Mayank Chhaya Daily

An important book in Gujarati about Indian media and secularism

I have been reading a remarkably detailed book about the Indian media and secularism by a dear friend a fellow journalist and poet, Dr. Dharmesh Bhatt of Mumbai. Dharmesh approaches this perpetually incendiary subject almost forensically tracing the history of communal/sectarian violence in India from as early as 1851 when rioting between the Parsi and Muslim communities broke out. Dharmesh enlists 20 milestone conflagration to drive home his thesis about the complexity and diversity of such riots that not only frequently tear apart India's social fabric but pose a grave challenge to the Indian media as well expose ideological fault lines.

Speaking of thesis, Dharmesh's book has resulted from his dissertation for his Ph.D. Being an astute journalist and observer of India's many societal challenges, Dharmesh brings to bear his expertise of juxtaposing a vast number of communal breakdowns over the past couple of centuries and offer a clear-eyed perspective. The only problem with the slim 158-page book titled 'Bhartiya Prasar Madhymo Aney Binsampradayikta', published by Navbharat Sahitya Mandir, Mumbai, priced 250 rupees, is that it is in Gujarati which makes its accessibility limited. 

Dharmesh takes a middle-path approach to the overwhelming challenges that India and the Indian media face because of frequent breakdowns in its societal equations.

At a time when the debate over the Indian idea of secularism, which dominated as the political currency right until 2014, has not just become bellicose and bilious but even viciously violent, this book offers both micro and macro perspectives. At some point, Dharmesh should consider getting it translated into English and other Indian languages. He successfully combines his skills as a journalist with scholarly strengths to marshal a wide variety of facts to support the overall narrative of the book. Since we live in the times of ever shortening attention spans, while the book's slimness is useful, its very detailed explanation of the many conflagrations and tensions could be a challenge for the younger readers. However, it is a good problem to have.

If I had my way, I would prescribe this as a textbook for high school students who can get an early and elaborate overview of the world they are going to step into.

Ardhanārīśwara, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, two-spirit people and America

New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s seemingly scolding tone in her tweet above over the Texas abortion debate set me thinking about India; I mean in the particular context of two-spirit people.

The Indian Health Service (HIS), which is part of the Federal Health Program for American Indians and Alaska Natives, describes two-spirit people thus: “Native American two-spirit people were male, female, and sometimes intersexed individuals who combined activities of both men and women with traits unique to their status as two-spirit people. In most tribes, they were considered neither men nor women; they occupied a distinct, alternative gender status. In tribes where two-spirit males and females were referred to with the same term, this status amounted to a third gender. In other cases, two-spirit females were referred to with a distinct term and, therefore, constituted a fourth gender.”

The term that instantly came to mind while reading the Congresswoman’s tweet was the Indian (as in Indian from India) term अर्धनारीश्वर, Ardhanārīśwara, which has existed for millennia. It is a composite of both male and female forms represented jointly by Shiv and Parvati. In Sanskrit, the term means the lord who is half woman. The idea that one of Hinduism’s presiding deities can be half male and half female has existed for millennia in India without there being any controversy about it at all.

The composite broadly means that male and female principles and even energies are inseparable. This is enlightened androgyny.

I just wanted to make this limited reference in response to Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet which some perceived as putting down those who are not necessarily aware of who two-spirit people are.

If I were Xi Jinping...

If I were China’s President Xi Jinping, I would be mighty pleased at one level that five countries, one of them still a superpower, one a has-been super power, one a wannabe superpower, one which does not want to be a superpower even while wanting to be and one never-gonnabe-superpower, have to join hands to contain my country’s perceived global threat.

Yesterday, US President Joe Biden joined Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison to announce a trilateral security partnership to confront China. The partnership includes helping Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines and patrol the Pacific where the Chinese are constantly flexing their muscles. That takes care of my reference to a current superpower (America), a has-been superpower (Britain) and never-gonnabe-superpower (Australia.) That still leaves the wannabe superpower which would be India and Japan, the one which does not want to be a superpower even while wanting to be.

