Mayank Chhaya Daily

Some gratuitous comments about Commonwealth

Queen Elizabeth II at the opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in London yesterday (Photo: thecommonwealth.org)

There is an anachronism called the Commonwealth, consisting of 53 countries which were once mostly British colonies. Queen Elizabeth II heads the Commonwealth and will continue to do so until her death. She turns 92 tomorrow.

As the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting concludes today in London, what is also being discussed is who will head it post-Elizabeth. She has made her wish clear. She wants her son and forever-in-waiting king of England, Prince Charles. She has said that it is her “sincere wish” that he takes over “one day.” For a 92-year-old queen to say “one day” sounds as if she hopes to live considerably longer.

The head of the Commonwealth is not a hereditary transition but then the existence of the Commonwealth is an oddity as far as I am concerned. Why does it exist and why must it be headed by a member of the British royal family? If the Commonwealth must exist, which it should not, why should its leadership not rotate among member-nations? The queen has headed it since 1952.

Charles is nearly 70-years-old (born on November 14, 1948). He is the oldest heir to the British throne in 300 years. The wait for him continues. He must wonder why mummy should, at the very least, not let him be the head of the Commonwealth. Since its formation in 1949 only two people have headed it—King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. Charles was just one when it was founded.

India was among the eight founding members of the Commonwealth along with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom.

There are those who see it as Britain’s way of desperately clinging on to vestigial imperial glory. I am sure it does some good by the sheer fact that its members account for one-third of the world population at 2.4 billion. Of that India alone accounts for over half of that 2.4 billion. At the very least it should be renamed “Aamdani” (Look it up.) The Commonwealth also makes up for a quarter of the world’s land mass. In short, it is very big and makes Britain’s royal family warm with nostalgia about the vast territories it once ruled as an empire.

I grant you that I am being just too cynical and gratuitously so but the idea that there exists an institution which comes across as a fief of the British royal family—a case in point being the queen expressing her wish that Charles take over “one day”—is not a particularly edifying one for me. If it must exist, why not open up its leadership on an annual basis to the best-run democracy within the group? That way the Commonwealth can encourage members to compete to become increasingly good democracies. After all democratic values are one of the key features of its charter.

The queen described the Commonwealth as “one of the world’s great convening powers, a global association of volunteers who believe in the tangible benefits that flow from exchanging  ideas and experiences and respecting each other's point of view.”

"And we seem to be growing stronger year by year. The advantages are plain to see. An increasing emphasis on trade between our countries is helping us all to discover exciting new ways of doing business. And imaginative initiatives have shown how together we can bring about change on a global scale. The Commonwealth Canopy has emphasised our interdependence, while the Commonwealth Blue Charter promises to do the same in protecting our shared ocean resources,” she said.

Among the things that I like about the Commonwealth is the acronym for its summit held every two years. It is CHOGM and often pronounced cho-gum. It reminds me of chewing gum.

Solitude for now

Solitude—MC

With the readership of this blog inexplicably dipping in recent days—it was not too high to begin with—it is only appropriate that I indulge myself in two depictions of solitude done in the past two days. These acrylic on paper pieces use the same four colors I have left but create two very different images. Both have a single person being part of and standing apart from awesome nature.

It is always heartening that when my paintings also lend themselves cinematic framing like these two do. That is all for today.

Monk by sea--MC

Joy of making a manifestly false claim

What I am about to claim has no basis in fact at all but in deference to the times we live in I am going to do it anyway. All you need to do is almost dogmatically assert that what one is saying is precisely what is true and facts can shag themselves.

My claim is in the context of the flap between U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow over whether the Trump administration was on the verge of imposing tougher sanctions on Russia. On Sunday Haley told CBS that the U.S. was preparing fresh sanctions targeting "any sort of companies that were dealing with equipment related to [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad and chemical weapons use.”

It was a categorical assertion of the kind that could not have been made without clearance from the White House. However, Kudlow took a position that amounted to publicly undermining Haley.

"There might have been some momentary confusion about that. I think the issue here is we have a set of sanctions and additional sanctions are under consideration but have not been determined,” Kudlow was quoted as saying.

It was the word “momentary confusion” that would sting anyone, especially Haley who is known not to be imprecise.

President Trump was said to have been angered by Haley’s comment.

This is where my completely baseless claim enters.

At 3.32 p.m. yesterday I tweeted to the ambassador the following. As with all my tweets to anyone about anything this one too had no response at all. To be fair, I have just 241 followers which in the gated world of social media does not even qualify you to be homeless. I understand that.

