Reading the news about gigantic cargo ship Ever Given, which ran aground in the Suez Canal and stayed stuck there for nearly a week, now having reflated, I was reminded of this famous line from Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar.’ Lest you think that I am scholar of Shakespeare, let me just say that I am not at all one. I have read him only in fits and starts and never fully.
The line is, “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Essentially, it means one must grab an opportunity when it arises because one never knows when one might ever get another. It has to do with how ships use high tides to enter a port or leave it.
That is precisely what happened as the full Moon, which was in fact a supermoon last night, caused the Suez Canal water to rise because of high tides helping the Ever Given refloat. Think about this. The gravitational pull of a moon, in this case the Moon, orbiting around us at roughly 238,900 miles causes the oceans to rise which in turns swells up the canal water which in turn helps free the cargo ship.
I can already hear astrologers saying “we told you so” about their rather ludicrous claim that planets control and rule individual lives. Sure, in the broadest sense of the word part of why Earth is hospitable to life generally has to do with its position within the solar system and how the other planets might have shaped some of the way sentient life evolved here but the notion that Mercury in retrograde will somehow determine my specific life is not worthy of comment.
Speaking of stars and us or, to be more accurate, planets and us there is another iconic line by Shakespeare that also happens to be Julius Caesar. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Indeed.
No, I was not imprisoned in 1971 in the run-up to the creation of Bangladesh. Also, I did not engage in Satyagraha either because there was no Satyagraha in Ahmedabad for a non-existent nation yet. Satyagraha was born in Ahmedabad as a form of protest courtesy of a certain Mohandasbhai sometime in 1917. I was also born in Ahmedabad in 1961. So I was only about 10 at the time of the war that led to the creation of a whole new nation courtesy of a certain Indiraben.
My point is it is natural to want to be a part of history-changing events such as the creation of Bangladesh, which was today, 50 years ago. One cannot fault India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be a part of that history if only to burnish his current image. One only expects accuracy. For instance, he had to be either 20 or 22 years old. he could not have been not both. Maybe he spoke colloquially as they do in that part of the world; "Main kuchh bees-baais saal ka hunga" sort of thing.
The 1971 war unfolded between March 25 and ended on December 16, 1971 when what is now Pakistan (it was West Pakistan then) surrendered to the Indian army on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s watch.
It is possible that Prime Minister Modi did take part in some kind of support movement during the war. But the idea that he was 20-22, as he said during his visit to Bangladesh, is a bit suspect because he would have been 22 in 1972 after Bangladesh was already born. Perhaps he meant 20. He could not be both. His birth date is not iffy. It is clear that he was born on September 17, 1950.
For instance, I know I was 10 years and four months old when the war began. I am also certain that Bangladesh was born 21 days before I turned 11. I also know that the windowpanes our house had to be either painted black or covered with newspapers in order that prospective Pakistani fighter jets did not bomb us. Gujarat is a state bordering Pakistan and Ahmedabad being the state’s biggest city there were apprehensions of such an eventuality occurring. I remember sirens going off which had the opposite effect of making us rush out to be part of the excitement of war.
If I were prime minister today and were in Bangladesh as part of the 50th year independence celebration I would not be able to credibly claim that as a 10-12-year-old boy I offered Satyagraha on which I had a special claim hailing from Ahmedabad. Maybe the prime minister can claim that since he was 10-12 years older than me.
I wrote the following post on March 7, 2014. It still works.
March 7, 2014
I often wonder whether I have a natural language; natural to the extent that anyone can have one. After all, language is acquired and is not innate.
My first acquired language was Gujarati. That was the language of all existential references but before I could graduate to its mature expression I switched to English for professional/survival reasons. I had never conversed in English till I turned 20 which was also the age when I started writing it as a means of earning.
It is my distinct memory that in those days my thought process was a sort of parallel processing in two languages—Gujarati and English. I never translated one to the other in my mind. They both blossomed on their own. All this while, a mixture of Hindi/Urdu had already become a third track from my early teens because of my natural affinity for poetry. As far as I can tell Hindi/Urdu too were getting fine-tuned in some corner of my brain simultaneously but independently. I am not going to include the other two languages that I understand very well—Marathi and Punjabi.
