As China prepares to celebrate the 70th anniversary of its founding as a republic by Mao Zedong on October 1, 1949, I am reminded of a stunning aftermath of its self-assurance in what it did barely a year after that. On October 7, 1950, the People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet via Chamdo.
I am making an educated guess here but I doubt if there is a comparable example of a new republic, albeit a very ancient and great civilization, annexing another country so early in its formation. Sixty nine years later Tibet is firmly under China’s control even as its most illustrious former resident, a certain Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, remains a lifelong refugee at 84.
China has many reasons to celebrate its founding, especially the lifting out of poverty of hundreds of millions of people and becoming the world’s second biggest economy poised to be the biggest. There is no comparable example, with the possible exception of India, of a country transforming the fortunes of its citizens on such a staggering scale and in such a short time. Between 1979, when China began its economic reform, to 2017, its gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an annual rate of about 10%. According to the World Bank, China has “experienced the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history—and has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty.” I am quoting that from a document by the US Congressional Research Service (CRS) updated on June 25, 2019. Think of the number—800 million people lifted out of poverty. That is astonishing by any measure.
Of course, a lot of that has been achieved at the cost of individual civil liberties and human rights. Disturbingly though, there is a sizable number of people who think it is well worth it. The overriding rationale of that school of thinking is that poverty is the ultimate deprival of basic human rights and civil liberties and it is broadly true. However, serious questions remain about China’s model of economics.
Chris Buckley, who reports on China for The New York Times, has an instructive story out today. It says among other things, “In his seven years in power, Mr. Xi has acted on the belief that to control China he must control its history. His administration has molded textbooks, television shows, movies and museums to match his narrative of national unity and rejuvenation under iron party rule.
Under him, the Communist Party has promoted revolutionary nostalgia and played down the strife of the Mao era. The anniversary celebrations, which culminate on Tuesday with a military parade in Beijing, have reinforced this rosy depiction of the past 70 years as a near-uninterrupted march of economic and technological progress, enshrining them through oversize floral displays in Beijing.”
Meanwhile, Tibet’s subduction, if I could use a term of the plate tectonics, under China seems complete even as the Dalai Lama and Tibetans-in-exile in India and elsewhere wonder what next.
About a year and half ago, I began to lose my sense of smell. For close to a year now I have had almost no sense of smell. As someone who comes from a family with sharp olfactories, this should have been a staggering loss for me. It indeed was for the first couple of days. However, after these many months I have become so accustomed to an odorless world that I dread regaining my sense of smell.
Lately, I have begun to smell some specific smells and stenches much to my chagrin. An odorless world has not been as bad as I thought it would be. It feels strangely clean. But in the past few weeks, there appears to be some return to the world of smells, especially the bad ones. I do not particularly like it.
My anosmia has not been that anosmic since there has been some ability left still to smell. I was told that with the loss of the sense of smell, food may taste different. It did not. One of the hazards of my condition is that in a toxic and potentially lethal malodorous environment I may expose myself to some serious danger. Or even a domestic situation such as not properly shutting off cooking gas stove could be seriously endangering. I do check the regulators on my gas stove a couple of times after I am done cooking with a final check just before going to sleep.
As some olfactory returns, I am not sure if I want it back. This is a strange thing to say for someone like me who processed people using smells wafting from them. I used to think and still do that it should be the least common courtesy to fellow humans for one not to smell bad, if not, smell good at all times.
Along with the loss of the sense of smell, I did wonder what if I also became colorblind suddenly. Now that is something I may not be able to deal with equanimity, especially because I like to paint. Come to think of it though, since I already know what colors look like I could still paint as easily as I do now.
I have developed a Zen-like interest in ants that occasionally appear on my bathroom floor. More often than not, it is a solitary ant or two that show up early morning. Their black contrasts very well against the dull ivory of the floor tiles. These days only one shows up. It could be any one or even the same one.
I could not say with any degree of certainty whether it is the same ant because—and I do not want to be labeled a specist* here—they all look exactly the same from the distance and height I view them. It is possible that Nature has ordained that ants have no individual personality but have a collective one only as a colony. Just as I am curious about the impossibly jerky flights of butterflies, I am equally curious about the way ants negotiate their space.
