Mayank Chhaya Daily

A brief video tribute to Maithili Sharan Gupt

 

Here's to #MaithiliSharanGupt on his 134th birth anniversary today. This was a tribute to him I broadcast on Suhani Subah today @fm_bharat. pic.twitter.com/uSc8Em5no0

— Mayank Chhaya, Journalist, Writer, Poet, Painter (@MayankChhaya) August 3, 2020

It is heartening for me to note that this very brief tribute of mine to the great Hindi poet Maithili Sharan Gupt on his 134th birth anniversary on August 3 has become perhaps my most watched video on Twitter. That is by my low standards but nevertheless the fact that there are 520 views as of posting this, it is clear that people appreciate substance. 

Some quick historic rumination over Ayodhya groundbreaking

After watching the telecast of the groundbreaking for a Ram temple in Ayodhya this morning, I can choose to write a great deal about it from the political standpoint since I reported on the whole Ram Janmbhoomi movement quite extensively. That reporting culminated into an extraordinary interview with Atal Behari Vajpayee on December 9, 1992, three days after the demolition of the Babri Masjid that he gave Tarun Basu and I. It was an interview that practically split the party down the middle.

Instead of writing about all that, I am more interested in how seemingly unconnected historical events spread over centuries come to shape and reshape our civilization. For instance, when Babur ordered the construction of the particular mosque in Ayodhya in 1528-1529 under the supervision of Mir Baqi, who would have thought then nearly five centuries later an aggressive political movement against it fundamentally reorder India’s politics and polity amid a great deal of bloodletting. What if there were no Babur and therefore no Babri Masjid, would we still have figures such as Lal Krishna Advani or Narendra Modi? I know these are what if questions which have no real answers.

Incidentally, the Ayodhya mosque was one of the three that Babur ordered to be built, the other two being in Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh and Panipat in Haryana.

Just to digress a bit, when the Babri Masjid was completed Tulsidas was barely 17 and had not yet written Ramcharitmanas, the seminal book about the journey of Ram’s life. Verses from Ramcharitmanas were recited by the speakers at the groundbreaking, including Prime Minister Modi.

I am fascinated by such convergences over centuries and often even millennia.

In another speculative detour, would Mir Baqi ever have thought that the building he was creating, in an architectural style that defined the Lodi dynasty before the Mughals, would be at the heart of so radically altering the country’s cultural and political life all these centuries later? Of course not because that is not how life works.

From that standpoint I do wonder how what happened in Ayodhya today amid promises of building a grand temple and thereby restoring the country’s civilizational pride and self-assurance (not my take but a sum-up of what was spoken there) might play out five centuries later, say in 2520. It is more than likely that some version of the human civilization will still be there.

More often than not, I have felt that the universe has already unfolded a long time ago and vanished and we are merely catching up with it now. We too are our own past. There appears to be an ever so subtle time lag between what I sense I am now and what I already have been.

On a separate and trivial note, it was instructive that purely going by a quick visual assessment there were so many more men among the special 175 invitees at the groundbreaking than women. It would be fair to assume that many of them were either lifelong bachelors or those who may have married but quickly chosen the life of one.

I can easily write a very well-informed political analysis of what happened but it has always been my habit to look at everything in cosmic terms. From that angle, what happened today alters nothing in the inexorable workings of the universe.

A few observations about Pavan K. Varma's take on Ramcharitamanas

Let us, for the purpose of this post, first accept the popularly acknowledged period of Narsinh Mehta to be 1414 to 1480 and historically established period of Tulsidas’s to be between 1532 and 1623. There is a reason why I speak about these two extraordinary luminaries of the Bhakti movement in one breath. Born some 100 years apart both, according to their respective legends, were led to their faith and philosophy obsessions Krishna and Ram respectively by figure of absolute reverence in Hinduism—Shiv.

It is well-known among those who believe such things that it was Shiv who led Narsinh Mehta to a Krishna’s Raas-leela, a sort of cosmic dance spectacle, that eventually made him an absolute devotion to the deity. I did not know that even in the case of Tulsidas, by a wide consensus, among the greatest poet-philosophers of the world, was also brought to Ram by Shiv and Parvati in a dream. That bit I am just discovering in the book ‘The Greatest Ode to Lord Ram : Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas; Selection and Commentaries’ by Pavan K Varma, a career foreign service officer turned a politician but someone who was always very scholarly ever since I knew him as the spokesman of India’s foreign ministry in the 1990s.  Pavan is easily among the five sharpest scholarly minds of all politicians in India.

To hear him speak of his scholarly preoccupations such as Mirza Ghalib or Adi Shankaracharya or now Tulsidas, is to hear him slurp with sheer intellectual relish. With some luck I will be able to feature him on my weekly radio interview show ‘Stars Aligned’ on Bharat FM. For now, I am reading some free excerpts from his latest work where I discovered Tulsidas’s dream.

