Mayank Chhaya Daily

Somewhat personal reminiscence of P V Narsimha Rao on his 99th birth anniversary

Today marks the 99^th birth anniversary of India’s late pioneering reformist Prime Minister P V Narsimha Rao, with whose five-year tenure about half of my posting in New Delhi as a journalist coincided. During that posting I met him many times.

Right until May 20, 1991 Narasimha Rao was in a full retirement mode having led a rich and fulfilling public life since 1957 and about to be 70 he thought it was as good a time as any to retire from active politics. It was a measure of how serious he was that even his books, which he called “most prized possession” during one of his many interactions with me, were packed and ready to be sent to Hyderabad.

Then 24 hours later everything changed in such a violent and definitive way that fundamentally transformed a man in a retiring mode into a man of history literally overnight. Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber. Rao, who was in Nagpur then, had to cut short his visit to return to Delhi.

It fell on Rajiv Gandhi’s wife Sonia to decide who might lead the Congress Party with her husband gone. The first name to be suggested was that of former Vice President Shankar Dayal Sharma, who demurred on the grounds of his age and health. The next name to be considered was that of Narasimha Rao.

Instead of retiring not only did Rao return to Delhi but went on to stay there for at least the next five years…as India’s 9th prime minister. “It was a case of life giving you what to you least expect,” Rao told me in one of his interviews.

Since the most defining legacy of Rao as the prime minister and Dr. Manmohan Singh as his handpicked finance minister is India's economy it is important to point out the circumstances in which the former rose to the country’s top office. In the immediate aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination India’s internal security was not the only question Rao confronted—and it was indeed an existential question—but even an equally important economic one.

In early 1991, I happened to have been told a very high finance ministry official, whose name I have chosen not to reveal after these many years, that India’s foreign exchange reserve was so bad at that point between January and June 1991 that it faced defaulting on its external balance of payment within weeks. With the country plunged in a deep crisis because of the Gandhi assassination anyone who came in as prime minister had a harrowing task laid out.

In January 1991, the foreign exchange reserves stood at $ 1.2 billion and by June when Rao took over as prime minister it was halved. In foreign exchange terms India’s was pauperized. Just for your comparison, industrial tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s high-rise home alone reputedly cost a billion dollars. That kind of skewed wealth creation was also one of the consequences of the fundamental policy alteration that Rao had to make right off the bat. He took over on June 21, 1991 and the very next day among the top ministers to be sworn in was Dr. Singh as the finance minister.

India had to to secure an emergency loan of $2.2 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by pledging 67 tons of the country’s gold reserves as collateral. The Reserve Bank of India airlifted 47 tons of gold to the Bank of England and 20 tons of gold to the Union Bank of Switzerland to raise USD 600 million. It was that desperate. If the country were a 1950s Hindi movie, there would be a scene where a character actor such as Nana Palsikar or Nasir Hussain takes off his turban and puts it on the floor as an act of abject supplication and says, “मैं घर का सोना गिरवी रखता हूँ. मेरी पगड़ी मत उछालो. (I am pledging my family gold. Don't humiliate me.)

Rao told Dr. Singh what he later told my colleague Tarun Basu, whom he knew well, and I. The message to Dr Singh was, “Give me a bold budget and I will take care of the political backlash.” The most intense backlash, ironically, came from his own Congress Party plus some entrenched business interests such as individual businessmen such as Dhirubhai Ambani and others  and chambers of commerce who had made a lot of money from India’s severely license-controlled economy.

Interestingly, years before, in 1984 to be precise, just as Rajiv Gandhi had risen to be India’s prime minister, Dhirubhai had answered that very question from me saying, “Mayankbhai, I work with the economic regime that is given to me by our politicians. Open up the economy and I will compete openly.”

The rest is history as Rao using Dr. Singh as his ramrod went on to dismantle the notorious regulations, a legacy of decades of the Soviet style commanding heights of economy. To be fair, those policies were essential at the beginning of India’s life as a new nation-state plundered for nearly two centuries by the English colonial predators.