After living with four (actually six) languages for the better part of the last nearly four decades I could not say with any degree of certainty which is my default language. Purely in terms of the frequency of use, English wins hands down as the likeliest default language. The reasons for that are obvious because it is as much a language of survival as it is of predominant communication. However, if the ease of cursing is used as the yardstick to measure my linguistic proficiency, then I would say it is a close contest between English and Hindi/Gujarati. I would define your natural language as one in which you would curse severely under your breath.
I feel linguistically promiscuous. The brain often indulges in verbal orgies of threesomes or foursomes or even sixsomes between these languages. Marathi and Punjabi remain only reluctant participants in these acts but they are there, hovering around.
These thoughts came to me this morning for no apparent reason. It would be interesting to see which language I might die in. One cannot foreshadow the circumstances of one’s death but I am curious to find out which language I might be thinking in when the end comes in whatever form it does. It is possible that I may have a reflective death where as I am fading away I am actually reflecting on this, that and the other in a particular language as opposed to an unexpected end where I have no control on such details.
I am at a stage where it is no longer possible to say which is really the language of my thoughts, the process of thinking. One wakes up with any of these six languages and goes to sleep with any of them. My monolingual American friends freak out when I discuss this with them. Many of them are unable to process a creature with so many languages rattling about in his brain. I compound it by saying that there are hundreds of millions of people in India and elsewhere in Asia and Europe who speak/understand/write more than three languages without consciously trying.
As one friend put it so eloquently sometime ago while discussing this at a Thanksgiving dinner, “Get the fuck outta here.” Of course, he did not mean for me to really get the fuck outta there but it was his way of expressing bewilderment at the idea that people could be proficient in many languages simultaneously.
Yesterday was World Storytelling Day. Today is World Poetry Day as declared by the United Nations. So after you tell a story, recite a poem.
I have nearly a lifelong association with poetry. It is only fair that I get to hold forth a bit on the subject.
I have described poetry as an unnecessary art. Let me, in the gloriously self-absorbed tradition of South Asian poets, quote myself. On September 15, 2014, I wrote, “Unlike prose, which is necessarily time-intensive, poetry, unless it is epic, is more often than not instantaneous. That is because it often results from an evanescent inspiration. It has to be captured in that moment otherwise it comes across manufactured or contrived. I have always considered poetry to be, apart from being an unnecessary talent, an affliction. It results from a massive chemical disturbance inside one’s brain. It has to be expressed as soon as it occurs even if it happens to be rough and raw. For accomplished poets, who have been doing it for a long time, it takes birth fully formed and polished.”
The same year on April 20, I said this: “Poetry is an unnecessary talent. Having written it since 13, I think I have earned the right to say this. That said, not all talents should be judged for their worldly utility. The real worth of poetry lies in its inspirational quotient.
I have not done a scientific study to say this but I am fairly certain that great poetry has inspired people to do great things. The poet is necessarily is an inspirer or an illuminator. Poetry is a catalyst. If a single poetic line inspires people with genuine utility-oriented talents to do great things that help humanity at large, then poetry serves its purpose as does the poet. However, it is not the poet’s business to do things. Poets lead a life of conceit where doing worldly/mundane/utilitarian things is anathema.”
For someone who writes a verse or two or a dozen perhaps every other day, today bears no particular significance. Poetry is not seasonal or a passing observance. It is a way of life just as painting or prose is. For instance, unaware that today is World Poetry Day, I was woken up around 2.17 a.m. (I always look at the clock when I wake up) by this verse in Hindi.
मर्ज़ अगर दिल का हो तो
इलाज दिमाग़ का कराना चाहिए
(Marz agar dil ka ho to
Ilaj dimagh ka karana chahiye)
Loosely translates as:
If your heart is afflicted (as in love)
You should treat your head
The idea of the verse being that if you fall in love, there is an element of insanity to it.
