Mayank Chhaya Daily

Sun bursting out between purple-rust bands and slate-grey clouds

Savera--MC

We will always have contention. Let’s have some concert. I could have written about any of acrimonious non-sense spewing out of various official orifices this morning. But then while returning from my daughter’s school after dropping her I saw a short-lived but spectacular sunrise this morning.

There was a thick layer of slate-grey clouds at the bottom and purple-rust bands on top. Between the two on the right hand side were light yellow sunrays bursting out. As soon as I reached home, I got on a Fresh Paint canvas and quickly painted this work in digital pastels.

I was reminded of Claude Monet’s obsession to capture light before it faded. This is what the sky looked like this morning for a few moments. My artistic merit is nowhere even close to Monet’s but my spirit and passion are.

So that’s that this morning.

Measuring solar radiation and how it affects Earth

The Boat--MC

There are two broad ways of looking at the universe and everything within it. One is religious where everything is preordained, deterministic and like clockwork controlled by an entity that various cultures call god. The other is that once the universe came to be—and how and why are vastly complex scientific questions—things happened dynamically without any specifically planned outcome. What we have is fortuitous and serendipitous.

Within that second view is the idea I have long propagated and it is that nothing in the universe or, closer home within our solar system, was aimed at necessarily creating and nurturing life. It just happened over billions of years of chemical reactions between elements along essentially unpredictable paths. In a sense, we are an unplanned baby. So get used to it.

That brings me to our sun which as we all know is the reason why we are here—you and I and this bloody blog. I was reading a fascinating piece on NASA about how the space agency has been measuring “how much sunshine powers our home planet.”

“The Sun’s output energy is not constant. Over the course of about 11 years, our Sun cycles from a relatively quiet state to a peak in intense solar activity — like explosions of light and solar material — called a solar maximum. In subsequent years the Sun returns to a quiet state and the cycle starts over again. The Sun has fewer sunspots — dark areas that are often the source of increased solar activity — and stops producing so many explosions, going through a period called the solar minimum. Over the course of one solar cycle (one 11-year period), the Sun’s emitted energy varies on average at about 0.1 percent. That may not sound like a lot, but the Sun emits a large amount of energy – 1,361 watts per square meter. Even fluctuations at just a tenth of a percent can affect Earth,” NASA says.

“In addition to those 11-year changes, entire solar cycles can vary from decade to decade. Scientists have observed unusually quiet magnetic activity from the Sun for the past two decades with previous satellites. During the last prolonged solar minimum in 2008-2009, our Sun was as quiet it has been observed since 1978. Scientists expect the Sun to enter a solar minimum within the next three years, and TSIS-1 will be primed to take measurements of the next minimum,” it says.

The sun-earth equation is a crucial one for sentient life, particularly from the standpoint of how much energy the former radiates and the latter receives. As the figures suggest, event just a tenth of a percent change in the amount of energy—1,361 watts per square meter—can have remarkable effect on our planet. That is the reason why NASA’s Total and Spectral solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1), which will precisely measure what scientists call “total solar irradiance”, is so important.

“TSIS-1 will study the total amount of solar radiation emitted by the Sun using the Total Irradiance Monitor, one of two sensors on the instrument. The second sensor, called the Spectral Irradiance Monitor, will measure how the Sun’s energy is distributed over the ultraviolet, visible and infrared regions of light. TSIS-1 spectral irradiance measurements of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation are critical to understanding the ozone layer — Earth's natural sunscreen that protects life from harmful radiation,” NASA says.

Have a dekho at Mumbai art deco

A version of art deco in the background and partly on the left. (MC)

In the 1980s, I worked for nearly a decade in an area of Bombay/Mumbai saturated with art deco buildings. The Marine Drive, Colaba, Flora Fountain area of the city is replete with some remarkable art deco buildings almost unknown to even the inhabitants of those buildings.

