Mayank Chhaya Daily

Some observations about Will Smith's resounding slap to Chris Rock

As a longstanding comic Chris Rock knows what happens when a joke bombs. Sometimes it explodes across one’s face; in his case in the form of a tight, well-calibrated slap by Will Smith. I must admit to being ambivalent about the slap that reverberated across the world followed by Smith shouting twice, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth.”

I say I am ambivalent because Smith did clearly laugh when Rock first made a reference to “G.I. Jane 2” and his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith because of her shaven head. Usually, the first reaction, especially to humor, is the honest one. If outrage follows, as it did in Smith’s case, it is because somewhere along the line he felt guilty laughing at a joke which was funny, albeit utterly uncharitable to his wife. Humor is frequently uncharitable and at the expense of someone or something.

It was almost as if having initially found Rock’s joke funny, Smith felt compelled to overcompensate. So he walked on to the stage and delivered one of the cleanest slaps in human history. Even as it was being delivered I knew that this was not scripted but a genuine one. I felt it on my face.  There was something to Smith’s body language as well as that of Rock’s that clearly suggested real physical violence. Rock’s left cheek seemed to be rippling for a few moments as his brain processed the fact that it really happened.

What is important here is not what transpired between the two alpha males but the way Jada handled it, first with an eyeroll and then with dignity. Her struggle with hair loss caused by a condition known as alopecia is well known. It was a transgression on the part of Rock to mock her condition. It is always a transgression when you mock someone’s medical condition. It is out of bounds unless the person being joked about is in on the joke. Even then, it is seriously problematic since medical conditions are usually not individual specific. There is always a larger community beyond the individual.

Rock has had a bit of a history with Jada. In 2016 she boycotted the Oscars which were hosted by Rock because Smith did not get nominated for the movie ‘Concussion’ in which he was widely appreciated.

“Jada got mad, said she’s not coming,” said Rock. “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited.

“You get mad. “It’s not fair that Will was this good and didn’t get nominated. It’s also not fair that Will was paid $20m for Wild Wild West,” the comedian said bringing the house down.

Rock had made a snide reference to the Smiths’ marriage a couple of years ago. The two have been candid about their other relationships even as their marriage has generally endured.

On balance though, everyone eventually seemed to win from this ugly altercation but it also served the purpose of normalizing violence. The incident prompted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to tweet, “The Academy does not condone violence of any form.”

Smith’s acceptance speech on receiving the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role was rather disjointed and even disingenuous since it talked about love in the aftermath of having slapped someone. And that too a comedian who is expected to cross the line because that is the whole model of comedy.

Oscars and the 20th anniversary 'Lagaan's nomination

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Ashutosh Gowarikar's 'Lagaan' being nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. It did not win. I was at the Oscars on March 24, 2002, to cover it for the Indo-Asian News Service wire.

I am reupping a piece I had written about it last year.

****

It began with renting a tuxedo, which sounds horrible even as I write it. But renting a tux is a thing in America because buying a good tux is expensive. How good my tuxedo must have been can be gauged from the fact that I paid $200 for a day. Yes, in those days—and I am talking 2002—I used to have money.

For the record, I can’t stand tuxedos on me. I look like an emaciated clown. Only Sean Connery and Daniel Craig should be allowed to wear tuxedos. The rest of us should just stand on the sidelines and wildly cheer as the two walk along. But I digress.

I did consider buying a tuxedo rather than renting it but then reasoned that I would never wear it again. It was a one-time affair, the affair being the 74^th annual Academy Awards which I was reporting for the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS). There was a specific reason for covering that particular one on March 24. Aamir Khan’s and Ashutosh Gowarikar’s ‘Lagaan’ had been nominated in the Foreign Language Film category. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the movie's release in 2001.

It was my first and only Oscars attendance even though I could have attended it every year as a journalist. I did not because penury began to set in gradually and a tuxedo seemed to slip away from my reach, even a rented one. But I digress.

I remember feeling particularly uncomfortable in my tuxedo in Los Angeles’s heat. Add to that I had to lug my laptop to file a story or two whether or not 'Lagaan' won. As an accredited journalist I had access to both the Interview section as were as the Bleacher section. We were not invited inside the main hall where the actual ceremony took place. Those who rented tuxedos did not make the cut, I suppose.