For a long time, Prime Minister Rao did not get the credit for transforming India’s economy albeit necessitated by a set of dire circumstances. Nearly three decades later and on his 99^th birth anniversary (he died on December 23, 2004) things have changed. He is now widely seen as the progenitor of the economic reform and liberalization in India.

Famously polyglot he reputedly spoke 17 languages which may be an overstatement but apart from his mother tongue Telugu he had varying command over Marathi, Hindi, Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu, English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German and Persian. I am certain he was proficient in many of those, including Spanish.

He told Tarun and I that he insisted on reading the Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s "Love in the Time of Cholera," in its original Spanish. “It reads way better in Spanish than it’s translation.” He told us. Rao wrote fiction in the Hindi, Marathi and Telugu languages.

He also wrote a novel in English called ‘The Insider’ whose synopsis reads: “The Insider is an account of the political scenario of India during the time of the former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who is the author of the book. The novel is based on a fictional state called Afrozabad, which is modelled on the actual state of Hyderabad.

In the story, the author talks about the shocking but true political happenings in the country that he witnessed during his tenure. The plot centers around a character called Anand, a young man who gives up a lucrative career in the hopes of bringing about political reformation. He begins his political career by contesting against the oppressive ruling party. Next, he reaches a spot where he has to choose between the current Chief Minister and his rival. His rival soon wins the post of CM, and he is made to serve under him. Anand then moves to Delhi, at a time when Indira Gandhi takes over the reigns of power. Under her governance, the tables turn, for Anand now replaces his rival Chaudhary and becomes the Chief Minister of Afrozabad. He then has to run the political show under her regime.

The book discusses the state of events and the political scenario in India under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, delving into areas like her rise to power, second coming, assassination, followed by her son Rajiv Gandhi’s entry into the world of politics. The Insider reveals to the reader the state of affairs in a political scenario, narrated by a man who has had first-hand experience of it all.”

Some observations about John Bolton's moral calisthenics

The one question that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has been aggressively and even disdainfully asked—by the way, rightly so—is why it is that he was willing to say for two million dollars (his supposed book advance) things about President Donald Trump that he refused to say in a Congressional testimony.

The answer is quite simple and the one I wish he had the integrity to give candidly. “Between the options whether I should make two million dollars and help my family and I secure our financial future or testify for no money and help history even if not the impeachment vote itself, I chose the former,” is what he could have said or a version of that in his own language.

There is no great mystery here as far as I can see. Like many who entered the Trump ecology, Bolton too appears to have chosen to help himself first over helping the country in the hope that by helping themselves they may eventually help the country. That is a self-serving approach but purely at a selfish survivalist level it is understandable.

Here is a man who had a direct view of the seedy and perhaps even, for America, dangerously counterproductive workings for 17 months. He also had considerable influence to change the course of many events and yet he did not do that. However, he says he tried many times to do precisely that but without much success. Bolton’s book ‘The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir’ levels accusations at the president, even a single one of which would/could/should have undone any other presidency but they did not. In fact, no one should be surprised if he wins a second term despite his rival former Vice President Joe Biden’s 14-point lead over Trump in a New York Times/Siena College.

It is instructive that despite all that he himself insists went down in the White House, including the sickening coddling of China’s President Xi Jinping by the US president, Bolton still says he will not vote for Biden because of his own conservative principles and values. So let me get this straight. Those conservative values and principles did not stand in his way for 17 months even as he allowed this Trump ecology to conserve and then even profit off it but voting for Biden undermines them. That’s neat is all I can say.

For many Republicans Trump is the ultimate means justifies the end vehicle on which they have hitched a ride for the past three years and more and may not mind continuing that for another four years. In an interview with Bill Maher on his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, Bolton says with a straight face that he would like the Republicans to retain control of the Senate in order that a prospective Biden presidency has some check on it. This is so rich in its expediency and in being devoid of any rectitude that one does not even know where to begin dismantling it. Here is a man who has written a 500 plus pages castigating a president whom he calls incompetent and unfit for the office who is aided and abetted by the very Republican senate that he wants to act as a check on a possible Biden presidency.

Process that over the weekend.

Preparation H1B

We might as well call it Preparation H1B. That’s how Indian technology professionals are feeling now.

