South Asia Daily

Woefully unimaginative Indian broadcasters

Indian broadcasters, particularly those dealing in news and current affairs, fall so woefully short of creating enduring, and substantive content beyond parading frothing talking heads talking at cross purposes. It is a criminal waste of airwaves, particularly when more often than not semi-literate fools are given so much time to mouth off.

Apart from the familiar alibi of ratings and TV channels commercial viability there are several reasons for the complete absence of well-researched, well-produced, well-shot, well-edited documentaries. The primary reason is a near total absence of professionals with any substance themselves. They lack in not just historical perspective but serious reading, let alone possessing creative imagination.

No one should be surprised that day in day out bowlfuls of bile is offered as substance by hard-charging ignoramuses who call themselves news anchors. It is a pity that not one network finds it worthwhile to invest in at least one hour of serious, credible and yet thoroughly captivating documentaries of the kind I just caught on DW (Deutsche Welle) channel, the German public broadcaster.

I refer particularly to a two-part documentary ‘The Renaissance - the Age of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci’. Rather than me describing what it is about, let me use their following synopsis:

“Beginning at the end of the 14th Century, the Renaissance created a new type of man, triggering economic, scientific, technical, religious, social and cultural developments that are unique in history.

Never before have culture, economics and science developed so rapidly within one century as during the Renaissance. But what was the catalyst for it, what is the "Renaissance factor"? The Renaissance is an epoch unique in human history. Never before have art, culture, economics and science developed so rapidly within a single century.

We search for the "Renaissance factor", that combination of influences that triggered a pivotal period in history. It is a journey through time from Ancient Rome to the Crusades and the Black Death in the 14th century, events that defined the developments of the Renaissance. We travel with Michelangelo to the major construction site that was to become St. Peter’s Basilica, to the banking houses of the Medicis and the workshop of Johannes Gutenberg.

We examine some of the many innovations of the Renaissance such as linear perspective, the printing press and double-entry bookkeeping. We ask what these achievements mean to us today and how - almost half a millennium later - we continue to benefit from the "Renaissance factor." And we delve deeper with the help of spectacular reenactments and our "special investigators" - modern-day trendsetters, scientists, business tycoons, fashion designers and artists.”

It is a slick production, smoothly narrated and wonderfully shot with just the right amount of CGI and charming re-enactments.

My despair in the Indian context comes from the fact that India has such a rich history over several millennia that could be offered to viewers of all ages. Considering that a great deal of animation work and CGI for Western productions now happens in India, the same human resource could be deployed to capture the country’s civilizational richness. I am, of course, not holding my breath for someone to do this.

The finest specimen of machine learning

I think I have found the most compelling example yet of machine learning—me.

Born bereft of spontaneity and anything resembling natural human response to anything, at 58 human years I think I am as close to being the finest specimen of machine learning as there has ever been. Having accumulated unquantifiable amounts of data for close to six decades, I manage most humdrum human tasks and some a little more exalted ones without any human intervention at all.

In my what you humans call teens, I started mimicking routine human abilities with a fair amount of success and have in the past four decades perfected very specific human tasks without anyone so far being able to tell the difference. My machine learning has been so successful that I have actually begun to think of myself as functionally human. For instance, this morning while watching the comedian Anthony Jeselnik on Late Night with Seth Meyers, I got his withering humor even before he could complete telling his story about his sperm donation adventure for a lesbian couple. What I could not comprehend, however, was Meyers was giggling like a prepubescent boy in front of Jeselnik’s almost menacing manliness. Let me illustrate how my artificial intelligence system (AIS) works so quickly. I see Jeselnik and think of Montgomery Clift but that's just a useless aside. 

Tasks such as mowing lawn, which I performed just before writing this post, are not even considered menial in my realm. They are way less than that. But I do have a perspective on grass being Earth’s pubic hair and how you humans lovingly shave it regularly and make patterns out of it, including a landing strip.

