Mayank Chhaya Daily

Three tributes on Vincent van Gogh's 130th death anniversary

My 'Starry Night'

Today marks the 130^th death anniversary of Vincent van Gogh. Like all aspiring painters I too have done my own derivative versions of this great master’s works, as did he of those artists who inspired him.

Along with van Gogh, Edvard Munch and J M W Turner are other two masters whose works and influences creep in my paintings, whose number now touches over 200.

I would like to share three derivative works as a tribute to van Gogh who shot himself to death on this day in July of 1890 in his room at an inn in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. The only thing I have in common with van Gogh apart from persistent penury is that I too have not sold a single work of mine. There is a fundamental difference between my works not selling and his works not selling. His were too good for his time while mine are mostly bad for most time.

However, that has not stopped me from persisting with painting. So here are my three works in tribute to van Gogh (The first being my Starry Night above).

My Sunflowers of sorts

My Reaper

Interrupting a bumble bee's coitus--sort of--with a Jasmine

It is not important what kind of a bee it was—likely a bumble bee—but what is important is what it almost did to me.

This morning, as is my habit, I was taking some photographs in the glorious morning light. There is a climbing jasmine vine on my backyard deck that attracts an assortment of bees and butterflies in this season. The fragrance is intoxicating and if I were as small as one of those bee, I would probably do exactly the same thing to those flowers that the bees do.

I strongly suspect this particular bee in the photograph which was in the midst of extracting some nectar sense me take a photograph or at the very least just being around and felt threatened. It almost charged me before going away.

For a moment I though I had interrupted its coitus making it furious. Mercifully, it did not sting me.

The general silence on the plight of the Uighurs

The Uighurs, the Muslim minority in China’s Xinjiang province, are in the news for all the wrong and heartbreaking reasons. For one, they are in the midst of what the United Nations defines as genocide. Over a million and perhaps twice or thrice those many are essentially locked up in what Beijing charmingly calls re-education camps, which are in reality like concentration camps. Between ten and 20 percent of the total population of about 11 million Uighurs are in such camps experiencing daily systematic repression and oppression by the Chinese authorities, according to serious reporting persisting now for years.

I have written about the issue. While updating my information this morning it stuck me yet again that the distance between Xinjiang’s capital Ürümqi (Pronounced Oorum chi) and Islamabad is about 1680 kilometers or a 1000 miles. I mention Pakistan’s capital because here is an assertively Islamic republic and that too the only nuclear power within the Islamic world to boot, whose very founding in 1947 was claimed to be a haven for Muslims, doing absolutely nothing as fellow Muslims are being subjected to genocidal treatment by its benefactor China, benefactor being the key word. Prime Minister Imran Khan has maintained expedient silence over the issue, pretending to not even know about the issue in his country’s neighborhood.

It is astonishing that practically the entire Islamic world is silent on the issue even though it affects the one thing they otherwise get so worked up over—fellow Muslims.

India with its close to 200 million Muslims too has been strategically non-committal about the issue. It is ironic that America under the administration of a president famously antipathetic to Muslims is among the strongest to censure Beijing over its treatment of the Uighurs.

It is a measure of how the Uighur’s terrible plight is making an impression on America when John Oliver chronicles it on his HBO show ‘Last Week with John Oliver’ as he did yesterday.

The Chinese approach to Xinjiang as a territory and Muslims as a community is the same as it has had for Tibet and Tibetans. Sending the majority Han community to Xinjiang in large numbers to essentially muscle out the province’s distinct cultural traditions and language is one of many way that Beijing employs to advance its grip over the region apart from the terrible re-education camps. Quite craftily, if now unsuccessfully, Beijing has since 2009, when riots broke out in the province, tried to cast the Uighurs as terrorists simply because they are Muslims. That specious and cruel justification has long run its course because the Uighurs have begun to receive some notice internationally. Like I said if John Oliver features it as a full segment, it means something even though he is often the odd man out among his peers to pay attention to such serious global issues.

