without the conniving and fertile socio-economic and cultural ecology that America offers. If he appears to be flourishing now with his forever unvarnished pronouncements, it is a measure of that ecology. One cannot denounce Trump without denouncing that ecology. I am not going to do it because my interest in the human species is at best desultory and my expectations from it in terms of standards of behavior non-existent.

With that out of the way, I am finished with Trump. I say this fully aware of my utter inconsequentiality to the human discourse generally and US discourse particularly.The man holds no curiosity for me even clinically. Unlike Blow I am not disengaging from Trump out of disgust but simply because even my detachment has worn off. TNN, I mean CNN, had him yesterday in some context and I went completely blank looking at his face. It was one of those natural switch-offs. He was saying something with his mouth pouched up but I saw only unique contortions of his face without my ears registering any sound at all. When that happens I move on to another sample.

He could well be the Republican Party’s nominee for president and eventually president of the United States. None of that will matter to me at any level at all. I feel zero need to counter him on anything. Mine is not the path of least resistance. Mine is the path of pure non-interest. My detachment has always been yogic.

I could easily analyze Trump’s evident success in commandeering a section of the popular American imagination. But what would be the point of that? None whatsoever. His vulgar self-assurance is in many ways a consequence of the conniving socio-economic and cultural ecology. I say more power to him because the multitude that follows him wants an agency through which they can live out their own angst and aspiration. In India, hundreds of millions have found it in Prime Minister Narendra Modi who too displays somewhat comparable smug self-assurance.

With that I conclude my Trump-watching.

A small step toward line of scarves

All scarves by Mayank Chhaya from his paintings

After considerable delay I am close to launching my line of scarves as step one of a bigger venture that will hopefully bring linen, furniture, shoes and lingerie. I have written about this before. The idea is to convert my entirely virtual paintings and artworks into actual merchandize. Here are the first six samples. I will offer scarves and neckerchiefs. I am yet to christen the line. That should happen soon.

I have also created a very basic website which is not yet named in terms of its own domain and not fully populated.

My idea is to offer prospective buyers an ability to choose a painting or an artwork on my website and specify the dimensions of the merchandize they are looking for. Of course, that is still some time away. I envision this as a venture where buyers can customize their goods.

For now though the focus is 100 percent on the eventual sale of my feature length documentary ‘Gandhi’s Song’ on the life and times of the 15th century Indian poet-philosopher Narsinh Mehta.

I have to be in order that the rest becomes

The world does indeed cease to exist for me when I am not looking at it. For instance, what exists for me as I write this post is whatever there is in my office. Everything else is a mere probability. If the footsteps or giggling of someone passing by is heard by me, it is because I am there to hear it. I have to be in order that the rest becomes.

The idea that the world exists only because individuals exist to cause it to exist and then experience it has been widely explored. Since these days I am immersed in selling my upcoming documentary ‘Gandhi’s Song’ my immediate reference to this view is a version that the great poet-philosopher Narsinh Mehta wrote over five centuries ago. One of the many things that Narsinh wrote was this verse towards the end of his life around 1471.

હું ખરે તું ખરો, હું વિના તું નહિ, હું રે હઈશ ત્યાંહાં લગી તું રે હઈશે,

હું જતે તું ગયો, અનિર્વાચી રહ્યો, હું વિના, કેહે, તુંને કોણ કેહશે?

You exist because I do,

If I don’t you don’t,

You will remain as long as I remain

If I cease, you cease, you remain unrecognized

Who will acknowledge you without me?

Of course, in Narsinh’s case the subject of his address is Krishna but it could easily be ported to mean what quantum mechanics says about quantum world. The headline of this piece is a version of what Narsinh has already said.

I have been thinking of all this—something I do all the time anyway—because I have begun reading again John Gribbin’s delightfully hard ‘In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat’. You would have noticed that I resort to Schrodinger’s Cat fairly regularly on my blog. That is because of what Niels Bohr said about quantum mechanics: 'If you are not shocked by quantum mechanics, you have not understood it'. I am shocked by it but I have still not understood it other than feeling a strange sense of elation at the idea that I have to be in order that the rest becomes. And that may not even be what quantum mechanics says.

Gribbin says quite categorically one should not look for any “eastern mysticism” or spoon bending or ESP (extra sensory perception)” while reading his book. In his assessment, “Quantum theory represents the greatest achievement of science , far more significant and of far more direct, practical use than relativity theory.” He also says this:

I first read this book 30 years ago and have since regularly attempted to get a handle on quantum theory without much success. There have been times when I have falsely concluded that I have intuitively understood it.

The prologue of the book has the title ‘Nothing is real’. If that is indeed the case, what’s the fuss about? If nothing real, everything is real within that non-real world.

It is only appropriate that I quote a fictional passage from a little play I wrote involving  Schrodinger. The scene is that Schrodinger is before a German judge answering the charge of having killed a cat. Here is how he responds as imagined by me, “It is an imaginary cat inside an imaginary box equipped with an imaginary radioactive substance from which an imaginary atom may or may not decay and the tube may or may not discharge and the hammer may or may not fall and the acid may or may not be released. Hence, the cat, which does not exist, may or may not die. And unless we open the box that also does not exist we may or may not know whether the imaginary cat is dead or alive.”

So nothing is real and everything is.

‘Thokna’ as in to kill or have vigorous sex

There ought to be some deeper psychology to the fact that the word "Thokna", widely used in Gujarati and Mumbai Hindi, means both to kill someone and to fuck someone. When I was growing up, apart from the second meaning, it also meant to beat someone up brutally. Now the most popular lexical interpretation of the word is to kill, particularly as a form of extra-judicial action reserved for those who have routinely killed people without ever having been within the reach of the law of the land in the normal course.