Today is supposed to be World Storytelling Day. As someone who began telling extempore, made-on-the-spot stories from the age of nine, I did not need a special day to tell stories. Many of those who grew up with me will bear me out when I say this.
From about age nine right until sixteen gathering neighborhood children and often even adults and telling them stories was my thing. My stories featured my own characters and versions of Phantom and Mandrake. Those were free-flowing sessions and stories which had clearly delineated heroes and villains although occasionally I blurred the lines so much as to make them indistinguishable.
Performing came naturally to me and stage fright was not something I even remotely understood. A complete lack of inhibition was an inheritance from my mother. In a span of seven years, I must have spun a few hundred yarns. I suppose it was a measure of how well I told them that the listeners ranged from those my age and in their 20s right up to 50s. It is conceivable that initially it was perhaps the cuteness of a nine-year-old acting out his plots that made my stories passable but as I grew older, I had to make sure that they were genuinely so.
Eventually word reached my school about my storytelling. That meant every time a teacher did not show up for whatever reason in whichever grade, I used to be called to hold forth hold class even if it meant I had to let go of my own. Like I said stage fright was utterly alien to me. There was nothing to getting on stage or in front of people. You just rise and do it.
It is not my case at all that every story I told was engaging but it is certainly my claim that a reasonable number of them was. If only some of those were recorded or written down I may have been sitting on a tidy collection.
I remember the one about Phantom and Dara Singh joining hands to take on a bunch of vicious thugs. Mandrake would come in as and when needed to help them. The only problem was that they did not speak each other’s language. So they spoke in Gujarati with some amount of Hindi and English thrown in.
On World Storytelling Day, it is just another day for me.
On the heels of director Hansal Mehta’s critically acclaimed web series ‘Scam 1992’ about the once flashy, brash, flamboyant, then disgraced and incarcerated and eventually dead stockbroker Harshad ‘Big Bull’ Mehta, comes a feature length movie clearly inspired his life.
The movie is called ‘The Big Bull’ featuring Abhishek Bachchan in the titular role and is directed by Kookie Gulati.
I had written the following to coincide with the web series and I might as well republish it to time it with the movie’s release.
I am reminded of my meeting with Harshad Mehta sometime in 1989-90.
“What you call crooked, saheb,” said Harshad Mehta to me, “is actually pure street smarts.” And then the stockbroker smiled as if particularly pleased at what he was about to say and how he had set up that punchline, “Or shall I say Dalal Street smarts?”
That was sometime in 1989-90 when I met the Bombay stockbroker, who took India’s stock market on a dizzying rollercoaster ride that eventually ended in his incarceration and death in jail due to heart attack on December 31, 2001. That is apart from a loss in hundreds of millions of rupees to various financial institutions, many of whose bosses were complicit in the scam which was at once ingenious and yet quite ordinary. The meeting took place in Mehta’s sprawling 15,000 square feet apartment on Bombay’s Worli Seaface. I noticed before going up to his apartment that his black Lexus was parked at a strategic spot where it could be seen prominently.
Remember those were still the pre-economic liberalization days and owning a Lexus, which reputedly cost him 4.7 million rupees then, was the pinnacle of luxury for the emerging nouveau riche like Mehta then. He made no apology about his wealth,
By the time I met Mehta had already been a darling of the business media that lapped up his every move as brilliant. That he sounded so self-assured in a brass-knuckle sort of way and dressed well in the late 1980s-early 1990s style coupled with his ability to project bragging dressed up as insights worked wonders with the generally unsuspecting business media.
My impression of Mehta from some three decades ago was that of someone who was driven by an unusual ambition to break into what he considered Bombay’s corporate elite in defiance of his own rise from a lower middle class Gujarati family. He seemed to think it was his manifest destiny to be both very wealthy and very successful. At the same time though, in a streak somewhat reminiscent of Dhirubhai Ambani, small associations seemed to give him particular joy. For instance, I also remember that his face brightened up when he found out that my family too was from Rajkot in Saurashtra where he was born. Dhirubhai had a similar reaction when he came to know that I too was from Saurashtra like him.
