Mayank Chhaya Daily

"Fame, flashes and photographs have been my life for a long time"--Rajesh Khanna

I knew Rajesh Khanna for over a quarter century from 1985 until his death in 2012 but have no photograph with him. Of my own, I have never taken photos with famous and consequential people I have known and interacted with in my long career spanning over four decades as a journalist. I see no point taking pictures with them. 

There is a reason why I am mentioning this. It has a bearing on my reminiscence of Rajesh Khanna on his 80th birth anniversary today. It involves an incident sometime in March of 1992 when Khanna was returning to Delhi, where I lived, as part of his preparations for an impending by-election to the Lok Sabha seat vacated by Lal Krishna Advani of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The star was the candidate of the Indian National Congress against a fellow star, Shatrughna Sinha on behalf of the BJP. 

By some serendipity we met at the Delhi airport. He knew my office in Jor Bagh was not far from the Ashoka Hotel where he had a suite. By then I had known him very well for over seven years. "No need to take a taxi. I will drop you," he said. "If you have the time, come to my suite. I want to pick your brain about the by-election," he said. Since I was returning from an assignment I was not expected in the office that day. These were pre-mobile phone days in India when one was not tethered to work 24/7. Along the way from the airport to the hotel, about half an hour drive, we spoke about Khanna's prospects against Sinha. My sense was that he would win comfortably.

"Kitne margin se? (By what margin?)" he asked me.

"That's a silly question. How can I predict a margin? It has no scientific basis," I said.

"Forget science. Just speculate," he persisted.

"If you insist, I am going to pull a number out of my ass. It will be 20,000 plus," I said.

"You could have pulled it out of your brain too," Khanna said.

"I often get confused between the two," I said. He smile-laughed, which was a combination of half smile and half laugh, at my response. 

(For the record, he went on to win by about 25,000 votes. Mine was a completely lucky guess.)

A point I made during our conversation was that essentially it was a battle between two famous men and which one would out-fame the other would decide the outcome. Khanna was unequivocally the bigger star of the two. It was in the context of fame that we talked about the insane craze he had experienced as a superstar in his 20s. In 1992, he was already 50 and the craze for him had waned a great deal. 

"I feel fame has always been around me. Fame, flashes and photographs have been my life for a long time," he said. 

As was my wont, for no apparent reason I pointed out that "fame, flashes and photographs" was only a phonetic alliteration because photographs had a 'p' in it . He just looked at me quizzically for offering that information.

We were already at the Ashoka Hotel with two Sardar ushers holding his car door in utter deference. One of them greeted, "Sat shri akaal, Kakaji." The other just saluted. Khanna effortlessly slipped 100 rupee bills in their palms. 

By the time we entered the reception area, Khanna had already been checked into his suite and his suitcase already been taken there. About a dozen people came to greet him and gawk at him. As we walked towards the elevator we ran into a family of three--a young couple and their daughter. They froze in their tracks finding Khanna just a couple of feet from them. The young woman looked stunned at first and then started crying while the man just laughed. Then all three touched his feet which Khanna stopped them from doing somewhat unsuccessfully. 

No words were exchanged; merely unrestrained exultation was heard from the family. "Camera hota to kitna achhchha hota. (We wish we had a camera)," said the man. Khanna was picture of warmth and friendliness as he tapped the young daughter on her head affectionately, smiled his famous crinkly smile as we got into the elevator. As the door shut the family was still standing looking in until the very last moment.

"I wish they had a camera. What a memory it would be for them," he said. 

Before entering the suite, he grabbed me by my arm and said, "You have often wondered what my fame would have been like at the peak of my career. Multiply what you just saw by a lakh or two and that too several times a day."

P.S.: It is only fitting that I carry no photograph with this post.

The unending misogyny of the Taliban

Why is it that historically the few have often managed to hijack and destroy aspirations of the many? This is true of countries across the world. For the purposes of this particular post, I want to talk a bit about Afghanistan.

Some of you might know that Afghanistan’s misanthropic Taliban rulers have intensified their draconian anti-women campaign by ordering an indefinite ban on university education for them. Sixteen months after they made a cakewalk entry into Kabul in the face of a disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years, Afghan women have to suffer the worst anti-women impulses of the rulers.

As pointed out by the well-respected Afghan women's rights activist, Mahbouba Seraj, the Taliban have "erased" women from her country's public life. It is heartbreaking that entire generations of girls and women are being destroyed by a bunch of men reveling in medieval prejudices and hatreds. 

