Mayank Chhaya Daily

In search of Tathagata

Tathagata—Mayank Chhaya

To coincide with the observance of the Buddha Purnima I republish a very short piece of mine which is among my favorite posts.

***

My name is Pukkusati and I am on way to Savatthi in search of Tathagata. I may find him or I may not find him but I am certainly looking for him. Looking for people is often more fulfilling than finding them.

As I take a break from my journey on foot to the countries to the north I choose this potter’s shed to rest for a few days. Like all potter’s sheds this one too is serene in its air and languid in its pace. That may be because of the way a lump of clay sits and spins on the wheel with the potter’s hands gently giving it a shape. It is deliberate and contemplative. The potter's wheel and hands move as if in convergence with some cosmic rhythm that only the potter can see.

It has been a few days and I must return to my journey. Tathagata is known to move much and may not remain in Savatthi for long. I must find him. I have no belongings. So leaving a place is essentially just getting up and leaving. I do not have to bother with whether I am forgetting something. As long as I am there I have all that I need.

Before I step out of the potter’s shed I hear the rustle of footsteps. The man walking ahead of the rest does not seem to be in any hurry to get anywhere. He knows where he is going but is not distracted by the destination. He is fully here right now even as he may not be here at all. We greet each other. “O Bhikkhu*,” he says, “It appears you are on a quest. You seem to have left home and family.”

I reply, “O friend, you are right. I am in search of Gotama, once the prince of the Sakyas and now a recluse.”

“Why do you look for Gotama? Have you seen him? Do you know what he looks like? Would you recognize him?” the man asks me.

“No, I have not and no, I don’ know what he looks like and no, I wouldn’t recognize him,” I reply. “Why I am looking for Gotama is because he is the Arahant.”

“What is it that you seek from him?” the man asked.

“I want to join the Sangha,” I said.

“I will teach you the doctrine of the Sangha,” the man said with such authority that I didn’t think of asking who he was to teach me the doctrine of the Sangha.

“We are composed of six elements. Solidity, fluidity, heat, motion, space and consciousness. None of these is really you, your Self. They appear and disappear. The moment you recognize something as you it fades as soon as you have recognized it. So you cannot really know that it was you. The only way to come to grips with this continuous transience is through equanimity. Detachment is the answer. If you do not cling to anything, you are never anxious. If you are never anxious, you are calm within…..”

The man’s words very magical. They fell over me like a sheet of silk so fine that it was there and not yet there. I could feel it but couldn’t see it. I could see it but couldn’t feel it.

I knew I was in the presence—the presence of Tathagata. I was embarrassed at having addressed him as my “friend”. Tahthagata is not a friend. He is the Arahant. I beseech him to ordain me into the Sangha.

He asks me if I have three robes and an alms-bowl. I say I don’t. He wants me to get those. I come out of the potter’s shed where the potter was making tiny cows and calves. I walk towards the marketplace and reach there to find some commotion. A cow is indiscriminately charging through the main street destroying shops and wares. Suddenly, I find she is charging head-on towards me. Before I could get out of her way she has gored me. I did not survive.

P.S.: The above is a somewhat reimagined encounter between the Buddha and Pukkusati whom he found to be earnest and intelligent.

Filing bruised knees after sprinkling salt on it

Comedian Michelle Wolf

Imagine that your knees are deeply bruised. Now imagine that someone pours vinegar and sprinkles salt on it. Wait, there is more. Now imagine that someone smoothens the bruises with a file. That’s what comedian Michelle Wolf did at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

This morning, as Wolf’s brutal takedowns of the movers and shakers in Washington D.C., starting with President Donald Trump, are predictably dividing those who watched the performance, I have no particular objection to it. She lived up to her unsparing humor. If you deliberately choose to stick your hand inside a hornets’ nest, you cannot complain against being repeatedly stung. The headliner at this annual dinner is not there to mollycoddle the powers-that-be. They are there to make people wince. Wolf did that repeatedly as many in the audience groaned.

Her vicious takedown of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders barely three feet away from where the latter sat was quite extraordinary.

“Every time Sarah steps up to the podium, I get excited,” Wolf said and continued. “I’m not really sure what we’re going to get, you know? A press briefing, a bunch of lies or divided into softball teams. ‘It’s shirts and skins, and this time don’t be such a little bitch, Jim Acosta.”  Acosta is CNN’s White House correspondent routinely clashes with Sanders.

