Mayank Chhaya Daily

Jupiter and earthworm with tumescent head

For close to 40 years, ever since I started reading physics, it has been my default philosophical position that the universe has no particular point or purpose the way our limited human mind understands either.

When I first came across the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg’s famous observation in his 1977 book ‘The First Three Minutes’ that “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless” I was inordinately thrilled. That is because it coincided with my own nascent view of the universe. That default position very much remains intact today but it comes under strain from time to time.  One does wonder if that is all there is to it—pointlessly comprehensible.

The other day while going through some stunning photographs of Jupiter taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft and discovering an earthworm with a bloated tumescent head and convulsing every few seconds in my front yard set me thinking about this theme all over again. While there are much smaller things than an earthworm and bigger things than Jupiter in our Milky Way galaxy, the two neatly framed the scale of things for the purposes of everyday conversation.

I was left practically paralyzed wondering yet again what the point or purpose is to Jupiter and the earthworm. They are just there like you and I are doing things that we can do before perishing at some stage of our existence. Where do Jupiter and the earthworm fit in the cosmic scheme of things? What impact do they have on the universe at large or there immediate surrounding? Precisely what is it that they do?  The questions kept coming devoid of any cogent answers.

Since I mentioned Jupiter, let me also mention the Great Red Spot on it. It is an enormous Jovian storm whose size in the 1970s, when I first read Weinberg’s quote, was 23,000 kilometers across or big enough to accommodate a couple of Earths and all the earthworms. It has progressively become smaller since and currently it is said to be 16,500 kilometers, still big enough to swallow one Earth and then some. If our own immediate solar neighborhood is home to bodies that big and small, what point or purpose could there possibly be?

Just as I do not quite understand what the earthworm was doing with a swollen end and convulsing every few seconds, I do not understand Jupiter in terms of what they do. Weinberg has been naturally asked that question many times. Perhaps the most elaborate answer that I found from him was in an interview with PBS some years ago.

QUESTION: You have written that the more comprehensible the universe becomes the more pointless it seems. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Years ago I wrote a book about cosmology, and near the end I tried to summarize the view of the expanding universe and the laws of nature. And I made the remark - I guess I was foolish enough to make the remark - that the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless. And that remark has been quoted more than anything else I've ever said. It's even in Bartlett's Quotations. I think it's been the truth in the past that it was widely hoped that by studying nature we will find the sign of a grand plan, in which human beings play a particularly distinguished starring role. And that has not happened. I think that more and more the picture of nature, the outside world, has been one of an impersonal world governed by mathematical laws that are not particularly concerned with human beings, in which human beings appear as a chance phenomenon, not the goal toward which the universe is directed. And for some this has no effect on their religion. Their religion never looked for any kind of point in nature. For others this is appalling, the idea that all of the stars and galaxies and atoms are going about their business, and it's just by accident that here on this solar system the peculiar chemical properties of DNA acting over billions of years have produced these people who have been able to talk and look around and enjoy life. For some people that picture is antithetical to the view of nature and the world that their religion had given them.

QUESTION: Do you believe then there is no overall point to the universe?

MR. WEINBERG: I believe that there is no point in the universe that can be discovered by the methods of science. I believe that what we have found so far, an impersonal universe in which it is not particularly directed toward human beings is what we are going to continue to find. And that when we find the ultimate laws of nature they will have a chilling, cold impersonal quality about them.

I don't think this means [however] there's no point to life. Usually the remark is quoted just as it stands. But if anyone read the next paragraph, they would see that I went on to say that if there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that -- in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play.

That is a rather optimistic, positive view of us in the context of a seemingly pointless and purposeless universe. Of course, that does not satisfy my sudden angst about the universe. Perhaps the trick is to ride the cosmic raft and go where it takes or jettisons. Or as the Sanskrit saying goes “अनुगच्छतु प्रवाहम्” (Anugachchhatu Pravaham) or Go with the flow.

That still does not settle my question—“Yaar, yeh Jupiter karta kya hai?” (Pal,  what does Jupiter do?)

