Mayank Chhaya Daily

Gravity, here I come

As I begin my preliminary reading and research for a distinctly possible book about Gravity for popular reading, I revisit a couple of posts I had written about in 2013. It is just as well that eight years later, I am on the cusp of a book about this most defining of the four forces of nature.

September 2, 2013

I think I have reached a stage in life where there is no difference between comprehension and incomprehension. Most concepts in physics, which I thought I comprehended in my younger years, are now safely beyond my comprehension. Gravitation is one such idea. I have always been fascinated by it but with advancing years it makes progressively less sense to me. I think I just don’t get it any more.

To be sure, my not getting it is not at the level of a fourth grader not getting it but not getting it in all its philosophical dimensions. Albert Einstein’s idea of curvature in spacetime caused by massive objects is exquisitely picturesque to me but I can no longer comprehend it. As I have often said the words strung together as part of sentences to explain his theory do make sense to me both individually and collectively but then at the end of it the final conclusive meaning eludes me.

My incomprehension about gravitation as a scientific concept does not prevent me from occasionally interpreting its philosophical and physical manifestations. For instance, I wrote the following as recently as May this year:

Gravitation as a natural phenomenon has been on my mind for as long as I can remember. In particular, I keep revisiting how gravity is at the heart of everything we are and the universe is.

Strangely, it is for the third time in as many years that I am thinking of gravity roughly around this time of year. It was in March, 2011, after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and again in April, 2012 that I wrote about gravity. This time it was triggered yesterday while watching my daughter Hayaa’s weekly soccer game; especially when I saw this assistant referee against the backdrop of the overcast sky above and the fresh green grass below. I was sitting in my partially broken deck chair on the sideline.

The entire activity of children running and kicking the ball, the ball moving, rising and falling, self in somewhat wobbly chair and the assistant referee with his feet firmly planted on the ground, everything was one of the millions of manifestations of gravitation.

Everything on Earth has evolved in response to the particular intensity of her gravity. On Mars, for instance, we would have to evolve in response to a gravitational force 62 percent lower than here. Presuming for the sake of illustrating the point that life could have still evolved and thrived on Mars, it would be so very different. Martians might still have played football (as in European football played with feet) but it would have been 62 percent slower than on Earth. Of course, the Martians would not have felt the slowness of their football because for them that would be the natural speed and their only reference point. Our understanding and experience of things are necessarily situational.

A vast majority of us, who would never get to enjoy interplanetary travel, cannot possibly know how it would feel to be on a planet which has 38 percent of our gravity. Even the expression “The gravity of the situation…” would have meant something different. An earthling visiting Mars would perhaps say, “The 38 percent gravity of the situation…..” As always, I digress but then an earthling would digress on Mars because of its lower gravity.

Am I glad that gravitation exists? Mostly yes, but I am equally curious about what if there were a sudden, albeit a slight variation in our terrestrial gravity. What if gravity could leak like a liquid?

The  National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), established by NASA, makes some fascinating points about the effects on human body of varying gravity. It talks about the effects of changing gravity on bones, muscles, spine, cardiovascular systems, inner ear and balance and sleep.

One was taught a long time ago that it is our inner ear that is particularly sensitive to gravity and helps us keep our orientation. Here is how the NSBRI explains: “On Earth, a complex, integrated set of neural circuits allows humans to maintain balance, stabilize vision and understand body orientation in terms of location and direction. The brain receives and interprets information from numerous sense organs, particularly in the eyes, inner ear vestibular organs and the deep senses from muscles and joints. In space, this pattern of information is changed. The inner ear, which is sensitive to gravity, no longer functions as designed. Early in the mission, astronauts can experience disorientation, space motion sickness and a loss of sense of direction. Upon return to Earth, they must readjust to Earth’s gravity and can experience problems standing up, stabilizing their gaze, walking and turning. These disturbances are more profound as the length of microgravity exposure increases. The changes can impact operational activities including approach and landing, docking, remote manipulation, extravehicular activity and post-landing normal and emergency egress.”

So as I sat on the sideline yesterday, somewhat disinterestedly watching the game but thinking more about gravity, it was entirely unique to my being on this particular planet. My predilections, predispositions, perspectives and perceptions would have been radically different even on our nearest celestial body, the dusty desolation we call Moon. That’s because my brain would have formed differently in keeping with the gravity there. By the way, the lunar gravity is a mere 16.7 percent of Earth’s. My point again is our certitudes become invalid even on our nearest neighbor. So next time you clear your throat and adjust your collar to hand down what you believe to be a grand universal pronouncement, take a pause and preferably give up the idea.