The global media were in a special hall where the ceremony was live-cast on a big screen. The tradition at the Oscars is that those who win would be brought to the media for interviews.

There was some mild curiosity about ‘Lagaan’ among some American journalists and since I looked recognizably Indian, notwithstanding my sharply cut tux, some of them did engage me in a polite chitchat about the movie. Some of them asked me if I thought ‘Lagaan’ would win. I said no for the simple reason that it demanded too much attention of the Academy members who vote. At the running time of three hours and forty-five minutes it was just too much even for the “exotica” hungry Hollywood types. I heard some journalists comment that ‘Lagaan’ would have been better off as a mini TV series given its length.

I do remember having done a couple of stories in the run-up to the Oscars about the amount of schmoozing needed to get the Academy members to watch your movies, especially if you are a foreign filmmaker in a foreign language. Aamir Khan and Ashutosh Gowarikar were understandably not well-versed with Hollywood schmoozing. “Praaji tussi tope ho” is not what worked there as it used in Hindi cinema of yore.

There was some disappointment that ‘Lagaan’ was beaten by 'No Man's Land' by Danis Tanović. It was obvious to me that ‘Lagaan’ was too much color and melodrama overload for the Academy members. Any hope that the Indians taking on cruel British colonizers via cricket may resonate with the Americans drawn to the underdog was neutralized by the sheer toomuchness (Not a word but coined right here) of everything.

The moment the winner was declared I remember having instantly gotten rid of my clownish bowtie and put it in my pocket.

The next day when I went to return the tuxedo in Fremont where I had rented it from, the shop owner asked me if the movie I attended the Oscars for won. (I had told him why I needed to rent the tux.) I said it did not. Out of both grace and pity he gave a 25-dollar discount.

It felt like “Lagaan maaf.”

Ants and Zen of watching them

Two ants have been going around the rim of my laptop screen and across it as well as on my desk for the past four hours. I don’t know what they are looking for but they are looking for something. It could not be food because I did sprinkle some but they maneuver around it. It seems ants too are choosy in what they eat.

There is something utterly Zen about watching these two ants crawling around without an apparent purpose. How else do you explain that they have taken several rounds on the rim of my laptop? Life at that scale or for that matter at any scale is eventually devoid of purpose or meaning. I watched these two ants for a couple of hours directly and in the process slowed down my metabolism to a crawl. It is only now that I am back to my normal pace. Hence this post.

While looking at them I had this silly and random question.

Is it racist to say all ants look alike?

Asking on behalf of all aardvarks.

It is conceivable that within colonies of ants, they have a sense of earnest purpose like we humans do. I have read that ants are divided into specific groups with assigned roles. They have their own caste system as it were.

The two ants that I have been observing this morning and which have just suddenly disappeared while writing this sentence ought to have been looking for something on behalf of their colony somewhere in my apartment. I tried asking one of them but it ignored me. It was unaware that I could have crushed it with next to no effort but I do not believe in anticide. (Not a word but coined here.) It is only when they turn out in thousands that they constitute a menace. An occasional one or two have the effect of creating a sense of Zen in me.

Given our anthropocentric obsessions we forget that there are so many parallel sentient worlds that live and thrive on Earth and many of them, right next to us. I admire ants’ gumption in thinking that they can just show up wherever and whenever they please. I mean what’s the point of crawling across my laptop screen several times? Interestingly, at this very moment two ants have returned to my desk. I am not sure if they are the same two ants from earlier. They all look alike to me.  Is it racist to say all ants look alike? Asking on behalf of all aardvarks.

P.S.: Just as I was wrapping this post up, one of the ants finally picked up a scrap from food I had strewn three hours ago. It is not just going around on my desk without any specific destination. Silly ant.

Farooq Sheikh: Reflective and genteel

Farooq Sheikh as Nawab Sultan in Muzaffar Ali’s ‘Umrao Jaan’ (1981)

I am reupping a tribute I had written after his death on December 28, 2013.

Today happens to be his 74th birth anniversary.

December 28, 2013

When I met Farooq Sheikh for the first and only time in the mid 1980s two adjectives came to my mind instantly—reflective and genteel. He was reading a book on economic theory which seemed incongruous considering he was waiting for a shot.