The way these work visas, which go to Indian tech professionals in a vast majority year after year, have been temporarily suspended by President Donald Trump.

Just to quickly put the numbers in perspective how Indian professionals benefit from these, out of 85,000 H1B issued last year about 20,000 were for those who have advanced degrees. Of the remaining 65,000 some 70% or about 45,000 issued to Indian tech professionals.

In terms of L1 visas, which allows companies to transfer executives to America, of the 77,000 issued last year about 18000 went to Indians.

In terms of green cards, there are a million people waiting as of now, of which 70% are said to be Indians. That number is expected to swell to 2.5 million of which about 70% are expected to be Indians.

In short, anything that happens in immigration or work visas in America have an inordinate impact on Indians.

When Trump was slobbered over in Ahmedabad, my hometown, courtesy of his sanguinely enthusiastic friend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his state visit on February 24 and 25, it was hardly anticipated that barely four months later he would suspend the visas still so coveted in India.

While all countries must have visa regimes that work for them, in the case of the H1B visas, they have not only worked wonderfully for america for decades but created quantifiable wealth, contribution to the economy and pumped in real hard cash by the billions into the national exchequer.

The COVID 19 pandemic has led to more than 40 million people out of their jobs. The notion that not allowing 65,000 job seekers from outside America would significantly dent the mounting joblessness is so manifestly untrue. Do consider the fact that, and this is according to The New York Times,  poor Americans are the hardest hit by the unemployment crisis. “Fully 39 percent of former workers living in a household earning $40,000 or less lost work, compared with 13 percent in those making more than $100,000,’ the Times quoted a Fed official in a story by Jeanna Smialek on May 20.

It is possible that tech workers on H1B, especially those coming from India do indeed eat away jobs for Americans but that number is not so high as to constitute the kind crisis that the presidential executive order makes it out to be. Any job lost is tragic and harrowing for families. I am uniquely qualified to say this not having had a salaried job for over a decade now. Some of it could be my incompetence but there are other factors as well. I have been routinely disregarded for journalistic and related positions that should have come to me blindly.

The point is numbers here do not add up when we lay the blame for joblessness to any significant degree on the H1B visas. Like I conceded the visa holders do take away some jobs from local Americans but even there the situation is how you assess employability.

To me this temporary suspension of H1B is nothing more than political grandstanding in a presidential election season.

No headline required

Uday--MC

Galwan, Google Earth and a fraught view

The Galwan River Valley, Google Earth view

If you want to understand the recent violent India-China confrontation in the Galwan River Valley along the line of actual control between the two Asian giants, I suggest you do not use Google Earth but also use it. This may seem an absurd and dichotomous suggestion to make because it is inherently contradictory to the extent that it cancels itself out.

Let me explain. If you must use Google Earth, you have to be ready to be disoriented by the sheer scale of what you are looking at as a satellite view of the region. The view is so austere and impersonal that it removes you completely from the real human pain felt by the 20 or more Indian soldiers who died after a hand-to-hand combat with Chinese soldiers in an area that from this elevation makes no sense to fight over.

Consider this simple fact. Even the slightest movement of your cursor takes you up and down by several thousand feet and across by several hundred kilometers. Dropping from an elevation of 20,000 plus feet to the level of the valley at about 13,000 feet is a question of virtually no time. Zooming in close to what looks like some Indian settlement along the riverbed dated 8/1/2016 may feel like a simulation but was in fact real at the time it was captured. I am not sure if it is still there.

The overall effect of navigating this troubled area using Google Earth is to create a cruel distance between what may have happened on the ground during the recent bloody standoff between the soldiers of the two countries. The Google Earth view gives you no sense of the sheer physical pain and suffering of the 20 or more soldiers who died in a hand-to-hand combat with the Chinese or the lifelong emotional pain of their families.

The overall point I am trying to make is that Google Earth view has the potential to desensitize you the way some of the operators of drones armed with Hellfire missiles have complained. As technology goes, Google Earth is a crowning achievement for the human race but it like all high technologies it also has a potentially destructive side to it.