The one this morning was quite like any on any morning. It zigzagged on the tiles and in the grooves between the titles. Its path was occasionally blocked by a strand of hair. It went around the hair generally but at times over it as well. There was no discernible pattern to its movement. There was no way to tell where it was headed and why. At times it just kept turning left like a NASCAR driver and then suddenly took a random tangent. It would occasionally come to a complete halt as if ruminating on the meandering mess that its life is. However, I am sure there is some purpose to its coming and going somewhere, anywhere, quite like the universe. Or maybe not, again quite like the universe.
In the scheme of sentient things, I am sure ants have a purpose, which perhaps extends beyond their own lives. Come to think of it, what purpose does any of us sentient being have eventually? None whatsoever.
There is probably a higher intelligence that watches you and I the way I watch ants crawl my bathroom floor. Do not extrapolate “higher intelligence” into a god-like entity. I am not even remotely suggesting that. I am merely saying that it makes logical sense that there is always something that upends different forces in a perpetual fashion. The universe is nothing but a perpetual upending of forces.
Wow! It did not take me much time to jump from an ant to the universe.
*Specist has been coined by me from species, as racist from race.
I suppose I should not be surprised if there are books in a library. That's what libraries do. They keep books that people can borrow and read.
Within that, I suppose again, I should not be surprised that it has my book 'The Dénouement: The 14th Dalai Lama's life of persistence'. Yesterday on a quick visit to Naperville's Nichols Library in downtown, I chanced upon my book, displayed on a shelf containing the works of local authors.
Although a copy of the biography also sits on top of my personal bookshelf at my home office, to see it in a library is a slightly different feeling. It illustrates that someone other than myself may be interested in it. This is, of course, contrived self-effacement because the first version of this book titled 'Dalai Lama: Man, Monk, Mystic" was first published by Doubleday/Random House in 2007 here in America and has since been published in over 20 languages worldwide. In fact, I just renewed my contract for reissue of its Arabic edition with a publisher in Beirut, Lebanon.
That said, it still felt charming to see a copy of the updated version with four new chapters in the Naperville Library. I did smile to myself when I saw it. I think I have earned a smile.
On his 96th birth anniversary today, I republish two little pieces I wrote about Dev Anand (1923-2011) soon after his death. They are my experiences with him 18 years apart. To know Mr. Anand was to know unbridled enthusiasm. The 2002 experience was soon after we had "lunch." I say lunch within quotes because it was just a half-inch Subway veggie sandwich each. While I finished mine, Mr. Anand ate only some shreds of lettuce sticking out from the roll. As we walked towards the location of a movie he was shooting in San Francisco, we walked past many curio stores. I bought a fleece as a gift for him and handed it. He flashed his trademark toothless smile, bobbed his head a bit and tapped me on my shoulder. He wore the fleece the next day.
Here are the two experiences:
Self-absorption is the core fuel of movie stars. Unless you believe that the world is watching you at all times, you have no business being a movie star. I think Dev Anand had mastered that truth.
Although this little post may seem as if I am being sarcastic or that I am smirking at him, nothing could be further from the truth. (Or is it farther from the truth?) Those who inhabit the make-believe world of cinema have to create agreeable realities around them and then make them believable.
Anand was shooting his movie called “Love At Times Square” in the U.S. in 2002 and some of the plot unfolded in San Francisco. He called to say that he would like me to accompany him for the shoot. “We will talk about this, that and the other,” he said on the phone from New York.
This particular clip relates to the shoot around the Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. I decided to carry my camcorder and record the event for my own entertainment. Although the clip is short, there is something revealing about the way the mind of a movie star works, particularly someone like Dev Anand who seemed to genuinely believe that people just stand and watch whenever and wherever he showed up. While very frequently that was indeed true, in this particular case he was merely coopting a parallel reality into his own world.
If you cue to 10 seconds, you would hear Anand say, “You can all stand and watch, why not?” For some reason this little remark has become one of my favorite expressions because it is so deeply illustrative of one man’s self-belief.
Those of you who might be familiar with the Fisherman’s Wharf would know that it is one of San Francisco’s most popular tourist spots. On any given day, there are hundreds of visitors enjoying its easy picturesqueness. I can tell you as a firsthand witness that other than about a dozen members of Anand’s unit, no one was paying much attention to the shoot. People were just walking past unaware of the presence of an Indian movie icon in their midst. In any case, how would they know who he was?
