South Asia Daily

Time 2021-01-16 23:19:51

Web Name: South Asia Daily

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During my interview with John Bolton, a former National Security Adviser to the outgoing President Donald Trump, he made a reference to how the US impeachment model was different from the one in British parliament. In that particular context, Ambassador Bolton made a specific mention of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India (1778-1884) who faced impeachment for his egregious conduct in India. Leading the charge was Edmund Burke, a member of British parliament.Bolton told me, that perhaps it was time to have a “serious constitutional discussion on whether the senate can try an impeachment after the president’s term has expired.” “I am very confident that the US did not pick up the impeachment model of the British parliament which did have impeachments after people had left office, notably Edmund Burke’s efforts against Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India…structure and wording in our constitution makes it clear it applies only to sitting presidents,” the former US ambassador to the United Nations told me.I decided to read some of what Burke (1729-1797) had said about Hasting (1732-1818) after he returned to England and faced impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It was Burke who led the prosecution of Hastings. Burke said, “The question is not solely whether the prisoner at the bar be found innocent or be found guilty, but whether millions of mankind shall be miserable or happy. You do not decide the case only; you fix a rule. For your Lordships will undoubtedly see, in the course of this cause, that there is not only a long, connected, systematic, course of misdemeanor, but an equally connected system of maxims and principles invented to justify them, upon which your lordships must judge. It is according to the judgment that you shall pronounce upon the past transactions of India, connected with those principles, that the whole rule, tenure, tendency and character of our future government in India is to be finally decided.”In terms of charges against Hastings, Burke told parliament between February 15 to 19, 1788, “I charge Mr. Hastings... with having destroyed, for private purposes, the whole system of government by the six provincial councils which he had no right to destroy..... I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing (Ganga Govind Singh, Maharaja of Benares) ..... I charge him with having robbed those people from whom he took the bribes. I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the fortunes of widows. I charge him with having ... taken the lands of orphans and given them to wicked persons under him. ...... and with having destroyed the landed interests, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt their houses, seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed the honour of the whole female race of that country. In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villainy upon Warren Hastings in this last minute of my application to you.”The trial started on 18 February 1788 and went on for nearly eight years. Eventually Hastings was acquitted by the House of Lords in 1795.I find it fascinating that a trial nearly 225 years old should come to be invoked in a discussion about something similar happening to an outgoing US president. Hastings was, of course, an imperial bureaucrat who believed it to be a matter of Britain’s rights to do what he did in India.If Bolton’s assessment is accurate, and I am sure there will be those who would disagree with it, then Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate beyond his presidency would lead to some serious constitutional discussions. Of course, if the trial does indeed take place, it is highly unlikely that it would stretch to a length of time anywhere close to Hastings. If you know the word schadenfreude, it likely that you have experienced it with some relish, even if momentarily. You know the act of deriving joy or pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. I have had my moments of schadenfreude when it comes to douchebags coming to harm. There are those who just deserve unkind karmic justice even though karmic justice is more like gravity, just too subtle at times.Schadenfreude is not what I feel while reading about journalist Nidhi Razdan’s terrible predicament in discovering that her appointment as an “Associate Professor of Journalism” at Harvard University was bogus. But I do feel baffled at her sheer credulity in believing a scam for so many months, especially when she should have known that becoming an associate professor in any university in America, let alone the Ivy League one like Harvard, is quite a process that involves years. I did some quick calculations and found that it averages between four and ten years before you become one after teaching for a length of time. That is elementary knowledge.When Razdan first announce in June last year that she was leaving NDTV for Harvard, I had a perfunctory interest of a journalist since it involved her teaching journalism at Harvard. Even at that point I was intrigued that she could have directly landed an associate