Reading live rather than watching live India-Pakistan final

Reading live the India-Pakistan Champions Trophy final rather than watching it live yesterday was a strange experience. The figures came alive way more than those men behind them. When Pakistan scored an eminently defendable 338 for 4 wickets in the stipulated 50 overs one was concerned but not overly so because India has a fine track record of chasing big totals.

I must say ticking statistics indicating runs and overs tell much more compelling story on their own when you are reading live a game rather than watching it. Your focus is not on the visual of the match but on the numbers of it. Pakistan’s opening pair Azhar Ali and Fakhar Zaman gave their team a solid start with the latter scoring a century —114 in 106 balls. At that point, I began to wonder what if for India. The eventual score of 338 was formidable but surmountable.

Then the Indian innings started unfolding in dire numbers. India lost its first wicket—Rohit Sharma—with no score on the board. That was followed by a complete disaster with its mainstay batsman and captain Virat Kohli was packed off after barely nine balls and five runs. I could hear the Indian gasps from behind those numbers. That set-off a collapse for which the Indian cricket team was notorious in the 1970s. A batsman after batsman—Yuvraj Singh, Mahnder Singh Dhoni and Kedar Jadhav—came and went as if runs were chasing them out rather than them chasing the runs.

At 72 for 6 it was clear to all that India had truckled under what seemed like a strange collapse. Social media was becoming abuzz with whispers of the game being fixed. I have no reason to believe that it was. Then came a remarkable fight back by Hardik Pandya who scored 74 runs in 43 balls blasting six sixes and four boundaries. He looked rather menacing before he was run out in what many thought was his fellow batsman Ravindra Jadeja’s inept play. I couldn’t tell because numbers do not tell you such things.

India had surrendered to Pakistan at 158 all out 30.3 overs. It was an abject play by a team that was favorite to win the Trophy. If silence could be heard on social media it was heard for a few minutes after India’s defeat. Indians were both distraught and disgusted, so much so that they forsook cricket for an India-Pakistan semi-final in Hockey World League being played around the same time and which India won handily 7-1. That both the matches were played in London provided a fitting ironic backdrop heightened by an inordinate amount of adulation and attention being paid to cricket.

Various sobriquets have been given to cricket in India, including religion. Although it is rather loosely described that some 1.3 billion Indians love cricket I suspect the actual effective number of those who follow it as a religion with all its fanatical devotion and rituals would not be more than 10 percent. In pure numbers that is still a large figure but the notion that 1.3 billion people suspend their lives for the game is nonsensical because they do not.

I used to be an avid cricketer as well as a watcher of the game for the first 35 years of my life but over the last two decades that interest has waned considerably to the extent that now I do not watch it at all. So reading live was an unusual experience where statistics appeared strangely disembodied and clinical. When India finally lost, the numbers stopped moving with no indication of the psychological collapse the defeat might have caused among its followers.

Cricket is a spectator sport like all sports, I suppose. One can read it live only so much. At some point you have to spectate.

Feeling tickled over trivial triumphs

I don’t know why I should write about this. I suppose one is tickled by such trivialities. A couple of days ago, I chanced upon the trailer of "First Man" on Curiosity Stream and was struck by a shot in it showing a new species of ape 25 million years ago. The apes in the shot right above this paragraph CGI although I am not sure if the jungle is real. While watching it I was instantly reminded of an actual shot in my documentary 'Gandhi's Song' that I took in the foothills of Mount Girnar. (See the frame right at the top.)

Not that it means anything at all but the similarities made me happy for a few moments.

A couple of years ago, I had felt a similar joy while watching the trailer of 'The Jungle Book' (2016) I came upon a passing shot. That too had instantly triggered a visual memory in me. Here is the reason why. The picture on top is from the movie and the one below is from the same documentary.

I know for a fact that in ‘The Jungle Book’ the jungle was entirely CGI and ‘First Man’ it seems at least partially so. It is heartening that I did not have resort to that. Mind you, I had no camera crew. I shot the jungle shots myself. Like I said, it is rather trivial but it tickles me.

