South Asia Daily

Of torn condoms and suchlike

I do not want to make light of Uganda’s crisis of torn condoms but I can’t help it. Rebecca Ratcliffe reports in The Guardian that “The charity Marie Stopes International is recalling more than a million condoms in Uganda, after officials raised concerns that they were prone to breaking.”

Reading the story, I am reminded of a revolting but brilliant insult that I used to hear in the early 1980s on Bombay’s streets. “Ey, fatey Nirodh ki aulad” or “Hey, son of a torn condom (Nirodh being the most widely used brand of condoms then)” is how the insult went. I say brilliant because it so succinctly captures the insult. To call someone a product of a torn condom is withering, notwithstanding the expression itself has high literary merit.

What makes Uganda’s problem of breaking condoms a crisis is this: “It is estimated that about 6% of Ugandans aged 15 to 49 are living with HIV, with women disproportionately affected by the virus, according to UNAids, the UN agency for tackling HIV. New HIV infections among young women aged 15 to 24 years were more than double those among young men.

Concerns were raised over two batches of the condoms, which each contained about 335,000 condom packs. Marie Stopes International said the manufacturer is approved by the UN Population Fund, the UN agency responsible for supporting family planning, and that products are tested at a World Health Organization lab before shipment.”

Defective condoms have a direct impact on public health and do indeed create a question of life and death. It is hard to say whether and to what extent the defective condom brand may already have caused some damage.

In the Indian context, Nirodh were first made by a state-owned enterprise called Hindustan Latex in 1969 and their quality, although generally good, could be problematic at times. Hence “Ey, fatey Nirodh ki aulad.”

I just found out something funny about how the word Nirodh came to be used for the condom brand. It seems it was originally called ‘Kamaraj’, derived from the Indian cupid Kamadev. It so happened that the president of the Congress Party in those days was K. Kamaraj and he would not have taken kindly to being called a condom. It is just as well because as names go Nirodh is much better than Kamaraj.

Quick observations about 'The Aladia Sisters'

It is admittedly a cheap thing to do but I have my compulsions to read a free sample of friend and fellow journalist Khalid Mohamed’s first novel ‘The Aladia Sisters’ by Om Books International on Amazon. At some point soon, I do intend to buy the actual book but from what I have read in the free sample, I am struck by how richly detailed Khalid’s prose is. It is as if he frenziedly observes everything in Qalayat, “pronounced ‘Qaleth’,  a “cross between a village and a township in the Jind district of Haryana.’

Khalid’s eye for details is both cinematic as well as novelistic. You can see that he conceives visually, something I have done all my life and hence can identify with it quickly. At one point, he describes the retina of the damaged right eye of Amina, one of the Aladia sisters, as “a black raisin dissolved in milk.”

As a rule, I do not review any creative work because I think it is futile. I do, however, point out some salient aspects that jump out at me for any reason. What jumped out at me from the free sample from Khalid’s book is how in a span of perhaps a couple of thousand words he paints such a detailed picture of Qalayat and those who inhabit it, particularly Saundha Bhai and Iddanbi and their seven children—six daughters and one son.

He sums up the state of the couple’s existence thus: “Saundha Bhai and Iddanbi were not scripted to taste happiness. That nectar was exclusively fermented by the gods for others; anyone but them. Love, in the Aladias’ unspoken vocabulary, was toxic, as colourless as cyanide.”

The overarching sense that I get reading the free sample is that Khalid has rapidly conjured up the world of Qalayat and those who live in it, particularly the Aladias, in sharp details before it vanishes. It is almost as if Qalayat magically materialized in front of Khalid’s eyes and he had to capture everything in it in rapid succession.

A side of Khalid’s, whom I knew in the Bombay of the 1980s, that I did not know about is that he also paints. That painterly eye comes in handy as he recreates that world.

An accompanying synopsis on Amazon lets one in on how he is able to bring it all alive. It says, “Traversing the era of the British Raj, the Partition and India's Independence to the here and now of the Internet millennium, the story of six sisters of a patriarchal Muslim family, is investigated by a journalist. Before coming of age, the sisters had run away in the deep cover of the night from a Haryana village to define their lives and destinies. Began an undeclared game of may-the-best-sister win. Earn money, express inchoate talents in the arts, hook the richest husband, raise the next generation right - these were just a scattering of their to-do list. Through confidences and vignettes, updates and interviews, the Mumbai journalist travels between Delhi, Ajmer, Mount Abu and London, to recreate the narrative of a confederacy of women who dared to break the rules way before they were written. The story - blending fact and fiction - could have been chronicled only by one journalist, the grandson of one of the sisters.”

