Mayank Chhaya Daily

Bhajia, leftover burnt vegetable oil and painting

The elephant--Mayank Chhaya

A few days ago, I made some bhajias on a whim. They turned out to be delicious but that is not the point of this post. It is about the thickened, somewhat burnt cooking oil that remained with bits of deeply fried besan droplets in it. I could have thrown the oil away in trash. For some reason though I just left it untouched in my oven along with other pans.

This morning I woke up with an epiphany. I know it is a grand word to describe something so mundane but let’s go with it. The epiphany was to prime a page of my sketchbook with that oil strained off the besan bits. That made the paper’s surface rather slick. I then used three pastels, dark blue, light blue and green to create a somewhat like a jungle foliage.

As expected, my pastels worked wonderfully on the vegetable oil-slathered paper. In the foreground, I had the idea about creating either a sleeping or dead elephant with quick broad brushstrokes in black acrylic. I did. Then I added a few blade-like marks near the head of the elephant to create some effect of grass and some flora.

The result is this quick work.

All stories do not have to have a moral but this one has—bhajias can lead to both intense acidity and creativity.

Working on my memoir 'A Tangential Life' like a spasmodic migraine

I have been working on my memoir, which I titled ‘A Tangential Life’ more than a decade ago, in fits and starts, almost like a spasmodic migraine. It is a perfect title for my life as a journalist because during the course of my having been one for 40 years now I have formed tangents with scores of people of consequence and great prominence without even remotely changing them in any way and most definitely remaining unchanged by them.

Before I get into the reason for randomly talking of my memoir, let me cite just one example. Soon after the release of the first edition my Dalai Lama biography ‘Man, Monk, Mystic’ by Doubleday/Random House here in America in 2007 I was interviewed by some half a dozen affiliate radio stations of the National Public Radio (NPR). One recurring question was, “So how did the Dalai Lama influence/change your life?” or versions of that.

For someone as detached as I am and so singular in his cosmic view as I am it is nearly impossible to answer that question honestly without coming across as rude, arrogant, conceited or even as a pompous jerk. I am, of course, none of those. I am merely a person of lifelong joyous detachment from the humdrum. My answer would invariably be varying versions of the same response, namely “The Dalai Lama has had no philosophical impact on my life at all. And that is true of many people of consequence I have come into contact with. They do not leave any mark.” You can imagine why I said there was no way to answer that question with candor without sounding like a pompous jerk. The simple fact is that I have never been changed by anyone.

Coming back to the reason for this post, I was watching an interview with the well-known journalist and columnist Vir Sanghvi with another well-known television journalist Barkha Dutt. Sanghvi is about four years older than me and is pretty much a contemporary in the profession. We have never met and there is next to no chance that he knows of me. However, when it comes to having interacted, interviewed and known Indian public figures we have done so with the same lot. In this particular interview Sanghvi is asked by Dutt about his most difficult interview. He mentions the late Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whom he knew very well for a long time. The interview is pegged to the publication of Sanghvi's memoir sharply and pithily titled 'A Rude Life' and I am sure he has many remarkable and readable stories to tell.

Vajpayee is one of those common names between Sanghvi and I as journalists. I would not claim to have known Vajpayee very well but I met him very frequently throughout my decade in New Delhi from 1989. I do not claim to know anyone well anymore because one really does not. I have barely cracked myself yet. But I digress.

Sanghvi makes a valid point about Vajpayee’s reticence and his peculiar habit to take very long pauses. In fact, I once told him this, “Atalji, aap itne lambey pauses lete hain ke un ke beech mein Dilip Kumar ke do teen pauses aa sakten hain. (Your pauses are so long that one can fit two or three pauses by Dilip Kumar in between.)” He instantly got the humor and laughed.

Sanghvi is right about Vajpayee’s habit of answering the first question even as you have moved on to your second, often wrongly thinking he was not going to because of his long pauses.