professorship at a non-existent program. I don’t think you could do that even at a subpar university here let alone Harvard. But then I reasoned that perhaps Harvard, not necessarily an agonizing stickler for not bending its own standards a bit in favor of some celebrity, might have given that position to her. It turns out not. As Razdan clarified in a Twitter statement she was duped by what she calls a “sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack” where she says the perpetrators used “clever forgeries and misrepresentations” to convince her that they were legit.I am just putting it out there. If even a local community college asked me to become a lecturer, let alone an associate professor, I would at least call them first to ascertain that they did indeed make the offer. I presume when Razdan was approached she interacted with someone in authority at Harvard’s journalism to confirm that the offer was genuine. Such offers are easy to confirm with a phone call or two. The passage of six months between her first announcement that she was leaving NDTV for Harvard and the one that said she was in fact duped by some sophisticated scammers is worrisome. May be there is a perfectly convincing explanation for this long gap. Perhaps it took that long back and forth to determine that it was a sinister phishing attack likely partly motivated by the fact she is a reviled figure among India’s extreme right-wing acolytes. These is just surmising on my part. I have no specific clue.She does call the scam an attack on her and has asked the police to investigate. That still does not answer the primary question about her credulity in taking the offer at its face value to begin with. It would be interesting to find out how much time passed between her being approached via, presumably, electronic communication and even formal one by mail and her actually calling the university.I just called the university while writing the post and the operator told me there is no department of journalism listed on her system. She transferred me to their public affairs which is a messaging service where I left a message. Hopefully, someone will call back. But I know that Harvard does not have a journalism program. Razdan too would have known with one phone call.It is not my case that there is no department of journalism Harvard—although it is my case because there is none at the university—but if there were it should have been listed on the university’s official phone directory which it is not. So please know that I am on the job and will unravel this utterly trivial and inconsequential story soon. Because that’s what I do--look for thing that do not exist.And yes, genuinely no schadenfreude here.* My headline is deliberately misleading. I have become an inordinately enthusiastic consumer of karaoke tracks of Hindi cinema music. I record one practically every day and post it on various social media accounts. The particular fascination for me, apart from some transient desire for an applause or two, is the astonishing confluence of technologies in the whole enterprise.A karaoke track is not just a karaoke track. Those who make these tracks more often than not use synthesizers to produce tracks as close to the original as possible. Synthesizing sounds itself is a remarkable set of technologies. Most of these karaoke producers scroll the original lyrics which is yet another layer of technology. They then upload it on the new via a desktop or whichever other form be it a phone or a tablet or a laptop, all results of brilliant technologies. Then comes telecommunications as in high-speed internet via broadband, yet another layer of rather complex technologies. I am not even getting into the wired and wireless aspects of transmission, which are also high-tech. After jumping so many technological hoops I park myself in from of my desktop and microphone to record songs and then upload them on various social media platforms, which in themselves are brilliant examples of technological advancement.It has been a longstanding annoyance of mine that we as a society do not adequately acknowledgement the backbreaking among of work that goes into creating a dazzling array of technologies by engineers toiling away in obscure recesses. What is worse is that these technologies are then deployed by those who do not their arse from their elbow to spout absolute non-sense. In a cruel irony the current prevailing contempt globally for pursuit of excellence in any field through hard work and respect for science, intellectual curiosity and facts then manifests itself with the help of technologies which are the very result of that passion for hard work, science, intellectual curiosity and respect for facts.Coming back to my current obsession with karaoke I find it to be a powerful tool to keep myself centered and anchored. Of course, it helps that more often than not I sing passably well. A couple of days ago mid-sentence while writing a piece my vision in both eyes became suddenly blurred. It was as if words had dunked themselves in water. I rubbed my eyes but it did not change. Soon enough transparent splotches, sort of life watery tumbleweeds, started blowing across my eyes. Sentences on my monitor were splintering