What I find extraordinary is that about 400,000 active Taliban members are able to ride roughshod over 40 million Afghans as if they were some trophy in a game of buzkashi. How is that one percent is able to lord over the rest with such brutal efficiency? I have long been mystified by the cruelly mesmeric hold that any such order is able to work up on the rest of the populace. Related to that is my incomprehension over why there are such few mass uprisings against an avowedly misanthropic order.

As Seraj and I discussed in my interview with her, it is instructive that the fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan's neighbor to its west, namely Iran, has been imposing some of the same draconian practices on its women. The Taliban, of course, is an extreme Sunni group while Iran's regime is a fundamentalist Shia order. Both these sects of Islam, otherwise at daggers drawn historically with stunning blood-letting between the two, are united in their misogyny. 

Women always bear the worst of all religions founded by men and yet they choose to follow them. This is beyond me. 

 

The deadly trap that is Lionel Messi’s deceptive torpor

I wrote the following for Indica News yesterday.

By Mayank Chhaya

As a casual watcher of football bereft of visceral passion, I feel a particular affinity for Lionel Andrés Messi because of his deceptively laidback style on the field. There were several moments during the just concluded epic Argentina-France World Cup final where he seemed to exude uninterest. It was anything but that.

I found him static at several points during the game. It was almost as if he were there against his wish and better judgment. The word lackadaisical came frequently to my mind. And then suddenly he would be animated as if he had drawn a bolt of electricity from the ground. His legs would be propelled by an unusual burst of energy and his feet’s movement would be sharp and deft while dealing with the ball. It is an extraordinary gift to be able to combine such speed with deftness. It is the hallmark of a player in supreme control of his preternatural abilities.

After that burst of activity, Messi would be once again his sedate but self-assured self either just ambling across the field or static. As one watched more of him doing less, one understood how unbelievably efficient he was expending his personal energy. I am not even a remotely committed admirer of any particular team or even a particular player. However, I make an exception for Messi. It reminded me of my unequivocal admiration for the master batsman Sunil Gavaskar. No matter whether India won or lost, I always wanted Gavaskar to score a century. I was conscious that I was being selfish on Gavaskar’s behalf even though, I am sure, he was playing for the team.

In Messi’s case, one knew that he was clearly playing for the team even while he was also playing for himself. It so happens that the fortunes of Argentina for years have become so inextricably linked with those of Messi’s. I cannot emphasize enough that I am not an avid football watcher, but Messi’s pull on me has been irresistible.

Messi’s apparent torpor is like a deadly trap for his opponents. He is so swift that his activity burst is necessarily short-lived. Within that short period, he does the most damage to his adversary. I do not know how much of that has to do with his diminutive physicality, a consequence of his well-documented childhood problems with growth hormone deficiency (GHD). I discovered that when he was first diagnosed with GHD he was four feet two inches as opposed to five feet seven inches now, the average height of Argentinian men. He had to be injected with human growth hormone (HGH) early on. His GHD was diagnosed when he was 11.

His deceptively laidback style was on display in all its glory during the Argentina-Croatia semifinal when he zipped past the 20-year-old defender Joško Gvardiol deftly passing to Julián Álvarez who scored a goal. Until that happened there was nothing in his body language to suggest what was impending for the Croatians. He did something similar in today’s final against France.

My knowledge and understanding of football are admittedly very limited but I have a fairly good handle on its physics. Every time Messi scored during this World Cup, or at any rate what I saw of his goals in the highlights of the pre-semifinal games I could tell from the trajectory of his movement that he was going to score. When he did, it felt as if either he had rearranged the field to suit his play, or the field had rearranged itself in deference to him.

His center of gravity seemed remarkably low keeping his feet firmly planted on the ground. From what little I have seen of him, he does not lift off the ground frequently. That is perhaps in keeping with relatively small stature even though at 5-7 he is not dramatically short at all.

The fact that the Argentinian and Messi triumph came in the face of France’s 23-year-old rising star Kylian Mbappé scoring the first hat trick in a final in 56 years is evidence that Messi has made a league where only he exists.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that when Argentina last won the World Cup in 1986, Messi was not even born. He was born on June 24, 1987. Now he has become the embodiment of his country’s excellence in league with the iconic Diego Maradona, who led Argentina’s World Cup win that year and with whom Messi has always been compared and benchmarked. With Messi’s 2022 World Cup victory he has finally attained the exalted status of Maradona.