I now struggle with even the difference between the Newtonian idea  and Einsteinian idea about the direction of forces that act on us as we feel grounded to the Earth like the referee is in the picture above. The Newtonian idea was that just as we are being pulled toward the Earth, the Earth is also being pulled by us. The Einsteinian idea says we are being pushed up even as we are pushing back on the Earth.

While I am at it I might as well mention the fallacy of straight lines. Since we all lived in curved space there are no real straight lines except that given the massive scale of the spacetime curve we may treat relative short lines between any two points as straight for all practical purposes. (Just about now I can see you scratching your head and saying “What is this man talking about?”) That incomprehension is precisely my point.

In my case comprehension and incomprehension about everything constantly cancel each other out in the final result, although at specific points in time one may be greater than the other.

April 6, 2012

The universe is forever balancing competing gravities.

It could be competing gravities between celestial bodies such as stars and planets or between sentient beings like you and I. When that balance goes out of control, things crash into each other.

Fortunes fall as do reputations in a way that is not so different from objects falling to the ground. In cultural terms, falling is regarded as a bad thing as in falling from grace. In physics, falling is merely a fact of the universe resulting from gravity that is shorn of any emotion or moral judgment. Come to think of it, the thud of a fall from grace is inaudible unlike that of a rock hitting the ground. In the physical world when you fall, you know instantly you have fallen. In the moral world, when you fall it takes a lifetime to experience that.

Being a universal force, gravity is really at the heart of everything. It holds everything together with the possible exceptions of fire and human mind. Fire can go in any direction as can human mind. The worship of fire in many cultures has also something to do with the fact that it seems to defy gravity. In reality, only a transient form of that appears to be rising. The soot eventually does fall.

I have been meaning to ramble on about gravity for a long time because it is a force I do not quite comprehend and yet can never escape. Everything we are on this planet of ours can be attributed to the earthly gravity and the kind of force it exerts. It is conceivable that even a slight change in the value of ‘g’ (as in terrestrial gravity) would radically alter everything and everyone. We forget that all of us are so completely a product of a vast variety of random happenstances. So next time when you feel like strutting and bragging, remember there is nothing special about anyone of us.

In the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami last March I wrote the following. It bears repeating because while ground is a decisive part of who we are, gravity is infinitely more consequential in a universal sense.

The earthquake-tsunami-radiation triumvirate in Japan demonstrates just how profoundly we as a civilization are shaped by a stable terra firma. Everything that has happened on this planet, particularly in the past 250,000 years since the rise of homo sapiens-- speech, language, culture, religion, conflicts, triumphs, revolutions, genocides , politics, economy, cinema, technology, bigotry, altruism, compassion, orgasm, Internet, blogs, Muammar Qaddafi and iPad2—has happened because the terra firma has generally remained stable.

We forget that we exist the way we do precisely because the ground beneath us has not slipped too much and too often. For over three decades I have thought about this theme. Some day I would like to write in detail about how the fact that we live on solid ground has so overwhelmingly created and defined the human race. What if we were a strictly water-based civilization? I am quite sure our brains would have been wired very differently  and we then would have created a radically different civilization. Can you imagine territorially defined nation-states if the whole planet was just water? And how do you define boundaries in a medium that is never steady?

For some strange reason we treat our incidental geological reality as our natural right and build a whole lot of mythologies around it. It is true that as a species humans are extraordinarily adaptable and flexible. One can say with a fair degree of certainty that we would have created a civilization in response to our geological conditions, however different they might have been.

The problem is that we have come so far as a solid ground-based species that we would find it practically impossible to survive if the earth were to fundamentally reshape its contours suddenly. Of course, in terms of its overall planetary impact the Japanese quake-tsunami cannot be considered even significant, but it is big enough to make us all wonder what if the earth’s crustal plates were to suddenly go into a global subduction mode.

It would help us all to remember that the ground beneath us is also a consequence of gravity and the way things have coalesced across the universe because of it. In my younger days, I used to feel utterly frenzied by the thought of the sheer randomness of it all. With age one becomes resigned to it, more grounded as it were. Incidentally, feeling grounded too has everything to do with gravity.

P.S.: This is what I mean by how fire and human mind defy gravity. My mind does indeed go in any direction it wants to.

 

Buddha and the absence of beinghood

A couple of immediate thoughts come to my mind on  Gautam Buddha’s birthday today. He was born in 563 BCE around this time of year. The fact that he was born more than 500 years before the onset of the current era and its calendar, it is an approximate date. However, according to the Indian calendar, which is much older, it was on this full moon’s day that Siddharth or Gautam was born.

One is the very essence of what Buddha taught; the profoundly original idea that we are forever in the process of becoming and never become. This is the heart of Anitya or Anicca* or Impermanence. Attached to that is yet another profound idea that existence is a series of moments or Kshanika as it is called in Buddhism.

There is nothing like beinghood because we are in a constant state of flux from moment to moment, Kshanika to Kshanika.

