Mayank Chhaya Daily

Some observations about US, India, Iran

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 27 (Photo: Twitter handle @nikkihaley)

It is not clear to me from reading news reports whether India has decided to truckle under the unambiguous US demand to stop importing crude oil from Iran or stand its ground and tell Washington to take a hike.

A Reuters story by Nidhi Verma on June 28 said, “India’s oil ministry has asked refiners to prepare for a ‘drastic reduction or zero’ imports of Iranian oil from November, two industry sources said, the first sign that New Delhi is responding to a push by the United States to cut trade ties with Iran.”

In contrast, a CNNMoney report by Rishi Iyengar on June 27 said, “One of the biggest buyers (India) of Iranian oil is unlikely to comply in full with US demands to reduce imports to zero.”

Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, who recently visited India, was quoted as having told Prime Minister Narendra Modi to reduce New Delhi’s dependence on Iranian oil. “Sanctions are coming (on Iran) and we’re going forward on that, and with India and the U.S. building strong relationships we hoped that they would lessen their dependence on Iran,” she told reporters.

“There’s a will, a political will, from both sides to figure out how to make this work,” Haley said. “Prime Minister Modi very much understands where we are with Iran, he didn’t question it, he didn’t criticize it, he understood it and he also understands that (India’s) relationship with the U.S. is strong and important and needs to stay that way.”

My first reaction on reading the reports of Haley asking India to reduce Iranian oil imports was “Yeah, right. She says and he does it. Not gonna happen.” It appeared for a couple of days after my June 27 reaction that I was completely wrong and that New Delhi may indeed consider complying with the US request. Now it appears that things may be a little more nuanced than that. I may still be wrong but not so flamingly so.

My reading of the situation is still close to my first reaction. Here is why. India imports 700,000 barrels of Iranian crude a day. Iran is India’s third largest supplier of crude after Iraq and Saudi Arabia. India is second only to China in buying Iranian crude. Iran is not just a supplier but a strategic supplier for India.New Delhi has deep civilizational and strategic relations with Tehran. Even at the height of sanctions against Iran, India continued to buy crude from there using the rupee to settle payments.

Modi is preparing for a potentially rough national election in 2019 and reducing crude supply from Iran would mean even higher gas prices,a decisive election issue because of its deep impact. As it is, there is widespread disaffection across India at his handling of the economy, which despite his characteristic bombast, has failed to create any significant number of jobs. Higher oil prices directly pose an existential threat to the electoral constituency that has uncritically embraced Modi—the middle class. But they too have been antsy lately because of the subpar progress on various fronts.

The narrative of India truckling under US pressure does not sit well with Modi’s image of a barrel-chested nationalist who would do nothing to dilute the country’s pride on the international stage. While that is just a narrative meant for popular consumption, his foreign policy handling has been quite a worrisome spectacle. The Trump administration, which was lapped up in its early months by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its extended right-wing Hindu affiliates, has not been particularly friendly in recent months with issues such as trade tariffs. President Trump has routinely slammed India’s approach to tariffs.

Modi was seen as a refreshingly transactional prime minister when it came to foreign affairs but in Trump he has found someone who is utterly, unreliably transactional making US-India relations tricky despite assertions of growing strategic convergence. The US threat of imposing sanctions against India if it went ahead with the purchase of S-400 antimissile defense shield from Russia is bound to have caused serious concerns among India’s strategic community. New Delhi has taken a tough stand saying that deal will not be changed.

“In all our engagements with the U.S., we have clearly explained how India and Russia’s defense cooperation has been going on for a long time and that it is a time-tested relationship,” India’s Defense Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said recently.

The postponement of the so-called 2+2 talks scheduled for July 6 between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense James Mattis on the US side and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Sitharaman on the Indian side may have been projected as routine. However, it wouldn’t be lost on strategic experts in Delhi that the postponement at the very least suggests that India is seen as dispensable by the Trump administration. This is the second time that the much anticipated strategic dialogue has been postponed. The first time it was in March.