Ever since the India-China standoff began over the Galwan River Valley I have been visiting it using Google Earth. Even though the images are quite dated, they do continue to accurately represent the terrain and that is where my second point becomes relevant. The fact that you can go up and down several thousand feet on hostile Himalayan mountains or traverse several hundreds kilometers by a very slight cursor movement is useful in helping you keep Earth and our position on it in perspective. For someone acutely philosophically-minded as I am and even clinical this tool is a gift.

I was thinking how everything we have been and become since the rise of modern humans some 200,000 years ago so quickly vanishes into indistinguishable terrain even at an elevation of 20,000 feet or so. You are struck by the utter futility of nation-states’ quest to grab, expand and control territories. The satellite view of Earth so thoroughly disengages you from the real human emotions so quickly that one ends up wondering whether anything is real at all.

What was real visceral pain for the Indian soldiers who died and were wounded on the ground so quickly seems unfeelingly remote on a Google Earth view that it takes some readjusting to get back on the ground. I toggled between a view from 10 miles and one in the valley next to the settlements at 13,000 plus feet and felt upended by how so very different they are.

Of Google searches and personal data as a currency

I have never understood why people did not and still do not realize that Google searches are not free at all. You and I and billions of other suckers pay Google in personal data which as we now know can be far more precious and reusable in many different avatars again and again.

I was thinking about this while reading a piece in the New York Times about Sridhar Ramaswamy who used to head Google’s giant $115 billion ad business and left disillusioned at the way the company’s business methods. As Daisuke Wakabayashi reports, Ramaswamy has started a new search engine called Neeva which will depend on people paying to use it rather than what Google does, giving it to you free but laced with ads and manipulated search order that let them make billions of dollars off us.

The reason why we do not see paying by the currency called personal data is because it does not seemingly affect our bank balance. What we forget is that it directly raids our life balance. The fact that even our emails are mined for targeted ads speaks to that. Every time I send a groveling message to one of my creditors, I am sure to get junk email offering predatory loans. That can happen only because Google has read my pathetic entreaties and passed on my life’s vagaries to predators. It is that simple.

I am as guilty as anyone else for inordinate dependence on Google search but what is one to do when it controls 90% of all searches? Am I supposed to use—and don’t laugh—Bing, which would be as predatory given a quarter of a chance?

In my particular case, targeted ads have zero impact since a) I don’t buy anything because b) I have no money to buy anything. Why else would I be sending those abjectly supplicatory emails to my creditors which Google reads in the first place and target ads of predatory lenders?

I commend Ramaswamy for finding the light but I would still like to ask him why it took him so long? Isn’t it a bit self-serving to now say that after building a $115 billion business for Google during his 15 years at the tech giant?

In his defense, as the Times story raises that very question he answers thus: “The core idea that you have to help revenue grow and that was important to the company’s success were not things you questioned. I’m not defending this. I was very much a part of this,” he said.

So how will his subscription-based service be different from Google which extracts its pound of flesh of your personal data? I am not sure if it is any significantly different other than personal data can be used many, many times over in many forms for a long time. And that is a significant difference, I suppose.

As for me, Google please feel to inundate me with your crappy targeted ads. It is my stellar record that I have not purchased a single item ever swayed by your targeted ad. And no, it is not because I have no money to buy it (Even this bit of information will be saved and mined by Google) but because I am not a sucker for ads.

A return to the story Tahawwur Hussain Rana in Mumbai terror attacks case

Eleven years after US prosecutors first claimed in a court memorandum that Dr. Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Canadian of Pakistani origin resident in Chicago, had prior knowledge of the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, he has been rearrested on an extradition request from India.

Ironically for the 59-year-old Rana the re-arrest came in Los Angeles on June 10 after he was released early from his 14-year-long sentence on compassionate grounds after he said he had tested positive for the COVID 19 virus.

Assistant US Attorney John J Lulejian told a California court that the Indian government has under the bilateral Extradition Treaty of 1997 requested the arrest and detention of Tahawwur Rana with a view to extraditing him.

Lulejian said India has informed the US that Tahawwur Rana is being prosecuted for a number of offences, including the conspiracy to commit murder. He made an initial court appearance on June 11.