I have frequently written about these themes.

The idea of Anitya or Anicca* or Impermanence has captured my imagination for as long as I remember. That it is at the core of Buddha’s philosophy is something I discovered only when I was 18 or 19. I have since reflected on it many times.

It is a spectacularly brilliant explanation of everything there is as long as you understand that everything there is, is there in that passing moment and hence it is really not there. The idea of Anitya can be deeply disturbing; especially because it removes what we like to call the essence. It can be deeply affecting for those stuck in the morass of corporeal certitudes about reality.

As part of my overall reading for the Dalai Lama biography ‘Man Monk Mystic’ I read many books. However, the one that has managed to make most impact is the 1916 edition of “Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism” by the extraordinary scholar of Indian culture and arts Ananda Coomaraswamy (22 August 1877 − 9 September 1947).

There is a lot to reflect over in this book first published in London by George G. Harrap & Company. For the purposes of this post, I would like to reproduce a brief passage about Anitya or Anicca. I must caution that it may sound rather abstruse at first but invest some thought in it and the idea will stand utterly illuminated. Of course, your comprehension will disappear as soon as you have attained it.

How essential in Buddhism is the doctrine of the eternal succession of causes appears from the fact it is often spoken as the gospel:

“I will teach you the Dhamma,” says Gautama, “That being present, this becomes; from the arising of that, this arises. That being absent, this does not become; from the cessation of that, this ceases.”

We read again that “Dhamma-analysis is knowledge concerning conditions.”

What he thought was designed to avoid the two extreme doctrines of realism and nihilism, the belief in phenomenal being and the belief that there is no phenomenal process at all. “Everything is: this, O Kaccana**, is one extreme view. Everything is not: this is the second extreme view. Avoiding both these extremes the Tathagata*** teaches the Norm by the Mean.” This doctrine of the Mean asserts that everything is a becoming, a flux without beginning (first cause) or end; there exists no static moment when this becoming attains to beinghood—no sooner can we conceive it by the attributes of name and form, it has transmigrated or changed to something else. In place of an individual, there exists a succession of instants of consciousness.

“Strictly speaking the life of a living being is exceedingly brief, lasting only while a thought lasts. Just a chariot wheel in rolling rolls only at one point of the tire, and in resting rests only at one point; in exactly the same way, the life of a living being lasts for the period of one thought. As soon as that thought has ceased, the living being is said to have ceased.

“As it has been said:

“The being of a past moment of thought has lived, but does not live, nor will it live.

“The being of a future moment of thought will live, but has not lived nor does it live.

“The being of the present moment of thought does live, but has not lived, nor will it live.”

As Coomaraswamy  points out, “We are deceived if we allow ourselves to believe that there is ever a pause in the flow of becoming, a resting place where positive existence is attained for even the briefest duration of time.”

Life as a series of moments always transmigrating is an astounding concept. Think about this assertion: “In place of an individual, there exists a succession of instants of consciousness.” It is poetic, profound and purely cerebral. Look at his explanation of moments which have passed, which are, and which are yet to be. It is so finely sliced. This is the mind of someone to whom everything stood fully explained.

I am willing to assert that as a purely cerebral living goes, there has been nothing that has surpassed Buddha since Buddha with the possible exception of Albert Einstein. In the timeline that we understand, that would be some 2500 years. It is ironic that for someone who emphasized the idea of Anitya or Anicca or Impermanence above all else seems to have lasted quite a while.

I would strongly recommend Coomaraswamy’s outstanding book to anyone who is interested in, for want of a better word, the gospel of Buddhism. I have always found it odd that a philosophy of impermanence should be given a traditional structure. But that is a separate discussion.

* Words such as Anicca or Dhamma are the Pali language versions of Anitya and Dharma

** Kaccana is Pali for Katyayana who was a disciple of Buddha.

*** Tahtagata is how Buddha referred to himself. It is interpreted to mean many things but mostly it is “The one who has thus gone” or “The one who has thus come.”

Brilliant works of Dr. Sudhir Patwardhan

I was mildly aware of the works of radiologist and painter Sudhir Patwardhan. It is only in the last few days that I have begun to discover how extraordinary his works are. His brilliant and astute observation of the life in Mumbai lights up his works. My reflexive reaction on seeing many of his works, particularly the four I have cited here, was Hopper, as in the American master Edward Hopper. However, Dr. Patwardhan in many ways surpasses Hopper. Both are very cinematic and much has been said about Hopper’s influence on Hollywood films, particularly when it comes to capturing the light and the mood of isolation. Dr. Patwardhan's works are more specific in their detailing. 