Speaking of manifest destiny, it often came out in the form of his aphorisms such as “I don’t create waves, I ride them.” In an era well before the internet, mobile phones and, of course, social media Mehta had figured out a way to make his presence felt. At one point in his conversation with me he got up to face his glass window facing the Arabian Sea, somewhat reminiscent of the scene from Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘Deewar’, and said to me in Gujarati, “Vat thi kamayo chhun. (I have earned it with confidence.) Vat in today’s parlance would be swag. “Aa dariyo dekhay chhe ne samey, that’s me. I will always be around.” (You see the sea from here, that’s me),” he declared so effortlessly that one might have suspected he had practiced those lines. He had not. During my interaction as well as his interactions with the media then, those lines came to him easy.
The purpose of this short post is not to dwell on all the complex ways in which Mehta gamed the subterranean criminal impulses within the leaderships of the Indian banking system and other financial institutions. Let me just say that he hit upon a few ingenious ways to exploit the system. He used banks’ money to play the share market by promising them high interest rates. In return, he would have the banks transfer money into his personal account. The ploy would be to buy securities from other banks.
Another way was to leverage the bank receipt or BR. The BR was a way in which the seller of government securities gave the buyer of those a BR rather than the actual transfer of the securities. Mehta’s criminal enterprise was to find pliable banks which would agree to issue fake BRs. He was said to have found a couple of small cooperative banks to do that for him for a consideration under the table for its managers. He then used those fake BRs to raise actual money from established banks. The sums were huge and at its height the scandal was supposed to be to the tune of sixty billion rupees.
One of the constant refrains that Mehta had after his life as a stockbroker began to unravel in the face of what was clearly criminal manipulation of the Bombay stock market by him and those close to him was to insist that had the system let him play he would have ensured that everyone made money. Clearly, that was an empty boast.
I remember him making another extravagant claim. He used to boast that if the rupee was made convertible he could bring in $3 billion in investment on his own strength alone. I had asked him about that to which he said rather cavalierly, “As long as no one stands in my way, I can deliver that.”
Mehta had a weird sense of self-assurance about him. In his mind he had absolutely no sense of having done anything wrong at all. It was that delusion that prompted him to make a stunning claim in 1993, by which time I had already shifted to New Delhi. On June 16, 1993 he claimed publicly that he had paid India’s Prime Minister P V Narsimha Rao Rs 10 million (one crore) to get him off the hook in the huge stock-banking scandal.
There was a time when Mehta’s personal portfolio was worth twenty billion rupees. He would write personal checks of five billion rupees to the State Bank of India and two billion rupees to the Bombay Stock Exchange to cover his stock purchases. In keeping with his panache to gain public attention he paid 260 million rupees in personal income tax in March 1993, making him India’s highest individual taxpayer then.
It was in April, 1992 when journalist Sucheta Dalal exposed Mehta’s racket bringing his life crashing down. I vividly remember a photograph of Mehta looking disheveled and holding a plastic bag coming out of a police van. He looked clearly beaten down. He was banished from trading but continued to giving stock market tips. He was convicted in September, 1999. About two years later he died of a heart attack while being in criminal custody in the Thane prison. He was 47.
Bombay’s stockbrokers, a vast majority of whom was and still is Gujaratis, treated Mehta as a folk hero for quite some time. Many of them called him the “Amitabh Bachchan” of the stock market, a sobriquet he was not particularly enamored of as far as I can tell. “I deal with real hard world, not a fictional one,” he told me.
My enduring image of Harshad Mehta, who was clearly devoid of any scruples and was perhaps even a sociopath, was him standing by his sea-facing apartment window in a ballooning white executive shirt, specially tailored trousers and a paisley patterned yellow tie. “I always wear a suit and tie. It gives you confidence,” he said.
One typically Harshad Mehta claim that he made after being convicted was that he would have paid back every single penny to anyone he owed were he allowed to operate in his own unfettered ways. He clearly had the mind of an autocrat.