Yesterday, US District Judge Jacqueline Chooljian in the US District Court, Central District of California, scheduled his bond hearing for June 30. His attorney has been asked to submit his plea by June 22 and the US government's response is due by June 26.

Lulejian said that the offences for which Tahawwur Rana's arrest warrant was issued are covered by the India-US Extradition Treaty.

An arrest warrant was issued against Tahawwur Rana in India by a special court of the National Investigation Agency in August 2018.

This is quite a turn of events for a man who escaped being convicted of involvement in the Mumbai attacks despite his childhood friendship and help to David Coleman Headley, one of the main plotters of the ghastly attacks, who also lived in Chicago for a period of time. Headley is serving a 35-year sentence currently.

I had extensively reported the Headley-Rana trial out of Chicago in 2009. It is remarkable that in a memorandum filed in the court of U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber, the then high profile United States Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald had said that terror conspiracy suspect Rana remain detained pending trial because he had advance knowledge of the November, 26, 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Prosecutors said Rana knew of the impending attacks days before they took place during a visit to Dubai where he was allegedly told about them by a retired Pakistani military officer named Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed.

Rana was also alleged to have even congratulated the perpetrators of the attacks.

That was for the first time that Rana, a Canadian of Pakistani origin resident in Chicago, the Mumbai attacks had been mentioned in the complaint against him. Until then he  been detained for his alleged role in plotting a revenge attack a Danish newspaper cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Mohammad as a terrorist.

But with the new memorandum the prosecution had then claimed that "Rana was told of the attacks before they happened and offered compliments and congratulations to those who carried them out afterwards."

Eventually, Rana was convicted for conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist plot in Denmark and providing material support to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a terrorist organization operating in Pakistan that was responsible for the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India. The defendant, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, was convicted of the charges on June 9, 2011, following a three-week trial in U.S. District Court in Chicago.

It would be interesting to see how India and US prosecutors now manage to relitigate the accusations, originally asserted by the then US Attorney Fitzgerald, of Rana’s alleged involvement in the Mumbai terror attack planning.

For me Rana’s re-arrest brings back vivid memories of reporting a story I had invested a great deal of time in. I am intrigued how trying him all over again for his supposed involvement in the behind-the-scenes operation of the Mumbai attacks via his childhood friend Headley. It is not clear whether India has presented any new evidence to compel his extradition in connection with the Mumbai attacks specifically because New Delhi has no say in his conviction and now finished sentencing for the Danish newspaper cartoonist case. That had nothing to do with India.

Essentially, Rana faces a slew of fresh charges as far as I can tell or fresh iteration of what US Attorney Fitzgerald had then maintained in his second memorandum.

I remain deeply skeptical if New Delhi will manage to win Rana's extradition. 

As the Rana case reopens I am reminded of two posts on December 14 and 15m 2009 I had written at the time. They bear repeating today.

December 14, 2009

During his last bond hearing Rana's attorney Patrick Blegen had invoked Pakistan's poet laureate Allama Iqbal to establish the "non-violent and decent" character of his client.

Blegen had presented three character witnesses, one of whom said Rana was a member of the Iqbal Society. The defense argued that the portrayal of Rana being a violent man was inconsistent with his interest in the poet's message of peaceful and legal transformation of society.

For reasons, which are not entirely clear, the latest memorandum, while mentioning the Iqbal Society mentioned Gandhi's name three times. The defense attorney had specifically raised Rana's interest in Iqbal's message and Gandhi was mentioned only incidentally. Iqbal was among the earliest proponents of a separate Pakistan for Muslims in 1930.

"In seeking a bond, defendant Rana has argued that he believes in nonviolence, citing his membership in the Iqbal society. Rana has even gone so far as to claim to this Court that his beliefs are akin to those of Gandhi. He also claims to have been a "dupe" of Headley. Ironically, in invoking the name of a man who embodied the principles of non-violence and speaking the truth, Rana seeks to mislead this Court as to the extent of his admiration and support for mass murderers," ht memorandum said.

It has also been alleged that during the course of Rana's conversations with David Coleman Headley, who has been directly named in the Mumbai attacks on 12 counts, the two men discussed "Somnath (a temple in India), Denmark, Bollywood (a reference to the Indian film industry) and Shiv Sena (a political party in India with roots in Hindu nationalism)."