However, soon after that Haley offered a succinct but caustic response to Kudlow saying, “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.”

My manifestly false claim is that her response was triggered by my tweet to her even though she had a million other more consequential ways to find out.

Kudlow was later reported to have called her to apologize. He told The New York Times, "I was wrong to say that. She was basically following what she thought was policy. The policy was changed and she wasn't told about it, so she was in a box."

That apology still had a hurtful twist in it because Kudlow caveated it by saying the policy over the sanctions had been changed and she was not told about it. So still, Ouch!

Captivated by the orientalist

Ferencz Eisenhut,1857 – 1903,HUNGARIAN, IN THE HAREM (All images: Sotheby’s)

This morning I have been captivated by the upcoming Sotheby’s auction titled ‘The Orientalist Sale’ on April 24.

The sale, according to the official description, “brings together paintings and sculpture representing the landscapes, people, and customs of North Africa, Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, and the Ottoman world during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

From scenes of worship, street life, and extensive desert views, to exquisitely worked costume bronzes, the sale features works that provide fascinating historical insights into the Arab, Ottoman, and Islamic worlds of the time.”

It is extraordinary how a majority of paintings by European artists captures textures, surfaces and light with such precision and detail. The immediate impact on me personally is to give up my painting because there is more artistic gift in the tiniest corners of these paintings than there ever will be in my entire career’s portfolio.

Some might say that the paintings forsake evocativeness for precision as if it takes any less talent to achieve the latter. In fact, precision because of its very detailed tediousness can be much more demanding of an artist than evocativeness which is often rather intuitive.

I have chosen a few random works and zeroed in on the details to illustrate how remarkable they are.I looked at all the 61 works and could not find any that was less than outstanding; even those which were relative less precise like the one below.

Adam Styka, 1890 – 1959, POLISH, SUNSET ON A LAKE SHORE

Notice the details in the two works below and how wonderfully the two artists, Raphael von Ambros, and Paul Joanowits execute them. Between the exposed bricks, bread, radishes, fabric, leather, metal, wood and stone the painters offer their complete mastery over their craft.

Raphael von Ambros, 1845-1895, AUSTRIAN, THE BAKER'S SHOP, CAIRO

Paul Joanowits, 1859 – 1957, SERBIAN, BASHI-BAZOUKS BEFORE A GATEWAY

Contrary to the first impression, many of these paintings have evocativeness too when you zoom in.

The works had the effect of visibly slowing me down and transporting me back to that world.

James Comey did not mind his Ps and Qs

Former FBI director James Comey

Former FBI director James Comey did not mind his Ps in response to Qs from ABC news anchor George Stephanopoulos. Get it? Ps and Qs? I wanted to get the silly pun out of the way before I made a couple of more substantive observations about the much anticipated interview.

It was remarkable that in a primetime news interview the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation prominently spoke of Russian prostitutes, peeing and America’s president. Three Ps as it were.

"I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don't know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013," Comey said. "It's possible, but I don't know."

"He (Trump) brought up what he called the 'golden showers thing' … adding that it bothered him if there was 'even a one percent chance' his wife, Melania, thought it was true," Comey said.

The word “prostitutes” figured 15 times according to the transcript of the interview and “peeing” five times.

That comment came pretty early on in the interview timed with the release of Comey’s memoirs "A Higher Loyalty," which is already a best-seller. Who would have thought that America’s once highest law enforcement officer would talk about peeing prostitutes and president? But this is where we are; standards of being scandalized have been completely rewritten in the Donald Trump era.

The interview was rather instructive for me in the way Comey, by his own admission, did not choose to unequivocally stand up to the new president hen the occasion clearly demanded that of him. When the two men met without anyone else being present and the president asked Comey for loyalty, the former FBI chief first promised him “honesty”. Then, when prompted against by Trump about loyalty, Comey said, “honest loyalty.”

That was clearly a mistake. Comey’s reflexive answer should have been to point out that his loyalty was to the law of the land and the constitution. I know this is easier said than done by those of us who were not in the room but FBI directors are expected to deal with hard realities. What does “honest loyalty” mean? Implicit in loyalty is the possibility that honesty may have to be forsaken by the one pledging it. Loyalty is necessarily at the cost of moral and legal rectitude. I thought that was a low moment.

Stephanopoulos persisted and asked Comey if it was a mistake not to make his stand clear. “But given what I know now, maybe it would’ve been better to give a more explicit– say, “Sir, I can’t promise you loyalty,” Comey said.

Another low point was when Comey told Trump “We're not investigating you.” Comey acknowledged that “It might have been a mistake.”