Dr. Patwardhan’s works superbly capture Mumbai’s middle class home scenes, particularly involving elderly people as so evident in these four works. It is not necessarily melancholic but a rather matter of fact depiction of the life in Mumbai apartments and homes. Two particular aspects strike me about these works apart from his sharp control of spaces. One is the way he captures the light of Mumbai’s apartments and homes and other how clutter-free those spaces are.

One gets the sense looking at Dr. Patwardhan’s paintings that he knows precisely what he wants to portray before he begins. I am guessing here but the feeling I get is that he does not seem to struggle with his brushwork at all. His angles and lines are very assured. There does not appear to be any frenzy in his works. Also, although he is the painter of these various scenes, one gets feeling that those inhabiting are not aware of his presence. He is an unobtrusive painter even though he is so completely immersed in the milieu of his paintings.

At some point soon I do plan to interview him for my online videos as part of ‘Mayank Chhaya Reports’.

 

Namaste, Alabama

There are those in Alabama who think merely saying Namaste turns you into a Hindu. I say this with only some mild exaggeration and levity, quoting from a bill just signed into law by the state’s Governor Kay Ivy that ended a nearly 30-year-long ban on yoga in K-12 schools.

Apart from expressly disallowing Namaste, the law now also says yoga is allowed in schools as long as it does not require meditation.

"Chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, and namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited," the bill says.

It is a measure of the paranoia that the bill even lays down that only English nomenclature be used to describe various poses and exercises lest using India/Hindu nomenclature instantly pushes you over into weird Hindudom.

The bill was piloted by State Representative Jeremy Gray, a Democrat, whose passionate advocacy of the usefulness of yoga for school students eventually won its reinstatement. However, the amount of caveating is both absurd and risible.

I am willing to say that had the roles been reversed and there was a form of exercise and meditative techniques that rose in a predominantly Christian country that came to today’s India, I would not be surprised if they too would find similar knee-jerk rejection. The world right now is so tribally entrenched.

I had interviewed Representative Gray a few weeks ago as part of ‘Mayank Chhaya Reports’ and he was confident that the ban would be reversed. I will speak to him again next week because I am sure he will have a few things to say about the language of the bill going to such lengths to strip yoga of its origins.

NPR reports "Yoga is a practice of Hindu religion," the Eagle Forum of Alabama told the National Public Radio’s (NPR) affiliate WBHM in an email. "Religious practice in the school's constitutes a violation of the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment as public schools cannot promote the practice or ideology of religion,” the Forum said even as it demanded that the ban be continued.

In the Forum’s imagination each yoga pose was designed not as an exercise but to "be an offering of worship" to Hindu gods.

I can at least understand part of that paranoia since over the millennia in India culture, religion and spirituality have become so fused and intertwined that it is hard to tell them apart for an outsider, especially someone sitting so far from it like Christian conservative groups in Alabama. They neither have inclination nor open-mindedness to dissect in a way that understand and accept that merely saying namaste or using Indian names of yoga poses does not instantly turn you Hindu. Nothing instantly turns you Hindu because it is not that kind of philosophical construct.

In the interest of clarity, I have never been a practicing anything. I have no religion, nor any spiritual consciousness. I do not pray. I do not find anything special about any religion. And yet, I would have no hesitation in saying Namaste. So, Namaste, Alabama.

Here is to Sundarlal Bahuguna, a man of natural benignity

My attraction towards the mountains, particularly the Himalayas, is primal. I have done a fair bit of traveling through them. One such journalistic trip took place in October, 1991 to Chamoli/Uttarkashi/Tehri Garhwal region. The circumstance of the visit was terrible. A major earthquake, measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale, had sliced through the mountains, destroying some 300,000 homes and claiming over 2,000 lives. It was among the world’s deadliest earthquakes in one of the most seismically active zones.

During the course of my interviews with the inhabitants in Chamoli, I chanced upon a soft-spoken, almost apologetic gentleman called Bachu Singh Rawat. He was already in his 70s then. It is less than likely that he is still alive. He gave me a flavor of what it means to be in the midst of an earthquake sitting atop a mountain. “Pahad naach rahe they, sahab (The mountains were dancing.)” he told me.

During the course of that conversation, he said quite casually, “Sundarlalji to kab se hum sab ko samjha rahen hain ki prakruti ke saath hame vinamra hona chahiye. (Sundarlal has been persuading us to be humble in front of Nature for a long time.”)

The Sundarlalji in question was Sundarlal Bahuguna, one of India’s most passionate, inventive and relentless environmental campaigners, who died yesterday at age 94. “Woh aaj kal yahin pe hain. (He is here these days.)” Rawat told me. My ears perked up because I was planning to meet him but was not sure he was around.