Cutting a dashing figure in a three-piece pinstripe suit Shashi Kapoor stood in the large porch of a famous bungalow in Bombay’s Juhu area. His right hand was in the pocket of his pleated trousers and left dangling from a lower pocket of his fully buttoned-up vest. The only detail missing was a retinue of obsequious servants. In the city’s polyester humidity Kapoor did not seem to be breaking into a sweat.
As I alighted from a taxi outside the iron gate of the bungalow ‘Radhika’, he appeared to sense that I was the journalist he had given an appointment to that morning. As I climbed up the few steps he stretched out his hand and said, “I am Shashi Kapoor. I am an actor.” “Mayank Chhaya,” is all I said. That I was a journalist was implicit.
I knew about Kapoor’s habit of always introducing himself by name but the way he did it with me came across as mildly mischievous humility. I was amused, especially by the part “I am an actor.” Later, he wove that reference into a context while talking about his much written about insanely busy career as an actor. He shot continuously in three shifts, prompting his more illustrious eldest brother Raj Kapoor to somewhat chidingly describe him as a “taxi”; as in someone who plied the roads being hailed by anyone and everyone as long as it paid.
He had seen me get out of a taxi earlier. “"Raj ji (Raj Kapoor) mujhe aaj kal taxi hi kehte hain, (Raj Kapoor calls me a taxi these days). I am, of course, an actor,” he said.
By the time I met him in 1986—and the only time I did—Kapoor was one of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars but wore his success lightly. He looked a tad older than his 48 because he had become somewhat neglectful of his own health after the death in 1984 of his wife Jennifer, whom he dotted on. Without being prompted by me he pointed at his portly bearing and said, “This is not for a role. Jennifer would not have let me become so fat.” He joked that his body worked for that particular role because he was playing a wealthy businessman in a movie whose name he did not seem to remember.
“I am an actor who does what is expected of him by the director,” he said.
Without the famous last name, Kapoor might have remained just a trophy star leveraging his remarkably good looks but he came from Hindi cinema’s most illustrious family where his father, Prithiviraj, and brothers Raj and Shammi had been among the biggest names. He drew upon his considerable talents to give some truly memorable performances. (I refuse to enumerate them here. It is just too much detail.)
I remember having observed that his eyelashes were so lush that he could lend some to some of his fellow actresses without noticing the difference. He guffawed. He said he had inherited his father’s features. Shashi Kapoor frequently looked like a spitting image of Prithviraj (See the latter’s photo below).
Prthviraj Kapoor
From what I remember the most of that interaction was a star untouched by the trimmings of his success. Being the youngest of the three Kapoor brothers, Shashi had seen glamor for such a long time—his whole life, really—that its lures had no effect on him. That unselfconscious attitude mixed with his extraordinary good looks and charms made him even more likeable than he might have been otherwise.
One of the questions that I remember was about how he managed to juggle so many assignments without messing up the details of a particular character. I was taken aback by his candor when he countered, “What details? You just create them as you go along.” Lest anyone underestimate his craft, it was the response of someone who had been at it from his childhood and had internalized the process. At the same time, he was quite humorously self-aware of how much of his work in the 1980s was eminently forgettable. “I need money to make my own, more credible movies. It is a good balance. I respect this work and that,” he said.
Although Kapoor’s career was full of instances of his impressive acting chops, he never really projected himself as a brooding, serious artist. He knew that acting was predominantly about being in the moment and not necessarily a doctoral dissertation.
I spent about two hours on the set of the movie he was shooting that day and whose name he appeared not to remember. I watched him give perfect single takes with rather involved lines and emotions. During one of his many returns from these takes he remarked that that ease of remembering lines had come to him having seen his father theater stage days. Performances were always in the Kapoor ecology and for Shashi Kapoor, being the youngest of the three brothers, particularly so. That was one main reason why he never seemed like a labored, rehearsed performer.