I thought of the word and its two meanings because of a promotional video of the Hindi TV news channel ‘Aaj Tak’ where anchor Anjana Om Kashyp asks vehemently, "क्या दावूद इब्राहिम को 'ठोकना' ही एकमात्र विकल्प है अब?" (Is killing Dawood Ibrahim the only option now?”).

Over the last two decades and more Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar, a former alleged Mumbai mobster and now one of the ten most wanted terrorists in the world said to be living in Karachi, Pakistan under the patronage of that country’s intelligence service, has routinely figured in the diplomatic dialogue between the Islamabad and New Delhi. Once again Ibrahim and his extradition has emerged as a major issue between the two.

To mark the cyclical revival of the issue, I republish a piece I wrote on May 17, 2010. Kaskar was 55 then. He is 60 plus now. He has entered an age, which by the ancient Indian tradition, is supposed to be a period of recompense in a philosophical sense and a time for deeper introspection. Not that Ibrahim is capable of either or both. Here is that piece:

It is a sinister distinction which those who lead the kind of life that Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar has led secretly enjoy but never publicly acknowledge.

Forbes magazine’s 10 most wanted fugitives features this 55-year-old boss of an alleged crime syndicate in South Asia at number 3. In the South Asian context only Osama bin Laden outdoes Ibrahim by being at the top of the list. At number 2 is Joquin Guzman, whom the magazine describes as the world’s most notorious drug trafficker.

I have been aware of Ibrahim since the early 1980s when I used to report on Bombay’s underworld. He was then a bit player reportedly working for the big daddies of the day, including Karim Lala and Haji Mastan. Given the kind of ambition that was raging inside him it was only a matter of time that this son of a former police constable would chart his own course. “Nam suna hai. Ladka thoda garam tabiyat ka hai (I have heard about him. He is a hot-headed young man),” was how Lala had once described Ibrahim to me when I met him during a police detention. Mastan, who consistently denied having led a life of crime but was always on the list of top police suspects of those engaged in smuggling and other crimes, was more dismissive of Ibrahim. “Aise to bahut chhokre ghum rahen hein (There are many youngsters like him roaming about),” was how Mastan had put it.

Now 25 years later, when both Lala and Mastan are dead, Ibrahim has way surpassed anything that the two men could ever dream of doing. Forbes says this about Dawood: “The most wanted man in India has for years led a 5,000-member criminal syndicate known as D-Company. The organized crime group has engaged in everything from narcotics to contract killing, working mostly in Pakistan, India and the United Arab Emirates. Ibrahim shares smuggling routes with al Qaeda, the U.S. government says, and has collaborated with both al Qaeda and its South Asian affiliate, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which pulled off the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, possibly with Ibrahim's help. Ibrahim is suspected of having organized the 1993 Bombay bombings that killed 257 people and wounded 713. Though the Pakistani government denies it, Ibrahim is probably in Pakistan, where he has important ties to the powerful intelligence service.”

I rode an elephant to work and how?

Illustration by MC

In my nearly 17 years in America I have never been asked if, while in India, I went to work on my elephant. Well, last night I did. In a dream.

Not ever having ridden an elephant in real life, either one walking gently or scampering through city streets, I was not sure what the experience felt like. However, the experience in the dream was so real that I am still shaking from it. It was like riding an earthquake measuring 7 on the Richter scale.

There is no point trying to explain why one dreams whatever one dreams. I treat dreams as completely free fantasy rides.

In the dream last night I was strapped onto the gargantuan behind of a pachyderm whose face I never saw because I was strapped on to his gargantuan behind. For some strange reason the mahout was a friend of mine called Rajesh Ranjan.

The swaying at the back was severe as the elephant negotiated the streets of a city which was most likely Old Delhi. I suffer from a strong case of motion sickness; so much so that I joke that I feel sick even while walking. Given that, you can imagine what I must have felt riding the elephant to work. My innards were all entangled. I walk up with nausea.

At one point, Rajesh seemed in such a hurry to get me to work that he speeded up the beast in a way that the elephant rose on the two hind legs and continued to running. I kept shouting from behind to stop the madness. The dream wouldn’t have lasted longer than a few seconds but it was so specific and visceral. I remember Rajesh parking the elephant by reversing it under a tree, its regular spot. Rajesh dismounted first and then helped me down.

I remember feeling and looking like a wreck in the way only someone with motion sickness and intense nausea after a wild elephant ride would. The dream ended with Rajesh sipping a cup of tea as I walked away looking at him and the elephant in disgust.

I don’t think I will ever ride an elephant either to work or for recreation.

The marvel of apps these days

Faces by MC

My current favorite new app with Windows 10, apart from the improved Fresh Paint, is Sketchable by Silicon Benders. It offers eight tools including brush, airbrush, pencil, marker, pen, inking nib, chalk and smudge tool. Since I first wrote about it on July 31, I have gotten rather used to the tool’s quick movements.

I do not use stylus because I do most of my work on my desktop or laptop, both of which are not touchscreen. Using the mouse to sketch or paint can be strenuous with age but it remains great fun so far.

Quite like when I discovered Fresh Paint, I still marvel at the kind of free apps one gets these days. Of course, with Sketchable one has to buy a set of tools, although the basic brush remains free. So far I have used the brush and a couple of other tools such as chalk and pencil. The sketches above are some of what I have done using Sketchable. The top sketch of a face is a single line, done without once lifting my digital brush.

Among the first works I did were these two sketches below. One is called The Dogwalker and the other a sort of an architectural concept drawing of an imaginary museum that I would like to build one day.

Without sounding immodest (Not that I actually care about it) I must point out that merely having Sketchable is no guarantee that you will create artworks. It presumes a certain degree of artistic talent.