Preoccupations with North Korea and the just scheduled summit between Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin are being cited for the postponement. One should not read too much into the second postponement but one is tempted to given the other developments.

I think India needs to take a position that is becoming of its strategic and civilizational strengths as a self-assuredly independent nation not beholden to the caprice of an unpredictable leader in Washington. I am not sure if Modi has the boldness to do that despite his much projected optics.

Oumuamua as an alien spaceship from Proxima b

The appearance and rapid transit of the first interstellar object Oumuamua has whipped up my story-telling juices. I have been meaning to write a story involving the likely elongated object as soon as we first came to know about it on October, 19, 2017. It was not clear precisely what the object was—first thought to be an asteroid—but now it seems it could well be a comet.

The determination that it may have been a comet comes from the sudden increase in its speed possibly caused by a part of it warmed up by the sun and puffing gas out, propelling it faster. Traveling at 196,000 miles per hour or about 320,000 kilometers per hour Oumuamua seemed like an asteroid at first because it had not gas emanating from it like comets have as they go close past the sun. It was thought to be an asteroid, made of rock and metal.

However, the sudden increase in speed as it moves away from our solar system suggests it was after all a comet.

In my fictional mind I have always seen Oumuamua as an alien spaceship designed to flyby through solar system generally but Earth particularly on a quick reconnaissance. Its mission was not to engage us but merely produce reasonably detailed imaging of the solar system and Earth before returning to its base on Proxima b, the exoplanet some 1.3 times the size of Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to us.  The discovery of Proxima b in 2016 was a sort of cosmic convergence meant to prepare us for the arrival and exit of Oumuamua.

I have made some quick calculations about when Oumuamua had to have left Proxima b to reach us now. Proxima b is part of the star system some 4.3 light years from us which makes it about 40 trillion kilometers from us. 40 trillion is—and I hope I am right about the zeros here—40,00,00,00,00,00,00. Oumuamua’s speed was a little over 196,000 kilometers per hour. I have rounded it off to 200,000 for my fiction. There are 8,760 hours in a year, which is not fictional but real. So in one Earth year the spaceship can cover 28,03,20,00,00 kilometers. At that speed it will need 14,270 years to travel through our solar system.

While that is terribly wrong from a single human’s standpoint, it is not that long to advance civilizational knowledge. Since this is science fiction, I have worked around the problem of the long travel time at ordinary speeds. Here on Earth there have been serious discussions about a breakthrough in laser-propelled interstellar probes that can travel at 20% the speed of light, covering the distance to Proxima b in 20 years.In fact, NASA is already said to be working on laser-propelled spacecraft that could cover massive cosmic distances such as the one to Proxima b at speeds with significant percentage of the speed of light.

Instead of burning chemicals to power spaceships—which is a rather inefficient method—the idea is to use electromagnetic acceleration. In the traditional rocket fuel, efficiencies are curtailed by the very chemical processes intrinsic to their burning. In electromagnetic acceleration the only bar is the speed of light beyond which nothing can travel. Of course, even traveling at speeds reasonably close to the speed of light is a complicated task but not an impossible one.

Photonic propulsion is a possible way out of our slow speeds challenge.  Serious scientists believe that spacecraft can be propelled at 20 to 30 percent the speed of light and some day at higher percentages. Even if you settle for 20%, we can reach Proxima b in 20 years.

In my fictional story about Oumuamua, I have it travel at that speed for almost the entire duration of its flight which is designed to slow down to about 200,000 kph as it passes by Earth and then it picks up the speed to its maximum as it returns to its home planet with reconnaissance data. The sudden increase in its speed, which scientists explained as gases from the comet puffing out  and propelling it in real life, is,in my story, a precursor to it acquiring a relativistic speed to return to its home planet.

Since it is fiction, I can have it travel at 50 percent the speed of light which means it would have taken just about eight years to reach us and return in the same amount of time. That makes it about 17 years if you factor in the slowing down during the transit through our solar system for data collection purposes.