halfway through as if thoughts had exhausted and given up on their articulation.I quickly went to Google to search for “splotches in my eyes” and sure enough there were several links about it, the top being from the Mayo Clinic that said, “Most eye floaters are caused by age-related changes that occur as the jelly-like substance (vitreous) inside your eyes becomes more liquid. Microscopic fibers within the vitreous tend to clump and can cast tiny shadows on your retina.”It did not seem serious because the explanation was that generally the condition goes away after some time. So I waited and it did go away….only to be replaced by something weirder. The corners of both my eyes suddenly turned into kaleidoscopes. Everything seemed like I was looking through a kaleidoscope. Sure enough, that too is a known condition called kaleidoscopic vision.Some amount of reading revealed that it is caused either by an ocular migraine or, more seriously, a mini stroke. The explanation was that the brain creates an illusion of bright or fractured light that looks like a kaleidoscope. It could also be caused by brain damage or a stroke.The problem has since gone away but while it lasted it was a remarkable experience. Both the transparent tumbleweeds racing across my eyes and splintered reality revealed yet again how much of life is what we see. The effects lasted about an hour.There was a brief moment where I considered the possibility of losing my vision suddenly. That would have been a problem. Traditionally celebrity or fame used to result from the quality of one’s work. Ever since the rise of social media work results from celebrity or fame. People become famous first which in turn leads to work. Influencers are a great example of this topsy-turvy world.Speaking of a topsy-turvy world, celebrity/fame, social media and work.... Donald Trump. He will be out of work that he was not in to begin with. The man built a fortune on the basis of his celebrity and fame. Now that Twitter, which profited from his unbridled toxicity and bigotry for years, has like Elaine Chow and Betsy DeVos developed a weird conscience about it and banned him forever. I am not sure about the definition of “permanent” on Twitter but do not be surprised if he is reinstated at some point.In the interregnum—who uses that word anymore except me—he may become like a mole in whack-a-mole and pop up from many unexpected holes. I do not know whether Twitter safety policy on such permanent bans also precludes Trump using his family or friends’ account as his proxy. Don Jr. and Ivanka could both choose to be his shoulder to rest his metaphorical gun.In late 2015 and then through 2016 as Trump was stomping through America’s political landscape with his outrage-a-minute ideas, people used to be confused about how to deal with that phenomenon. Writing in The Atlantic Salena Zito said something that became the early explanation cum extenuation of the horrendous Trump phenomenon.“It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally,” Zito wrote about one of his million affronts to facts. As sharp and glib that construct was, I rejected it out of hand. For as long as I remember I have said demagogues like Trump ought to be taken literally because that is how they think. They are literalists. That’s how religions and cults have born in this world.There has never been anything subtle about Trump. He has no subtext. He is all text and that too in ALL CAPS and exclamations. His tweets were littered with absurd assertions in all caps. The one thing you can’t ever accuse him of is any subtlety or nuance. There was nothing to read between his lines because the lines made it obvious. Like I said he is a literalist.The man spawned an entire political industry from which so many have benefited but are now faking outrage. The idea that Trump has become progressively infra dignitatem ‘beneath (one s) dignity’ or more popularly infra dig and anathema is a non-sense that those who gained so much from those very failings are now selling. Trump is that rare example where a failing was not just a single failing but part of an unbroken chain of egregious character flaws which together make what he is. The man grotesquely mocking the disabled is the same as the man threatening election officials in Georgia and the man grabbing pussy is the same as the man rationalizing and promoting hate and misogyny. It is a horrid continuum.At some level it should have been quite easy for America to reject him because it was all stated, often in ALL CAPS. But not only did a significant part of the American electorate vote for him the first time but did so even more significantly the second. They bear as much responsibility as him. Here was a man who needed no reaffirmation or reinforcement of his spectacular view of self being handed 74,222,958 votes, or 46.8 percent of the votes cast. What do you think that does to his narcissism which needed no endorsement in his mind to begin with?It is beyond the purview of this short post to discuss what it tells about America that voters gave him a staggering number like that. It is the second highest in US history after President-elect Joe Biden’s 81.3 million votes, or 51.3% of all votes cast.I am sure in his private