As the iconic pioneer of the “Chipko”, which literally means hug or cling, environmental movement in 1974 where activists hugged trees as part of their action to save forests and hence the environment, he was already a high-profile name. Over the decades Bahuguna had expanded his movement to include indiscriminate dam construction and that was the reason why he was there. He was opposing the upcoming Tehri Dam over the Bhagirathi river. In fact, he piloted that movement which eventually did not stop the dam construction. The Tehri dam is the tallest dam in India.

The deadly earthquake that year had served to reinforce Bahuguna’s argument against the dam. He was in the process of moving about as part of his campaign. The day I met him for a short conversation he was not too far from the dam site. If memory serves, he was sitting on a jute charpoy.

“Is bhukamp ke pehle bhi yeh dam banana nahi chahiye tha. Is ke baad to ab bilkul bhi nahi banana chahiye,” Bahuguna told me. He had his trademark bandana on. His clothes were spare khadi kurta pajama. His visage had a certain benignity about it which suggested a man who was reflexively kind. There was also a certain mountain-like dignity to his bearing. After all he was born amid the Himalayan mountains in Maroda in the Pauri Garhwal district which too I visited.

When I found out I was from Ahmedabad, he said, "Gandhiji pranam (My respect to Gandhi.)" he was a lifelong Gandhian himself.

We spoke quite a bit but what has stayed with me all these decades is what he said about his iconic Chipko movement. “Jab aap ped ko chipakte or un se lipatte hain to ped bhi aap ko gale lagata hai. (When you hug a tree, it hugs you back.”)

I frequently hug trees and think of this remarkably sensitive man. Here is to Sundarlal Bahuguna, an enlightened soul who communed with Nature before it was fashionable to do so.  

Revisiting Rajiv Gandhi's macabre assassination on its 30th anniversary

It was 30 years ago today that once again the lure of journalism was proved to me in all its macabre glory. At 10.10 p.m. on the night of May 21, 1991 a suicide bomber named Dhanu, a female member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), blew herself up right in front of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, killing him and others instantly.

It was less than 50 minutes later that I was thrown into the thick of things in New Delhi where I was stationed as the South Asia chief correspondent of the New York-based India Abroad and India Abroad News Service. May is a horrible month in Delhi with its summer at its peak. It is obscenely hot.

Living in what Delhites call a “barsati” or a top floor apartment of, in my case, a three-story home the heat can get particularly unbearable. Although I was very well paid then, I did not think of installing an air conditioner. What I had instead was a contraption called a desert cooler that operated on the simple principle of water evaporation cooling the ambient air down. The evaporative cooler made of an aluminum box whose three sides were fitted with sort of excelsior (wood sliver) pads and one side with a fan. When air passes through water-soaked pads, its temperature drops significantly. My evaporative cooler was on that night.

I offer some details about the cooler because it has a bearing on the story that I am about to tell. I was then in the middle of writing a biography of Sam Pitroda, who revolutionized India’s telecom and information technology sector in his capacity as Gandhi’s all-powerful advisor. I was supposed to have met Gandhi for an interview for the book but given his preoccupations with the electioneering he could not find any time for me. In fact, I did meet him at a high tea in the forecourt of his residence in Delhi just a few days before May 21 . I told him how he was delaying my biography of Pitroda’s. He was very apologetic to me, saying, “Either Mani (Shankar Aiyar) or Suman (Dubey) will fix up a meeting with me once I return from this campaign tour.”

He did not return from that campaign tour.

Here is how my biography opened:

“The dessert cooler outside my bedroom made a squeaky noise that night. I had postponed lubricating it for far too long. Behind the door a cricket chirped incessantly. God had omitted lubricating it altogether. The two noises combined to produce an eerie effect. I was gradually slipping into sleep when the phone rang. There is nothing more exasperating than being interrupted in the first stages of sleep. I have this habit of looking at the clock by my bedside every time I am woken up by a phone call. It was 11 p.m. on May 21.

Shreyans Shah was calling from Ahmedabad. Shah, the owner of the Gujarat Samachar, the largest Gujarati daily in the world, asked me a matter-of-fact question. “Is it true that Rajiv Gandhi has been assassinated?” Without realizing the shattering import of his question I said I didn’t know. Shah sounded pretty certain about the news, but since I live in New Delhi he probably thought that I would be better informed about such matters. I promised to get back to him as soon as I found out the truth.

I called Sam Pitroda to ask him if he had heard anything about Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. There was silence on the other end, a silence jagged by anguish. Pitroda had just recovered from a quadruple bypass surgery a few months before, and despite his protestations to the contrary he was still not fit enough to take such news with equanimity. If hurt could be seen on telephone, I saw it that night.”

Pitroda called T N Seshan, who was then the cabinet secretary, the country’s top bureaucrat who went on to become India’s Chief Election Commissioner later. Seshan, a no non-sense man, told Pitroda that there had been an explosion in Sriperumbudur which had killed Gandhi. Pitroda in turn called me back to confirm the news. By 11.10 I knew the operative details of what had occurred.