“I read anything and everything. Why miss out on knowledge?” he said to me as if to preempt a contrary view I might be harboring. For someone trained to be a lawyer, Sheikh came across as remarkably devoid of contention. There was a certain quietude about him, a certain polished demeanor that seemed entirely natural.

As I read the news of his passing at age 65 of a heart attack in Dubai, it struck me that I might have seen the most number of films of a single actor in Sheikh with a few possible exceptions. Going through his filmography on IMDB and elsewhere (Internet Movie Data Base) I counted close to 20 starting with his debut in ‘Garm Hawa’  (Scorching Winds) in 1973. It could be because he did movies that did not grab you by the scruff of your neck. Many of them had the distinction of being an easy watch where Sheikh excelled unfailingly without trying to excel.

I remember him telling me something to the effect that he wanted to “do as little as possible while acting”. “Chalo aaj acting kar lete hein,” (Let’s act today) is not how I see my profession,” he said. That summed up his long career in the movies and on television. He refrained from accentuating his gestures and instead chose to behave like any regular person would in real life. That said, Sheikh possessed that remarkable flair for comedy that often prompted him to “do as little as possible”.

His success as an actor of great substance did give Sheikh considerable fame and visibility but he made it look as if that was just something he chose to do just as he could have as easily become a lawyer or an economist. Quite like Balraj Sahni, one of Indian cinema’s finest actors, Sheikh had a screen presence that never came across as frenzied unless a performance demanded. There was no effort to keep the attention on himself. It always seemed as if his entire career was an ensemble piece even though in many of his roles he was the dominant presence.

Although often seen as a key figure in the so-called parallel cinema movement in the 1970s and 1980s, Sheikh’s made a transition into frothy and humorous romantic comedies effortlessly. There was always a lightness of touch to his performances that made those movies watchable without much fuss. Check out this scene from Satyajit Ray’s ‘Shatranj ke Khildai’ at cue 3.34.

"Imran, you are a rat."

Video courtesy: Dawn News

Watching a video of Bilawal Bhutto, chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), calling Prime Minister Imran Khan “a rat” I was reminded of my visit to his mother, the late Benazir Bhutto’s residence ‘Bilawal House’ in Karachi in the early 1990s.

I think it was on my second visit in March 1993 that I traveled to Karachi from Islamabad as part of an assignment for the New York-based India Abroad newsweekly and its offshoot, the India Abroad News Service wire.

My March, 1993 Pakistan visa

While Bilawal House had all the appurtenances of a traditionally wealthy family, my memory is also one of it being somewhat beat down. The ornate furniture, including white lacquered chairs, was not to my tastes. It was just as well that I was seated on one of them as I waited for a possible interview with Benazir Bhutto. That never materialized but as I waited, I saw a cute four or five-year-old boy who in retrospect, I am fairly certain, was Bilawal. I paid no particular attention to him other than smiling at his confident body language. He had the demeanor of someone who owned the place even then. Unless every offspring from the Bhutto clan had that demeanor, it ought to have been Bilawal.

At most of his public rallies, Bilawal speaks as if the world is about to end unless he was in charge of it. That is an attribute that most leaders possess—the belief, some might call it delusion, that the world would be bereft without their presence and wisdom.

In this particular video, Bilawal is his usual fire and brimstone self, calling Khan “a rat.” What baffles me is that Bilwal first says in Urdu “Imran tu(m) chuha nahi ho”, which translates as “Imran, you are not a rat.” And then he adds, “You are a rat.” I suppose Bilawal was making some fine literary distinction between a rat and a RAT.

Sometimes I get the sense that Bilawal is channeling his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister from 1973 to 1977. Before that he was Pakistan’s president from 1971 to 1973. I saw some of Bhutto Sr.’s speeches and saw some parallel except that Bilawal’s decibel levels are higher as are his gestures more vehement.

There is something inherently entertaining about such speeches, especially when you are asked to choose between a rat and RAT, perhaps as in one being a furry rodent and the other who rats people out. I am just guessing.

“I am Shashi Kapoor. I am an actor."