All stars the world over often come to be distilled into a few memorable scenes and lines. For him it was from the 1979 movie ‘Deewar’ (The Wall) where he was paired with Amitabh Bachchan and with whom he did more than a dozen movies. The scene and the lines are so iconic for Hindi cinema audiences around the world that they need no introduction. For me it would be enough to say “Merey paas ma hai. (I have mother with me).” The measured, succinct tone with which Kapoor, playing a morally upright police officer, delivered that one line in response to a rather grandiose boast by his wayward, smuggler brother, Bachchan, remains one of Hindi cinema’s most defining moments.
Even though “Merey paas ma hai” has now become a cinematic cliché in India, it is also a great example of a no-fuss actor-star delivering from the gut of his lifelong exposure to the craft.
I surprised Kapoor by deliberately not asking about that line. “You have said and done it. There is nothing more to dwell on,” I said. On that note, we shook hands. That was 31 years ago. I never met him after that.
A relatively new trend that I am intrigued by is the weird success of reaction videos on YouTube. For those of you living under the rock, reaction videos are videos in which YouTubers watch a wide range of videos of just about any content and offer their reactions—both verbal and physical.
Many of these reaction videos routinely notch up hundreds of thousands of views themselves, occasionally even more than the original content they might be reacting to. Particularly popular is Indian content including Hindi movie trailers, songs and scenes, stand up comedy routines and some classical performances. My sense is that some of the reaction video hosts have themselves become minor celebrities.
This is a uniquely internet age trend where those who have done nothing original except reacting to something created by someone else grants you some measure of fame. I personally find it quite pathetic but it would seem as if many of these reaction video hosts make good money doing just that. The game is to build up an audience for anything.
A major part of the fascination for Indian media consumers is to see how Westerners, especially Americans, respond to Indian content. There is definitely an element of seeking validation from the West at play here. I have seen major Indian stars granting interviews to the hosts of such reaction videos merely because they are Westerners. By and large these reaction videos are pretty idiotic with occasionally sharp insights thrown in.
A subset of these videos that Indians seem to like consists of Pakistani fans producing such reaction videos.
It is remarkable neither those who react nor those who watch them react have anything to do with the original content. And yet both appear to derive some pleasure out of it. We live in rampantly voyeuristic times where people just like to watch and like to be watched even while they are watching and are being watched. Watching is the operative word here.
Once again, one remarkable aspect for me is the confluence of so many complex technologies here, from the internet to broadband to mobile phones to streaming. I am not even including the technologies that go into making those movies or songs to which so many of these reaction videos react to.
Merely because the artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple sold his digital work via Christie’s for an astonishing $69.3 million does not mean that I will be able to sell mine for even 69 cents. However, as someone who began a painting career digitally some six years ago it is heartening to note that digital paintings have suddenly become as prized as the actual physical canvases.
I routinely paint digitally and must have accumulated perhaps some 300 works of varying merit and quality. Those are apart from the actual physical works I do. Ever since I started painting digitally I have grappled with whether one should call it art in the league of physical works. Considering that the iconic painter David Hockney was among the first to work digitally I felt encouraged to treat my computer and painting apps merely as tools in service of my artistic impulses quite like paints, brushes and canvases.
Speaking of Hockney, I had done the one below as a tribute to him last year.
Hockney--MC
I still hesitate to put my digital works in the same category as my physical paintings but after Beeple’s sale I am rethinking my hesitation.
One major problem with digital works is that they are so instantly fungible as soon as you upload them anywhere online. All that one has to do is to right click on a piece and either copy it or save it as on your system. Of course, there is a way to disable the right-click option but I do not do that. It is not my case that my works are so good as to lend themselves for instant duplication but it is not entirely inconceivable that some day they might some day become reasonably attractive.
Going by the response of people on social media platform some of my recent works do seem to capture considerable attention. I do put in quite a bit of work to create them by using a combination of apps. These days I mostly use an app called Sketch Book which offers a wide variety of tools and effects. It is true that the traditional brushes and paints do not give you flexibility anywhere close to such apps. Any special effects that you want to create in traditional painting depends on your personal skills. That is not the case with such apps that offer many astonishing special effects. To that extent apps create an unfair advantage to digital paintings over traditional physical painting. And that is the reason why I still hesitate to put my digital works in the same cherished category as actual canvases.