I quote these opening paragraphs from my own 1992 book not because I love quoting myself but because today is the 30^th anniversary of that gruesome assassination.

It was inevitable that as a journalist I did not sleep that night. Among the callers was the host of a news show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking me to report on the assassination. I remember he asked me if there was any immediate suspicion as to the identity of Gandhi’s killers. I told him that given that it was a suicide bomber in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu it was more than likely that it would turn out to be a plot by the Tamil Tigers separatists of Sri Lanka. It did.

The next time I was anywhere close to him was at the Delhi airport when his badly dismembered body was flown in by a special aircraft in a casket. Since those were pre-24/7 news channel days, there was no media frenzy at the airport. There were only two journalists—my friend and colleague Tarun Basu and I. Gandhi’s close friend and journalist Suman Dubey was among the men shouldering the casket as the former prime minister’s wife Sonia Gandhi came down from the aircraft looking poised but inscrutable. However, her eyes gave a glimpse of the profound sense of loss she must be feeling.

The passage of three decades has done nothing to erase the vividness of those 24 hours.

Iniquitous vaccination, Israel and the Palestinian Authority

I have been trying to look at the current Israel-Palestine conflagration from the standpoint of the COVID 19 pandemic. Expectedly, the picture is deeply troubling in so much as it highlights the inequitableness and inequity in vaccination.

Before I dwell on that, here are some bare numbers. So far over 200 people have died in Israel and the occupied territories as of yesterday because of the rocket attacks by Hamas and the retaliatory strikes by Israel. A majority of deaths has occurred in the Palestine. In contrast, the pandemic has claimed close to 3500 lives in the occupied territories, according to reasonably reliable sources online.

Purely numerically, the pandemic has been more lethal than the current violence but that argument does not mitigate the frustratingly intractable territorial dispute that has stretched over seven decades now. I am also struck by the irony that while the Israel-Palestine standoff is about territory and geographical boundaries, something that respects neither, namely SARS CoV2, has swept through here as well like the rest of the world. The virus made no distinction on the basis of which parts of that region it infects and kills.

That brings me to the remarkably iniquitous vaccination drive. I chanced upon a piece by Matthias Kennes, who is a registered nurse, and medical adviser for the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) COVID-19 response in Hebron, West Bank, Palestine. This is dated February 22, 2021, under the headline “In Israel, you’re 60 times more likely to have a COVID vaccine than in Palestine.” Mind you this was written nearly three months before the current conflict.

Kennes writes, “As a medic, I am shocked. The internationally-acclaimed COVID-19 vaccination success of Israel has a dark side, the consequences of which are being felt cruelly in the West Bank territory of Palestine where I work, and in the blockaded Gaza Strip where my Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) colleagues work.

Israel has managed to vaccinate nearly 4.2 million people with a first dose – that’s around 50 per cent of the population – and 2.8 million people with the full two doses – that’s more than 30 per cent of the population.

Meanwhile, only several thousand doses are available in the Palestinian West Bank, and a delivery of 20,000 reported to have arrived last weekend in Gaza scarcely scratches at the surface of the needs. At a generous maximum, assuming that the 35,000 reported Sputnik and Moderna vaccines are all available, that would be around 0.8 percent of the Palestinian population.”

Those figures are from February. The iniquitous vaccination has not since improved for the Palestinians. As the New York Times reported today, “Covid-19 vaccinations have stopped, and on Tuesday an Israeli strike knocked out the only lab in the territory that processes coronavirus tests.”

How horrible is this existence! On April 9, writing in The Guardian Yara M Asi, said, “Instead of vaccinating Palestinians, Benjamin Netanyahu tried to send thousands of doses around the world as rewards to countries that moved their embassies to Jerusalem.” Asi is a Non-resident Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC, a Policy Member of Al-Shabaka, and a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the University of Central Florida specializing in health in fragile and conflict-affected states.

On May 5, writing in The Times of Israel, Lazar Berman, said, “With Israeli officials floating even the possibility that it might be forced to dump millions of COVID-19 doses, the question must be asked: Why not make them available to the PA?”, PA being the Palestinian Authority which is the governing body of the Palestinian autonomous regions of the West Bank the Gaza Strip established in 1994 as part of the Oslo Accords peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

According to the Johns Hopkins COVID 19 overview , Israel has so far administered 10,537,076 doses to 5,102,510 people, which 53.36 percent of the population fully vaccinated.

My general point is that so much can wrong in life at so many levels at the same time for ordinary people. Imagine what it does to a people to have their lives turned upside down and downside up in a relentless cycle of violence. This is not about who is right and who is wrong but about how life throws completely unexpected problems in the mix.