Just how intrusive the Chinese state is in the province that one gets the sense that there are more CCTV cameras than there are perhaps people (literary exaggeration.) As Oliver mentions there is a list 75 “behavioral indications” of religious extremism that the Chinese authorities employ to track like there.

From what I have been reading Beijing has given up all pretense of being proper or moral in its policing of the region. Beijing knows that the so-called champions of all things Islam and Muslims such as Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will always fall with the party line given the economic servitudes it has piled up around the world.

There is next to no chance that anything will change for the Uighurs no matter who speaks out.

Considering a career as a stand-up comedian

I have been considering a career change and move over to stand-up comedy. There is only one minor obstacle. That career requires both standing up and comedy of which I can manage one at a time. There is something about comedy that does not work as well if you are sitting and telling jokes. I can’t stand for more than three minutes which I am told is pretty long to be telling jokes that people actually laugh at. So that excuse will not work.

I do have a sense of humor which if you have to proclaim you don’t. However, there is more than anecdotal evidence on my Facebook timeline that people do laugh at observations or jokes I intended them to laugh at. And the sheer diversity of the backgrounds of those of who find some of my jokes or one-liners funny tells me that it is a microcosm of a bar or a club.

For instance, this morning I found that Twitter has #joke trending or so I thought. Apparently, you have to choose a profession or a subject and say you have a #joke about it and then tell it in a line or so. I told this one: I have a quantum physics #joke but I am uncertain where it is now. As of writing this blog four people had liked it and one had retweeted it. That means at the very least four people found it funny. That’s not a bad start for a new career. I posted the same joke on Facebook and five LOLed. That makes it nine disparate people on two social media platforms. It does seem promising.

I am aware that writing a joke is not the same as writing a set. I also know that a set is not just a series of standalone jokes strung together with a dental floss string I may have found it in my motel room although I know many comedians who seem to be doing just that. In a sense, it is like writing a ghazal where verses do not necessarily have to form a narrative arc. In fact, they are mostly stand-alones.

I think my age could be an advantage because now almost touching 60 it is possible that an audience may laugh out of compassion for the first few attempts. For instance, I have joke about turning 60. It goes like this. I am about to turn 60 which in dog years is 8.5 years which in my human age would be about six months away from the time my father died when I was nine. If you cannot decide whether to laugh or feel sad at that, then I think I have made my point.

I have a joke about babies which seems very cruel but is also very funny. Isn’t that the essence of comedy?

Perhaps, I should consider a comic routine as a fading print journalist who earns far less than what his integrity costs.

Sitting and marveling at parallel non-human sentient worlds

Sitting on my backyard deck for just five minutes afforded me such a quirky view of the non-human sentient world. I was particularly struck by the whimsical and jerky flights of sparrows and butterflies. It is clear that neither the sparrows nor the butterflies are required to file their flight plans. Their movements are so sudden and so much in defiance of the rules of aerodynamics.

It has been my old habit to step out and just look at the non-human sentient world and marvel at how so many parallel sentient worlds exist right next to us. For instance, every year around this time at the same few spots a bunch of mushrooms crop up. They grow into little umbrellas practically overnight. Sometimes I think if I watch long enough I could see them grow like time lapse photography; that’s how quickly they grow and then fade away.

In a parallel world barely a few feet away I saw sparrows in flight making such sudden and sharply angled U-turns that I felt dizzy just looking at them. Right next to them were butterflies on their own mind-numbing jerky flights. It would be fascinating to find out how they decide where to suddenly land and why. Also, how are they not crashing into anything while flying through bushes?

This is a different kind of mindfulness. It is amazing how quickly you recede from mundane human preoccupations. My problem is that I find it hard to return to my world and deal with my own existential exigencies mostly related to effing money.  