It is moments like those that could cut down Comey’s stature as an independent investigator among those who already view him with skepticism or through pro-Trump prism. One could tell in his demeanor while answering that question that he was aware of how “honest loyalty” would be seen by history.

Comey appeared to redeem himself when he said this in response to the question whether he thought Trump was fit to be the president.

“I don’t think he’s medically unfit to be president. I think he’s morally unfit to be president.

“A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds. And that’s not a policy statement. Again, I don’t care what your views are on guns or immigration or taxes,” he said.

It is being said that the interview which had the president and the White House on the edge during its countdown may not have been as devastating as apprehended. Part of it may have to do with Comey’s rather languid manner of saying things. Not that he intends to be so but there is something to the way he says damaging things that have some mitigation attached to it.

Even the fact that he called the president a habitual liar who treats women as “pieces of meat” and one is who is morally unfit is being viewed as low burn. To me they come across as clear castigation.

A few points about Syria and chemical weapons

With the “mission” in Syria having been “accomplished” one has to wonder what that was and what was accomplished. We are told that the heart of Syria’s chemical weapons program in Barzeh has been destroyed and set back “several years.”

What we are not told is whether the precise strikes will have any impact at all on the relentless killings that go on using conventional weapons which, incidentally, are also chemical weapons.

The debate over the use of chemical weapons and its utter cruelty has been going on for a long time. It was precisely a year ago that I wrote a post, some of whose content bear repeating. One of the points I had made was this:

“While to me all weapons at their core are chemical weapons because they contain chemicals inside some kind of casings, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) describes them as follows:

“The general and traditional definition of a chemical weapon is a toxic chemical contained in a delivery system, such as a bomb or shell.

The Convention defines chemical weapons much more generally. The term chemical weapon is applied to any toxic chemical or its precursor that can cause death, injury, temporary incapacitation or sensory irritation through its chemical action. Munitions or other delivery devices designed to deliver chemical weapons, whether filled or unfilled, are also considered weapons themselves.

The toxic chemicals that have been used as chemical weapons, or have been developed for use as chemical weapons, can be categorised as choking, blister, blood, or nerve agents. The most well known agents are as follows: choking agents—chlorine and phosgene, blister agents (or vesicants)—mustard and lewisite, blood agents—hydrogen cyanide, nerve agents—sarin, soman, VX.””

The difference between conventional weapons such as bullets and bombs and chemical weapons such as nerve agents is in their semantics. I have never been fully persuaded by the distinction. This is particularly so because hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died due to conventional weapons whose deaths, while igniting passing outrage, have mostly been treated as consequence of an endless war. One part of the reason why chemical weapons horrify us more is because of the sheer visual cruelty of what its victims suffer from.It is a grotesque sight.

We are told that the latest bombing strikes on Syria’s chemical weapons facilities by the United States, Britain and France were not aimed at toppling President Bashar al-Assad who has been waging an utterly inhumane seven-year-old civil war. The limited, precision bombing campaign was triggered by a suspected poison gas attack on April 7 in Douma that killed 75 people.

Other than significantly degrading or even fully destroying Syria’s chemical weapons program, which is a good thing, the strikes’ long-term efficacy is in serious doubt. It is almost as if what is being objected to is Syria’s choice of weapons by the three powers rather than unnerving suffering pouring down on civilians every day.

I have a sinking feeling that other than creating a narrative of Western muscularity for a few days the strikes will not in anyway diminish death stalking civilians in Syria day and night.

Revisiting Talaja morning and photons from Sun

While shooting my documentary ‘Gandhi’s Song’ a little over three years ago near Talaja along the coast of Bhavnagar in Gujarat I was rewarded with an absolutely magical sunset. Fortunately, I had my mobile handy to capture the arresting light (See above). That picture would inevitably prompt a painting (see below) and an accompanying piece that I wrote on June 11, last year. I republish it today.

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 because that is me.

To Asifa

Any attack on any child anywhere by anyone constitutes the worst kind of human cruelty. What happened to Asifa, an 8-year-old daughter of nomadic goat-herding parents in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir, goes even beyond that. Her repeated rape under sedation and then murder by strangling and bludgeoning by grotesquery masquerading as men has left me unable to process how I feel.

It is a crime so cruel and degeneration of humanity so deep that one finds it impossible to fully articulate the mélange of raw rage, pure disgust and profound visceral pain. I also feel restrained in order not to stomp on a child’s dignity more than it already has been. Photos of her juxtaposed as a vivacious eight-year-old bursting with life in her eyes with her lifeless body having endured unspeakable violence are doing the rounds of social media. Andy Warhol-like treatment of Asifa’s lovely face with a curious gaze turning from color to black and white in several frames have also been posted on Facebook and elsewhere.