Sixteen-seventeen years compared to 14,270 years feels almost contemporaneous. In a sense when Oumuamua left Proxima b in my story, Barack Obama was about to or had just become the U.S. president and by the time it reached our solar system it is Donald Trump.

Those tempted to steal my fictional idea consider yourselves warned. This has already been registered. I am now in the process of developing it into a full-fledged novel.

Scientists were intrigued by Oumuamua’s silence and a seeming lack of any activity as it flew past. That was by design. It had drawn its shields in order that any Earth-based civilization could not detect any activity. There were life forms—not necessarily human-like at all but more intelligent—onboard. The shields were such that they could block any attempt to read any activity inside. The civilization on Proxima b, which sent Oumuamua, knew about life on Earth and the spaceship was the first in a series of probes meant to eventually make contact.

Incidentally, Oumuamua is the name we gave. They gave it no name but just a graphic unique to the ship like the human fingerprint. I am working on that graphic now.

Note: In my artistic depiction of the spaceship (see below) you can see complex circuitry lighting up as it flies past our sun.

Enceladus and its complex organics

A dramatic plume sprays water ice and vapor from the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Cassini's fist hint of this plume came during the spacecraft's first close flyby of the icy moon on February 17, 2005. (Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.)

It was almost as if Enceladus, one of Saturn’s 62 moons, was waiting for the spacecraft Cassini to spray its organic material which may turn out to be the clearest evidence yet of life elsewhere in our solar system. As I tweeted, Europa, suck on that.

There is always the danger of premature elation when it comes to such discoveries but while it lasts that elation is quite joyous even if it is not real. As is my habit, I read the scientific paper published in Nature in support of the Enceladus finding and understood barely one percent and that too by some intelligent inference. I studied physics and chemistry at graduate level, which has given me at least some lexical familiarity with technical terms. However, that is woefully adequate to make sense of the pure science of the paper.

NASA explains it best in its official release:

Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal complex organic molecules originating from Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, strengthening the idea that this ocean world hosts conditions suitable for life. Research results show much larger, heavier molecules than ever before.

Powerful hydrothermal vents mix up material from the moon’s water-filled, porous core with water from the moon’s massive subsurface ocean – and it is released into space, in the form of water vapor and ice grains. A team led by Frank Postberg and Nozair Khawaja of the University of Heidelberg, Germany, continues to examine the makeup of the ejected ice and has recently identified fragments of large, complex organic molecules.

Previously, Cassini had detected small, relatively common organic molecules at Enceladus that were much smaller. Complex molecules comprising hundreds of atoms are rare beyond Earth. The presence of the large complex molecules, along with liquid water and hydrothermal activity, bolsters the hypothesis that the ocean of Enceladus may be a habitable environment for life."

Potsberg from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and the lead author of the paper, has been quoted as saying by National Geographic, “We cannot decide this hundred-million-dollar question, but it certainly shows that something is going on there, that complex organic chemistry is happening and that we can probe it from space,” says Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg, lead author on the paper describing the results today in the journal Nature.

“The moon freely delivers its organic inventory at high concentrations to the Cassini spacecraft. That’s just an amazing finding.”

The finding does not necessarily mean that these organic chemicals made the leap to self-replicating organisms, which we understand as life. However, as evidence of life goes this appears to be the strongest yet. The Independent newspaper of Britain quoted Dr. Christopher Glein, a space scientist specializing in extraterrestrial chemical oceanography but and one of the authors of the research paper, as saying that based on this finding Enceladus is the only body so far other than Earth which “simultaneously satisfy all of the basic requirements for life as we know it”.

Some of you might remember that Cassini, which explored the Saturn system for some 13 years, was deliberately crashed into Saturn on September 15, 2017. But that was after it had sent back an enormous amount of data about the Saturn system,including information about the organics bubbling up from Enceladus’ hydrothermal vents on the floor of its ocean and eventually shot up into space. (See the photograph).

