Mayank Chhaya Daily

A couple of observations about Tibetan celebrations and New Delhi

The cover of Time magazine from April, 1959

In the interest of clarity the obvious has to be stated. The Dalai Lama has been in India for nearly 60 years. His entire rise as a global leader of conscience and consequence has been out of and because of India. When he first came into exile on March 31, 1959 as he crossed from Tibet and reached Tezpur in the Indian state of Assam on April 18, he was 23. He will be 83 on July 6 this year.

It is unquestionable that Tenzin Gyatso’s widespread global impact as the 14th Dalai Lama has been almost entirely because of the freedom that he has enjoyed in India. He has repeatedly acknowledged it.

None of these facts is a secret that China is only just discovering or India has hidden until now. Given all that it seems rather silly that as the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community-in-exile celebrate from today the 60th year with a series of year-long “Thank you India” events New Delhi should feel defensive and pretend to distance itself from the goings-on. Even in this era of frenzied “breaking news”, it is no breaking news that the Dalai Lama completes 60 years on Indian soil.

I have been reading about and watching with some amusement the contortions New Delhi is going through to not appear to join the celebrations. The Indian Express broke the story about India’s Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale sending a classified note to the country’s top bureaucrat, Cabinet Secretary P.K. Sinha asking “senior leaders” and ‘government functionaries” to stay away from participation in the celebrations. The classified note had the effect of the Central Tibetan Administration having to cancel a major event in the country’s capital and shift it to Dharamshala, near where McLeod Ganj in Himachal Pradesh where the Dalai Lama has lived all these decades.

That celebrations were kicked off today with a somewhat surprising presence of junior Minister for Culture and Environment Mahesh Sharma along with his Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) ideologue Ram Madhav.

The celebrations did lose some of its profile after the issue of the classified note but in terms of changing any minds in Beijing about the Dalai Lama or Tibet they are unlikely to move any needles. For all practical purposes, the underlying tensions between China and India over a complex set of issues will remain as they are irrespective of whether New Delhi officially distances itself from the celebrations or not. The idea that a gesture by the Indian government in not appearing to be joining the celebrations would make any material difference is laughable.

India’s eyes are set on the upcoming summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in June. The long festering border disputes between the two Asian giants, apart from trade and other issues, are expected to figure in the summit. I seriously doubt whether officially eschewing the celebrations would earn Modi any significant bargaining strength during the summit. That is a sideshow that India should not have bent over backwards to avoid.

When the two leaders meet, they would be in political positions that couldn’t be more dissimilar. Xi is triumphant from his recent historic consolidation of power, including ensuring that he remains the undisputed leader of China as long as he wants by eliminating a term limit on the presidency. Modi on the other hand appears to have lost much of his shine because of the mounting domestic problems over failed lofty promises as he prepares for the 2019 general elections. Unlike Xi, Modi has to face an increasingly disenchanted electorate and could suffer significant political diminishment if not an outright defeat. Xi has to have factored in that political calculation as he receives Modi. Of course, the BJP leadership is absolutely confident of winning the 2019 elections.

History, both ancient and relatively contemporary, never seems to leave the discourse in that part of the world and in fact continues to shape it as evident in the Tibetan celebrations. More than 94,000 Tibetan refugees out of a total of over 128,000 live in India. The rest are spread across the world. If they have any significance at all it is embodied in the person of the Dalai Lama who remains revered in Tibet despite a severe Chinese policy against glorifying him.

To Vincent van Gogh

The Farmer—Mayank Chhaya, Acrylic and pastel on paper. A tribute to Vincent Van Gogh.

On Vincent Van Gogh’s 165th birth anniversary today here are two personal tributes to the great master. Consider this one simple fact and you understand the extent of his artistry. He painted for barely nine years, starting at 28 and ending at 37 when he shot himself. In that short period he produced over 800 oil paintings and numerous other sketches. That gives him an average of about two per week. He famously sold just one painting in his lifetime. Since his death on July 29, 1890 he has become an ever-renewing genius.

Flowers—MC, Acrylic on paper. A tribute to Vincent Van Gogh.

Big Bang began as a pejorative

It is known among the scientific community that what began as a pejorative came to be the most widely accepted theory about the origin of the universe. In a tweet yesterday physicist Brian Greene recalled what the great astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) had said on March 28, 1949 in a BBC radio interview.

"The hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one 'big bang'...[is] in conflict with observational requirements."--Dismissive on-air comment by astronomer Fred Hoyle that unwittingly coins the term Big Bang,” Greene tweeted.