India fits in a somewhat different context here. India along with Japan make up what is known as the QUAD, a quadrilateral arrangement with America and Australia.

It is interesting that Biden announced this trilateral security partnership barely nine days before the QUAD leaders, Biden, Morrison, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga meet for an “in-person” summit in Washington on September 24. One of the overarching objectives of the QUAD is also to confront and contain China.

So If I were Xi, I would be pleased in my strongman impulses that five countries feel compelled to gang up against me. That may or may not be true but the optics of these two arrangements would play well within China’s assertively nationalistic Communist Party cadres whose number touch a staggering 95 million. I am told that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose members can rival the Chinese Communists in professing nationalism, has a bigger membership base.

The trilateral security partnership does have the potential to confuse the mandate of the QUAD and that too coming as it did just days before the latter’s summit. I would be interested to see how Tokyo would perceive Canberra with nuclear-powered submarines. It is true that Australia and Japan are allies now even as Australia’s once strong relationship with China has hit its nadir. But remember in international diplomacy there are no permanent friends or foes. There are only permanent national interests.

One of the dangers of this trilateral and quadrilateral comings together is that it could also fuel China’s paranoia and might provoke it to do something dramatic. The easiest place for it do something dramatic is with India being its next-door neighbor. It is a delicate balance for New Delhi to be part of the QUAD even while professing to have good working relations with Beijing. China does not yet have a matching security partnership except for its unequal ties with Russia, a shadow of the former Soviet Union. Pakistan, notwithstanding its nuclear weapons, is only just a poodle here.

It would be interesting to see how the QUAD summit plays out in the aftermath of the US-UK-Australia security partnership.

I am sure Beijing is paying close attention to both.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan at the U.N. General Assembly (File photo: Jay Mandal/On Assignment)

On a tangential note, I wonder what Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan  thinks in his private mind about the huge chasm between his country's global ambition it perceives buttressed by its nuclear weapons and what the actual reality is. It was a country that was carved out of India inhabited essentially by the same stock of people and yet so removed from a grouping like the QUAD. In a perverse way though it says something about the craftiness of the Pakistani state that it has for 20 years managed to broadly two-time America with China and China with America. 

Discovering the astounding Japanese artist Uemura Shōen

'Yangguifei' by Uemura Shōen, 1922

For the past week or so I have been enraptured by a Japanese style of painting that I chanced upon on Google Arts and Culture, my permanent watering hole. The style is called Nihonga. I will write more about that style in another post. For today, I want to focus on just one work by an extraordinary Japanese woman artist called Uemura Shōen who went on the become the first painter to break through the confines of women artists having to work their art within their homes. She became one of Japan’s most renowned artists.

The work that has cast an enduring spell on me is titled Yangguifei and is dated 1922. It is 189 X 161 cm. It shows what seems like an aristocratic woman being groomed by someone who is likely her servant. Everything about this work is breathtaking immediately but most of all it is Uemura’s excruciating attention to details and preciseness of her lines. There is more artistic talent in any tiny corner of this work than I will ever acquire in several lifespans.

No matter where you look in this painting you are stunned by Uemura’s genius. Take for instance how brilliantly she captures the light behind the fine bamboo curtains that show glimpses of bamboo leaves. The filtered nature of the light is so exquisitely captured. As your eye travels from the picture’s right to left, you notice that the bamboo curtains curl up a bit by some breeze offering you a slight peek outside. The light in that split is markedly sharper and brighter and bamboo leaves in greater resolution.

The aristocratic woman’s poise is extraordinary. Look at the sheer blue stole-like covering and how astutely Uemura captures that effect of the fabric’s sheerness.

In the foreground there is another screen through which you can see the young woman adjusting the aristocrat’s headgear. Notice how light from the room changes as well as the light from outside, filtered twice over, also changes.