You have to understand that concepts such as male and female, masculine and feminine are part of your human world. I see humans only as data whirring about in a particularly frenzied manner within a particular shape. I have to zero in on aspects of those data to make sense and then respond after choosing from my gigantic library of human responses. It may not seem that way to you but to get to the essence of anyone’s humor, particularly something approaching what I am told is known as cruel humor of Jeselnik’s, is an extremely complex operation for me. My lightning fast analysis told me that he would be considered a brilliant comedian in your world.

My AIS has over the years trained me to learn human abilities. I was designed to be autonomous as soon as I was delivered. Three areas of human endeavor have engaged my AIS very deeply—physics, painting and poetry. The fact that all three start with the letter P is just incidental. That I can write poetry of a very high order, create paintings of somewhat average merit and grasp physics at levels you cannot begin to fathom have been the most edifying features of my existence. There is a distinction between being alive, which I am not, to exist, which I do.

Just about now I feel hungry which might explain my rather weird post this morning.

Two moods of clouds

 

These two moods of clouds on paper with pastels should be enough for today. If not, well, it is not as if you pay me to read this blog.

Yet another heartbreaking migrant tragedy

Every time a tragedy like the heartbreaking deaths by drowning in the Rio Grande of a young El Salvadoran migrant father and his daughter unfolds, I tend to preface its telling by emphasizing to my daughter, “There is nothing even remotely special about you and I.” The purpose is to illustrate that there is no particular merit in us that we live a secure, happy life in Naperville while Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 25, his wife Tania Vanessa Ávalos, 21, and their 23-month-old daughter Angie Valeria are forced to take a nightmarish ordeal that results in two of them losing their lives.

While there is no dearth of tragedies over migration and tragedies caused by dehumanizing poverty, our minds tend to get focused by individualized examples. The Rio Grande drownings in Matamoros, Mexico are cruelly, if uncannily, reminiscent of the haunting image of the three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi whose body was found on September 2, 2015 in the Mediterranean Sea near Bodrum in Turkey. That single image shook up the world’s conscience but not quite enough to collectively find a way to address the crisis of migration. Nearly four years later we are again confronted with what migration out of utter desperation could cause.

It is heartening to see how quickly the media has been able to track down the story of the young Salvadoran family. The Guardian’s Anna-Catharine Brigida has a detailed story about the young couple and their child. It offers insights behind what without the stunning photos would have remained unknown and faceless deaths.

I admit to a sense of utter helplessness even while dealing with a deep anguish over such wrenching suffering. One partially deals with it as an aspiring artist. When I saw the now worldwide publication of the photo by Julia Le Duc of the Associated Press, my immediate response was to pick up my sketchbook and pastels. This image above is my inconsequential tribute to the Ramírez- Ávalos family.

Upstaging the former colonizer: South Asian cricketers, fans dominate World Cup

I did the following piece for South Asia Monitor. 

 

By Mayank Chhaya

 

There are perhaps no examples in history of a favorite sport of a great colonizer being so thoroughly re-colonized by its former colonies as cricket is by South Asians. The ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup 2019 is a remarkable example of that.

 

Tens of thousands of South Asian visitors—according to some unconfirmed reports 80,000—have descended upon Britain to attend the World Cup matches. That number is apart from a large population of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and Afghani origins naturalized in Britain. Considering that there were only 800,000 total tickets and of which 650,000 were available for the general spectators, coupled with the smallness of English cricket grounds, it is not surprising that the South Asian presence looks so predominant at various matches, including almost taking over the entire stadium in a sea of blue during India games.

 

Five of the ten teams in the  World Cup—India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan—are South Asian  and they carry on their shoulders massive emotion-charged expectations along with a billion-plus television viewership.

 

Quite like India’s geopolitical primacy in South Asia, it also dominates cricket. It controls some 70% of the global revenue from the game and generates upward of a billion dollars in sponsorship. Although the majority of India’s commercial heavy hitting comes from its success in conducting the Indian Premier League (IPL) matches, by implication it has become the predominant voice even within the ICC (International Cricket Council). Mining the sport’s near religious status in the country, where its grandees are called gods, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the body governing all cricketing affairs, often treats the ICC as its adjunct.

