South Asia Daily

"I am a laborer. On the day I do not write, I have no right to eat."

Munshi Premchand--MC, July 31-1880--October 8, 1936

"मै एक मज़दूर हूँ। जिस दिन कुछ लिख न लूँ, उस दिन मुझे रोटी खाने का कोई हक नहीं।"

-मुंशी प्रेमचंद

"I am a laborer. On the day I do not write, I have no right to eat."

--Munshi Premchand

Shakti Singh, a Facebook friend, posted the quote above by  Munshi Premchand, one of India's greatest litterateurs, whose 139th birth anniversary falls today.

Merely because both Premchand and I write for survival does not even remotely make me a writer and by no stretch of the imagination in his category of litterateurs. I regard myself as an efficient hack.

To mark Premchand's birth anniversary I republish a short post I wrote on this day in 2017.

July 31, 2017

On the great litterateur Munshi Premchand’s 137th birth anniversary today this morning I simultaneously read his two celebrated short stories ‘Idgah’ (1933) and ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ (1924). One felt entranced by the descriptions of the life in the early 20th century by an author in complete command of his supreme literary craft.

It was by some coincidence that I read two short stories that depict life at the two ends of the economic spectrum of the era. ‘Idgah’ deals with poverty at the edge of society with charming subtlety and dignity while ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ talks about two decadent feudal lords addicted to playing chess utterly oblivious to the world around them seems to be spinning out of control.

It is a tribute to the genius of Premchand that in just a few deft sentences he lures the reader into four or five-year-old Hamid’s penurious but still uplifting world. Hamid’s decision to buy a pair of tongs for his grandma who regularly burns her fingers while making rotis (bread) rather than sweets and toys to celebrate Eid like other children leaves one heartbreakingly touched. The author employs his much celebrated craft in ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi to bring alive the characters of  Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mirza Roshan Ali, the two unabashed hedonistic chess players in Lucknow.

It is extraordinary how in a dozen or sentences Premchand paints such captivating portraits of the two contrasting realities. In ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ he writes about the extent of how unconcerned everyone had become by saying that even beggars used their money to buy opium rather than bread. In ‘Idgah’ he captures in one sentence a telling detail of life then when he writes about how people rushed to a local oil merchant with their hardened leather shoes to soften them with oil.

By any measure Premchand (July 31, 1880—October 8, 1936) ranks as one of the world’s great writers so completely immersed into the sociocultural realities of his time. It just strikes me that he died at 56, having created a remarkable body of work. It just strikes me that he died at 56, having created a remarkable body of work. I am at the same age with absolutely nothing to show for myself other than being alive.

And then there is relentless dark silence

Caution: Gross reading

A catheter is like a deformity, a vulgar protuberance jutting out of one’s body without permission. And yet, it is surprising how quickly one gets used to it. It is like dentures, a foreign object in your mouth. I have the former these days—a catheter—but not the latter.

My eighth day into it today, it has become a part of my body. The tube that carries the discharge—remnants of abscess from my colon—is always hanging out under my shirt. I keep the receiving pouch in my pocket. One looks at it and understands how under the thin veneer our skin, packed is a jumble of wet, gooey, oozy, throbbing organs that keep us alive. They do their essential duties as we go about pursuing our hubris in the impossibly thin protection of our skin. We pay attention to them only when a sickness takes over, as is the case with me currently.

The packaging of the human body is astonishing, Consider this simple fact. The colon or the large intestine is five about feet long and three inches in diameter. It is, of course, our sewer line/sewage system without which we will not survive too long. It is dirty, smelly, sticky stuff that passes through it. The packaging ensures that we don’t see it while inside.

When you consider that everyone of us humans—no matter how strikingly beautiful or the opposite of that, how rich or poor, how powerful or powerless, how liberal or bigoted, how successful or not—we all pack inside our skin organs that do their jobs for decades irrespective of the harm or the good that we do to the world.

While recuperating in hospital last week, I was contemplating whether we are a sum of organs or there is something more. Evidence suggests that there is probably something more that vanishes with the death of any or all of our organs.

In the context of the universe, which is 13.8 billion years old, our life span is akin to the bursts of fireflies. We were not there, then we were there and then we were not there at all, never to become again. What we have is it—including with a catheter hanging from one’s stomach.

यह हंगामें कुछ देर के मेहमां हैं

फिर तो बस एक मुसलसल काली ख़ामोशी है

--मयंक छाया

A couple of observations about Trump and Afghanistan

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, left, with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on July 22 (A frame from a Guardian video)

I am conscious that I am addressing this a week too late but my health came in the way and it is still relevant.