That he is a grandson of one of the Aladia sisters gives him a unique vantage point on them as well as their stories in the tumult and ferment of India’s independence movement. It should not be surprising if the novel becomes a movie. After all, Khalid has written several films including, “Zubeida”, “Fiza” and “Mammo.”

When I do buy my own copy of the book, I will let Khalid know.

Rain in forest

Rain in forest--MC

That should be all for today.

S5-HVS1 and its crazy ejection from Milky Way

The coolest space story that is currently grabbing my attention involves a star named S5-HVS1 and its escape from the Milky Way at a staggering speed of 4 million miles per hour or 6.4 million kilometers per hour. It is as if the star, which is twice as massive as our sun and ten times more luminous, encountered something so monstrously powerful and scary that it felt compelled to leave our galaxy forever.

A team of astronomers led by Ting Li of the Carnegie Observatories have been tracking the S5-HVS1 and have concluded that its exit has been caused by its encounter with Sagittarius A*, a gravitationally giant black hole at the center of our galaxy. The encounter happened five million years ago when the star came close to the black hole. S5-HVS1 was sling-shotted with such force that it is well on its way out of our galaxy and into interstellar oblivion.

The rather uninspiring name of the star comes from the location where it was found, namely the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey or S5 combined with the fact that it is an HVS or hyper-velocity star. Astronomers have over the decades studied such hyper-velocity stars but there have not been any so far whose path can be tracked directly back to our Galactic Center. However, the paper published by the Li team in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society says, “In this paper we present the discovery of a new nearby unbound HVS that can be unambiguously traced back to the Galactic Centre.”

The ejection of S5-HVS1 happened five million years ago but by the time it was detected by the astronomers it was 29,000 light years away from us, which is a relatively short distance. What it means that the image of the star we are witnessing now is only 29,000 years old. That image has traveled 174,000 trillion miles or 272600 trillion kilometers (Light travels about 6 trillion miles or 9.4 trillion kilometers in a year that makes one light year). Since these are absurdly incomprehensible numbers let’s just say that it is a lot.

As is my habit, I read the particular paper announcing the discovery in some details and although I did not quite comprehend all the mindbogglingly complex calculations, I know it enough to say that is mindbogglingly complex. Take just this one random detail. The team had to account for “the relative geometry between the Sun and the Galactic Center” while determining S5-VHS1’s track back to the galactic center. You might have noticed that science, particularly space science, is not as easy as tweeting intimidating messages to witnesses.

Picture, if you can, a star twice as massive as our Sun and ten times as luminous being kicked out of our galaxy at 4 million miles per hour or 6.4 million kilometers per hour. I can try and calculate the star’s current distance but that would be equally incomprehensible. So let’s just say it is very far now.

Nothing as cool as space. Remember that we, as in life on Earth. Are also in space because Earth too is in space like everything else.

That melting yellow sky...

वोह पीला सा पिघलता आसमान 

वोह पारदर्शी नीला पानी 

वोह ज़रा सी डोलती नाव 

वोह पेड़ों की हलकी सी छाँव 

वोह मेरा इस दृश्य में खो जाना 

वोह तुम्हारा आगमन 

--मयंक छाया 

That should be all for today. यार, मुफ्त का चन्दन कितना घिसोगे?

 

Hey Universe, increase your data transmission speed

I have been wanting to say this for a long time. Today is as good a time as any to do that.

I do not know about you but I think the universe needs to significantly increase its data transmission speed or photon speed (PhoSpee) as I call it. The universal ceiling of the speed of light in a vacuum of 186,282 miles per second , 299,792 kilometers per second, first theorized by Albert Einstein, is no longer acceptable to me. It is too 20^th century. It is like your internet service provider (ISP) still operating the analog modem with that horrendous screechy noise.

Come on, Universe, you can do much better. At one level, it is still impressive that although Voyagers 1 and 2 are as of this morning over 13.778 billion and 11.405 billion miles away respectively after 42 years of traveling, in radio signal time they are only 20 hours and 17 hours away in one-way light time. That means to communicate with them, which will soon become impossible because of the diminishing radio signal strength, we need 40 hours and 34 hours each. Since they are pulling away from us at over 38,026 miles per hour (61,196 kmh) and 34,390 miles per hour (55,345 kmh) the length of that one communication loop is constantly increasing.

This is an example of my complaint about the universe’s data transmission being restricted by the speed of light ceiling, courtesy of Einstein. It is not as if Einstein imposed that limit. He brilliantly theorized it and has been proven right time and again. It is not his fault that he is right about the whole universe so far.