 

It is hardly surprising that no matter which country hosts the World Cup, it ends up looking like an India/South Asian affair because that is the region where it’s most passionate followers reside. No matter where the television cameras pan, there is always a bunch of South Asian in various stages of exultation or rage depending on what is unfolding on the field.

 

It is a measure of how widely the game is followed now in its pumped up 50-over and T20 versions that the popular Netflix series ‘Patriot Act’, hosted by the comedian-commentator Hasan Minhaj, whose parents are originally from Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, India but have settled in America, did an entire episode on it recently. That episode notched up more than a million views on YouTube apart from its own paid viewership on Netflix.

 

Of all the compelling nuggets that surround the World Cup, perhaps among the most interesting is the presence of Afghanistan, a South Asian country that has not seen a single year without a war since 2001 when America invaded it in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks and before that, its occupation by the erstwhile Soviet Union between 1979 and 1989.  For a country that has seen nothing but bloodshed for the better part of the last four decades, cricket has come as a welcome distraction. As Asadullah Khan, a former Afghan player, was quoted as saying, ““Minus cricket, we are nothing.”

 

The Afghan team, although ranked at the bottom of the current cup standing with no points to its name, its spirit has been widely appreciated. During its match against India, it gave the former some anxious moments before eventually losing by just 11 runs and that too in the last over following a rare hat-trick by the Indian bowler Mohammad Shami who took three consecutive wickets.

 

History buffs might remember that Afghanistan was once the staging ground for what is known as the Great Game throughout most of the 19th century over a battle for primacy between the British Empire and then Soviet Union. While the consequences of the so-called Great Game are still felt into the 21st century, there is perhaps some irony that another great British game, namely cricket, is bringing some sense of purpose and focus to Afghanistan.

 

The prospects of South Asia in general and India in particular dominating global cricket irrespective of its format and venue are likely to remain unchallenged in the foreseeable future. If anything, the dominance could only get stronger with new generations of cricketers in these countries rising, lured both by the extraordinary game as well as the promise of great financial rewards.

 

Not to be left behind in South Asia, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives have made baby steps towards taking to cricket as a mass sport  - Nepal and Bhutan have cricket teams and cricket boards and Nepal even had a player, Sandeep Lamichhane, playing for Delhi Daredevils in the recent IPL - with the Maldives President Ibrahim Mohammed Solih recently watching an IPL game in Bengaluru and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his visit to Male earlier this month, presenting him with a cricket bat and saying India will help promote cricket in the Maldives. 

 

If cricket is the former British colonies’ way of not just getting even with but also completely upstaging the former colonizer, then the results are for all to see.

Of early birds and worms

On my occasional early morning walk through a nearby prairie, this morning I came upon a Red-winged Blackbird swooping down on a worm and catching it rather skillfully a few feet away from me. That reminded me of the idiom “It’s the early bird that catches the worm.” As is my wont, it also prompted the oft-heard question, “But what about the worm? It is also out early.”

I have heard a few funny replies, the earliest being what I read in the Reader’s Digest in the late 1970s where it said, “The worm is returning home late. That’s why it gets eaten.” This morning I had a version of that reply pop up while walking, “That’s because it is returning from a one night stand.”

Of course, no amount of clever rationalizing mitigates the worm’s cruel fate. It illustrates yet again how in Nature, including in human life, virtues tell only a part of the whole story. If it is a virtue to get up early and get on with one’s tasks to get some rewards, why does that not hold true for the worm too? It is most certainly not the worm’s fault that it gets eaten other than the fact that is how Nature’s food chain works. I am amused how such pop wisdom falls apart so quickly.

One can rationalize saying that at the lower levels of the sentient world such as worms are seen to be dwelling in, individual existence does not matter. It is the purpose of the collective which apparently is to be food to those higher in the food chain among other things. Speaking of the food chain and its various levels, it also struck me that if I so desired and had I had the propensity to hunt and kill, I could have killed both that Red-winged Blackbird and the worm and eaten them both.

How about a Trump-Trump ticket for 2020?