“I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies,” Wolf said in a rather weirdly visualized ritual. Burning facts and using its ash to create smoky eyes is actually quite literary.

One could clearly see that Sanders was not at all amused even as Wolf piled on, “I’m never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Is it Sarah Sanders, is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is it Cousin Huckabee, is it Aunt Huckabee Sanders? What’s Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women? Ah I Know, Aunt Coulter.”  Coulter is a witheringly insolent  wingnut.

If the dinner organizers’ intention was to go for anodyne, inoffensive entertainment, they should have altogether avoided Wolf whose reputation for abrasive comedy is quite well-known.But I suspect the organizers knew what they had paid for and invited her quite consciously.

There are already demands for the White House Correspondents’ Association to explain their choice. To which the association must tell its critics to go take a hike. Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, himself a subject of frequent ridicule once, tweeted saying the association needs to respond “since they paid for her (Wolf) to speak.” This from a man who routinely fudged facts from the official podium. 

The tenor of Wolf’s act was clear from the get-go when she said, “Like a porn star says when she’s about to have sex with a Trump, let’s get this over with.”

“It’s 2018 and I am a woman so you cannot shut me up. Unless you have Michael Cohen wire me $130,000,” she said. Of Trump she said, “I would drag him here myself, but it turns out that the president of the United States is the one pussy you’re not allowed to grab. He said it first. Yeah, he did. You remember? Good.”

In another particularly brutal crack she said of Vice President Mike Pence, “He thinks abortion is murder. Which first of all don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it, you gotta get that baby out of there. And yeah, sure, you can groan all you want, I know a lot of you are very anti-abortion, you know, unless it’s the one you got for your secret mistress.”

Wolf’s routine was full of such vicious attacks which burned many in the process. It is more than likely that Wolf’s presence would reinforce the ludicrous narrative disingenuously peddled by the president about a biased “elite liberal” media out to get him.

As an aside, I have never understood the idea of describing journalists as “elite” because a vast majority—with the exception of some broadcast media superstars—is made of those who struggle to survive with barely survival salaries. It is because of the nature of their profession which puts them in the midst of the real power elite, as embodied by the president himself, that they get ridiculously branded as elite themselves.

Wolf’s attack on Sanders appears to have made many journalists uncomfortable. Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent of the New York Times, tweeted: “That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.”

To which Wolf responded in a tweet saying, “Hey mags! All these jokes were about her despicable behavior. Sounds like you have some thoughts about her looks though?”

Like I said at the beginning, I have no particular objection to Wolf’s gig. If some newspaper is willing to give her the job and if the White House press office grants her the credentials she should consider becoming an occasional White House correspondent.

This morning

Savaar—MC

आज सुबह हम

कल की सारी उमीदों के रंग

बिखेर आये

--मयंक छाया

Conceit of poetry at 2.17 a.m.

Conceit is the fuel that propels all creative pursuit. It is particularly true of poetry. That the poet writes something of one’s own volition and then expects any response at all from others is an act of conceit. Whether that poetry would be praised or not is beside the point.

Poetry came to me early in my teenage but not as a conscious act of conceit. That I figured out later. After nearly 45 years of having written it mostly in Hindi/Urdu without formally publishing any I am now fully aware of that.

This bit of preamble is necessary to tell you what happened at 2.17 a.m. this morning. I woke up then for reasons which are not germane to the point I am about to make. I have this habit of switching on my mobile phone to check the time and then, in a nakedly narcissistic impulse, check my Facebook timeline since more often than not I post something—poetry or a comment or a video—before I go to sleep.

Yesterday I had posted the following verse which I had written sometime ago.

खुश्क पत्तों के जंगल मे

दबे पाओं चलते हो

यह क्या करते हो?

--मयंक छाया

(Khushk patton ke jungle mein

Dabey paon chaltey ho

Yeh kya kartey ho)

You walk tiptoed

In a forest full of dry leaves

Why?

--MC

I noticed an inordinately generous praise* by Naseem Naqvi, a friend based in Delhi, who said this particular verse is reminiscent of Jaun Elia (1931-2002), a very highly regarded poet and scholar. I knew of Elia by name with some awareness of his extraordinary standing in the world of Urdu poetry. I had not heard or read his poetry although I was vaguely familiar with his reputation as a great contrarian. His biography illustrates why he enjoyed such a formidable reputation as a scholar as well. He was proficient in Urdu, Arabic, English, Persian, Sanskrit and Hebrew.