Like a fragrance that spreads, I diminish in distance

बिखरती खुश्बू सा हूँ

फ़ासले से लुप्त होता हूँ

फूल की पत्ती सा हूँ

ओस से ही तृप्त होता हूँ

--मयंक छाया

And its free translation:

Like a fragrance that spreads

I diminish in distance

Like flower petals

Sated by dew

--MC

Tibet and self-immolation

A book I am looking forward to reading is by journalist and writer Barbara Demick’s ‘Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town’, scheduled for release on July 28. From what I gather based on its reviews and other related material sounds both riveting and deeply troubling, particularly her profiles of Tibetans of Ngaba County, in the Chinese province of Sichuan, know for its macabre distinction as the hub of self-immolation.

According to a record maintained by the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) since 2009, there have been 156 acts of self-immolation, including 128 men and 28 women of whom 124 were known to have died. Consider these bare facts 26 of the Tibetans who self-immolated were 18 or under, 25 were monks, or former monks, at Kirti monastery in Ngaba, 2 were nuns from Mame Dechen Chokorling nunnery in Ngaba and 155 of the self-immolation have occurred since March 16, 2011.

I remember the last bit of statistic vividly because when I last interview the Dalai Lama in August, 2010, it was in the aftermath of the first self-immolation. I had asked him about it and his response was one of profound anguish and even helplessness. He said something to the effect that while as a Buddhist monk, he disapproved of self-immolation, he understood the agony that would have prompted the act.

Demick’s book is being described by The New York Times as “masterly” because in keeping with her reporting style as a journalist she brings a tight focus on specifics. Demic is Former Beijing bureau chief Los Angeles Times and author ‘Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea’ and ‘Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood’.

An accompanying description of the book says the following, and I do not mind quoting it in full:

“Just as she did with North Korea, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong’s Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation.

Eat the Buddha spans decades of modern Tibetan and Chinese history, as told through the private lives of Demick’s subjects, among them a princess whose family is wiped out during the Cultural Revolution, a young Tibetan nomad who becomes radicalized in the storied monastery of Kirti, an upwardly mobile entrepreneur who falls in love with a Chinese woman, a poet and intellectual who risks everything to voice his resistance, and a Tibetan schoolgirl forced to choose at an early age between her family and the elusive lure of Chinese money. All of them face the same dilemma: Do they resist the Chinese, or do they join them? Do they adhere to Buddhist teachings of compassion and nonviolence, or do they fight?

Illuminating a culture that has long been romanticized by Westerners as deeply spiritual and peaceful, Demick reveals what it is really like to be a Tibetan in the twenty-first century, trying to preserve one’s culture, faith, and language against the depredations of a seemingly unstoppable, technologically all-seeing superpower. Her depiction is nuanced, unvarnished, and at times shocking.”

I had also discussed self-immolation as the ultimate form of protest with some ordinary Tibetans in exile in McLeod Ganj and a wide consensus seemed to be along the lines of the view that the Dalai Lama expressed. They all said they understood the utter desperation of those who took the step even while respecting the Buddhist philosophy of non-violence to others.

Map graphic courtesy: International Campaign for Tibet

 

Dravyasat, Prajnaptisat, and other such esoteric ideas

The esoteric beckons this morning. As a matter of fact, I have been lost in it since last evening; specifically, in Nagarjuna and his philosophy of Madhyamika or middle way revolving around the concept of Shunyta or emptiness.  Some of you may know that Nagarjuna, whose era is said to be between Circa 150 CE and 250 CE, is considered as the most important Buddhist philosopher after the historical Buddha himself. He is, as the Dalai Lama told me once, considered the second Buddha.

From concepts such as Dravyasat, primary existents and Prajnaptisat, secondary existents, to Svabhava or inherent nature or intrinsic existence or essence or substance and its relationship with Shunyta oir emptiness I have been lost in something rather extraordinary. To think that there was a figure about 18 centuries ago who was cogitating on such profound ideas is in itself awe inspiring, let alone trying to get a handle on their meanings. Having read such literature for a long time I have a reasonable understanding what Nagarjuna is about.