Art is an immaculate child of conceit

Art is an immaculate child of conceit. It begins with conceit, conceit that what I write or paint or compose or sing or perform will be well-received by at least one person. 

I have not come across anyone who, like me, thinks about the staggering conceit, arrogance if you will, of thinking that I will indulge in poetry, painting, writing, performing or singing and there will be someone, anyone, somewhere, anywhere who would applaud it.

Of course, while one is in the process of creation, one does not think of its reception. At least, I do not. However, more often than not on completing a piece of art or writing or singing or composing one can tell whether that might be well received. 

I am embarrassed somewhat to say this but I encounter that more frequently than ever before. Even if I discount 90 or even 95 percent of appreciative reaction as social media politeness or just pure indulgence of a fellow human being, that still leaves five percent of those who genuinely seem to like what I post. That is an overwhelming feeling. 

Let me cite just two examples; one is a poetic verse, a line really, and the other a rapid sketch that I did recently.

The verse in question is this in Hindi.

यह कैसा शबाब है

 

न मिले तो हक़ीकत,

 

मिले तो ख्वाब है

 

(What kind of beauty is it?

 

When unattainable, it is real

 

When attained, it is a dream).

 

The rapid sketch is the one above. Both took next to time for me. The verse was born on my morning walk and the sketch on my iPad just randomly moving my fingers. And yet both have earned me lovely appreciation. When I think about the fact that neither existed just moments before they came into being immaculately, it leaves me profoundly moved. Art is what did not exist once, does now.

The hand-to-mouth existence of porn stars

Pink Flower by Mayank Chhaya

I am republishing a piece about porn industry that I had written on November 15, 2013. 

November 15, 2013

As I approach my 2000th post on this blog in the next two weeks, it occurs to me that it has been a fairly eclectic collection even by my eclectic standards. I have written enough for me to able to forget most of it. For instance, this short piece about the porn industry that I wrote this January. I had forgotten about it until this morning when I saw someone had searched for it on Google. I republish it because like porn, this too does not get dated.

Here is a tongue-in-cheek short on the porn industry, although the expression tongue-in-cheek in their profession has a completely different meaning. Their tongue is always in someone else’s cheek. (I had to slip it in).

I empathize with porn stars. They all lead such a hand to mouth existence. More often than not they have to be on their knees and all fours begging for more.

They get slapped and pushed around on a daily basis. The more they scream the more intense the slapping and shoving becomes, rather than less. Many of them even get chained and shackled and whipped and scraped. And yet they go on because they have to survive.

They don’t get proper clothing and whatever they get is often so short and tight that it climbs up their orifices. But for a helpful hand from a fellow porn star they may never be able to remove ropes that pass off for underwear painfully wedged deep inside.

They are handcuffed without ever having been mirandized. The only right they have is the right to be gagged. They are often thrown into narrow cages and left at the mercy of prison guards wielding leather whips and generously using them.

The contortions they are subjected to earn a decent buck would be classified as torture in any other profession. There is a whole class of them who have to endure piercings in places where the sun never reaches.

Contrary to all norms of civility, their ordeal is also filmed with proper lighting and several cameras. It is then viewed around the world, often free and always in violation of international conventions prohibiting the parading and filming of captives.

And through this unspeakable ordeal, they have to look inexplicably pleased and pleasured, moan and shriek in joy and invoke god every step of the way. What is worse is that at the end no one helps them put their clothes back on. They just stay there naked, smiling for the camera until the picture fades. Who knows what happens when lights are off?

Penury and the excruciating joy of finding $20

Finding money unexpectedly and that too while tearing up old documents and bills is an indescribable high. Yesterday, while clearing up the last batch of my documents I was tearing an unopened envelop when it happened.

Normally I tear such envelopes right in the middle but my fingers slipped because of having torn up hundreds of pieces. That was just as well because it opened the envelope the way it should if you do not want to destroy its content. Because of my jerky movement what peeked out of the envelope was some dollar bills. I exulted first as if I had made that possible. I then let out a whistle, followed by a sideburn to sideburn grin. Then my face lit up like a Diwali neighborhood. And finally, my eyes welled up and I sobbed (literary exaggeration.)

I counted the money immediately. It was twenty dollars, two fivers and the rest in singles. 