I was overwhelmed by Naseem’s compliment—at 2.19 a.m. As it often happens—and this is unrelated to Naseem’s high praise—a couple of new verses were born around 4 a.m. when I wok up again. I had to jot them down at the back of an envelop. (Why is it that there is always an envelop available and not a proper pad? But that is for another time.)

One verse was clearly prompted by the reference to Elia.

नाम तो सुने हैं कई सुखनवरों के

लेकिन उनकी करतूत से नवाकेफ़ हूँ मैं

(Naam to suney hain kain sukhanwaron ke

Lekin unki kartooten se nawaqef hun main)

I have heard of many poets

But I am unaware of their deeds (Works in this context)

(You may note that the word kartoot can have a rather mischievous connotation.)

After I quickly jotted that one down and tried to go back to sleep some other verses were born a few minutes later.

टूटे रिश्तों का आदि हूँ मैं

बनाम दुनिया फरियादी हूँ मैं

बेवजह काटता नहीं मैं किसी को

ऊंचे उसूलों का फ़सादी हूँ मैं

(Tootey rishton ka aadi hun main

Banam duniya fariyadi hun main

Bewajah kat ta nahin main kisi ko

Oonche usulon ka fasaadi hun main)

I am accustomed to broken relationships

I am the plaintiff versus the world

I do not kill without cause

I am a rioter of high principles

--Mayank Chhaya

I have long stopped analyzing how one’s brain produces what it does. These verses are so disparate. For them to be born practically as literary triplets is a weird thing but who knows how the mind works, especially a poet’s conceited mind?

* I hesitated to use “inordinately generous praise” because it was presumptuous/patronizing to think that the person praising had not rationally analyzed the merit of before he or she made that comment. There is a tendency towards self-effacement in the face of high praise born of fake humility that leads to the use such as “inordinately generous praise.” I think it is more respectful to accept the praise for what it is even if you risk coming across as arrogant.

Modigliani and his Reclining Nude

Nu couché (sur le côté gauche)”, Reclining Nude (on the left side), by Amedeo Modigliani, 1917. (Image: Sotheby’s)

A little over a hundred years after he painted it as a 32-year-old artist, Amedeo Modigliani’s ‘Reclining Nude’ is being offered by Sotheby’s for an estimated price of $150 million. Yes, that’s right. $150 million. If he were alive today, he would have probably recited Dante as was his wont.

A gifted sculptor and painter, Modigliani transformed the way nudes were painted and ‘Reclining Nude’ is considered the finest example of that. In the realm of nudes there is before and after Modigliani. His nudes, unlike the more distant classical ones, stand out for their directness and proximity. The one here directly meets the viewer’s gaze even while she retains her utter self-assurance. She seems to communicating directly to the individual viewer.

The face of the model has the characteristic Modigliani elongation and is as captivating an aspect of the painting as the rest of the body. That in a nude of this quality the viewer feels as engaged with the model’s eyes as the rest is a tribute to the great painter.

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)

If you have two hours to spare—even if in bits and pieces—I suggest you watch this movie about his life. Andy Garcia acquits himself powerfully as Modigliani.

Going forward stop saying going forward

This morning I republish a very short piece about my pet peeve against stating the obvious.  Before I do that, let me get another pet peeve out of my system—the ludicrous use of “going forward” in America, particularly by TV talking heads.

Going forward is intrinsic to existence. Every moment is either now or going forward. It is a laughably redundant expression and needs absolutely no stating. So “going forward” please drop saying “going forward.”

June 7, 2016

As you can obviously see the cartoon is about a man coming to an office and asking the receptionist if he can state the obvious there. This is notwithstanding that there is a whole noticeboard that says “Do not state the obvious here. It has already been stated.”

The receptionist whose face resembles the man in Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ points out the sign exasperatedly.

Although the cartoon is self-explanatory and therefore obvious, I have still explained it or, in other words, stated the obvious. Get it? Stating the obvious.

* In case you have not noticed, I am stating the obvious in describing a cartoon about stating the obvious.

Not being there

I have not quite attained the enlightened incompetence and a penchant for profound inanities of Peter Sellers playing Chance the Gardner in the 1979 movie ‘Being There’. But I think I am beginning to show some of those signs since I barely step out of the house.

Chance is a gardener who has never stepped out of his rich reclusive employer’s townhouse and walled garden in Washington. He has next to no exposure of the outside world until his master’s death. He is then thrown into the real world where he speaks in rather obvious generalizations which sound profoundly wise to others. Sellers ends up being a sort of wisdom dispenser for the movers and shakers in the nation’s capital where he tells the president "Spring, summer, autumn, winter . . . then spring again.''