It is an epic irony that in being derisive about the idea that the universe suddenly came into being through a big bang, Hoyle unintentionally coined the name for the most respected theory about our origin. Hoyle was what was known as a steady-stater; someone who proposed a theory known as Steady State which essentially said the universe had no beginning and no end.

My understanding on Hoyle’s view of the universe was that even if a big bang happened, it was essentially a local phenomenon which did not alter the steady state of the universe. The idea that the Big Bang was just an event in a corner of the universe is intellectually stimulating although I must caveat it by saying that that is my interpretation of what Hoyle might have meant.

The open-ended nature of the Steady State was deeply disturbing for scientists who want specificity about everything. Hoyle steadfastly believed in it even though by 1965, in the wake of the 1963 detection of a universal background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, it was more or less defeated as a theory.

These days one does not hear of Steady State at all unless a super nerd like Dr. Greene fishes out a comment as he tweeted. I have always been interested in Steady State. In the early 1980s I conducted an extensive interview with Professor Jayant Narlikar, who as a young physicist, collaborated with Hoyle on a theory of gravity which later fell by the wayside.

Hoyle was a combative, colorful mind who could not care less about the consequences of going against the established wisdom. He once said, "It is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right".

I think should be enough for a post made out of a tweet. In any case, it is not as if anyone pays me to read this blog.

Wild Wild Country, Rajneesh and I

Rajneesh (Photo: Wild Wild Country)

I have just begun watching a six-part Netflix documentary series ‘Wild Wild Country’ about Rajneesh. What I have watched of the first part so far is riveting with director brothers Chapman and Maclain Way offering some remarkable found footage about Rajneesh and his life in the 1980s and earlier.

Pretty sharp editing that intelligently toggles between the footage from the 1980s and current interviews with some of the players in the rather sordid saga gives the series quite a bite. I may write some more once I finish watching the series. For now I must do I am known to do—fish out my tangential but interesting connection with the subject I am writing about.

The post below is an amalgamation of what I wrote in 2010 and 2013.

August 21, 2010

Let me tell you about a 40-second visit to the Osho Commune, which I returned to after 24 years. The last time I was here it was in 1986 on my way back from Battis Shirala where I had gone to do a feature about its famous snake festival for the Associated Press (AP). I stayed at what then was just Blue Diamond Hotel owned by the Kirloskars. I came back to the hotel in its new avatar under the Taj management.

I had no plans to visit the commune but while taking an evening stroll along the leafy lanes around the hotel I ended up near it. I went inside the reception center where a sullen man in a maroon robe (It really looked like a gunny sack with two holes to slip in one’s hands) asked me why I was there. As I stretched to shake hands after introducing myself, he looked at my hand as if it was a slithery creature out to impregnate him. He recoiled and said no by shaking his head.

I said I was looking for Swami Chaitanya Keerti. He looked at me as if I had been roused from a slumber of a different era. “He is not here. He has not been here for a long time,” he said, feeling vindicated at not having shaken hands with me. Who knows what contaminations I might be carrying from whichever era that I had emerged from? That seemed to be the question on his mind. Before I could ask my next question he had moved on two women in white robes. I said, “Thank you for not shaking my hand” and left.

As I walked back to the hotel I reminisced about my encounter with Rajneesh at the Bombay airport after being deported by the US authorities following his arrest under immigration laws. That was in October/November timeframe in 1985. Rajneesh was a big story in the US then and the AP was naturally interested in a follow-up out of Bombay.

January 1, 2013

I did not know Rajneesh but met him twice fleetingly in 1985-86 after he was essentially prosecuted out of the United States. Both my meetings took place in Bombay as an Associated Press (AP) correspondent and both were unintentionally memorable.

My first meeting with Rajneesh was at the Bombay airport as he was being wheeled out by one of his aides. Rajneesh had become a huge story in the US having been slapped with a 35-count indictment by a federal grand jury accusing him and his disciples of violating immigration laws. He was arrested on October 28, 1985 on board a private jet in North Carolina  and then paraded in chains. There are several sordid details to the whole case but they are not germane to this post.

The case against Rajneesh concluded with him having agreed to what is known as the Alford plea, which essentially means the defendant not pleading guilty and maintaining innocence even while conceding to the existence of enough evidence with the prosecution to convict should the case go to trial. I am mentioning the basic details because they are relevant to my meeting. Rajneesh received a suspended sentence of 10 years, a fine of $400,000 and was asked to leave the country.

As Rajneesh was coming out of the airport I quickly introduced myself. The word AP did the trick because by then he was very familiar with it.