Ramcharitmanas was also extensively read in my family, including by my grandmother Shobha on practically a daily basis. I have some muscle memory of the Sundar Kand, for instance, one of the seven Kands of this extraordinary work. A point that jumped out me about Tulsidas is also the same point that had jumped out at me about Narsinh Mehta. Tulsidas chose to write Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi in order that ordinary people understood rather than Sanskrit which his fraternity, namely Brahmins, would have approved. Mehta, who was supposed to be unlettered, too wrote in colloquial Gujarati even though the concepts he deals with both Sagun (with attributes) and Agun (without attributes) as descriptions of the divine are profound.

It is a mere happenstance that I am reading Pavan’s excerpts in the countdown to the groundbreaking ceremony for a Ram temple in Ayodhya by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi tomorrow. That is not nearly as compelling for me as reading a book of this nature. Incidentally, I extensively reported Phase 1 of what is known as the Ram Janmbhoomi movement that first led to the systematic dismantling of the Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992 to make way for this temple nearly three decades hence. Those three decades have seen the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party from a ragtag band of ideologues and zealots into what it is a today—a nearly unchallenged political juggernaut. That is another story which I will not tell here to contaminate the remarkable spirit of Ramcharitmanas.

I had mentioned Aguna and Saguna. Pavan’s book has a remarkable stanza by Tulsidas about it. I have used the image below.

Varma translates it as “There are two aspects of God—the one unqualified and the other qualified. Both these aspects unspeakable, unfathomable, without beginning and without parallel. To my mind greater than both is the Name, that has established its rule over both by its might.

More than the faith aspect I am moved by the sheer astonishing philosophical aspect of both Tulsidas’s and Mehta’s constructs. And to think that they lived 100 years apart and very far from each other united by their shared philosophical incisiveness—one in service of Ram, the other Krishna, both reputedly led by Shiv.

An extraordinary biography of J.B.S. Haldane

I have just begun reading free excerpts from what is clearly an extraordinary book, a biography of the widely celebrated British biologist J. B. S. Haldane and have been immediately captivated its author Samanth Subramanian’s exceptional detailing and perspective.

If life turns for the better for me in terms of money, I may even consider splurging a whole $22.59 that the biography ‘A Dominant Character: The Radical science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane’ is priced at. For now though, that amount is better spent on groceries.

For me, the foremost attribute in any written material is that it should be at the very least readable. Subramanian has no problem on that score since produces a finely etched prose on which heavy historical details—both scientific and political—glide so lightly. To be able to so seamlessly and so tellingly blend biology, politics, Marxism, the erstwhile Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin and details of Haldane’s facility in quoting Dante, Norse myth and the Bhagwat Gita from memory requires a hefty writerly talent and Subramanian clear has it.

Samanth Subramanian

From what I have read so far, this is a truly great biography of not just a great biologist but an astonishingly eclectic mind who thought of and wrote about anything and everything, particularly politics. As Subramanian points out, Haldane never held back his political opinion. “It is difficult to imagine now a scientist like Haldane, who recognized how deeply political his work was and who thought it his duty to speak loudly about it. Except in rare cases scientists today wipe their public selves clean of any trace of politics ideology.”

With some luck I will set up an interview with Subramanian for my radio show on Bharat FM but irrespective of that I strongly recommend your read this book even though I have so far only read some free excerpts on Amazon. Like I said, for me a whole $22.59 is better spent on groceries in the current circumstances.

Some quick observations about Amar Singh

It may or may not be true but Amar Singh, who passed away today at 64, was one of those Delhi political fixers who always seemed either on the verge of striking a deal or seemed to have already struck one. The quality of that deal was another matter altogether.

During my stint in Delhi for about a decade in the 1990s I peripherally met him a few times and was every time struck by a certain slickness to the man that only the capital’s toxic yet fertile air gave birth to. I don’t know if Amar Singh was more sinned against than sinning but he seemed to be in midst of everything that happened at the heart of India’s power elite. And as you know what happens in the midst of power elites is not always uplifting.

Whether he was a poseur or really someone who made things happen for the larger good was a matter of which side of his posing one found himself on. As a journalist, I always put myself well outside the splash zone. I heard stories about him all the time and much of them in the realm of not particularly edifying.

I am not sure what I make of his contribution to India’s polity and politics but going by some sanguine tributes he has got in his passing it seems he might have been of some good consequence after all. He had been ailing for a long time and he was in Singapore in the aftermath of a second kidney transplant. Figures like Amar Singh, who was a member of the upper house of India’s parliament, the Rajya Sabha, towards the end of his life enjoyed power directly or indirectly for the better part of his adult life. He had a certain political panache that endeared him across party lines. I was told by at least one top Congress Party leader, who is no more, once that he was always wary of Amar Singh’s friendship and enmity. This was someone who needed neither given his own enormous standing within the country’s public life in the 1980s and 1990s.

It is clear that India’s increasingly fractious politics men like Amar Singh have a special place of influence which cuts both ways. In his mind though he was certain that everything he did was for the larger good, even when he was doing it for himself.

For quite some time, one of his biggest calling cards was his weirdly assertive and brotherly relations with the superstar Amitabh Bachchan. There was a time when they could not be separated and then came a time when they would not be caught together at any cost.

In his passing, Delhi has lost a colorful inhabitant at the heart of the world’s most fluid democracy.