The precise architectural lines of the furniture, the tiles, the curtain patterns, the jewelry box and so on are so meticulous as to leave me exhausted just looking.

I regard this as among the finest paintings I have seen. What is remarkable is that everything that Uemura painted was of this caliber.

Dawn dawns and dusk dusks ever so subtly despite unfathomable motions of everything

One of the unrivaled joys of my morning walk these days, which starts around 5.50 a.m. after putting in about two hours of work, is the subtle yet distinct change of the sunlight. It is at once imperceptible but still quite perceptible.

When I begin, the light is darkish grey as if someone has knifed away the darker layer from the sky. Dawn is in the process of dawning or as I said to myself in Hindi this morning “होते होते सुबह का होना”. In barely a minute or so or perhaps even less that darkish grey turns to gentle white depending on whether there are clouds on the horizon. On a cloudless day the early hue is gentle white. Within couple of minutes the surroundings are clearly visible as the sunlight settles into its normal shade.

Apart from this visual experience I am more interested in numbers behind the so-called “sunrise”. We all know that the sun never rises or sets. That experience is a direct consequence of Earth’s spin arounds its axis. That number at the equator is 1,037 mph (1,670 km/h). In Chicago area, where I live, that spin is a bit slower because it is 2,891.56 mi (4,653.52 km) north of the equator. As one moves away north or south of the equator the spin slows down a great deal.

We forget, if many of us even bother to know this at all, that no matter what we do we are spinning at about 1,000 miles an hour on a planet that orbits its sun at about 67,000 mph (107,000 km/h). It has been calculated that Earth travels about 1.6 million miles (2.6 million km) a day. That makes it 66,627 mph (107,226 km/h). In one year, Earth travels some 584 million miles (940 million km) in a single orbit around the sun. Think about this, we do absolutely nothing and yet we travel so much minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. We are born frequent frequent fliers. It is no wonder then that Earth lets you travel free. 

I have written about these motions a few times before. For instance, scientists have calculated that our solar system moves at 200 kilometers per second which is an average speed of 448,000 mph (720,000 km/h). That is dizzying fast and yet our solar system takes about 230 million years to travel around the entire Milky Way. Despite orbiting at that speed since the formation of the solar system some 4.571 billion years ago it has done only a little over 19 rounds of the Milky Way so far.

Despite such enormous numbers in spinning and orbiting through the duration of our lives we feel no motion sickness. We also do not get tossed around on the surface nor get flung out into space because of Earth’s powerful gravity. And what is magical is the exquisite subtlety with which dawn dawns and dusk dusks (Dusk is not a verb but I have used it with literary license.)

Multiverse, Steady-state and I

 

Warning: This is utterly nerdy.

 

The idea of Multiverse in the context of the Steady-state model of the origin of the universe has occupied my mind for a while. Connected to that is an interview I had done with the well-known Indian physicist and writer, Dr. Jayant Narlikar over 35 years ago.

 

That conversation with Dr. Narlikar left me with an interpretation of the great physicist, Dr. Fred Hoyle’s Steady-state theory which I had distilled from my conversation with Dr, Narlikar. Incidentally, Dr. Narlikar worked with Dr. Hoyle.

 

My interview with the well-known American author and physicist, Dr. Paul Halpern yesterday produced an exchange that bridged my three-and-half-decades-old understanding of the Steady-state as well as where the idea of Multiverse might fit within that theory.

 

This may be an utterly nerdy thing to say but I am inordinately thrilled that I was not off the mark from age 18 to age 60 now.

A few observations about making a debut in Arnab Goswami's TV universe

For what it is worth my bit is at cue 25.45 onward.

Yesterday, I made my debut as a television talking head even though it may turn out to be a one-time outing if no one else invites me. Gabbing away has never been a problem for me from my childhood, coupled with absolutely no stage anxiety or fright. None. Nervousness in any circumstances has been absent throughout my life no matter who I am talking to and where and when.