moments Trump has let Trump know that even when he loses, he loses creating history. Elaine Chao (Photo: https://www.transportation.gov/)This post is mostly triggered by the gratuitously self-serving resignation of Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao because she was deeply troubled by the entirely avoidable attack on the Capitol Hill yesterday. I say mostly but it equally applies to all of President Donald Trump’s top government colleagues who are now scrambling for the exits over yesterday.What makes Chao’s departure barely two weeks before she would have been out anyway particularly galling in its hypocrisy is that she happens to be married to someone—namely a certain Senator Mitch McConnell—who has for four years deployed every ounce of brazenly cynical utilitarianism to drive his partisan agenda on the back of the president. All along the high-powered Washington D.C. couple knew of their Faustian bargain.I would like to give you an analogy of the Manhattan Project, you know the one that built the first atomic bomb in absolute secrecy. Consider for the sake of this analogy that you were a key member of the Manhattan Project fully aware of what the endgame was. You gave the project your everything. At the conclusion of the project, you also watched a test that atomized things within a large vicinity. You did all of that with blind and even admiring conviction. And once that bomb went off you began developing a weird conscience and you felt you were deeply troubled by the entirely avoidable enterprise.At that stage of the game who the fuck is going to believe you? Do we think that you thought the Manhattan Project was about making a vada pav?**If you don’t know what vada pav is, it is just too bad. You may instead read a burger. At age 10 I used to wonder what life might feel like at 60. I turn 60 today and now wonder what I really felt at age 10.At 10 looking ahead it could only be speculative and imaginary. At 60 looking back it is a cavalcade of memories, some accurate but many amorphous and perhaps even unintentionally false.My sister Pallavi told me that yesterday was my father Manharray’s birthday. He would have been 95 today had he lived another 50 years. Strangely until yesterday I did not know when my father was born. I knew precisely when and how he died—on May 4, 1970 of a fourth heart attack at age 45. That means I have outlived my father by 15 years today. If only outliving someone were an accomplishment….I can say with a fair degree of certainty that in my mind I do not feel any significantly different at 60 than I did at 10. Sure, a whole lot has changed in terms of life’s experiences and physically. You can see the second law thermodynamics at work with advancing years. Entropy increases by the day and disorder becomes the order of the day. For instance, since Saturday, I have been laid low by a horrendous if routine sinus attack. Since the release of sinuses, accompanying headaches and body aches, runny nose and terrible cough all mimic symptoms of the COVID 19 I got myself tested yesterday. The result will be known likely by tomorrow.Entropy will only get more intense as I deplete whatever number of years I have left in me. I have always considered between 75 and 80 to be the optimal age in terms of their effectiveness. Let’s say for the sake of argument that for an average human being like me it is 75. That means at 60 I have already lived 80 percent of my life. By definition, 80 percent of all my life’s success and failure, joy and grief ought to have been lived and experienced by now. But we all know life does not unfold in percentages. It is possible that a single day or a single hour or a single minute at any age could produce a remarkable accomplishment. For the sake of argument, however, it is fair to say that 80 percent of my effective life is over.I was told by a friend of mine who believed in birth charts and astrology—for the record, I do not—that the 60th will be an important year for me. He also said it would be a very rewarding year for me. That year has just begun today. I am willing to give that friend, who is no longer alive, my 60th year to test his hypothesis.I mentioned the second law of thermodynamics and its application to human life. It is true that the availability of my system’s energy that can be converted into mechanical work has diminished over the decades. I do not see my system lasting beyond its 65th year. Let me correct it. I do not want my system to last beyond its 65th year.One has no delusions about what one brings to the human discourse—nothing. I can safely say that my birth and life have made no material difference to the universe at all. If you cannot make an impact on the universe, what’s the point of your existence? Today happens to be the 27th death anniversary of the composer Rahul Deb Burman. To mark the anniversary I would like rerun a piece I had written on June 27, 2014 his 75th birth anniversary.June 27, 2014The great sarod maestro and musician Ali Akbar Khan told me once this about Rahul Dev Burman, “Pancham (R D Burman) could pretty much do anything with music. He just lived music.” That was sometime in 1999, at Khan’s music academy in San Rafael, California where I had gone to interview