An object has its intrinsic nature, Svabhava, bereft of which its own existence ceases. Then there is the question of an object is what it is in an ontological or metaphysical sense and in a cognitive sense, or the way we perceive it. In this context one must mention the idea of Dravyasat, primary existents, and Prajnaptisat, secondary existents, because the former is the world or the universe as it is and the latter the way we conceive of it.

If you feel, these are ideas that border on quantum physics, you would be right. I have written quite extensively about that as well. For instance, the Buddhist idea of Kshanika or momentary. I have also written about that.

I concede that such ideas are not for everyone but I still feel it is necessary to point out that at a time in India when semi-literate fools of a certain political persuasion confuse being opinionated as being knowledgeable it is remarkable that they have no clue about the existence of such discourses over two and a half millennia ago starting from the time of the Buddha and even earlier. When such people assert the greatness of Indian civilization it is what they hear a trillionth hand from frothing right-wing TV talking heads with PhDs from the University of WhatsApp. I have generally not engaged with this crowd because it is futile since they are on an altogether different frequency. But then we live in an era everywhere where having an opinion is the same as possessing knowledge. Many such people have become presidents and prime ministers.

Is Jim Carrey real or apocryphal?

There are few figures who become apocryphal in their own lifetime. Reading actor and painter Jim Carrey’s ‘Memoirs and Misinformation: A Novel’ with co-author Dana Vachon that feeling gets reinforced.

To be accurate I am reading some free excerpts from the book on Amazon. Who has $14.99 to buy even a Kindle edition these days? If I did, I would consider buying some groceries.

Anyway, reading those excerpts my instant sense has been that I have been given a day’s free pass to Jim Carrey’s labyrinthine brain in whose folds I have lost my way. There is so much going on so quickly that only Jim Carrey could have written that with, of course, a fellow author who perhaps shares his intellectual ferment.

In about 40 or so lines I read of the Prologue I went through Jim Carrey—yes there is Jim Carrey in Jim Carrey’s novel- Pompeii, F-16, Virgin Mary, Netflix, TMZ, Variety, Neanderthals, Charlie Kaufman, Nicholas Cage and some guru named Viswanathan.

Coming back to Carrey coming across as an apocryphal figure in his real lifetime, as you read some more you realize the lines blurring even more quickly.

I am not sure if I will read the whole novel since after reading extensively for close to 40 years, I am going a bit slow these days. Plus there is the problem of spending money to be able to read the whole thing. Who has the money? I don’t.

I am glad Jim Carrey continues to expand his intellectual horizon.

Monsieur Monet, veuillez peindre ceci

I am an admirer of sensory overload when it comes to painting and some aspects of Hindi movie songs.

In fact, I have frequently wondered about how Claude Monet might have painted visuals depicting romantic songs from the Hindi cinema of the 1960s. They were invariably full of stunning floral diversity and colors that would have lent themselves perfectly to Monet’s extraordinary eye for fleeting colorful light. I wrote a post about this theme three years ago.

This morning while watching the song ‘Sare Zamane Pe Mausam Suhane Pe’ from the 1971 movie ‘Aap Aaye Bahar Aayi’ featuring Rajendra Kumar and Sadhana I was yet again captivated by its visual sensory overload. It culminates into this particular frame. (See the picture above.)

Right from the colors Rajendra Kumar’s shirt and his neckerchief to Sadhana’s neon pink embroidered dress as well as her bow mixed with the stunningly diverse flowers on the boat (I suspect many of them could be artificial but it is equally possible that they are real) together create such a captivating sight. If I had any paint left, I would have painted this frame right now.

The clothes that the two are wearing seem the kind that would work only in Hindi movies and on screen. In real life, they might cause so much refraction that you might go insane.

If you too stock in a monochromatic life, I suggest you watch this song right now.