Adapting and merging art

‘Wadi’ by MC

A few weeks ago I did the watercolor and crayon above titled ‘Wadi’ (Valley). My vantage point as its painter was behind the brown rocks in the foreground with hills contrasted against the sky. The expanse in the middle was rust, yellow that looked like a rushing flow of lava. In my imagination though it was a blur of flowers.

While doing that I debated whether there should be a human figure in it and if so what it might look like. I avoided painting a figure in it. However, yesterday while browsing through Christie’s website I came across Vincent van Gogh’s Le moissonneur (d’après Millet), which the master had adapted from his personal favorite artist Jean-François Millet’s works. Therefore the ‘d’après Millet’ which means ‘from Millet’ in French.

Vincent van Gogh’s Le moissonneur (d’après Millet) (Image: Christie’s)

I am sorry to offer you so much detail here but without that this post does not hold together. When I saw Le moissonneur my instant response was to adapt it within my extremely limited skills. (See below). Christie’s estimate for the original is between $ 15.9 million and $20.988 million when it goes under the hammer in London on June 27. I thought to myself looking at the price, what you cannot afford, you must create yourself.

After finishing my version, I remembered my work ‘Wadi’ and what a human figure might look like in it in distance. So I merged it with ‘Wadi’ by soft-edging it. That complete the story for me.

Le moissonneur—tribute by MC

 

The quarter moon was like a red sickle

The quarter moon

Was like a red sickle

Slicing through clouds

Is it any wonder that

It rained blood today?

--MC

Blood Moon--MC

Gauguin is coming to town in all his glory

The Toilette, 1882. Pearwood, Paul Gauguin

A gorgeous exhibition of Paul Gauguin comes to Chicago’s Art Institute from June 25 through September 10.

“The exhibition features some 240 works, including the largest-ever public presentation of his ceramics, the reunion and display of related works side-by-side, and a selection of ethnographic objects that reveals his sources of inspiration. Together these works attest to Gauguin’s expansive notions of what art should be and his embrace of multimedia, installation, and found objects long before these concepts were considered artistic practices,” says the Art Institute’s website.

The website also offers a richly designed catalogue with some remarkable insights into Gauguin’s eclectic artistic genius. He produced an extraordinary range of paintings, ceramics, sculptures  and graphic works, showing a rare mastery over each of those.

Earthly Paradise, 1888, Chestnut and pine, carved and polychromed; glass, metal hardware, Paul Gauguin

Carved Wooden Cask, 1889–90. Wood barrel, carved and painted, Paul Gauguin

Gauguin is most popularly known for his exuberantly imagined and painted images of Tahitian life and landscape. It is well known that what you see of Tahiti was Gauguin’s much heightened representation because in reality it was quite depressingly unkempt place.

I plan to visit the exhibition as a newspaper assignment. If you are not in Chicago, I suggest you check out the catalogue. 

Of panspermia and abiogenesis in TRAPPIST 1

Trappist by Mayank Chhaya

I read this fascinating study titled ‘Enhanced interplanetary panspermia in the TRAPPIST-1 system’ by Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Panspermia means seeds of life can hitch a ride on planet debris and go planet hopping. In simple terms, seeds of life on one planet could be transported to another by debris carried across space because of asteroid strikes. There is a possibility that life on Earth may have been seeded via panspermia from Mars.

The study deals with TRAPPIST 1 exoplanets recently discovered just 39 light years from us. The seven alien Earth-like planets in this system are so close to each other seeds of life could have jumped around.

The study says, “We present a simple model for estimating the probability of interplanetary panspermia in the recently discovered system of seven planets orbiting the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, and find that panspermia is potentially orders of magnitude more likely to occur in the TRAPPIST-1 system compared to the Earth-to-Mars case. As a consequence, we argue that the probability of abiogenesis is enhanced on the TRAPPIST-1 planets compared to the Solar system. By adopting models from theoretical ecology, we show that the number of species transferred and the number of life-bearing planets is also likely to be higher, because of the increased rates of immigration. We propose observational metrics for evaluating whether life was initiated by panspermia on multiple planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. These results are also applicable to habitable exoplanets and exomoons in other planetary systems.”