Generally, I did not have a problem drawing Vajpayee out. I would point out one extraordinary occasion in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque on December 6, 1992, when Tarun Basu, my colleague and dear friend who was the founder-editor of the IANS wire, and I were granted an interview by Vajpayee just three days after the disaster, the only one of its kind. The way we questioned him animated Vajpayee so much that he said many damning things about his Bharatiya Janata Party’s action, many of which were off-the-record but some which were on the record practically split the party. During that one interaction, there were no pauses at all. He was like a man driven, willing to empty his disquiet with Tarun and I.

Another figure that Sanghvi talks about is the superstar Amitabh Bachchan whom he has known closely. In my case, I would not say I have known him at all but I have met him a couple of times for rather detailed interviews. In particular, Sanghvi talks about Bachchan's near fatal 1982 accident on the sets of a movie called 'Coolie' by Manmohan Desai. Speaking of tangents, I was there at Bachchan's residence 'Prateeksha' as a young journalist soon after he returned home from Bomaby's Breach Candy Hospital. I was the only journalist present when a devotee of his ran backwards from Baroda to Bombay as his prayer. 

Sanghvi and I have been privy to, him far more intimately than I, to many of the same movers and shakers of India. However, like I said, I have chosen to remain tangential to many historic events and historic figures during my four decades. Hence the title ‘A Tangential Life’, likely out sometime late next year.

Perpetually trying to rise above farce under Steven Weinberg's advice

Professor Steven Weinberg (Photo: he Nobel Foundation archive.)

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

Of the many books I have read about physics by physicists and others this is by far the grandest and the most philosophically insightful idea that I have come across. As a teenager growing up in Ahmedabad in the 1970s ever since I first read the Nobel Prize winning physicist’s brilliant book ‘The First Three Minutes’ at age 18 and came upon this quote, it has stayed with me. I can recite it verbatim at any time of night and day.

In Professor Weinberg’s passing at age 88 not just the world of physics but the world generally has lost a scintillating intellect and profound thinker.

He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize with Sheldon Lee Glashow and Abdus Salam "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current."

I was always interested in physics as I recall from an early age, perhaps early teenage. However, it was when I read Weinberg’s ‘The First Three Minutes’ generally and this quote particularly that my lifelong passion and fascination with the subject was fully cemented. In that book, he writes about how at about one-hundredth of a second of the universe, “the earliest time about which we can speak with any confidence”, the temperature of the universe was a hundred thousand million degrees or 10 raised to 11 Centigrade. At that temperature nothing held together—atoms, molecules and even the nuclei of atoms. This temperature had followed a general explosion everywhere and not in just one spot.

He then writes about the temperature dropping to thirty thousand million in about one-tenth of a second. Fourteen seconds into the explosion, when the temperature dropped to three thousand million, things began to cool down. At the end of the first three minutes, the temperature had dropped to one thousand million degrees and that led to the protons and neutrons forming complex nuclei. As the first three minutes ended, the universe was most light, awash in neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.

Once you are exposed to this view and that too as a teenager, life takes a different turn culturally, philosophically and intellectually. It is little wonder that I struggle to relate to the mundane and the humdrum.

I had read up Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Schrodinger’s Cat before Weinberg but it was his philosophical construct about the effort to understand the universe lifting human life above farce that firmed up my direction. For that I am grateful.

The Dalai Lama's inner circle, Pegasus spyware and I*

Of all the news stories emanating from the exposé about Pegasus spyware and its alleged deployment by at least 11 governments, including apparently India, I am most fascinated by the one about the mobile devices of the inner circle of the Dalai Lama being targeted.

The Guardian reported yesterday that said, “The phone numbers of a top ring of advisers around the Dalai Lama are believed to have been selected as those of people of interest by government clients of NSO Group. Analysis strongly indicates that the Indian government was selecting the potential targets.”

New Delhi has vehemently rejected all such allegations as an attempt to “malign India’s democracy.”