The probe also studied particles in Saturn’s E ring which is the farthest from the planet. A NASA backgrounder describes the E ring thus: “The E-ring is centered on Saturn's moon Enceladus. (Enceladus is about 4 Saturn radii from Saturn, if you want to locate it on your ring map.) The densest part of the E ring is right at Enceladus' orbit, which suggests that Enceladus is the source of the particles in the E ring. In fact, we've just recently discovered that that's what's happening: there is a geyser at the south pole of Enceladus that is shooting a jet of water particles into space, and it's particles from this geyser that has created the E-ring.” That description should explain why Cassini studied that ring as well.

There is nothing to suggest so far that the Enceladus discovery could signal large complex organisms comparable to ocean creatures on Earth swimming around there. There is, in fact, nothing to suggest life as we have come know it in its everyday sense. For instance, there is no Supreme Court on Enceladus where an ageing justice has just announced his retirement. Or for that matter that is also no football world cup. And there is certainly no Donald Trump on Enceladus.

I always make this broader point when I post such findings. As a professional class of people scientists and engineers are perhaps the only one making a real contribution to human life. They may be wrong in their inferences sometimes but they never reach their conclusions before an intensive process. Read the paper about the Enceladus finding here if you don’t believe me.

Sushma Swaraj and her grotesque trolling

I have been tracking reports of the grotesque trolling that India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has been subjected to on Twitter. While the language of that trolling is now quite typical of what happens on social media— the vilest abuse expressed in a semi-literate phraseology—what is not typical is that she has come under assault from those who would normally be considered warriors of broadly the same ideological persuasion as her.

Swaraj herself is seen to belong to a rapidly dwindling moderate fringe of her Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that still believes in a measure of civility. However, those who have attacked her represent a substantially more popular segment within the BJP-Hindutva universe who are unshakably devoted followers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as an individual.

Having once known her very well during my political reporting days in the 1990s in New Delhi, I know for a fact that she is genuinely troubled by the politics of egregious vilification. She is more akin to the philosophy espoused by former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee than the brass-knuckle combativeness of Modi. And that is where the rub lies. Modi’s fierce supporters see no virtue in the brand of politics of relative reasonableness that Swaraj stands for. Although a strong votary of much of the core of her deeply Hinduized party, Swaraj still retains some of her socialistic impulses of her early political career that run counter to the street-level discourse prevalent on social media.

She had been frequently seen as “prime minister-material”, an idea effectively upended by Modi’s virtually unchallenged rise on the national scene in 2014. The kind of masculine, barrel-chested politics that his supporters have pushed, including the ludicrous references to his “56-inch chest” as evidence of his male invincibility, makes space for Swaraj’s nuanced and reasonable approach impossibly constricted. No one should be surprised that barely any of her ministerial or party colleagues stood up for her in the face of some trolls virtually calling for her death over the transfer of a passport officer who allegedly harassed an inter-faith couple. So far it is not even clear whether Swaraj had anything to do with the transfer.

I would not like to waste this space on the kind of language that the trolls used because it is pointless. It is enough to say that social media discourse finds ever more abusive depths. It is true that more often than not these trolls are orchestrated by the BJP’s own IT cell against the party’s detractors outside. However, the fact that they turned on their most high profile leader other than Modi with such viciousness shows that the battle for supremacy within the BJP universe is in some upheaval as the 2019 parliamentary elections approach. So far, Modi seems well set to be the party’s choice to continue as prime minister but there have been some rumblings about a possible change of guard should the BJP fall short of a simple majority.

As of now, Modi along with his fellow Gujarati cohort, BJP president Amit Shah, seems to be in full control of the state of affairs within the extended Hindu political family. But his more loyal than the king followers on social media feel compelled to make sure that Swaraj gains no ground beyond what she already enjoys should push come to shove in the 2019 election results. Having been a creature of that ecology, which was always toxic on its fringes but has now traveled more deeply inside, Swaraj knows how to take care of herself. She does not need help from her party colleagues and certainly not from outsiders.