However, for Anand, who was already 78 then and had lived the life of a giant movie star for over 50 years, it took no time to reflexively rearrange the reality and conclude that they were all there to watch him and the shoot. Hence the almost involuntary remark, “You can all stand and watch, why not?”
Here is a suggestion. Next time you go to a party try saying this line aloud. I guarantee you will feel good and might even make some people stand and watch. Why not?
***
I first met Dev Anand in 1984, when he was 61, which in Dev Anand years would be early 20s.
He wore a blue gabardine shirt and black corduroy trousers. A flaming orange scarf was wrapped around his neck. He stood in the doorway to his Navketan office in Khira Estate, Santa Cruz, with hands akimbo, mouth breaking into his signature toothless smile, and said, “You are young, Mayank.” For the record I was 23. It sounded as if he was relieved that I was young.
Before that first meeting I had spoken to him a couple of times on the phone, one of which had such a refreshing Dev Anand whimsy attached to it. Sikh separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale had just been killed in Operation Blue Star and I was seeking reactions from prominent figures of Bombay. Dev Anand was one of them.
I called his residence Iris Park in Juhu. The first call was answered by an aide of his who said something which could mean any number of things in the context of a Hindi movie star except what it really means. The aide said, “Sahab, abhi bathroom mein hein aur ready ho rahen hein.” (He is in the bathroom and getting ready).
Since I was on a deadline, I called again five minutes later. This time another man answered with a distinctively stretched hello that sounded like “haloooo.” Perhaps half of India would have recognized that voice instantly. It was Dev Anand and my first ever conversation with him. I could hear some water flowing in the background. I told him who I was and explained the purpose of my call.
“Mayank, can I call you back in 15 minutes? I am in my shower,” he said and actually held the receiver close to the showerhead to prove that he was telling the truth. He told me to leave my number with his aide. That is another thing with movie stars. They generally do not return your calls. That’s just their way of saying that they would never call you back.
Some 20 minutes later I received a call from Dev Anand. He gave me a brief reaction and ended the call saying, “Let’s meet sometime.”
We met several times over the next quarter century or so, the last being on my last visit to Mumbai last year. There are so many stories to tell which I would do over the course of the next few days. For today, one particular bit from my first interview with him is instructive because it speaks so eloquently to his character.
We spent nearly two hours together in his rather charmingly unkempt office, but he did not sit down even for a moment. Barely third year into my career as a journalist, I considered it very becoming of me to ask insolent questions, one of which was, “Mr. Anand, what do you have more—talent or enthusiasm?”
The impudence of the question was not lost on someone who had already been an iconic movie star for close to four decades by the time I posed it. The only sign that this otherwise remarkably classy gentleman was discomfited by my effrontery was evident in the way he took two brisk rounds of his desk and said, “I am as talented as anybody else.”
It is entirely a measure of Mr. Anand’s character that he did not let my first encounter with him stand in the way of what turned out to be a long friendship.
The first interview also tried to dwell on themes that I thought other journalists, mostly specializing in Hindi movies (I was a general hard news reporter), were not at all curious about. Flamboyance was Dev Anand’s default temperament and I saw an opening there. Since by that time it was more a conversation than an interview I said something to this effect. “It would seem that you use your flamboyance as a shield to keep most of the world out. They are so taken in by your flamboyance and charisma that they do not bother to look beyond it.”
He had a fountain pen in his mouth as he looked at me and then through me. He then drummed his desk with the pen as if harmonizing what he was about to say and then said, “That is an unusual question and unusual theory. But I am not going to discuss that.”
Another question I remember distinctly was about his views on friendship. His reply, “Everybody is a buddy but then nobody is.”
P.S.: In 2001, as the founder-owner of a now defunct California based publishing house I almost commissioned Dev Anand to write his autobiography. We had even drawn up the basic contract but it did not work out because, in his words, “It is too early look back.” He was 78 then.
My pastels on paper titled Ballerinas is my current obsession. I like the way my lines have worked out to depict the characteristic self-assurance of ballerinas. I know the Ballet-Ballerinas genre is an almost exclusive preserve of the great Edgar Degas but one tries.