I suppose the best way to resolve the intractable Afghan conflict is for US president Donald Trump to tell Afghanistan that he could have had Afghanistan “wiped off the face of the Earth” but for the fact that he does not “want to kill 10 million people”.

I suppose we should be thankful for the small mercies that even the current incumbent has qualms about killing ten million people.

The pileup of the Trumpian transgressions is so high that a statement of such staggering misanthropy barely registers in the global discourse. That he made it sitting next to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan at the Oval Office on July 22 makes it even more stunning. From what I have read of the media accounts, Khan did not feel the need to challenge that his country’s immediate neighbor was being talked about in such terms. In fact, watching a video of the time when Trump made his remarks—twice in rapid succession as is his wont—Khan merely smirked and smiled.

“Pakistan’s going to help us out to extricate ourselves,” Trump said, “We’re like policemen. We’re not fighting a war. If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. But I don’t want to kill 10 million people. Afghanistan could be wiped off the face of the Earth. I don’t want to go that route.”

Quite amusingly in a span of about one minute Trump’s time-frame to win the Afghan war, if he wanted to, changed from a “one week” to “ten days” to “a very short period of time.”

Khan’s silence over those comments is somewhat strategic. There is not much love lost for Afghanistan in Pakistan. Apart from everything else, it is also viewed as close to India helping the latter keep Pakistan hemmed in.

Pakistan’s game in Afghanistan is not subtle. Having provided shelter to the Taliban since 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan, it has visions of installing a Taliban government in Kabul which it can control. That approach appears to have been strengthened with the Trump administration more than keen to strike some kind of a deal with the Taliban, which indirectly means significantly strengthening the influence in Kabul of its benefactor, the Pakistani military.

Consider the four decades-long clusterfuck in Afghanistan. A decade after the erstwhile Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, it was forced to depart in February, 1989 after the CIA successfully engineered the push by the mujahideen—those who engage in jihad--some of the same elements that later became the Taliban. The same Taliban came back to harbor Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden who led the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, triggering Washington to invade, oust it and cause them to flee to Pakistan. Nearly 19 years hence, they seem set to return with the Trump administration willing to reach a deal with the help of the Khan government.

One should not be surprised that Khan smiled when Trump made those threats.

Two giant powers have messed around in Afghanistan for forty years and there is absolutely nothing to show for it other than relentless bloodletting.

The colon puts a punctuation mark on life and it is the exclamation mark

The colon has put a punctuation mark on my life for now, as in “Really! This bad!”

That is my response to my life’s first experience of antibiotics. You are required to eat some food as an offset against the effects of antibiotics but that, in turn, causes nausea and deep fatigue. As I struggle to eat minuscule amounts to stay afloat, throwing up or diarrhea or both are always around the corner. That empties out of your stomach and you are back to square one.

As I endure diverticulitis and its effects, listlessness appears one of the primary ones. Last night after throwing up, as I struggled to fall back to sleep, the following verses were born.

सहमे सहमे से मिलते हो

ख़फा ख़फा से मिलते हो

जैसे में कोई संगीन जुर्म हूँ

सज़ा सज़ा से मिलते हो

(Free transliteration)

You meet me frightened

You meet me upset

As if I were a serious crime

You meet me like punishment.

--MC

It is heartening to know that the poet is not listless. Another positive outcome of not being able to eat much is that I have lost my one and half chins into nearly one.

Diverticulitis and I

Mayank Chhaya

Diverticulitis.

Now that’s a word I did not know existed a couple of months ago. Even less that it is a deeply painful condition of the colon and it is quite common. So common, in fact, that even I have been gripped by it.

Some of my regular readers might have noticed that I missed writing a post for four consecutive days, something that has never happened in my more than a decade of writing this blog every single day.

I am mindful that while writing about personal ailments, one runs the risk of exhibitionism and a measure sympathy-seeking. I promise this is neither. I do it as a public service, however minor and limited in reach it may be.

Last Sunday, I began to feel a peculiarly discommoding pain in my lower abdomen, something I have felt before. Until then I had put it down under IBS or irritable bowel syndrome although it could as easily be I BS. However, that particular attack became so debilitating so quickly that I was bent over and could not move. It was as if someone had put a clamp inside my stomach of the kind a car repo man might do.

That attack was the worst pain of my life but I was unprepared what followed that night after I was admitted to the nearby Edward Hospital’s emergency care first and then its surgical care unit.

Before I narrate that experience, I was first made aware of diverticulitis because a dear friend who had suffered such an attack was rendered out of commission for two days and in pain for several days after that. He mentioned some of the symptoms , all of which I had on Sunday and more.