Let’s for a moment or two put aside that denial and focus on why I am fascinated by this story. There are elements to it which seem so delightfully magical here. On the one hand, we have a more than six-centuries-old institution of the Dalai Lama flowing from the mysterious practice of finding, testing and anointing reincarnations of a Dalai Lama that died. The practice of the search itself is quite magical. I have written about it in my critically acclaimed and authorized biography of the Dalai Lama, first issued as ‘Dalai Lama: Man, Monk, Mystic’ in 2007 by Doubleday and over 20 other global publishers and recently updated as ‘The Dénouement: The 14th Dalai Lama's life of persistence’.

On the other hand, you have a piece of spookily magical software called Pegasus that sits on your mobile devices completely unbeknownst to you accessing everything on it, including remotely operating your camera and microphone.

If the Guardian report is to be believed, now these two have come together with the phones of the Dalai Lama’s inner circle being allegedly spied on. Interestingly, there are at least two names mentioned by the Guardian whose phones were apparently targeted, whom I have known for a long time. They are Tempa Tsering, the Dalai Lama’s longtime envoy to Delhi as well as his brother-in-law, and Tenzin Taklha, who was once in charge of the Dalai Lama’s security and went on to become a senior aide. I have known and interacted with both quite a bit during the course of my researching for the book. During my posting in New Delhi, I used to meet Tsering quite regularly to keep myself abreast of the goings-on.

The Guardian story suggests that the motivating factor behind the phones of the Dalai Lama’s inner circle being targeted by New Delhi could be the question of the Dalai Lama’s succession which is a very urgent and crucial one for China but India equally. Once again, I have extensively written about this over the years and have only recently engaged Dr. Orville Schell, one of America’s foremost Sinologists, on this very theme. You can watch that interview right here on my YouTube channel.

Even though officially China has always scoffed at and dismissed the institution of the Dalai Lama, it is equally aware of its unassailable sway over the Tibetan people in Tibet. It is equally conscious that the Dalai Lama enjoys considerable respect and fascination even within the Han Chinese via the agency of Tibetan Buddhism. Beijing has been doing everything in its powers to hijack the process of finding and appointing a pliable successor to the Dalai Lama once the 14^th dies. It sees a great value to having a puppet Dalai Lama through whom it thinks it can control and calm a restive region. This notwithstanding that the Tibetans in Tibet will clearly see through these machinations.

With that as the backdrop, the 86-year-old Dalai Lama is keeping his intentions rather close to his chest even while from time to time suggesting that whether the institution of the Dalai Lama continues beyond him is up to the Tibetans. That is more a ploy to work behind the scenes to ensure that Beijing does not run away with the powerful institution.

The Guardian quotes an unnamed former staffer with the Tibetan administration in exile in McLeod Ganj, the seat of the Dalai Lama, to say, “India wants to make sure that Tibetans don’t strike a deal with the Chinese that involves the Dalai Lama going back to Tibet.”

I seriously doubt if the Dalai Lama will strike a deal of any significance without Delhi being at least aware of it if not actually consulted about. His return to Lhasa has been speculated about for years and I too have substantively addressed it in my book. In fact, during my last interview with him at his residence, he even joked, “You will come with me to Lhasa to do part 2 of the biography when I return.” He then guffawed as he does so often at the seeming improbability of it.

The idea that New Delhi may also be monitoring these devices over the informal contacts between China and Tibetans in exile in order not to be taken by surprise or upstaged by the making of any deal between the two is a far-fetched one. From what I know, the Dalai Lama is acutely conscious about the lengths to which India has historically gone to host him and the Tibetan refugees since 1959 and considers it important that whatever he may choose has official support from Delhi. He thinks he would be ingrate to not keep Delhi well informed.

The Guardian story about the Dalai Lama’s inner circle being targeted via Pegasus is quite remarkable in that it suggests how the spyware could become a powerful tool for such a wide variety of purposes, most of which are deeply worrisome.

* I am aware that the headline is gratuitous but these days one's got attract some attention.