him.Khan was visibly happy to hear Burman’s name and, in fact, quickly hummed the great composer’s first song “Ghar aya ghir aayi” from the 1961 film ‘Chhote Nawab’ sung brilliantly by Lata Mangeshkar. Khan had a special fondness for Burman because as a child in the 1940s the latter learned the sarod under him. “He did not want to make a career as a Sarod player but strengthen his foundation as a music composer,” Khan told me.Being a son the illustrious Sachin Deb Burman and himself a preternaturally talented musician, Pancham had his career laid out for him. People are surprised when they realize that he would have been 75 today had he lived past 1994 when he died at 55. At some level Burman seems like a figure from another era but at another level he is easily the most current of all Hindi cinema music composers.I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours with Burman at his apartment in the suburb of Khar in Mumbai in 1993, barely a few months before he died. I had gone to interview him. I vividly remember entering his music room whose floor was covered with wall-to-wall mattresses in spotless white sheets with half a dozen bolsters, also in white covers thrown about casually. Burman was sitting cross-legged and playing his harmonium. He was singing/humming something he had just composed. By the time I met him, he was well past his prime and made it a point to tell me that. “I have at least 1000 compositions sitting with me as of now,” he told me, “But no one wants them.”Burman was then in the midst of composing for his last film ‘1942: A Love Story’ directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. The songs from the movie became widely popular. He asked me to accompany him for a recording of one of the songs at a studio in Mahalaxmi. I remember Burman, lyricist Javed Akhtar and I took a cab from Khar to Mahalaxmi. Once at the studio, he told me that he had unabashedly copied “Baba”—his great composer father Sachin Dev Burman—in some of that film’s music. In particular, he pointed out that interlude from the song ‘Jane who kaise log’ from the 1957 classic ‘Pyasa.’ “If you pay attention, you would feel as if your are listening to Baba’s composition,” Burman said.That particular day Burman was recording a singer called Shivaji Chattopadhyaya for the song ‘Yeh safar bahut hai kathin magar na udas ho mere humsafar’. Being a Bengali speaker, he had trouble with some of the pronunciations which Akhtar, a stickler for such details, kept correcting. It took some effort for Chattopadhyaya to nail it. I could see the Burman was getting restless and at one point said as long the singer sang it right, they might have to compromise on his pronunciation.In my book, Burman has always been one of the five greatest composers of Hindi cinema in this order—S.D. Burman, R.D. Burman, S.D. Burman, R.D. Burman and the fifth position changes among the others. That may seem like a controversial thing to say but we have to judge a Hindi cinema music composer, just as we have to do a cinema lyricist, by employing many varied yardsticks. The father and son have been unsurpassable from that standpoint. From time to time, time does weigh on my mind. This morning is one such time.For as long as I remember, even before I became aware of physics as a subject and Albert Einstein as the grandee of that world, I had that nagging sense that time was notional.One remarkable feature of time is that the universe makes less sense as time goes by. The expression time goes by is not accurate because nothing is really going by.Speaking of time, today happens to be the so-called last day of a so-called year, in this case 2020. I can guarantee that in the broadest sense there will be zero difference between 11.59 tonight, which is December 31, 2020, and 12.01 a.m., which is January 1, 2021. The change of what we call year will make next to no difference or as much difference as any notional passage of time makes at any point during our lifetime.All of us have a nebulous sense of the passage of time without quite being able to pinpoint what that is. That could be because there is really nothing called time. Perhaps the nearest anyone comes to feeling time tangibly, if we could call it that, it would be a watchmaker or a watch repairer but they too deal with tiny gears and screws which together do not quite add up to the grand idea of time. I used to say a long time ago that merely because you have a watch, it does not mean you have time.Just about now you ought to wonder about the disjointed nature of this post. That is exactly how I think of time—fractured and splintered. Every individual lifeform, human or otherwise, lives in an individualized time which is unique to them. My time is not your time. We just have this illusion of time convergence which keeps the world generally sane for us collectively. As humanity we have just agreed on the broad uniformity of time, such as the beginning and end of a particular year or a month or a week or a day. We have done it because that is the only way to smoothly run our lives. However, we must all be conscious that within that uniformity we are all on our individualized time and experience caused by it.Einstein’s idea that time passes differently