Since I work from home and have developed a rather peculiar aversion to going out I sense I might soon lose some basic real world skills. Last evening I had an assignment to interpret a focus group in Chicago which meant my having to drive there, find the right building on Upper Wacker Drive, locate a nearby parking place and then walk to the appointed building. As apprehended, it turned out to be quite a task for me despite my old GPS which went haywire like me after approaching Wacker Drive. I took a convoluted detour as the GPS woman kept saying “recalculating”. At one point I even said to her, “Shut your trap.” Weirdly, she did not reply.

As I eventually stepped out of the parking garage I was intensely reminded of Chance and his predicaments. I had to ask a passer-by where Wacker was which he was kind enough to tell me. Getting inside the building was Task #2 since there was some construction going on and the main entrance was under a canopy. Then came Task #3 of locating the office. (I am taking literary liberties here.)

After the two-hour engagement, came Task # 4 of finding the parking place again followed by Task # 5 of locating the paying station. Then came the classic nightmare of all those who have parked in a multistoried facility. I remembered the aisle but had forgotten which level. I had even forgotten that I had taken pictures of the level on my phone as a reminder. It was not before I had gone through two levels that it remembered to look at the pictures. I found the right level and finally found the car.

Coming out of the lot and with GPS struggling to locate satellites I began driving blind in some random direction. However, as luck would have it, I was driving in precisely the right direction even as the GPS caught a signal and brought me home.

I see this as an example of how your individual evolution takes a subtly different direction as your working environment changes—in my case having to work from home and barely going out. My gait changes when I am in an unfamiliar surrounding like I was last night. I look visibly unsure like Chance. At the same time though, one’s muscle memory is so strong that were I to do it again in the next few days I would do it without a hitch.

ഇപ്പോൾ ശശി തരൂരിന് ഹിന്ദിയിൽ

It has been noted with some amusement that Shashi Tharoor, a Congress Party Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, has begun to occasionally tweet in Hindi. If English is the language of the global economy, then Hindi is—and I say it with some despair—the language of Indian political discourse.

“The Hindi stuff is an acknowledgement that a lot of our national discourse now is taking place principally in Hindi and people like myself and other leaders from the South, who have tended to work nationally in English, find ourselves at a small disadvantage in reaching the sort of the Hindi heartland as it were (in the North) which in terms of national agenda setting is necessary,” Tharoor told Maya Mirchandani of The Wire in a video interview.

Tharoor, who is an enormous presence on social media with 6.69 million Twitter followers, clearly wants to make inroads into the Hindi heartland by using the language that the Hindi heartland speaks, namely Hindi. With close to 500 million people reading, writing and speaking Hindi either as their first language or second language, it makes profound political sense for Tharoor or any other non-Hindi politician with national aspirations to do that. I would not call it a decision of expediency but it is very nearly that even while being a decision of necessity.

Let me explain why I said “some despair” about Hindi being the language of India’s national political discourse. As a native Gujarati speaker I have written far more in Hindi/Urdu since my early teenage than my own mother-tongue. In fact, I find poetic expression comes much more easily to me in Hindi/Urdu than in Gujarati. My despair has nothing to do with linguistic prejudice. It is one of the world’s great languages but then India is home to many of the world’s great languages spoken by hundreds of millions of people. 

Hindi’s political primacy in India is undisputable and it would be pointless to work on a counter. Just as it would be pointless to replace English as the language of the global economy and even popular culture, it would be futile to try and replace Hindi. My despair comes from the fact that a language necessarily comes attached with regionalized culture which in turn means piggybacking on the political primacy are also many of the cultural predilections from the Hindi heartland. In any case with the enormous success of Hindi cinema Hindi has long been the lingua franca of popular Indian culture. If it is a contest, it has already been won by Hindi.

Notwithstanding that fait accompli I think it is essential that all other great Indian languages have some political clout as well. At this stage it seems inconceivable that a politician from the so-called Hindi heartland with national aspirations would even academically consider learning other politically influential languages such as Marathi, Bengali, Telugu and Tamil for instance. I chose these four because they represent states with sizable parliamentary seats at Maharashtra (48), West Bengal (42), Andhra Pradesh (42) and Tamil Nadu (39). Of course, given India’s splintered center and left-of-center political world smaller states with different languages can also be decisive. My point is there has to be some effort to reach out in other languages as well by Hindi speaking politicians with national aspirations.