My reaction was magnified by my relentless penury because otherwise finding twenty bucks should not have triggered such a cornucopia of emotions. 

I derive particular joy out of such quirks of life. After all what are the odds of my fingers slipping and tearing the envelope along its edge and not down the middle? By the time I came upon this envelope, I had been through so many that I was tearing a bunch of them together causing my fingers considerable pain. I used to have a shredder but in moving several homes, it got lost. For reasons I cannot explain I chose to tear this particular envelope singly. 

If life is not a game, what is it?

 

Gujarat rewards Prime Minister Modi’s BJP even more after 27 years

I wrote the following for Indica News yesterday. 

I have added here a paragraph about the October 30 Morbi footbridge collapse that killed 135 people.

By Mayank Chhaya

For 34 years between 1977 and 2011 the Left Front, with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM as its main constituent, ruled the state of West Bengal. With its thumping electoral victory in Gujarat’s just concluded assembly elections the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has moved a step closer to repeating that extraordinarily one-sided ideological dominance of a state.

The BJP has won 156 seats out of the total of 182, gaining a whopping 57 seats over its 2017 performance and in the process turned the idea of anti-incumbency on its head. Quite inevitably, the success of the party is directly attributed to one man—Prime Minister Narendra Modi who remains a political and electoral juggernaut all by himself.

On the flip side, the Indian National Congress (INC) Party, which once dominated the state but over some three decades ago, has been left in tatters losing 61 seats over 2017 and plummeting to a bare 17. This is notwithstanding that the party’s most public face, Rahul Gandhi has been on by all accounts a widely well-received cross-country march by foot for national integration. His lackadaisical efforts in the state by holding two rallies were not expected to turn the tide and they did not.

However, his party scored an equally assertive victory in Himachal Pradesh where it won 40 out of 68 seats, improving by 19 seats over its 2017 performance. Given the askew political discourse in India the BJP’s Gujarat win is already being projected as a harbinger of a similar performance by the party in the 2024 national elections even though the factors there will be fundamentally different. That is partly because Gujarat with its close to 64 million population is considered the political bellwether for the Hindu right dominance of the country’s electoral politics while Himachal Pradesh with its 7.32 million people is not even considered an also-ran.

In pure statistical terms, the BJP’s Gujarat triumph is unprecedented. Apart from 156 being the highest number of seats won by a party in the state’s history, it has notched up an incredible 52.50 % of the votes cast. Compare that with Congress’s 27.28 %. One remarkable feature of the elections has been the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) helmed by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. Although AAP won only five seats, its vote share, according to the Election Commission of India, is 12.92 %. For a party making its debut in a state so completely overwhelmed by the BJP, this is as good a performance as any that could have been. Clearly, AAP ate into INC’s base even though retaining that base would not really have helped the latter.

What has been jarring for those who do not support the BJP in Gujarat is that INC has practically written off the state from its electoral planning. It is almost as if a peculiar kind of defeatist diffidence has paralyzed the party apparatus in Gujarat. It went into the elections intent to snatch defeat from the jaws of defeat.  

The BJP on the other hand went into the elections intent on winning with unabashed enthusiasm and it did. Gujarat has been a BJP captive for over a quarter century and a decisive percentage of its electorate has internalized the pithy, albeit arrogant, political construct “Ayega to Modi hi” (Eventually, only Modi will win). At least in Gujarat Modi remains the ultimate political truth despite the fact that he is not necessarily as invincible outside.

The party’s apparent invincibility in Gujarat, which derives from Modi’s personal popularity, is underscored by the fact that even the death of 135 people after a footbridge over the Machchhu river in Morbi in the runup to the election—on October 30 made next to no difference in the state electorate’s gushing and uncritical view of the BJP.

There are those who cite the fact that eight Indian states -- Rajasthan, Odisha, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar, Punjab and Jharkhand-- accounting for some 416 million Indians have non-BJP governments at the state level. Their point being that the claims of Modi personally dominating the national electoral scene in terms of its impact in state elections is seriously exaggerated.  However, the same Modi and the same BJP won 37.36 percent of the total votes in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the highest for a party since 1989, to notch up 303 seats in parliament. India may not be Gujarat but at least twice since he first took to the national stage in 2014 the country’s electorate has returned him triumphant.