I have been thinking of death generally using my mother’s passing in May last year as a reference point. There is no sentimentality here but just some thoughts about the final irreversibility of death. One dies and that’s that.
One moment you are a throbbing corpus of joys and sorrows, angst and aspirations, melancholies and exhilarations, pains and pleasures and the next, all that ceases. That’s it. You are done.
Each human being, or for that matter each sentient life, being unique in its formation, lasts for whatever length of time they do and then fades away never to be seen. It is quite a remarkable phenomenon. Every moment is life and every moment is death.
One can only speculate what happens after death but for me death ends it. There is nothing beyond that. The idea that someone—in this case my mother because that is the reference point for now—who was encased in a particular corporeal case with all her joys and sorrows, angst and aspirations, melancholies and exhilarations, pains and pleasures can never return is, for me, strangely reassuring. Done is done sort of thing.
I think of my mortality frequently enough; sometimes wanting to hasten it because you know what’s the point? I have long insisted that any emotion, be it painful or pleasurable, lasts in all its genuine essence for no more than 10 minutes. Anything after that is just an embellished reminiscence, a contrivance. My death, whenever that happens, would cause pure pain in my immediate family for no more than ten minutes. It is of course a presumption on my part that it would cause pure pain at all. It is entirely conceivable that it may not.
Coming back to the finality of death, where a person is completely erased, deleted if you will, it is peerless. One has to die to know what it means to die even for a nanosecond. And then there is nothing to retain what the one who died might have felt. Brilliant.
This morning while reading excerpts from the well-known theoretical physicist Sean Carroll’s new book ‘Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime’ I came upon a particular passage that triggered a memory of something I had written on November 25, 2016.
The passage goes: “So the reality of a quantum system, according to austere quantum mechanics, is describe by a wave function or quantum state, which can be thought of as a superposition of every possible outcome of some observation we might want to make. How do we get from there to the annoying reality wave functions appear to collapse when we make such measurements?”
Along those lines, Carroll talks about macroscopic things needed to make those microscopic measurements such as people and cameras. He then says this, “If atoms obey the rules of quantum mechanics and cameras are made of atoms , presumably cameras obey the rules of quantum mechanics too. For that matter, you and I presumably obey the rules of quantum mechanics. The fact that we are big, lumbering, macroscopic objects might make classical physics a good approximation to what we are, but our first guess should be that it is really quantum from top to bottom.”
It is that observation that took me back to my post from nearly three years ago. I think it merits republication. I had headlined it, “Humans as quantum particles in all possible states until measured.”
It turns out I had cited this very post of mine on June 21, 2019, after watching a video by Prof. Carroll. What it means is that this has been on my mind quite a bit.
Here is the original post of mine on 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.
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.
Shah Jahan and Dara Shikoh by Rembrandt (1654-56) Google Arts & Culture
On my routine impulsive visit (An oxymoron, yes) to Google Arts & Culture, I chanced upon something I would have never connected—Rembrandt (1606-1669) and the Mughals in India, particularly Shah Jahan (1592-1666) and Dara Shikoh (1615-1659). The drawing is circa 1654-56.
An accompanying description says Rembrandt made 25 Indian drawings “based on miniatures from the Mughal Empire that he saw in a Dutch collection and presumably studied over a long period.” That is a revelation for me. I would be keen to look at the rest.
The description says, “Adopting some aspects of the extremely precise manner of these miniatures--so unlike his usual loose, evocative style of draftsmanship--Rembrandt nonetheless enlivened the figures' poses by giving them more sense of action than did the Mughal style. Despite their looseness, his lines present the figures in the three-quarter body and profile head view common in Indian painting.
A contemporary of Rembrandt known for his building campaigns and as a patron of art, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan is recognizable from his characteristic dress and face--and the aureole, which distinguished portrayals of Mughal rulers beginning with his father's reign. This depiction resembles the many portraits in the illustrated history that Shah Jahan commissioned of his reign. In characteristic Mughal fashion, he rather stiffly faces his eldest and most beloved son, Dara Shikoh. The falcon represents the popular courtly sport of hunting, often depicted in Mughal art.”