Shashi Kapoor in Ivory-Merchant’s ‘Heat & Dust’

Today marks the 84th birth anniversary of the actor and producer Shashi Kapoor. Here is a piece I originally wrote for this blog on December 5,2017, a day after he passed away at age 79.

December 5, 2017

Cutting a dashing figure in a three-piece pinstripe suit Shashi Kapoor stood in the large porch of a famous bungalow in Bombay’s Juhu area. His right hand was in the pocket of his pleated trousers and left dangling from a lower pocket of his fully buttoned-up vest. The only detail missing was a retinue of obsequious servants. In the city’s polyester humidity Kapoor did not seem to be breaking into a sweat.

As I alighted from a taxi outside the iron gate of the bungalow ‘Radhika’, he appeared to sense that I was the journalist he had given an appointment to that morning. As I climbed up the few steps he stretched out his hand and said, “I am Shashi Kapoor. I am an actor.” “Mayank Chhaya,” is all I said. That I was a journalist was implicit.

I knew about Kapoor’s habit of always introducing himself by name but the way he did it with me came across as mildly mischievous humility. I was amused, especially by the part “I am an actor.” Later, he wove that reference into a context while talking about his much written about insanely busy career as an actor. He shot continuously in three shifts, prompting his more illustrious eldest brother Raj Kapoor to somewhat chidingly describe him as a “taxi”; as in someone who plied the roads being hailed by anyone and everyone as long as it paid.

He had seen me get out of a taxi earlier. “"Raj ji (Raj Kapoor) mujhe aaj kal taxi hi kehte hain, (Raj Kapoor calls me a taxi these days). I am, of course, an actor,” he said.

By the time I met him in 1986—and the only time I did—Kapoor was one of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars but wore his success lightly. He looked a tad older than his 48 because he had become somewhat neglectful of his own health after the death in 1984 of his wife Jennifer, whom he dotted on. Without being prompted by me he pointed at his portly bearing and said, “This is not for a role. Jennifer would not have let me become so fat.” He joked that his body worked for that particular role because he was playing a wealthy businessman in a movie whose name he did not seem to remember.

“I am an actor who does what is expected of him by the director,” he said.

Without the famous last name, Kapoor might have remained just a trophy star leveraging his remarkably good looks but he came from Hindi cinema’s most illustrious family where his father, Prithiviraj, and brothers Raj and Shammi had been among the biggest names. He drew upon his considerable talents to give some truly memorable performances. (I refuse to enumerate them here. It is just too much detail.)

I remember having observed that his eyelashes were so lush that he could lend some to some of his fellow actresses without noticing the difference. He guffawed. He said he had inherited his father’s features. Shashi Kapoor frequently looked like a spitting image of Prithviraj (See the latter’s photo below).

Prthviraj Kapoor 

From what I remember the most of that interaction was a star untouched by the trimmings of his success. Being the youngest of the three Kapoor brothers, Shashi had seen glamor for such a long time—his whole life, really—that its lures had no effect on him. That unselfconscious attitude mixed with his extraordinary good looks and charms made him even more likeable than he might have been otherwise.

One of the questions that I remember was about how he managed to juggle so many assignments without messing up the details of a particular character. I was taken aback by his candor when he countered, “What details? You just create them as you go along.” Lest anyone underestimate his craft, it was the response of someone who had been at it from his childhood and had internalized the process. At the same time, he was quite humorously self-aware of how much of his work in the 1980s was eminently forgettable. “I need money to make my own, more credible movies. It is a good balance. I respect this work and that,” he said.

Although Kapoor’s career was full of instances of his impressive acting chops, he never really projected himself as a brooding, serious artist. He knew that acting was predominantly about being in the moment and not necessarily a doctoral dissertation.

I spent about two hours on the set of the movie he was shooting that day and whose name he appeared not to remember. I watched him give perfect single takes with rather involved lines and emotions. During one of his many returns from these takes he remarked that that ease of remembering lines had come to him having seen his father theater stage days. Performances were always in the Kapoor ecology and for Shashi Kapoor, being the youngest of the three brothers, particularly so. That was one main reason why he never seemed like a labored, rehearsed performer.