“If conditions favourable for the origin of life (abiogenesis) exist on one of the TRAPPIST-1 planets, this raises an immediate question with profound consequences: could life spread from one planet to another (panspermia) through the transfer of rocky material? Panspermia has been widely investigated in our own Solar system as a potential mechanism for transporting life to, or from, the Earth [9–13]. The planets in the HZ of the TRAPPIST-1 system are separated only by ∼ 0.01 AU, tens of times less than the distance between Earth and Mars. Thus, one would be inclined to hypothesize that panspermia would be enhanced in this system,” the authors say.

For those of you not familiar with terms such as HZ and AU, they are Habitable Zone, which is the zone around a star which may support life, and Astronomical Unit, which is the distance between the sun and Erath.

TRAPPIST 1’s short distance from us would be useful in eventually understanding a great deal about whether life exists on any of the seven planets and whether it went hopping across the system. One of the promising features of TRPPIST 1 is that presuming life may exist is the successful panspermia possibility being higher because of the short distances among the planets compared to our solar system. The study points that “the survival probabilities of microbes on the TRAPPIST-1 system could be about 100 times higher.”

This is quite an exciting prospect even though we seem to be messing our own glorious life through ridiculous fractiousness here on Earth.

My first job interview and rejection

The other day I gave my life’s first job interview. This morning I received an email informing me solicitously that I have not been selected for the position. There could be any number of reasons for the rejection but I would consider only two—1) I am incompetent and 2) Because I said at the beginning of the interview that I doubt if I fit the bill.

In case of reason number two being the cause of rejection, you might ask why I said that and if I indeed thought so why I applied in the first place. I have no answer for either other than saying it is what it is.

I am not the interviewee type in the sense that I lack the deference and subservience that often inform such interactions. Having been a journalist all my career I am strictly the interviewer and not the interviewee. All indications were that those who interviewed me seemed to enjoy the sweep of the conversation while I was in it. In retrospect though it could be that they were merely enjoying in the way one enjoys a slow-moving disaster. I am merely speculating on what might have gone wrong. It is most likely that I was there was what went wrong.

I am curious at what point the interviewers would have decided that I am not the man for them without me having told them candidly that I may not be the man for them. On paper, my credentials match what they required reasonably well subject to some minor learning curve. I suppose what was on paper may not have really translated well.

One should never say never but I will say it nevertheless. I will never subject myself to an interview. Not because I cannot handle it but I think I can handle it too much with a degree of disdain that comes through to those interviewing me. It is entirely possible that given the trajectory of my career I may have to subject myself to more interviews. We will see about that.

Some points about Dyer-Rawat comparison

The problem with odious, deliberately provocative comparisons between any two wrongdoings as a way of criticism is that unless the scale and proportion of the two significantly match, they can come across as ludicrous. More importantly, they tend to undermine the egregiousness of the original cause.

Reading about the now passing controversy over academician Partha Chatterjee comparing India’s Army chief General Bipin Rawat with the notorious British Brigadier General Reginald Dyer of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of 1919, I don’t quite know what to make of it.

On April 13, 1919, Dyer ordered British troops to fire on unarmed Indians on an enclosed public square in Amritsar, Punjab, that mercilessly killed 379 people, including children, and wounded 1200 more. The massacre came to define the inherent cruelty of the colonial British rule over India. The massacre remains etched in India’s national memory. Although Dyer was forced to resign after an investigation, the outrage in Britain over his action was nowhere close to what one might have expected. In fact, Winston Churchill, then secretary of war, in a speech in the House of Commons praised him and honored with a ceremonial sword that had the inscription “Saviour of the Punjab.”

In contrast, General Rawat is the army chief of a sovereign nation who took over only in December, 2016, some 27 years after the insurgency began in Kashmir. The immediate reason for his criticism is a much commented upon action by Major Leetul Gogoi who tied a resident of Srinagar in front of an army jeep as a shield in the face of the ongoing stone-pelting by Kashmiri separatists. Rawat has taken an unambiguously tough stand on the issue and expressed support for Gogoi and his “innovative” approach and even awarded the officer. Rawat has extensive experience in high altitude warfare in Kashmir.