"In his post-arrest statement, Rana falsely claimed that these were references to potential business ventures. It is difficult to imagine why a person who praises the work of a designated terrorist group that attacks India would look at an Indian temple or a Hindu nationalist party as a business venture. And it bears note that, as set out in the complaint, "business" and "investments" were code words used by Headley, Rana, "Pasha" and others to describe terrorist plots," the memorandum said. Incidentally, "Pasha", according to the memorandum, is Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed, whom the government has charged in a separate complaint for his involvement in the conspiracy to attack the Danish newspaper.

December 15, 2009

Tahawwur Hussain Rana is no Mahatma Gandhi. Not that one can be confused with the other but in the interest of historical accuracy it is good to bear this truism in mind.

It is not my station to point out confusion in the argument advanced by U.S. prosecutors in the case involving terror suspect Rana. However, I will do it anyway. The memo filed by the prosecutors yesterday mentions Gandhi three times, primarily to assert that any suggestion that Rana believes in the principle of non-violence is untrue on the face of it.

"Far from advocating non-violence, Rana's own statements reveal his support for the brutal killing of 170 people. Rana was told of the attacks before they happened and offered compliments and congratulations to those who carried them out afterwards. Even if one were to credit Rana's false post-arrest claim that his compliments directed to "one of the main planners" for LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) – a designated terrorist organization – only related to attacks in Kashmir it is quite clear that Rana is no Gandhi," the memo says.

It is a fair, solid point raised by the prosecutors. However, there is a slight problem with it. The main thrust of the argument offered by Rana's attorney Patrick Blegen during his last bond hearing on December 2 was about his client's membership of the Iqbal Society. Iqbal, as some of you might know is the poet-laureate of Pakistan and one of the earliest proponents of a separate country for Muslims to be carved out of a united India in as early as 1930. I distinctly remember that one of three character witnesses presented by Blegen spoke in some detail about the Iqbal Society and Rana's membership of that. The overarching point of the defense was that someone who followed Iqbal's message of a peaceful and legal transformation of the Muslim society could not have been part of a violent plot.

Gandhi was mentioned by Blegen merely to assert that it would be inconsistent for the leader's adherents to be violent. For some reason the prosecution's memo speaks more of Gandhi than Iqbal. I asked the U.S. Attorney's office to clarify but their response was "Comparisons were made to Gandhi during the hearing."

I am conscious that in the annals of global jurisprudence and even the Rana case this is a laughable triviality that I seem to be fixated on. Can you really blame me? I have to produce this blog every morning.

Not quite a Bolt-on from the blue

We have had to long redefine what constitutes a damning conduct in public life during the Trump era. Everything feels like cavalier, up-yours transgression and yet nothing seems to eventually work. Now comes an even more damning insider account from a man who had a direct personal view of what can only be described as skulduggery. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s already fraught memoir ‘The Room Where It Happened’ reveals so many utterly damning details about President Donald Trump’s conduct that one cannot but wonder whether any of that makes any difference any more other than perhaps turning the presidential election against him.

From allegedly offering to do personal favors to dictators around the world by halting criminal investigations against them to brazenly asking China’s President Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 election, it seems nothing was off limits. Excerpts in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times reveal such a wide range of alleged transgression as witnessed by Bolton that one is forced to wonder if there is anything more left.

With Xi, it is alleged, the attempt by Trump was to plead that China buy more agricultural products thereby help swing the outcome in his favor. While on Xi, Bolton also reportedly suggests that in order to keep the Chinese leader on his side, Trump was also willing to overlook human rights concerns, including not standing in the way of him continuing to build concentration camps for China’s Muslim Uighur population.

Just one of these specifically or so many others would have long undone any president or presidential aspirant. But not this one, it seems.

As stunning as Bolton’s revelations are, I am not holding my breath for them to be of any serious consequence for President Trump because it appears as if life has offered him a shield that has so far withstood many potentially terminal attacks. The November election could well change that but given the way people have so willingly chosen to mortgage their innate individual intelligence in favor of tribal viciousness I am not sure at all.