By the time I reached the Edward ER I had concluded for myself that it had to be diverticulitis. When the ER doctor confirmed it I was strangely triumphant. Rather than me explaining it, let me quote from the Mayo Clinic website what it is.

“Diverticula are small, bulging pouches that can form in the lining of your digestive system. They are found most often in the lower part of the large intestine (colon). Diverticula are common, especially after age 40, and seldom cause problems.

Sometimes, however, one or more of the pouches become inflamed or infected. That condition is known as diverticulitis (die-vur-tik-yoo-LIE-tis). Diverticulitis can cause severe abdominal pain, fever, nausea and a marked change in your bowel habits.

Mild diverticulitis can be treated with rest, changes in your diet and antibiotics. Severe or recurring diverticulitis may require surgery.”

Mine turned out to be a particularly severe form with abscess in a 2 cm by 3 cm pouch. Mercifully, that pouch was walled off. If there was any perforation and subsequent leak, it could have been potentially fatal.

Despite being so common, I find that not a lot of people know about it. Interestingly, after being one of the victims I have come to know of at least four others among those I indirectly know.

The fact that a few drops of abscess can wreck your body and routine so swiftly is a sobering one. In five days, I feel wiped out, not to mention aged. I suspect my right eyebrow became grey in a span of hours because of the pain. Speaking of which, it was so severe on Sunday night that I practically fainted until I was administered some kind of morphine every few hours.

The only upside this morning is experiencing so many spectacularly visual dreams that some of them will eventually become my painting. That is when I have the strength to stand in front of my easel and hold brushes. Until then I yield to diverticulitis.  

A request to all those who might read this. If you have any early indication of this, don't file it under IBS. That would indeed be BS.

A high-fiber diet is supposed to be one of the antidotes to this disease. Having been a lifelong vegetarian, I should have had that antidote. But as my surgeon described it that it is "one of the universe's cruel ironies" that even strict vegetarians get it.

 

Done with 'Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee'

It is with some relief that I announce my disengagement from Jerry Seinfeld’s “Oh, we comedians are such a unique tribe” jerkoff fest that goes by the name ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’ (CCGC). Having watched every episode of every season from the time it began as an incidental web series until its Netflix avatar, including the first entire episode featuring Eddie Murphy and a part of Seth Rogen in episode 2, I am calling it quits.

Over the years, I have written a fair amount about this decidedly Seinfeldian outing. I have mostly written about how I remained annoyed with it and yet made it a point to watch all of it as soon as it came out. It is useful to quote from a post I wrote on November 21, 2014, to sum up what I feel about it. It is, of course, of zero consequence to anyone what I feel about, especially to Seinfeld.

In Jerry Seinfeld’s conception the world is divided in two—one populated by comedians, which is his world, and the other populated by “regular” people about which he makes his jokes. It seems like a world he can barely tolerate. Had it not been for the hundreds of millions that that world has made him he might not have tolerated it at all.

He forgets that it is that world full of “regular” people which he needs both as source material as well as an audience. He couldn’t possibly sustain his career as a comedian by depending on other comedians to fill up the venues where he performs. In any case, other comedians have what they think is their own angst and self-absorption to deal with. They may not sit through the act and pay for it too.

These thoughts came to mind while watching the new season of Seinfeld’s hit web series ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’ where comedians in cars, one of whom is necessarily Seinfeld, get coffee and talk. I remain annoyed at its mounting smugness but continue to watch every single episode.

The one in which Seinfeld shows his barely concealed wariness for “regular” people, the hoi polloi if you will, the swinish multitude if you insist, also features Amy Schumer.

The following exchange between Seinfeld and Schumer tells you a lot of what the former is:

Seinfeld: Already as a comedian, the world has a transparent quality to you. You see through everything. That’s why you spend all your time trying to cogitate.

Here is my secret trick for talking with people.

Numbers. Ask them questions to which the answer is a number.

Schumer: Why numbers, though?

Seinfeld: There’s always an answer. This is Seinfeld's secret technique for talking to regular people….

How long have you lived here? What time do you start work?

On July 14, 2014 I wrote this about the series, specifically about the episode featuring Jon Stewart.

“I am almost annoyed that I regularly watch  Jerry Seinfeld’s increasingly smug net-only series ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’. To the extent that any performance art demands a measure of self-absorption, the core of this series makes sense. However, one finds that Seinfeld elevates the tribe of comedians to a level, which they do not necessarily deserve. He sees charming quirks in almost everything that comedians do even when they don’t exist. It is as if he falls in love with his craft and those who practice it with manifest success over and over again. He presumes a uniqueness to his profession that no other can come anywhere close to.”