Some observations about Pegasus

NSO Group, the Israeli company which created and licenses the spyware Pegasus, is pissed.  Yesterday a spokesperson issued a statement that seemed to suggest that the company will no longer entertain any media inquiries.

First let me quote the statement in its entirety and then make some observations.

Here it is:

“Enough is enough!

“In light of the recent planned and well-orchestrated media campaign led by Forbidden Stories and pushed by special interest groups, and due to the complete disregard of the facts, NSO is announcing it will no longer be responding to media inquiries on this matter and it will not play along with the vicious and slanderous campaign.

“We will state again:

“The list is not a list of targets or potential targets of Pegasus.

“The numbers in the list are not related to NSO group.

“Any claim that a name in the list is necessarily related to a Pegasus target or Pegasus potential target is erroneous and false.

“NSO is a technology company. We do not operate the system, nor do we have access to the data of our customers, yet they are obligated to provide us with such information under investigations.

“NSO will thoroughly investigate any credible proof of misuse of its technologies, as we always had, and will shut down the system where necessary.

“NSO will continue its mission of saving lives, helping governments around the world prevent terror attacks, break up pedophilia, sex, and drug-trafficking rings, locate missing and kidnapped children, locate survivors trapped under collapsed buildings, and protect airspace against disruptive penetration by dangerous drones.”

Ends

Essentially what we are being told is to make a distinction between the company licensing the ware to a client, which is apparently always a government, and the way that client/government may choose to use/misuse/abuse it. Personally, I did not have to be taught to make that distinction. I was already doing that.

Many technologies are a double-edged sword. They cut both ways. In the case of Pegasus, it can do all of what the company says it can, namely, “save lives, help governments around the world prevent terror attacks, break up pedophilia, sex, and drug-trafficking rings, locate missing and kidnapped children, locate survivors trapped under collapsed buildings, and protect airspace against disruptive penetration by dangerous drones.”

That is the ostensible purpose for which governments buy the license. However, and this is a massive however, the fundamental attraction of Pegasus is obviously its ability to surveil for reasons and in categories that do not fall under those listed above. Instead, they enter the political and personal realms. There is zero doubt in my mind that governments which have bought the license, including apparently India, would have deployed it outside the ambit of what NSO says it is supposed to be used for.

In this context, let me cite what the company statement says here: “NSO is a technology company. We do not operate the system, nor do we have access to the data of our customers, yet they are obligated to provide us with such information under investigations.”

That NSO customers are “obligated” to provide the company information under investigations is the operative part. I do not know whether it happens at all or happens erratically and with great reluctance. That’s where the rub lies.

If people and institutions were targeted in India for specific political and personal motives, then it is a huge problem that goes to the very heart of individual civil liberties and hence democracy itself. I seriously wonder whether we will ever get the full measure or even any substantive measure of whether Pegasus has been deployed in India and if so on whose phones and why. For instance, if Congress Party grandee and Member of Parliament Rahul Gandhi was targeted, it begs an explanation why. Did he meet any of the threat criteria that NSO says Pegasus is supposed to counter? The question is valid for any of other names mentioned as Pegasus targets in India.

It is very important that we know that NSO has created guardrails that compel governments to be forthcoming about whether its spyware is being used for reasons that clearly violate individual civil liberties.

Anecdotally, the reaction among ordinary citizens to these pernicious intrusions into individual civil liberties has been rather muted and even apathetic. The outrage is limited to those who are seen as the elite in India. That is disturbing because Pegasus can be deployed just as easily on ordinary citizens’ phones for reasons which are downright personal and vindictive.

There ought to be greater outrage against the practice even if so far the use appears to be against public figures whom ordinary people, particularly those who support the Bharatiya Janata Party government, detest along partisan lines and therefore would have no compunctions if their liberties and privacy were so flagrantly violated. They should remember that at some point in the near or not-so-near future there will be a government of a different ideological hue and they too could easily use the same spyware against those who are choosing to be indifferent or even acquiescent now. Remember that.