Any and all cruelty to fellow humans should affect us all equally but some like what happened to Asifa cut right to the bone. I do not intend to resist what I feel but feel compelled to point out how conflicted I am about the inundation of those images. It is almost as if a child who had not even begun get a taste of what life had in store for her and was assaulted with its worst features all at once is being trampled upon all over again in the name of shared grief and outrage.

I had no intention of writing this short post because it risks perpetuating the myth of shared grief and outrage in a near voyeuristic fashion. I do so only to say no one will ever get even the slightest measure of the primal pain and helplessness she must have felt. The least we could do is not pretend that we do.

Why flowers blooming at high Alpine attitudes is not necessarily good

Climate change skeptics and outright deniers could happily twist the latest cover story in the prestigious science journal Nature. It is about how climate change is “increasing plant species richness at high altitudes.”

In other words, pretty flowers are blossoming at altitudes once covered by snow and ice. The debate between pretty flowers growing out of rocks versus frozen mountain tops would seem to be a non-brainer for the skeptics and deniers. Flowers—woohoo!, snow/ice—boo!

Nature’s accompanying description says,”The cover shows the Alpine rock jasmine (Androsace alpina) in the scree of Piz Lagalb in the eastern Alps. Mountains are experiencing some of the highest rates of warming under anthropogenic climate change. In this issue, Manuel Steinbauer and his colleagues examine how plant species richness has changed over the past 145 years on 302 mountain summits across Europe. Using vegetation survey data, the researchers find that richness increased strongly on the vast majority of Europe’s summits over this period. They note, however, that the rate of increase has accelerated over time, with five times as much species enrichment occurring in the past decade compared with fifty years ago. Their analysis reveals a positive correlation between the magnitude of the increase in richness and the rate of warming, suggesting that climate-induced biotic change is accelerating even in remote places on Earth.”

An abstract also says this: “Globally accelerating trends in societal development and human environmental impacts since the mid-twentieth century are known as the Great Acceleration and have been discussed as a key indicator of the onset of the Anthropocene epoch. While reports on ecological responses (for example, changes in species range or local extinctions) to the Great Acceleration are multiplying, it is unknown whether such biotic responses are undergoing a similar acceleration over time. This knowledge gap stems from the limited availability of time series data on biodiversity changes across large temporal and geographical extents. Here we use a dataset of repeated plant surveys from 302 mountain summits across Europe, spanning 145 years of observation, to assess the temporal trajectory of mountain biodiversity changes as a globally coherent imprint of the Anthropocene. We find a continent-wide acceleration in the rate of increase in plant species richness, with five times as much species enrichment between 2007 and 2016 as fifty years ago, between 1957 and 1966. This acceleration is strikingly synchronized with accelerated global warming and is not linked to alternative global change drivers. The accelerating increases in species richness on mountain summits across this broad spatial extent demonstrate that acceleration in climate-induced biotic change is occurring even in remote places on Earth, with potentially far-ranging consequences not only for biodiversity, but also for ecosystem functioning and services.”

The reality is, of course, far more complex than just the deeply edifying sight of lovely flowers defying rocks to bloom. As the abstract says there has been “a continent-wide acceleration in the rate of increase in plant species richness, with five times as much species enrichment between 2007 and 2016 as fifty years ago, between 1957 and 1966. This acceleration is strikingly synchronized with accelerated global warming and is not linked to alternative global change drivers.”

So while flowers anywhere are wonderful, in this context they symbolize a greatly worrisome shift. This shift has the potential to alter the future of coming generations in ways which could be devastating. We can choose to smell the flowers now, ignoring those who will follow us But is that a kind thing to do?

In the middle being articulated

Women by coconut tree—MC

Sometimes it is best to leave some paintings incomplete; in the middle of being articulated. This one titled ‘Women by coconut tree’ is one such work. As I run out of the watercolors used for Holi by my daughter, I do some quick brushwork to finish some pieces. I may eventually finish this one but for now this is good enough.

This one was prompted by a 1974 oil on canvas by the brilliant Indonesian painter Hendra Gunawan (1918-1983) titled ‘The Mango Seller’. I will write about Gunawan’s enchantingly statured style tomorrow but for today have a look at the work by Gunawan that triggered mine.

‘The Mango Seller’ by Hendra Gunawan (1918-1983), Oil on canvas, 1974.