I am sure she sees some irony in the fact that she is being trolled by those very people whose abusiveness she overlooked or at least least resisted as long as it was directed outside their world. She knows that world all too well because she has operated in it  her entire career without letting it tarnish her own reputation or erode her own principles.

China, Sri Lanka, Hambantota and I told you so

Maria Abi-Habib, the New Delhi-based South Asia correspondent of The New York Times, has an excellent and thorough, if quite damning, investigation into China’s engagement with Sri Lanka. In particular, the investigation under the headline ‘How China got Sri Lanka to cough up a port” reports how a billion-dollar-plus port in Hambantota in the country’s southern coast overlooking the Indian Ocean that Beijing financed became the latter’s property after Colombo failed in its debt obligations.

Within the report are clear indication of serious political corruption as well how China uses its financial muscle towards  much deeper strategic goals. It was an investigation waiting to be done and who better than the Times with its reputation and resources?

After Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa was voted out of power in 2015, Abi-Habib writers, and Colombo failed to make payments on the massive Chinese debt he had taken, the inevitable happened.

“Under heavy pressure and after months of negotiations with the Chinese, the government handed over the port and 15,000 acres of land around it for 99 years in December,” the report says.

With that China has firmly established its long-term presence on one of the most strategic waterways in the world. China now has its own outpost, 15,000 acres of it, within strategic earshot of it’s main Asian rival and neighbor India. Incidentally, Colombo had originally approached New Delhi to help develop the port but the latter declined saying it was not economically feasible.

Abi-Habib writes, “The case is one of the most vivid examples of China’s ambitious use of loans and aid to gain influence around the world — and of its willingness to play hardball to collect.

The debt deal also intensified some of the harshest accusations about President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative: that the global investment and lending program amounts to a debt trap for vulnerable countries around the world, fueling corruption and autocratic behavior in struggling democracies.”

Her report is a remarkable example of what serious journalism is all about and what a serious journalist can do. I did compliment her via Twitter and to my pleasant surprise she acknowledged.

Now that I have set up a justifiable way to bring myself in, I must bring myself in. Sri Lanka used to be my reporting beat in the 1990s and I have kept up my interest in the country since 1994. I have also written about it in this blog and elsewhere frequently.

On reading Abi-Habib’s story I was reminded of a short piece I had written on May 2, 2009. In analyzing China’s methods I wrote something nine years ago that Abi-Habib’s reporting vindicates. Like I have said many times before, for a print journalist vindication is perhaps the only happy reward in the absence of actual cash. I have this silly vision of people walking up to me and handing cash every time something I said turns out to be accurate.

Here is what I wrote:

"In some ways China has been following the ways of predatory lenders in its quest for establishing a global sphere of influence. Quite like predatory lenders, it preys on countries which are either unsuspecting or desperate or helpless or a combination of all three to lend large sums of money and arms without any conditions attached. Once these countries are hooked on to money without any apparent strings, China moves in with its long-term objectives.

As a rule China does not seek to politically influence a country it sees as a part of its larger design. However, the backing of the world’s most coveted economy has unintended consequences. For instance, it is believed by Indian experts that the reason why Sri Lanka has been able to withstand international pressure during its current bloody military assault on the Tamil Tigers separatists, it is because of the no-strings attached Chinese billions. In return China would demand untrammeled access to Hambantota port. Many see this as a Faustian bargain which will eventually exact its price on these countries."

Perverse joy of vindication in such situations is a fair, if short-lived, reward for a perennially cash-strapped print journalist. However,as that joy wears off one is left feeling despair at the ways of the real world.

Disjointed articulation and existential absurdities

Apparition by MC

Caution: Random rumination.

Life is not a countermove that some strange force makes to your every move. In its raw form—as in immediately after one is born—it is a purposeless endeavor. When one is born, one is not handed a particular set of coordinates to arrive at. Nothing is discernibly charted out. Life is mostly about getting used to it unfolding in constantly changing contexts.

I do not accept the idea of the first man and woman from whom we all became. Since humans appeared on Earth some six millions years ago and we as modern humans, Homo sapiens, some 200,000 years ago, we were always born into a larger context. There was always more than just one original couple. I had to clarify that in order to make a point I am about to make.