All stars the world over often come to be distilled into a few memorable scenes and lines. For him it was from the 1979 movie ‘Deewar’ (The Wall) where he was paired with Amitabh Bachchan and with whom he did more than a dozen movies. The scene and the lines are so iconic for Hindi cinema audiences around the world that they need no introduction. For me it would be enough to say “Merey paas ma hai. (I have mother with me).” The measured, succinct tone with which Kapoor, playing a morally upright police officer, delivered that one line in response to a rather grandiose boast by his wayward, smuggler brother, Bachchan, remains one of Hindi cinema’s most defining moments.

Even though “Merey paas ma hai” has now become a cinematic cliché in India, it is also a great example of a no-fuss actor-star delivering from the gut of his lifelong exposure to the craft. 

I surprised Kapoor by deliberately not asking about that line. “You have said and done it. There is nothing more to dwell on,” I said. On that note, we shook hands. That was 31 years ago.(Now 35 years ago) I never met him after that.

Universality of free fall and Albert Einstein

On Albert Einstein's 143rd birth anniversary let me republish a piece I wrote on June 10, 2020. Over the years I have read a great deal by and about Einstein. I continue to read his thin volume 'Relativity: The Special and the General Theory' which sits on my desk in the hope that a brilliant insight might strike me one day. 

Here is that piece:

Add to the long list of being told again and again and again that Albert Einstein was right about some profound theory or the other, something even grander.

Einstein’s idea of the universality of free fall, which is at the heart of his theory of general relativity, has just been proved right with unprecedented accuracy.

The universality of free fall means precisely what it says. It means all objects accelerate identically under the influence of gravity. Those astronomical bodies, according to Einstein’s principle, should also include objects that are so massive as to have strong self-gravity. Even in the middle of writing about something as serious as this I thought of a profanity that these objects such as neutron stars can use to curse one another— “Go self-gravitate yourself.” But my shallow mind digressed.

As insights go the idea that free fall under gravity ought to be universal and identical irrespective of how massive bodies are was breathtaking in a list of breathtaking ideas emanating from one brain—that of Einstein’s.

Einstein said gravity is not a force but a consequence of a curvature of space-time which in turn should mean that it would act on all masses the same way. This insight is at the core of the theory of general relativity that Einstein himself described as “the most fortunate thought in my life”.

That most fortunate thought has most fortunately been proved right with unprecedented accuracy.

“An international research team including astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn determined with extremely high precision that gravity causes neutron stars and white dwarf stars to fall with equal accelerations. They did this by precisely tracking the motion of pulsar PSR J0337+1715, a neutron star that is a member of an unusual triple star system. Their findings – achieved by a new rigorous method and a combination of radio telescope data with latest insight from gravitational wave detectors – provide the strongest test ever of one of the most fundamental predictions of general relativity: that gravity attracts all objects with the same acceleration, without regard for their composition, density or the strength of their own gravitational field,” an official release from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn says.

“Confirming it to this precision constitutes one of the most stringent tests of Einstein’s theory ever made - and the theory passes the test with flying colors”, the release quotes Guillaume Voisin, one of the team members, as saying. "Moreover, the results also provide very stringent constraints on alternative theories of gravity, which compete with Einstein's general relativity to explain gravity and, for example, dark energy.”

“The universality of free fall is a unique feature of gravity: Unlike all other interactions in nature, gravity attracts all material objects with the same acceleration. Galileo Galilei allegedly dropped several differently-sized weights from the leaning tower of Pisa to test this. Isaac Newton later considered this to be a fundamental principle of gravity, presenting it without a deeper explanation. The most precise test of the universality of free fall has, to date, been obtained by an especially designed satellite called Microscope (developed by the Centre Nationale d'Études Spatiales, in France). The small proof masses within the satellite show identical accelerations in the gravitational field of the Earth to better than 1 part in 10 raised to 14,” it says.

It might be hard to comprehend that even objects as large as our sun have relatively weak gravity and in order to test Einstein’s universality of free fall for all objects one needed something as strong as neutron stars and white dwarf stars. That has now happened with this announcement.