I was told sternly by the aide that unless I addressed him as “Bhagwan Rajneesh” he would not respond. I kept calling him Mr. Rajneesh. He relented after a while. One of the questions I asked was whether his commune in Oregon was seen as a threat to the local Christian community. He looked at me with mild amusement and replied in his trademark nasal tone, “If a religion, which is nearly 2000 years old, can be destroyed by an old, unarmed man (namely Rajneesh), then that religion deserves to be destroyed.”

For the record Rajneesh was not that old then. He was 54 but managed to look much older. He told me he had been administered a slow acting poison during his incarceration.

***

I was granted an interview with Rajneesh soon after the airport encounter. The interview was at a bungalow belonging to a leading transport company owner in Bombay’s Juhu Vile Parle area. I vividly remember his followers, both in saffron/orange robes as well as in normal everyday clothes, sitting on the floor facing an elaborate chair. They looked as if they were about to be delivered deliverance. There was a smaller chair next to the bigger chair, making clear the pecking order—Rajneesh were to sit in the big chair and I, the lesser moral, in the ordinary chair.

I was less than subtly told to keep the interview’s focus on “spiritual matters.” As Rajneesh entered a weird hush fell over the large room. Some followers were instantly overcome and started to sob. Some just stood up as if in a trance. I remained seated. As he sat down I said namaste to him. He smiled and greeted me back. My first question was about his recent expulsion from the U.S. because both the AP and I were interested in the news aspect of the story and not his spiritual take on life. Rajneesh did not answer.

A minder came to me to remind that “Bhagwan” would not answer questions that were not spiritual in nature. I told the minder that in that case I had to end the interview. I said a polite namaste to  Rajneesh and walked out. His followers could not process what had just happened.

Bliss

Bliss-MC

Painting someone blissfully asleep is not easy for me. Bliss makes the face of the person serene and it is hard to capture that serenity.

Yesterday, I did a few strokes on paper in black first to mark the contour of a young girl sleeping. I hesitated a bit before painting her eyes because I knew that could mess things up if I did not get the mood right. Fortunately, two quick lines to depict eyes shut worked.

The rest was easy, particularly because I had next to no paint left. I cut open the tubes and scraped out whatever was left. It is amazing how far even a few drops of paint can stretch.

Looking at the finished work tells me that it might sell as a print or other merchandise on my Fine Art America page here. Here are a couple of samples. You might consider buying either a throw pillow ($22) or a fleece blanket ($40). As a rule I avoid offering my paintings as a fleece blanket or a throw pillow but in this case it seems appropriate considering the theme.

 

Ball tampering and world crises

Cricket--MC

As world crises go, cricket ball tampering is an admittedly silly one. In the world of cricket though it is right there at the top. Ball-tampering is meant to illegally alter the ball’s surface in order that the way it swings through the air changes. People do not immediately realize that ball tampering is about aerodynamics; it is about physics.

Ball-tampering has been in the news after Australian player Cameron Bancroft was caught by television cameras as he appeared to rub the ball with a piece of yellow strip. Although I have not come across any reporting as to what that strip might have been, my conjecture is that it was a piece of yellow Velcro whose sandpaper-like surface can scuff the ball’s leather. I am speculating and I have absolutely no evidence that it was a piece of Velcro. I could be completely wrong.

The Australian team under the captain, Steve Smith has come under considerable strain after the incident caused him to step down and be suspended for one match. Smith has admitted that ball-tampering was part of a plan by the team’s “leadership group” which Bancroft carried out.

One has to be particularly inept to think that in this day and age of ubiquitous cameras, any player can get away with ball-tampering. The footage of the ball- tampering using the yellow piece of tape is so telltale that the Australian team had absolutely no choice but to admit it.

I am particularly interested in the physics of ball-tampering. When one side of cricket ball is scuffed and other polished the way it travels through the air changes. The rough side interacts with the air very differently than the polished one because of the resistance and that affects the way it swings. The air faces resistance with the rough surface while it glides over the polished one. Bowlers use any number of things to tamper with the ball, including sugary spit, picking at the seam and scratching the leather with their nails. There have been cases of Vaseline use to make one side of the ball heavier than the other to affect the swing.

All these are illegal actions and can lead to fines and match suspensions. All sports have a measure of cheating because all sports have humans involved. The quaint description of cricket being “a gentleman’s game” is precisely that now—quaint. It is an aggressive, combative and often ruthless sport that often results in on-field fights and abuse.

There is so much money at stake in the more commercialized versions of the game such as T-20 that players feel the need to cut corners. Fortunately, the camera technology has improved so dramatically along with quality of the TV camerawork that no action is ever missed as the Australian team found out.

That said, ball tampering is a silly crisis in a world full of real crises.