Here is to Lynn Franklin

Lynn C. Franklin displaying a scarf designed by me that she bought (Photo: Selfie)

I was introduced to Lynn Franklin by Mallika Sarabhai sometime in 1997-98. It was shortly after I had been authorized by the Dalai Lama to write a biography. Lynn, a well-known New York-based literary agent, was gracious and expeditious in responding to my inquiry if she would consider representing me. She said yes without any delay which took a major load off of me since US publishers do not normally deal directly with writers.

The fact that it was an authorized biography and I had had the full cooperation from the Dalai Lama and his office carried a great deal of weight and made Lynn’s task that much lighter. My being an unknown entity to US publisher was mitigated by the formal authorization and Lynn’s representation.

When I first spoke to Lynn by phone from Delhi she sounded immediately amiable and someone who knew her business very well.

“When can you send an outline etc.?” she asked me to which I replied right away. I did that because I had already worked out an outline.

Based on that we spoke again a couple of weeks later when Lynn said, “This would be an easy sell. There are three publishers interested, including Doubleday/Random House.”

I left it to Lynn to decide whom we should go with, the amount of advance certainly being a consideration. We eventually went for Doubleday.

I was thinking of our early interaction yesterday in the immediate aftermath of Lynn’s passing on July 19 at age 74 due to cancer-related complications. She had let it be known on Facebook without any fuss or sentimentalism that she did not have too much life left.

On June 19, I sent the following email to her:

“I am generally not at a loss for words but this one time I do feel awkward asking you. I just saw a photograph of yours on your Facebook timeline. It appears you are not well. May I ask if the problem is serious? It certainly seems so.

I am sorry if I am prying.

My best to you as always. You are exceptional.”

She replied:

Yes. You know I’ve been dealing with metastatic breast cancer for 10 years. Now I’m in hospice. Days or something left.  No intrusion.

Precisely a month after that exchange Lynn passed away.

As expected, she turned out to be an extraordinary literary agent for me who guarded my commercial and literary interests with quiet confidence. By 2002-2003 Lynn had justifiably begun to get restless about my not submitting any manuscript at all. I told her I still had some interviews to finish.

Then sometime in 2003 or 2004 the Dalai Lama was visiting the U.S.; Bloomington, Indiana being one of his major stops. Lynn had never met the Dalai Lama and was quite keen to do so. She was not sure if I would be able to organize an audience. I reassured her that it would not be a problem. She and I met in Bloomington on the sidelines of a major Tibetan initiation event the Dalai Lama was involved in.

We were granted an audience at the end of a particularly hectic day. Lynn was a bit nervous, still unsure if an audience was actually going to take place. I kept reassuring her it would. And then suddenly she was in front of the Dalai Lama. She was quite overcome as he draped a khata, a white ceremonial Tibetan silk scarf, around her shoulders and touched her head. It was a routine I had gone through many times before since I had spent weeks interviewing him everyday at his residence in McLeod Ganj in Himachal Pradesh, India.

Normally those who come to meet the Dalai Lama carry their own khata. I have never done that. Lynn was unaware of the practice. So when the Dalai Lama gave a khata himself, she found it quite precious. After exchanging some pleasantries, we left.

As we stepped out, Lynn hugged me and welled up.

It was not until early 2007 that I had submitted the final manuscript. After the commissioning editor at Doubleday, Trace Murphy approved it, I told Lynn something that stunned her. I had finished writing the book in one month from start to finish; over 175,000 words, just a month prior to the submission.

“No wonder you kept stalling things,” she mock-slapped my shoulder and laughed during a lunch in New York after our meeting at Doubleday.

It was a tribute to Lynn’s extraordinary work as a literary agent that she sold the publishing rights of my book to publishers around the world in close to 25 languages, including in Arabic. The Arabic edition, incidentally, was renewed only late last year.

Between 2007 and 2012 when I decided to become a full-time writer it was Lynn’s remarkable work that guaranteed that I had substantial royalty advances from around the world to sustain a decent and comfortable life. Not once did she make a show of the amount of work she was putting in. All that she would do is either send me a check or a new contract.