To Sushant Singh Rajput

Sushant Singh Rajput from his Twitter feed, January 21, 1986--June 14, 2020

I did not know the actor Sushant Singh Rajput at all but what I knew a little bit about him was his abiding passion for physics. There are other actors who may be interested in physics—Kay Kay Menon is a prominent name in that—but Sushant Singh was particularly into it as well as astronomy. In fact, his career choice was to be an astronaut.

He was a winner of a Physics Olympiad and could have pursued a career in engineering having cleared several entrance exams. He wrote in the Hindustan Times in 2017 that he had a scholarship offer for the Stanford University. I don’t know what precisely that means but the point is he could have been headed in the more serious direction but instead he chose a career in stage and the movies.

I have an affinity for those who are into or drawn to physics, a subject I have pursued all my life from early teens. I remember having tweeted to Rajput a couple of times about some physics-related themes. I got no response, of course.

The police have been quoted as having ruled Rajput’s death today by hanging as suicide. If that is indeed the case, we do not know what might have triggered the extreme step for a young actor—he was 34—who seemed to have everything going for him. His talents were already in great evidence from the get-go. He had what it took to become a major force in India’s movie industry. In everything project he did, be it his debut movie ‘Kai Po Chhe’ set in my hometown of Ahmedabad, or 'M S Dhoni: The Untold Story', 'Sonchiriya', 'Kedarnath', 'Shuddh Desi Romance', 'Chichore' or most of his 25 IMDB credits Rajput always acquitted himself with great success. Clearly, he had so much more in front of him.

On hearing the news of his death, irrespective of the cause, the first thought that came to my mind was this remarkable quote from the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg’s remarkable 1977 book ‘The First Three Minutes’ about the first three minutes of the universe. I read it in 1979 and remember this quote verbatim.

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce,  and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

It is quite possible that Rajput knew of this quote or at least the book. Here is to him.

Really, Anna Wintour? This late in the game?

Anna Wintour--MC

Vogue’s eternal boss Anna Wintour is 70-years-old, an age by which I presume most people have known, comprehended, dealt with, resolved or even chosen to consciously ignore life’s many horrible socio-cultural problems. One of those problems would be systemic racism and discrimination in an empire she has been lording over for a while.

Quite apart from never really understanding Wintour’s mystique I don’t understand that it is only now she has come to deal with Vogue’s terrible diversity record as well as some less than racially insensitive management styles, if not altogether racism. It is not for me to hold forth whether all the career-long strutting about she has done is actually grounded in some real journalistic talent.

The Guardian’s Edward Helmore reports today that the extraordinary reckoning with racism across America in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by the police, the Condé Nast publishing empire generally and Vogue particularly are in for a very rough time.

Just as in the face of the 1917 Russian revolution it was said that “the private life is dead”, as memorably shown in Dr. Zhivago, in the aftermath of the coronavirus the kind of exalted private life that Wintour is so accustomed to leading, fueled by her sway over the fashion industry may be in serious trouble if not dead altogether. The fashion industry itself could be in great jeopardy unless you consider designer masks as its ticket out of this doom.

The Guardian reports this morning, “On Thursday, Wintour attempted to quell the tide of protest when she admitted to making mistakes and publishing material that has been intolerant, as well as not doing enough to promote black staff and designers at the magazine. Wintour apologized to staff for “publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant” and admitted there were too few employees of color.

“I want to say plainly that I know Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators. We have made mistakes too, publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes.”

Really? It has taken Wintour this long to look beyond her own nose to recognize and acknowledge and want to do something about the intolerance and discrimination against “black staff and designers”? This is so self-serving in the cheapest possible way. Now that she is getting it on her shin, she is scrambling to take full responsibility.

The reason I did the inelegant thing of mentioning a woman’s age at the start of the piece is to make a point about the fact that Wintour has been at the helm of Vogue since 1988, when she was 39. Even that was a mature enough age to recognize systemic problems and begin to address them. To wait for over three decades and that too for a whole country explode into ferment to come to terms with “those mistakes” is so manifestly self-serving that I do not even know how else to put it.

I am glad I got a chance to write this post so that I could use a painting of hers that I had done a while ago.