His party’s Gujarat victory is being seen from the standpoint whether barely two years before the next national elections it foreshadows yet another five-year term for him as prime minister. In objective terms, winning Gujarat would not necessarily mean winning India in 2024 but, by the same token, losing Gujarat also would not necessarily have meant losing India. Electoral quirkiness in India hard to define but in so much as the landslide Gujarat victory bolsters the party’s confidence for the general elections, it has a significant symbolic value.

It is true that for over a quarter century and especially since 2014 a decisive number of Gujarat’s people has made Modi their permanent political passion both at the state as well as national levels. His is a singular success in the state which not just remains undiminished but has strengthened going by the state election results. If the BJP generally and Modi individually remain unassailable and even win 50 plus percentage of votes, it means just as West Bengal loved its doctrinaire Marxist in the late Chief Minister Jyoti Basu for 34 years irrespective of all his flaws, Gujarat continues to love its crafty pragmatist Modi after 27 years. Whether it bodes well for India is a different matter altogether.

I do not have painter's block like I do not have writer's block

Quite along the lines of not ever suffering from writer's block, I also do not experience painter's block (my coinage). If there is a blank surface in front of me--in fact, even if the surface is not blank--something of some artistic merit will get painted. 

Just as in writing, in painting too I keep my benchmark very low. If just one person chooses to take a second glance at my painting, I would call it a success. To the extent that art has any purpose at all, it is to slow someone down, compel a glance and move on. Any creative pursuit is an act of epic conceit. The idea that one would create something so that others would engage with it is inherently conceited. 

In some ways being in any creative pursuit is about having the self-assurance to open oneself to ridicule and derision. That self-assurance partly stems from the fact that by and large humanity is quite indulgent towards artists. Related to that is the fact that the idea and definition of art are so broad that someone somewhere would appreciate what one has produced. No artist that I am aware of is propelled by the wish to be universally applauded. In fact, as a rule whether a piece of art would succeed is not a consideration during its making.

I cannot speak for others but once I finish a painting or an artwork, I detach myself from it. It is almost as if I am not painting but purging myself of passing visual impulses. I can never replicate my paintings and that has nothing to do with their quality. It may be the world's suckiest painting and I would still not be able to replicate it. In that sense all my paintings are a unique, one-time experience. I cannot emphasize enough that none of what I am saying here even remotely presumes that what I do has any merit at all. All art is personal. If some become partly larger than personal, then it is entirely fortuitous as far as I am concerned.

The advent of social media has afforded me the extraordinary platform to display whatever I paint and engage a few people. I find that in the past three years or so I have developed an instinct about which painting would appeal across demographics and tastes. That is a good place to be in. It is a different story that my works do not sell.

Chandrasekhar's reductio ad absurdum was not absurd at all

Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Reading physics regularly is my version of sadomasochism to derive intellectual gratification. I practiced it this morning by reading the 1969 Richtmyer Memorial Lecture by Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, one of the giants of 20th century physics and, as a minor aside, the first hypothesizer of black holes at, hold your breath, age 19.

A copy of Chandrasekhar's lecture was found in one of the many boxes retrieved from a public storage unit that I had to vacate under financial pressures. 

For close to fifty years I have experienced that the more I read physics the less comprehensible it becomes to me. Comprehension in this case is inversely proportional to reading it. I ought add a qualifier here. I understand physics much more than a vast majority of people. My not understanding it is comparison to topnotch physicists. Speaking of topnotch physicists, it was as a 19-year-old student onboard a ship from Madras to London in August, 1930, that a preternaturally brilliant and meticulous mind of Chandrasekhar worked out what is regarded as the first mathematical description of black holes. Our Sun will not become a blackhole because it is too small for that. Its inevitable end will be as a red giant some five billion years from now when it will become so gigantic that its atmosphere will engulf Earth. 

What Subrahmanyan developed was an extraordinary calculation for a scientist at any age but for a 19-year-old student it was stunning. In simple terms what he said was that certain stars in their death spiral would collapse into what can only be called nothingness. In specific terms what he said relates to the white dwarf state of a star. Chandrasekhar worked out the greatest mass limit exceeding which a white dwarf’s final fate would be a spectacular and violent collapse, ending in a black hole. This limit, 1.44 times the mass of our Sun, was named the Chandrasekhar Limit.

The lecture that I read by Chandrasekhar created in me the same sense of incomprehension that I have felt for a long time. I comprehend in broad terms what is being said but trip over myself on specifics.