Over the years we met a few times at her office and once or twice at her lovely Park Avenue apartment. One of Lynn’s gentle complaints to me about me was that I did not project myself enough considering that I was an authorized biographer of the Dalai Lama whom I had met so many times. My answer to her was and still remains, “Let my book do the talking. If that is not enough, that’s just too bad.”

We, of course, live in a time of hyper promotion of everything, something I have eschewed steadfastly and paid the price for it.

Once in 2013 I was so hard up that I reached out to Lynn to see if there was any royalty had accrued. She immediately sent me $200. It was only in 2016 that I found out that Lynn had sent the money out of her own pocket.

Lynn’s influence on my career as a writer has been exceptional in so much as it meant that her assiduous selling of the book’s publishing rights ensured that I had money in my pockets for several years.

Even now when an occasional renewal payment, no matter how small, arrives, I think of Lynn.

Lynn is gone but she will remain with me until I am gone.

Here is to dear Lynn.

My questions to NSO Group about Pegasus and their response

I reached out to NSO Group this morning as part of working on the Pegasus spyware story for ‘Mayank Chhaya Reports’ (MCR). I sent the following questions:

• Typically, which government agency orders your spyware for legitimate purposes?
• In the Indian context, which agency ordered it?
• How much does it cost to buy your spyware?
• Once bought does Pegasus belong to the buyer in perpetuity or it has some sort of a life span?
• Who at NSO monitors, if at all, how it is deployed?
• Do you have the ability to terminate its use should you find the user/buyer has defied your core requirements?

I received the following formal response attributable to an “NSO Spokesperson”. They are not necessarily answers to my questions but a general response. Nevertheless, it is important to carry them.

“NSO is not related to the list published by Forbidden Stories, it is not a NSO list, and it never was – stating that it is, is fabricated information. It is not a list of targets or potential targets of NSO`s customers, and your repeated reliance on this list and association of the people on this list as potential surveillance targets is false and misleading.

“NSO does not have access to the data of its customers, yet they are obligated to provide us with such information under investigations.

“From a sensational headline screaming “50,000 phone numbers” we are left with 37, that we are still seeking any proof of their relation to NSO.

“If and when NSO will receive a credible proof of misuse of its technologies, it will conduct a thorough investigation, as it always had and always will.

“NSO products are saving lives and helping governments fight crime and terror.”

Of Mangal Pandey and the East India Company

Yesterday, July 19, was the 194^th birth anniversary of Mangal Pandey, a key figure in the 1857 mutiny by him and other Indian soldiers employed by the East India Company. It was this great uprising, or the first war of independence, that led to the demise of the most galling and yet the most successful example of a corporate takeover of a country.

Pandey, who was born on July 19, 1827, was recruited as a soldier by the East India Company in 1849. The company used this army, which at its peak was 200,000 men, twice the number of what England had, to remote-control what was then the world’s richest country. India, or at any rate what was then India, contributed some 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Its dominance over the global economy was nothing short of astonishing.

As many of you might know, during Pandey's posting in Barrackpore in the mid-1850s, the soldiers were introduced to the Enfield rifle. The rifle used cartridges which were either greased with cow lard or pig lard and the soldiers like Pandey were required to bite off the bullet ends in order to load them. The idea that Hindu soldiers would bite off cow lard and Muslim soldiers pig lard was loaded with mutiny and the company did not realize it. It led to spectacular violence caused by the mutiny, which the English called the Sepoy Mutiny, on both sides but the company was particularly indiscriminate in its killings.

The 1857 mutiny compelled the British crown to nationalize the East India Company in 1858.

A lot of people do not realize that between 1600 and 1857 it was a corporation, the East India Company that gradually took over India by starting small early on but eventually increasing its stranglehold on the rich country. Its 200,000-strong army was used to control various states.