To get back to digital works being fungible and therefore vulnerable to losing its original authorship there is something called non-fungible tokens or NFTs which are sort of electronic identifiers that establish the true identity of the creator. Perhaps I should consider that. Beeple’s recording breaking work titled ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ is a collage of 5000 of his digital works and is an NFT.
I do not know about other artists but I can never duplicate my work even with a proximate likeness, let alone a precise likeness, irrespective of whether it is digital or physical. In my digital works I frequently forget the steps I took and the tools I used to achieve a particular final visual product. I seriously wonder whether any work, digital or physical, can be reproduced in all its precisely perfect details. I don’t think so. Even masterful forgeries can be eventually unraveled with some investigation. Since so much of the early part of any painting, both physical and digital, is so impulsive and impromptu that one can never really reproduce the process ever again.
Separately, I would not be surprised if soon artists will begin to debate physical painting versus digital painting quite the same way filmmakers have debated actual film stock versus digital.
Beeple’s sale at least creates some hope in me that some of my works may fetch a buck or two.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price yesterday stated the obvious over the issue of whether China has any role in the reincarnation of the 14th Dalai Lama. Lalit Jha, a dear friend and fellow journalist, the chief Washington correspondent of the Press trust of India (PTI), asked Price about the issue and here is what he said:
“Well, we believe that the Chinese Government should have no role in the succession process of the Dalai Lama. Beijing’s interference in the succession of the Panchen Lama more than 25 years ago, including by, quote/unquote, “disappearing” the Panchen Lama as a child and attempting to replace him with a PRC Government-chosen successor, it remains an outrageous abuse of religious freedom.”
That is crystal clear and final. It would be so in an ideal world and not in the one we live. But then in an ideal world this question would not have arisen because the outrageous annexation of Tibet would not have occurred.
In this world, not only has China already made it its business to anoint the 14th Dalai Lama’s successor but the rest of the world has found it nearly impossible to head it off. I should know because I have written a 500-plus page book on the subject. That’s a great plug.
Ever since China annexed Tibet in 1950 the world has been able to do, to put in highfalutin geo-diplomatic terms, fuck-all about it. The Sinicization of Tibet is irreversible and Beijing is not about to let go off a territory that forms a fourth of its landmass. Thrusting on some six million Tibetans a 15th Dalai Lama of its own expedient choice is a relatively easy thing for Beijing. Merely because Washington says that the Chinese government “should have no role in the succession process of the Dalai Lama” it does not mean it will obligingly step aside. If anything, that will only reinforce its resolve to do precisely that.
Broadly the current Dalai Lama has two options—either name a successor in his own lifetime even if it goes against the 600-years-old tradition of reincarnation or end the tradition of Dalai Lamas altogether. The former is far more likely than the latter even though I am not particularly privy to his thinking despite having written a 500-plus page book. Yet another neat plug.
It has long been China’s position that its government controls the issue of the Dalai Lama’s succession which is absurd but that is also its current position. In 2015, for instance, Zhu Weiqun, the then chairman of the ethnic and religious affairs committee of the top advisory body to Chinese parliament, had said, “Decision-making power over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, and over the end or survival of the lineage, resides in the central government of China.” Zhu has since retired.
Note his wording carefully. He is essentially saying that the power that has traditionally rested with the incumbent Dalai Lama, including “over the end or survival of the lineage” is now with the central government. There has not been any change in the official Chinese position.
There is next to no prospect of Beijing stepping aside in the matter merely because Washington thinks it should.
The only real power lies with Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama who if he chooses either to name a successor in his lifetime or end the lineage can preempt Chinese designs. Of course, the Dalai Lama has also said the decision whether there should be a 15th Dalai Lama lies with Tibetans which he also knows is not a practical choice given that only a little over 150,000 Tibetans are in exile outside Tibet and the vast majority live under the ever stifling Chinese control.
My point is that the US will have to invent a better response that what we have heard or simply accept as a fait accompli that China will ram through its own choice eventually.