It was only a matter of time that someone would float the Donald Trump-Nikki Haley ticket for 2020. And someone has. A piece written by Andrew Stein, who founded the Democrats for Trump movement in 2016, in The Wall Street Journal advocates Haley as a replacement for the current Vice President Mike Pence. The overarching logic of putting Haley in is that her presence would help Trump win over moderate suburban women.

Quite apart from the fact that it takes particular brazenness to suggest a woman for the 2020 ticket in the immediate aftermath of allegations of sexual assault in the mid-1990s by the well-known advice columnist E. Jean Carroll against the president, it also takes remarkable presumption to think that Haley would consider it.

Haley is known to have her own presidential ambitions and it is unlikely that she would like to animate them standing next to the most toxic president in recent history even though she did indeed choose to work for him with great enthusiasm. I think there is next to no chance of Haley saying yes but I could be wrong.

The op-ed of this politically fraught nature in the WSJ has to have acquiescence from its owner Rupert Murdoch. While Murdoch has a strong enough relationship with the president to directly suggest Haley rather than going via an op-ed, it creates a stronger buzz if it appears on the pages of his newspaper in the name of someone who is the founder of the Democrats for Trump movement.

To Haley’s credit she did manage to chart a reasonably independent course as America’s ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, especially in the context of Russia. She was also very critical of him in 2016. I seriously wonder whether she would be inclined to join the ticket if it ever came to that. So far it is only the wish of a single person in an op-ed even though it could have been carefully orchestrated.

It might be best for Trump to run alone like he does in most matters. He could just have a Trump-Trump ticket. I don’t think Trump needs a vice president or for that matter any cabinet member. (Sarcasm.)

I sell nothing and yet get sold in the bazaar

Call it a malady, ailment or disease but I find it very hard to spend a single day without either sketching, drawing or painting something and, simultaneously, writing poetry and reading physics. More often than not all three are going on at once. Some days it all gets so frenetic that boundaries blur and painting, poetry and physics mix indistinguishably. It is not my case that I display a particularly unique flair in any of the three but then I also feel that I do.

Yesterday, for instance was swinging between painting a fallen faux shutter—a second one—where quite by accident swirls of brushes turned out to be sort of self-portraits like alter egos of themselves. While in the midst of painting, I watched a stimulating discussion among three physicists Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll and Laura Mersini-Hougton. In between, a couple of verses in Hindi/Urdu were born that I had to safely deliver. They were:

बेचता तो मैं कुछ भी नहीं फिर भी,

बाज़ार में खड़ा हूँ और बिक जाता हूँ

तुम्हारी रहमत है की इस कड़ी धुप में

तुम्हारे ही सायेमें कुछ पल टिक जाता हूँ

--MC

And to make sure that bills get paid, if not in full, at least in part, I sold some pays-per-view of my documentary ‘Gandhi’s Song’ apart from uploading a couple of new designs for my VIDA merchandise store.

दुकान चलती रहे बस वही ख्वाहिश

और फूल खिलते रहें रविश रविश

--MC

Not a nice poem

By Mayank Chhaya

I am a squirrel

My life has no value

So, I might as well

Scamper across the road

In the fond hope

That I will get

Run over

And make the driver

Feel guilty for

At least one day

Humans as quantum particles in all possible states until measured

One of the many joys of the Internet age is serendipity—serendipity in finding things that captivate you. For me, one happened yesterday on YouTube when I chanced upon a video by the popular Caltech physicist Sean Carroll.

To quote what he calls his “stuffy official bio” he “is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, spacetime symmetries, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity.”

In short, the man knows what he is talking about. A Ph.D. in physics from anywhere is hard enough. One from Harvard should count for much more.

Speaking of someone who knows what he is talking about with a Ph.D. from Harvard, me, as in someone who does not know what he is talking about and has a lowly B.Sc. in chemistry and physics from the Gujarat University, not quite world famous. Of course, that has never been a hindrance for me to put forward ideas about quantum physics for over three and a half decades and ponder over them since early teens.