Because it was Mangal Pandey’s anniversary yesterday I re-read about the East India Company to refresh my information that I had read in the late 1970s that it was a very small company to begin with. During its first 20 years, it was a like a modern-day Silicon Valley start-up run from the home of its governor, Sir Thomas Smythe. Its total staff was just six people. By 1700 it had only 35 permanent employees and a small office in London. By 1785 it had 159 permanent employees in London but control India from there.

It is astounding how a company with next to no grounding in India insidiously built up its control over what then was the world’s richest society. Although the 1857 uprising did not end the company’s by then over 250-year-long involvement with India, it certainly brought the British crown in in 1858. Technically, the British Raj over India was 89 years from 1858 to 1947 but the English stranglehold over it was for close to three centuries.

Since I have long been working on a novel that touches upon some of this background I remain fascinated by how a country as rich and skilled as India could fall prey to colonial depredations so easily. It was not a country as we understand it today in terms of a sense of national consciousness and shared destiny. With the Mughals in charge first and then hundreds of small kingdoms and principalities the idea of India was amorphous. It was only in response to the cruel British colonial presence spread over nearly nine decades that we began to form contours of what India is today.

Mangal Pandey and his fellow mutineers’ motivations may not necessarily have been lofty but their action certainly changed the course of history which eventually led to independence.

Pegasus is now a spyware that infects and not a horse that flies

In Greek mythology Pegasus is a winged horse that could fly, and which eventually became a constellation. It is also seen as a symbol of soul and its immortality that can inspire poetry. However, in the world we live in it is an unstoppable military grade spyware that threatens to upend democratic processes around the world because it has lent itself to alleged governmental abuse in at least ten countries, including India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

A total of 37 phones, 10 of which are said to be Indian, were infected with the Pegasus spyware so powerful as to be able to strip mobile devices of any known security. In a sense, mobile devices infected with Pegasus are like an electronic tether which only created an illusion of free movement.

The spyware created by an Israeli company called NSO group and its availability is mainly restricted to governments. However, how these governments use the spyware is apparently beyond the control of the company. That means that it could just as easily be used to track a terrorist’s communications as a jealous minister spying on his wife’s extramarital affair.

That is the thing with any great technology. It is morally not just agnostic but indifferent and there lies the rub. The expose of this spyware is a result of a significant investigation based on a leaked database accessed by Paris-based media nonprofit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International and shared with The Wire, Le Monde, The Guardian, Washington Post Die Zeit, Suddeutsche Zeitung and 10 other Mexican, Arab and European news organizations as part of a collaborative investigation called the ‘Pegasus Project’.

The investigation is causing both global ripples as well serious worries about how a spyware like this seriously threatens democratic processes and institutions apart from individual civil liberties. Since the mobile phone owners of those who were targeted never just call and message themselves a whole ecology of their friends gets swept up in such egregious surveillance.

It has been pointed out that Pegasus is so sophisticated that it turns your mobile phone into an appendage of yours and can even turn on its camera and microphone to watch and hear you without you realizing it. It might be best to shove your mobile phone into a microwave oven but please do not turn on the oven unless you want to both destroy the phone and create a serious fire hazard. You can also shove it up your arse sometimes.

I have no FOMO* about this as a journalist because my phone number is not on this list. In a sense, it may be a reflection on my inconsequentiality as a journalist but then I would rather be inconsequential than be intruded upon and defiled. To be sure, there are people whose phones may be needed to be tracked but a vast majority of people, including even those meddlesome journalists, do not deserve this at all.

I have just begun working on a story for Mayank Chhaya Reports (MCR) about the fallout of Pegasus. As part of that, tomorrow I will interview the leading India telecom and security expert Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad.

Since I am working on the Pegasus story for MCR, my reading so far suggests that other than the act of infecting phones with the spyware, which is outrageous in itself and represents a major threat, the substance of it is still rather thin.

At one level, of course, the story is about the creation and use of a spyware which can strip your devices of all known security. At the more insidious level we have to establish how it has been deployed for clearly malicious purposes with larger societal consequences.