Lately, I have tried a new approach; that of not actively doing anything about anything. I am tempted to call it enlightened inaction but it is not even that. It is mostly letting the social, cultural, financial, emotional and natural contexts you are surrounded by do what they want without any resistance from me. Imagine me as a lump of featureless clay. I suppose no feature is also some feature if I am a lump malleable clay. The sheer physics of existence ensures that we have some features.

One possible way to negotiate the existential absurdities that I find myself in everyday is to become consciously disjointed in my articulation/reaction. I used to know a man like that in the 1980s who of course had a mental condition that made him so. None of his two sentences had any identifiable link or logical progression. He was utterly disjointed in his mind as well as articulation. In small doses, I used to find that delightful because it offered a version of reality that I did not naturally see. For instance, he would say in Gujarati things like, “Sujata (his daughter) should get married now” in one sentence followed by the very next, “Why are they building a flyover here?” That would be followed immediately by, “My air-conditioner throws only hot air” and finally, “Would you have tea?” I found that quite entertaining in small doses but I could empathize with the difficulty that his family had to face while living with him. More important, it is impossible for me to gauge what he must have felt.

He was a kind man and in his earlier normal life a rather engaging conversationalist. I do not know what that condition is called medically but I presume it has a nomenclature. The reason I mention this is because I feel I might become like him except that in my case it would be a deliberate choice, a strategy, to cope with existential absurdities. I am tempted to try it today as a new week opens and inevitably brings with it its own assault on my personal peace and share of unpleasantness. If I do try that strategy, I would be happy to report the results.

Coming to terms with digital painting as actual painting

Woman in forest--MC

Among other things the painter David Hockney is also known for his use of iPad to paint. Not that I am comparing myself to him but I began my painting career, such as it is, digitally on my desktop using an app called Fresh Paint. That was over five years ago. Some of my works done thus have been merchandised and worn by people.

On June 19, last year I also began experimenting with the app Paint 3D, which is an offshoot of the popular Microsoft app Paint. I do not use the 3D part of it but the virtual tools such as the marker, calligraphy pen, spray can and oil brush fairly regularly. The reason I mentioned Hockney is because he says he started using iPad in 2010 and found it to be “a terrific medium.” He also speaks about how digital painting involves “no cleaning up.” I too have written about it. He saw a new medium in iPad and in keeping with his prolific output he has produced a sizable body of those works as well.

For me digital painting was out of pecuniary compulsions. Paint supplies cost quite a bit, especially if you are not able to sell any work. These two apps—Fresh Paint and Paint 3D—allowed me to explore my abilities without having to spend extra on the supplies. I have hesitated to call those as works of art by the standards of the traditional definition of painting.

Is painting decided by the tools and supplies one uses? I don’t think so but I am not yet fully clear in my mind. Hockeny, of course, has embraced iPad fully and produced some remarkable works. I see the rationale in calling it just another medium which just happens to be virtual. Merely because I have not used actual paint, brushes and canvases should not mean that I have not produced them fully.

This morning I felt the urge to do a quick work on Paint 3D. As I often do to maintain my motor skills, I first produced an unbroken, single-line sketch of a sort of forest canopy under which a woman is standing.

Once that was done, I saved a copy and started filling colors into. That part of the Pain 3D done I transferred my work to Microsoft Word, which has some amazing editing and effect tools, which I used to create a few other versions. Among the effects that I like is randomly removing background and then giving the surviving work some shadow effect, which in this case is one below. I can do so many different versions of it. You can be bet that one of these will be merchandised immediately after posting this blog.

Nature is not obliged to vindicate our sense of aesthetics

Theoretical physicist and widely read blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has lobbed a Molotov cocktail in the world of physics, particularly the part which has made a fetish out of the aesthetic appeal of mathematical explanations of the universe.