One often interviewed grandees of the city, including former prime minister Morarji Desai and former chief minister Abdur Rehman Antulay in their lovely art deco apartments. So it is heartening to note that a movement to chronicle, preserve and popularize this unique heritage of Mumbai, second only to the famed Miami strictures, has risen. Called Art Deco Mumbai, the movement by its citizens has the potential to turn this extraordinary concentration into heritage tourism.

Led by Atul Kumar, a passionate advocate of this heritage, Art Deco Mumbai is beginning to generate interest among its citizens about close to 200 such buildings. The art deco design movement dates back to the 1920s in the west making its way to the Bombay of the 1930s. By the 1950s South Bombay’s Marine Drive area had become a hub of art deco. Movie theaters such as Eros, Liberty and Regal are among the best known examples of this style of architecture. It so happens that I used to frequent all three as part my assignment to review movies.

As the Britannica points out, the name art deco is a derivative of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925. It describes the features of art deco thus: “The distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean shapes, often with a “streamlined” look; ornament that is geometric or stylized from representational forms; and unusually varied, often expensive materials, which frequently include man-made substances (plastics, especially Bakelite; vita-glass; and ferroconcrete) in addition to natural ones (jade, silver, ivory, obsidian, chrome, and rock crystal). Though Art Deco objects were rarely mass-produced, the characteristic features of the style reflected admiration for the modernity of the machine and for the inherent design qualities of machine-made objects (e.g., relative simplicity, planarity, symmetry, and unvaried repetition of elements).”

I could be wrong about this but I suspect that the newspaper/news agency’s office where I worked on Nagindas Master Road in Fountain area in 1985-86 was in fact an art deco building. Its sweeping wide, cylindrical staircase sure felt like that. Like a majority of these buildings, this one too was in some desperate need of upkeep. Even with its corners mucked up with the gunk of tobacco-betel nut-laden spit the staircase had a certain majesty about it that is so characteristic of art deco.

Art Deco Mumbai is a modest effort which deserves to be patronized by the city’s residents as much as by those who have the good fortune of living in them. I intend to meet the Art Deco Mumbai team on my next visit to Mumbai.

Incidentally, I have written this piece partly to be able to use this punny headline. Although the original Anglicized expression is “have a dekko”, the correct word is of course “dekho” which in Hindi means have a look. Hence, I have used the original.

Engaged to be married

There is a telling saying in Hindi that goes “बेगानी शादी में अब्दुल्लाह दीवाना” (Begaani shaadi mein Abdullah deewana) which loosely translates as “Deriving joy from strangers’ happiness.” It literally translates as Abdullah is joyously celebrating the nuptials of those he has absolutely no relations with.

At its core, this approach to life can be selfless but it can become meddlesome rather quickly because it may mean crashing someone else’s happy occasion. The reason I was thinking of this saying was because I heard the news of the impending wedding of Harry and Meghan Markle. The announcement was made by Charles today.

Reading the formal text of the announcement (see the image above) I was struck by a few things. In the eight-line announcement the word “Prince” is used five times, “Royal” and “Highness” thrice each and “Majesty” and “Queen” once each. To that I say, “We get it. All this is very royal and high and princely and majestic.”

It is a tremendously happy occasion for the young couple and their families and one must not either take away from or intrude in that. It is the inordinate sense of joy that the multitude at large feels that prompted me to remember “बेगानी शादी में अब्दुल्लाह दीवाना”.

For those of you who may not know such things—I too did not until this morning—Clarence House is a royal residence which is where Charles, Prince of Wales, and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, live. “We are very excited for Harry and Meghan. It has been wonderful getting to know Meghan and to see how happy she and Harry are together,” they said on the engagement and upcoming wedding in spring next year.

Britain will now have a national obsession for the next several months or, in other words, “बेगानी शादी में अब्दुल्लाह दीवाना”.

It may seem like that but I am not deriding the idea of being happy about someone else’s happiness because at its core it is a selfless act. I am merely pointing out that it can quickly lapse into meddling.

Oh, he's just like any other man, only more so

It was 75 years ago today that ‘Casablanca’ premiered in New York in 1942. The passage of long decades has not diminished any of its appeal. To mark this rather trivial anniversary I republish a piece I wrote on September 16, 2009 for no obvious reason.

Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in the 1942 classic ‘Casablanca’

On a complete whim I watched ‘Casablanca’ the other day after nearly a quarter century. I am glad to report it has not lost of any of its crackling smart impact. If anything its distilled humor has only intensified with the passage of time. The delivery of the movie’s lines was accentuated by the deliberate concision of their words. While the 1942 movie is full of crisp cynicism and probably offers more memorable lines, the following brief exchange has remained with me.

Let me set up the scene for you. Annina, a Bulgarian woman who wants to escape a Europe tormented by the Nazis and escape to America via Casablanca, approaches Rick (brilliantly restrained Humphrey Bogart), a café owner of great influence. The woman wants her husband to win some quick cash at Rick’s casino and needs the owner’s munificence. Captain Renault (a memorably unscrupulous Claude Rains) is the eminently pliable French prefect of police whose blessings are essential to leave Casablanca.

Annina: Monsieur Rick, what kind of a man is Captain Renault?

Rick: Oh, he's just like any other man, only more so.

Then there is Senor Ferrari, who owns café Blue Parrot but wants to buy Rick’s café. In a scene there is a character beseeching him for help. His response:

Senor Ferrari: As the leader of all illegal activities in Casablanca, I am an influential and respected man.

Let me cite three more and move on.

There is scene where Rick is chatting with the Nazi officer Major Strasser along with his underling Heinz and Captain Renault.

Major Strasser: Are you one of those people who cannot imagine the Germans in their beloved Paris?

Rick: It's not particularly my beloved Paris.

Heinz: Can you imagine us in London?

Rick: When you get there, ask me!

Captain Renault: Hmmh! Diplomatist!

Major Strasser: How about New York?

Rick: Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade.

There is a character called Ugarte who sells exit visas for a premium. Rick does not particularly like him. Check out this exchange between them.

Ugarte: You despise me, don't you?

Rick: If I gave you any thought I probably would.

In an early scene Rick denies an influential German banker entry into the casino. Incidentally, Carl in the exchange is Rick’s waiter-cum-manager-cum-accountant-cum-resistance.

Rick: Your cash is good at the bar. 
Banker: What? Do you know who I am?

Rick: I do. You're lucky the bar’s open to you.

Woman: What makes saloonkeepers so snobbish?

Banker: Perhaps if you told him I ran the second largest banking house in Amsterdam.

Carl: Second largest? That wouldn't impress Rick. The leading banker in Amsterdam is now the pastry chef in our kitchen.

Banker: We have something to look forward to.

(Some of the bankers today should have met a similar fate, not that there is anything wrong with being a chef.)

More than anything else Casablanca endures over six decades after it was made, and that too at the height of the bloodiest conflagration that the world has seen, is because director Michael Curtiz and his writers made a sharply defined entertainer. The fact that he made it on the margins of the Second World War gave it authenticity even while it was laced with all the levity and license of a Hollywood film. The beauty of Casablanca is that every time you watch, you feel it always existed as a finely polished finished product. You do not see the labor behind assembling all the nuts and bolts.

Since no compelling is art is free from flaws, let me nitpick a bit in conclusion. There is a glaring problem of continuity in one of the scenes.

It takes place at the Paris railways station when Rick and his faithful musician friend Sam are waiting for Ilsa (divinely distant Ingrid Burgman). There is a heavy downpour as Sam delivers a note to Rick from Ilsa saying she would not be joining him. As Sam hurries Rick up to catch the departing train, the two in their soaked up raincoats enter the platform. Coming in they are dripping with water but in the very next frame as the camera changes angles, their raincoats are totally dry. Here are the pictures of those frames.

P.S.: Lest you think that I have nothing better to do than memorizing them, I have been able to reproduce the lines verbatim courtesy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/quotes

Don’t be taken in by the deceptions of existence

Copper Hill--MC

हस्ती के मत फरेब में आ जाइयो असद

आलम तमाम हल्क़ा-ए-दाम-ए-ख़याल है

(Hasti ke mat fareb mein aa jaiyo Asad

Aalam tamam halqa-e-daam-e-khayal hai)

--ग़ालिब

Don’t be taken in by the deceptions of existence

The universe is but a consequence of a chain of thought

--Ghalib

One cannot possibly top that and, in any case, the poet has said powerfully what needs to be reminded the world of. So that’s all for today.