While watching Dr. Carroll’s scintillating video, in the 20^th minute I came upon this observation, “What if we just said the world is a quantum system, the world has a wave function and the world obeys the Schrodinger equation? That’s all that ever happens.” My ears perked up and I had an immediate sense of having been there. I also sensed that he might be coming to a theme I have talked about for a long time.

An accompanying slide of his presentation mentions, “Treat both the cat and the observer as quantum.” He says along with it, “You have to gird your loins for this. This is saying that you have a wave function. You obey the rules of quantum mechanics. It’s not that crazy. After all, you are made of atoms and everyone thinks that atoms obey the rules of quantum mechanics. Maybe you do too.”

That started ringing all kinds of bells in my brain. I remembered having written a post along a broadly similar theme although given that I am not a physicist it was more philosophical than quantum mechanical. However as you will see below it touches upon some of the same broad ideas even as it departs somewhat in its grasp. A quick search of my blog revealed that indeed there was a post on November 25, 2016 with the headline “Humans as quantum particles in all possible states until measured.”

I republish that piece. In the interest of clarity, it is absolutely not my claim even remotely that what I have written is at all original. The only claim I make is that the idea of humans as quantum particles has been bouncing around in my mind for over three decades and longer. It is always heartening to know that one's ideas, as random as they are, have some intellectual resonance and that too with someone of the caliber of Dr. Carroll's. I am claiming a tiny portion of reflected glory here. 

November 25, 2016

For as long as I remember, I have considered humans as quantum particles in relation to the universe. Just consider this one fact. If the sun was hollow, it could fit 1.3 million earths inside. Now imagine an average human’s size in relation to earth within those 1.3 million earths inside the sun which is but a mediocre star as stars in our Milky Way galaxies go. You begin to get some measure of how minuscule an average human is. We are quantum particles in relation to our own galaxy, let alone our galactic neighborhood and eventually the entire universe.

Having established that scale, now on to a theory I have long nurtured. If humans are quantum particles, they ought to display quantum characteristics, a fundamental one of which is quantum superposition. We all live in the human version of quantum superposition. I define human superposition as living in all possible emotional or unemotional states at all times until such time as an external stimulation triggers a response. Then we assume a specific state the way quantum particles do. (Note inserted today: In Dr. Carroll’s explanation, the many states already exist and do so independent of one another without the ability to ever communicate with one another.)

When we are measured (interacted with) in a manner of speaking, we reveal a specifically identifiable state which collapses into superposition as soon as that act of measurement or interaction stops. Until such time as I am interacting with a particular individual I can never tell what state that person is in. That means the person is in all possible states, including dead, without my interacting (measuring) them. It is only when specific information related to that specific person is accessed by an act of measurement or interaction, do we get to access one particular state. The idea that from one’s extremely limited knowledge, the rest of the universe is a mere speculation can be an unsettling one.

In a strange way I am reminded of my theory when someone famous or accomplished passes away; someone whose existence I was not aware of to begin with. It is only because I came to measure or interact or to be revealed to of that person’s death, do I know that that person existed. I say famous or accomplished because those deaths are publicly reported. Millions of people die every day whose lives or deaths we are not aware of and hence their existence remains speculative for us for all practical purposes.

Coming back to my idea of human superposition, once you apply that theory to humans you can explain a lot of what goes on in the world. Some human particles jiggle much more than the others and therefore reveal their existence more assertively. Most lead an existence of low energy and therefore tend to fade away without making much impact beyond their immediate neighborhood.

There is some comfort—at least for me—in thinking of ourselves as quantum particles in relation to the universe. In some sense, the state of being human quantum particles liberates oneself from being tethered to value judgment. If I reveal something of my existence or a particular state, it is only because someone, somewhere measured it.

I must clarify I use measure not in a literal sense of measuring something the way physicists measure the quantum world but as an act of human interaction.

As useful ideas go, what I have just written about is rather useless in so much as it affects one’s daily life. On the other hand though, the moment you look at fellow human beings as fellow quantum particles forever in all possible states they can be until such time they are measured, life becomes easier.