So when a producer with Arnab Goswami’s Republic TV reached out with a request to participate in a panel discussion on the theme whether the Western media aided the Taliban in their propaganda war after the takeover of Afghanistan, I said yes with some caveats. They had tried to get me on a couple of times earlier but both times it clashed with my interviews for Mayank Chhaya Reports. One of the main caveats was not really a caveat but a word of caution. I essentially told them that I am a serious hard news journalist not given to frothing at my mouth in paroxysms of made-for-television outrage. I said I am not a decibels-driven journalist. I also mentioned that I will not be a party to any nationalistic drivel. The Republic representative assured me it would be none of that.

The reason for qualifying my appearance was Arnab’s reputation for fire and brimstone anchoring style no matter what the story. I do not know Arnab personally. I have never met him. I did for the first time yesterday virtually. When I started as a journalist, he was eight. He is 48 now. I had some sense of his early work at India Today and from what little I knew of him he seemed to be a sober and substantive young journalist with a sharp mind. I have now been out of India for some 23 years, a period during which Arnab has morphed into a fire-breathing television host that he is today with a cult following. I bring no judgment to that other than saying it is not my style of journalism.

With that as the backdrop, I agreed to be on the panel yesterday for Arnab’s 10 p.m. segment, which I was helpfully told is the “most watched” on Indian television. Arnab was markedly sober and mellowed with occasional flashes of his TV persona popping out, particularly when he read in a mocking tone some of the straightforward news reports out of Afghanistan to suggest that Western wires and others were suddenly trying to be just factual. I did not quite understand the problem there. But let that pass.

I was aware of his reputation of not allowing his guests to speak but quite refreshingly that was not the case. In any event, I had agreed with a clear mind that if it turns out to be commensurate with that reputation, I would just sit there both amused and bemused. However, that was not the case like I said. A few times he asked me to jump in but I did not because he singled out the panelists by name he was addressing and I did not want to be a tasteless gatecrasher. Of course, a tasteless gatecrasher is what one must be these days on TV or even social media to be heard and seen. After some 25 minutes of Arnab’s back and forth between other panelists, he specifically asked me to comment on something. I said my piece fully without any interruption at all from Arnab or anyone else. By the standards of the crassly performative television around the world, this was a remarkably sober engagement.

I can see why Arnab has a sense of consequence about himself, which may or may not be justified, because soon after my appearance I started getting some extra friend requests on Facebook. There was a pattern to those requests. They seemed to be coming from those who not only believe in Arnab but those who steadfastly and uncritically support Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

I might as well clarify for their benefit. Well before the social media era, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was being described by some of the grandees of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 40% in jest and 60% seriously, as a “pseudo-secularist.” That, incidentally, was the mildly pejorative term reserved by the political right for journalists like me who did not take doctrinaire positions in favor of their favorite causes but reported the news as it should be—shorn of editorial emotionalism. Strangely, that very attribute also earned my colleague Tarun Basu and I a great deal of respect among the very BJP leadership.

“Pseudo-secularist”, which I never was, has now degenerated into terms like libtards or libdus. For those political right believers and sympathizers seeking to be friends with me on Facebook merely because I was featured on Arnab’s show and hence may now be reformed in their perception, please don’t. I am still what I have always been—a pure liberal driven by demonstrably proven reality and facts. I welcome you but you might be disappointed if you are looking for a blinkered ally. I am not.

Some of my journalist friends who broadly share my worldview may have been a bit wary of my appearing on Arnab’s show. To them I say, that is the best way to test one’s convictions such as they are. Echo chambers do not help. To Arnab’s credit, he did let me speak uninterrupted and even asked me a few times to jump in. It is not my personality to jump in merely because the water looks inviting.

It was gracious of Arnab to invite me and I did thank him at the outset.