Best alternative to selling original paintings

I am not necessarily attached to my paintings even though there are some I would find hard, if not altogether impossible, to sell. I say this with a caveat that it is not as if buyers are knocking my doors down to acquire my art. Not at all.

Within that bleak scenario, there are times when an occasional art lover expresses interest in a work of mine. One such work is a watercolor I did on March 12 this year depicting Mohandas Gandhi’s historic and iconic Salt March, aka Dandi March. The impromptu work on paper was done to commemorate the 87th anniversary of the march.

Since I am disinclined to sell the original work I was searching for ways to make it available in formats which are close to the original. Creating prints myself did not seem feasible because of the economics for a single individual. It was fortuitous that I came across a website called www.fineartamerica.com, a highly popular online destination for artists such as me trying to find a wide distribution of their works without having to invest in any infrastructure.

One of the works is the Salt March. It is gratifying to see the many versions that fineartamerica.com offers of that painting. They include prints on canvas, in frames, acrylic, metal and wood. I must admit that the acrylic version offered by fineartamerica.com appears better than the original in terms of its feel. I would have bought it myself if only I had the money.

So if there is a reader of this blog who might be interested, I have uploaded that particular painting along with some other works on my URL: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/mayank-chhaya.html

Some observations about Black Friday, again

By MC

Tomorrow is Black Friday which actually starts sometime later today. I republish a post I wrote almost exactly to the day three years ago to mark another Black Friday. So here.

Black Friday is a day when hands and feet work a lot. But brain? Not so much, if any at all. Door busting hordes with their eyes glazed over by greed roam the streets in search of anything that resembles a deal and devour it with unseemly urgency. I have seen shredded remnants of deals hanging from shoppers’ mouths as they look for more through the ransacked aisles.

Deals hide behind the store display windows and under the tables in the vain hope that they would avoid getting brutalized a billion hands reaching out for them. It is a tragic day for deals soon after it is a tragic day for turkeys. Unlike deals, turkeys can at least run before they get harvested but not far because they are inside enclosures whose only exit leads them to the cone to drain their blood or the nearest tree to be strung up to and hung upside down before their neck is slit.

Incidentally, I am not one of those who believe that vegetarians are any less cruel than non-vegetarians. I do not see any difference between mounting a ripe tomato on a chopping board and slicing it and cutting through a roasted turkey. So no vegetarian sanctimony here.

The point of this post is not the vegetarian versus the non-vegetarian but the door buster versus the non-door buster. Far be it for me to judge those who stand in long lines outside giant retail stores in temperatures freezing their testicles to save some money. It is pitiable that we have created a whole ecology of fierce acquisitiveness where it takes corporations nothing more than a few deals to unleash the acquisitive monster. I have never stepped out on Black Friday or for that matter any day with the specific intention to grab a deal or two. That does not necessarily make me a better human being but merely one with no initiative, I suppose.

Zombies may or may not be real but the door busters are. They have a certain look in their eyes which tells you that the rest of the world has been expunged for the duration of the Black Friday sales. You stand in your way at your own peril. Those who engage in such shopping insist that there are genuinely great deals and bargains to be had. And I believe them. However, the sheer inelegance of standing in a line at 1.37 a.m. to buy something is beyond my comprehension. Human aesthetics collapse on a day like this. When shoppers are in that frenzy, you must leave them alone. The normal rule is non-shoppers should leave the door busters alone for several hours after they have returned home because it takes a while for the frenzy to subside.

One understands the allure of buying a 50-inch television set for $27 (literary exaggeration) which would normally go for $475. If it means spending four hours in a line for it, then so be it. The irony is that people watch new deals for next year’s Black Friday on the same TV before they set off again. It is a spell that is activated at a certain time of year. It is a dormant but annualized virus.