My Leh Holiday like Roman Holiday, sort of

Every so often, I watch 'Roman Holiday' in the hope that some of Joe Bradley's luck might rub off on me. Not being even remotely romantic, I watch it for the possibility that in the intervening decades the film may magically have a different ending where Bradley (Gregory Peck) does choose to publish his exclusive story about Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn). That's how little a romantic and so much a journalist I am.

I am watching the movie again right now even while writing this post, perhaps my 600th time, give or take 550. To commemorate yet another viewing, let me republish a post I wrote on June 23, 2015. It involved me, a wire correspondent, and a Princess,  Anne. Sort of. Here it is:

June 23, 2015

As a perpetually penurious print journalist (Brilliant alliteration) the 1953 film ‘Roman Holiday’ is the ultimate press romcom. Having watched it more number of times than I care to remember or count over the past 35 years, I am yet to find any parallels in my own professional life. There is the penury, of course. That’s there. Other than that there has been no Peckian suave or Hepburnian elegance. I did in fact work once for a wire service better known as IANS like Joe Bradley’s American News Service (ANS). ‘I’ was missing from ANS in the movie.

I began watching the movie again last night in the hope that the plot might have changed on its own in the past 62 years. I have often wondered about what if movies were organic in the sense that over a period of time they changed their plots on their own, evolved into something that their makers did not intend. What if they were intelligent enough to change their storylines from time to time? That is a separate subject for some other time.

There has been only one assignment in my hard news career spanning over 33 years (Now 40) which had me follow a princess. It was Princess Anne, the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip and sister of Prince Charles. I use these useless honorifics purely as identifiers. She was visiting Leh in Ladakh region of India in the late 1980s  (I think it was 1989) as patron of the Save the Children Charity. I was reporting her visit for IANS. Princess Anne was no Princess Ann of ‘Roman Holiday’ and I was no Joe Bradley. She did not have the Hepburnian elegance, nor I the Peckian suave.

It strikes me even as I write this that I too had my Princess Anne moments minus the subtle romance or even any access whatsoever. The setting was Leh which is at the altitude of 3524 meters or 11,562 feet. One feels breathless at that height not because of any feminine beauty in front of you but because of the thin air. Anne was not a reluctant princess like Hepburn’s Ann and seemed to enjoy the life she was born into. Royal reporters and photographers, who accompanied her from London, took down every detail of her royal paraphernalia including her hats and luggage. She looked propah at all times. Her smile was finely rehearsed and deportment impeccable. She looked like someone accustomed to deference from the world for no apparent reason.

The thing with the movies about journalists and newspapers is that for those of us living that life for a living the plot never quite unfolds the way it does on the big screen. For Anne it was a sort of holiday and for me an assignment. Unlike Bradley I was not likely to miss any event because I was in a real life situation with the prospects of being fired for missing a story being very real. For Gregory Peck/Joe Bradley it was just a movie assignment. Anne did not run away from the palace to experience a life free of regimental royal encumbrances. And I certainly did not promise my wire service any exclusives. There was none to be had other than talking about how charming her hat boxes were.

I wrote several inconsequential stories about the visit during which she did not hold forth on the future of Europe or the world because she had no authority to. We did not have ice cream together. She was blissfully unaware of my presence. For the record, I was too preoccupied with the awe-inspiring beauty of Leh to really notice much of her either. That’s how I spent my Leh Holiday.

The death chill factor

Statistics are never a good measure of human emotions, particularly when it comes to describing health calamities. And yet that is the only way to get a handle on the extent of any such crisis. The SRAS CoV-2 pandemic ravaging India right now is a great example of that.

Perhaps we need a version of the wind chill factor for pandemics. The wind chill factor is a measurement of what the human body feels in cold when there is a wind accompanying it. For instance, if the temperature is 4 degrees Fahrenheit and there is a wind blowing at 30 miles per hour, if you stand outside your body will feel as if the temperature is minus 20.4 F. There is a formula to calculate the wind chill factor.

The reason the body perceives a much colder temperature is because the wind blows the heat away from the body and makes the body feel it to be much lower than it is.

I cite this because after being pummeled for weeks by the critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his terrible handling of the pandemic in India, his hardcore base is beginning to push back with some statistics. For once, they are not pulling those figures out of their ass.

The latest comparison being cited is a mortality table by the Johns Hopkins University’s (JHU) COVID tracker. The supporters give their own perverse twist by saying at the top of the table “India is the safest country to live.” It lists countries such as Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Sweden and the United States along with India to drive home the factual point that India has the lowest mortality of those.