The point is the universe needs to measure up and give us a much faster data transmission speed. Ideally, I would ask for instantaneous transmission, meaning something occurring and being detected by us happening at once with zero, yes pure zero, time lag. I understand that this is the spooky action at a distance realm but I am not talking quantum scale but the normal macro scale that our dense brain operates on.

Can you imagine how that would completely transform our experience of the universe? It is not a rhetorical question. I am working on what that might mean in our daily human experience to have absolutely no time lag at all.

If the universe were my ISP, I would have long disconnected it with the pathetically slow light speed it is offering.

Jawaharlal, Raj Kaul, Farrukhsiar, nahar and Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru by MC

Today happens to be the 130^th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru. I can write an informed tribute to an extraordinary life but, as is my wont, I won’t and instead focus on something tangential and even trivial.

It strikes me yet again how human life and therefore human history is either improbably random or so finely designed. By the time Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, Mohandas Gandhi was already 20 years old. He had left for England in 1888 and the year 1889 for him was eventful for him as he immersed himself in learning elocution, French, dancing, and Western music. The month Nehru was born was the month Gandhi met Madame Blavatsky, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, and Annie Besant, a well-known theosophist and women’s rights activist.

The reason why I mention this is because in 1889 when Nehru was literally in conception, turning into a fetus and eventually a fully-formed baby in November, 1889, Gandhi was already an adult firming up his personality through various influences. At that point who would have thought that the baby born to Motilal Nehru and Swarup Rani Nehru in Allahabad (now Prayagraj) would go on to become Jawaharlal Nehru? Or for that matter, Gandhi’s most cherished young disciple?

What are the odds that two men separated by 20 years and thousands of kilometers at that stage would go on to preside over India’s destiny? Apparently quite high because it did indeed happen. I do not want to be graphic here but when Motilal Nehru and Swarup Rani were in the process of conceiving someone who became Jawaharlal, there was next to no prospect or knowledge of what future held not just for the baby being conceived but, by implication, for India and the world.

Another defining figure of India’s destiny, Vallabhai Patel, whose life too would be intertwined with Nehru’s so deeply, was already 14 years old by then. In a sense Patel was Gandhi’s contemporary rather than Nehru’s peer, something that is often forgotten by those who constantly harp on the non-existent rivalry between the two great men.

I am fascinated by these connections. Consider the fact that Motilal Nehru’s first wife died during child birth. Had she lived, it is conceivable that India’s history would have taken a different turn. That’s what I mean by how human life and human history are either so improbably random or finely designed. I think it is the former.

By the time Nehru met Gandhi for the first time in December, 1916, the 47-year-old Gandhi was already an internationally prominent figure because of his work in South Africa. Nehru was just 27. History seems to be a series of happenstances and fortuitous events somehow coming together. In that it is quite like the way the universe appears to have evolved. It could have taken any number of directions, including the one it eventually took and the one we are part of.

Interestingly, as an aside, even the last name Nehru, which is these days perhaps the most reviled in India’s politics, comes from the word nahar or a canal. Jawaharlal writes in his autobiography, “We were Kashmiris. Over two hundred years ago, early in the eighteenth century, our ancestor came down from that mountain valley to seek fame and fortune in the rich plains below. Those were the days of the decline of the Moghal Empire after the death of Aurangzeb, and Farrukhsiar was the Emperor. Raj Kaul was the name of that ancestor of ours and he had gained eminence as a Sanskrit and Persian scholar in Kashmir. He attracted the notice of Farrukhsiar during the latter’s visit to Kashmir and, probably at the Emperor’s instance, the family migrated to Delhi, the imperial capital, about the year 1716. A jagir with a house situated on the bank of a canal had been granted to Raj Kaul, and, from the fact of this residence, ‘Nehru’ (from nahar , a canal) came to be attached to his name; and, in later years, Kaul dropped and we became simply Nehrus.”

Once again, that is a charming example of the randomness of human life. Had Raj Kaul not been noticed by Farrukhsiar and had he not migrated to Delhi and not lived by a nahar, history may have been very different. At the very least Kaul would have been the most reviled last name today. Perhaps.

You can argue that it is all written, if you have that sort of mindset, or argue that nothing is written. Either way, here we are 130 years after the fact.

Wolf Blitzer: Bringing a toothbrush to a gumfight

So far the best image of the impeachment day has been this photo of CNN grandee Wolf Blitzer and his desk. 