Her book ‘Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” demolishes the much cherished idea that the most remarkable theories about the universe are elegant and beautiful. Her primary contention appears to be that in their fixation on the elegance and beauty of mathematical theories physicists have let physics stagnate for the past four decades.

Hossenfelder is a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and the author of the popular physics blog Backreaction.

A description accompanying the book on Amazon puts it thus: “Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these "too good to not be true" theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods. Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth.”

In the preface to the book Hossenfleder writes, “What failed physics wasn’t their math; it was their choice of math. They believe that Mother Nature was elegant, simple, and kind about providing clues. They thought they could hear her whisper when they were talking to themselves. Now Nature spoke, and she said nothing, loud and clear.”

This particular passage takes me back to an old view of mine about Nature in a different but philosophically related context. Let me, for want of a better expression, quote me. When one is as quotable as I am, what is one to do?

“Over the years I have written about the utterly misplaced ennobling of Nature as mother. As recently as January 9, 2014, I did a quick piece on request from a Mumbai-based newspaper in the wake of the frightening cold spell caused by a phenomenon called the polar vortex, which simply means a cyclone over Earth’s geographical poles.

That piece began with my longstanding theme. “One always knew that Nature has no direct stake in sentient well-being. It does what it must do irrespective of its consequences on life.” That piece ended with this paragraph: “For me personally, once a native of Ahmedabad where summer heat can nearly destroy conscience, the cold in Chicago is always a reminder that it is us, sentient life that must adapt to Nature and not Nature to us. That is because Nature is inherently detached and unemotional even if people curiously ennoble it with the sobriquet Mother. Its affections, if there are any at all, are not motherly by any imagination.”

My basic point has been that we are incidental to Nature whose primary purpose or for that matter any purpose is not to ensure that humans survive and flourish. At best we are an unintended consequence of the enormously complex natural forces that have existed since the existence of the planet over the past four and half billion years. Nature does not cradle us like babies, swaddling up in her motherly embrace. It couldn’t care less if we are around or not. Some of my friends who have this near divine view of Nature were unhappy at my approach which can come across as devoid of emotion.”

Hossenfleder’s book, which I am in the midst of reading, is bound to make the establishment physicists rather uncomfortable and perhaps even rightly so. They might need some Preparation H.  Having followed physics for a little longer than the timeframe of four decades or so that she talks about I have had similar misgivings about it. I have found these intellectually brilliant theories a bit too glib—the idea about a multiverse for instance. A lot of what we have been told about the fundament aspects of Nature/Universe over the decades has been so captivating and even elegant that we have come to believe its intrinsic veracity.

Hossenfleder writes, “After 20 years in theoretical physics, most people I know make a career by studying things nobody has seen. They have concocted mind-boggling new theories, like the idea that our universe is but one of infinitely many that together form a “multiverse.” They have invented dozens of new particles, declared that we are projections of a higher-dimensional space, and that space is spawned by wormholes that tie together distant places.”

Her justifiable objection is that most of these ideas are “so difficult to test, they are practically untestable.” And then she adds something that is the core intellectual argument of her book. “What they have in common is that they are backed by theoreticians convinced their math contains an element of truth about nature. Their theories, they believe, are too good not to be true.”

It is an extraordinary contention to make and I am thrilled that a professional theoretical physicist is making it. I might do a longer piece once I have finished reading the book but now it is enough to recommend all those who devour complex physics made sexy to read Hossenfleder’s book.

It is not Nature’s primary purpose to vindicate our obsessive sense of aesthetics. It is also not the Universe’s obligation to in fact be as spectacularly elegant as the mathematics we have worked out would have us believe.

The New York Times and Amrita Sher-Gil

“Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people.”

That is how the newspaper of record describes its series ‘Overlooked’ to right historical wrongs and it deserves to be applauded for the effort. The latest to be so acknowledged is the great Indian-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), whose obit was carried by the Times on June 20.

“Amrita Sher-Gil, a pioneer of modern Indian art, used her paintbrush to depict the daily lives of Indian women in the 1930s, often revealing a sense of their loneliness and even hopelessness,” is how the writer Tariro Mzezewa begins.