That overall approach continues with the new season. Not that I was expecting it to change because that is the default nature of Seinfeld’s world. Check out the two shots I have taken out of his latest episode featuring Bill Burr. The two are at a cigar bar in Hollywood.

Watching ‘Comedians..’ is not mandatory. No one has coerced me into watching it. I do it because I watch and read a lot of things to just keep up. I am not emotionally invested in anything I do by way of media consumption. My annoyance is a performance whipped up for the purposes of writing something, anything. We live in a world where everyone performs for everyone else.

While watching Murphy and Seinfeld yesterday, I finally asked myself, “What the fuck am I doing watching this?” I asked out aloud since I was alone in the house. There was nothing in the conversation—nothing—that even remotely engaged me. Other than Murphy saying Seinfeld was the funniest and Seinfeld returning the compliment, there wasn’t much to it. Seinfeld, of course, kept returning to his favorite theme—“Oh we comedians are such a unique tribe” by saying things like how there is no situation where comedians do not find something funny, even when someone has died. I thought he was trying too hard to reiterate the uniqueness of comedians.

My not watching CCGC means nothing to anyone, the least of all to Seinfeld who, I guarantee, is unaware of my existence or for that matter the existence of almost anyone outside his tribe in any meaningful way.

To the moon

That should be all for today on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

 

The sickening chants of "Send her back", first "Americans" and human evolution

A frame from PBS/ NOVA documentary 'First Face of America' (This is an artistic representation.)

With the disgusting chants of “Send her back” by President Donald Trump’s supporters against Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar still reverberating in my ears, I watched an extraordinary PBS Nova documentary ‘First Face of America’ (2018) by chance.

Rather than me rephrasing its synopsis, let me directly quote from the documentary’s website to underscore how absurd the debate about who qualifies to be real Americans at a time when its definition is being strangled by the boa constrictor of race politics.

“One unlucky day 13,000 years ago, a slight, malnourished teenager missed her footing and tumbled to the bottom of a 100-foot pit deep inside a cave in Mexico’s Yucatán. Rising seas flooded the cave and cut it off from the outside world—until a team of divers chanced upon her nearly complete skeleton in 2007. Intricate detective work reveals that the young woman’s bones are among the earliest known human remains in the Americas. What drove her to venture nearly a mile underground inside a vast cave? Where did her people come from, and why does she look so distinct from today’s Native Americans? From a stunning Mexico cave to the wilderness of the Yukon, from the genetics lab to the forefront of forensics, NOVA pursues tantalizing new clues that are rewriting the story of the forgotten first people who ventured into our continent,” it says.

I strongly recommend people watch this documentary to understand how absurd such debates as the current one inflaming America’s guts are. Given my weakness to always give a grander, loftier perspective to everything, I would add to my recommendation this remarkable piece on BBC headlined “Would humans evolve again if we rewound time?”

The piece by James Horton and Tiffany Taylor essentially says this, “Our species emerged as a result of a mind-bending number of random events and mutations, but it may also have been inevitable that humans, or something like us, would walk the Earth.”

If you have about an hour to spend, please watch the PBS documentary and read the BBC piece. Of course, those who mindlessly chant “Send her back” at a Trump rally may not feel enthused to do either.

After Dalai Lama who? Does Beijing have a role?

I did the following piece for the highly respected journal South Asia Monitor.

 

By Mayank Chhaya 

 

At 84, the Dalai Lama is closer than ever before to his corporeal mortality and China is watching out with considerable morbid interest for that eventuality. Even though as a state and a political system China is irreligious, it is acutely aware of the cultural and philosophical appeal of Buddhism, something that Tenzin Gyatso has embodied his entire life from the age of three. In his inevitable death, whenever that may come to pass, lies a powerful opportunity for China to reshape an institution of over six-centuries-old and in the process deepen its control over Tibet even more.

 

April 2019 marked the 60th anniversary of the 24-year-old Tenzin Gyatso’s exile from Tibet.  Not willing or able or both to deal with the currently living Dalai Lama, China insists that he must reincarnate after his death, presumably as a pliant 15th Dalai Lama. The 14th Dalai Lama, who is arguably the most popular and consequential in the tradition’s history, is much more inclined to end his lineage and preempt reincarnation if it means Beijing will hijack the institution after his passing.

 

In a bizarre believe-it-or-not twist to the question of whether the Dalai Lama should reincarnate, Beijing now seems to insist that he must but as a sort of made-to-order successor who could be shaped and conditioned to accept complete Chinese control over Tibet and Tibetans.Even as the Chinese Communist Party does not accept the concept of Dalai Lamas as an old institution and is particularly contemptuous towards the current one, it is astute enough to recognize the political and cultural consequence of having a Dalai Lama in place as long as he is the kind they can run as their operative. It would not mind some return to Buddhism as long as it is this Dalai Lama-free.