 The world has long stopped marveling at the almost incomprehensible power of a single brain, namely Einstein’s, but with this finding it has acquired a new mythic status altogether.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan, the Bhagawad Gita and I

Julius Robert Oppenheimer, Photo: Courtesy https://www.atomicheritage.org/

On reading the news of the director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming biopic ‘Oppenheimer’ I was reminded of a piece I had written for the IANS wire five years ago to mark the 113^th birth anniversary of Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Quite fortuitously I am also in the advanced stages of finishing a play about Oppenheimer whose theme is quite exciting for me. I intend to finish it by April 22, Oppenheimer’s 118^th birth anniversary.

Nolan’s biopic is expected to be quite ambitious featuring Cillian Murphy in the titular role along with a huge star cast that includes Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., and Kenneth Branagh among others.

It is a great biopic and requires the kind of canvas that Nolan would hopefully create. Some of you might know that there is a strong Indian angle, to be specific a Hindu angle, to Oppenheimer. It stems from the physicist’s long fascination for and dependence on the Bhagawad Gita. Oppenheimer's remarkable clarity over the bomb's creation and justifiability of its use followed by philosophical ambiguity can all be traced to his passionate lifelong fascination for the Gita.

Perhaps the most quoted expression of his would be what he took from Krishna as telling Arjuna in the Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

According to many scholars, Oppenheimer had internalized the core message of the Gita, a thumbed copy of which he famously kept handy by his work desk. He was known to gift its English translation to his friends and others. Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit in 1933 and first read the Gita in the original language.

James A. Hijiya, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, in his remarkable work The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer likens him to the great warrior of the Mahabharata, Arjuna. "For an uncertain soldier like Oppenheimer, nervously fashioning his own atomic 'arrow', Arjuna sets a good example. Arjuna is fighting to install his eldest brother, Yudhishthira, as ruler of the kingdom and emperor of the known world, and to thwart the pretensions of their cousin Duryodhana. Yudhishthira is a better man and ruler than Duryodhana, who is motivated by ferocious envy and has resorted to fraud and attempted murder of his cousins to gain the throne," Hijita writes.

 

"Krishna's message to Arjuna is clear: you must fight. To Oppenheimer the message would have seemed equally clear. If it was proper for Arjuna to kill his own friends and relatives in a squabble over the inheritance of a kingdom, then how could it be wrong for Oppenheimer to build a weapon to kill Germans and Japanese whose governments were trying to conquer the world," he asks.

Oppenheimer's engagement with the Gita was active during the conception and execution of the Manhattan Project from 1941 onward that created the world's first atomic bomb tested on July 16, 1945 at Trinity near Alamogordo in New Mexico. According to Hijiya, in April, 1945 during a memorial service for President Franklin Roosevelt, Oppenheimer quoted this from the book: "Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is."

The Sanskrit verse in question that captured Oppenheimer's imagination in the aftermath of the successful test was "Kalo'smi loka-ksaya-krt pravrddho", which has been variously translated. While "Kal" has generally been interpreted as Time and therefore Time being the great destroyer of worlds, there is a fairly widespread interpretation in the Western scholarship about Kal being Death by its very implication. Hence the most popular transliteration as used by Oppenheimer, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Among the Indian scholars the more acceptable translation has been, "I am terrible time, the destroyer of all beings in all worlds."

It has been argued by scholars such as Hijiya that Oppenheimer's approach to the atomic bomb was that of doing his duty as part of his dharma as prescribed in the Gita. Professor Hijiya describes it thus: "Just as Arjuna and Yudhishthira honored their elders by submitting to their decisions, even when those decisions were wrong, so did Oppenheimer yield to those he recognised as his political and military superiors. He was a scientist, so it was his duty to make judgments on scientific matters, like how to build the bomb. But when it came to politics and war, he refused to oppose decisions made by people seemingly more qualified than himself. He would not venture outside his dharma."

Oppenheimer's dispassionate, almost coldly detached acquiescence to the broader politics of the atomic bomb has been interpreted as a direct result of the way he digested the Gita. He saw it purely in terms of his duty as a scientist and perhaps nothing more.

Much has been written about whether Oppenheimer came to regret having pioneered the atomic bomb. There appears to be considerable agreement that he did not feel remorse in any manifest sort of way. Even during the first successful test in 1945 he was said to have thought of this line from the Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One." This was notwithstanding his full understanding of the potential for death and destruction that the enormous power could and would unleash.