Chatterjee’s comparison, published in ‘Democracy’, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM, found particular attention because he is a well-known social scientist. Having covered the Kashmir insurgency for several years since its inception in 1989, I can tell you that the army-insurgent dynamic has always been fraught with fundamental human rights problems. The army has the thankless job of keeping Kashmir firmly under India’s control in the face of a relentless campaign of terror and separatist insurgency fueled by Pakistan.  But then having a thankless job is not in and of itself a justification for a questionable conduct nor should it immunize it against any criticism. It is undeniable that the Indian troops in Kashmir are under constant threat from a kind of guerilla warfare that has now repeatedly upended life there for close to three decades.

Positions—ideological, cultural, political and military—are so firmly entrenched that it is next to impossible to justly apportion blame. Kashmir invariably plays into India’s core sense of its definition about itself as a nation-state. Nothing here is safe from the Indian people’s inevitable sense of self to the extent that Kashmir embodies it geographically, ideologically and culturally.

Given that context, not to mention the over-the-top Dyer-Rawat comparison, it is not possible to have a reasonable debate on the subject. In my younger days I would have happily jumped into the fray vigorously arguing various points of view. But now, it seems rather futile to say anything at all. It took some prompting from within to say even this much.

My fundamental point is that even if Chatterjee’s purpose was to point out the excessive nature of the army in the peculiar context of Kashmir, I think the comparison defeats that purpose completely because there is no serious comparison. My worry is that such comparisons greatly diminish the need for a very genuine debate to be had over how the Indian army should battle a long simmering insurgency that explodes from time to time. The place is so prone to unceasing national second-guessing that it has become very hard, if not impossible, to be fair and rational.

Of Talaja, sunlight and photons

Talaja Morning—MC

If it mattered to me how many people read this blog, I would have stopped writing it in less than a week of having begun it. Readership is incidental to what one writes here. Response is even less relevant.

With that freedom, one writes what one feels like. Lately, that freedom has meant writing short pieces about my paintings more frequently although I do regular comment on current affairs, my main calling as a journalist.

This morning though what attracts me is this watercolor-crayon titled ‘Talaja Morning’. Talaja is a small coastal town in Gujarat where dawn and dusk produce spectacular colors. I caught the scene depicted here one summer evening two years ago. There is, of course, the sun in all its resplendent mauve, ochre, orange, rust, litharge glory. Then there are people silhouetted against it standing or sitting on the uneven terrain. What I have in mind is the figure sitting on a rock on the extreme left of the frame. I am interested in him because that could have been me.

Perhaps he has a story to tell or may be he just sitting there washed over by the fading light and energy of the star over 90 million miles away. He is thinking about how old the photons might be. In a superficial sense, they are about eight minutes old because that is the amount of time they take to reach from the sun to us.

I wrote about sunlight before and how old it might be on September 19, 2015. 

“Even those who know such things and bother to think about them often mistakenly believe that the light reaching us is eight minutes old because it takes that long for sunlight to travel from there to us. The eight-minute journey is the just the final and the tiniest part of a photon’s destiny. According to NASA, which concerns itself with such things, “Most answers for the age of sunlight come out to be between 10,000 and 170,000 years.”

A photon born at the core of the sun as a result of the spectacularly violent fusion has to go through an absolutely nightmarish journey zigzagging through various layers and materials at 300,000 kilometers a second (The speed of light). It collides millions of times with charged particles in searing plasma in the process, changing its course all the time. The photons from the sun that touched me this morning could at the very least be 10,000-years-old. The knowledge that the light that reached me this morning left before there was what we now call civilization is strangely exhilarating. The sunrise that we saw this morning  was in the making for thousands of years. If that does not thrill you, then I cannot help you. I am not even going into the fact that there was no sunrise in the real sense. The sun does not rise or set. We see it because of the way the earth rotates around its axis.”

That is what the man on the extreme left of the painting is thinking about.