 

In March, 2015,   Zhu Weiqun, chairman of the ethnic and religious affairs committee of the top advisory body to China's parliament, was quoted as saying, “Decision-making power over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, and over the end or survival of this lineage, resides in the central government of China.”

 

Four years after Zhu’s comments, the issue of who and what after Tenzin Gyatso has heated up all over again since the Dalai Lama is that older and in likely more frail health. The question now is whether a Dalai Lama appointed by Beijing would find endorsement by New Delhi and, if not, how might that impact the already wobbly bilateral relations. 

 

Prof. Zha Luo, the director of the Institute of Social and Economic Studies of the China Tibetology Research Centre, a Chinese government think tank that helps formulate Beijing’s Tibet policy, has been quoted as saying, “It will be a major political difference that would impact bilateral relations and any wise political leader wouldn't do that." His comments and those of other Chinese officials dealing with Tibet came to a group of Indian journalists visiting Lhasa on July 8. He, of course, pivoted it saying his was a “hypothetical” answer to “hypothetical question”. 

 

However, Wang Neng Sheng, director general of the People’s Government Information Office of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, told Indian journalists, “It is the position of the Chinese government that the reincarnation cannot be decided by his (Dalai Lama) personal wish or some group of people living in other countries.” At some level, the politics of reincarnation is realpolitik for Beijing. Ideas such as spiritualism, religion and reincarnation may not fit with Communist philosophy but China’s leaders know the value of using them as convenient instruments of state control. Beijing also knows the value of controlling all aspects of Tibetan Buddhist traditions beyond the lifetime of this Dalai Lama. 

 

Irrespective of whether you believe in reincarnation and irrespective of whether Tenzin Gyatso would like to reincarnate, Beijing has next to no role in the matter. It is an entirely and uniquely Tibetan question that must be decided by Tibetan people, both inside and outside Tibet. In the end, it is also the Dalai Lama’s personal decision. If he thinks the lineage should end now, then it should.

 

The Dalai Lama has once again asserted that the decision whether to reincarnate is entirely his. He has been steadfast in saying that eventually whether the institution of the Dalai Lama survives his departure is a matter for the Tibetan people inside and outside Tibet. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, it is a tough choice between endorsing a pliant Dalai Lama appointed by Beijing and the one that Tenzin Gyatso might name in his lifetime. For the Modi government, coming down on either side emphatically is fraught with diplomatic and strategic consequences for India, although for a country and prime minister sure of their  role on the world stage, it would be wise to take a principled stand and say that the decision is solely that of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people.

The moon and I

Apollo 11 astronauts (from left) Neil Armstrong, Michael Collin, Buzz Aldrin (Photo NASA)

Quite apart from the fact that my name in Sanskrit means moon, I am generally interested in Earth’s only groupie. As NASA and the world mark the 50^th anniversary of the launch of the Saturn V rocket on July 16, 1969, that carried the Apollo 11 crew to the moon as well as their actual arrival on July 20, I have been thinking about my other tangential connection to the mission this morning. It came courtesy of my father Manharray.

My father had a pen pal in America in 1969-70 named Carol with whom he corresponded regularly. She would occasionally send some minor mementos via mail in those days but the one that I remember the most was a kit that contained photographs of the three astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins—posing in front of a model of the moon as well as a soft record that supposedly had all the recordings of the event, including Armstrong’s famous words “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” If memory serves, I think that soft record was produced by CBS for NASA. The record’s jacket had a closeup shot of the moon’s surface.

As a barely 9-year-old what I remember the most from that package was the photograph of the three. Last night, while watching a CBS special I saw that picture again and was transported back to my childhood. The legendary anchor Walter Cronkite helmed CBS’s Apollo 11 mission news coverage and was speechless when Armstrong stepped foot on the moon’s surface for the first time.

That moon publicity kit traveled with me during my many moves in India but somewhere along the line I have lost it now. When I first saw the picture (above), which was also the part of the package Carol had sent my father, the face that etched itself instantly was that of Collins’, followed by Armstrong and then Aldrin. In fact, Collins was the most memorable face of the three for me. It was much later that I found out that he was assigned to stay in orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon.

That we had a moon kit made us somewhat coveted among out immediate neighbors in Ahmedabad. It was almost as if my father had been to the moon. (Literary exaggeration.) That joy did not last long since my father died in May, 1970 and the only memorable inheritance we got was that moon kit.