Perhaps I am belaboring the point too much but this Monday morning I do not have anything better to do. As for Tharoor occasionally tweeting in Hindi in recognition of the language’s political primacy, the ambitious politician must do what he’s got to do.

* The Malayalam headline is intended to read ‘Shashi Tharoor now in Hindi’. I have used the Google translation tool to translate but cannot at all vouch for its linguistic accuracy.

I just know a couple of sentences in Malayalam such as “ennik  sanskarikkanam’ (I want to talk) or “pattida monay” (son of a dog).

To Earth even though it does not know it

Girl on the bridge--MC

Earth has no clue we are celebrating it today. Earth also has no stake in whether it is hospitable or hostile to us. It is for us to try an attain a measure of equilibrium with this enchanting and mesmerizing planet so that all sentient life can thrive for as long as Earth will allow it.

NASA’s planet hunter Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is in the process of setting itself up for what is going to be the most comprehensive survey of 85% our sky to search for Earth-like planets. TESS will examine 200,000 stars for two years in the largest exoplanet search mission of its kind. There are reasonable expectations that TESS will find thousands of exoplanets, many of which could be similar to Earth.

But while that search goes on we ought to be mindful that we are already on one arrestingly beautiful planet whose bounties never cease to amaze us. Even if we do find a comparable exoplanet, there is no next to no chance of our reaching there physically in the foreseeable future. Even if we do advance technologically to a level where interstellar travel becomes a viable option with humans, it will never be more than a handful of people who would get to go there.

For the vast majority of us Earth is our only option. And what a gift it is! My recommendation would be to make the most of what we have right here. By all means, celebrate Earth as long as you know that Earth does not really care if we mess it up. It will do what is natural to the system, including wipe us out.

Now a bit about the painting. Although it was not done with Earth in mind, it strikes me that it captures the sheer wonder of looking Earth from a vantage point. The effect I have tried to achieve is the girl looking down from a bridge at a hint of Earth.

Watching a solitary ant and its random movements

Ant

This morning I was captivated by a single ant and its utterly whimsical movement on the floor. I have long tried to understand if a single ant or many ants have a certain logic—movement path, if you will—when they crawl around.

One can safely assume that an ant or ants are going somewhere specific to either accomplish something specific or returning to a specific place after accomplishing something specific. There ought to be an aim and/or destination to their movement. Otherwise, why come out of the colony at all to be crushed under human feet?

I actually stared at this solitary ant for several minutes as it changed its direction randomly and several times before I felt dizzy and decided to give up and write about it instead.

Since it was alone I thought it was looking for its colony of ants or fellow ants that would have come out to forage. Unless ants come out for a morning jog or a brisk walk, that was a safe assumption. However its movement suggested it was confused as it rapidly turned at sharp angles on the tiles. It kept weaving in and out of the grooves between the tiles. Just as I thought it had found its direction it took a 180 degree turn and started in the exact opposite direction. It stopped for a moment, did some contortions with its head and then turned right back.

It must have been separated from its fellow ants because I did not see any for miles—miles in ants’ unit but less than a step for us. So its immediate goal must have been to find its fellow ants.

I did some reading about ants’ movement and discovered that they do collectively choose routes which have certain probabilities although watching them one would never suspect it. Scientists who do such research find that ants do have certain mathematical patterns to their movements. During my search I chanced upon a service known as SiNC or the Information and Scientific News Service (SINC), “the first state public agency specialising in science, technology and innovation information in Spanish.”

In a story headlined “Ants’ movements hide mathematical patterns’ dated May 11, 2015, it quoted María Vela Pérez, researcher at the European University in Madrid and co-author of a study about ants’ movements as saying, “To be more specific, they are a mixture of Gaussian and Pareto distributions, two probability functions which are commonly used in statistics, and that in this case dictate how much the ant ‘turns’ at each step and the direction it will travel in.”

Ant movements have been studied as a possible model for micro-robots to accomplish various tasks such as cleaning a contaminated area.

Coming back to the solitary ant that seemed to be lost on my bathroom floor this morning it eventually went under the door and disappeared. It struck me that I will never see it again and even if I did, how would I know? At the risk of being branded an ant racist I must say they all do look the same to an untrained eye. Perhaps that is how Nature wants it—a collective identity for an entire colony of ants rather than an individual one unlike in other larger species. Of course, a single ant has to have its own identity. It is just that I am not looking hard enough.