The Johns Hopkins table says that India has 24,372,907 infections, 266,207 deaths, 1.1% case fatality and 19.48 deaths per 100,000 population. I am citing the official table from the JHU. What is cited in the table being circulated by Modi supporters is also from the JHU but it is slightly different. The point that India has among the lowest mortality rates is well taken though.

For the sake of this post I am not going into the contention by serious experts that the actual number of deaths is perhaps already touching a million but gratuitous under-reporting of numbers by the central and state governments irrespective of their party affiliations makes it seem low. Given the size of India’s population any percentage tends to come across as low. That’s just the nature of a massive population.

That is precisely why I am suggesting a version of the wind chill factor pandemics. Let me call it the death chill factor. Quite like its weather counterpart, this factor significantly accentuates the emotional impact of deaths beyond just the bare numbers. Over a quarter million people dying randomly and unexpectedly is a tragedy by any measure. Add to that visuals of scores of bodies floating in the Ganga and the death chill factor multiplies several folds.

This is where the quality of leadership comes in where the leaders must be able to express empathy in a way that the citizens get a clear sense that there is someone at the top of the pyramid who cares. More often than not people understand that the pandemic is an unprecedented health crisis and there are bound to be staggering lapses by any government. The important thing is for the prime minister to be upfront, empathetic and contrite, not one of which he has been. That is where most of the criticism centers on.

The prime minister is quite expeditious in expressing grief when it comes to what he perceives to be individual loss as long as it is of some consequence to him personally but he has consistently failed to live up to one of the key responsibilities of national leadership—to be able to offer soothing, reassuring words even while pointing out the extraordinary nature of the crisis.

It is a measure of how serious the failure has been that even Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ideological parent and compass, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), said, “All of us general public, government and administration - became complacent after the first wave. Doctors were indicating but we became complacent. That's why we're facing this problem. Now there are talks of the third wave but we don't have to fear but prepare ourselves.”

"We are facing this situation because, whether it was the government, administration or public, everyone dropped their guard (Hum sab guflat mein aa gaye) after the first wave despite indications from doctors,” Bhagwat said.

While he has tried to apportion the blame equitably for obvious reasons, the fact that he said what he did at all underscores the extent of the failure.

Some observations about BJP leader 30 years ago and now

From left, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Tarun Basu and I (Photo: Jay Mandal)

As a journalist in New Delhi who was frequently referred to as a “pseudo-secularist” and even “communist” by the Hindu right as early as 1991-92, I find one dramatic difference between the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) then and now. Incidentally, the word “libtard” was not yet coined then otherwise that too would have been used to describe me.

Frequently reporting the capital’s political scene as South Asia chief correspondent of India Abroad and India Abroad News Service then I routinely and regularly interacted not just with BJP grandees such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani but several others such as Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, Sushma Swaraj, K R Malkani and Sikander Bakht, the last being sometimes derisively called the BJP’s “token Muslim” much to his chagrin and anger.

While one did not agree with almost any of these leaders’ ideological predilections, all of them had the civility, maturity and substance to engage without frothing at their mouth. Without an exception all of these figures would happily engage in serious, sometimes even polemical, conversations. Someone like K R Malkani, for instance, a soft-spoken, almost tentative ideologue whose 100^th birth anniversary falls on November 19 this year, would have no problem taking jibes without getting defensive or aggressive about them. That was equally true of Vajpayee, Advani, Swaraj, Joshi and Bakht. Make no mistake, most of them were as dyed in the wool Hindu hardliners as they get but it was still possible to talk to them. 

I once asked Dr. Joshi how he reconciled his physics with his “absurd politics.” Incidentally, he has a Ph.D. in spectroscopy and taught physics at the Allahabad University. He had the sense to laugh at the question, adding, “As someone with a background in physics yourself, you should know how absurd physics gets too.”

More often than not, many of the same BJP types who used colorful sobriquets for me then would look disoriented and deeply surprised after reading my stories which were always entirely focused on facts and had zero editorializing. However, they would always have a perspective. I would then have to tell them that I had absolutely no ideology other than rational humanism. 

I have now been out of Delhi for a very long time—23 years to be precise—but I doubt if one would now find among the BJP leaders those who are not reflexively sullen. Also, anecdotally there appears to be such a marked decline in the level of genuine intellectual curiosity that the names I mentioned showed compared to those now.

Most of the names I mentioned here with the exception of the late Sushma Swaraj, were born much before India’s independence and were exposed to a generation of towering leaders then and their scholarship. That is no longer the case not just in the BJP but all political parties across the spectrum. Self-assurance, self-belief and self-absorption without substance seem to be the order of the day.

Sitting afar, another significant difference I notice in the BJP is that many of them look permanently aggrieved. Despite having ruled the country for seven years, many of them still sound as if they have just been wronged grievously. I never got that sense with any of the names I mentioned even though oftentimes they were part of a very thin parliamentary presence.