Among the names that came out today whose phones may have been infected is that Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi. Once again, reading the report I am not clear about the extent of spying, its details and its eventual political misuse and abuse against Rahul and others. Roughly such intrusions happened in 2018 which means in theory it has been about three years. I am not saying the intrusion lasted three years. Maybe it did, maybe it did not. The point though is whether Rahul Gandhi and others were subjected to coercive and even punitive measures resulting from the information that may have been collected from their phones. That goes for the journalists too. I have read about at least one case of a rural journalist, Rupesh Kumar Singh, whose name appears on the list was in fact jailed for writing a questioning report about the death of tribal man. Because of that reporting Singh was detained for two days on June 4-6, 2019.

As for Rahul, since he was a target of surveillance in the run-up to the 2019 general election, at the very least it shows a political intent by whoever ordered it. That in and of itself is deeply problematic.

Speaking in parliament India’s Communications and Electronics & Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnav sounded dismissive about the Pegasus controversy and quite predictably suggested that its timing was curious considering it came just a day before the start of the monsoon session of India’s parliament. It was if every newspaper in the world that carried the exposé was waiting for the monsoon session to start. In any case, the timing of the exposé has zero connection or relevance to the disturbing implications of this kind of surveillance.

*In case you do not speak the social media lingua franca, FOMO is a short for Fear of Missing Out.

Of dreams and multiversal identities

Photo: MC

I have long thought that dreams are more complicated than what experts have been saying. Just the one simple fact that they are often about things, situations, experiences and so on that you have absolutely never gone through in your "real" life should mean that their origin, their trigger, is not as simple as we think. Over the years I have offered fantastical theories about dreams like the one below that I wrote about in 2014. While you read that consider this one as well. I am beginning to think that our parallel multiversal identities all live together on generally separated layers in a single brain. Sometimes we jump those layers and end up experiencing what seems like a dream in a particular life but are in fact real specific to that layer of existence. 

I have dreams often enough which have absolutely no shred of connection to my life in this universe were I am writing this post. I do not know how to explain dreaming of things that I have absolutely never been through. I know you might argue that dreams are not necessarily about what one has been through and hence they are dreams. Let me counter it by asking where then those ideas are coming from. 

Perhaps what I wrote on October 6, 2014 offers some explanation, no matter how absurd it may sound. And it does sound loony but then who cares?

October 6, 2014

It has been quite a while since I spun one of my fake but, presumably, entertaining cosmic theories. This one relates to parallel universes and dreams. I think dreams are information spillovers or leaks from one of the many universes where one of our many versions exists into our own.

The fact that dreams are so vivid and so precisely laid out and yet so improbable means that they are bits of experiences that our own version in a parallel universe could be going through. They do not make sense in what we think is our own universe because they have no reference to the context here.

Last night, for instance, I had a dream where I was carrying a vial of iodine for some purpose in what could well be a parallel universe. In the universe that this version of me exists I actually needed my nasal drops because my nose was blocked solid. Before I woke up in the midst of the iodine dream to spray some nasal drops, I remember the vial to be so distinctly real and even having considered putting a couple of drops of iodine in my nose. Mercifully, I did not.

It was at that point in the night in this universe that I started to think about information leaks or spillovers within a multiverse. As I sat up thinking a bit more, I started to wonder whether what we call consciousness is common through these infinite parallel universes. Think of these parallel universes as slabs of luminescent glass stacked up neatly on each other. Now picture consciousness as a beam of light running through the center of all those slabs or horizontal monoliths. That is what I have in mind.

While the same consciousness animates all our infinite existences or versions in this multiverse, it fashions itself and its sensory responses to the realities of a particular universe. So it is entirely possible that the leak from a parallel universe showing me a vial of iodine had a specific purpose that was relevant to that world but when it slipped into my dream last night, it seemed bizarre.

To make it more interesting, we can also have consciousness as something specific and distinct to each of these infinite universes. In such a scenario, dreams could be a clash of consciousnesses (Consciousnesses is not a word but I am using it for this purpose) within this multiverse.