Edvard Munch tributes

As the Met Museum, New York, hosts Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed, featuring 43 of the master’s works, it strikes me that I have done more painting tributes to him than to any other artist’s.  Since this is my blog I am making it about me rather than Munch because who is else is going to do it?

A Met description of the exhibition says, “Although Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) attained notoriety early in his career for his haunting depictions of human anxiety and alienation that reflected modern experience, he believed that his artistic breakthrough occurred around 1913 at the age of 50.Throughout his career, Munch regularly revisited subjects from his earlier years, exploring them with renewed inspiration and intensity.”

Here are six of my Munch tributes.

I have done ‘The Scream’ but deliberately avoided it here.

Human as quantum particles in all possible states until measured

Treating humans as quantum particles has been one of my longstanding favorite fantasies. I first began thinking about this in my late teens but did not quite develop it beyond just an idea. Decades later it still remains an idea with some flesh around it. I wrote a piece on November 25, 2016, which I am republishing it today. I was reminded of it by a tweet by physicist Brian Greene on November 19, 2017, where he said this: "What's shocking about quantum mechanics? A particle traveling from here to there explores every possible path, and what we observe is a melding of them all."

In my continuing but failing attempts to engage people on Twitter I tweeted this to him, "Is it possible that we might be like quantum particles to a much bigger observer? Might that not mean that we take every possible path to a destination until observed?"

There was, of course, no response because he might have found the idea ludicrously hare-brained. Or may be he just did not read my tweet. The former is a more likely reason.

Nevertheless, here is that piece again.

For as long as I remember I have considered humans as quantum particles in relation to the universe. Just consider this one fact. If the sun was hollow, it could fit 1.3 million earths inside. Now imagine an average human’s size in relation to earth within those 1.3 million earths inside the sun which is but a mediocre star as stars in our Milky Way galaxy go. You begin to get some measure of how minuscule an average human is. We are quantum particles in relation to our own galaxy, let alone our galactic neighborhood and eventually the entire universe.

Having established that scale, now on to a theory I have long nurtured. If humans are quantum particles, they ought to display quantum characteristics, a fundamental one of which is quantum superposition. We all live in the human version of quantum superposition. I define human superposition as living in all possible emotional or unemotional states at all times until such time as an external stimulation triggers a response. Then we assume a specific state the way quantum particles do.

When we are measured (interacted with) in a manner of speaking, we reveal a specifically identifiable state which collapses into superposition as soon as that act of measurement or interaction stops. Until such time as I am interacting with a particular individual I can never tell what state that person is in. That means the person is in all possible states, including dead, without my interacting (measuring) them. It is only when specific information related to that specific person is accessed by an act of measurement or interaction, do we get to access one particular state. The idea that from one’s extremely limited knowledge, the rest of the universe is a mere speculation can be an unsettling one.

In a strange way I am reminded of my theory when someone famous or accomplished passes away; someone whose existence I was not aware of to begin with. It is only because I came to measure or interact or to be revealed to of that person’s death,do I know that that person existed. I say famous or accomplished because those deaths are publicly reported. Millions of people die everyday whose lives or deaths we are not aware of and hence their existence remains speculative for us for all practical purposes.

Coming back to my idea of human superposition, once you apply that theory to humans you can explain a lot of what goes on in the world. Some human particles jiggle much more than the others and therefore reveal their existence more assertively. Most lead an existence of low energy and therefore tend to fade away without making much impact beyond their immediate neighborhood.

There is some comfort—at least for me—in thinking of ourselves as quantum particles in relation to the universe. In some sense, the state of being human quantum particles liberates oneself from being tethered to value judgment. If I reveal something of my existence or a particular state, it is only because someone, somewhere measured it.

I must clarify I use measure not in a literal sense of measuring something the way physicists measure the quantum world but as an act of human interaction.

As useful ideas go, what I have just written about is rather useless in so much as it affects one’s daily life. On the other hand though, the moment you look at fellow human beings as fellow quantum particles forever in all possible states they can be until such time they are measured, life becomes easier.