He writes about his early conclusion by quoting his work, "Finally, it is necessary to emphasize one major result of the whole investigation, namely, that it must be taken as well established that the life-history of a star of small mass must be essentially different from the life-history of a star of large mass. For a star of small mass the nature white-dwarf stage is an initial step towards complete extinction. A star of large mass cannot pass into the white-dwarf stage, and one is left speculating on other possibilities."

One of those "other possibilities" was black holes.

In his excellent biography of Chandrasekhar's  this is how Professor Arthur Miller describes it: “Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s flash of inspiration came when he was an unknown nineteen-year-old in the hot summer of 1930. In ten minutes, sitting in a deck chair overlooking the Arabian sea, Chandra (as he is universally known) carried out some calculations that augured a disturbing fate for the small, dense stars known as white dwarfs. At the time scientists assumed that white dwarfs were dead stars in their final state. Those that had been found had more or less the mass of the Sub but were no bigger than Earth. Chandra’s calculations showed there was an upper limit to the mass of these white dwarfs. Any star more massive than that when it burned out would not end its life as an inert rock but would begin an endless process of collapse, crunched by its own gravity into a singularity—a miniscule point of infinite density and zero volume, many trillions of times smaller that the period at the end of this sentence and many trillions of times denser than Earth. Only one person understood the full importance of Chandra’s discovery; Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, the greatest astrophysicist in the world at that time.”

In one of the most famous and ultimately gratuitous insults of physics, Eddington had said this about Chandrasekhar's work: "Chandrasekhar, using the relativistic formula which has been accepted for the last five years, shows that a star of mass greater than a certain limit remains a perfect gas and can never cool down. The star has to go on radiating and radiating until, I suppose, it gets down to a few km radius, when gravity becomes strong enough to hold in the radiation, and the star can at last find peace.

Dr. Chandrasekhar had got this result before, but he has rubbed it in in his last paper; and, when discussing it with him, I felt driven to the conclusion that this was almost a reductio ad absurdum  of the relativistic degeneracy formula. Various accidents may intervene to save the star, but I want more protection than that. I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent star from behaving in this absurd way!"

As it turned out, stars do indeed behave in this absurd way, as calculated by Chandrasekhar as a 19-year-old. These days 19-year-olds make absurd reels, not that there is anything wrong with it. 

In praise of father Manharray's voracious reading and penmanship

Penmanship is not particularly celebrated any more given that the world now is so accustomed to keyboards, both virtual and real. I used to have fairly good penmanship before 1981 but after I became a journalist, first the typewriter and then the PC gradually destroyed it. So enslaved I am to the keyboard that I can no longer write more than a sentence or two in longhand. Lately, I have been trying to revive penmanship via a different route. I paint words rather than write them.

So this morning while clearing many old boxes retrieved from a vacated storage unit I found some perforated pages from my late father Manharray's diary dating back to nearly sixty years. He died in 1970 when I was nine. The two enduring attributes of his that I remember are his fine penmanship and his voracious reading habit. In the diary pages that I have shown here are dated August 6, 1963, when I was barely two. He has taken down some notes about subjects such as muscles, sleep and bicycle. 

"Sleep is psychologically described as a kind of idling of the body mechanism; muscles relax, body temperature and the blood pressure drop. The brain waves--tiny electrical impulses that the highest nerves control, the cortex itself  closes down its million tiny circuits like the switchboard going dark for the night. Our plain of consciousness sinks low," Manharray writes.

About the human heart, he notes, "Heart is simply (a) rugged pump which can be studied like any other pump. And when necessary can be surgically repaired."

I found that ironic because he died after a fourth heart attack, having been paralyzed on the left side of his body by one of them at a very young age. He died at 42. Evidently, his heart could not be surgically repaired even though the congenital condition--mitral stenosis--that he had is now easily fixed.

Coming back to his voracious reading, Manharray used to read all kinds of books and other materials. For instance, he was an obsessive reader of the National Geographic which in the Ahmedabad of the 1960s used to be available as severely backdated issues. I knew of the National Geographic as a boy under ten, courtesy of my father.

Interestingly, my uncle, Bhaskarray, my father's younger brother, also possessed excellent penmanship. 

Incidentally, father's diary pages measure five inches by three inches with lines less than a quarter inches apart. It strikes me that there are no corrections as in scratching out words for reasons of misspelling or otherwise.

And to think that we live in an era where we say ELI5 for explain like I am five and BRB for be right back, not to mention the now dated LoL or LMAO or ROFL.