Mayank Chhaya Daily

Girl on bench in rain

 

That should do it for today. It is not as if you pay me to read this blog. 

 

Protest is the mood

Protest--MC

Protest is the mood for the morning.

 

 

Instead of reacting to the Attorney General's presser, this drawing

I did set out to write a first quick response to Attorney General William Barr's news conference. In fact this is how I started my post, "Given the opportunity to rise above partisan politics over the impending release of the Mueller report, Attorney General William Barr chose to do a limbo under it."

However, instead I have chosen to offer you my version of a charmingly simple but evocative work of the much-loved American artist Wayne Thiebaud.

By Wayne Thiebaud

Dodging cookies outside stores and on the Net

Going on any website these days feels like dodging girl scouts selling cookies outside stores here in America. Every website has this mandatory notice about how they use “cookies” and whether I accept them.

A typical notice reads thus: “We use cookies to personalize content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyze our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners.”

In short, you are being told that you are being watched and are about to be exploited for commercial gain. It is easier to buy girl scout cookies once and be done with it than accepting cookies on the net because the former do not steal your life’s history while the latter do. One can treat cookies as the modern-day hazard of surfing the net but it is getting annoyingly intrusive.

I am yet to accept cookies on any website. It is possible that some of them may make them surfing their site incumbent upon accepting those cookies. I can, of course, change my settings to get around this annoyance but who’s got the time?

To Notre-Dame

 

Notre-Dame, Amrita Sher-Gill, courtesy of Google Arts & Culture

Not having been there, I have no moving stories to tell you about the Notre-Dame cathedral, its flying buttresses, its beguiling gargoyles, and its majestic bell-tower. Not having been to Paris, I have no stories to tell about what seems like a great city.

The nearest I came to visiting Paris was 35 years ago when I accompanied a news photographer from the Paris Match news weekly to report a riot in Bombay in 1984, triggered by a major conflagration in the nearby textile loom town of Bhiwandi. The photographer, whose name escapes me now, generously invited me to visit Paris. At 23 and barely into my third year in journalism I just smiled at the extravagant prospect of a print journalist from Bombay visiting Paris on a whim. In short, I have not been to Paris.

I knew, of course, about Notre-Dame in a broad sense, the fact that the great cathedral is the religious and cultural heart and essence of France. If a building or a physical structure were a country, France would be either Notre-Dame or Eiffel Tower. I also had some sense about the cathedral from Victor Hugo’s ‘Hunchback of Notre-Dame.’ For close to a millennium—about 856 years to be precise—it has embodied the essence of France. In many ways, France is Notre-Dame and Notre-Dame is France.

Yesterday’s devastating fire significantly destroyed the cathedral, particularly the famous spire that was consumed by the flames and seen live around the world. France is in deep shock and grief and rightly so. As for me, not being invested in much in life, it is a process to commemorate it. One best way that I know was to quickly draw it even as it was being consumed. It was a stunning contrast to see a grand building being static while flames around it leaping and dynamic. A fire that does not move is not a fire that lasts long. I couldn’t but help think how fire has no consideration for human history and all the complex emotions invested in it. It is both greedy and abrupt.

For the Catholics in France and around the world, the destruction of Notre-Dame, particularly in the all-important week of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, must be benumbing. But even for those who looked at the cathedral has an extraordinary achievement of architecture and art, it is equally so. People come to monuments from different standpoints.

As is my wont, I searched for compelling paintings of Notre-Dame and found a remarkable one by the great India-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gill (1913-1941). I am sure many others exist but I found this to be the most compelling to commemorate its history. Sher-Gill has painted it from an interesting angle, perhaps standing on one of the two towers behind it. She was said to have done it when while she was a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. By a delightful coincidence I came across a striking picture by the great Henri Cartier-Bresson, retweeted by friend and fellow journalist Aseem Chhabra courtesy of Daniel Brami. That picture has almost exactly the same vantage point as Sher-Gill’s painting. I offer them both here in the hope that Cartier-Bresson’s estate or Magnum Photos do not sue me. Ditto Sher-Gill’s descendants.