 It was clear to those involved in the Manhattan project, particularly someone at its helm like Oppenheimer, that the eventual purpose of the bomb was to be deployed as a weapon very soon. It was in that context that the physicist's dependence on the Gita as his guide ought to be viewed.

 

It is entirely logical to think that Nolan’s biopic would make some reference to Oppenheimer and the Gita if not a significant one.

My Kashmir files

The release of the director Vivek Agnihotri’s much-discussed film ‘The Kashmir Files’ brings back several memories of my having reported the harrowing plight of the Kashmiri Pandits in the early 1990s from Anantnag, Srinagar, Jammu and New Delhi. I was among the first journalists to extensively report on the crisis in my capacity as the South Asia chief correspondent of the New York-based weekly India Abroad and its offshoot, the wire service India Abroad News Service.

On one of my many visits to Kashmir in the early 1990s, it was probably 1991, I began a report with this lead; “I flew over the mountains of ifs and landed into the valley of buts.” Three decades hence not much seems to have changed. It is still ifs and buts and a whole lot of tensions in between.

When I first landed in Srinagar and came out of the airport looking for a cab, a young man, Ghulam came to me and said, “Aap to Hindustan se aaye hain na?” (You have come from India?”) That one question summed up the detachment, disengagement and alienation that Kashmiri Muslims in the valley have displayed for decades. I was about to correct him and say “Which country are you in?" but I did not in order to dwell into that mindset. Quite fortuitously, Ghulam himself offered the explanation about why he was treating India as a separate country. “Hum Kashmiri azad hain. Yeh hamara mulk hai,” (We Kahsmiris are independent and this is our land)” he said. I found that absurd and pointed out to him the irony of calling himself “azad” even while retaining the name “Ghulam”, which literally means a slave or, more broadly, a subject.

My introduction to the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits did not take much time. Just as I was driving to my hotel, we went past several homes that seemed strangely abandoned. I asked Ghulam about them. “Yeh Panditon ke ghar hain. Woh chhod ke gaye hain” (Those belong to the Pandits. They have left them.),” he said in a tone remarkably bereft of any emotion.

I probed him a bit more, “Kyun chale gaye?” (Why did they leave?)”

He looked at him in his mirror and said, “Bhagaa diya hai unko jihadiyon ne.” (The Jihadis have driven them away.)

That set me on to what turned out to be a detailed cover story about the Kashmir Pandits’ exodus from the Valley in the face of often unspeakable cruelty and killings. During my subsequent visits to the state I went to Anantnag as part of my story. When I told my taxi driver, whose name escapes me now, that I wanted to go to Anantnag, he corrected me to say “Islamabad.” Intrigued by that I asked him why he was calling it Islamabad, he said, “Hamare liye to wahi naam hai. (That’s the name for us.)”

These little nuggets, first from Ghulam and then from the second taxi driver, began to tell me a story about some deep-rooted animus between the Pandits and Hindus that was clearly fraught with the problems that exploded soon afterward. Sustained campaigns against their lives and property forced the Pandits to flee the land they had called home with great cultural pride for centuries and more.

In a sense, Anantnag was a hotbed of Pakistan-sponsored jihadi insurgency. The young men of the town were not subtle in their hatred. But for my profession, they would not have indulged me. In me they saw a chance to tell their stories which were often thinly disguised talking points handed to them from across the border. Occasionally though one would come across a glimpse into why the whole area was so thick with anti-India sentiments. I was taken to what looked like a bombed-out shelter by about half a dozen young men. One of them asked me to guess what the building was before it was destroyed. I said I couldn’t. He said it was once a school, the only school in the area.

I asked him who bombed it. He claimed it was the Indian army. As it turned out some heavily armed insurgents had been hiding there. A fierce gun battle between them and the army led to the structure being bombed. Later, an Indian army official in the area told me that it was the insurgents themselves who had destroyed it.

I asked those young men about the Pandits and why they had to flee from their own homes. Four of them did not say anything. One of them said quite plainly, “Yeh Kashmiri Muslamanon ka hai. (This belongs to Kashmiri Muslims).” Only one of them had a nuanced response. “Unko chhod ke nahi jana chahiye tha. Woh hamare bhai hain. (They should not have left. They were like family to us.)” The other five were particularly displeased with the response but chose not reprimand him in my presence.