I like a lot of things just about enough

I like a lot of things just about enough

but not enough to possess them

or be possessed by them.

--MC

Leaping from thought to thought

विचारों के अरण्यमें

मैं एक डाली से दूसरी डाली

यूंह उछलता हूँ

जैसे वानर

पैड़ों की शाखों को

फल की खोज में लांघता है

--मयंक छाया

In the forest of thought

I leap from one branch to another

Like an ape

In search of fruit

--MC

Check out prints of my paintings

As a free agent in terms of journalism, writing and even painting it is essential that I sell my stuff. I frequently fail but one persists even though having to sell is one of the most debasing features of life.

It is from this standpoint that I reintroduce you to my paintings via my page on Fine Art America. It is a remarkable service that allows artists to merchandise their works in various forms, including prints and posters, without having to invest in infrastructure themselves. I have been on it for a while but so far I have not sold any work. Hence this plug.

Twenty five of my works are on sale here in various forms and many of them look pretty damn good. Take the one on top for example. There is a bit of a backstory attached to it. With paint having run out and tubes sprawled on the floor like savagely mauled soldiers I decided to give them all one last squeeze. I put so much force that some of them cracked and split on the sides, squirting some remaining drops of paint.

I had the last few drops of five colors—black, vermilion, blue, yellow ochre and unbleached titanium. When I say last few drops, I mean two-three drops each. I took an 11 x 17 glazed printing paper and went at it with my plastic palette knife. After the first few stabs it struck me that that I had messed up. The woman in pink looked interesting enough but I had no plan for the rest of the picture. I was about to trash the sheet but decided to wait a bit and do some writing.

I returned to it after an hour or so of writing. Within about 20 minutes I had finished the work as captured here. That and 24 other pieces are available on my page on Fine Art America. So do consider spending some money.

A few points about Facebook

A frame from CNN’s interview.

I have a simple rule about all quizzes on social media, including the seemingly fun ones—never take them because they are almost invariably Trojan horses that hide the real intention. That real intention could be something as selfish as marketing a product or something as sinister as data mining for political or cultural manipulation.

As Facebook and Marc Zuckerberg battle an existential threat because of the damning allegations that data belonging to some 50 million of its users was deceptively mined and misused for political purposes by Cambridge Analytica, it might be useful to remember my rule. All such quizzes are designed to flatter to deceive in one way or another.

People do not realize that in answering questions in those quizzes, which are frequently couched as humorous personality tests, they are unintentionally  giving away personality traits that are then analyzed by professional psychologists to create lucrative data products. In a sense, Facebook itself is a gigantic data trap now used by some two billion people who often voluntarily give away information that many of them would think several times before doing in an individualized situation. If I walked up to you in a mall and asked you some of those very questions one on one, you might either walk past me or punch me.

For some strange reason people feel a false sense of security in a collective context where a large number of people are engaging in the same social behavior. Always remember that everything on social media is for sale in one form or another. Users are a commodity to them whose life’s data means cash. That in itself may not be wrong or bad as long as people are told upfront and then they choose to go along. No one has been forced to be on Facebook or any other social media. It is our own need for applause, validation and approval not to mention just the simple joy of social interaction that we all use social media.

Zuckerberg may tell us repeatedly that his eventual goal is to help create a harmonious, peaceful world where people interact civilly even when they disagree. But even he has to pay his 25,000 plus employees apart from the massive costs of maintaining its huge server farms and other infrastructure. And yes, there is also that small detail of keeping its stock holders happy. In short, he has to do something with the constant data flow that its users disclose with the slightest of tease.

Since the Cambridge Analytica allegations there has been some movement towards leaving Facebook in droves in order to punish it. That is one way to do it but not necessarily the most effective way. I am fairly certain that there will be no major exodus from Facebook in the wake of these revelations. That is because the urge for social interaction, even if it is virtual, tends to triumph over privacy concerns. Zuckerberg knows that better than anyone.

In his interview with CNN’s Laurie Segall yesterday he looked chastened and apologetic. "This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened," Zuckerberg said. "We have a basic responsibility to protect people’s data."

He even spoke in terms of regulation. "I'm not sure we shouldn't be regulated," he said, adding, "There are things like ad transparency regulation that I would love to see."

One might say that he has no choice but to say and do this because it could easily spiral into something terminally destructive for his company. It is a very hard task ahead for him—having to guard the very data which earns his company billions of dollars.

I am not sure about the long-term impact of these revelations because public memory is short and people tend to move on. Unless there is a significant punitive cost for Facebook, it will not feel the pressure to ensure that the data harvesting is done strictly in adherence to acceptable standards.