We are so used seeing Rembrandt as a breathtaking portraitist that it is a strange feeling to look at his nearly sketch-like drawings. I have seen quite a few by him and could tell you that the man was in supreme command of his lines.
I get the feeling that were Shah Jahan aware of Rembrandt and his genius, he would have somehow found a way to have him do his portrait. Come to think of it, it could be the essence of quite an imaginative piece of fiction as a novel.
I did the following story for the IANS wire based on an interview with Dr. Bharat Thakkar, 77, a veteran of quality control and reliability of systems, who has taught at several prestigious institutions here in Chicago. He raises some very important questions about the crash of the Indian Space Research Organizations's (ISRO) Vikram moon lander.
The story has been widely published by several media outlets.
By Mayank Chhaya, Indo-Asian News Service
Chicago, Sept 19: The Vikram lander likely crashed at about 184 miles per hour, a speed at which nothing of value could have survived, a highly respected Indian American mechanical engineer, specializing in such critical failures has calculated.
Dr. Bharat Thakkar, 77, a veteran of quality control and reliability of systems, who has taught at several prestigious institutions here in Chicago, has raised several fundamental questions about the lander. “These questions may be uncomfortable to those lay observers not trained in mechanics, projectile motion, horizontal and vertical velocities etc. They certainly go beyond any politics and ideology,” Dr. Thakkar told IANS in an interview.
“Vikram was designed for soft landing. Is it true that there was no contingency in design for free fall any time during moon landing or any other time during Chandrayaan-2 mission? 2. Expecting Vikram to function after free fall is a false hope similar to a ‘dead person’ coming alive. Pulling the plug on ‘brain dead’ is the right attitude. Expecting for divine intervention is very much cultural phenomenon in India,” he said.
However beyond that broad criticism, Dr. Thakkar, a longtime well-wisher of India’s science and technology who was a key member of the C-DOT generated telecom revolution, Dr. Thakkar made some very specific technical points. One relates to whether there was consideration in Vikram’s design about “the moon’s ‘coefficient of restitution’ at the predetermined landing location.”
“Upon free falling from 2.1 km height, Vikram would have bounced back and forth more than ten times in upright position (positive thinking) before coming to rest at a different location with a different coefficient of restitution than originally planned. During bouncing back and forth, the pre-determined centre of gravity of Vikram could have gone into non-equilibrium position upon the first impact. Thus, is it not hopeless to think for Vikram to stay in upright position?” he asked.
“A post-mortem must be carried out in terms of the mechanical design of Vikram. What was the factor of safety used in the dynamic mechanical design of Vikram? Was it even considered? These are the questions that need to be asked to ensure that upcoming missions do not suffer a similar fate,” he said.
In arriving at the figure of 184 miles an hour crash, Dr. Thakkar, who calls himself as a great admirer of the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) passion, said, “Free fall velocity can be closer to square root of 2gh. Where g is one-sixth of earth (32.2 feet per sec2) h = 2.1 km = approximately 7000 feet. With this free fall velocity is 270 ft per second = 184 miles per hour, nothing can survive at that speed.”
“I am assuming ‘free fall’ but it is not exactly so. It is a minor thing but needs to be mentioned. At 2.1 km height, because of existing trajectory, there must be initial downward velocity. This is equivalent to forcing the tennis ball downward with a velocity that can rebound greater than ‘free fall’. This downward velocity and coefficient of restitution combined can give us worst first bounce than I mentioned earlier.
In my opinion, only the first hit, may have crushed Vikram. There could have been no chance for subsequent bouncing. However, theoretically it is possible to have more bouncing like tennis ball but Vikram is not a tennis ball,” Dr. Thakkar reasoned.
“Anything four-legged falling does not necessarily hit all four legs at the same time depending upon the profile of moon’s surface. It is always one leg touching first and taking all the forces due to free falling. If one leg is weakened, the rest cannot help the situation. The deformations that are plastic are not recoverable in metal and materials. Anyone making prediction with a common sense, Vikram was destroyed as soon as it hit the moon ground,” he said.
Dr. Thakkar said since it involves a large sum of public money, ISRO and those involved must ask difficult questions of them beyond just “sentimentalism”. “ISRO is a great enterprise and has done India proud. I am sure it has within its DNA the ability to ask brutally honest questions and come up with rational answers,” he said.