 

Notre-Dame, Henri Cartier-Bresson

Here is to Notre-Dame which means Our Lady in French.

Notre-Dame--MC

Yielding to Andrei Trakovsky

The Kiss--MC

The Kiss--Andrei Tarkovsky

I tend to yield to my visual and poetic impulses irrespective of the time or the day or the place or the people I may be with. The visual and the poetic takes precedence over the rest.

On this Monday morning, I have yielded to the visually masterful filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, in my book one of the four greatest visually stimulating filmmakers , along with Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa and Satyajeet Ray. There are others in the top ten but for today let’s go with these four and particularly Tarkovsky. It is not a race.

It has been my practice to watch random clips from Tarkovsky’s works. This morning I was captivated by two—one from The Kiss and the other a horse rolling. I did quick pastels and pencils of the two scenes. Here they are.

Three promo shorts of my various works

I do things. Some of them are showcased in these three promo shorts. 

 

A very short autobiography of a toilet bowl

 

And now a very short autobiography of a toilet bowl.

“Oh, shit! Life stinks.”

The End.

Hi to Munch via my Madonna

My version of Edvard Munch's 1894 iconic 'Madonna' (Pastel on paper)

Every so often, I turned to the great Edvard Munch to test my hands. Yesterday was one of them when I turned to his famous 1894 work ‘Madonna’ to do my own version. I have posted both here. I think these should be enough for Friday. Also, it is not as if you pay me to read this blog.

Concluding the thread on Subramanyan Chandrasekhar and black holes

It is rare that my tweets get any traction at all as RTs. So it is particularly heartening that the one about the great astrophysicist Subramanyan Chandrasekhar has notched up considerable attention in light of the just released picture of a black hole. It is ironic that I should use the expression “in light of” while describing a black hole.

What the RTs tell me is that on the otherwise bedeviled Twitter there are themes that people feel intellectually stirred up by.  I suppose what appears to have drawn people is the fact that a 19-year-old Chandra, while traveling by sea from Madras to London in 1930, made some remarkable calculations in about 10 minutes which went on to set a limit on the mass of a white dwarf beyond which it cannot stay stable.

For a 19-year-old to draw on Albert Einstein’s special relativity and quantum mechanics and that too aboard a ship in 1930 when international transmission of information was so limited was extraordinary to say the least.  Chandra showed that a white dwarf with a degenerate gas of electrons, cannot remain stable if its mass was 1.44 times that of the Sun. Such a star under what became known as the Chandrasekhar limit must become either a neutron star or a black hole.

I do not want to overstate the fact that he was just 19 because at an even older age that would have been a remarkable intellectual achievement. Going to Britain and pursuing advanced physics was his way of showing his patriotism. Arthur I. Miller’s biography of Chandra ‘Empire of the Stars,  that I referred to yesterday, quotes him as saying, “Indians could be accomplished in a way which the outside world could recognize.” “Certainly one of the earliest motives that I had was to show the world what an Indian could do,” he said.

Chandra’s famous/notorious standoff with Sir Arthur Eddington, the second most famous physicist of the day after Einstein, is among the most discussed stories of the physics folklore. His calculations setting the limit of 1.44 times the mass of the Sun was a very significant breakthrough which physicists in Britain,, particularly Eddington, were aware of. Contrary to Chandra’s expectations of being warmly applauded for that, Eddington went on to publicly deride it at a lecture series on January 11, 1935, where Chandra’s presentation preceded Eddington’s. The 25-year-old Indian student was shaken up by the public ridicule. Of course, Chandra’s theory went on to be proved right.

If I had the means, I would make a biopic about Chandra’s early years starting with his passage by sea and ending in the standoff and triumph.

Incidentally, Chandra was a nephew of Sir C V Raman, the Nobel Prize winner for the Raman Effect of 1928. The two had rather uncomfortable uncle-nephew relationship but that it irrelevant here.