What strikes me the most about Blitzer's desk is the toothbrush. Any weapon in service of journalism, including gleaming teeth, is welcome. It is called bringing a toothbrush to a gumfight. (I couldn't resist that one.)

That's all for today. 

With all due respect, it is delightfully unprincipled

From what little one has read and heard about her book ‘With All Due Respect’, it is clear that former US Ambassador the United Nations Nikki Haley expects Donald Trump’s sway over not just the Republican Party but his own fiercely loyal base to last well beyond his presidency. And she wants every part of it as she might consider 2024 as her time to run for president.

As political positioning goes, Haley, a former Governor of South Carolina, uses her book with remarkable sagacity, albeit with cynical efficiency, to keep the Trump constituency on her side just in case she does indeed go for presidency. The most telling part of the bits of excerpts from the book that support her apparent game plan is the way she describes how former White House chief of staff John Kelly and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tried to recruit her against President Trump and some of his policies to “save the country.”

According an excerpt published by The Washington Post, Haley writes, ““Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country. … It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said. The president didn’t know what he was doing.”

That’s a stunning claim, which Tillerson has sort of denied while Kelly has so far kept silent to, that Haley uses to illustrate how she did not go along with it. Her point being that not only would it have been dangerous to America’s constituency but implicitly that she is keeping her powder dry for 2024. The calculation appears to be that the Trump era may not end with the end of his presidency in so far as the pathological loyalty of his base to him is concerned. It is a constituency that Trump has created and could well remain decisive within the Republican world for a significant period.

It is extraordinary how all the way in she is with Trump was illustrated during an interview this morning with Savannah Guthrie on Today Show on NBC, when she was asked, "Did you think he (Trump) was a truthful person?"

"Yes," Haley said. "In every instance that I dealt with him, he was truthful, he listened, and he was great to work with."

That flies in the face of what the rest of the world has experienced relentlessly for at least three years now.

Notwithstanding that, Haley appears to have begun at least some exploration of her prospects for 2024. It is not my case at all that she would run but if she does want to run this is probably the most astute way to signal it. Ever since she was appointed the US Ambassador to the UN and even after she left she has carefully choreographed her working relationship the president given all his terrible flaws but on balance making her peace with them.

Self-serving? Unprincipled? You might ask. Sure, and flagrantly so. But we live in flagrantly unprincipled times.

A short reminiscence about T N Seshan

India’s former Chief Election Commissioner  (CEC) T.N. Seshan, who died yesterday at age 86, had what would in today’s parlance be described as swag. His brief rise as an icon of the middle class in the mid-1990s coincided with my nearly one decade in New Delhi as the South Asia chief correspondent of the then India Abroad News Service and India Abroad newsweekly.

About a year after I arrived in Delhi in 1989, Seshan was appointed the CEC. He quickly recognized the enormous importance of the body in the world’s largest democracy and got on with the task of enforcing unprecedented discipline on political parties and politicians who were until then used to cavalierly flouting election laws and norms. A strict adherence to the model code of conduct was Seshan’s mantra.

Although the body language and bearing of a CEC, for that matter any government functionary should hardly matter, in Seshan’s case he had a certain lumbering presence, made somewhat Hitchcockian because of his baldhead, that seemed to accentuate his reputation as a whip-cracking election boss.

I had my share of interactions with him. What struck me the most was that his body language suggested a man of fiery ambitions. It was no surprise that he once said he “ate politicians for breakfast” and saw himself as fit to be India’s president. Something tells me that had Seshan been a CEC in this era of social media he would have built up an enormous following with his often unfiltered pronouncements.

One of the recurring complaints about Seshan from politician at the receiving end of his wrath was that he was arrogant. Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha, herself no stranger to being called imperious, described him as “embodiment of arrogance.” I asked him if he was that, he struck a mock arrogant posture and said, “What do you think?”

Even as Cabinet Secretary under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the country’s top bureaucrat, or before that as Defence Secretary as well as Secretary (Security) Seshan left his mark with his crusty no non-sense style.

His lasting legacy would be the significant reform he brought in as the CEC and giving the body much-needed teeth and snarl, although some might argue that much of it has since eroded, particularly since 2014.

My one tangential connection with Seshan, apart from some direct interactions, came in by 1992 biography of Sam Pitroda. It was I who had called Pitroda on the night of May 21, 1991 with the news that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated. Pitroda in turn called Seshan who confirmed that in the early minutes of the macabre killing that Gandhi was apparently killed in an explosion.

I think India needs top government functionaries such as Seshan who often step out of the bounds of bureaucratic correctness and act in the larger interest of the country. If in the process they come across as excessively ambitious, so be it.