I have many stories to tell from my visits to Kashmir but I am saving them from my possible memoir. Let me recall just one experience when I visited a makeshift refugee camp for the dislodged Pandits in Jammu. Despite the obvious challenges of refugee life, I discovered many Pandit families engaging their children in regular studies. An elderly gentleman who introduced himself by his last name Kaul and who was reading a book about Kashmir’s history sitting inside his tent, told me, “Learning has historically been the most important part of Kashmiri Pandits’ lives. There is a reason why we are call Pandits. Our young Muslim compatriots don’t believe in learning. They prefer coercion and violence.”

More about my Kashmir files some other day. After all, you don’t pay me to read my blog.

Marking four decades as a journalist by reminiscing ramshackle aesthetics of newspaper office

If memory serves this month marks my 40^th year in journalism even though I started interning at the Free Press Journal (FPJ) in Bombay towards the end of 1981 at a stipend of 500 rupees.  It was only around this time in 1982 that I was confirmed as an employee at a salary of 1500 rupees.

The Dalal Street office of the Free Press Journal in Bombay’s Flora Fountain area had all the trimmings of a daily newspaper, by which I mean it had ramshackle aesthetics. That is what gave it the air of a throbbing newspaper. The throbbing was literal since those were the days of the linotype machines and printing blocks cast from molten lead. When linotype machines were operated, the floor of the office had the rumblings of a minor quake.

I remember the furniture was rickety. The central desk around which many reporters sat had rusted nails sticking out. My trousers got caught in one of those, leaving a little rusty hole. When that happened, I thought I had arrived as a journalist since I had the rip to show for it. Oh, the wounds one bore to be a journalist!

The newsroom looked as if originally it had been built bigger and then deliberately shrunk to make its occupants particularly unconformable. There were far less chairs than there were reporters resulting in our version of musical chairs. I always got a chair but not because I was adept at the game but because as the junior-most reporter, the senior ones dumped every press release on me to be converted into news stories and news snippets. Since they did not want to do the grunt work I had to sit down and do it. That required constant typing which in turn meant I had to have a dedicated chair and desk space with my own typewriter.

The FPJ’s Dalal Street office was great fun despite its obvious shortcomings. In fact, it reminded me of the 1974 Hollywood classic ‘The Front Page’ except that there was no Jack Lemon or Walter Matthau but rather poor composites of those characters. I would sometimes fantasize that I was assigned to cover a hanging like Lemon’s character Hildy Johnson. I was, of course, saddled with idiotic press releases.

Occasionally, Deepak Niyogi, the then chief reporter who is now no more, would encourage me to contribute to their daily column which went under the name Skylark. It was a compilation of tidbits that did not mature into full-fledged stories. The column allowed one the freedom to editorialize a bit and offer personal observations. My tidbits were immediately appreciated to the extent that by the very next month of my fulltime employment I was writing the bulk of the Skylark column. That experience eventually led to my own weekly column for the FPJ’s eveninger ‘Bulletin’ titled ‘Streetwalker’. That was my choice of name. One had a cheeky sense of humor early on.

In many ways, the FPJ threw me into the deep end almost immediately after joining it, giving me a remarkable platform so early into my career. I was barely 21. One of the fun beats was the night shift when the paper was being put to bed. Just before closing I would have to call the police control room to do one final checkup on whether there were any major crime stories breaking. More often than not, there wasn’t any. The first Marathi words I learned and used were, “Namaskar, mee Free Press madhun boltoy. Kaai tari vishesh aaj ratri?” (Hi, I am calling from the Free Press. Anything special tonight?”

The police constable answering the call would normally say, “Aaj vishesh kahi nahi” which was a bit of a stretch to believe in a metropolis of Bombay’s size. I was sure someone was getting robbed or murdered somewhere.

As I look back on my four decades in the profession, I have to say that that first year in the FPJ office on Dalal Street was quite memorable with the smell of molten lead and printing ink still stirring in my nostrils. The joy of picking up the firsts of the freshly printed broadsheet was unique. Sometimes the fresh printing ink would smudge on to my fingers. I was tempted to lick them but I hate finger-licking with abiding passion. As I have watched the media becoming another name for arse-licking these days, I think I was better off wanting to lick printing ink.