in different places in the universe is applicable to individuals as well. It can be unsettling to know that we all live in our own individual time cocoons which converge with others from time to time. We are all just discrete chunks of time floating around.My favorite teenage story also relates to time. I have written about this. I must have been 16 when this happened. I was waiting for a bus one afternoon near Ahmedabad’s C U Shah Science College where I studied physics and chemistry. I was wearing a newly gifted HMT or Hindustan Machine Tools watch. As I waited for the bus an older man also joined at the bust stand.For reasons I did not understand then and have not since, he asked me pointing at my watch in English, “What is time?” Why in English? I do not know. Also why point at my watch while asking for the time because where else I was going to look for the time. More importantly though, the way he framed his question which was clearly grammatically incorrect. I knew he mean what the time was at that particular point.I could have disregarded the inaccuracy and answered without trying to be a pain-in-the-arse smart aleck about it. But did not. Instead, I said, “That is a question even Einstein did not fully answer but if you want to know what the time is, it is 4.10 p.m.,” I answered. The man was both mystified and pissed at my response, especially coming as it did from a teenager.Just how upset he was could be gauged by the fact that he did not board the bus even though he wanted to. I did. Thanks entirely to my late brother Trilochan Chhaya, a brilliant architect himself, we grew up with a particular familiarity with names such as Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Alvar Alto and Balkrishna Doshi and their remarkable buildings. I feel a particular affinity to and understanding of great architecture because of my brother.So when I read about the kerfuffle over the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad’s (IIMA) decision to demolish 14 dormitories designed by Kahn I pay serious attention. I am very familiar with this Kahn-designed IIMA complex and note with some disquiet the planned demolition of the dorms.I have just read an exchange between Prem Chandavarkar, a Bengaluru-based architect, and the IIMA director, Professor Errol D’Souza. The exchange is an example of how a serious debate should be about any subject of consequence. Of course, Prof. D’Souza’s reply to Chandavarkar’s exhaustive objection to the planned demolition is rather short on substantive arguments but the fact that he has chosen to engage is commendable.D’Souza writes to Chandavarkar that he is “in consonance with your view that what Louis Kahn built was for all humankind and we are custodians of that work.” He adds, “That in itself makes it very important that we approach any decision in regard to the buildings slowly, after taking into account whatever inputs we can muster, and as hesitatingly as possible,” D’Souza writes.In that context, the IIMA director points out that keeping that approach in mind the institute has chosen to restore some of the dorms, “especially where they align with the signature Vikram Sarabhai Library and the Louis Kahn Plaza.” At the same time though he seems to imply that the other buildings are not necessarily safe. “That they are in such a dilapidated state despite attempts to maintain them in such short span of time speaks for the material used and the sparse attention to the structure’s capability to withstand an earthquake in a seismic zone,” he says.He makes a distinction between the problem faced by the dorms and the library.What jumped out at me from his letter is this comment by D’Souza: “I would hesitate to call a set of buildings that are just about half a century old heritage.”That is an interesting point to discuss. Does a building or a piece of work become “heritage” only on achieving a certain vintage? I don’t think that should be the overarching standard, if any at all. Heritage may have age in it but it is mainly about the quality of the work and its larger cultural significance that together add up to heritage.Coming back to whether the 14 IIMA dorms should be demolished or restored, I am reminded of some of my conversations with the inhabitants of Ahmedabad’s old quarter known as Pols. There are several buildings in Pols which are very old even if with the vestigial reminders of their once grand and glorious origins. They are known as havelis and there is always a great deal of enthusiasm among those who live outside Pols to preserve them as heritage. However, those who live in those buildings often dismiss such ideas saying they may seem like heritage from outside for those who don’t have to live in them but they are anything but for those who live in them.The IIMA dorms are part of a great Kahn legacy and everything should be done to restore them to bring them up to the current code and seismic requirements. If that is genuinely not possible—and that’s a big if given that other similar structures on the campus have been found to be fine—then as a last resort they should be demolished. Reading some literature on it I am not sure if that last resort has been reached.

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