Inevitably, the obit makes a reference to Sher-Gil as the “Indian Frida Kahlo”, which does not make much sense to me because they were contemporaries. While Kahlo was born about six years before Sher-Gil in 1907, she died 13 years after the Indian painter. However, that is a minor quibble.

Sher-Gil was eminently deserving of an obit in the Times at the time she died but as the paper is candid enough to admit those columns were “dominated by white men.”

“She understood the loneliness of her subjects well, since their moods were a reflection of her own. Because of her upbringing, she lived between worlds, often searching for a sense of belonging,” Mzezewa writes.

I was long aware of Sher-Gil and her formidable reputation even though I began to look at her works rather late in the day. I wrote this on August 2, 2014.

“While living in Delhi for nearly a decade from 1989 and often driving on the Amrita Sher-Gil Marg, not to mention being fully aware of her formidable talent as a painter, I never bothered to view her paintings at the National Gallery of Modern Art. I am discovering her now courtesy of the Google Art Project.

Looking at these three random works, one is not surprised at Sher-Gil’s enormous reputation. I intend to write about her in greater detail some day but for today it is enough to highlight these three works. In all three, the faces—be it that of one of her lovely cousins Sumair or the Brahmcharis or the Bride—they all have a certain inscrutability about them. Sher-Gil (1913-1941) was half Sikh from the father’s side and half Hungarian Jewish from the mother’s side. Notwithstanding her early death, she produced a body of work regarded as a defining influence on the successive Indian artists. Sumair’s proportions are fabulous.”

The Sumair in question is the woman below.

Sumair by Amrita Sher-Gil (1936)

Brahmcharis by Amrita Sher-Gil (1940-41)

It is just as well that the Times has righted this wrong done to a truly great artist whose short lifespan may have restricted her output but could not diminish its glorious quality.

Spot the impetuous toddler

I have my reasons to avoid commenting on the rampage of contentiousness that the Trump administration has been from the get-go. The main reason is how utterly ineffectual my reach is. Having written this blog everyday—every bloody day—for close to a decade I am aware of its efficacy. It is next to nothing.

However, when I see this latest Time cover, I have to offer a couple comments. I wonder whether the publishers obtained the permission of this two-year-old Honduran girl’s mother to juxtapose it with someone who embodies the current political toxicity. The powerful picture of this child was taken by John Moore of Getty Images. The original picture shows parts of two border patrol officers. The girl being a toddler is in no position to give or deny consent to being photographed. It reminds me of an even more dramatic photograph of 5-year-old Elián González, who in April, 1999, became the face of the difficult issue of immigration when he was seized by heavily armed policemen as part of an international custody battle.

In the latest case, Time has photoshopped an image—and cleverly so—to make it into a devastating critique of the Trump Administration’s lunatic policy of separating children from parents entering the United States illegally along the US-Mexican border. Some 2300 children have been separated as part of the government’s zero tolerance policy so far.

Raising the question of permission may sound like distracting from the much larger tragedy caused by the cruel separation. However, I do see the image being manipulated, even if to stop precisely such tragedies, as problematic. One can safely presume that the child’s mother, who was detained, may not be fully aware of the goings-on considering she is in custody awaiting criminal charges for illegally crossing the border. At the very least it is worth debating by those in the media whether it is fair to put a child within such a terribly malignant context. One can argue that the child is already a victim of this horrible system and using an image to possibly try and change that system is useful. I am still not entirely sure.

We have seen such devastating images of children capturing the essence of international conflicts before. The last one to capture the world’s attention was that of a three-year-old Syrian refugee child named Alan Kurdi, whose body washed ashore along the Mediterranean coast On September 2, 2015. That too framed the problem of people forced to flee harrowing conditions in their own countries.

The least the human civilization can do in the much trumpeted 21st century is to ensure that children do not have to be at the receiving end of the follies of mindless adults. Notwithstanding that wish, children seem the inevitable victims of what the way adults have run this world.